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• What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on March 13, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organization to observe their behavior and interactions up close. The word “ethnography” also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography, other interesting articles.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate  football fans , call center workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyze a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g. a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited timeframe.

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There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs. closed settings, overt vs. covert ethnography, and active vs. passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs. closed settings

The setting of your ethnography—the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action—may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighborhood, or the fans of a particular baseball team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult…
• …but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting…
• …but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organization.

Overt vs. covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent…
• …but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretense for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher…
• …but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs. passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence…
• …but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking…
• …but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organization you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organization allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

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The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions—body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organized (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviors and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded—to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice Introduction

• First Online: 05 December 2020

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• Vincenzo Matera 3 &
• Angela Biscaldi 4  

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In the last three decades, more or less, ethnography, that was long thought to be simple, turned into a complicated concept. At least for anthropologists, as is clearly demonstrated by the dense reflection and the vivid discussion that emerged about ethnography inside the anthropological academic community. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are not at all an easy and epistemologically plain activity. The Introduction aims to underline the common line of this edited volume that ethnography is strongly connected with a sophisticated theoretical reflection and strongly linked with cultural and social anthropology. Outside this frame, ethnography is nothing, and worthless are also the forms of knowledge one may expect to obtain by a naive use of a so-called “ethnographic method.”

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Introduction

Ethnographic Analysis: D. Fitzgerald

Not Having an A Priori Has Become the Anthropological A Priori: Multiple Forms of Knowledge Are Produced in Ethnographic Experiments

• Ethnographic theory
• Ethnographic practice
• Ethnographic writing
• Anthropological knowledge
• Ethnographic imagination

Over the last four decades, ethnography, which had long been imagined as a self-evident and unproblematic process of data collection, has become a complicated and tricky issue. This is especially true for anthropologists. The dense reflection and the vivid discussion about ethnography that emerged in the 1970–1980s inside the anthropological academic community clearly prove it. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are far from easy, epistemologically straightforward activities. Nevertheless, as a result of its widespread perception as both a powerful and easy-to-use tool to gain qualitative research data about a community, it became a privileged research method for sociologists, and also for psychologists and, finally, even for interculturally oriented scholars of any social science and humanities field (such as pedagogy).

With this volume we offer both a historical overview and a critical reflection on ethnography—how it originated, and how it was conceptualized, represented, and discussed by anthropologists.

It is intended as a tool for deepening the conditions that have seen the emergence of the research practice, the branches it has taken in relation to particular theoretical needs, the role it played in the construction of anthropological knowledge and the limits that sometimes affected its effectiveness.

It is also a “dense” support that is rich in indications and suggestions for anyone interested in practicing ethnography, studying it, becoming an anthropologist, or, more in general, doing social research.

Furthermore, it aims to emphasize the particular and innovative character of the Italian anthropological tradition with reference to an anthropological gaze full of political sensitivity, long unexpectedly overlooked; it aims to account for the great liveliness that Italian anthropology has taken on, especially in recent decades, in the critical confrontation with the international guidelines of the discipline.

The aspect that characterizes the volume is the central idea that animates it: repositioning ethnography at the core of the anthropological tradition and showing the extent to which ethnography is strongly connected to a sophisticated theoretical reflection and deeply embedded in cultural and social anthropology. Outside this intellectual endeavor, ethnography itself has little value, and nor does the knowledge one may hope to obtain through the naive use of a so-called “ethnographic method.”

This does not mean to deny that ethnography also exists outside anthropology, for example in research based on Max Weber’s theory of social action, in the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago School or in ethnomethodology, but anthropology is certainly the discipline in which ethnography originated and which has cultivated it deeper and for longer. It is the discipline that maintains the most intimate and exclusive relationship with ethnography.

As a consequence, ethnography can no longer be viewed as the simple empirical side of anthropology, or as a “practical” mode of research, a kind of technique; it requires a recognition of its high theoretical value since the real core of ethnography (and anthropological knowledge) lies in the way in which it formulates research problems and conceptually defines its objects.

“Being there” in itself has no value; otherwise, the best ethnographers would be the missionaries—and there are those who have said this—or they would be the “natives” themselves—and there are those who have said this, as well.

So, the common thread of the essays contained in this volume, beyond the particular perspectives of the individual authors, therefore lies in the belief that ethnography is a theoretical elaboration tool and, because of this, it becomes an indispensable part in any production of knowledge on social and cultural facts.

We think that outside this frame, ethnography is nothing , just as little knowledge is believed to be able to derive by a “simple use” of the ethnographic method (that without reference theory does not exist).

In the chapters of the volume, in fact, there are many ethnographic approaches, aimed at grasping worlds, networks, or flows of meanings, which both sprang from and are projections of theoretical concepts and intellectual sensibilities, but there is no “method.”

To confirm what we say, we quote the sentence of a famous British social anthropologist, suspiciously very critical of the practice he had practiced for a long time, with intensity and with remarkable results during his career:

Anyone who is not a complete idiot can do fieldwork, […]. It has been my woeful experience that many a student comes home from the field to write just another book about just another people, hardly knowing what to do with the grain he has been at such pains to garner. (Evans-Pritchard 1973 , p. 3)

This statement should not be understood as an absolute criticism of fieldwork. Rather, it is an implicit call to those solid foundations of theory that allow the anthropologist to win the decisive battle, that is not fought in the field but in the study afterward, Evans-Pritchard said. In fact, theoretically oriented ethnography is necessary in order to go beyond the surface of everyday projects, actions and words, toward those invisible bonds that bind individuals together and give body to the community (or communities) to which they belong.

Today (the last couple of decades), communities have opened up and become porous; the protagonists of primordial myths have been replaced (or joined) by movie stars or football champions, political leaders, and rock stars; the “dense” description is being replaced (or flanked) by the anthropology of global processes (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992 ; Fabietti et al. 2020 ).

Anyway, ethnography is not a simple “global interview.” There is always something more, there is always another “level” that is not directly perceptible and that escapes the immediate conceptualization of the “here”—on the spot—and the “now”—in the present—of empirical research, of fieldwork.

This “something” is certainly ambiguous, indeterminate, incoherent, asymmetrical, open to intertwining sometimes inextricable, but never completely meaningless; moreover, it is always attributable to constraints (for example, “material conditions of existence”) and to power relationships (for example, “dominant and dominated”); in other words, it is identifiable.

This means that subjective, personal, and individual action is always rooted in society, history, and culture (Wright Mills 1961 ; Ginzburg 1986 ; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992 ; Appadurai 1996 , 2004 ). The ways of this rooting are opaque, and we have the task of trying to make them as transparent as possible (cfr. Hannerz 2010 ). Without this projection in wider frames, toward the wider world of power and meaning, ethnography loses its potential.

So ethnography emerges in this volume as a fragment—a multiplicity of fragments—which aims to be reunited with a (partial) totality (Fillitz 2013 ). How? There is no univocal answer to this crucial theoretical and methodological question, even if we consider the current enlargement of the classic ethnographic “field” (Matera 2013 ).

Instead, there are many. Some of these are outlined in this volume. In fact, the volume presents both a historical overview of ethnography and a thematic discussion of its major trends, which have oriented research practice in the field in different periods. It also presents more marginal—in the sense that they are undervalued in history of anthropology or introductory textbooks—modes of ethnographic research (for example feminist and phenomenological approaches), those that had less impact and resonance inside the academic community, but that nonetheless had a solid theoretical frame and a range of insights with regard to their effectiveness as paths to gaining anthropological knowledge.

The volume is divided into four parts.

Part I, Grounds for sociocultural anthropology: USA, UK, FR, IT, lays the foundations for our discussion. Enzo Vinicio Alliegro , in Ethnography before ethnography argues that, although anthropologists are used deconstructing mythological narratives to unveil their underlying logic of power and functioning, they themselves contribute and are victim to them. This is the case in the history of ethnography, which is often simplistically traced back to the works of Malinowskiand Radcliffe-Brown in the early twentieth century. Through a thorough comparison with the specialist literature and relying on a large mass of documentary sources, the article deals with the origins of ethnography, focusing on the pioneering research activities conducted in the United States of America. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the sensitive and bloody question of the natives made the study of the so-called “redskins” urgent, and led to a methodology based on a long stay in the field. Even though an ill-concealed guilt has clouded this research period for a long time, after over a hundred years, it is now possible to go back to the contribution and brilliant intuitions of such students as Franz H. Cushing and James Mooney, who, along with colleagues of the Bureau of American Ethnology, laid the foundations of conscious scientific ethnological methodology, acknowledged as such first by M. Mauss and then by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Particularly worthy in this sense is the “transformative spiral” triggered during his fieldwork experience, by which Cushing changed from an “extraneous unidentified object” into a trustworthy “subject” according to a dynamic that recalls the anecdote that Clifford Geertz tells at the beginning of his perhaps most famous essay:

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school… ( 1973 , p. 413)

In the ethnographic cases presented in Alliegro’s essay, the radical importance of the experience marks the researchers in the body, as well as in the mind, and it stands out and qualifies their research as ethnographic.

Why then, is the birth of ethnography linked to Malinowski?

Alessandro Mancuso , in Radcliffe - Brown, Evans - Pritchard and the Issue of the Relationships between Fieldwork Methods, Ethnography and Theory in British Social Anthropology , analyzes another crucial context for ethnography, the British one, and focuses on the figure of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who has contributed to the consolidation of the procedures for the construction of anthropological knowledge.

Mancuso underlines how Radcliffe-Brown’s theoretical social anthropology program as a “natural science of society” empirically founded on the “comparative method” for generalization purposes on social phenomena has been seen as a fundamental research tool useful not only to guarantee reliability scientific work to collect and record ethnographic documentation, but also to empirically test theoretical hypotheses.

In the first part of the paper, Mancuso exposes some points of debate inside British Social Anthropology before 1960 on how to organize fieldwork research and ethnographic monographs by trying to conciliate the stress that Radcliffe-Brown puts on the search for the normative and structural aspects of social life with the Malinowskian imperative of presenting thorough documentary evidence of every detail of “natives’” views, beliefs, discourses, and behavior, also taking in account individual variation. In the second part, he focuses on the new twist to which these epistemological dilemmas about the aims of fieldworkresearch and ethnography were submitted after Evans-Pritchard’s turn to a view of social anthropology as a discipline which rather deals with the study of “moral systems” and it is closer to history and humanities than to the models of natural sciences.

