Key Ideas
- Ethnography is the systematic study of a particular cultural group or phenomenon.
- Ethnography is naturalistic; ethnographers focus on real people and their everyday activities in their natural environment.
- Ethnographers engage in extended fieldwork to document beliefs and practices from people's own point of view.
- Written ethnographies have changed over time from texts exhibiting a disembodied, all-knowing perspective to experimental texts that are unconventional, polyphonic, and heteroglossic.
- Transparency in research methods and analysis improves the credibility and validity of ethnographic reports, as does the inclusion of researcher reflexivity and thick descriptions.
I have been intrigued by culture since I traveled to “the old ...