\n<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Contents Ethnography and Ethnology<\/span>. <\/span><\/span>1<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Origins:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>1<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Usage:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>1<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Key dimensions:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>2<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Approaches:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>3<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Ethnography before Malinowski<\/span> <\/span><\/span>3<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Malinowskian era and immersion:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>3<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Writing culture and <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/sdt><\/p>\n Ethnology is the attempt to develop rigorous The words “ethnography” and There is a duality in the idea of ethnography. Ethnology and ethnography developed, of course, The underlying Embeddedness:<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n The ethnographic interview is distinguished from Second criterion for embeddedness refers to the Openness:<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n In addition Ethnographic fieldwork tradition has a long While anthropology was developed with As Malinowski did his seminal work in Trobriand The tradition of fieldwork set by Malinowski a)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 b)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 c)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 d)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These questions opened up new possibilities for a)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 b)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 c)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n post-Malinowskian era:<\/span> <\/span><\/span>4<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nand scientifically grounded explanations of cultural phenomena by comparing and
\ncontrasting many human cultures. By contrast, ethnography is the systematic
\ndescription of a single contemporary culture, often through ethnographic field.
\nThe two concepts are often combined in anthropological writings and they have a
\nclose and complex historical relationship.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n“ethnology” appear to have been introduced in the late eighteenth
\ncentury. Hans Vermeulen (1995) cited the German historian and linguist August
\nLudwig Schl\u00f6zer’s Allgemeine nordische Geschichte (1771) as probably the first
\nuse of the term “Ethnographie,” which Schl\u00f6zer seemed to employ
\ninterchangeably with the term “V\u00f6lkerkunde” to designate the
\ndescriptive and historical study of peoples and nations. Vermeulen noted
\nSchl\u00f6zer’s involvement with the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences and his
\nresidency in St. Petersburg in the 1760s, where he ed with G. F. M\u00fcller, J. E.
\nFischer, and other German scholars recruited by the Russian government to
\nreport on the peoples of the newly explored eastern territories.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nOn one hand, the word designates observations, ranging from isolated remarks to
\nextended studies of nations, tribes, or peoples, by anyone who has recorded
\nwhat he has seen or heard. On the other hand, ethnography also designated the
\naspiration to collect systematically, and according to rigorous procedures,
\nfacts about human languages, customs, arts, and achievements. Ethnography in
\nthis sense included the culling of material from documents and interviews with
\nvisitors returning from foreign lands and the redaction of this material into
\nlearned treatises. The scientific ethnographer was someone who staked a fairly
\nlarge claim on erudition, breadth of learning, and capacious memory; thus
\nethnography gained a certain reputation as a field for pedants.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\ndialectically. As the antiquity of man became established in the mid-nineteenth
\ncentury and anthropological inquiry began to focus on evolutionary questions,
\nthe need for better data became clear. In 1843, Prichard and two of his
\ncolleagues drew up a schedule of questions to guide observations of native
\npeoples (Penniman 1935: 53). Lewis Henry Morgan began sending his first kinship
\nterminology questionnaires to missionaries and commercial agents in January
\n1859 (Trautmann 1987: 103). In 1874, the British Association for the
\nAdvancement of Science published its first edition of Notes and queries on
\nanthropology, for the use of travellers and residents in uncivilized lands.
