Fieldwork is the most important method by which cultural anthropologists gather data to answer their research questions. While interacting on a daily basis with a group of people, cultural anthropologists document their observations and perceptions and adjust the focus of their research as needed. They typically spend a few months to a few years living among the people they are studying. The “field” can be anywhere the people are—a village in highland Papua New Guinea or a supermarket in downtown Minneapolis. Just as marine biologists spend time in the ocean to learn about the behavior of marine animals and geologists travel to a mountain range to observe rock formations, anthropologists go to places where people are.
Both the work done by anthropologists to study cultures as well as the written accounts of that work are referred to as ‘ethnography.’ The word ethnography comes from the Greek for ‘people’ (or culture) and ‘writing’ (or description). Just as ‘geography’ is writing about or descriptions of ‘earth’ as well as the work done by geographers, ethnography is writing about or descriptions of cultures as well as the work done by ethnographers—a title anthropologists like to claim for themselves but which can just as well apply to sociologists, educators, and others in social science or humanities fields.
Ethnography is cultural anthropology’s distinctive research strategy. It was originally developed by anthropologists to study small-scale, relatively isolated cultural groups. Typically, those groups had relatively simple economies and technologies and limited access to larger, more technologically advanced societies. Early ethnographers sought to understand the entirety of a particular culture. They spent months to years living in the community, and in that time, they documented in great detail every dimension of people’s lives, including their language, subsistence strategies, political systems, formation of families and marriages, and religious beliefs. This was important because it helped researchers appreciate the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social life. The key to the success of this ethnographic approach was not only to spend considerable time observing people in their home settings engaged in day-to-day activities but also to participate in those activities. Participation informed an ‘insider’ perspective of the culture, something that had been missing in earlier social science research.
Sources of Ethnographic Data
Working in the field often places anthropologists in settings very different from what they are familiar with. Upon first arriving at an unfamiliar field location, it is common for anthropologists to feel out of place and uncomfortable as they adjust to a new culture and environment. Many anthropologists keep a daily log of their feeling and impressions in their new environment. Researchers studying other cultures practice a method called participant observation, which entails directly participating in the activities and events of a host culture and keeping records of observations about these activities.
Of the various techniques and tools used to conduct ethnographic research, observation in general and participant observation in particular are among the most important. Ethnographers are trained to pay attention to everything happening around them when in the field—from routine daily activities such as cooking dinner to major events such as an annual religious celebration. They observe how people interact with each other, how the environment affects people, and how people affect the environment. To conduct participant observation, ethnographers must live with or spend considerable time with their informants to establish a strong rapport with them. Rapport is a sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other and agreeable to working together. It is essential for anthropologists to rigorously document their observations, usually by writing field notes and recording their feelings and perceptions in a personal journal or diary.
Researchers may create various types of records of their interactions as participants and their observations about the host culture and environment. These might take the form of field notebooks, computer files, digital recordings, photographs, or film. Researchers working in the field may also collect objects that will remind them of the culture they are studying, often memorabilia such as maps, tourism brochures, books, or crafts made by the people they are observing.
Some researchers regularly record impressions of activities while they are occurring so that they do not forget to make note of important aspects of the culture. But many researchers will wait to take photos, draw images, or write in their notebooks until after an activity is over so that they do not disturb the culture through their efforts at documentation. This type of ‘field notes’ is described in greater detail below. In any case, it is important that researchers be respectful and responsible and always ask for permission from subjects before taking photos or recordings. Many researchers will have gathered signed permission from their subjects before beginning their research and will work with a documented plan that has been approved by their institution before going into the field.
Another primary technique for gathering ethnographic data is simply talking with people—from casual, unstructured conversations about ordinary topics to formal scheduled interviews about a particular topic. An important element for successful conversations and interviews is establishing rapport with informants. Sometimes, engaging in conversation is part of establishing that rapport. Ethnographers frequently use multiple forms of conversation and interviewing for a single research project based on their particular needs. They sometimes record the conversations and interviews with an audio recording device but more often they simply engage in the conversation and then later write down everything they recall about it. Conversations and interviews are an essential part of most ethnographic research designs because spoken communication is central to humans’ experiences.
Interviews can be uncomfortable for people, and it is important that researchers do all they can to help subjects feel at ease. Researchers will normally conduct an interview in a familiar space for the informant, such as the informant’s home. They will help the subject ease into the interview by participating in introductory and hosting protocols followed in that culture when a visitor comes to someone’s home. The researcher will start off the interview with the exchange of pleasant comments and will introduce themselves by explaining who they are, where they come from, and why they are doing this research. Then the interview may commence.
