What is ethnography used for?
Ethnography
Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services. Companies make increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (such as video ethnography). The "Ethnographic Praxis in Industry" (EPIC) conference is evidence of this. Ethnographers' systematic and holistic approach to real-life experience is valued by product developers, who use the method to understand unstated desires or cultural practices that surround products. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data. Modern developments in computing power and AI have enabled higher efficiencies in ethnographic data collection via multimedia and computational analysis using machine learning.
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.