Ethnographic Methods

Data Collection

Anthropology and sociology are the two academic disciplines that traditionally cornered the market on ethnographic methods, but other social sciences have become more interested in the kinds of nuanced information that is gathered during intimate and ongoing interactions between qualitative researchers and their research subjects, interactions euphe-mized as “deep hanging out.” Ethnographers spend time drinking beers with the folks they study, eating meals at their dinner tables, and shadowing them on the job—all in an effort to figure out what people's everyday lives actually look like and to determine how people make sense of those lives.

When they first start conducting research in a particular community, ethnographers may stand out like sore thumbs, drawing attention to themselves and making their research subjects self-conscious, which means that they run the risk of witnessing things that probably wouldn't have taken place at all without the conspicuous seductions of an outside audience. But as ethnographers spend more and more time observing and participating in the same community, among the same community members, they eventually begin to lose some of their distracting influence on people's behaviors. They transform into proverbial flies on the wall. The ethnographer is still there, asking questions and watching people's daily reactions, but is hardly noticed any more, not in ways that might compromise the reliability of what the ethnographer sees or hears.

Ethnography's value is based on the kinds of intimate and unguarded data that researchers gain from extended contact with one particular social group. When the discipline first emerged, this meant relatively small-scale and remote societies. Bronislaw Malinowski's early-20th-century work with Trobrianders is taken as a powerful marker for the birth of full-fledged ethnographic research within anthropology. He crossed the seas, pitched his tent, and found a way to live among people whose cultural world seemed radically different from his own. Part of the point, of course, was about making it clear to the European audience back home that those foreign practices could be understood only with the fullest knowledge of how people's entire belief systems fit together—even and especially when those cultural systems seemed spectacularly exotic to the Western eye.

Ethnography in Anthropology and Sociology

Anthropology was traditionally about studying societies unsullied by the advances of modernity. From the attempts at salvage ethnography among Native American tribes in the early 19th century (archiving cultural practices before they disappeared forever) to the constructions of primitive societies as examples of the modern Western world's hypothetical pasts, anthropologists used ethnographic methods to study those populations most removed from the taint of modern living.

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