Collecting a personal narrative of someone’s life is a valuable ethnographic technique and is often combined with other techniques. Life histories provide the context in which culture is experienced and created by individuals and describe how individuals have reacted, responded, and contributed to changes that occurred during their lives. They also help anthropologists be more aware of what makes life meaningful to an individual and to focus on the particulars of individual lives, on the tenor of their experiences and the patterns that are important to them. Researchers often include life histories in their ethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.
Within any culture or subculture, there are always particular individuals who may have more-detailed or privileged knowledge. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic research in the field often seek out such cultural specialists to gain a greater understanding of certain issues and to answer questions they otherwise could not answer. When an anthropologist establishes a rapport with these individuals and begins to rely more on them for information than on others, the cultural specialists are referred to as key informants. These individuals can allow the ethnographer to uncover the meanings of behaviors and practices the researcher cannot otherwise understand. Key informants can also help researchers by directly observing others and reporting those observations to the researchers, especially in situations in which the researcher is not allowed to be present or when the researcher’s presence could alter the participants’ behavior. In addition, ethnographers can check information they obtained from other informants, contextualize it, and review it for accuracy. Having a key informant in the field is like having a research ally. The relationship can grow and become enormously fruitful.
The use of participant observation, interviews, and life histories are the bread and butter of today’s anthropological fieldwork because they ultimately work to reveal the paradoxes of culture. These methods and a few other related techniques are part of anthropology’s wholistic approach because they are based on the principle that humans are the foremost experts about themselves. The resolutions to the paradoxes of culture can only be understood from the perspective of the culture itself. This is contrary to the old style of anthropology based on outsider description alone.
Ethical Considerations
Contemporary sociocultural researchers and anthropologists must follow protocols established by an institutional review board (IRB) and any research protocols specific to the culture being researched. IRBs are committees under scholarly organizations (usually universities) that review and approve research plans before any research begins. The proposed research is normally fully planned first, with specific information about the type of research, examples of questions to be asked, potential risk factors to subjects, plans for emotional support for subjects, means of protecting the identity of subjects, language used to fully disclose the intent of the project to subjects, and the final plan for archiving the research data. IRB ‘informed consent’ protocols ensure informants can freely choose their participation or withdraw, safeguarding against harm.
Additionally, many Indigenous nations and foreign countries have their own research protocols and processes for securing permission to conduct research. Researchers must often gain written consent for interviews, be transparent about their goals, protect anonymity, and specify how data will be archived or destroyed. Content may appear in publications, but collaborators often retain rights to review, correct, or even own the material, and many researchers now establish long-term, trust-based relationships with subject communities, returning regularly, involving them in project design, and seeking to address their needs. This open-ended, applied research has grown in response to critiques by scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., who questioned the benefits of earlier anthropology for those it studied; in such projects, communities help decide what should be published, sometimes requiring manuscripts to be reviewed by tribal councils or committees. Increasingly, researchers assign ultimate ownership or even authorship to the communities themselves.
Anthropologists must be especially careful about the ethical aspects of their fieldwork. For one, we have seen that ‘culture’ has a great deal to do with sometimes sensitive topics—including the ultimate values (and internal ethics) of a group. Furthermore, some anthropologists argue that truly ‘informed consent’ pollutes their data. Having subjects sign a document acknowledging that you are watching them impacts the behavior the anthropologist gets to see. Part of the work of IRBs is to work with researchers to strike this balance between method and protecting those being studied. For example, in some cases, an IRB will approve research without directly informed consent in writing so long as it is based on public behavior and no individually identifiable information is included in the final publication. In the case of interviews, researchers must often share the degree to which a person will be anonymized in the resulting work.
Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange
The cultural anthropologist’s goal during fieldwork is to describe a group of people to others in a way that makes strange or unusual features of the culture seem familiar and familiar traits seem extraordinary. The point is to help people think in new ways about aspects of their own culture by comparing them with other cultures. Recall that Margaret Mead (a student of Franz Boas) studied young women in villages in Samoa and found that the stress, anxiety, and turmoil of American adolescence were not found among Samoan youth. Rather, young women in Samoa experienced a smooth transition to adulthood with relatively little stress or difficulty. Boas described what he saw as the key insight of Margaret Mead’s research to be that “her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.”
Another classic example of a style of anthropological writing that attempted to make the familiar strange and encouraged readers to consider their own cultures in a different way is Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema (1956). The essay described hygiene practices of the Nacirema in a way that, to cultural insiders, sounded extreme, exaggerated, and out of context. He presented the Nacirema as a little-known cultural group with strange, exotic practices. The twist was that he was describing what was then modern American culture: Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards. Miner wrote the essay during an era in which anthropologists were just beginning to expand their focus beyond small-scale traditional societies far from home to large-scale post-industrial societies such as the United States. He wrote the essay primarily as a satire of how anthropologists often wrote about “the Other” in ways that made other cultures seem exotic and glossed over features that the Other had in common with the anthropologist’s culture. The essay also challenged U.S. readers in general and anthropologists in particular to think differently about their own cultures and re-examine their cultural assumptions about what is “normal.”
