What is Ethnography & How It is Done?
Ethnography is often referred to as “culture writing,” and it refers to a type of documentation often employed by Anthropologists in their fieldwork.
Ethnography The word Ethnography comes from these two Greek words:” Ethnos”, meaning people & “Graphein”, meaning writing. Wolcott (1999) defines ethnography as a description of “the customary social behaviours of an identifiable group of people”. Ethnography is often referred to as “culture writing,” and it refers to a type of documentation often employed by Anthropologists in their fieldwork. This genre of writing uses detailed first-hand written descriptions of a culture based on first-hand research in the field. Ethnographies often reflect the anthropological desire for holism, the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. In the case of ethnography, holism refers to the fact that a culture can be best understood through the understanding of as many aspects of the cultural context as possible. Cultural anthropologists who write ethnographies are often called ethnographers. Ethnographers who write about what they have learned from the people that they ha…