What is ethnography used for?
Ethnography
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely used by communication scholars. As the purpose of ethnography is to describe and interpret the shared and learned patterns of values, behaviors, beliefs, and language of a culture-sharing group, Harris, (1968), also Agar (1980) note that ethnography is both a process and an outcome of the research. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen's analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar, working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, "Speaking 'Like a Man' in Teamsterville", paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication.
Mama Lola
In the "Preface to the 2001 Edition" of "Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn", Brown explains, "an ethnography is written by making meaning out of others' processes of meaning making" (xi). Even so, ethnographic research is "continuous, dynamic, [and] reciprocal" (xi). The ethnographer engages with a culture and people, and is simultaneously engaged by this culture and people (xi). Brown admits that "at the same time and in the same places" she was attempting to understand the Haitian diasporic tradition and culture, the people that constitute this culture were attempting to understand and negotiate life in America (xi). Mama Lola is not simply an ethnographic study; it is the result of ethnographic exchange. While Brown is conscious of this and while her intentions are to portray "three-dimensional people," she admits she cannot completely achieve this representational goal (14). Alourdes herself voices displeasure at this limitation when she explains about the book, "I change and it doesn't" (399). In fact, it seems as though it is important to both Alourdes and Brown that the reader would be aware of the limitations of representation. Even as Brown attempts to show Mama Lola as complex and dynamic, as human, in reality Alourdes' complexity and dynamism, her humanity, extends far beyond the more than four hundred pages of the book.
Cultural relativism
Boas and his students realized that if they were to conduct scientific research in other cultures, they would need to employ methods that would help them escape the limits of their own ethnocentrism. One such method is that of ethnography: basically, they advocated living with people of another culture for an extended period of time, so that they could learn the local language and be enculturated, at least partially, into that culture.
Genealogical method
The genealogical method is a well-established procedure in ethnography. It was initiated by early ethnographers to identify all-important links of kinship determined by marriage and descent. Genealogy or kinship commonly plays a crucial role in the structure of non-industrial societies, determining both social relations and group relationship to the past. Marriage, for example, is frequently pivotal in determining military alliances between villages, clans or ethnic groups.
Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples' customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not still exist. The term is most commonly used in writing about the history of the Americas.
Ethnic pornography
Ethnic pornography is a genre of pornography featuring performers of specific ethnic groups, or depictions of interracial sexual activity. Though productions can feature any type of ethnic group (Caucasian, Asian, African American, Native American), the most common emphasis is on relationships between white- and black-skinned individuals.
Ethnography
The word 'ethnography' is derived from the Greek ἔθνος ("ethnos"), meaning "a company, later a people, nation" and -graphy, meaning "writing". Ethnographic studies focus on large cultural groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a set of qualitative methods that are used in social sciences that focus on the observation of social practices and interactions. Its aim is to observe a situation without imposing any deductive structure or framework upon it and to view everything as strange or unique.
Person-centered ethnography
Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques and theories from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. The term was first used by Robert I. Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal.
Ethnic groups in Europe
The origins of modern ethnography are often traced to the work of Bronisław Malinowski who emphasized the importance of fieldwork.
The emergence of population genetics further undermined the categorisation of Europeans into clearly defined racial groups. A 2007 study on the genetic history of Europe found that the most important genetic differentiation in Europe occurs on a line from the north to the south-east (northern Europe to the Balkans), with another east-west axis of differentiation across Europe, separating the "indigenous" Basques and Sami from other European populations.
Despite these stratifications it noted the unusually high degree of European homogeneity: "there is low apparent diversity in Europe with the entire continent-wide samples only marginally more dispersed than single population samples elsewhere in the world."
Archaeology
Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of living people, designed to aid in our interpretation of the archaeological record. The approach first gained prominence during the processual movement of the 1960s, and continues to be a vibrant component of post-processual and other current archaeological approaches. Early ethnoarchaeological research focused on hunter-gatherer or foraging societies; today ethnoarchaeological research encompasses a much wider range of human behaviour.
History of anthropometry
Phylogeography is the science of identifying and tracking major human migrations, especially in prehistoric times. Linguistics can follow the movement of languages and archaeology can follow the movement of artefact styles but neither can tell whether a culture's spread was due to a source population's physically migrating or to a destination population's simply copying the technology and learning the language. Anthropometry was used extensively by anthropologists studying human and racial origins: some attempted racial differentiation and classification, often seeking ways in which certain races were inferior to others. Nott translated Arthur de Gobineau's "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1853–1855), a founding work of racial segregationism that made three main divisions between races, based not on colour but on climatic conditions and geographic location, and privileged the "Aryan" race. Science has tested many theories aligning race and personality, which have been current since Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) contrasted the "Français" (French people), alleged descendants of the Nordic Franks, and members of the aristocracy, to the Third Estate, considered to be indigenous Gallo-Roman people subordinated by right of conquest.
Ethnography
According to Dewan (2018) the researcher is not looking for generalizing the findings; rather, they are considering it in reference to the context of the situation. In this regard, the best way to integrate ethnography in a quantitative research would be to use it to discover and uncover relationships and then use the resultant data to test and explain the empirical assumptions 
The ethnographic method is different from other ways of conducting social science approach due to the following reasons:According to the leading social scientist, John Brewer, data collection methods are meant to capture the "social meanings and ordinary activities" of people (informants) in "naturally occurring settings" that are commonly referred to as "the field." The goal is to collect data in such a way that the researcher imposes a minimal amount of personal bias in the data. Multiple methods of data collection may be employed to facilitate a relationship that allows for a more personal and in-depth portrait of the informants and their community. These can include participant observation, field notes, interviews, and surveys.
Video ethnography
Photos and moving pictures have been used by ethnographers since soon after they were invented. The first ethnographic film occurred in 1895 by Felix-Louis Regnault who filmed a Senegalese woman making pots. Film was used among many researchers however it was Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who first used methods of visual ethnography such as photos and film as scientific instruments. They opened up the potential of photography and film as analytical tools and data repositories. Visual anthropologists became very interested in the use of video on the 1980s for its convenience, durability, economy and utility. Since the 1990s researchers from different disciplines began to engage with videos as distinct from ethnographic films. This involved the reflexive use of the video as a medium to create knowledge and not just to store data. Technological developments, such as the use of digital video, continue to offer new possibilities for the use of videos in ethnography.
