2 Ethnography Flashcards
Ethnographic analysis
In the ethnographic approach, one is mainly interested in the shared cultural patterns, values, beliefs, language, interactions and behaviors of a specific group. To be able to study these shared patterns is it often assumed that one needs to do extended fieldwork and to immerse into a specific culture-sharing community or site. Describing and analyzing these patterns is usually done in close connection to writing about these cultures.
Background
Ethnography has its roots in anthropological research on far away strange cultures but is nowadays also applied to (sub)cultures and communities in western countries. Although in the beginning it was mainly descriptive and refrained from theorizing, in its current fashion finds its theoretical roots in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, as well as structural functionalism, cultural studies, critical theory, feminism and cognitive anthropology.
Core elements
Ethnographies focus on a holistic description of the culture of a group.
Ethnographers typically search for general patterns, such as rituals, customary behaviors, regularities, norms, ideas, beliefs, etc. which are expressed through language or material activities.
The theoretical framework mainly focusses the researcher’s attention to certain topics or themes.
Ethnographers usually engage in extensive fieldwork immersing themselves in the daily life of the culture-sharing group.
Ethnographers strongly rely on the inside emic perspective of the participants, which are in a second step systematized following an etic perspective.
A typical result of ethnographic research is the story which the researcher tells about the culture and giving voice to that culture.
Realist ethnography
The realist approach is a more traditional approach which focusses on an objective account of the situation and which puts the researcher in a third-person point of view, assuming one can describe a culture according to a number of standard categories. This approach is, therefore, more based on a structuralist approach to ethnographic and anthropological research.
Critical ethnography
The more critical account of local cultures uses a much emancipatory and advocacy perspective on the situation under investigation. They, therefore, focus more on issues of power, prestige, privilege, authority, inequality, repression, hegemony, victimization and domination with the purpose to empower the culture-sharing community.
Challenges
The depth of the fieldwork, the diversity of different sources, and the emerging properties of the ‘culture’ to be described and analyzed are the main challenges of ethnographic research.
Going ‘in depth’ is also a challenge with respect to the positioning of the researcher with respect to the community to be researched.
On the one hand, the researcher wants to immerse him or herself in that community, on the other hand, one needs to stay an outsider and avoid ‘going native’ to be able to (critically) reflect on one’s findings.
The large amount of unstructured data usually requires a transparent and structured approach to data analysis and a well-documented audit trail, meticulous registration of decisions about emerging categories and themes.
The strong focus on narrating the research findings in an almost literary way, demands special writing skills, and may also limit the audience to be reached.
