Ethnography: what is ethnography? (part 1)

17 March 2025

I wrote the following lecture for a class in ethnographic methodology years ago. This is the second "what is" lecture. The class is taught in Malay and I write in English. So no promises about delivery. I haven't published any of this. Reading it again I'm amused by how it "dates" me. Nevertheless, readers might find it useful.

PART 1

Before we can “do” ethnography, we must know what it is. Ethnography arose as the defining practice of anthropology, and has been borrowed widely by other disciplines—where, however, it doesn’t always fulfill its promise. Sociology, education, management, etc.

Some classics in sociology

If you’re interested in ethnography as a method, you can go to YouTube. There are many videos there, that outline the steps of the method and how to go about collecting data as an ethnographer. Having looked at a few of these, though, I realize that many of them aren’t teaching how to do ethnography. They teach about doing interviews, what you can observe, building rapport in the field, how to enter the field, how to write and code your fieldnotes, etc., and sometimes these videos are very good.

 

But these are just qualitative methods applicable to most research projects. I hope any researcher, no matter what their orientation or chosen approach, will learn how to do those things. But such a list of things you can do in the field does not necessarily amount to ethnography. There is in fact a lot of misunderstanding about what ethnography is.

 

Ethnography is different. Going back to the word ‘ethnography,’ it refers to the practice of “writing”: writing about the people, writing about way of life. But as generally used by anthropologists, it is both noun and verb: referring to both the materials that are made to communicate ethnographic knowledge (in textual and visual form, e.g. articles, books, film / video, photos), and the making of them. Both product and process, and includes methods. Thus, in this class, we deal with the three aspects of ethnography:

 

1. gathering the materials together (fieldwork),

2. making ethnography (photography / filmmaking and writing), and

3. reading ethnography.

 

All three steps are intimately related. You need the fieldwork to write and you won’t know what to write about unless you’ve read ethnographies and know what usually goes into them. Having these elements together in the same course hopefully gives a better sense of their interconnections.

Be careful: as Pink says, “traditional” research methods (like the videos I mentioned earlier) “wrongly assume that ethnography entails a simple process of going to another place or culture, staying there for a period of time, collecting pieces of information and knowledge and then taking them home intact” (Pink 2001:18). In the next lecture, we’ll talk about fieldwork and why it doesn’t quite work like that. Then in lecture 5 I discuss what happens with fieldnotes. In this lecture, we focus mainly on ethnographies that take the form of full-length books, although I would argue that they’re pertinent to analyzing scholarly articles intended to be read by other scholars (at a higher level of scholarship).

Examples of anthropological ethnographies

An autobiography, such as Menchu’s (Menchú and Burgos-Debray 2009), can be ethnographic if it does what that book does: claim to represent the world of a group of people rather than focus only on the author’s life. Same with fictional works: sometimes reading a work of fiction gives insight into cultural idioms and practices even more vividly than the writings of anthropologists.

Writers of fiction and documentary works (journalists, etc.) sometimes can be very ethnographic in their approach. For example, Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote murder mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, often wrote from her own life or research experiences. Murder Must Advertise, set in an advertising agency, drew from her own experiences working in such an agency before she became a writer. It’s been a long time since I read that book but I recall that it gives some very vivid descriptions of daily working practices in these agencies in 1930s England. The point here is that good ethnography isn’t something that only anthropologists or only professional researchers can do.

What makes ethnography different from other kinds of writing is the work that goes into them.

What do we do with ethnography? The writer, the anthropologist, means for you to gain something from reading ethnography: anthropological knowledge about a group of people in their own time. Ethnographers want to communicate knowledge about groups or networks of people; and hopefully contribute to anthropological theories that explain something about the human condition. But how does the anthropologist gain that knowledge, at least deeply enough to enable him/her to write that book?

 

Here is where we start to see what makes ethnography different from other kinds of writings: ethnography is based on fieldwork. But not just any kind of fieldwork: long-term, committed fieldwork where the researcher lives for a long period of time with the people, learning the language or the local ways of expressing things, takes part in activities (either instigated or spontaneous), and through getting involved in the life of the group or place, learns something about the people.

