North American scholars developed a social–cultural anthropological approach to studying (and in some ways reconstructing) the cultural life of ‘native’ American peoples. One such researcher, Franz Boas, a German physicist turned US anthropologist, was particularly influential in developing the anthropological interest in culture and language. Dismissive of what were then evolutionary approaches to the study of culture (and indeed also of biological–scientific racism), Boas articulated more nuanced understandings of difference between societies or social groups as a result of social learning – that is, as differences of culture rather than of biology. In so doing, Boas developed the important anthropological concept of cultural relativism – which might usefully be described as both an imperative and a willingness to suspend one’s own cultural assumptions in order to understand social structures, belief systems and practices from within a culture. Cultural relativism provided a framework for studying and seeking to understand a culture on and in its own terms through its own cultural frame of reference. Boas helped to shape cultural anthropology in the USA and across the world, with many of his students, such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, going on to influence the discipline over the course of the twentieth century.
While there were differences in the development of the social and cultural anthropological traditions across both sides of the Atlantic, in relation to both choice of sites for study and the lens through which societies were seen, there were also considerable similarities of practice. These early pioneers of what came to be identified as ethnography advocated a prolonged engagement with the society or culture to be studied, with immersion of the researcher held up as a standard to which ethnographers should aspire. That is, there was recognition of fieldwork in the setting as a means to understanding the everyday practices in and of that setting. Ethnographic research does not have to involve extended engagement, perhaps over several months or years, or full participation and immersion on the part of the researcher within the culture. However, the very idea of understanding a setting from the point of view of those engaged in that setting, and doing so through on the ground engagement in and with that setting, remains a powerful underpinning of contemporary ethnographic approaches.
The School of Sociology at the University of Chicago is often credited with bringing ethnography to wider sociological attention, drawing on anthropological sensibilities in more mundane research settings. Founded in 1892, the Chicago School was the first dedicated university department of sociology, and is responsible for helping to shape the social sciences, both empirically and methodologically. With an emphasis on urban sociology, The Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s theorized about the city, drawing on ethnographic research of Chicago and its environs. Chicago scholars encouraged their students to get first-hand experience of social life in different parts of the city. To do so they adapted the idea of engaged fieldwork, including participant observation, to study the contemporary urban cityscape. The journalist Robert Park, alongside Ernest Burgess and W.I. Thomas, was a key figure in the development of the Chicago School, bringing with him an early interpretation of investigative journalism, relying on ethnographic methods of sorts – listening, experiencing, asking questions and observing social life first-hand. This brought anthropological ethnographic methods ‘home’, using participant observation to study familiar and everyday settings on the doorstep, as opposed to the study of the ‘exotic’ or ‘different’ that had been favoured by early social and cultural anthropologists.
Park and his colleagues transformed the study of the city, through close and varied empirical and ethnographic inquiry. Following the Second World War, this influence endured, with students learning about and practising interpretative sociology and ethnographic methods with scholars such as Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer. This ‘second’ Chicago School was a key influence in shaping the development of post-war American sociology, and indeed the discipline more generally (Fine, 1995). The Chicago School approach is credited with influencing the ways in which social institutions are studied and understood by sociologists; this influence has been wide reaching, including in fields such as health care and education, as well as organizational studies more generally. The way was also paved for the wider adoption of qualitative research methods in the medium term, grounded in and emergent from ethnography. This influence though was not just in relation to methods of inquiry, but also relatedly to sociological theory and methodology. The Chicago School was pivotal in the development of the theoretical perspective and frameworks of symbolic interactionism. Drawing on the philosophical work of George Herbert Mead, symbolic interactionism focused on shared meanings that are generated and maintained through social interaction. While not exclusively so, symbolic interactionism has been particularly associated with ethnography and qualitative research methods, with its emphasis on meaning and process, and ‘where acts, objects and people have evolving and intertwined local identities that may not be revealed at the outset or to an outsider’ (Rock, 2001, p. 29). In the next section the theoretical and methodological frames of and for ethnography are further explored.
The methodological contexts of ethnography
Ethnographic research is now practised across a wide range of disciplines, and as such it draws on a rich palette of theoretical and methodological frameworks. It is important to note that ethnography lends itself to and is influenced by a variety of theoretical positions. Ethnography is not reduced to a single approach to theorizing about the social world. Indeed ethnography has been adopted and shaped by a range of methodological approaches to the making sense of social life. It is generally understood that ethnography sits at the inductive end of the theoretical spectrum, and that a value of ethnography is its capacity to enable study of social worlds in their ‘natural’ state – inductively through close and detailed attention. Early adopters of anthropological ethnography began with a specific setting, culture or community at hand – and set out to learn about and understand that setting through close study and participative engagement. They did not start, at least explicitly, from the position of a hypothesis to be tested or a theory to prove or improve. However, early ethnographic practitioners were increasingly influenced by a view of the social world that is orderly and functional, and by an understanding that society is achieved by organization and through social institutions. This functionalist–structural perspective included a focus on the role of social institutions in supporting the everyday functioning of society (and indeed in turn led to a particular preoccupation with the role of the family and kinship as a particular, and presumed universal, social institution). A focus on structure and function led to the pursuit of ethnography as an empirical project, where social action, behaviour and belief are revealed as social ‘facts’ to be gathered – ‘objectively’ and untainted by researchers, who are but neutral observers. Inherent within this model is a rather uncritical adoption of a naturalistic perspective. That is, a view that social worlds can and should be studied in their natural states, with the main aim being to describe what is actually and naturally happening. Following this through to a natural conclusion, if we are to understand what it is we are describing then we need an approach that provides access to behaviour and the patterning of that behaviour. Thus prolonged engagement provides the opportunity to observe and to learn, coming to understand the ordering and functioning of the social world in much the same way as the social actors themselves.
Symbolic interactionism, influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, focuses less on institutions and the identification of patterning, and much more on the ways in which human actions are imbued with social meanings which are made and revealed through social interaction. Thus people, as social actors, are active and interactive agents in social worlds where there is continual interpretation, revision and reshaping. This is a more dynamic and moving view of social life, and one which brings with it an assumption of the self as socially constructed, and ‘made’ through action and interaction. In terms of ethnography, symbolic interactionism brought to the fore a focus on meanings and symbols; less a focus on objects and behaviours than on how they are and come to be imbued with social and symbolic meaning. There is also an interest in how social actors learn and interpret these meanings in and through their everyday practice. These meanings are uncovered through an exploration of the symbols in which meanings are encoded, and shared in the course of interaction. Interactionist ethnography does not ‘presume too much in advance’
