Public Interest Anthropology at Penn

Students learning about ethnography for the first time are often tempted to promise fervently to be "objective" in their research and to learn what is "really" happening in the field. However, anthropologists have long since acknowledged that ethnographic research is not objective research at all. The following are some of the reasons for this conclusion:

Ethnography is an interpretive endeavor undertaken by human beings with multiple and varied commitments which can and do affect how the research is done and reported. We all have backgrounds, biographies, and identities which affect what questions we ask and what we learn in the field, how our informants let us in to their lives, and how our own interpretive lenses work.

Not all fieldsites are "foreign" for ethnographers in the same way. Some ethnographers are native to the communities in which they study, whereas some enter as complete strangers with no obvious common ground. Even though they may learn somewhat different things, both kinds of researchers are legitimately able to undertake ethnographic research.

Ethnography is not replicable research (like many kinds of science).

Ethnography is not based on large numbers of cases (like quantitative research).

How can any research done under such circumstances, which is not even pretending to be objective, have any worth at all? In other words, how can we claim ethnographic insight into cultural practices? What is the basis of ethnographic authority under these conditions? Anthropologists have seriously considered these charges, and concluded that there are several ways in which insight and authority in ethnographic research can be persuasively claimed:

Anthropologists generally subscribe to some form of cultural relativism, meaning that we believe that there is no one standpoint from which to judge all cultures and ways of being in the world. Because of this, we are conditioned to see various perspectives as "positioned" (Abu-Lughod 1991), and the things that we learn in the field as "partial truths" (Clifford 1986). Therefore, there is not one single truth in a research situation to be uncovered; there are many.

Ethnographers are expected to be "reflexive" in their work, which means that we should provide our readers with a brief, clear picture of how the research we have done has been or could have been affected by what we bring to it. This can take the form of revealing details of our own experience or background to readers up front.

Ethnographers should have more than one way to show how we arrived at the conclusions of our research; we expect to have a collection of fieldnotes, interviews, and site documents (where possible) which work together to support our claims. This is called triangulation.

Ethnographic research takes place in depth and over a great deal of time, often months or years for professional ethnographers. Ethnographic conclusions are, therefore, arrived at only after lengthy consideration.

Sanjek (1990) recommends that readers and writers of ethnography focus on what he calls the "validity" of ethnography. In this way, we can judge the clarity with which decisions regarding the application of theory to data are explained as well as follow ways in which events in the text are persuasively linked in making the conclusions presented there.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila
1991 "Writing Against Culture" In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Richard G. Fox, ed. Pp. 137-162. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Clifford, James
1986a. "Introduction: Partial Truths" In Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. Pp. 1-26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sanjek, Roger
1990 "On Ethnographic Validity" In Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology. Pp. 385-418. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.