Autoethnography
Autoethnography is also used in film as a variant of the standard documentary film. It differs from the traditional documentary film, in that its subject is the filmmaker himself or herself. An autoethnography typically relates the life experiences and thoughts, views and beliefs of the filmmaker, and as such it is often considered to be rife with bias and image manipulation. Unlike other documentaries, autoethnographies do not usually make a claim of objectivity. An important text on autoethnography in filmmaking is Catherine Russell's "Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video" (Duke UP, 1999). For Autoethnographic artists, see also Jesse Cornplanter, Kimberly Dark, Peter Pitseolak, Ernest Spybuck.
Ethnography
Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts, which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski, "Ethnologische Excursion in Johore" (1875) by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, "Coming of Age in Samoa" (1928) by Margaret Mead, "The Nuer" (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "Naven" (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson, or "The Lele of the Kasai" (1963) by Mary Douglas. Cultural and social anthropologists today place a high value on doing ethnographic research. The typical ethnography is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common. Ethnographies are also sometimes called "case studies." Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities, and its variations through the ethnographic study based on fieldwork. An ethnography is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Neophyte Ethnographers are strongly encouraged to develop extensive familiarity with their subject prior to entering the field; otherwise, they may find themselves in difficult situations.
Autoethnography
Autoethnography in performance studies acknowledges the researcher and the audience having equal weight. Portraying the performed "self" through writing then becomes an aim to create an embodied experience for the writer and the reader. This area acknowledges the inward and outward experience of ethnography in experiencing the subjectivity of the author. Audience members may experience the work of ethnography through reading/hearing/feeling (inward) and then have a reaction to it (outward), maybe by emotion. Ethnography and performance work together to invoke emotion in the reader.
Ethnography
Critical ethnography is a kind of ethnographic research in which the creators advocate for the liberation of groups which are marginalized in society. Critical researchers typically are politically minded people who look to take a stand of opposition to inequality and domination. For example, a critical ethnographer might study schools that provide privileges to certain types of students, or counseling practices that serve to overlook the needs of underrepresented groups. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94). The important components of a critical ethnographer are to incorporate a value- laden introduction, empower people by giving them more authority, challenging the status quo, and addressing concerns about power and control. A critical ethnographer will study issues of power, empowerment, inequality inequity, dominance, repression, hegemony, and victimization. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 94)
Ethnoecology
Ethnoscience emphasizes the importance of how societies make sense of their own reality. In order to understand how cultures perceive the world around them, like the classification and organization of the environment, ethnoecology borrows methods from linguistics and cultural anthropology. Ethnoecology is a major part of an anthropologist’s toolkit;  it helps researchers understand how the society conceptualizes their surrounding environment i and that it can determine what the society considers "worth attending to" in their ecological system. This information can ultimately be useful for other approaches used in environmental anthropology.
Ethnography
There are different forms of ethnography: confessional ethnography; life history; feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 93)
Ethnography
Another form of data collection is that of the "image." The image is the projection that an individual puts on an object or abstract idea. An image can be contained within the physical world through a particular individual's perspective, primarily based on that individual’s past experiences. One example of an image is how an individual views a novel after completing it. The physical entity that is the novel contains a specific image in the perspective of the interpreting individual and can only be expressed by the individual in the terms of "I can tell you what an image is by telling you what it feels like." The idea of an image relies on the imagination and has been seen to be utilized by children in a very spontaneous and natural manner. Effectively, the idea of the image is a primary tool for ethnographers to collect data. The image presents the perspective, experiences, and influences of an individual as a single entity and in consequence, the individual will always contain this image in the group under study.
Ethnologue
In 1986, William Bright, then editor of the journal "Language", wrote of "Ethnologue" that it "is indispensable for any reference shelf on the languages of the world". In 2008 in the same journal, Lyle Campbell and Verónica Grondona said: ""Ethnologue"...has become the standard reference, and its usefulness is hard to overestimate."
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology provides methods which have been used in ethnographic studies to produce accounts of people's methods for negotiating everyday situations. It is a fundamentally descriptive discipline which does not engage in the explanation or evaluation of the particular social order undertaken as a topic of study. However, applications have been found within many applied disciplines, such as software design and management studies.
Ethnoarchaeology
Although ethnography has long been used by archaeologists to draw analogies to the past, ethnographic data is not gathered with specifically archaeological goals in mind. Ethnoarchaeology developed as a response to the feeling among archaeologists that ethnography did not adequately answer their own specific research questions.
Ethnology
Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct contact with the culture, ethnology takes the research that ethnographers have compiled and then compares and contrasts different cultures.
The term "ethnologia" ("ethnology") is credited to Adam Franz Kollár (1718-1783) who used and defined it in his "Historiae ivrisqve pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates" published in Vienna in 1783. as: “the science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned men in which they inquire into the origins, languages, customs, and institutions of various nations, and finally into the fatherland and ancient seats, in order to be able better to judge the nations and peoples in their own times.”
Albert Piette
In the aim of detailed observations of existences, Albert Piette thinks that ethnography, working especially on groups and activities, is less suitable that phenomenography, focusing on singular individuals. As the word implies, phenomenography studies on the one hand what appears, forms, movements, gestures and on the other hand, as an empirical counterpoint to phenomenology, it attempts to describe states of mind and feelings in the moments’ continuity.Directly downloadable on Albert Piette's homepage and on Academia.edu
Ethnic studies
While early ethnic studies scholarship focused on the repressed histories and identities of various groups in the U.S., the field of study has expanded to encompass transnationalism, comparative race Studies, and postmodernist/poststructuralist critiques. While pioneering thinkers relied on frameworks, theories and methodologies such as those found in the allied fields of sociology, history, literature and film, scholars in the field today utilize multidisciplinary as well as comparative perspectives, increasingly within an international or transnational context. Central to much Ethnic Studies scholarship is understanding how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and other categories of difference intersect to shape the lived experiences of people of color, what the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw calls intersectionality.
Netnography
Though netnography is developed from ethnography and applied in the online settings, it is more than the application of qualitative research in the form of traditional ethnographic techniques in an online context. There are several characters that differentiate netnography from ethnography.
Netnography is also similar to ethnography in these ways:
Netnography
The difference between netnography and digital ethnography could be seen in several ways, but the most obvious one is the research motivation and methodology determined by the purpose. Netnography believe in internet users forming an online community which is highlighted from the substantial daily life, while digital ethnography only treat the digital world as a place to extend their offline data collection to complement the ethnographic research. The methodological framework between them are not typically different, since Netnography mainly use online qualitative techniques and use online quantitative research as a supplement occasionally, while digital ethnography combines both quantitative (e.g. network and co-word analysis) and qualitative (e.g. sentiment and content analysis).
Ethnomethodology
The term's meaning can be broken down into its three constituent parts: "ethno" – "method" – "ology", for the purpose of explanation. Using an appropriate Southern California example: "ethno" refers to a particular socio-cultural group (for example, a particular, local community of surfers); "method" refers to the methods and practices this particular group employs in its everyday activities (for example, related to surfing); and "ology" refers to the systematic description of these methods and practices. The focus of the investigation used in our example is the social order of surfing, the ethnomethodological interest is in the "how" (the methods and practices) of the production and maintenance of this social order. In essence ethnomethodology attempts to create classifications of the social actions of individuals within groups through drawing on the experience of the groups directly, without imposing on the setting the opinions of the researcher with regards to social order, as is the case with sociological studies.
Netnography
The term netnography is a portmanteau combining "Internet" or "network" with "ethnography". Netnography was originally developed in 1995 by marketing professor Robert Kozinets as a tool to analyze online fan discussions about the Star Trek franchise. The use of the method spread from marketing research and consumer research to a range of other disciplines, including education, library and information sciences, hospitality, tourism, computer science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, leisure and game studies, and human sexuality and addiction research.
Ethogram
Ethograms are used extensively in the study of welfare science. Ethograms can be used to detect the occurrence or prevalence of abnormal behaviours (e.g. stereotypies, feather pecking, tail-biting), normal behaviours (e.g. comfort behaviours), departures from the ethogram of ancestral species and the behaviour of captive animals upon release into a natural environment.
Field research
In anthropology, field research is organized so as to produce a kind of writing called ethnography. Ethnography can refer to both a methodology and a product of research, namely a monograph or book. Ethnography is a grounded, inductive method that heavily relies on participant-observation. Participant observation is a structured type of research strategy. It is a widely used methodology in many disciplines, particularly, cultural anthropology, but also sociology, communication studies, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or sub cultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, usually over an extended period of time. The method originated in field work of social anthropologists, especially the students of Franz Boas in the United States, and in the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology.
Ethnoarchaeology
Ethnography can provide insights of value to archaeologists into how people in the past may have lived, especially with regard to their social structures, religious beliefs and other aspects of their culture. However, it is still unclear how to relate most of the insights generated by this anthropological research to archaeological investigations. This is due to the lack of emphasis by anthropologists on the material remains created and discarded by societies and on how these material remains vary with differences in how a society is organised.
Usability
Ethnographic analysis is derived from anthropology. Field observations are taken at a site of a possible user, which track the artifacts of work such as Post-It notes, items on desktop, shortcuts, and items in trash bins. These observations also gather the sequence of work and interruptions that determine the user's typical day.
Ethnic studies
Ethnic studies, in the United States, is the interdisciplinary study of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals. As opposed to International studies, who originally created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World Countries, Ethnic studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic studies is an academic field that spans the humanities and the social sciences, it emerged as an academic field in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and area studies which were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective. Its origin comes before the civil rights era, it comes from early as the 1900s. During this time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. However, Ethnic Studies became widely known as a secondary issue that rose after the civil rights era. Ethnic studies was originally conceived to re-frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms. In recent years, it has broadened its focus to include questions of representation, racialization, racial formation theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches.
Ethnography
In order to make the data collection and interpretation transparent, researchers creating ethnographies often attempt to be "reflexive". Reflexivity refers to the researcher's aim "to explore the ways in which [the] researcher's involvement with a particular study influences, acts upon and informs such research". Despite these attempts of reflexivity, no researcher can be totally unbiased. This factor has provided a basis to criticize ethnography.
Ethnic group
Ethnicity is an important means by which people may identify with a larger group. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf, do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups.
Processes that result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis. Members of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural continuities over time, although historians and cultural anthropologists have documented that many of the values, practices, and norms that imply continuity with the past are of relatively recent invention.
Anthropology
Archaeology is the study of the human past through its material remains. Artifacts, faunal remains, and human altered landscapes are evidence of the cultural and material lives of past societies. Archaeologists examine this material remains in order to deduce patterns of past human behavior and cultural practices. Ethnoarchaeology is a type of archaeology that studies the practices and material remain of living human groups in order to gain a better understanding of the evidence left behind by past human groups, who are presumed to have lived in similar ways.
Museum Ethnographers Group
The Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) is a United Kingdom-based collective for those working with and researching ethnographic collections in museums. It is registered as a charity in England and Wales (no. 1023150) and is recognised in the UK museum sector as a subject specialist network. It is often known to its members by its acronym MEG. Its most obvious functions are the annual conference it organises and the journal it publishes.
Ethnography
Realist ethnography is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists. Characterized by Van Maanen (1988), it reflects a particular instance taken by the researcher toward the individual being studied. It's an objective study of the situation. It's composed from a third person's perspective by getting the data from the members on the site. The ethnographer stays as omniscient correspondent of actualities out of sight. The realist reports information in a measured style ostensibly uncontaminated by individual predisposition, political objectives, and judgment. The analyst will give a detailed report of the everyday life of the individuals under study. The ethnographer also uses standard categories for cultural description (e.g., family life, communication network). The ethnographer produces the participant's views through closely edited quotations and has the final work on how the culture is to be interpreted and presented. (Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 93)
Ethnoscience
Since an ethnographer is not able to physically enter inside an indigenous person's mind, it is essential to not only create a setting or question-answer format to understand perspective but to analyze semantics and word order of given answer to derive an emic understanding. The main focus on a particular component of the languages is placed on its lexicon. The terms "etic" and "emic" are derived from the linguistic terms of "phonetic" and "phonemic".
Interrogating Ethnography
"Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters" is a 2017 book by Steven Lubet of Northwestern University Law School, critiquing methods used it the discipline of ethnography. Writing in "Contexts", Syid Ali of Long Island University called it "an essential critique of the most public-facing product sociology has to offer."
Human Relations Area Files
The results of cross-cultural studies using ethnography are usually correlational. But it would be informative to go beyond cross-sectional validation, in particular to see if temporal sequences validate causal theories. The "eHRAF World Cultures" database often contains information from more than one time period, so while not often done, it is possible to measure ethnographic cases for two different points in time. But for many questions about cultural evolution, the ethnographic (or ethnohistorical) record is not likely to provide enough of the necessary time-series data for statistical analysis.