\nThese attempts to guide inquiry sometimes had richer returns than their authors
\nanticipated, as recipients began to engage the larger problem of putting the
\nanswers into local context. The outstanding example is the ethnographic \u00a0<\/span>of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt in
\nAustralia, culminating in Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Fison 1880), which grew out of
\nthe missionary Fison’s original correspondence with Morgan (see Stocking 1995:
\n17 34). By the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were several examples
\nof a new kind of ethnographic book in which the hypothetical pronouncements of
\narmchair theorists were tested against the author’s own observations. Robert
\nHenry Codrington’s The Melanesians (1891) and Baldwin Spencer and Frank
\nGillen’s The native tribes of central Australia (1899) exemplify this new,
\ntheoretically informed style of extended firsthand observation. Also during
\nthis period, the Bureau of American Ethnology began its publication of
\nethnographic monographs based on systematic field.<\/span><\/p>\n
\ncontrast between the interview and ordinary (some might say naturalistic) conversation
\nremains at the core of scholarly \u00a0<\/span>on
\nethnographic interviewing. Most generally, discussions of the ways ethnographic
\ninterviewing differs from other kinds of interviewing have tended to emphasise how
\nethnographic interviewing aims to be more like ordinary conversation. scholars
\ntypically focus mainly on two key dimensions of the ethnographic interview process
\nthat I have called embeddedness and openness.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nother kinds of qualitative interview in its striving for a high level of
\nembeddedness. The term embeddedness may be used in two senses: to describe the
\ndegree to which the interview is taking place within the social world one is studying,
\nrather than in isolation from it; and to describe the degree to which the
\ninterview is conducted from within a field of knowledge about the social,
\ncultural and material world of the interviewee. This embeddedness can result in
\ndeeper understanding of the \u2018other\u2019 and produce \u2018thicker\u2019 description about
\ntheir life as they live (Geertz 1973). <\/span><\/p>\n
\ndegree to which the interview unfolds within the interviewee\u2019s everyday social
\nmilieu. The most embedded interviews in this sense take place within the context
\nof long-term participant observation, after researchers have made efforts to
\nestablish a place within the nets of social relations of the people they will
\nbe interviewing. By speaking the local language or local dialect, and by being
\nattentive to social norms, ideally they will have established rapport with
\ntheir interviewees, and earned their trust. This stands in contrast to
\ninterviews that take place in isolated settings in which the interviewee knows
\nthe interviewer only as a researcher, and not as neighbour, friend, co-er, or
\nperhaps, (fictive) kin. In much psychological interviewing, there is in fact an
\neffort to minimize the effects of the setting and to make sure the social
\nidentity and opinions of the interviewer are obscured, so as to encourage
\nresponses that are as little affected by external conditions as possible. In
\nethnographic interviews, by contrast, interviewers deliberately seek to
\napproach their interviewees with an understanding of the complex social
\nrelationships involved. Through a deep appreciation of the context of these
\nrelationships, they expect to develop a richer and more layered understanding
\nof the social worlds they are studying.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nto embeddedness, the ethnographic \u00a0<\/span>can be
\ndistinguished from other kinds of qualitative interview by its degree of
\nopenness. It is informal because there are no lists of questions, the
\nethnographer is not taking on the role of an interrogator, and it happens in the
\ncourse of everyday social interactions (Agar 1980: 90). In ideal typical terms,
\nstructured interviewing, by contrast, involves asking respondents a
\npre-established list of questions, sometimes using an interview schedule that
\ncustomizes the direction of the interview based on responses to previous questions.
\nIn structured interviewing, the interviewer must be \u2018directive and impersonal\u2019,
\nand ideally, \u2018nothing is left to chance\u2019 (Fontana and Frey 2000: 650). Between
\nthese two extremes are unstructured (or openended) interviewing and
\nsemi-structured interviewing.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nhistory and it is rooted from the 19th<\/sup> century enlightenment
\nphilosophy. Roughly the ethnographic approaches can be divided into the
\nfollowing traditions.<\/span><\/p>\nEthnography
\nbefore Malinowski<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
\nenlightenment philosophy and British territorial expansionism, it is commonly
\nbelieved that ethnographic fieldwork which tends to dominate much of the
\npractices of anthropology started with Malinowski. Before Malinowski, there
\nwere surveys and before that there was anthropology from distance popularly
\nknown as the \u2018armed chair anthropology\u2019. \u00a0<\/span>A recent edited volume Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork,
\n1870-1922 <\/i>by Frederico Delgado Rosa, and Han F. Vermeulen (2022) show that
\nthere was serious ethnographic fieldwork being carried out by scholars before
\nMalinowski. Women practitioners and indigenous experts have been documenting society
\nand culture quite like an ethnographer during the era when 19th<\/sup>