Angela Biscaldi and Vincenzo Matera , in Ethnography in France. Ethnographic practices and theories in Marcel Griaule explore how ethnography in France—a relatively neglected scholarly practice till the late twenties—developed and was actually practiced and conceptualized during the two world wars up to the late fifties, when Marcel Griaule published his now classic Méthode de l’Ethnographie (1957), the first ethnographic handbook available in French. The chapter highlights how the idea of ethnography of Marcel Griaule was really variable and contingent, going from a documentary ethnography, to a semi dialogical and exegetical ethnography—as it emerges from the famous Conversation with Ogotemmeli —, to a new redefinition of ethnography as judiciary inquiry, as it was strongly expressed in Méthode . On the background of Griaule’s ethnographic in progress idea, there was the project of the Institute of Ethnology established by a physical anthropologist (Paul Rivet), a sociologist of Durheimian obedience (Marcel Mauss), and a socialist, politically influential academic philosopher (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) at the University of Paris in 1925. During the twenties and thirties, the Institute of Ethnology promoted several “ethnographic expeditions” (among which the renowned Dakar-Djibouti mission, conducted in 1931–1933 by a research collective led indeed by the young Marcel Griaule), which contributed to codify ethnography as a specific set of practices which ultimately merged into the general scientific framework offered in Griaule’s handbook. From this standpoint, Conversations with Ogotemmeli appears as an exception, even if this exception probably become in the work of Marcel Griaule’s daughter, Genevieve, the bridge between this first ethnographic practice in France and the dialogical anthropology of the 80s in the United States. The chapter asks what kind of characteristics may help to describe a “French ethnographic tradition,” and according to which kind of features it might be considered specific in comparison to other relevant anthropological/ethnographic national traditions of the same time period (USA, UK, Italy). It finally asks to what extent a French ethnographic tradition contributed to developing a certain anthropological style (understood as a set of ethnographic practices and theories together).

Giovanni Pizza , “ The structural formula of the équipe [team]. ” Reflections on the historical - ethnographic method of Ernesto de Martino is the last chapter in Part I. The author proposes some reflections on the ethnographic methodology of Ernesto de Martino (Naples 1908–Rome 1965), in particular as regards what he himself called “la formula strutturale dell’ équipe .” What is an “ethnographic équipe [team]”? It is the main question that the essay tries to answer. As he has been considered the “father” of a specific vein in Italian anthropology, de Martino is really an original thinker and an anthropologist whose theoretical lines as well as methodologies are really unique and original. In the chapter, after revisiting some of the main ethnographic research carried out by de Martino and his team in Southern Italy (above all the one in Apulia on tarantism), the author goes deep inside what has been considered as an “Italian style” in ethnography, stressing the advantages and limits of this peculiar scientific practice in the history of global cultural anthropology. The reinterpretation presented in Pizza’s text becomes the premise to resume the “Italian ethnographic style” with a somewhat ironic register. Pizza proposes a rereading of the ethnographerde Martino articulated in three main points: the role of fieldwork in the production of anthropological knowledge; the effects in terms of Italian mimesis of Demartinian ethnography; the “cognitive blindness” recently observed in the results of its production, after the southern Italy trilogy. Today, we wonder why de Martino did not take into consideration the entry of the Italian State on the southern scene, despite it seeming to be an anachronistic operation (a bit like criticizing Tristi Tropici for the lack of “ethnographic acumen”), because it is an important way to trace the foundations (and also the entanglements) of Italian anthropology from the postwar period up to now.

Part II, Anthropology (Theory) vs Ethnography (Fieldwork) , opens with the essay by Ferdinando Fava, Illusion of immediate knowledge (immediacy) or spiritual exercise? The dialogic exchange and Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography. This contribution attempts to locate the ethnographic practice of Pierre Bourdieu by articulating two perspectives that are distinct but not separate. First of all, it illustrates the function that ethnography assumed in the construction of the central concepts of his “theory of practice” (habitus, field, temporality, symbolic capital) in his scientific and biographical trajectory. It then identifies the characteristics of Bourdieu contemporary reception and appropriation in socio-anthropological research contexts.

How to read Bourdieu? This is the question that Fava asks at the beginning of the text to point out the complexity of reading the author’s work in a nontemporally offset way, so to speak, with respect to the author himself. Rather, it is a question of bringing out the logic of his research practice without reducing it to pure methodology.

It follows very similar reasoning to the idea that the basis of an intellectual product is always a process of research, reflection, study, and thought.

Ethnography is a product that is accessible to any reader. However, without the elements that can help to reconstruct the process that underlies it, it is de-historicized and reified by the writing. There is always a distance between theoretical statements and empirical practices; in the case of ethnography, this distance has appeared to be constant since the time of Malinowski. How is it possible to look closely without losing sight of the structures that produce what you look at.

Fava tries to answer this question in detail and with strict reference to Bourdieu’s texts. Accounting for the “total meaning of the experience” is what he proposes, an outcome that can only be achieved through the gradual and progressive convergence of different research practices on the same subject. This is a modus operandi to be continuously reviewed to escape the “illusion of immediacy”: social relations are not reduced to interactions between subjectivities animated by intentions and motivations; rather, they are always stuck in social and economic positions. Here there is a distrust of an ethnography completely focused on action. A French and an Algerian, a conversation between a “white” and a “black” activate a communication between dominant and dominated, imbued with relationships of strength, colonial history, and politics.

In the final part, Fava’s chapter presents the inversion that characterizes the way Gerard Althabetakes Bourdieu’s perspective: for Althabe, unlike Bourdieu, it is the world of the dominant that takes on meaning in the world of the dominated.

Luca Rimoldi and Marco Gardini present an essay entitled An Anthropologist on the Bridge. Max Gluckman and his Analysis of Social Situations.  It explores the ethnographic method of the Manchester school: a method based on the detailed descriptions of particular social situations, the analysis of different strategies and positioning of the actors involved, which aims to present the materials that anthropologists collected in the field, but which uses them not as illustrative examples of given structural principles, but rather as points of entry for understanding the dynamism and variability of the contexts under investigation.

Specifically, the chapter explores the methodological contribution of Max Gluckman in his  Analysis of a Social Situation   in Modern Zululand  (1940–1942; 1958). By analyzing the literature on this essay, it takes into consideration the communities and innovations that this text has produced over time.

Although influenced by the structural-functionalist frame, the analysis that Gluckman carries out in describing the events of January 7, 1938, builds a bridge to a contemporary public anthropology. The three parts in which the essay is divided show the complexities of Gluckman’s idea of ethnography, expressed in the  extended case study . Moreover, the ethnographic method proposed by Gluckman and practiced by the researchers of his  Seven - Years - Research - Plan at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute and, later, by his students at the Manchester School, enriched the context of ethnographic analysis by bringing in new figures (colonial administrators and officials, missionaries, mine owners, and trade unionists), new sources (documents of colonial administrators, censuses, written and oral historical sources), new roles that groups and individuals play in producing, reproducing or questioning norms and values.

The chapter highlights the interconnections between ethnographic practice and a sophisticated theoretical reflection.

Vincenzo Matera , Politics within Cultural and Social Anthropology , aims to underline the theoretical depth of ethnography, retracing some significant steps of anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. The goal is to trace and highlight the effects of the discovery of history and consequently of politics (and ethics) within the production of anthropological knowledge, also, though not only, through ethnography.

In particular, the essay runs through Antonio Gramsci’s intuitions regarding the political potential of popular culture, and connects them to the developments of the Italian line of reflection, which are not always linear and sometimes ambivalent.

It reveals the impossibility of a “neutral” anthropology and the power of a political sensitivity in the approach, ethnographic or otherwise, to social and cultural phenomena.

The text also highlights that the Gramscian conceptualization of popular culture, which had and continues to have a lot of influence on cultural analysis, inside and outside anthropology, all over the world, has been elaborated in the enclosure of a cell.

The chapter also focuses on one of the most famous books written by an Italian anthropologist and translated outside Italy: Vittorio Lanternari’s, The Religions of the Oppressed. A Study of Modern Messianic Cults . When Lanternari’s book was published in the American edition ( 1963 ), a great deal of criticism was directed at it. Some of this criticism was made by specialists in particular areas on the risks of large generalizations. In his reading of this debate, which is significant of the link between cultural anthropology and ethnography that was prevalent in the immediate postwar period, Matera would like to point out that omissions of ethnographic details and misunderstandings of the cultural significance of a specific element do not always undermine the theoretical, analytical, and heuristic relevance of the reading of such a large phenomenon as the one at the center of Lanternari’s analysis. And vice versa, we should also consider how much even maniacal ethnographic precision, achieved after years of specific in-depth study in the same “field,” does not ultimately prove itself to be devoid of any theoretical significance; in short, it is “missionary knowledge” of very little use for the purposes of anthropological theory.

The last chapter of Part II is Patrizia Resta Stumbling blocks. The irruption of the interpretive approach in twentieth century anthropology. Geertz’s interpretive anthropology has guided the anthropological debate of the mid-twentieth century, laying the deconstructionist approach foundation privileged by the anthropological discipline at the end of the same century. In a broader perspective, without attempting to exhaust the topic, this chapter proposes to relaunch some questions: first, that of ethnographic practice. Did Geertz’s reflections undermine the authority of the ethnographic paradigm in its connection with the field as it had hitherto been known and practiced? Or is it possible to find the original features that distinguish the epistemological dimension of the ethnographic paradigm in its theoretical methodological proposal? In his collected works, do the “parochial facts” allow the emergence of the “broad principles” in which the possibility of understanding them is embedded? Or has reflexivity oriented his research to such an extent that no posthumous diary can allow a different interpretation? Very briefly, reevaluated at a distance, can we say that the interpretive paradigm has been truly revolutionary, innovative, alternative or that it must be repositioned in the discipline’s historical trajectory oriented toward assuming diversity within the framework of cultural creativity? The author emphasizes the critical issues of the interpretative and ethnographic perspectives that emerged in the twentieth century, in particular research contexts, such as those in which corruption and organized crime are articulated.

Patrizia Resta highlights the great contradiction present in an ethnography that places itself, in the light of a long and settled empirical practice and theoretical reflection, as an effective tool for understanding the other with respect to which, however, it turns out to be condemned to the inscrutable opacity that the other opposes him.

Despite the enormous influence it has exercised on the anthropological debate throughout the last century, the interpretative approach and anthropological writing show all their limitations and they stop in the face of contexts of unquestionable relevance in the contemporary world that oppose an unsurpassed impermeability.

Part III, Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Multi-sited ethnography, counts four chapters on specific research approaches in ethnography.

The first is by Francesco Faeta , Seeing means knowing (Zu sehen bedeutet zu wissen).   On visual paradigm in ethnography . Taking as a matter of fact a specific and complex consideration of ethnography (authoritatively supported by other writings present in the book), Faeta’s chapter focuses on the issues of the gaze connected with fieldwork. He dwells on the critical exiguity of anthropological reflection on the topic, and on the need to define in theoretical terms, even with the help of conceptual frameworks tangent the disciplinary field (see, i.e., Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu), the nature of the ethnographic gaze, in the perspective of the visual construction of the subject and of the access of this subject to the awareness of the ethnographic relationship.

