Overview

Ethnography (from Greek ethnos “folk/people” and grapho “to write”) is both a process and a product. It is the process of doing fieldwork—living with a group of people for an extended period to understand their way of life. And it is the product—the written book or article that describes that culture. It is the art of “deep hanging out.”

Core Idea

The core idea is immersion. You cannot understand a culture from a library or a survey. You have to be there. You have to smell the food, hear the gossip, and feel the rhythm of daily life. The goal is to grasp the “native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski).

Formal Definition

It is a qualitative research method predicated on participant observation: the researcher participates in the daily life of the subjects while simultaneously observing them with a critical, analytical eye.

Intuition

If you want to understand what it’s like to be a high school student today, you don’t just send out a questionnaire. You go to the high school. You sit in the cafeteria, you go to the classes, you get bullied, you go to the prom. You become part of the scenery until people stop acting for you and start being themselves. Then you write it all down. That is ethnography.

Examples

  • Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands: Stranded there during WWI, he invented the modern standard of fieldwork: pitching a tent in the middle of the village and learning the language, rather than observing from the veranda of the colonial mission.
  • Alice Goffman’s On the Run: A modern urban ethnography where the sociologist lived in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood for six years to understand the impact of policing on young Black men.
  • Corporate Ethnography: Tech companies hire anthropologists to watch how people actually use their products in their homes (e.g., Intel studying how people watch TV).

Common Misconceptions

  • It’s just “people watching”: It is highly rigorous. It involves taking thousands of pages of field notes, coding data, and checking interpretations against social theory.
  • It’s objective: Since the 1980s (“The Crisis of Representation”), anthropologists acknowledge that ethnography is subjective. The identity of the ethnographer (gender, race, class) shapes what they see and how they write.
  • Thick Description: Clifford Geertz’s term for explaining not just the behavior (a wink), but the context that gives it meaning (is it a joke? a signal? a twitch?).
  • Autoethnography: When the researcher analyzes their own personal experience and culture.
  • Fieldwork: The physical act of data collection, of which ethnography is the written result.

Applications

  • UX Research: “User Experience” research is essentially rapid ethnography—observing users to design better products.
  • Public Policy: Understanding the real-world impact of laws (e.g., how welfare recipients actually navigate the bureaucracy).
  • Marketing: Understanding the “culture” of a brand or a consumer segment.

Criticism / Limitations

  • The “Observer Effect”: The presence of the researcher changes the behavior of the people being studied.
  • Colonial Legacy: Historically, ethnography was the study of “primitive” people by Westerners, often serving the interests of colonial administration. Modern ethnography works hard to decolonize this history.
  • Sample Size: It is deep but narrow. You can’t generalize to a whole population from one village.

Further Reading

  • Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. 1922. (The introduction is the “bible” of fieldwork).
  • Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. 1973.
  • Clifford, James and Marcus, George. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. 1986.