Differences in doing Ethnography

Traditionally, anthropologists worked in primitive societies; sociologists, in modern nations. Different field techniques emerged for the study of different types of societies. Sociologists and other social scientists who work in complex societies use survey research to sample variation.

There are several contrasts between survey research and ethnography. With more literate respondents, sociologists employ questionnaires, which the research subjects fill out. Anthropologists are more likely to use interview schedules, which the ethnographer fills in during a personal interview. Anthropologists do their field work in communities and study the totality of social life. Sociologists study samples to make inferences about a larger population. Sociologists are often interested in causal relationships between a lirnited number of variables. Anthropologists are more typically concerned with the interconnectedness of all aspects of social life.

Ethnography has several characteristic field procedures, including observation, establishing rapport, participant observation, conversation, listening to native accounts, formal and informal interviewing, the genealogical method, work with well informed informants, and life histories. Recording the imponderabilia of daily life is particularly useful early in field work. That is when the most basic, distinctive, and alien features of another culture are most noticeable. Ethnographers do not systematically manipulate their subjects or conduct experiments. Rather, they work in natural communities and form personal relationships with informants as they study their lives.

Ethnographers work closely with well-informed informants to learn about particular areas of native life. Many ethnographers work long hours with particular informants. Life histories dramatize the fact that culture bearers are also individuals and document personal experiences with culture and culture change. The collection and analysis of genealogical information is particularly important in tribal societies, where principles of kinship, descent, and marriage organize and integrate social and political life.

Anthropologists use modified ethnographic techniques to study complex societies. The diversity of social life and subcultural variation in modern nations and cities requires social survey procedures. However, anthropologists add the intimacy and firsthand investigation characteristic of ethnography. Community studies in regions of modem nations provide firsthand, in-depth accounts of cultural variation and of regional historical and economic forces and trends. Anthropologists may use ethnographic procedures to study urban life. Network analysis focuses on individuals and the nature of their social links to, and interactions with, others. Urban ne~ works differ from those of tribal societies. Anthropologists make greater use of statistical techniques and analysis of the mass media in their research in complex societies.

When studying complex societies anthropologists also have many more resources available to them than they do when they study most tribal societies. It is usually possible to learn the language of the field area before going off to do ethnographic research, thus enabling the ethnographer to begin work immediately. For most regions of the world the anthropologist can take advantage of regional studies programs which provide a far more detailed understanding of the context in which the field research will be placed. Often their work can be linked up to that of historians, political scientists, literary scholars, art historians and historians of religion. While once anthropologists were the only ones who knew about the cultural peculiarities of exotic tribes, they now contribute their findings as much to mixed disciplinary conferences of area studies associations as they do to exclusive gatherings of anthropologists. Furthermore, anthropologists now find themselves collaborating in ways never before possible with educated and well-trained colleagues from the complex cultures they study.

Differences in Writing Ethnographies

Ethnographic writing on small-scale, tribal societies usually presented us with only a snapshot in that culture's time. The ethnographer concentrated his or her attention on describing observations made in the present, and made little or no attempt to see changes over time. Often this was because little or nothing was known about the history of such societies, but it was also because such cultures were presumed to be 'traditional' and unchanging. Indeed, so thoroughly were they seen as fossils of an earlier time in human cultural evolution, that it was tacitly assumed they had no significant history, that, as 'traditional' cultures, life had gone on from time immemorial as it was viewed by the anthropologist in the present. Hence one dimension of the misleading categorical contrast between 'traditional' societies and the 'modern' ones of the anthropologist.

Recent ethnographic writers have attempted to correct the deficiency of romanticized timelessness, which is obvious in the classics. Linked to salvage ethnography was the idea of the ethnographic present -- the period before westernization, when the "true" native culture flourished. This notion gives classic ethnographies an eternal, timeless quality. The cultures they describe seem frozen in the ethnographic present. Providing the only jarring note in this idealized picture are occasional comments by the author about traders or missionaries, suggesting that the natives were already part of the world system.

Anthropologists now recognize that the ethnographic present is a rather unrealistic and romantic construct. Cultures have been in contact -- and have been changing -- throughout history. At least 80 percent of native cultures had at least one major foreign encounter before any anthropologist came their way. Most of them had already been incorporated in some fashion into nation-states or colonial systems.

The classic ethnographies neglected history, politics, and the world system, but contemporary ethnographies usually recognize that cultures constantly change and that an ethnographic account applies to a particular moment.

(Portions adapted from Kottak, pp. 31-2)