Netnography
Unlike the fetishization of big data and its attempt to portray a generic, characterization of markets in online communities (i.e., frequency of brand engagement), netnography enables researchers "to argue for a central tenet" (Kozinets, 2016, p. 2) that emerges from the collected data that represents a particular market. Netnography has an advantage over ethnography in that it focuses primarily on the context of textual communication and any affiliated multimedia elements, whereas ethnography focuses primarily on physical forms of human communication (e.g., body language) (Bartl "et al.," p. 168). Since Netnography uses spontaneous data and conducts observation without intruding online users, it is regarded as more naturalistic than other approaches such as interviews, focus groups, surveys and experiments (Kozinets, 2015). While online communication has a relatively shorter duration in efficiency when compared to human communication, the speed in collecting online communication is much faster and far less expensive than traditional in-person ethnography and other qualitative methodologies like focus groups or interviews . It is also a challenging approach involving work to tackle unpredictable and abundant data (Kozinets, 2015).
Ethnography of communication
The ethnography of communication (EOC), formerly called the ethnography of speaking, is the analysis of communication within the wider context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the members of a particular culture or speech community. It is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics that draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, EOC takes into account both the communicative form, which may include but is not limited to spoken language, and its function within the given culture.
Ethnoscience
Ethnoscience deals with how a given culture classifies certain principles in addition to how it is express through their language. By understanding a given culture through how they view the world, anthropologists attempt to eliminate any bias through translation as well as categorized their principles in their own ways. "The new methods, which focus on the discovery and description of folk systems, have come to be known as Ethnoscience. Ethnoscience analysis has thus far concentrated on systems of classification within such cultural and linguistic domains as colors, plants, and medicines" (Perchonock and Werner, 1969). An ethnoscientific approach can be used to better understand a given culture and their knowledge of their culture. Using an ethnographic approach can help anthropologists understand how that given culture views and categorizes their own foods, animal kingdom, medicines, as well as plants.
Autoethnography
According to Adams, Jones, and Ellis in "Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research", "Autoethnography is a research method that: Uses a researcher's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences. Acknowledges and values a researcher's relationships with others. . . . Shows 'people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles'" (Adams, 2015). "Social life is messy, uncertain, and emotional. If our desire to research social life, then we must embrace a research method that, to the best of its/our ability, acknowledges and accommodates mess and chaos, uncertainty and emotion" (Adams, 2015).
Salvage ethnography
The term "salvage ethnography" was coined by Jacob W. Gruber, who identified its emergence with 19th-century ethnographers documenting the languages of peoples being conquered and colonized by European countries or the United States. According to Gruber, one of the first official statements acknowledging that a major effect of colonialism was the destruction of existing languages and ways of life was "The report of the British Select Committee of Aborigines" (1837).
Video ethnography
Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. Ethnographic video, in contrast to ethnographic film, cannot be used independently of other ethnographic methods, but rather as part of the process of creation and representation of societal, cultural, and individual knowledge. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, and cultural studies. Uses of video in ethnography include the recording of certain processes and activities, visual note-taking, and ethnographic diary-keeping.
Ethnography
Ethnography (from Greek "ethnos" "folk, people, nation" and "grapho" "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, which partly depends on whether it is used as a count noun or uncountable. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group.
Ethnography
Ybema et al. (2010) examine the ontological and epistemological presuppositions underlying ethnography. Ethnographic research can range from a realist perspective, in which behavior is observed, to a constructivist perspective where understanding is socially constructed by the researcher and subjects. Research can range from an objectivist account of fixed, observable behaviors to an interpretive narrative describing "the interplay of individual agency and social structure." Critical theory researchers address "issues of power within the researcher-researched relationships and the links between knowledge and power."
Ethnoscience
""A societies culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them."
" (Goodenough 1957:167)
In order to properly put ethnoscience in context we must first understand the definition of ethnoscience. it is defined as "an attempt at cultural description from a totally emic perspective (a perspective in ethnography that uses the concepts and categories that are relevant and meaningful to the culture that is insider analysis) standpoint, this eliminating all of the ethnographer's own categories" (Morey and Luthans 27). Ethnoscience is also a way of learning and understanding how an individual or group perceive their environment and how they fit in with their environment as reflected in their own words and actions.
Ernest Spybuck
Like Harrington, other anthropologists recognized that Spybuck possessed a remarkable talent, and it served a practical purpose in the domain of ethnography. His paintings served as illustrations for numerous anthropological writings. Dobkins calls this practice autoethnography, in which the artist or writer assimilates the techniques of ethnographers to create representations of themselves and their cultures, with the implication of an asymmetrical power relationship between the ethnographer patron and the Native artist. Along with Spybuck, Dobkins names Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), Peter Pitseolak (Inuit), and Frank Day (Maidu) as artists who practiced autoethnography to regain control over representations of their cultures and to retrieve and preserve their traditions. Other reviewers recognize Spybuck as an Indian artist who is a recorder and preserver of traditional practices in the midst of social change.
Ethnodoxology
Ethnodoxology is an application of ethnomusicology, ethnic arts studies, worship studies, missiology, and related disciplines. Those in this field study local musical traditions and work with local musicians and churches to adapt and develop locally created musical forms for Christian worship. Examples of such work include engaging a local praise singer in translating and singing Mary's Magnificat, developing local hymns, leading people in creating localized forms of liturgy, sharing examples of starting points for people interested in utilizing local arts but not knowing where to start. A broad resource for those in the field is a pair of volumes: "Worship and Mission for the Global Church: An Ethnodoxology Handbook" and its how-to companion "Creating Local Arts Together: A Manual to Help Communities Reach their Kingdom Goals".
Ethnic studies
Thailand
Ethnography
Gary Alan Fine argues that the nature of ethnographic inquiry demands that researchers deviate from formal and idealistic rules or ethics that have come to be widely accepted in qualitative and quantitative approaches in research. Many of these ethical assumptions are rooted in positivist and post-positivist epistemologies that have adapted over time but are apparent and must be accounted for in all research paradigms. These ethical dilemmas are evident throughout the entire process of conducting ethnographies, including the design, implementation, and reporting of an ethnographic study. Essentially, Fine maintains that researchers are typically not as ethical as they claim or assume to be — and that "each job includes ways of doing things that would be inappropriate for others to know".
Ethnoscience
Ethnoscience is a new term and study that came into anthropological theory in the 1960s. Often referred to as "indigenous knowledge", ethnoscience introduces a perspective based on native perceptions. It is based on a complete emic perspective, which excludes all observations, interpretations and or any personal notions belonging to the ethnographer. The taxonomy and classification of indigenous systems, to name a few, used to categorize plants, animals, religion and life is adapted from a linguistic analysis. The concept of "Native Science" is also related to the understanding the role of the environment intertwined with the meaning humans place upon their lives. Understanding the language and the native people's linguistic system is one method to understand a native people's system of knowledge of organization. Not only is there categorization for things pertaining to nature and culture thought language, but more importantly and complex is the relationship between environment and culture. Ethnoscience looks at the intricacies of the connection between culture and its surrounding environment. There are also potential limitations and shortcomings in interpreting these systems of knowledge as a dictation of culture and behavior.
