Ethnographic Realism

Ethnographic realism holds that ethnography can and should strive to document sociocultural structures, processes, and situations as existing independently of the researcher.

For much of its history, ethnography has been committed to realism and to methods of investigation based on that commitment. For example, anthropologists have long argued that other societies must be studied through close PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION in order for their culture and social organization to be understood properly. Within 20th-century U.S. sociology, Herbert Blumer and others recommended much the same approach, emphasizing the need to capture the interpretative and processual character of human social life, as well as criticizing methods that failed to do this. In the late 1960s, this realism—sometimes also referred to as NATURALISM—was summarized by David Matza as the obligation to remain true to the nature of the phenomenon under study.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, ethnographic realism came under challenge. The critics raised questions about the very possibility of providing accounts of the “nature” of social phenomena, sometimes denying that these phenomena exist independently of the process of inquiry. This critique arose, to some extent, out of ethnography itself. Typically, ethnographers have portrayed people as actively making sense of the world, thereby developing distinctive cultures. If this approach is applied reflexively to ethnographic accounts themselves, the conclusion may be reached that these accounts are creative constructions that reflect the sociocultural identities of researchers, rather than being objective representations. The tendency to draw this conclusion was encouraged by the influence of some strands of continental philosophy, notably PHENOMENOLOGY, HERMENEUTICS, and POSTSTRUCTURALISM (though these positions do not all imply epistemological RELATIVISM or skepticism).

Another important component of the critique pointed out that ethnographic accounts often rely on the same literary devices that are used in realist fiction. The critics insisted that no form of writing is merely representational: All language use is constitutive and performative, and no writer should pretend otherwise.

Along with criticisms of ethnographic realism on epistemological and rhetorical grounds, there has also been an ethical and political critique. Drawing on radical Leftist challenges to sociology in the 1960s, as well as on feminism, this critique has argued that realist ethnography amounts to voyeurism and/or serves as a means of surveillance by which those in subordinate social positions are kept under control.

In line with these arguments, some critics of ethnographic realism have sought to develop new forms of writing designed to subvert any impression that ethnographic texts can provide objective accounts of the world, to display their own constructed and indeterminate character, and/or to give voice to those who are seen as being “silenced” by mainstream accounts (see Denzin, 1997).

There has been some defense of ethnographic realism against these criticisms. The self-undermining character of skeptical and relativist arguments has been reiterated. Furthermore, a distinction has been drawn between the naive realism that is sometimes ascribed to ethnographers of the past and more [Page 327]sophisticated forms. The latter take account of epistemological conundrums and of the socially contexted character of all research but do not deny the possibility of social scientific knowledge or insist that ethnography is inevitably implicated in political struggle supporting or resisting the status quo (see Hammersley, 1992).

...