Long-term fieldwork (Margaret Mead in the field); learning the language (Gerard Diffloth with Kuay man); participant observation (Bion Griffin returning from the hunt with Agta friends (c) Bion Griffin)

Learning the language is (should be) key, but it gets difficult in the multicultural situations we find ourselves in, here in Malaysia. Because I’ve never got used to dialects of Malay, every time I go into the interior of Pahang, I just kind of “wing it” and I know I’m not qualified to say much about the speakers of those dialects. In short, it’s not just two languages we must deal with (our own native language, and the field language) but any languages in between that may help to better understand the broader context of people’s lives.

You do fieldwork not only to look, and project your own cultural biases on what’s going on, but to understand things from the inside out. There’s a lot more to anthropological fieldwork than this, but for now: this is what we call participant observation.

So, ethnography refers to writing and writings about people and their worlds based on a particular mode of doing research. Anybody can write ethnography but most are written by outsiders, or using the point of view of an outsider looking in and out again. Think of a mirror: you see not just your own image but what’s behind you. That’s the reverse of what happens in the field: as you look around you, you also keep your professional goals in mind (I used to think about my doctoral committee members: the professors who were the first readers and evaluators of my ethnography). As you sit down to write, it’s reversed again.

The field experiences—the sights, sounds, smells, textures, images, words, voices, emotions—have become part of you, but now you must “turn your back on them” and face the professional world of anthropology. This is when experiences are turned into ethnography. The experiences of the ethnographer are part of the ethnographic process (from fieldwork to writing) and therefore should not be sanitized from the final account. What happens in the field is not just “data collection” but a learning process without end. We draw on our own discovery processes in order to elucidate cultural idioms and practices.

But outside of fieldwork memoirs, you must avoid turning ethnography into autobiography:

...ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences. It does not claim to produce an accurate or “truthful” account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. (Pink 2001:18)

While I agree that ethnography is based on experiences in the field, I would argue that ethnography should go beyond ethnographers’ experiences. Through oral history, dream accounts, and event-memories, for example, we hear about things we never experience. When someone tells me that something happened in another place that I didn’t see, I would note that this was reported to me, but I’d rather describe what was reported than the act of reporting. (Though if you’re doing discourse analysis, the act of reporting is given equal importance)

The question for ethnographic writing is how to select from different sources of knowledge, interpret what they mean and how they are connected to the research problem, and put the description and analysis together in a readable way that also acknowledges the presence and choices of the ethnographer. For readers, it is enough to know that what you read is not journalism (where “truth” matters); it’s not simple reportage. Mixed in with the facts of time, place, and people (which constitute a relatively small part of the ethnography) is knowledge that has gone through a complex process of analysis and interpretation.

Ethnography, then, refers to the communication of cultural knowledge (“communication” being both noun and verb): what the ethnographer learnt in the field. Historically, anthropologists have reveled in their outsider status. The classical image of the outsider (orang luar) is of Malinowski, who was stranded in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War, and pioneered anthropological fieldwork partly out of necessity. He has a vivid, beautifully constructed image of arriving in the field, which emphasizes being a stranger:

“Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight” (Malinowski (1922) 2005:3).

Galpong on the beach - photo of Agta man from Bion Griffin

We’ll come back to him later. Agar (2008), in an introductory text first published in 1980, used the term “professional stranger” (orang asing profesional) to describe anthropological fieldwork. To some degree, I agree with this. Professional practices certainly make us different: strangers, outsiders, always hanging about without a role or task to do, asking silly questions, never far from a notebook or camera. But knowledge doesn’t flow one-way only, from insider to stranger. In the best of fieldwork, there’s alot of knowledge sharing going on. Everywhere that I’ve done fieldwork, people are extremely curious about the world that I come from. Back then, whenever I’d leave one group and join another, people wanted to hear what I’d learnt in other places, or they’d urge me to interview some old shaman because they wanted me to set up the context for their education. Many anthropologists, including myself, discover that sometimes people find our naïve questions useful, for directing their attention to things that they hadn’t thought about, and they’re pleasantly surprised to learn something new about their own world, because of our probing.

There is no reason that ethnographic inquiry cannot be a two-way learning process, where the informant and not just the anthropologist becomes more aware of relationships or systems in his or her culture. This was very much the case when I probed and probed as to why there was a matrilateral bias in remembering kin. And some would say that patrilocality was preferable yet the vast majority of post-marital residence over time was matrifocal. When this was pointed out, no one could say why. When I suggested that it was because sisters preferred being together in order to work more effectively (and women have far more work than men) than with sisters-in-law who always have to be respect- ed as kuyong, everyone was in an uproar because I was right. My informants had not quite thought about it, but they said I was right. In fact, Bauwe said that he did not believe that I was studying to be a “thinking doctor” (doktor na isip) like my father, but now he did. We both learned something by pursuing the logical conclusions of people’s information. (M. Griffin 1996:148)

We get interested in what locals may think of as being ordinary and uninteresting. Hence the reason I prefer the term “cultural mediators”, for even beyond the field, if the ethnography succeeds, it will affect the cultural knowledge of the readers. The stranger’s perspective can be valuable tools of research: so long as it’s not the defining perspective of the ethnography. Which, after all, is about how they inter- pret their world—which now includes you in it.

Arriving as an outsider, you aspire to become an insider (albeit a positioned one) who can represent the insider’s perspective sympathetically and authoritatively in your writings, as well as address the research questions you bring with you. In any ethnographic text, there are at least two perspectives represented: the ethnographer’s and the “subjects’”. But since there is only one, at most two, ethnog- raphers writing, and many subjects being written about (after all, in any community there will be multiple points of view), there is an inherent imbalance of power. Whoever writes controls the text, but the writer in this case is not the true expert. The experts are the people with whom you work. You are writing about their thoughts, their feelings, their identities, their relationships, their politics, their behaviours, their place, their symbolic worlds, and any number of other topics. These are very complex issues and ethnographers, rightly, often feel inadequate and humbled by the whole experience (doing the research, and then writing about the research). Yet despite these personal feelings of incompetence and doubt, you are also the authority on your subject, and you want to be recognised as such. So, while recognising (acknowledging) the limits to your knowledge, you also want the book to say: I was there, I did this, this is what I learnt, and I hope you learn something too.

Ethnography has come a long way since the days of Malinowski. In his programmatic statement about fieldwork (which does not equal ethnography): “The final goal ... is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (Malinowski (1922) 2005:19). A whole group of people are represented as a singular “he”, and it’s doubtful that we can achieve full understanding of such wide-ranging subjects as point of view, relation to life, and vision of the world. Let’s look at the first issue. This was part of the wider movement, pioneered by Malinowski, to regard anthropology as a “science” of interpretation that would be different from the “amateur” accounts that had gone before.

The authority of the ethnographer was established through distancing strategies, such as indicating fieldwork conditions and experiences outside the main body of the text (dividing the text between “me” and “them”). Photos, maps, drawings, etc. further gave the text legitimacy: “evidence” of fieldwork. Scholarship was established through claims to have studied the language through interpretations and explanations of native concepts (Marcus and Cushman 1982). Anthropologists were not just strangers and outsiders, but they had to emphasise this status in their ethnographies as well. People were represented as “they” / the native and the first-person pronoun “I” was often missing outside of fieldwork accounts. The ethnographic monograph was conventionally written in the third-person.

These “distancing” strategies were part of the effort to claim scholarly legitimacy for the work. Emphasising the authority of the ethnographer. Someone who had adequately left the field behind and now possessed the scholarly authority to write about it with scientific vigour. But they may have gone too far, made ethnography seem too tidy and the field too remote. Ethnographies now better reflect the humanity of the people, the polyvocality of the field, and the work of interpretation. It goes without saying that “first person” is now the norm, although whether personal names or pseudonyms should be used is a source of continuing ethical debate.

On the second issue, critiques of the Malinowskian goal have come from, among others, Levi-Strauss, who recognised the problem of inter-individual and intergroup differences in cultural perspectives, and whether ethnography can deliver on its promise to get into the mind of the native:

 

“To assert this would be to forget that .... we are dealing with systems of representations which differ for each member of the group and which, on the whole, differ from the representations of the investigator. The best ethnographic study will never make the reader a native” (Lévi-Strauss 1963:16).

He suggests more modest goals: “All that [an ethnographer] can do, and all that one should ask of . . . them, is to broaden a particular experience to the dimensions of a more general one, which thereby becomes accessible as experience to men of another country or epoch” (17). In short, make your knowledge accessible so that it says something about the human experience that people who don’t share your knowledge can relate to. But Malinowski’s influence persists, and to one extent or another, we do try to achieve those goals, usually by taking selected topics as our research focus.

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Agar, Michael H. 2008. The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.

Griffin, Marcus B. 1996. Change and stability: Agta kinship in a history of uncertainty. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural anthropology. Translated from the French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922) 2005. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge.

Menchú, Rigoberta, and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. 2009. I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian woman in Guatemala. London and New York: Verso.

Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Next (part 2)