In this perspective, Faeta emphasizes the body-gaze and body-world relationships, on the background of the consideration that visual processes have had in the construction of knowledge in the contemporary West. Finally, he tries to focus on the link between ethnography and photography (identified as a valuable tool for a critique of the gaze), with attention to some possibilities of experimental and “conceptual” declination of this connection.

Faeta points out that it is not important what we look at , but how we look and he points out that the critical and self-critical effort of each ethnographer must be based on a systematic analysis of his own, as well as others’, way of seeing.

Visual ethnography can act as the foundation of the most extensive research practices as a tool for a critique of the gaze.

Only this perception of reality can lead to the construction of an ethnography that restores the consistency of the data in front of us in a non-naive or superficial way.

The second chapter in this section is by Angela Biscaldi . The chapter, entitled Dennis and Barbara Tedlock: Dialogical Anthropology , discusses three main aspects of Barbara Tedlock’s and Dennis Tedlock’s fieldwork and anthropological reflection; poetics, participation, and translation. According to Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, every act of speech, writing, or doing has a poetic dimension. They discuss how the categories of a poetics based in Western literacy tradition require extensive revaluation in order to improve our comprehension of native arts and our concept of performance too.

Barbara and Dennis Tedlock were also interested in the personal encounter of the anthropologist and the informant and in examining how this encounter serves as the origin of the ethnographic material. They reflect on and critically engage with their own participation within the ethnographic frame and on the consequences of thinking and doing anthropology as dialogue, not only during fieldwork, but in publication as well. Barbara Tedlock created the concept of “Observation of participation.” During participant observationethnographers attempt to be both emotionally engaged participants and coolly dispassionate observers. In the observation of participation, ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others’ coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter. The shift from one methodology to the other entails an important representational transformation. Finally, translation is the main topic of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock’s reflection. They proposed the concept of “dialogical anthropology”—an important epistemological paradigm turn. Analogical anthropology involves the replacement of one discourse (the native one) with another (the anthropological one). Analogical Anthropology is “Talking above,” “talking beyond,” or “talking later”; it produces a result. Dialogical anthropology is “talking across” or “talking alternately”; it illustrates processes and changes. Theoretical and methodological implications of this shift are relevant, and they are analyzed in the chapter.

Ivo Quaranta Sensory and Embodied Ethnography presents in a critical way the paradigm of embodiment that helped to redefine the very way cultural processes are conceptualized and investigated in social sciences. By placing the analysis at the level of lived experience, embodiment has emerged as a powerful way to relate perceptions and sensations to broader socio-historical dynamics. Such a shift, though, did not focus merely on the issues of the cultural construction of the body and the senses, it rather allowed analyses to account for the very process of actors’ engagement in the production of meaning, i.e., in the practical embodied production of culture.

If culture is rooted in, and emerges from, social practices and these are inevitably incorporated, then corporeality is not an accessory segment, a specialized theme, to rise to a constitutive and unavoidable dimension of anthropological reflection.

Working through the incorporation paradigm does not require specific research objects or special data; it means adopting a posture aimed at grasping the relationship that research themes maintain with corporeality.

The body of the ethnographer therefore should not be understood as a natural and unmediated tool for data collection, but as a tool for meeting, negotiating, and cultural production.

Within this broader theoretical scenario, ethnography has been profoundly reframed as an embodied practice as well. The contribution aims at reconstructing such a theoretical debate arguing how sensory ethnography has allowed scholarship to de-intellectualize the interpretations of social reality, placing intercorporeality as the very lived ground of that mutual understanding that we represent through ethnographic writing.

Bruno Riccio , Exploring Mobility through Mobility. The Challenges of Multi - sited Ethnography from Marcus and Hannerz to nowadays , closes this Part. With the aim of grasping “glocal” nexuses as much as different human experiences of movement (migration, tourism, aid, and development) within contemporary societies, mobile approaches as multi-sited research developed, where the field was shaped by following people, kin, and other social networks, economic and social remittances, political projects, etc. Drawing on ethnographic examples, Riccio shows how this methodological perspective is well suited to the analysis of displacement through space: considering migrants and their families in both the place of origin and contexts of arrival considerably facilitates the understanding of a complex and multidimensional process such as migration.

By following migrants’ relationships and practices, Riccio connected up the different locations and methodological experiences (participant observation, interviews, archive research, and life stories) by continuously comparing their life and professional stories (similarities and differences) while also engaging spatially with the continuous references and comparisons between actions and thoughts that surfaced in the different field research sites.

Simultaneously Riccio considers and discusses critical challenges to such an extension of the ethnographic field. More than on Space, he focuses on Time as a crucial variable to be managed in the attempt to compensate the “centrifugal” dispersion of multi-sited explorations. In fact, the multi-sited character of migration ethnography may be appreciated not only in terms of space, but also from a temporal perspective: ethnography is not only multi-sited but also multi-temporal, thus addressing the need to adopt a longitudinal perspective and periodically revisit the field as the years pass.

The last Part is Part IV. Visual, Dialogical, Sensorial, Practical, Multi-sited ethnography . This Part opens with Gabriella D’Agostino Participant observation. A problematic methodological topos.

The chapter begins with Malinowski, an author who could not be left out of a book dedicated to ethnography. While it is well known that the attribution of the ethnographic primacy to the Polish anthropologist is a matter of disciplinary tradition rather than of history [cf. Alliegro], the importance of the Argonauts, and also of the Diaries, remains unquestionable for the foundation of the ethnographic practice and for the scientific status of the knowledge acquired by its means.

Gabriella D’Agostino reads in depth the most significant passages in this sense of the famous Introduction to the Argonauts, explains and problematizes the foundational value of a specifically ethnographic epistemology. She also reads Malinowski’s Diaries, not as a stone of a scandal but as a counterpart to a practice that is in itself reflective, ambivalent, and finally procedural, as the ethnographic one will later reveal in unsuspected years.

This essay has several purposes: highlighting some issues related to Malinowski’s theory and practice of research, which are full of implications not always grasped in their theoretical and methodological complexity; recalling some criticisms that have been put forward in the anthropological debate toward the notion of reflexive observation; discussing some uses and abuses of ethnographic practice in disciplinary domains other than anthropology.

We leave the reader with the difficult task of determining whether the pioneering role that disciplinary history attributes to Malinowski is founded or not.

The second chapter of this part is by Alessandro Simonicca , Marcus and Clifford, between deconstruction and agency in anthropological field work. The essay aims to retrace some fundamental phases of the interpretive anthropological currents of the late twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between the “end of the subject” in philosophical deconstruction (first French, then American) and “text” as an ethnographic organization of anthropological discourse.

Referring to authors such as George Marcus and James Clifford, it has the intention of demonstrating both the usefulness of the notion of text and the overcoming of the classical antinomies of the relationship between power/structure and action in ethnography.

The concept of design is introduced here. Design is an analytical representation of reality: the researcher connects and groups certain aspects of reality by providing a category capable of understanding realities without clear boundaries. Both for logical structure and for theoretical references, it is connected to the ideal type of Wax Weber, in the sense of a conceptual framework that functions as a scheme for a case of the world. Anthropology, for Marcus, is topological research that focuses on the practice of connectivity. With it the anthropologist tries to undertake an ontological, conceptual, and moral commitment with the world; and this practice places “design” at the center, as an arrangement that gives access to an understanding of reality. The notion of “design” has been central in recent decades and continually appeals to how Marcus—referring to design disciplines such as architecture or art—defines his two souls: “design practice” and “design studio,” a model for doing and a model for understanding. The common matrix is the idea of a non-theory driven practice, but a series of regulatory skills whose structure is the collaborative cognitive enterprise, which is carried out by means of invention, learning, and analysis processes.

Michela Fusaschi The theory and practice of gender ethnography: a textbook case of invisibility. The gender ethnography such as feminist anthropology has a long history, but they are a textbook case of invisibility, at least in Italy. The contemporary anthropology analysis has focused on denaturalizations and deconstruction to unveil the mechanisms of power and the dynamics of social hierarchy. In this sense, cultural anthropology would have had to acquire the commitment and reflexivity of gender and feminist ethnography without hiding them or relegating them into “dedicated texts.” Why are anthropologists such as Denise Paulme, Germaine Tillion, Michelle S. Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Gayle Rubin, Marilyn Strathern, Henrietta Moore, and Lila Abu-Lughod less famous than Bronislaw Malinowki, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Marcel Griaule, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz? The author of this chapter proposes the reconstruction of some of these exemplary ethnographies to bring them to the heart of the history of anthropology. The goal is to show how theory, practice, and posture of feminist ethnography produce analytical-descriptive elaboration on gender and generation of how they are multi-located, sexed, and historicized even in the form of critique politics for the recognition of subjects and subjectivity.

Fabio Dei “ Beyond the field: research experience and theoretical elaboration in anthropological traditions ” closes Part IV. The centrality of field research, so strong in mainstream English-speaking anthropology, sometimes turns unduly into a sort of “mystique of fieldwork,” according to which anthropological knowledge stems directly from the researcher’s subjective experience.

If Geertz and the Writing Culture movement insisted on rhetorical-literary devices filtering field experience, its relationship with the theoretical dimension of anthropological writing is less clear. This aspect can be explored in two directions: (a) the analysis of anthropological traditions including forms of empirical research other than fieldwork; (b) the analysis of “mainstream” authors in which the research/theory relationship is configured in a less classical way, e.g., with a conspicuous theoretical elaboration based on the use of empirical data not directly produced through fieldwork.

If the attention to the anthropology-literature link has diminished over time, Fabio Dei underlines how that intellectual season contributed to accentuate the myth of a fieldwork as a subjective experience, testimony of participation, of political denunciation, or of anti-hegemonic practice. It is a conception of research that perhaps still covers part of the real ethnographic work. But it does not account for a more widespread reality of empirical research, which does not take place in “other” worlds but also in “ours” and is no longer divided between a clearly separated Being there and Being here. It is research that uses multiple methods of dialogue, documentation, data “collection,” but also of engagement and involvement of the researcher in the context studied.

In conclusion, the author calls for a different way of characterizing anthropological research, which arises from a broader comparison between the different histories and traditions. However, it takes into account the essential core of ethnography: an endeavor to cautiously and patiently punctuate the fine grain of social relations, that which generally escapes grand models and the surface of official and institutional self-representations.

