ETHNOGRAPHY.

Ethnography, often paraphrased as "participant observation," is a mode of deriving knowledge about particular, local worlds through direct engagement with their peoples and ways of life. As a mode of inquiry, it is primarily associated with the discipline of anthropology, the comparative study of human societies and cultures that took definitive shape as a scholarly field in the early years of the twentieth century. But the implications of the approach are more complex than suggested by this definition; for while ethnography is empirical in spirit, in practice it flouts many of the assumptions underlying positivist investigation, and has long enjoyed something of a maverick status within the social sciences.

Tracing its mythic origins to the celebrated research of Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia in the teens of the last century, anthropological ethnographers have classically worked in non-European contexts, relying less on written records or formal techniques than on qualitative perceptions gleaned from interpersonal encounters in the field. In this enterprise, writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, "[t]he observer apprehends himself as his own instrument of observation" (p. 35). Such frank reliance on the role of subjective experience in empirical investigation sits somewhat uneasily with the value-free ideals of mainstream social science methodology. In fact, while it is in many ways a product of the Enlightenment impetus to bring the universe under the Western gaze, ethnographic observation, and the cultural relativism with which it has long been associated, has always been controversial. While hailed by many as a uniquely sensitive means of unsettling European hegemonies and revealing the cogency of other orders of meaning and value, it has also been accused of biases, ranging from insurmountable ethnocentrism to a fetishism of difference. Ironically, as critique of the method has mounted within anthropology in recent years, ethnography has been ever more enthusiastically embraced in several fields outside itself, among them cultural and legal studies, musicology, education, sociology, and political science. True, it is often hard to gauge, once the method is separated from the anthropological perspective that spawned it, just what it implies (besides "talking to people"). But even in watered-down form, its current popularity is surprising: How are we to explain its appeal in these postcolonial, global times, when many scholars have come to question the capacity of small-scale qualitative methods to grasp the ever more intensive translocal forces spanning the planet?

The Paradox

In fact, such ironies are not new. Ethnography was founded on a paradox that has rendered it both unusually useful and vulnerable to critique. This conundrum is also integral to modern anthropology, which is simultaneously universalizing in its key assumptions (about the intrinsic nature of humans as social, signifying beings, for example) and relativizing (about the fact that societies and cultures vary fundamentally with context). As a critic once quipped, anthropologists believe that "people everywhere are the same, except where they are different." Put in more generous terms, the discipline seeks to subvert modern universalist assumptions by making Westerners aware of other viable forms of reasoning and rectitude, kinship and sexuality, religion and representation, politics and politesse. But this procedure also raises thorny epistemological problems. To what degree can one assume that cultural categories are translatable across lines of difference? Is it not the case that the platonic referents of the whole enterprise—not to mention the politics of its practice—remain indisputably Eurocentric? What violence do we do to African assumptions that people can harm each other by powerful, superhuman means when we refer to these etiologies as "witchcraft"? How does such a term, which Europeans associate with dark ages past, color our rendering of African existential realities in the present? How does one establish the qualities and currency of such a "belief" in the first place?

These questions of method rest on a host of interpretive presumptions: What constitutes a field for analytical purposes? How systematic is culture, and how much is it the stuff of conscious reflection? How much does one impose order on action through one's very observation and description? Such things clearly are also matters of theoretical assumption, and here again ethnography can never simply be distinguished from the presuppositions and interests of those who practice it. What is more, scholarly values have varied across time and place: the accounts of the early ethnographers Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978) were hailed in their time as relativist correctives to unquestioned Western orthodoxies. But in a later, postcolonial climate, their texts have quite often been criticized for offering timeless, essentialist, exoticized depictions of "others" (Said, and Clifford and Marcus).

Intrinsic Features

In what ways are these vulnerabilities inherent in the way ethnography has been harnessed to the project of anthropology? As a method, ethnography seems quaintly anachronistic. It puts its primary trust in evidence generated by the human senses, being vested in the direct empirical gaze—the naked eye, as it were. This way of seeing characterized the early-nineteenth-century biological sciences (Foucault), which served as a model for early anthropology, described by one of its founders as the "natural science of society" (Radcliffe-Brown). Yet despite occasional scientific pretensions, anthropology has remained at base a resolutely humanistic art (Evans-Pritchard, 1950) vested in insights generated by a "long conversation" between ethnographer and subject(s) (Bloch). Mastering this somewhat underspecified art is still a crucial component of recruitment to the anthropological profession. And certain canons of practice did become standard, at least as ideals: fluency in the primary field language, for example; minimal reliance on formal interviews and artificial situations; sufficient time in situ to distinguish patterns of repetition from random events; and sensitivity to the ethical implications of one's presence and one's representations of local life. The qualitative nature of such observation, coupled with the anthropological concern with demonstrating the salience and complexity of meaning and value in human action, makes writing a crucial aspect of the ethnographic enterprise: the observer must communicate his or her insights in language that conveys the expressive richness and texture of local experience, yet retains the authority of objective reportage. In the late twentieth century, a heightened sensitivity in the human sciences to the independent life—and political mediation—of texts brought the conventions of ethnographic prose under new scrutiny. More than one observer has noted that ethnography preserves features from an era of travel writing and adventure and that it is still dependent in large part on the legitimacy of first-hand experience and interpretation (Pratt).

Yet it could be argued that what some see as the greatest weaknesses of ethnography are also its major strengths. Most significantly, its practitioners refuse to put their trust in techniques that grant scientific (and above all, quantifying) methods an exaggerated sense of objectivity. They distrust instruments that rely on a priori questions and units of analysis, for instance, preferring to derive their categories of inquiry from a direct engagement with the phenomena at issue; and they are critical of investigative means that reify human action by divorcing it from its social context or claim to eliminate subjective bias. The very concept of participant observation—an oxymoron to some—implies that knowledge is inseparable from its knower. Thus, while ethnographers do seek to objectify social facts in the world, and also to make viable generalizations about them, their assertions remain clearly identified as the fruit of interaction between reporters and their subjects. But in this, ethnography is merely a marked instance of the inescapable interplay of fact and value that renders all human observation partial, imperfect, and a product of its time and place.

The Native's Point of View?

If ethnographers are unusually aware of the dangers of vulgar empiricism, why have they themselves frequently been accused of essentializing others? To what extent has such critique actually been aimed at the wider anthropological project? How much does it reflect a growing discomfort, in a postcolonial world, with experts—still largely of Western origin—who claim a privileged ability to interpret other cultures, or to represent those threatened by a dominant world order? The claim that anthropology was directly complicit with colonial rule, and that it remains irredeemably orientalist in perspective, is clearly overdrawn: much early ethnography was liberal, even critical in intent, and the discipline has long been subversive of establishments of most kinds, at home and abroad. At the same time, the discipline's enduring investment in cultural difference and local particularity—and in the independent existence of the powerless peoples within the world order—has laid it open to the charge that it fails realistically to come to terms with the oppressive, large-scale forces ravaging these local contexts (Graeber, and Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003). The taint of European paternalism lingers—although this does not necessarily attach itself to ethnography per se, which some see as having the potential to empower its former subjects. Thus Archie Mafeje, a respected African scholar, has declared that ethnography, to be true to itself, needs to be liberated entirely from anthropology so that it can become a source of "social texts authored [solely] by the people themselves" (Mafeje).

There is also a history of efforts to deploy participant observation beyond the orbit of anthropology in Western contexts. From the classic "Chicago School" of urban sociology in the 1920s, to those of the late-twentieth-century Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, investigators have seized on what Graeme Turner has called "the democratic impulse" of ethnography—its promise to give expression to human worlds that exist beyond established cultural discourses, elite institutions, and highbrow media (Turner, p. 178). The approach has yielded resonant accounts of European and American phenomena like youth cultures and urban underclasses (Park, Whyte, Willis, Duneier) and the everyday life of formal institutions and the professions (Goffman, Becker). The impetus to understand forms of ordinary activity that lie in the shadow of grand institutions is closely related to the methods of social history, the kind that aim to recuperate the texts and traces from other times to uncover "hidden" chronicles, written "from below" (Samuel, Davis). It has often been noted that, to the degree that they treat the past as "another country," historians work very much like participant observers, practicing what amounts to an "ethnography of the archives" (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; Hobsbawm; Cohn). But nonanthropological ethnographers have not entirely escaped the accusation of paternalism, or of exoticizing "local" worlds. Speaking of British cultural studies, an approach that shares anthropology's concern with culture (but more as a function of class differences within societies than totalizing differences between them) Turner suggests that "the democratic impulse and the inevitable effect of ethnographic practice … contradict each other" (p. 178). Here one might do well to recall that there are non-Western critics who believe that the method might serve as a means of empowerment. It might also be argued that the tendency to fetishize "marginal" cultures is not altogether absent from the paradigm of cultural studies itself.

Ethnography and Globalization

While rooted in phenomena that pass directly before the observer's eye, ethnographic description also involves selection and interpretation. Its practitioners usually aim to produce generalizations about the nature of relations and significations, about reproduction, rupture, or change in specific kinds of contexts. Classically, participant observation has been deployed within tightly bounded analytic fields, within which a certain coherence was presumed to exist (whether it resided in kin ties, productive forces, norms, signs, networks, subcultures, or nations). While holism of this sort has often lent itself to bold theory-making, ethnography-generated insights tend to be of human scale and humanist by implication. Ethnographers have tended to mount strong arguments against formalist models of economy and society that divorce phenomena like markets or international relations from actual social contexts, or that reduce human motivation to formulae like "rational choice."

The small-scale compass of ethnography, and the relatively bounded fields within which it has been effective, have raised new questions at a time of heightened global awareness, when most social phenomena seem so obviously to extend beyond local situations. At a moment when many domestic groups count transnational migrants among their close kin, and consume goods and images from across the planet, it becomes less and less possible to divorce intimate contexts from larger social forces, such as worldwide movements of capital.

The challenge of practicing ethnography "in the modern world system" (Marcus) should not be underestimated. It has produced creative efforts intended to extend the range of existing methods to accommodate the intensified circulation of persons and things in the world, and to comprehend these expanded flows. In part, this has involved combining ethnographic observation with other ways of generating social knowledge—those of political economy and literary theory, for example. But the most significant response has been to insist that now, more than ever, as people everywhere seem captured by material processes of planetary scale, it is necessary to demonstrate that no world-transforming force exists without the engagement of tangible human agents and interests. As the ideologies of the powerful seek to make their policies seem like technical necessities, operating beyond the realm of politics and value, the perspectives of ethnography insist on the opposite: that all activities, large and small, can be shown to have social and cultural determinations and, hence, are susceptible to debate, contestation, and intervention. Therein lies appeal of participant observation in an unpromising age.

See also Anthropology ; Borders, Borderlands, and Frontiers, Global ; Cultural Studies ; Ethnocentrism ; Ethnohistory, U.S. ; Globalization ; Identity: Personal and Social Identity ; Interdisciplinarity .

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Jean Comaroff