can be found in the literature by scholars with the expertise in this topic (I highly suggest Michael Agar’s works—in particular 1996—for an accessible in-depth overview of ethnography). My suggestion is to use this, and Chapter Two, as references to clarify doubts about ethnography and auto-ethnography, especially when reading Chapter Three. I hope that these resources are also useful for readers who wish to explore these topics in more depth (hence, I have included in the references, works not discussed, for readers who want to explore issues that I don’t address fully here).
The views of ethnography that I am offering respond to my situated interpretations, according to my own academic formation and to the particularities of my vision and experiences. My discussion begins with definitions and explanations of what ethnographers do during fieldwork. I discuss then moments of transformation and critiques of the ethnographic practices. I conclude with a genealogy of sorts, of currents and scholars that were important to me during my graduate training and later through my research (indirect mentors); hence, this chapter is filtered through a first person auto-ethnographic voice, which honors the main proposal of this book.
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What Is Ethnography?
Before we get tangled with academic jargon and lost into conceptual abstractions, I offer the punchline: Ethnography is a methodology, that utilizes mixed field methods, to design research projects and to conduct research. Ethnography is also considered a genre of writing, due to the particular narrative style to report research findings. As a methodology, ethnography is a kind of qualitative methodology (in contrast to quantitative) that requires fieldwork. The knowledge produced from ethnographic research, aims at understanding and explaining present human experience within a particular topic, from the grounded perspective of particular social groups, and through their cultural practices. Ethnography, as a constantly evolving genre or writing style, ranges from texts centered in narratives and descriptive passages about a particular group way of life, to more theoretical analysis of social phenomena, and includes also more researcher-centered self-reflections. Ethnography is used in Anthropology, other social sciences and, increasingly, in many other kinds of academic research, such as in art and humanities, education and health related fields. In this sense, this interdisciplinary use becomes an ideological choice or perspective from where to question and to understand the poetics and politics of our complex human condition. In the more than 150 years of anthropological publications, ethnography has become a kind of cultural production in its own right, that has amazed a remarkable textual and visual archive of the human experience, from the perspective of diverse anthropologists and scholars, in the context of their own historical times.
Just as when defining what is life, sometimes it is best to focus on characteristics rather that attempting a coherent definition. Ethnography as a methodology involves conducting fieldwork research with living human groups, in everyday settings, rather than in labs or controlled experiments (calling this “natural” settings is problematic). Given the complexity of our human lives, ethnographers focus on a particular topic, and generate specific research questions to guide their focus during fieldwork, but trying to take in, holistically, all the rest. The main method of fieldwork is participant-observation, acquiring original knowledge from interactions with particular people, in specific places, to produce primary sources by documenting (through fieldnotes and audiovisual recordings) ordinary behavior, communication, practices, artifacts, and gathering narratives, oral histories, informal interviews, elicitation of vernacular knowledge, questionnaires, among other qualitative instruments. As any other research involving interactions among humans, the ethnographic fieldwork is a process that requires ethical training and compliance. The central ethical and legal mandate, as it is supposed to be in medicine, is first “doing no harm,” to interact in respectful and patient ways, regardless of what is going on.
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Through ethnographic fieldwork research, we try to understand the individual and group experiences in their own cultural specificity and simultaneously in the shared grounds of our humanity; how we do, perceive-think, speak-communicate, and create the marvelous and weird things we do as well as the tensions, conflicts and negotiations that ensue. Yet no social group is homogeneous, and no individual human is generic; hence, ethnographers need to document behaviors and events from culturally specific points of view, angles or perspectives of particular people, in particular geographic places at particular space-times, and in specific local-global relations. As ethnographers we are aware that many points of view or perspectives [henceforth POVs] are needed for a wider vision of the human condition, so generalizations from our data is not the main aim, that is why the sampling is valid even if it focuses on a small group, one family or even one single individual (as Ruth Behar has done). Like a close-up photo, we narrow the human unity to get a more depth of understanding of differences, to feel-hear-see-touch-taste what it means for the participants in our studies to be human (this is what we call the “emic” or inside POV). We also do more classical bibliographic and archival research about our project’s community and field-site, to locate them in historical context and current statistical data, and to find out about the current state of academic understanding about the particular topic of our research project. This goal of this bibliography is to create an “etic” understanding from the “outside” POV of the researcher, and to inform the analysis and interpretation of the field data.
Of course, this kind of research, as any other qualitative methodology, is not clear cut, nor is a smooth going somewhere and “gathering data.” As will become evident in further discussions below, these clear-cut steps and tasks (as practiced mostly before the 1980s) are still one of the major problematics of ethnographic research, that have driven critiques, transformations and refinements of this tool from within and outside anthropology (and these limitations is what auto-ethnography puts, so powerfully, in evidence). More simply put, ethnographers gather stories in the context where they occur. We listen, ask (and respond if prompted), observe and participate in what is going on. Ideally, we are supposed to be fully present, engaged in the measure that collaborators in our studies allow us to participate and to share their worlds. Ideally also, this process happens in a non-judgmental space of acceptance and appreciation of differences, aware of our own ethnocentrism, this is, consciously examining the influences of our own cultural filters. Through fieldwork many challenges and micro-political negotiations occur; yet, this method also renders marvelous mutual insights and discoveries. In this sense, ethnography is a space of intercultural and interpersonal encounters and exchanges, as complex, contingent and “real” as our everyday interactions. To me, these experiential aspects of our human interactions are what makes ethnography a needed tool for qualitative research.
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To conduct ethnographic research and to understand what ethnography is, we need to address the term culture. Widely varied definitions of culture have been proposed, and their implications have been debated since the 19th century (in their 1952 book, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn gathered more than 200!), and the problematics of its essentialized usage has been questioned and denounced (see Stocking 1996). The concept of “culture,” so central in US anthropology, was also transformed during the 1980s “crisis” within the discipline; culture went from a concrete “reality” out there, that can be easily identified as an avocado in a tree (bounded “culture areas” or studying “a culture,” for example) to an abstract concept in its adjective form (“cultural” practices), this is the version that most ethnographers use commonly today. The following is an idiosyncratic, yet useful metaphor for “culture”: “… But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand
