The advantages and disadvantages of Ethnographic methods.

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Stella Fuja

Qualitative Research Methods PS2023S

Hayley MacGregor

The advantages and disadvantages of Ethnographic methods.  This should include as illustrative material (i) Your own ethnographic case study, and (ii) examples from both (a) anthropological research in a modern organisational context and (b) more traditional ethnographies.

‘Ethnography is the hallmark of social anthropology’.  It’s the study of people in naturally occurring settings or ‘fields’ (whether in a ‘New Guinea village or on the streets of New York’), through the use of methods, which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities, involving the anthropologist participating directly in the setting and ‘immersing himself within the culture’ over a period of time (Spradley 1979:3).’

Despite its prominence, at present ethnography has an undecided status within all the social science disciplines.  On the one hand, it has come to be widely accepted as a legitimate approach to modern day social research. It’s a fact that the proportion of anthropologists and other social researchers who use this qualitative method has increased considerably in recent years.  Criticisms that it is unscientific have declined ‘sharply in many quarters’.  Even many quantitative researchers now accept that qualitative research has its own logic and criteria of validity (Hammersley 1992:1). Simultaneously, criticism of ethnographic practice has arisen from new directions.  Indeed from among the ethnographers themselves.  Such internal criticism is put down to the general acceptance of ethnography, which has led to ‘internal diversification of the approach’.

In this essay, I will look closely at the advantages and disadvantages of ethnographies; by first addressing the critiques of ethnography (disadvantages) and then the counter arguments (advantages), using illustrative material, from traditional ethnographies, anthropological research in a modern organisational context and my own personal ethnographic case study.  

First, it is necessary to provide some notes on where ethnography came from historically.

‘Ethnography is not one particular method of data collection but a style of research that is distinguished by its objectives, which are to understand the social meanings and activities of people in a given field or setting, and its approach, which involves close association with, and often participation in, the setting (Brewer 2000:11)’.

According to anthropologists such as Malinowski, ethnography is the work of describing a culture.  The essential core of this activity aims to understand another way of life from the native point of view.  The goal of ethnography, as Malinowski put it, is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1922:25 cited in Spradley 1979).  The ethnographer’s task is not only to collect information from the emic or insider’s perspective, but also to make sense of all the data from an etic or external social perspective; thus ensuring that rather than just studying people, ethnographers also learn from people (Spradley 1979:25).

Several methods of data collection tend to be used in ethnography, such as in-depth interviewing, participant observation, personal documents and discourse analysis of natural language.

As such, ethnography has a distinguished career in the social sciences.  There have been ‘travellers tales’ for centuries, which count ‘as a form of ethnographic research in that they purported to represent some aspect of social reality’ through close contact with and observation of a country, culture or group.

Ethnography began properly during the twentieth century, as a result of two, independent intellectual developments, one British and the other North American.  The first was the emergence of the classic tradition of social anthropology in Britain, with figures such as Tylor, Morgan, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Who acknowledged a close association between social anthropology and British colonialism.  And while social anthropology is at present, no longer associated with colonialism, its origins were tied to the needs of the British Empire to understand the cultures it was seeking to rule once the period of colonial conquest was completed (Brewer 2000:11).

Anthropologist pioneered an approach that involved close relations with cultures by close immersion and observation.

Key figures such as Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan were the first publish influential work on the subject of ethnography prior to Malinowski.

Morgan (1851) was the first anthropologist to write an ethnography depicting life from the perspective of the natives.  He like Tylor, had never conducted field research personally, but instead relied on the accounts of colonial officials, missionaries, travellers and other non-specialists for their primary data.

Malinowski however, is often said to have single-handedly developed the technique of ethnography.  Prior to Malinowski’s groundbreaking fieldwork within the Trobriand Islands, anthropologists tended to either participate, without systematically observing for the purpose of gathering data for future analysis, or observe, without necessarily participating in any meaningful sense, when conducting fieldwork.  Malinowski became very concerned with the methodologies of other anthropologists and critical of his own research.   Before he wrote his first major ethnographic account on the Trobriand Islanders he planned to preface his work with comments on methodology, which would distance his work from earlier ethnographic descriptions.  This he termed ‘principles of method’ under three headings in the opening chapter of his first book.  First, he argued that the ethnographer must possess ‘real scientific aims’ and knowledge of ‘modern ethnography’.  Secondly, he believed the ethnographer must live among the people themselves; and finally the ethnographer must apply ‘a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating and fixing his evidence’ (1922a: 6 cited in Ellen 1984:49).  The goals of the ethnographic research Malinowski placed under the three headings were given titles.  First, there was the outline of native customs, which he called the method of ‘Statistical documentation by concrete evidence’ (1922 a: 17,24 cited in Ellen 1984:49), which also included the collection (through direct questioning) of the village census, details on technology etc.  The second goal was taken from his second principle of method (from the ethnographer living with the natives) and termed the collection of the ‘imponderabilia of actual life and of typical behaviour’ (1922a: 20,24 cited in Ellen 1984:49).  This method revealed the minute details of everyday life as lived by the people and observed by the ethnographer.  The third method required the ethnographer to become competent in the language of the people for it involved the recording of everyday speech, magical formula and myths to be presented as ‘a corpus inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality’ (1922a: 24 cited Ellen 1984:49).  According to Malinowski, these three methods were needed to achieve ‘the ultimate goal of ethnography’.  

Malinowski’s descriptions of actual people and behaviour was without a doubt taken from what is now known as participant observation, it was also a valid part of his functional analysis of the interdependence of institutions in cultures (which is believed to have been the basis for his work on ethnographies).  He recognised this quite clearly when he stated that functionalism was a “ theory which, begun in fieldwork, leads back to field work again” (1932: cited in Ellen 1984:50).

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Malinowski however, had failed to develop, what most anthropologists such as Ellen 1984, would have described as being one of the key methods of pre- 1914 fieldwork: the use of the ‘genealogical method’ to collect information with its emphasis on the study of kinship.  Although his own fieldwork belonged more to the tradition of pre- 1914 survey work, Radcliffe-Brown was most influential in continuation of kinship studies backed up with intensive participant observation (like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown came from a functionalist background).

Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown sought to understand the ways in which groups are formed in society, the ...

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