\ncentury evolutionism was the dominant paradigm. For example, it was Franz Boas\u2019
\nprescription to adapt to \u2018their\u2019 customs in order to become a fieldworker
\nhinting towards immersion based work. <\/span><\/p>\nMalinowskian
\nera and immersion:<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
\nIsland and published his principal work, Argonauts
\nof the Western Pacific<\/i> (1922), which established him as one of Europe’s
\nmost important anthropologists he successfully influenced a generation of
\nanthropologist with his rather unique of method of participant
\nobservation<\/a>.[i]<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>
\n<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>He took posts as a lecturer and
\nlater as chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics, attracting
\nlarge numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of
\nBritish social anthropology. Over the years, he guest-lectured at several American
\nuniversities; when World War II broke out, he remained in the United States,
\ntaking an appointment at Yale University. During this entire period of his
\ncareer he has been successful to influence social anthropologists all over the
\nworld to embrace participant observation because, being there <\/i>is seen as resulting in production of much superior information
\nand that has an advantage over the survey methods because there is a difference
\nbetween what people say they do and what they actually do. Even today, the
\nstereotypical ethnographer is seen as doing participant observation, but
\nresearchers also perform quantitative, survey, textual, demographic, and other
\ntypes of analysis, depending on local conditions and the nature of the research
\nproject. Until recently the optimal choice was to seek out as exotic a locale
\nfor research as possible; choosing sites closer to home and writing library
\ndissertations were viewed as inferior alternatives. Researchers carrying out
\ntraditional fieldwork are supposed to immerse themselves, taking in large
\namounts of vastly different kinds of data. This range and abundance of
\n“raw” experience and observation helps put the more formally acquired
\ninformation, gathered through structured interviews, for instance, into
\ncontext. Supporters of traditional fieldwork also argue that a great deal of
\nlearning about people and CULTURE needs to occur through direct experience, as
\nopposed to the distancing and objectivity of the scientific method. Learning
\nthrough senses other than seeing and hearing\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/span>by smelling or imitating habitual body postures, for instance\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>should occur (Stoller 1989). Through using
\ntheir senses anthropologists serve as data-gathering instruments and
\nalterations in themselves become a way of knowing; or, as Susan Harding states,
\n“the only certain evidence of the reality that preoccupies ethnographers,
\nof shared unconscious knowledge, is experiential” (1987: 180).<\/span><\/p>\nWriting
\nculture and post-Malinowskian era:<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/h3>\n
\nand later anthropologists continued to embrace immersion and continue to
\nproduce an authoritative <\/i>accounts on
\nthe natives until it was late 1980s and especially before the James Clifford
\nand George Marcus\u2019 Writing Culture: The
\nPoetics and Politics of Ethnography<\/i>. Writing
\nCulture <\/i>movement in the 1990s was by the \u201cwriting against culture\u201d
\nmovement, which expressed misgivings about a common form of anthropological thought
\nthat imposed excessive and disadvantaging \u201cotherness\u201d on the cultures and
\npeoples studied. This movement implicitly reasserted the humanist universalism
\nof anthropology and pointed up how other cultures were described in terms that
\ndistanced and dehumanized them. This was a very direct and forceful challenge
\nto customary descriptive and categorizing practices, and it provoked strong
\ndebate in the discipline. Fundamentally they brought out a few uncomfortable
\ntruths:<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>How
\nfar an ethnographer\u2019s account of a people is accurate, especially in an era of
\npost-structuralism when it is well known that writing is fashioning and when
\nyou write you tend to objectify reality.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>If
\nthere is a \u2018mispresentation\u2019 of reality in ethnographic writings wheather the
\nfinished ethnography is poetically
\nwritten <\/i>to appease its readers, or political
\nwritten <\/i>to appease their masters.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>What
\nabout the individual biases that might result in (un)intentional creation of
\nfiction about a group of people.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Where
\nlies the truth, is it in the diary that Malinowski wrote (A diary in the strict sense of the term<\/i>) or in the ethnographic
\naccount?<\/span><\/p>\n
\nethnographic work and some of the new directions include:<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Experience
\nnear ethnography \u2013 ethnographies which are being conducted by an ethnographer
\non his\/her own culture<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Self
\nreflexivity \u2013 when an ethnographer speaks openly about his\/her own position in
\nthe ethnography and more generally.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>Multi-site
\nethnography \u2013 when an ethnographer is no longer documenting everything under
\nthe sun but working on a particular research question at multiple sites.<\/span><\/p>\n