Ethnomusicology
Comparative musicology, an initial term intended to differentiate what would become ethnomusicology and musicology, was the area of study concerned with utilizing methods of acoustics to measure pitches and intervals, quantitatively comparing different kinds of music. Because of the high density of Europeans and Euro-Americans engaged with the area's research, comparative musicology primarily surveyed the music of non-Western oral folk traditions and then compared them against western conceptions of music. After 1950, scholars sought to define the field more broadly and to eradicate these notions of ethnocentrism inherent to the study of comparative musicology; for example, Polish scholar Mieczyslaw Kolinski proposed that scholars in the field focus on describing and understanding musics within their own contexts. Kolinski also urged the field to move beyond ethnocentrism even as the term ethnomusicology grew in popularity as a replacement for what was once described by comparative musicology. He noted in 1959 that the term ethnomusicology limited the field, both by imposing “foreignness” from a western standpoint and therefore excluding the study of western music with the same attention to cultural context that is given to otherized traditions, and by containing the field within anthropological problems rather than extending musical study to limitless disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences. Throughout critical developmental years in the 50s and 60s, ethnomusicologists shaped and legitimized the fledgling field through discussions of the responsibilities of ethnomusicologists and the ethical implications of ethnomusicological study, articulations of ideology, suggestions for practical methods of research and analysis, and definitions of music itself. It was also at this time that the emphasis of ethnomusicological work shifted from analysis to fieldwork, and the field began to develop research methods to center fieldwork over the traditional "armchair" work.
Ethnomusicology
As technology advanced, researchers graduated from depending on wax cylinders and the phonograph to digital recordings and video cameras, allowing recordings to become more accurate representations of music studied. These technological advances have helped ethnomusicologists be more mobile in the field, but have also let some ethnomusicologists shift back to the “armchair analysis” of Stumpf and Hornbostel. Since video recordings are now considered cultural texts, ethnomusicologists can conduct fieldwork by recording music performances and creating documentaries of the people behind the music, which can be accurately studied outside of the field. Additionally, the invention of the internet and forms of online communication could allow ethnomusicologists to develop new methods of fieldwork within a virtual community.
Cultural anthropology
In the 20th century, most cultural and social anthropologists turned to the crafting of ethnographies. An ethnography is a piece of writing about a people, at a particular place and time. Typically, the anthropologist lives among people in another society for a period of time, simultaneously participating in and observing the social and cultural life of the group.
Anthropology
Inquiry in sociocultural anthropology is guided in part by cultural relativism, the attempt to understand other societies in terms of their own cultural symbols and values. Accepting other cultures in their own terms moderates reductionism in cross-cultural comparison. This project is often accommodated in the field of ethnography. Ethnography can refer to both a methodology and the product of ethnographic research, i.e. an ethnographic monograph. As a methodology, ethnography is based upon long-term fieldwork within a community or other research site. Participant observation is one of the foundational methods of social and cultural anthropology. Ethnology involves the systematic comparison of different cultures. The process of participant-observation can be especially helpful to understanding a culture from an emic (conceptual, vs. etic, or technical) point of view.
Ethnography
Where Geertz's and Turner's interpretive anthropology recognized subjects as creative actors who constructed their sociocultural worlds out of symbols, postmodernists attempted to draw attention to the privileged status of the ethnographers themselves. That is, the ethnographer cannot escape the personal viewpoint in creating an ethnographic account, thus making any claims of objective neutrality highly problematic, if not altogether impossible. In regards to this last point, "Writing Culture" became a focal point for looking at how ethnographers could describe different cultures and societies without denying the subjectivity of those individuals and groups being studied while simultaneously doing so without laying claim to absolute knowledge and objective authority. Along with the development of experimental forms such as 'dialogic anthropology,' 'narrative ethnography,' and 'literary ethnography', "Writing Culture" helped to encourage the development of 'collaborative ethnography.' This exploration of the relationship between writer, audience, and subject has become a central tenet of contemporary anthropological and ethnographic practice. In certain instances, active collaboration between the researcher(s) and subject(s) has helped blend the practice of collaboration in ethnographic fieldwork with the process of creating the ethnographic product resulting from the research.
Geography
Geographic qualitative methods, or ethnographical research techniques, are used by human geographers. In cultural geography there is a tradition of employing qualitative research techniques, also used in anthropology and sociology. Participant observation and in-depth interviews provide human geographers with qualitative data.
Visual anthropology
Even before the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline in the 1880s, ethnologists used photography as a tool of research. Anthropologists and non-anthropologists conducted much of this work in the spirit of salvage ethnography or attempts to record for posterity the ways-of-life of societies assumed doomed to extinction (see, for instance, the Native American photography of Edward Curtis)
Netnography
Research ethics may be one of the most important differences between traditional ethnography and netnography. Ethical concerns over netnography turn on early concerns about whether online forums are to be considered a private or a public site, and about what constitutes informed consent in cyberspace (see ). In a major departure from traditional methods, netnography uses cultural information that is not given specifically, and in confidence, to the researcher. The consumers who originally created the data do not necessarily intend or welcome its use in research representations. Netnography therefore offers specific guidelines regarding when to cite online posters and authors, how to cite them, what to consider in an ethical netnographic representation, when to ask permission, and when permission is not necessary (; cf. ).
Ethnofiction
Being mainly used to refer to ethnographic films as an object of visual anthropology, the term ethnofiction is as well adequate to refer to experimental documentaries preceding and following Rouch's oeuvre and to any fictional creation in human communication, arts or literature, having an ethnographical or social background.
Ethnologue
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published annually by SIL International, a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization. SIL's main purpose is to study, develop and document languages to promote literacy and for religious purposes.
Sociocultural anthropology
The rubric "cultural" anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people. "Social" anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.
Ethnoscience
Ethnoscience has many techniques when applied to an emic perspective. Ethnosemantics, ethnographic semantics, ethnographic ethnoscience, formal analysis, and componential analysis are the terms that apply to the practice of ethnoscience. Ethnosemantics looks at the meaning of words in order to place them in context of the culture being studied. It allows for taxonomy of a certain part of the culture being looked at so that there is a clear breakdown which in turn leads to a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. Ethnographic semantics are very similar to cognitive anthropology in that its primary focus is the intellectual and rational perspectives of the culture being studied. Ethnographic semantics specifically looks at how language is used throughout the culture. Lastly, ethnographic ethnoscience is related to ethnosemantics such that, it uses a taxonomic system to understand how cultural knowledge is accessible through language. Ethnographic ethnoscience uses similar classification systems for cultural domains like ethnobotany and ethnoanatomy. Again, ethnoscience is a way of understanding a how a culture sees itself through its own language. Understanding the cultural language allows the ethnographer to have a deeper and more intimate understanding of the culture.