Miner detailed the seemingly barbaric practices of 'holy mouth men' and the Nacirema obsession with oral cleanliness. [Source Harvard School of Dental Medicine via Wikimedia Commons]
When anthropologists conduct fieldwork, they gather data. An important tool for gathering anthropological data is another subtly different sense of the word ‘ethnography’—the in-depth study of everyday practices and lives of a people. Ethnography produces a detailed description of the studied group at a particular time and location, also known as a “thick description,” a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe this type of research and writing. A thick description explains not only the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it. Such descriptions help readers better understand the internal logic of why people in a culture behave as they do and why the behaviors are meaningful to them. This is important because understanding the attitudes, perspectives, and motivations of cultural insiders is at the heart of anthropology.
Emic and Etic Perspectives
Different types of data produce different kinds of ethnographic descriptions, which also vary in terms of perspective—from the perspective of the studied culture (emic) or from the perspective of the observer (etic). Emic perspectives refer to descriptions of behaviors and beliefs in terms that are meaningful to people who belong to a specific culture, e.g., how people perceive and categorize their culture and experiences, why people believe they do what they do, how they imagine and explain things. To uncover emic perspectives, ethnographers talk to people, observe what they do, and participate in their daily activities with them. Emic perspectives are essential for anthropologists’ efforts to obtain a detailed understanding of a culture and to avoid interpreting others through their own cultural beliefs.
Etic perspectives refer to explanations for behavior by an outside observer in ways that are meaningful to the observer. For an anthropologist, etic descriptions typically arise from conversations between the ethnographer and the anthropological community. These explanations tend to be based in science and are informed by historical, political, and economic studies and other types of research. The etic approach acknowledges that members of a culture are unlikely to view the things they do as noteworthy or unusual. They cannot easily stand back and view their own behavior objectively or from another perspective. For example, you may have never thought twice about the way you brush your teeth and the practice of going to the dentist or how you experienced your teenage years. For you, these parts of your culture are so normal and “natural” you probably would never consider questioning them. An emic lens gives us an alternative perspective that is essential when constructing a comprehensive view of a people.
Most often, ethnographers include both emic and etic perspectives in their research and writing. They first uncover a studied people’s understanding of what they do and why and then develop additional explanations for the behavior based on anthropological theory and analysis. Both perspectives are important, and it can be challenging to move back and forth between the two. Nevertheless, that is exactly what good ethnographers must do.
Because of how useful the ethnographic research strategy is in developing an emic perspective, it has been adopted by many other disciplines including sociology, education, psychology, and political science. Education researchers, for example, use ethnography to study children in classrooms to identify their learning strategies and how they understand and make sense of learning experiences. Sociologists use ethnography to study emerging social movements and how participants in such movements stay motivated and connected despite their sometimes-conflicting goals.
The Importance of Field Notes
Field notes are indispensable when conducting ethnographic research. Although making such notes is time-consuming, they form the primary record of one’s observations. Generally speaking, ethnographers write two kinds of notes: field notes and personal reflections. Field notes are detailed descriptions of everything the ethnographer observes and experiences. They include specific details about what happened at the field site, the ethnographer’s sensory impressions, and specific words and phrases used by the people observed. They also frequently include the content of conversations the ethnographer had and things the ethnographer overheard others say. Ethnographers also sometimes include their personal reflections on the experience of writing field notes. Often, brief notes are jotted down in a notebook while the anthropologist is observing and participating in activities. Later, they expand on those quick notes to make more formal field notes (or thick descriptions), which may be organized and typed into a report. It is common for ethnographers to spend several hours a day writing and organizing field notes.
Ethnographers often also keep a personal journal or diary that may include information about their emotions and personal experiences while conducting research. These personal reflections can be as important as the field notes. Ethnography is not an objective science. Everything researchers do and experience in the field is filtered through their personal life experiences. Two ethnographers may experience a situation in the field in different ways and understand the experience differently. For this reason, it is important for researchers to be aware of their reactions to situations and be mindful of how their life experiences affect their perceptions. In fact, this sort of reflexive insight can turn out to be a useful data source and analytical tool that improves the researcher’s understanding.
The work of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo provides a useful example of how anthropologists can use their emotional responses to fieldwork situations to advance their research. In 1981, Rosaldo and his wife, Michelle, were conducting research among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Rosaldo was studying men in the community who engaged in emotional rampages in which they violently murdered others by cutting off their heads. Although the practice had been banned by the time Rosaldo arrived, a longing to continue headhunting remained in the cultural psyche of the community.
Whenever Rosaldo asked a man why he engaged in headhunting, the answer was that rage and grief caused him to kill others. At the beginning of his fieldwork, Rosaldo felt that the response was overly simplistic and assumed that there had to be more to it than that. He was frustrated because he could not uncover a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Then, on October 11, 1981, Rosaldo’s wife was walking along a ravine when she tripped, lost her footing, and fell 65 feet to her death, leaving Rosaldo a grieving single father. In his essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” Rosaldo later wrote that it was his own struggle with rage as he grieved for his wife that helped him truly grasp what the Ilongot men meant when they described their grief and rage. Only through the very personal and emotionally devastating experience of losing his wife was Rosaldo able to understand the emic perspective of the headhunters. The result was an influential and insightful ethnographic account.
Methods to Fit the Situation
Like the cultures and peoples studied, anthropology and ethnography are evolving. Field sites for ethnographic research are no longer exclusively located in far-flung, isolated, non-industrialized societies. Increasingly, anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research in complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States and in urban environments elsewhere in the world. Often, anthropologists who study certain topics must conduct research in multiple locations. This is known as multi-sited ethnography.
Anthropologists use ethnography to study people wherever they are and however they interact with others. New technological “sites” of human interaction (such as ‘virtual worlds’) are fascinating to many ethnographers and have expanded the definition of fieldwork.
In the early years, ethnographers were interested in exploring the entirety of a culture. Taking an inductive approach, they generally were not concerned about arriving with a relatively narrow predefined research topic. Instead, the goal was to explore the people, their culture, and their homelands and what had previously been written about them. The focus of the study was allowed to emerge gradually during their time in the field. Often, this approach to ethnography resulted in rather general ethnographic descriptions.
Today, anthropologists are increasingly taking a more deductive approach to ethnographic research. Rather than arriving at the field site with only general ideas about the goals of the study, they tend to select a particular problem before arriving and then let that problem guide their research. Following a research “problem” orients and guides a study from beginning to end focusing on the things most closely related to the research problem rather than every dimension of informants’ lives.
Increasingly, cultural anthropologists are also using quantitative research methods to complement qualitative approaches. Qualitative research in anthropology aims to comprehensively describe human behavior and the contexts in which it occurs while quantitative research seeks patterns in numerical data that can explain aspects of human behavior. Quantitative patterns can be gleaned from statistical analyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions. Surveys are a common quantitative technique that usually involves closed-ended questions. While surveys usually lack the sort of contextual detail associated with qualitative research, they tend to be relatively easy to code numerically and, as a result, can be easier to analyze than qualitative data. Surveys are also useful for gathering specific data points within a large population, something that is challenging to do with many qualitative techniques.
In recent years, anthropologists have begun to combine ethnography with other types of research methods. These mixed-method approaches integrate qualitative and quantitative evidence to provide a more comprehensive analysis. For instance, anthropologists can combine ethnographic data with questionnaires, statistical data, and a media analysis. Mixed methods can be particularly useful when conducting problem-oriented research on complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States. Detailed statistical and quantitative data are often available for those types of societies. Additionally, the general population is usually literate and somewhat comfortable with the idea of filling out a questionnaire.
Remember that the guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor view other cultural ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.
As a result, anthropologists reject ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as a stick by which to measure all other cultures. People who are ethnocentric view their own cultures as central and normal and reject all other cultures as inferior and morally suspect. All people and cultures are ethnocentric to some degree. Often the answer to the most complex cultural questions is simply “because that is how it is done.” We believe what we believe and doing things any other way seems wrong. Compare this to definitions of culture itself!
Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists in the field, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentrisms and let cultural relativism guide our inquiries and interactions with others so that our observations are not biased. Cultural relativism is at the core of the discipline of anthropology.
Revisiting Anthropology as a Science
Anthropologists have described their field as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. Early anthropologists fought to legitimize anthropology as a robust scientific field of study. To do so, they borrowed methods and techniques from the physical sciences and applied them to anthropological inquiry. Indeed, anthropology today is categorized as a social science in most academic institutions in the United States alongside sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. However, in recent decades, many cultural anthropologists have distanced themselves from science-oriented research and embraced more-humanistic approaches, including symbolic and interpretive perspectives. Interpretive anthropology treats culture as a body of “texts” rather than attempting to test a hypothesis based on deductive or inductive reasoning. The texts present a particular picture from a particular subjective point of view. Interpretive anthropologists believe that it is not necessary (or even possible) to objectively interrogate a text. Rather, they study the texts to untangle the various webs of meaning embedded in them. Consequently, interpretive anthropologists include the context of their interpretations, their own perspectives and, importantly, how the research participants view themselves and the meanings they attribute to their lives.
Anthropologists are unlikely to conclude that a single approach is best. Instead, anthropologists can apply any and all of the approaches that best suit their particular problem. Anthropology is unique among academic disciplines for the diversity of approaches used to conduct research and for the broad range of orientations that fall under its umbrella.
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