Finally, a retrospection. In 1997 , a book entitled Ethnography. Writings and representations of anthropology was published in Italy written by Ugo Fabietti, and one of the two editors of this volume, Vincenzo Matera.

The theoretical core of that volume is the writing, understood as the engine of any research project aimed at producing knowledge on social and cultural phenomena. The book emphasized that the strength of anthropology lies in its ability to construct wide-ranging discourses on cultural diversity and that this ability is played out in the field of writing and representation. The anthropologist creates a discursive field, a way of considering problems, events, conflicts, and values. Whether he uses fieldwork or other sources to do this, what matters is the power to engage with the representation he has built. In other words, the specificity of anthropological knowledge lies in the way it sets problems, thinks about them, and represents them, not in what, without theoretical openness, is reduced to a mere “technique” of research, nor (even less) in the “courage” of the intrepid explorer/ethnographer. Today, that position leads both editors of this volume to reaffirm that “ethnography without anthropology is nothingness” (Ingold 2007 ) to express a critique of the ethnographic “fashion” that has dominated and still dominates the recent field: a retreat into angles of the world from which few then succeed in coming out in a convincing way. The ability to persuade is played on a complexity that has many faces, as emerges in the following chapters.

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Matera, V., Biscaldi, A. (2021). Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice Introduction. In: Matera, V., Biscaldi, A. (eds) Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_1

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Ethnography

Associate Professor of Sociology

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Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) provides a comprehensive guide to understanding, conceptualizing, and critically assessing ethnographic research and its resultant texts. Through a series of discussions and illustrations, utilizing both classic and contemporary examples, the book highlights distinct features of ethnography as both a research methodology and a writing tradition. It emphasizes the importance of training—including familiarity with culture as an anthropologically derived concept and critical awareness of the history of ethnography. To this end, it introduces the notion of ethnographic comportment , which serves as a standard for engaging and gauging ethnography. Indeed, ethnographic comportment issues from a familiarity with ethnography’s problematic past and inspires a disposition of accountability for one’s role in advancing ethnographic practices. Following an introductory chapter outlining the emergence and character of ethnography as a professionalized field, subsequent chapters conceptualize ethnographic research design, consider the practices of representing research methodologies, discuss the crafting of accurate and evocative ethnographic texts, and explain the different ways in which research and writing gets evaluated. While foregrounding interpretive and literary qualities that have gained prominence since the late twentieth century, the book properly situates ethnography at the nexus of the social sciences and the humanities. Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) presents novice ethnographers with clear examples and illustrations of how to go about conducting, analyzing, and representing their research; its primary purpose, however, is to introduce readers to effective practices for understanding and evaluating the quality of ethnography.

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Research Guides

Education Ethnography

Aslihan Guler; Yeoeun Park; Youngjoo Seo; and Amy Walker

Description

Ethnography is a method of qualitative research which seeks to understand the social and cultural practices of everyday life in a particular culture (Spradley, 1980). Ethnography allows the researcher to provide a thorough description of the culture in which they are studying (Geertz, 2000). Ethnographic tools focus on listening and learning from the participants and include field observation, participant observation, interviews, document analysis, focus groups, field notes, and reflexive notes and memos (Spradley, 1980).

Ethnography is a popular method of qualitative research that is used to study education, providing researchers and educators alike with in-depth insight around topics of learning in participants’ social contexts …providing researchers and educators alike with in-depth insight around topics of learning in participants’ social contexts. Stakeholders in education ethnographic studies can include administrators, teachers, parents, students and community members and can take place in a variety of settings in and out of school, including classrooms, homes, and communities (Athanases & Heath, 1995).

Athanases, S. & Heath, S. B. (1995). Ethnography in the study of the teaching and learning of English. Research in the Teaching of English , 29 (3), 263-287.

Geertz, C. (2000). The interpretation of cultures (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Spradley, J. (1980). Participant observation . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Key Research Books and Articles on Education Ethnography Methodology

Carspecken, P. F. (1996).  Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide . New York: Routledge.

This book outlines a five-stage approach towards conducting critical ethnography, also referred to as critical qualitative research. The author defines critical ethnography as a type of research that not only describes social interactions but focuses on unpacking social inequalities. The five stages focus on both technical and theoretical aspects of what it means to conduct ethnography as social activism. This book serves as a practical, applicable guide for researchers who seek to conduct qualitative research.

Grenfell, M. (2012).  Language, ethnography, and education:  B ridging new literacy studies and Bourdieu . New York: Routledge.

This text focuses on ethnography through the lens of Bourdieu’s sociological tenets. The author combines the study of language, literacy and education, offering a new perspective on traditional ways of using ethnography to study education. Throughout the book, Grenfell offers students and researchers alike a new method for conducting ethnography in a classroom setting. Grenfell approaches this in three sections: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu–Principles; Language, Ethnography and Education-Practical Studies; and Working at the Intersections–In Theory and Practice.

Heath, S. B., & Street, B. V. (2008).  On ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research . New York: Teachers College Press.

Researchers at Stanford University, Brown University, and King’s College London provide a step-by-step guide for conducting ethnographic research in language and literacy education, from forming research questions to publication. The authors guide Molly, a novice ethnographer, through ethnographic research by answering her questions about different stages of the research process. The authors provide examples from their own field work in literacy education to guide Molly. This book can be used to gain deeper perspectives from two experts about conducting ethnographic research in language and literacy education.

Mills, D., & Morton, M. (2013).  Ethnography in education . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Scholars at the University of Oxford and the University of Canterbury guide readers through the application of ethnographic approaches in education by including their teaching and field experience. Through the book’s eight chapters, they provide in-depth explanations of various approaches in ethnographic research and guide researchers on how to find new ways to approach ethnography. This book serves as a comprehensive guidebook for graduate students who are interested in conducting ethnographic research for their dissertations.

Recent Dissertations Using Education Ethnography Methodology

Adams, S. R. (2013).  The meaning of race-based professional development: A critical feminist ethnography . Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (Order Number 3556387)

This study seeks to understand the meaning of the experiences of a group of nine diverse educators who participated in a five-day, residential, intensive seminar known as the Teaching for Educational Equity (TFEE) in 2010. Louie F.  Rodriguez’ (2012) “Framework of Recognition for Latina/o Youth” provides a theoretical foundation for interpreting individual interviews over the six months following the TFEE seminar. Using critical feminist ethnographic methodology, the authors developed a collaborative affinity mapping analytic for use with the four local TFEE participants. The authors were able to collaboratively analyze the interview transcripts using TFEE interview analysis, which indicated that all of the five elements of the Rodriguez Framework of Recognition were present and evident in the TFEE seminar. This study suggests that educators must first experience the Framework as learners before they can recreate these learning conditions in their classrooms. Educators must also experience collegial recognition as learners and within their professional settings. Based on these results, Adams developed the Professional Framework of Recognition for Educational Equity (PFREE), which is a new model for creating and delivering race-based professional development for educators.

McNabb, M. B. (2017).  Voices of beginning college students on academic probation: A classroom ethnography. Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (Order Number 10278058)

McNabb conducts classroom ethnography with members of an academic probation class in a Midwest university to investigate the experiences of students classified as “beginner underachieved” from multiple perspectives. This study provides in-depth information on how to conduct ethnographic research in a formal setting such as a college classroom; therefore, it can be a helpful example for graduate students who plan to use classroom ethnography.

O’Meara, K. D. (2016).  A community of second language writing at Arizona State University: An institutional ethnography . Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (Order Number 10105920)

Institutional ethnography examines the relationships people have with institutional practices and how these individuals interact in light of the ruling relations. O’Meara’s study uses institutional ethnography to examine the lived experiences of nine second language (L2) writing teachers with regard to the interpersonal, material, and spatial relationships inherent in their work using interviews, focus groups, and a mapping heuristic.

Yumarnamto, M. (2016). Indonesian English language teachers’ professional growth and changing identities: An autoethnography and narrative inquiry. Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (Order Number 10124174)

This study explores contributing factors to Indonesian English language teachers’ professional growth and identity. The central research question of this study was: What are the factors and challenges that contribute to Indonesian English teachers’ professional growth and identity formation as reflected in their life histories, critical events, and identity claims? Three additional research questions include: 1) What are the major critical events and identity claims in their life histories which were pertinent in the ELTs’ professional identity formation ? And in what ways do the ELTs consider them pertinent? 2) What are the challenges encountered by the ELTs in the profession? 3) What do those challenges imply about how Indonesian ELTs aspire to develop and fulfill their professional identities? Using Freeman’s (2009) framework, this study used autoethnography and narrative inquiry as methodologies. The data collected involved personal documents, notes, photos, interviews and focus groups.

Internet Resources

Arizona State University. Learning how to look and listen [website]. Retrieved from https://www.learninghowtolookandlisten.com

This website brings together resources from a conference supported by the Spencer Foundation at Arizona State University where groups of scholars gathered to document and illustrate the basic patterns of visual and auditory attention employed by researchers who use video to study social interaction. The site offers different sections, which focus on individuals viewing and discussing the data, groups viewing and discussing the data together, and samples of presentations by established scholars.

Ethnography matters . [website] http://ethnographymatters.net/

Ethnography Matters is a free online space where ethnographers share their experience and knowledge about conducting ethnography in innovative ways. This accessible website might help researchers connect with other ethnographers around the world to create a network. Also, by participating in this cyber platform, ethnographers can exchange their thoughts and ideas about novel ways of conducting ethnography.

Gibbs, Graham. (2012). Ethnography. Part 1 of 2 on ethnography and participant observation. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/V8doV3P0us4

Gibbs, Graham. (2012). What to observe in participant observation. Part 2 of 2 on ethnography and participant observation. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/JADIR-J9Ht4

In this two-part series, Dr. Graham R. Gibbs of the University of Huddersfield offers a lecture to graduate students on the purpose of ethnography and how to conduct ethnographic research. These videos serve as learning tools for students and novice researchers. Part one examines the nature of ethnography, conducting participant observation, managing the role of a researcher when conducting observations, and analyzing examples of existing ethnographic studies. Part two discusses the nuances of observation and taking field notes during ethnographic research, data collection, emic and etic typographies, and recording one’s findings. These videos serve as valuable tools for someone who seeks to learn more about ethnography and possibly use it as a qualitative research method. These videos have over 72,000 combined views and are the foremost training videos for ethnography found on YouTube.

National Park Service. (n.d.). Ethnographic research center [website]. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/ERCa.htm

The Ethnographic Research Center (EFC) is provided by the National Park Service. This website explains what ethnographic research is and why it is important for your research. By focusing on applying ethnographic methods to learning about African American heritage, the Center helps visitors learn about ethnographic research from the detailed research process and how to apply it to various projects.

