5 Ethnographic analysis

Question 1

Ethnographic analysis

Answer 1

In ethnography, we are describing the culture of a group. We are describing the patterns and regularities, practices, or customs of social behavior as performed in concrete settings and situations. With all cultural ideas, traditions, beliefs, rules, norms, and values, and the language, material objects, organizations, and institutions related to them.

To be able to do so, the ethnographer will need to engage in extensive fieldwork, collecting primary data through interviews, observations, and by analyzing documents and artifacts.

In doing so, the ethnographic researcher relies on the participants’ view; as an insider emic perspective, trying to empathically feel and see from the position of the participants. The ethnographic researcher tries to report them in an authentic as possible way. Then the researcher tries to filter and synthesize the data from the researcher’s etic, scientific perspective. This results in a general and overall interpretation of the culture of the group under investigation.

Question 2

Development of ethnographic analysis

Answer 2

Ethnography was first developed in the 18th century by Gerhard Friedrich Muller, a professor in history and geography, when he was describing the Siberian culture. A bit later, it was established as an academic discipline by August Ludwig von Schlözer.

Ethnography became the core method for anthropological research. But the founding fathers and mothers of ethnography as we know it nowadays were Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. From the 1920s onward, the ethnographic methodology was incorporated into social sciences, especially after it was adopted by the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago.

Nowadays, ethnography is practiced also in psychology, geography, economics, management sciences, and in the field of education and science studies, as well as in medical care. Originally, it was used as a method to understand tribes and cultures in distant places, and today it is applied to any culture, group, or organization, including our own.

Question 3

multi-sited ethnographies

Answer 3

the view that the culture is made and transformed at a multitude of related sites

Question 4

theme analysis

Answer 4

The general ethnographic way of analyzing qualitative data is often described as theme analysis. Which in contrast to the earlier rather unreflective ways of doing ethnographic analysis, is not satisfied with the often-observed expression in many ethnographic writings that ‘certain themes emerged’. But would rather add more methodological rigor into the analysis, and therefore move beyond the expression that themes emerged by showing how and why they emerged.