Anthropology
Media anthropology (also known as the anthropology of media or mass media) emphasizes ethnographic studies as a means of understanding producers, audiences, and other cultural and social aspects of mass media. The types of ethnographic contexts explored range from contexts of media production (e.g., ethnographies of newsrooms in newspapers, journalists in the field, film production) to contexts of media reception, following audiences in their everyday responses to media. Other types include cyber anthropology, a relatively new area of internet research, as well as ethnographies of other areas of research which happen to involve media, such as development work, social movements, or health education. This is in addition to many classic ethnographic contexts, where media such as radio, the press, new media, and television have started to make their presences felt since the early 1990s.
Autoethnography
Symbolic interactionists are particularly interested in this method, and examples of autoethnography can be found in a number of scholarly journals, such as "Qualitative Inquiry", the "Journal of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism", the "Journal of Contemporary Ethnography", and the "Journal of Humanistic Ethnography". It is not considered "mainstream" as a method by most positivist or traditional ethnographers, yet this approach to qualitative inquiry is rapidly increasing in popularity, as can be seen by the large number of scholarly papers on autoethnography presented at annual conferences such as the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the Advances in Qualitative Methods conference sponsored by the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology. The spread of autoethnography into other fields is also growing (e.g., psychology), and a recent special issue of the journal "Culture and Organization" (Volume 13, Issue 3, Summer 2007) explores the idea of organizational autoethnography.
Musicology
Ethnomusicology, formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context. It is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music. Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music". Although it is most often concerned with the study of non-Western musics, it also includes the study of Western music from an anthropological or sociological perspective, cultural studies and sociology as well as other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Some ethnomusicologists primarily conduct historical studies, but the majority are involved in long-term participant observation, or combine ethnographic and historical approaches in their fieldwork. Therefore, ethnomusiological scholarship can be characterized as featuring a substantial, intensive fieldwork component, often involving long-term residence within the community studied.
Closely related to ethnomusiology is the emerging branch of sociomusicology. For instance, Ko (2011) proposed the hypothesis of "Biliterate and Trimusical" in Hong Kong sociomusicology.
Ethnovideography
Credited for coining the term ethnovideography as well as its development as a methodology, Alexander Flor considers it more than a research procedure but a knowledge management system and a form of development intervention as well. Flor was a professor of development communication at the University of the Philippines Los Banos who underwent a Fulbright-PAEF post-doctoral tour in the US in 1989. The tour included a summer at the USC Center for Visual Anthropology, wherein exposure to the use of video in urban anthropology contributed to his early constructs on ethnovideography. Other influences include Professor Alain Martenot who mentored Flor on Direct Cinema technique under a French Foreign Ministry grant. His early work on ethnovideography was sponsored by the Users' Perspectives with Agricultural and Rural Development (UPWARD) facility of the Lima-based International Potato Center. Succeeding research were conducted mostly by development communication graduate students, e.g. Bandara, Hardono, and Maya. Recently, ethnovideographic studies have been uploaded to YouTube.
Ethnochemistry
Ethnochemistry is the study of chemical ideas found in any culture; where an appreciation of cultural heritage is preserved. In the West African country of Ghana, an example of this are the bead makers who do not explain what they're doing in modern chemical terms, though they do explain the process in their own artistic way. A similar concept is ethnomathematics; Achor, et al. concluded that there was a positive impact on the achievement of students and retention of knowledge when ethnomathematics is applied to a classroom setting, it can also help to make students aware of the role in which chemistry plays in their everyday lives. This suggests that similar results are possible in a chemistry classroom if ethnochemistry is applied.
Ethnomusicology
In the 19th century until the mid-20th century, European scholars (folklorists, ethnographers, and some early ethnomusicologists) who were motivated to preserve disappearing music cultures (from both in and outside of Europe), collected transcriptions or audio recordings on wax cylinders. Many such recordings were then stored at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv at the Berlin school of comparative musicology, which was founded by Carl Stumpf, his student Erich M. von Hornbostel, and medical doctor Otto Abraham. Stumpf and Hornbostel studied and preserved these recordings in the Berlin Archiv, setting the foundation for contemporary ethnomusicology. But, the “armchair analysis” methods of Stumpf and Horbostel required very little participation in fieldwork themselves, instead using the fieldwork of other scholars. This differentiates Stumpf and Hornbostel from their present-day contemporaries, who now use their fieldwork experience as a main component in their research.
Ethnomusicology's transition from “armchair analysis” to fieldwork reflected ethnomusicologists trying to distance themselves from the field of comparative musicology in the period following World War II. Fieldwork emphasized face-to-face interaction to gather the most accurate impression and meaning of music from the creators of the music, in contrast with “armchair analysis” that disconnected the ethnomusicologist from the individual or group of performers. David McAllester was paramount in helping the discipline transition from the “armchair analysis” to culturally specific fieldwork. He worked with the Navajo, living with them so he could study Enemy Way music more intimately. This work involved an entirely different conceptualization of music than that generally accepted in the West. (Navajo, like some other languages, has no direct word for music, instead referring to it in the context of its function). Due to McAllester's success, fieldwork became one of the most important parts of ethnomusicological study.
Ethogram
An ethogram is a catalogue or inventory of behaviours or actions exhibited by an animal used in ethology.
Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory uses both historical and ethnographic data as its foundation. Its historical methods and materials go beyond the standard use of documents and manuscripts. Practitioners recognize the use of such source material as maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral tradition, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and placenames.
Ethnography
The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century. It spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) from Britain and Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881), an American scientist were considered as founders of cultural and social dimensions. Franz Boas (1858–1942), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884—1942), Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), and Margaret Mead (1901–1978), were a group of researchers from the United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. Boas's approach focused on the use of documents and informants, whereas Malinowski stated that a researcher should be engrossed with the work for long periods in the field and do a participant observation by living with the informant and experiencing their way of life. He gives the viewpoint of the native and this became the origin of field work and field methods.
Ethnic studies
California
Ethnography of communication
General aims of this qualitative research method include being able to discern which communication acts and/or codes are important to different groups, what types of meanings groups apply to different communication events, and how group members learn these codes, in order to provide insight into particular communities. This additional insight may be used to enhance communication with group members, make sense of group members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from one another, among other things.