The website offers several sections. In the Individual Viewing section, participants conduct individual video analysis sessions by “thinking out loud” while watching a 2-minute video of classroom interaction. In the Group Viewing section, researchers conduct group “interaction analysis” of the classroom interaction with the same video used by participants in their individual analysis session. In Presentations, scholars present how they have used video-based analysis in their past and present research. They show diverse sets of historical, contemporary, and interdisciplinary approaches to video-based analysis from different philosophical orientations. The participants also discuss synthesizing conference themes and further directions for video analysis in education and the social sciences.

TEDxBroadway. (2013). Ethnography: Ellen Issacs at TEDxBroadway . Retrieved from https://youtu.be/nV0jY5VgymI

This YouTube video is an effective guide for graduate students who are interested in incorporating ethnography in their studies. Showing examples of how computers and copiers have been developed in the past decades with images and pictures, this video facilitates the audience’s understanding of how ethnography can be used to examine human behavior within a culture, especially implicit aspects, such as thoughts or emotions. Through this video, graduate students can understand the different ways to use ethnography in their fields, such as service of markets and companies, employment networking, and studies in humanities.

University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. (n.d.). Ethnography forum: Video library . Retrieved from https://www.gse.upenn.edu/cue/forum/video_library

The Ethnography in Education Research Forum is a meeting of qualitative researchers in education, and its foci include: multicultural issues in education, practitioner/teacher/action research, critical and feminist ethnography, ethnographic evaluation in education, language issues in education, uses of ethnography in math and science, and indigenous language revitalization. Past keynotes from the Ethnography in Education Research Forum are available for viewing, such as the 2016 keynote on mobility, multiplicity, and multimodality, which facilitates reflection on new theoretical tools in education ethnography.

Education Ethnography Copyright © 2019 by Aslihan Guler; Yeoeun Park; Youngjoo Seo; and Amy Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Research Methodology & Design

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Selected Videos

Learn how to locate videos in the Library. See the FAQ: Where can I locate videos in the Library?

• Qualitative Research and Ethnography [SAGE video] Dr. Marsha Henry discusses ethnography and broader feminist qualitative research. She defines ethnography as embedded and embodied research, then explores the implications of that definition. She also touches on the differences between qualitative and quantitative approaches, and how feminism is challenging long-held assumptions about research.
• What Do You Mean by the Term “Ethnography”? [SAGE video] Dr. Sara Delamont discusses ethnography and ethnographic research. Ethnographic research is done primarily through observation, usually over a long period of time. Delamont examines ethnography through research that she has done, primarily in classrooms.
• Researching Rural Schools Using an Ethnographic Approach [SAGE video] Dr. Sam Hillyard describes her ethnographic research into the idea that schools are at the heart of village communities. She highlights unexpected findings, particularly in how and in where the village has changed. She also brings in concepts of space and agency from human geography.
• Researching Multiracial Identity Using Ethnographic Methods [SAGE video] Dr. Jennifer Jones discusses her ethnographic research into multiracial identity and whether "mixed race" is a simple category or a cohesive identity group. She explains the challenges she faced as well as the importance of theory building throughout the research process.

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Dissertation topics

Msc or mphil visual, material and museum anthropology: dissertation topics.

MSc VMMA students have the three months of the summer to research and write a 10,000 word dissertation for submission in September; Those students who stay on for the second year of the MPhil do not write the MSc dissertation but spend the summer conducting preliminary research, and then over the second year of the degree write a 30,000 word dissertation.

Examples of previous dissertation titles by VMMA students:

Museums of Decay: An ecological approach to comparative museology at Old Car City, USA

The Body And The Person: Resisting Representation In Photographic Practice

Women hold up half the sky and screen: The evolving relationship and representation of female sexuality and power in Chinese cinema and society from the 1980s to present day

Building Decoloniality: The contribution of Uncomfortable Oxford walking tours to decolonising Oxford’s cityscape

The Power of Layers - Tracing the Mediated Nature of Museological Representations of 'Islam' in Europe

Beyond the frame: the materiality, social lives and comfort of family photographs 

Digital Gigs: A Visual, Material and Ethnographic Study of Online Jazz Performances During Lockdown

Queering the Ethnographic Museum: Beyond the Binary at the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Nostalgia of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Nostalgia at St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Oxford

Sonic systems of knowledge: an ethnographic study of the use and value of sound in museums

Between a Rock (Oyster) and Hard Place: The Changing and Conflicting Values of the Rock oyster, Crassostrea Gigas, through Conventional and Alternative Supply Chains in the British and Irish Isle

Learning a Skill in Lockdown: An investigation into the development of pottery skills and its affective impact in lockdown Britain

(Web)sites of (Post)memory: when is Facebook a site of memory?

Re-examine the authenticity of photographs in postmodern context, taking tourists photographs as an example

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• What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

What Is Ethnography? | Meaning, Guide & Examples

Published on 6 May 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 6 April 2023.

Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organisation to observe their behaviour and interactions up close. The word ‘ethnography’ also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.

Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.

Table of contents

What is ethnography used for, different approaches to ethnographic research, gaining access to a community, working with informants, observing the group and taking field notes, writing up an ethnography.

Ethnographic research originated in the field of anthropology, and it often involved an anthropologist living with an isolated tribal community for an extended period of time in order to understand their culture.

This type of research could sometimes last for years. For example, Colin M. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti people for three years in order to write the classic ethnography The Forest People .

Today, ethnography is a common approach in various social science fields, not just anthropology. It is used not only to study distant or unfamiliar cultures, but also to study specific communities within the researcher’s own society.

For example, ethnographic research (sometimes called participant observation ) has been used to investigate football fans , call centre workers , and police officers .

Advantages of ethnography

The main advantage of ethnography is that it gives the researcher direct access to the culture and practices of a group. It is a useful approach for learning first-hand about the behavior and interactions of people within a particular context.

By becoming immersed in a social environment, you may have access to more authentic information and spontaneously observe dynamics that you could not have found out about simply by asking.

Ethnography is also an open and flexible method. Rather than aiming to verify a general theory or test a hypothesis , it aims to offer a rich narrative account of a specific culture, allowing you to explore many different aspects of the group and setting.

Disadvantages of ethnography

Ethnography is a time-consuming method. In order to embed yourself in the setting and gather enough observations to build up a representative picture, you can expect to spend at least a few weeks, but more likely several months. This long-term immersion can be challenging, and requires careful planning.

Ethnographic research can run the risk of observer bias . Writing an ethnography involves subjective interpretation, and it can be difficult to maintain the necessary distance to analyse a group that you are embedded in.

There are often also ethical considerations to take into account: for example, about how your role is disclosed to members of the group, or about observing and reporting sensitive information.

Should you use ethnography in your research?

If you’re a student who wants to use ethnographic research in your thesis or dissertation , it’s worth asking yourself whether it’s the right approach:

• Could the information you need be collected in another way (e.g., a survey , interviews)?
• How difficult will it be to gain access to the community you want to study?
• How exactly will you conduct your research, and over what timespan?
• What ethical issues might arise?

If you do decide to do ethnography, it’s generally best to choose a relatively small and easily accessible group, to ensure that the research is feasible within a limited time frame.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

There are a few key distinctions in ethnography which help to inform the researcher’s approach: open vs closed settings, overt vs covert ethnography, and active vs passive observation. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Open vs closed settings

The setting of your ethnography – the environment in which you will observe your chosen community in action – may be open or closed.

An open or public setting is one with no formal barriers to entry. For example, you might consider a community of people living in a certain neighbourhood, or the fans of a particular football team.

• Gaining initial access to open groups is not too difficult …
• … but it may be harder to become immersed in a less clearly defined group.

A closed or private setting is harder to access. This may be for example a business, a school, or a cult.

• A closed group’s boundaries are clearly defined and the ethnographer can become fully immersed in the setting …
• … but gaining access is tougher; the ethnographer may have to negotiate their way in or acquire some role in the organisation.

Overt vs covert ethnography

Most ethnography is overt . In an overt approach, the ethnographer openly states their intentions and acknowledges their role as a researcher to the members of the group being studied.

• Overt ethnography is typically preferred for ethical reasons, as participants can provide informed consent …
• … but people may behave differently with the awareness that they are being studied.

Sometimes ethnography can be covert . This means that the researcher does not tell participants about their research, and comes up with some other pretence for being there.

• Covert ethnography allows access to environments where the group would not welcome a researcher …
• … but hiding the researcher’s role can be considered deceptive and thus unethical.

Active vs passive observation

Different levels of immersion in the community may be appropriate in different contexts. The ethnographer may be a more active or passive participant depending on the demands of their research and the nature of the setting.

An active role involves trying to fully integrate, carrying out tasks and participating in activities like any other member of the community.

• Active participation may encourage the group to feel more comfortable with the ethnographer’s presence …
• … but runs the risk of disrupting the regular functioning of the community.

A passive role is one in which the ethnographer stands back from the activities of others, behaving as a more distant observer and not involving themselves in the community’s activities.

• Passive observation allows more space for careful observation and note-taking …
• … but group members may behave unnaturally due to feeling they are being observed by an outsider.

While ethnographers usually have a preference, they also have to be flexible about their level of participation. For example, access to the community might depend upon engaging in certain activities, or there might be certain practices in which outsiders cannot participate.

An important consideration for ethnographers is the question of access. The difficulty of gaining access to the setting of a particular ethnography varies greatly:

• To gain access to the fans of a particular sports team, you might start by simply attending the team’s games and speaking with the fans.
• To access the employees of a particular business, you might contact the management and ask for permission to perform a study there.
• Alternatively, you might perform a covert ethnography of a community or organisation you are already personally involved in or employed by.

Flexibility is important here too: where it’s impossible to access the desired setting, the ethnographer must consider alternatives that could provide comparable information.

For example, if you had the idea of observing the staff within a particular finance company but could not get permission, you might look into other companies of the same kind as alternatives. Ethnography is a sensitive research method, and it may take multiple attempts to find a feasible approach.

All ethnographies involve the use of informants . These are people involved in the group in question who function as the researcher’s primary points of contact, facilitating access and assisting their understanding of the group.

This might be someone in a high position at an organisation allowing you access to their employees, or a member of a community sponsoring your entry into that community and giving advice on how to fit in.

However,  i f you come to rely too much on a single informant, you may be influenced by their perspective on the community, which might be unrepresentative of the group as a whole.

In addition, an informant may not provide the kind of spontaneous information which is most useful to ethnographers, instead trying to show what they believe you want to see. For this reason, it’s good to have a variety of contacts within the group.

The core of ethnography is observation of the group from the inside. Field notes are taken to record these observations while immersed in the setting; they form the basis of the final written ethnography. They are usually written by hand, but other solutions such as voice recordings can be useful alternatives.

