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4. Ethnography
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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C h a p t e r 4 Ethnography The word ‘‘ethnography’’ has a double meaning in anthropology: ethnography as product (ethnographic writings—the books and articles written by anthropologists) and ethnography as process (participant observation or fieldwork). The product depends upon the process but not in any simple AVB 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, then it must also be accepted that ethnographies and the ethnographic process from which they derive are shaped and molded by theory. Ethnography (in both senses) may profitably be envisioned as one side of an anthropological triangle. The other two sides are comparison and contextualization . Together, the three sides of this triangle define the operational system by which anthropologists acquire and use ethnographic data in writing ethnographies. Fieldnotes are filtered through and interpreted against comparative theory and contextual documentary materials. As they are read, ethnographies stimulate comparative theoretical thinking, which in turn suggests new problems and interpretations to be resolved through further ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnographies, and the comparative theoretical reflection they spur, also regularly lead to new demands and rising standards for documentary contextualization (more history; more ecological or demographic backgrounding; more attention to state policy, economic trends, and the world system). This anthropological triangle of ethnography, comparison, and contextualization is, in essence, the way in which sociocultural anthropology works as a discipline to explain and interpret human cultures and social life.1 60 Chapter 4 Ethnographies as they have evolved over the past hundred and sixty years constitute a genre, a form of writing conditioned by the process of knowledge construction epitomized in this anthropological triangle. Ethnographies consequently differ from travel writing, gazetteers, interview-based surveys, or even the personal fieldwork accounts of anthropologists (which form a separate genre). Ethnography, both product and process, has a history and pattern of development of its own. A Brief History of Ethnography As a written account, ethnography focuses on a particular population, place, and time, with the deliberate goal of describing it to others. So, often, did the writings of nineteenth-century explorers, missionaries, military agents, journalists, travelers, and reformers, and these contain much information useful to anthropologists. What distinguishes the first ethnography, Louis Henry Morgan’s The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), from these other writings are two qualities: its attempt to depict the structure and operation of Iroquois society from the Iroquois viewpoint (the ethnographic side of the anthropological triangle) and its grounding in the monogenist anthropological theorizing of its time (the comparative side of the triangle), ideas to which Morgan would make major additions and reformulations. Morgan’s book detailed Iroquois matrilineal kinship, political and ceremonial life, material culture, and religion, the ethnographic basis for this information being Morgan’s partnership with the Western-educated Iroquois Ely S. Parker, his translator and cultural interpreter . The book’s attention to history, geography, the impact of white settlers, and contemporary land-rights issues also established standards for pre- and postfieldwork contextualization (the third side of the triangle) that anthropologists continue to heed. Morgan’s ethnography, still authoritative and readable, was not joined by comparable works until the 1880s. What ensued instead were increased efforts to provide standardized guides for gathering ethnographic data to local ‘‘men on the spot’’ (few were women) in accord with the comparative goals of armchair theorists. Although Morgan did collect kinship data himself from American Indian groups on field trips during the 1860s, much of the material he used in later writings arrived from missionary and other amateurs in India, Australia, and elsewhere who filled in and returned his Ethnography 61 kinship schedules. In England, E. B. Tylor played a key role in drafting Notes and Queries on Anthropology, first published in 1874 for use around the globe; he and other comparativists, such as James Frazer, helped shape up the resulting local work for publication, often first as articles in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, which dates to 1872. Through these efforts, ethnographic standards slowly improved, and theoretical perspectives became more overt, but contextualization retreated, a victim of antihistorical and ethnocentric evolutionism or diffusionism. The fieldwork of Frank Cushing among the Zuni Indians in the early 1880s made a great leap forward in ethnographic method. Cushing learned to speak Zuni, resided at the pueblo over a four-year...