Ethnomusicology
The relevance and implications of insider and outsider distinctions within ethnomusicological writing and practice has been a subject of lengthy debate for decades, invoked by Bruno Nettl, Timothy Rice, and others. The question that causes such debate lies in the qualifications for an ethnomusicologist to research another culture when they represent an outsider, dissecting a culture that doesn’t belong to them. Historically, ethnomusicological research was tainted with a strong bias from Westerners in thinking that their music was superior to the musics they researched. From this bias grew an apprehension of cultures to allow ethnomusicologists to study them, thinking that their music would be exploited or appropriated. There are benefits to ethnomusicological research, i.e. the promotion of international understanding, but the fear of this “musical colonialism” represents the opposition to an outsider ethnomusicologist in conducting his or her research on a community of insiders.
In "The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts", Nettl discusses personal and global issues pertaining to field researchers, particularly those from a Western academic background. In a chapter that recounts his field recordings among Native Americans of the northern plains, for instance, he attempts to come to terms with the problematic history of ethnographic fieldwork, and envision a future trajectory for the practice in the 21st century and beyond. Considering that ethnomusicology is a field that intersects in a vast array of other fields in the social sciences and beyond, it focuses on studying people, and it is appropriate to encounter the issue of “making the unfamiliar, familiar,” a phrase coined by William McDougall that is well known in social psychology. As in social psychology, the “unfamiliar” is encountered in three different ways during ethnomusicological work: 1) two different cultures come into contact and elements of both are not immediately explicable to the other; 2) experts within a society produce new knowledge, which is then communicated to the public; and 3) active minorities communicate their perspective to the majority.
Ethnography
Gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–43) as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated "Völker-Beschreibung" as a distinct area of study. This became known as "ethnography," following the introduction of the Greek neologism "ethnographia" by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin and the German variant by A. F. Thilo in 1767. August Ludwig von Schlözer and Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer of the University of Göttingen introduced the term into the academic discourse in an attempt to reform the contemporary understanding of world history.
Clinical ethnography
Clinical ethnography has strong similarities to person-centered ethnography, a term used by Robert I. Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal in the 1960s-1980s and used by many of his students and interlocutors. In practice the two approaches overlap but seem to differ in emphasis: clinical ethnography seems to be used more by anthropologists writing about sexuality or medical anthropology (particularly psychiatric anthropology, e.g. Luhrmann 2000, or anthropology of mental illness), while person-centered ethnography, though sometimes addressing these topics, more often focuses on the study of self and emotion cross-culturally. Person-centered anthropology also implies a style of ethnographic writing that emphasizes psychological case studies.
Anthropology
Since the work of Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "social" anthropology in Great Britain and "cultural" anthropology in the US have been distinguished from other social sciences by its emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons, long-term in-depth examination of context, and the importance it places on participant-observation or experiential immersion in the area of research. Cultural anthropology, in particular, has emphasized cultural relativism, holism, and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques. This has been particularly prominent in the United States, from Boas' arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through Margaret Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to current criticisms of post-colonial oppression and promotion of multiculturalism. Ethnography is one of its primary research designs as well as the text that is generated from anthropological fieldwork.
Ethnography of communication
The term "ethnography of communication" is meant to be descriptive of the characteristics that an approach towards language from an anthropological standpoint must take. Namely, according to Dell Hymes, it must 1) "investigate directly the use of language in contexts of situations so as to discern patterns proper to speech activity" and 2) "take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole." In other words, rather than divorcing linguistic form from its function, the analysis of a culture's or community's communication, linguistic and otherwise, must occur with respect to the sociocultural context of its use and the functions of the meanings conveyed. As Deborah Cameron puts it, "If you are mainly concerned with the way a certain speech event fits into a whole network of cultural beliefs and practices, you will spend more time describing things that are external to the talk itself: who the speakers are, where they are, what beliefs and customs are important in their lives."
Ethnoarchaeology
Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually through the study of the material remains of a society (see David & Kramer 2001). Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. Ethnoarchaeology also aids in the understanding of the way an object was made and the purpose of what it is being used for. Archaeologists can then infer that ancient societies used the same techniques as their modern counterparts given a similar set of environmental circumstances.
Ethnomusicology
Bruno Nettl, Emeritus Professor of Musicology at Illinois University, defines fieldwork as “direct inspection [of music, culture, etc] at the source”, and states that “It is in the importance of fieldwork that anthropology and ethnomusicology are closest: It is a ‘hallmark’ of both fields, something like a union card”. The experience of an ethnomusicologist in the field is his/her data; experience, texts (e.g. tales, myths, proverbs), structures (e.g. social organization), and “impoderabilia of everyday life” all contribute to an ethnomusicologist's study. The importance of fieldwork in the field of ethnomusicology has required the development of effective methods to pursue fieldwork.
Ethnovideography
"...a research procedure developed at the UPLB Institute of Development Communication, which makes use of small-format video-generated non-alphanumeric data for social analysis. This procedure entails video documentation of five types of subjects: people, places, processes, events and social problems..."
Ethnoornithology
Ethnoornithology (also ethno-ornithology) is the study of the relationship between people and birds (from "ethno-" - relating to people and culture - and "ornithology" - the study of birds). It is a branch of ethnozoology and so of the wider field of ethnobiology. Ethnoornithology is an interdisciplinary subject and combines anthropological, cognitive and linguistic perspectives with natural scientific approaches to the description and interpretation of people's knowledge and use of birds. Like ethnoscience and other cognate terms, "ethnoornithology" is sometimes used narrowly to refer to people's practice rather than the study of that practice. The broader focus is on how birds are perceived, used and managed in human societies, including their use for food, medicine and personal adornment, as well as their use in divination and ritual. Applied ethnoornithological research is also starting to play an increasingly important role in the development of conservation initiatives.
Fungus
The human use of fungi for food preparation or preservation and other purposes is extensive and has a long history. Mushroom farming and mushroom gathering are large industries in many countries. The study of the historical uses and sociological impact of fungi is known as ethnomycology. Because of the capacity of this group to produce an enormous range of natural products with antimicrobial or other biological activities, many species have long been used or are being developed for industrial production of antibiotics, vitamins, and anti-cancer and cholesterol-lowering drugs. More recently, methods have been developed for genetic engineering of fungi, enabling metabolic engineering of fungal species. For example, genetic modification of yeast species—which are easy to grow at fast rates in large fermentation vessels—has opened up ways of pharmaceutical production that are potentially more efficient than production by the original source organisms.
