Good ethnographers are told never to be a fly on the wall
Ethnography studies a culture from the inside, by joining in. Researchers learn the trade they are observing, attend the congregation, even take on a family role in the household that hosts them. Some change to the researcher is unavoidable, and the method treats that immersion as a feature rather than a flaw.
The name joins Greek ethnos, people, and grapho, I write. Ancient authors described foreign cultures constantly: Herodotus is the conventional starting point, and Tacitus's Germania is the only complete classical monograph on a foreign people to survive. Yet antiquity had no concept of ethnography as its own discipline. That idea came from Gerhard Friedrich Muller, a historian on Russia's Second Kamchatka Expedition of 1733 to 1743, who separated the description of peoples as a distinct field. The Greek-style label followed, and scholars at the University of Gottingen brought it into academic use.
As a modern method it grew out of early twentieth-century anthropology and spread into sociology and far beyond, from nursing and accounting research to urban planning and computer science. Studies have covered youth gangs, religious cults and corporations. Some work relies on documents and interviews to reconstruct past events such as the Challenger disaster, and online communities are studied through what is sometimes called netnography.
The core tool is participant observation, backed by field notes, recorded interviews and visual methods. Interviews run from casual conversations, reconstructed afterwards for meaning and tone rather than verbatim, through semi-structured sessions guided by a written list of questions, to fully structured questionnaires. Researchers often find informants by snowball sampling, asking knowledgeable members to point to others. Kinship charts, once standard for mapping non-Western societies, are rarely used now that much anthropology focuses on cities.
Bias is the method's standing criticism. Ethnographers practise reflexivity, examining how their own presence shapes what they record, but none can be fully neutral. Positions range from realists who simply observe behaviour to constructivists who see understanding as built jointly by researcher and subjects, while critical theorists probe the power running through that relationship.
Source: Ethnography
