What is ethnography?

eth·nog·ra·phy n. the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.
The New Oxford American Dictionary 2nd Edition.
Pronunciation: \eth-ˈnä-grə-fē\
Function: noun
Etymology: French ethnographie, from ethno- + -graphie -graphy
Date: 1834


Merriam-Webster Online
Photo of book: Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronislaw Malinowski.
Ethnography consists of the observation and analysis of human groups considered as individual entities (the groups are often selected, for practical and theoretical reasons unrelated to the nature of the research involved, from those societies that differ most from our own). Ethnography thus aims at recording as accurately as possible the perspective modes of life of various groups.
Structural Anthropology (1963), by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Photo of book: Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The word 'ethnography' has a double meaning in anthropology: ethnography as product (ethnographic writings—the articles and books written by anthropologists), and ethnography as process (participant observation or fieldwork). The product depends upon the process, but not in any simple A>B relationship. In constructing ethnographies, anthropologists do more than merely 'write up' the fieldnotes they record as part of the process of doing fieldwork. If ethnographies can be seen as the building blocks and testing grounds of anthropological theory, ethnographies and the ethnographic process from which they derive are also shaped and moulded by theory.


As a written account, an ethnography focuses on a particular population, place and time with the deliberate goal of describing it to others.

“Ethnography” by Roger Sanjek in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (2002), Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds.).
A research method located in the practice of both sociologists and anthropologists, and which should be regarded as the product of a cocktail of methodologies that share the assumption that personal engagement with the subject is the key to understanding a particular culture or social setting. Participant observation is the most common component of this cocktail, but interviews, conversational and discourse analysis, documentary analysis, film and photography, life histories all have their place in the ethnographer's repertoire. Description resides at the core of ethnography, and however that description is constructed it is the intense meaning of social life from the everyday perspective of groups members that is sought.
"Ethnography" by Dick Hobbs in The SAGE Dictionary of Social Research Methods (2006), Victor Jupp (ed.).
Photo of book: The Interpretation of Cultures
From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures that define the enterprise. What defines it is what kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, “thick description.”



The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz (1973).