Back to the future

Ethnography is not a new method, although it may be novel to some commercial researchers. For a good general introduction see Hy Mariampolski’s paper, ‘The Power of Ethnography’ (1999). Its beginnings are usually traced to the work of the social anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) and Franz Boas (1911; 1927) in the early 20th Century.

Malinowksi conducted fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of the Western Pacific and his major contribution was to establish participant observation as key to ethnographic research. He also emphasised the importance of the relationships between different elements of a social system.

Boas, on the other hand, stressed the meticulous collection of data while emphasising the differences and particularities of cultural groups. By the 1920s the key aspects of ethnographic method were well established. These included long-term immersion in an alien culture; learning the language of the people; participating in as well as observing their social lives; and analysing all aspects of culture, to produce a complete account of the group being studied. (Clearly, commercial ethnography is different, with researchers spending less time with participants and having a more focused research topic... but let’s leave that to one side for now.)

Since the 1980s, however, these ethnographic conventions have been increasingly questioned from within anthropology and from cultural studies and literary analysis. Key criticisms include these:

• Ethnography has a colonial heritage and, historically, was used by the powerful to exploit the weak

• The knowledge produced was biased because the researchers adopted a colonial perspective

• Male ethnographers ignored the role of women, producing patriarchal accounts of the societies researched

• Research subjects were construed as passive and were unable to influence how they were portrayed

• Ethnographic reports were written as objective, scientific accounts, although this is not what they truly were

For some academics, particularly those within linguistics or cultural studies (Barthes 1977; Foucault 1979), these problems are inherent to the method and cannot be resolved. Other ethnographers, however, have developed a range of approaches to address these problems, approaches that can be adapted usefully for commercial researchers.
 

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