Field notes record any and all important data: phenomena observed, conversations had, preliminary analysis. For example, if you’re researching how service staff interact with customers, you should write down anything you notice about these interactions – body language, phrases used repeatedly, differences and similarities between staff, customer reactions.

Don’t be afraid to also note down things you notice that fall outside the pre-formulated scope of your research; anything may prove relevant, and it’s better to have extra notes you might discard later than to end up with missing data.

Field notes should be as detailed and clear as possible. It’s important to take time to go over your notes, expand on them with further detail, and keep them organised (including information such as dates and locations).

After observations are concluded, there’s still the task of writing them up into an ethnography. This entails going through the field notes and formulating a convincing account of the behaviours and dynamics observed.

The structure of an ethnography

An ethnography can take many different forms: It may be an article, a thesis, or an entire book, for example.

Ethnographies often do not follow the standard structure of a scientific paper, though like most academic texts, they should have an introduction and conclusion. For example, this paper begins by describing the historical background of the research, then focuses on various themes in turn before concluding.

An ethnography may still use a more traditional structure, however, especially when used in combination with other research methods. For example, this paper follows the standard structure for empirical research: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The content of an ethnography

The goal of a written ethnography is to provide a rich, authoritative account of the social setting in which you were embedded – to convince the reader that your observations and interpretations are representative of reality.

Ethnography tends to take a less impersonal approach than other research methods. Due to the embedded nature of the work, an ethnography often necessarily involves discussion of your personal experiences and feelings during the research.

Ethnography is not limited to making observations; it also attempts to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way. For this, you may draw on theory, but also on your direct experience and intuitions, which may well contradict the assumptions that you brought into the research.

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40 Most Interesting Ethnographic Research Topics

Finding A-grade examples of ethnographic research topics may not be a walk in the park for college students.

The way of writing an effective ethnographic paper depends on the points discussed below.

So, here is a ready solution.

What is an Ethnographic Research Paper?

Ethnography is a social science method of research that counts on personal experiences within a subject group or a culture. Different instructors may recommend several writing guidelines for such a paper, but it generally follows a standard format. Such an arrangement incorporates a proper analysis and evaluation of the problem. Before we embark on learning how to write an ethnography, let us have a look at an ethnographic essay outline.

Structure of an Ethnographic Essay

The paper should follow the outline below: Introduction It is where you introduce your thesis statement, which is the main idea of the whole project. A proper ethnographic research topic would form a strong foundation for this part. The reader should be able to see an overview of what to expect in the essay. Methodology In this part, you explain how you did your research. Mention all the tools used and why you settled on them. It should be detailed and even a couple of in such a way that the reader can verify the information you used. Presentation and Analysis of Collected Data The findings should be placed on the table first. They should be in a logical manner, beginning with the essential facts. After that, analyze and precisely interpret the data. Let your readers know your criteria for interpretation before you start. Conclusion Different ethnographic research paper topics have different endings. However, the standard procedure is that you reiterate the most important points. Ensure that they are presented in an original way to make your conclusion not to look like a reversed introduction. That is the first part; however, finding quality examples of ethnographic research topics is another battle. Yet, don’t panic, we’ve got a legion of professional soldiers to cover your back on this.

We are going to explore a list of ethnography topics in clusters of ten each to prompt you for more. Get that notebook as we embark on this exciting experience. The items strive to meet your high school and college ethnography topics requirements.

Let’s get right into it, gang.

We will start with the easiest ones as we slowly advance to the technical topics. There is something for everybody!

Easy Ethnography Topics for High School

• A study of the incisor tooth
• The best careers that people can settle on in 2023
• A survey of the lifestyle of a teacher
• A study of the health benefits of taking water daily
• A look at the importance of the sun to children
• How greetings are in Africa
• A study of the eating habits of dogs and cats
• A comparison of the red meat and white meat
• How wealthy children compare to needy children in academic performance
• A look at how children behave at home versus in school

Interesting Ethnography Topics for College

• An ethnographic study of the Chinese diets
• The inner perspective of the culture of skateboarders
• Critical issues on the social, cultural experience of the dancing
• How nurses make sense of their caring abilities on the job
• A study of how second-hand merchants impact the bookselling industry
• Evaluating the satisfaction of a patient with the quality of care in a hospital
• What myths and misconceptions surround the global connection
• A study on the effect of uniforms in schools
• How language impacts culture
• A survey of qualitative sampling in data collection

Great Mini Ethnography Topics

• How have malls changed the shopping sector?
• Racism and its effects on campus
• Values promoted by media productions
• How cultural productions interpret the history
• A study of the communities in New York
• Teamwork and its impact on football
• Reasons for differences in families
• How service staff view people
• Lives and cultures of the hotel industry
• How immigrants express their identity
• The view of people on gays
• Adjustments made by women to fit in societies
• Homeschooling and low grades
• Hunting as a rite of passage
• Wrestling and men
• Concerts and teens
• Cultural differences between different ethnic groups
• How political clubs are changing
• A study of street children in Africa
• Politics and the U.S

How to write an effective ethnographic paper depends on the points discussed above. There are several ethnography paper examples online to give you more ideas on what you can write. Do not limit yourself to the topics above; create more unique ones on your own.

If you still need more professional writing help on any other essay, we would be more than glad to help. Hit that sends message button today.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Ethnography (Research methodology)'

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von, Oldenburg Tim. "Representing bicycle-based interaction: An interaction design exploration into bicycling research." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21838.

Angelopoulou, Zoi. "ICTs and Citizen Participation : An Ethnography in the Municipality Level." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för informatik (IK), 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-59778.

Rönkkö, Kari. "Making Methods Work in Software Engineering : Method Deployment - as a Social Achievement." Doctoral thesis, Ronneby : Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-00264.

Kaufman, Sara Victoria. ""You Can See it in Their Eyes:" A Communication Ethnography of a Humane Society." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/200.

Pereira, Beatriz de Castro Sebastião. "Pesquisa etnográfica em marketing." Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12139/tde-03092008-115700/.

Clark, Jodie. "The critical analysis of discourses in communities of practice : a methodology for ethnographic research." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.492853.

Rodriguez, Carmella M. "The Journey of a Digital Story: A Healing Performance of Mino-Bimaadiziwin: The Good Life." Antioch University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=antioch1433005531.

Albuloshi, Fatemah Mohammed K. "Reflections on current directions in leadership research : a reflexive-ethnographic examination of leader-follower and group dynamics in an international human rights based organization." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/31815.

Perombelon, Brice Désiré Jude. "Prioritising indigenous representations of geopower : the case of Tulita, Northwest Territories, Canada." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71e14c26-d00a-4320-a385-df74715c45c8.

Stritch, Rohan Lea. "Be sugar in milk : local perspectives on volunteer tourism in India and Uganda." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10170/445.

Hayes, Katie. "Chinese perspectives on environmental sustainability : the shaping of public opinion." 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10170/396.

Sabet, Denise. "Confucian or Communist, post-Mao or postmodern? : exploring the narrative identity resources of Shanghai’s Post-80s generation." 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10170/382.

Oliver, Nicole L. "The Supermom syndrome : an intervention against the need to be king of the mothering mountain." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10170/460.

Schwartz, Gerrit Jacobus. "Workplace learning in the South African Police Service (SAPS) : themes and perspectives in teaching research methodology module." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/21924.

Marshall, Tamara. "A tribal journey : canoes, traditions, and cultural continuity." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10170/448.

Durňak, Milan. "Analytické dispozice vizuální etnografie." Doctoral thesis, 2019. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-408177.

Jaimungal, Cristina S. "Language, Power, and Race: A Comparative Approach to the Sociopolitics of English." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/42856.

Colman, Robert. "The significance of Barney Simon's theatre-making methodology and his influence on how and why I make theatre: an auto-ethnographic practice as research." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/15112.

55 Ethnographic Essay Topics

Table of Contents

Ethnographic Essay Topics: A Comprehensive Guide

Ethnography is a fascinating field that delves into the study of cultures, societies, and human behaviors. An ethnographic essay allows writers to immerse themselves in different cultures and present findings in an engaging manner. If you’re struggling to pinpoint the right topic, this guide will walk you through some brilliant ideas and explain how to make your choice.

How to Choose the Best Ethnographic Essay Topic?

Modern ethnographers often hone in on specific aspects of cultures rather than trying to cover everything. Some focus on particular nations based on ethnicity, language, or geography, while others might delve into aspects like migration, interethnic relations, or religion across multiple cultures. To choose a topic, follow these steps:

Identify a Specific Theme : Decide on a particular cultural element you wish to explore. For instance, if you’re interested in rituals, you could delve into traditional wedding ceremonies in a particular region.

Research : Before diving in, spend some time online familiarizing yourself with your chosen cultural area. This will help you narrow down your topic and ensure it’s unique.

Personal Connection : Choose a topic that resonates with you or that you have a personal interest in. It will make your writing process more enjoyable and your essay more compelling.

Top Ethnographic Essay Topics:

• Exploring professional and ethical differences in gender indicators.
• Delving into Egyptian funeral rites and their cultural significance.
• The role and significance of traditional calendar rituals.
• Migration patterns and ethnocultural adaptation in the Jewish Autonomous Region in recent decades.
• The historical and mythological roots of Korean ethnic identity.
• Preserving the traditional culture of Akha Thailand amid modernization.
• Unpacking ‘Englishness’ in contemporary Northern England.
• The roots and progression of Chinese tea culture.
• Linguistic diversity in Spain: Between theory and practice.
• The socio-anthropological study of youth political movements.
• The cultural significance of names in Japan.
• The Sociocultural Journey of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region.
• Re-emigration patterns in Israel at the turn of the century.
• The role of tolerance in multi-faith cultures.
• Challenges of globalization in today’s diverse world.
• Spatial behaviors in multi-ethnic youth groups.
• Internet resources and their role in ethnic discourse.
• Traditional gaming practices in Japanese culture.
• Collective identity territories in contemporary French discourse.
• The role and significance of puppets across cultures.
• Ethno-caste communities and their role in India’s traditional social organization.
• Unpacking Korean dance: Ethnic and cultural dimensions.
• Artistic expressions of early European farmers.
• The role of magic in traditional rituals.
• The pantheon of Ancient Greek deities: A study in typology and personification.
• Role-playing games as a modern subculture.
• The cultural significance of women’s tattoos.
• Traditional Micronesian shipping: An ethnohistoric perspective.
• Female deities in Central Asian religions and worldviews.
• The significance of animals in traditional cultures.

Cultural Practices and Rituals

• The significance of coming-of-age rituals in indigenous Australian tribes.
• Wedding traditions and their symbolic meanings in Southeast Asia.
• Culinary customs: Exploring the communal dining practices in the Middle East.
• The role of music and dance in West African ceremonies.
• Birth and naming ceremonies in Native American cultures.

Language and Communication

• Sign language communities and their cultural significance in the U.S.
• The oral storytelling traditions of the Maasai tribe.
• How language preservation efforts shape cultural identity among the Welsh.
• The evolution and modernization of the Gaelic language in Ireland.
• The intricate art of Inuit throat singing and its societal implications.

Religion and Spirituality

• Voodoo practices in Haiti: Beyond the misconceptions.
• The intricate temple rituals of Balinese Hinduism.
• Shamanic practices and their role in Mongolian tribal communities.
• The blending of indigenous beliefs and Catholicism in the Philippines.
• Pilgrimage trails and their socio-cultural importance in Tibetan Buddhism.

Economic and Social Structures

• The role of marketplaces in shaping community ties in Morocco.
• Barter trade systems and their continued relevance in Papua New Guinea.
• Nomadic lifestyles and economic adaptations among the Bedouins.
• The cultural significance of cowrie shells as currency in ancient Africa.
• Traditional and modern coexistence: The tech hubs of Bangalore amidst age-old practices.

Art and Aesthetics

• The cultural and spiritual significance of Polynesian tattoo art.
• Maori wood carvings: A story of ancestry and legends.
• The evolution of sari designs and weaving techniques in India.
• The symbolism behind Native American totem poles.
• Balinese mask-making: A blend of craft, drama, and spirituality.

Core Themes in Ethnography:

When considering your essay, you might want to explore some of these overarching themes:

• The main goals and categories of ethnography.
• The impact of the terrestrial environment on human development.
• The intricate relationship between language and cultural traits.
• The unique religious beliefs across global societies.
• A study of paganism versus global religions.
• An insight into primitive beliefs and regional religions.
• The daily lives and traditions of different ethnic groups.
• The history and significance of ethnonyms.

Should you find yourself still grappling with a topic, it can be valuable to seek guidance from experts. For top-quality essays crafted to perfection, our team at writeondeadline.com is at your disposal anytime. And if you’re racing against time or need professional input, our skilled writers are just a click away . Don’t hesitate to reach out!

89 Ethnographic Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best ethnographic topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 interesting topics to write about ethnographic, 👍 good essay topics on ethnographic, ❓ ethnographic research questions.

Ethnographic essays are an excellent way to show your understanding of the science and the relationships that form a particular development or situation. You have to display your knowledge of anthropology and how it influences a particular population group based on a variety of circumstances.

There are many factors that can affect a group of people, including their geographic location, climate, relationships with other groups, numbers, and more. As such, compiling them to form a logical conclusion can be an overwhelming task.

The complex relationships between different variables may appear relevant when they are not and vice versa. However, there are several tips that will let you write an outstanding essay.

You should try to determine the root causes behind the formation of a particular culture or phenomenon and work outwards from them. For example, overpopulation does not generally occur without a definite reason, as human populations tend to regulate themselves.

Once you identify that it is present, search for causes such as immigration, poverty, or sudden removal of a threat. After you identify the reason, you can mention it in your essay before overpopulation and use the two to develop a logical argument.

In doing so, you will establish a link and introduce a structure to your essay. The relationships may even provide you with ethnographic essay ideas that you may explore in detail.

Here are some tips for your writing process:

• Write a clear and concise thesis that will describe the topic of your essay and include it at the end of the introduction. It will help the reader understand what you are discussing early on and evaluate your arguments.
• Try to focus on one specific option among different ethnographic essay topics and have every point you make support it. The goal of the essay is to defend ideas, and deviations into unrelated matters serve as distractions. The reader will not appreciate a deviation from the subject matter into unknown territory.
• Separate the body of your essay into sections with concise and descriptive titles. A structure that divides the paper by topics makes navigation easier in case the reader wants to revisit your essay later.
• Remember that you are writing about ethnography, the study of cultures. While it may be tempting to concentrate on the circumstances of a specific group, your goal is to explain its practices and traditions. As such, you have to provide concrete examples of how a behavior emerged to suit the population’s needs.
• Make sure to cite relevant scholarly research whenever you want to make a statement of fact. Today’s science is founded on the achievements of past researchers, and their findings should not be taken as universal truths.

These considerations will help you improve your essay while you write it, reducing the workload and letting you achieve better results. The paper you will produce by following the tips will be easy to read and comprehend and show your understanding of the topic.

It will also demonstrate that you have studied the relevant sources and obtained accurate data for the formation of your conclusions.

However, you may struggle to write an essay from nothing using just these suggestions, as they require that you have some notion of the ideas you will discuss. For inspiration, visit IvyPanda to find ethnographic essay examples and other useful paper samples!

• Ethnographic and Phenomenological Approaches to Research Ethnographic research is an approach to data collection and analysis that aims at evaluating and categorizing human experiences through the lens of the participants’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
• Ethnographic Research Methods Participant observation can be defined as a qualitative method in ethnology research that is used by researchers in the areas of cultural anthropology in which the researcher in given the opportunity to get a close […]
• Ethnographic Field Notes from Starbucks The two large supermarkets, the large pharmacy, the three playgrounds, the community garden, the eclectic shopping and night life of South Street itself, the mural art of Isaiah Zagar, and other attractions, all pull a […]
• A Critical Review of Ethnographic Analysis The difference between these two techniques is transparent: in the case of open observation, the group of respondents knows that the researcher is conducting an analysis and is aware of its goals, whereas covert observation […]
• Ethnographic Design: Types The investigator is required to define the characteristics of the society under study. Abalos, argues that “critical ethnographic studies are a type of ethnographic research in which the author is interested in advocating for the […]
• Barker’s Ethnographic Exposé: Revealing Structural Violence Against the Marshallese Barker’s study of the Marshallese people and their victimization by the U.S.government is an outstanding demonstration of how ethnographic research and writing should be conducted.
• Ethnographic Design: Characteristics According to Abalos, “ethnography is the in depth study of naturally occurring behavior within a culture or a social group; it seeks to understand the relationship between culture and behavior, with culture referring to beliefs, […]
• Clement Restaurant: Ethnographic Description The ethnographic analysis will be added with a demographic review of the region in order to identify whether the business success is stipulated by the ethnographic background of the restaurants, or the population that is […]
• Ethnographic Prospects in Teaching and Learning Such a controversial view on the approaches taken in the research complies with the changeability of the social life at the moment.
• Ethnographic Interview of the Costa Rican People The analysis of the social environment is the important aspect of realizing the cultural background and the social problems of the clients.
• Tourism Management as an Ethnographic Theme Thus, as it is stated in some of the interview, tourists generally expect the attitude of obeisance towards them, and the workers of the tourism sphere feel themselves as the obedient servants.
• Hong Kong Street Food in Ethnographic Studies Bronislaw Malinowski is often cited as one of the first practitioners of this method during his research of the people of Papua New Guinea.
• Mayan Culture in Ethnographic Interpretation The Mayan elders were charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the traditions of the people and overseeing all the cultural practices.
• The Kurds Culture: An Ethnographic Study The most popular of the two dialects is the Kurmanji, it is the language of communication for most of the Kurds today.
• Mesoamerican Ethnographic Interpretation The civilization of these people faced strong influences from the people in the non-Maya cultures which include the Olmecs of Mexico and the Izapa cultures of people who lived in the Pacific coast.
• Mayan Ethnographic Interpretation: Traditions and Rituals According to The Mayan culture, the human body was viewed as a combination of the body and the souls. This means that the blood could communicate to the inner and the outer environment of the […]
• Navajo Ethnographic and Ethnological Studies The story is preserved in myths and is recounted in the ceremony known as ‘blessing way’ which is the foundation of the Navajo way of life.
• Kmart Department Stores: Ethnographic Study During the meeting, much attention was paid to the particular features of communication between the meeting participants in order to understand the aspects of the environment, characteristics of individuals, their interactions, and the presented culture.
• Ethnographic State in India He stated that their ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the Indian people had a hit against the British and that this had resulted to a distant loss of administrative power to British government.
• Cheyenne Indians History and Culture Furthermore, it was to emphasize the unique powers and the superiority of the chief priests and the prophets in the community.
• The Significance of Ethnographic Observation Thus, Arthur concentrates on the role of women in the use of lithics and the role of females in the development of Prehistoric communities, whereas Sillitoe and Hardy study the use of stone tools and […]
• Ethnographic Research: Coming of Age in Samoa Considering Margaret Mead’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Samoa, it is possible to say that dwelling upon that society she paid much attention to religion, education, upbringing and relation to each other within a family, […]
• Ethnographic reflection Mixing the scientific and humanistic approaches and implementing the anthropological framework and the concept of the bio-cultural triad for covering various sides of life of Beaver community, Brody uses dialogic procedures for depicting and explaining […]
• Twin Oaks Intentional Community Ethnographic Analysis It was through field work that the community was noted as one of the intentional communities. One of the main lessons learnt was their effort to bring gender equality in the community.
• Understanding the Science of Ethnographic Through Oneirology
• An Overview of the Dream State and the Concept of Human Ethnographic
• Understanding the Unconcious Ethnographic
• The Beauty Of Ethnographic: How Dreams Drive The Individual
• The Skeptical Ethnographic Argument of Rene Descartes, and the Priori and the Posteriori
• Ethnographic And Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• An Overview of the Controversy of Ethnographics, a Cognitive Activity During Sleep
• Animal Ethnographic And Substantiation A Connection To Humanity
• The Psychological Theories Of The Function Of Ethnographic
• The Ethnographic and Traditional Aboriginal Spirituality
• Sleeping and Ethnographic and Theories of Sleep
• Ethnographic Is Known As The Journey Your Mind
• The Centrality of the Ethnographic and Its Importance for Aboriginal Spirituality
• The Benefits Of Lucid Ethnographic
• Procrastination and Day Ethnographic
• Comparing and Contrasting Psychological Theories of Ethnographic
• Ethnographic as a Significant Process in Human Life Experience
• The Use of Illusion Argument, Ethnographic Argument, and Evil Genius Argument by Descartes
• Varieties of Lucid Ethnographic Experience, by Stephen Laberge
• Day Ethnographic in the Middle of the Summer Heat
• Ethnographic Various Amount Of People Experiences Different Effects
• Dreams, Ethnographic and Phases of Sleep
• Freud’s Theory of Ethnographic and Repression
• Synchroncities in the History of Paranormal Ethnographic
• Dreams and Ethnographic Nightmares in Children
• Gender And Ethnographic in Mapuche Shamanistic Practices
• Phenomenology of Ethnographic
• Descartes’ Meditations: Ethnographic and Evil Demon Arguments
• How Is the Power of Dreams and Ethnographic in the Novel of Mice and Men
• Difference Between Astral Projection And Lucid Ethnographic
• The Significance of Land to the Ethnographic for Aboriginal People and the Impact of the Land Rights Movement
• The Importance of Ethnographic and Sleeping
• Ethnographics Can Bring Misery in the Great Gatsby By F. Scott
• Exploring Causes of Sleep Difficulty and Ethnographic Problems
• The Importance of Ethnographic and the Sub-Conscious
• What Are the Problems and Constraints of Making Films on Ethnographics?
• What Importance May the Sex of the Anthropologist Have on the Ethnographic Process?
• What Does Ethnography Mean?
• What Is an Ethnographic Example?
• What Is Considered Ethnographic?
• What Is Ethnography Used For?
• What Is the Difference Between Ethnography and Anthropology?
• Why Is Ethnography Critical in Research?
• What Is Ethnography in Sociology?
• What Is Ethnography in Social Research?
• What Kind of Research Is Ethnography?
• What Is a Synonym for Ethnography?
• Is Ethnography a Research Design?
• How Do You Use Ethnography in a Sentence?
• When Did Ethnology Appear?
• How Does Ethnography Work in Real Life?
• What Are the Critical Characteristics of Ethnography?
• What Is the Difference Between Phenomenology and Ethnography?
• Who Was the First Ethnographer?
• Who Is the Father of Ethnography?
• How Do Ethnologists Study Culture?
• What Is the Difference Between Archaeology and Ethnography?
• What Is the Ethnological Argument?
• Is Ethnography a Theory?
• What Is the Weakness of Ethnography?
• What Is the Difference Between Ethnography and Qualitative Research?
• What Are the Problems With Traditional Ethnographic Film-Making?
• What Is the Relationship Between Students and Teachers in Ethnographic?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Ethnographic Reflexivity?
• What Are the Defining Activities and Principles of Ethnographic Research?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Top 101 Ethnographic Research Topics

The most common query for students studying ethnography is, “can I get help online for my ethnographic research topic?” while others search “ethnographic research topics.” Getting proper ethnographic research or essay topic has been a problem for many learners of the various subjects we handle.

That is why at HelpForHomework, we designed a service to help you whenever you need ethnographic research help. If you are looking for ethnographic research topic help, you do not need to look far. We provide professional research help for ethnography and all types of social science-related topics.

How do you select the best Ethnographic Research Topic?

As one of the best online ethnographic research platforms, we offer timely and top-notch social science research help. It is straightforward: you can either pick one from the article, contact our support department on the chat button or fill in the order form to get started.

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When researching your topics, we ensure that they are unique. We also understand that research papers must not be plagiarized. For this reason, we have employed top-level plagiarism checkers to ensure we achieve 100% originality.

References and Citations

We also offer you reference material used for citation when recommending ethnographic research topics. Also, if you let us handle your research paper, we ensure it is well-cited and referenced before submitting it to you.

What is ethnography?

Ethnography is qualitative scientific research on people’s culture, beliefs, customs, and differences. The word ethnography also implies the reports that an ethnographer produces after research.

The subject is flexible as you understand society’s social challenges and conventions in focus.

Importance of Ethnography

Ethnographic research involves anthropologists living in a particular society to learn and understand their way of living for a while. However, the subject is vital in other social science fields, not only anthropology. For example, ethnographic research is applicable in:

• Gang investigation
• Studies on sports fans
• Understanding how call centres work
• Probing police officers

Ethnography has immense career possibilities. Ethnographers get employment in:

• Anthropological organizations
• Archeological organizations
• NGOs specializing in social-cultural aspects

What are the advantages of ethnographic research?

Ethnography gives a researcher first-hand information of cultures and practices of communities. The ethnographic approach gives researchers first-hand interaction with people within a particular setting.

By becoming an ethnographer, you access more authentic information that you cannot easily find when asking or reading.

Further, the subject is flexible and open to other research methods. In this case, when doing ethnography research, ethnographers do not aim to verify theories and hypotheses. Instead, they are open to gathering narratives to explain a specific culture and other aspects of a community.

Why should you use ethnography in your research?

Students who want to use ethnographic research for thesis or dissertation writing should consider using the right approach. Below is a highlight of the questions that you need to ask yourself before starting your research:

• Can you collect the information using another method? (e.g., interviews or surveys?
• Is the community in focus easily accessible?
• What methods will you use to conduct the research?
• Can any ethical issues arise during the research?

When you choose to do ethnographic research in person, we recommend finding a group that you can easily access to complete in a short timeframe.

Qualities of an excellent ethnographic research topic

To create an excellent ethnographic research topic, you should formulate a question that you are curious about and have a passion for learning. We recommend that your research idea should be:

Clear: The ethnographic research topic should be clear to understand. A precise research topic makes it easy for your audience to understand your ideas.

Concise: The research topic should be direct to the point. For this reason, you should express your topic in the fewest understandable words possible.

Complex: As much as we recommend a presice research topic, it should not be answerable by yes or no. Your research topic should require analysis and synthesis.

Arguable : Your research topic should be not only factual but also debatable. Your research should also use examples to back up your points.

Focused : Your research topic should be narrow enough to answer it concisely and thoroughly.

Top 100 ethnography research topics

The number of research topics for ethnography is unlimited. However, it would be best to consider your research’s relevance, accuracy, and audience. For this case, we have selected the best ethnographic topics for you. We hope you find a suitable one.

• Access how the culture of Native Americans have changed over time
• An ethnographic study of military families
• Can racism impact scientific decision-making?
• Comparison of the behavior of kids in school and at home
• Discuss the links between drug trafficking and violence in an area of your choice
• Gender and socialization in Muslim communities
• Homelessness is a global catastrophe
• How is child protection offered in an area of your choice?
• How to improve services for homeless pet owners
• How to punish brutal police officers
• How vulnerable are homeless women? Are they as vulnerable as homeless men?
• Impacts of foreign languages on culture
• Is homelessness a problem in your home area? (or an area of your choice)
• Police brutality to minority communities
• Racial discrimination in public universities
• The concept of adulthood in the European setting
• What are the effects of skilled migration from third-world countries?
• What are the habits of rich people in a city of your choice?
• What are the impacts of COVID-19 on socially excluded people?
• What are the interventions that could help solve homelessness
• What causes rural-urban migration?
• What is seasonal migration?
• What is the best policy analysis used by ethnographers?
•  What is the cause of hospital vandalism?
• What problems do police officers face?

Easy Ethnographic Research Topics

Do you want some easy ethnography questions? Check out the list below and tell us what you think:

• An ethnographic study of Asian diets
• Causes of seasonal migrations
• Discrimination against the LGBTQ community
• Discuss how minority groups are treated  in prison
• Domestic violence against men
• Effects of COVID-19
• How are languages affected by code-switching?
• How are refugees used to legitimize territorial claims?
• How does domestic violence affect women?
• How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected gender-based violence victims?
• How to make ethnographic research innovative
• Mental health in conflict areas
• Mental health issues among the elderly
• Methods to eliminate homelessness
• Methods used to access the quality of life
• Narrative analysis with ethnography
• Prevention of gender-based violence
• Relationship between structural discrimination and moral status
• Social stigma amongst infertile couples
• Stigma towards COVID-19 victims
• The conflict between prisoners and prison staff
• The role of self-deception in racism
• What are the challenges of taking care of people with disabilities?
• What drives people from third-world regions to travel to first-world countries?
• What is the extent of drug trafficking in South America?

Interesting Ethnographic Research topics

Are you looking for interesting ethnographic research topics? Worry no more. We have got you covered.

• Describe the cultural clashes between natives and colonizers
• Do mixed origin people have a culture
• Economic generating activities of street families
• Effects of unemployment
• Ethical theories concerning gay marriage
• History of feminism
• How are the youth affected by poverty in Canada
• How do celebrities influence the culture of their fans?
• How do drugs affect culture?
• How do illicit economies affect development?
• How do native communities perceive modern fashion?
• How does culture influence the economy
• How does foreign religion influence native culture?
• How essential is it to preserve cultural diversity?
•  Impact of education on the poverty rate
• Is feminism relevant?
• Is homelessness a crisis vs. homelessness as an institution
• Issues facing bisexuals in society
• Policies essential in the management of poverty in contemporary social market economies
• Poverty eradication
• Strategies to minimize unemployment among youth in Africa
• Transgender discrimination in the USA
• What are the similarities and differences between African and American feminism?
• What defines culture?
• What factors contribute to joining cults?
• What factors contribute to leaving cults?

Additional Expert Ethnography Research Topics Suggestions

Ethnography has no limit. Some best suggestions are listed below:

• Coexistence between natives and refugees
• Coexistence of religion and politics
• Compare IQ difference between people living in rural and urban areas
• Compare the perception of children from wealthy and low-income families
• Describe the demographic characteristics of the Native communities of Hawaii
• Difference between American and Norwegian prison system
• Differences in diets in the Asian community
• Discuss the perception Japanese perception of pain
• Gender roles in African communities
• Gender roles in European communities
• Global mental health in a low-income society
• How can developing countries reach their full potential?
• How communities coexist with terrorism
• How do lifestyles encourage migration?
• How does authoritarianism affect communities?
• How does terrorism affect migration?
• How will humanity survive its inventions?
• LGBTQ in the Muslim community
• Methods of eradicating poverty
• Perception of beauty in the Maasai community in Kenya
• Racial discrimination in the 19th century
• The social-economic situation during the COVID-19 period
• Why are the minority communities suffering from severe outcomes of COVID-19 infections?
• Why do migrants use Malta as a strategic point of movement?
• Why is low income associated with poverty?

Tips for creating an ethnographic research topic

Do you want to create an ethnographic topic yourself? Below are expert tips to help you through.

Choose a general topic

Choose a broad research question of the topic that interests you. If you are interested in a topic, you have to research and make coherent points of the idea.

Do preliminary studies on the topic

By carrying out preliminary studies on the topic, you know the areas to scale down. Therefore, you should read journals and periodicals and see what researchers have covered and what thye have missed.

Consider your audience

It would be best if you determined your audience by your education level. If you are a college student, your research should be college-level. Before starting your research, ask yourself, “will the research interest my audience?” 

Create evaluative questions

When selecting a research topic, create questions to evaluate it. You should ask questions like “how” and “why” to know if the topic is compelling. At this stage, also ask yourself:

• Is the ethnographic research topic clear?
• How straightforward are the research questions?
• Is the ethnographic project idea complex?

By reading through the topic suggestions and tips, we are sure you now have insightful information for your next project. But do not forget to consult us if you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions.

Also check, Is It Safe To Consult Online Writers?

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