NCRM videos

What is ethnography? by Penny Harvey

26-08-2014

Ethnographic fieldwork as practiced within contemporary social anthropology is a powerful way of opening up and extending understandings of how human beings live in the world. Ethnography is a disciplined preoccupation with the enactment, articulation and transmission of social imaginaries (values, ideas) and material practices. It is a relational approach to social life in which the researcher is fully implicated. Unlike some methods, ethnography is not a technique that can be first mastered and then applied because in some ways every ethnography is unique, it is something the ethnographer does, a particular mode of attention that requires skills of patience, endurance, perspicacity, diplomacy and most importantly perhaps for the western academic the willingness to unlearn. In this sense ethnography is also not something that somebody else can easily do for you, and the empirical, the analytical and the theoretical are inter-twined from the start - their relationship crafted in the writing of an ethnographic text.