Cyber-ethnography
Traditional ethnography study observes the interactions between individuals who are co-located. Ethnographies of online cultures and communities extend ethnographic study to settings where interactions are technologically mediated, not face-to-face. Cyber-ethnography therefore addresses limitations in the traditional notion of a field site as a localized space. It also understands that online communities can create a shared culture through digitally mediated interactions. Although the assertion that ethnographic fieldwork can be meaningfully applied to computer-mediated interactions has been contested, it is increasingly becoming accepted.
Autoethnography
Autoethnography is being used to examine popular culture artifacts and our relationships with pop culture. As Herrmann (2013) wrote, "Our identities and identifications with popular culture artifacts assist in our creation of self. Our identities and pop culture have a long-term recursive relationship" (p. 7). Jimmie Manning and Tony Adams (2015) noted five strengths for autoethnographic approaches to popular culture, including "1) use personal experience to write alongside popular culture theories and texts, especially to show how personal experiences resemble or are informed by popular culture; 2) use personal experience to criticize, write against, and talk back to popular culture texts, especially texts that do not match their personal experiences or that espouse harmful messages; 3) describe how they personally act as audience members, specifically how they use, engage, and relate to popular texts, events, and/or celebrities; 4) describe the processes that contribute to the production of popular culture texts; and 5) create accessible research texts that can be understood by a variety of audiences." (p. 199-200). Autoethnographer Robyn Boylorn examined televised media and the representations of race. Jimmie Manning used autoethnography to examine polymediated narrative and relationships in reference to "catfishing."
Bernardino de Sahagún
Sahagún was among the first to develop methods and strategies for gathering and validating knowledge of indigenous New World cultures. Much later, the scientific discipline of anthropology would formalize the methods of ethnography as a scientific research strategy for documenting the beliefs, behavior, social roles and relationships, and worldview of another culture, and for explaining these factors with reference to the logic of that culture. His research methods and strategies for validating information provided by his informants are precursors of the methods and strategies of modern ethnography.
Anthropology
Ethnohistory is the study of ethnographic cultures and indigenous customs by examining historical records. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may not exist today. Ethnohistory uses both historical and ethnographic data as its foundation. Its historical methods and materials go beyond the standard use of documents and manuscripts. Practitioners recognize the utility of such source material as maps, music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral tradition, site exploration, archaeological materials, museum collections, enduring customs, language, and place names.
Social structure
Ethnography has contributed to understandings about social structure by revealing local practices and customs that differ from Western practices of hierarchy and economic power in its construction.
Ethnostatistics
Ethnostatistics is the study of the social activity of producing and using statistics. The premise of the area of study is that statistics are themselves not neutral facts, but are themselves influenced by the social biases of the persons involved in their production. The concept was suggested in John Kitsuse or Aaron Cicourel in their 1962 article, "A Note on Official Statistics", published in "Social Problems", where they suggested that "criminal statistics" are indicative of the social organization of the agencies responsible for assembling them. The concept was developed by sociologist Robert Gephart in his 1988 book, "Ethnostatistics". The field of study "uses concepts from ethnomethodology to study sensemaking practices that social scientists employ in the production, interpretation, and display of statistics created in social research". As of the early 2000s, there were three "levels" of ethnostatistics, the first examining the social production of statistics, the second using computer simulations to examine the degree to which methods of gathering statistics may distort data, and third examining the persuasive effect of statistics on their end consumer.
Ethnography
Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communicative behaviors and phenomena. This is often characterized in the writing as attempts to understand taken-for-granted routines by which working definitions are socially produced. Ethnography as a method is a storied, careful, and systematic examination of the reality-generating mechanisms of everyday life (Coulon, 1995). Ethnographic work in communication studies seeks to explain "how" ordinary methods/practices/performances construct the ordinary actions used by ordinary people in the accomplishments of their identities. This often gives the perception of trying to answer the "why" and "how come" questions of human communication. Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally, or the way firemen communicate during "down time" at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, and participate in and/or directly observe the particular social group being studied.
Cultural anthropology
Multi-sited ethnography may also follow ethnic groups in diaspora, stories or rumours that appear in multiple locations and in multiple time periods, metaphors that appear in multiple ethnographic locations, or the biographies of individual people or groups as they move through space and time. It may also follow conflicts that transcend boundaries. An example of multi-sited ethnography is Nancy Scheper-Hughes' work on the international black market for the trade of human organs. In this research, she follows organs as they are transferred through various legal and illegal networks of capitalism, as well as the rumours and urban legends that circulate in impoverished communities about child kidnapping and organ theft.
Ethnogeology
Ethnogeology is the study of how geological features were understood by ancient peoples around the globe from a "place-based" perspective, in specific reference to traditional knowledge and to the stories and ideas about the Earth that were passed down through traditions and the wisdom of elders. The focus in past research tended to be on the unique ideas and knowledge of minorities and distinct cultural groups, and how this relates to universal and cross cultural knowledge discovered by humanity as a whole. Knowledge claims that are based more on universal discoveries and natural science can be found in the subjects of philosophy, chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, and geology. The term "ethnogeology" first enters the geological literature through the work of John Murray of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada in the mid-1990s by virtue of his studies of the Northern Cree First Nation geological worldviews in the Province of Manitoba in Canada. At that time, a cadre of geologists and geoscience educators - particularly Dr. Steven Semken of Navajo Community College in Shiprock, New Mexico and colleagues - were examining the interesting connections among Native American traditional knowledge, geoscience concepts, and the unique vision of planet Earth's history as articulated by indigenous ethnogeological wisdom (see references below).
Netnography
Netnography is an online research method originating in ethnography which is applied to understanding social interaction in contemporary digital communications contexts. It is defined as a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data. It is an interpretive research method that adapts the traditional, in-person participant observation techniques of anthropology to the study of interactions and experiences manifesting through digital communications .
Ethnochoreology
Ethnochoreology (also dance ethnology, dance anthropology) is the study of dance through the application of a number of disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, ethnography, etc. The word itself is relatively recent and etymologically means “the study of ethnic dance”, though this is not exclusive of research on more formalized dance forms, such as classical ballet, for example. Thus, ethnochoreology reflects the relatively recent attempt to apply academic thought to why people dance and what it means. It is not just the study or cataloging of the thousands of external forms of dances—the dance moves, music, costumes, etc.— in various parts of the world, but the attempt to come to grips with dance as existing within the social events of a given community as well as within the cultural history of a community. Dance is not just a static representation of history, not just a repository of meaning, but a producer of meaning each time it is produced—not just a living mirror of a culture, but a shaping part of culture, a power within the culture: