Ethnography has two root words: ethno, and graph. Ethno means “race, culture, or people” — like in the sense of an ethnicity. Graph means “write” — telegraph, graphite, graphic, photography, phonograph, monograph, etc. So, ethnography literally means writing a culture.

Historically, ethnography is the primary genre used by anthropologists — scientists who study humanity as a whole. Biological anthropologists study human evolution and our physical bodies, cultural anthropologists study our cultures, linguistic anthropologists study our languages, and archaeologists study the belongings, buildings, and trash we leave behind.

“Ethnographic writing” refers to writing that may not be “an ethnography” but uses a similar approach. Ethnographic writing can appear in a variety of academic disciplines– education research, sociology, psychology, English, geography, history, and more.

Brief Anthropology History Lesson

The history of anthropology — like pretty much every area of study — is pretty interwoven with racism. Biological anthropologists (along with medical doctors) are responsible for some of the beliefs that people of different races are better or worse physically, or that their bodies make them better or worse mentally or emotionally. Anthropological research was used as a justification for a lot of horrible things.

Anthropology as its own discipline started in the 1800s, although people wrote “ethnographic” notes long before that. For example, Julius Caesar (Roman Emperor who lived in the B.C. era) wrote some ethnographic notes about the Gauls and other “barbarians” he met while conquering parts of Europe as a general.

So, cultural anthropology, the subfield that solidified what “ethnography” means in the modern sense, mostly took this form in the 1800s:

1. An economically privileged white man (maybe not rich, but certainly with financial advantages in life), originally from Europe but later also from the U.S., would travel somewhere “exotic” to find some people who aren’t part of European/Western culture.
2. He would live with them and talk to them and do stuff with them for a year or so, studying them and taking notes.
3. Then he would go home and write a book describing their culture. They became “his” people, and other anthropologists would have to go find someone else to study.

You might already be able to think of some of the ethical problems with this. Anthropologists often did not ask permission to come study people, or give much back to the community they were staying with. Even though anthropologists try to understand other people’s way of life from their own perspective, they often failed, either by accident or because they were judgy and thought Western culture was superior. They often took things back with them, to sell or donate to museums. Sometimes they tried to impose their own ways of life upon the people they were studying.

So, a lot of it wasn’t good. At the same time, the discipline of anthropology has accumulated a lot of information about the very diverse cultures of humanity, which means there’s a lot of data on how what Western culture considers “just human nature” or “the normal way to do things” is not normal or human nature at all. For example, the first ethnography to go mainstream (as opposed to just being read by other anthropologists) was Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928). People in the U.S. were really interested in this ethnography because Samoan teenagers didn’t exhibit many of the behaviors or moods associated with “just part of being a teenager.” They fought with their parents a lot less, for example, and seemed happy overall, as opposed to the stereotypical moodiness of American teenagers. Mead thought that this was because Samoan teenagers (at the time, at least) had a lot more freedom and trust than American teenagers, especially in the 1920s. It wasn’t controversial for them to have sex with each other. If they didn’t want to live with their parents, it wasn’t a big deal for them to go stay with a friend or another family member for awhile.

Modern Anthropology

While there are still plenty of ethical issues in the discipline of anthropology and in the genre of ethnography, anthropologists are by and large trying to recognize the racist and sexist histories of the discipline and reinvent their research practices.

Some key changes:

1. Many more anthropologists study parts of their own cultures. There are now lots of ethnographies of different aspects of mainstream U.S. culture. Usually, ethnographies no longer try to describe all of an entire culture, but will instead focus on a key area (like a particular town) or group of people. For example, the punk scene.
2. The discipline is more diverse — it’s not just white European and American men studying everyone else (although there is definitely a lot of improvement still to be made here).
3. Many anthropologists practice applied anthropology— that is, using anthropological methods to try to figure out how to help a community. (An example might be an anthropologist going somewhere where the opioid epidemic is really bad to talk to people and figure out what aspects of their life situations lead them to getting addicted to opioids and what other factors are contributing to their struggles.) Applied anthropology is often used to craft public service announcements or promoting other public health initiatives. For example, how can you convince _____ group of people to use condoms, if they don’t want to use condoms?  I think a good use for an anthropologist right now could be, “For people who don’t want to take coronavirus precautions like masks and social-distancing, why not, and what would convince them to do it?”
4. Many anthropologists work or volunteer at the place/with the people they are studying, as a way of being helpful and giving back to the community instead of just taking up time and knowledge and resources. For example, when David Valentine was researching the lives of trans people in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s, he was also working at the LGBT Center to help provide people with medical resources. Working at the LGBT Center gave him additional opportunities to meet and talk to people, but he was also making a positive impact.
5. Many anthropologists do collaborative research, where instead of just showing up and doing a study, they work together with members of the community. The anthropologist might ask, “What kind of research would you like to do?” or “What information would you find it useful to have?” Sometimes this takes the form of oral history collections to preserve a community’s stories and lives, or language preservation, in cases when only a few people in a community still speak an ancestral language, so the language is at risk of dying out.

Back to Ethnography

So, just as the discipline of anthropology has a gross history but is evolving, so does the genre of ethnography. One issue with ethnography is that it is originally a scientific genre, with all the claims to “objective truth” that come with it. Another issue is that word choice and the author’s perspective can embed a lot of bias (usually negative) into the writing. The anthropologist may not even realize they’re doing it.

One important change in ethnography is that now it’s much more common for anthropologists to talk about themselves, and explain their relationship to the people they’re writing about and their own position in society, and to reflect on how that might affect their perspective. Whereas an anthropologist back in the day might try to “fade into the background” of his ethnography and pretend he was just an invisible camera watching the people, a modern anthropologist might talk about who she is, her own emotional reactions to her experiences and what she thought about it. You can never fully escape your own bias, but by trying to be as honest and transparent about it as you can, you can help the reader to put the information in context.

Many college classes have “mini-ethnography” assignments. When I was in college, we all had to go to a restaurant near campus and conduct a mini-ethnography of the restaurant. We had to sit there for about an hour, eat some food, and observe everything that happened around us. What kinds of people came in? What kinds of things did they order? How did they interact with the employees? What was the vibe? Then, we went home and wrote about it.

So, the general process for an ethnography is:

1. Go to your “place” (place is in quotation marks because you could also do an ethnography of an internet community) and spend some time there. Observe how people act and interact, and what kinds of people are there. This is called your fieldwork.
2. Take notes on your observations, but don’t be weird about it
3. As soon as possible after your fieldwork, write down everything you remember noticing in as much detail as you can. These are your fieldnotes.
4. Write an article describing your findings.

An ethnography will often follow the same general form as a scientific article, but it’s less strict. You can say “I” and talk about yourself. You should still talk about your research methods, your results, and do a discussion of your results, but these sections can be mixed together more if you want. You should still try to be thorough, as objective as possible, and always back up your ideas with evidence. You should definitely write about any expectations you had that were wrong, or times when you had to revise your interpretation or opinion.  More on this in the assignment instructions!