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Ethnography
According to the dictionary of anthropology, ethnography is the systematic description of the single contemporary culture often through fieldwork. [1] In basic terms ethnography is the practice of anthropological research based on direct observation of and reportage on a people's way of life. For the ethnographer there are two stages, the first of which is fieldwork, which is the process of observing and recording data. The second stage is the production of a written description and analysis of the subject under study. Its place in post-colonial studies has not always been as straightforward, and has on some level contributed to our colonial assumptions
The
discipline of anthropology has complex intellectual roots in the Enlightenment
and the European discoveries of non-western peoples. [2]
Within the two hundred years of history of the human sciences, the
denotations of the word ethnography have shifted several times. According
to Thomas
Barfield “the English scholars who took these words up from the 1830's
onwards seem to have de-emphasised the geographic and linguistic aspect
of ethnological and ethnographic inquiry in favour of a study of racial
origins”. [3] Historically
ethnography concerned itself mainly with recording the habits and life
of people from different societies - “Usually distant locales, distant
that is geographically or culturally from the west and seen as different
from the normative European cultures”. [4]
. James Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind
(1813) is the first prominent work in English to deal primarily with ethnology.
For Prichard ethnology and hence the practice of ethnography, aimed 
“to trace the history of the tribes and races of men from the remotest
periods which are within the reach of investigation, to discover their
mutual relations and to arrive at conclusion, either certain or probable,
as to their affinity or diversity of origin”. [5]
Prichard's idea of ethnology as a reconstruction of racial history
and human origins survived into the early twentieth century. By the 1860's
with the rise of Darwin
and the evolutionists, anthropology and therefore ethnography
became more concerned with tracing the progressive development of society.
As the nineteenth century progressed, anthropological inquiry began to
focus on evolutionary
questions. The need for better data became clear. In 1843 Prichard and
two of his colleagues drew up a schedule of questions to guide observations
of native peoples. [6]
Lewis Henry Morgan began sending his first kinship terminology questionnaires
to missionaries and agents in January 1859. The relationship between
colonialism
and anthropology was therefore established. Looking at these indigenous
peoples through a Darwinian lens was clearly useful to colonial
discourse in constructing a cultural hierarchy which later helped to justify
the “scramble for Africa”.
There has been widespread criticism of what are seen as the impossibilities of the aims of ethnography. Some believe that an observer cannot be neutral or objective or operate outside their own value system and assumptions. Ashcroft makes the clever distinction that what is known depends upon how it is know and that cultural knowledge is ‘constructed' rather than ‘discovered' by ethnography. In many ways it is the same argument that many engage in with regard to history and the impossibility of objectivity that Carr and Fulton speak so much about. James Clifford insists that ethnography is essentially a form of writing and should be approached from the point of view of its textuality. He says that with the demise of colonialism “the West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others” (1988: 22) But the most forceful criticism of ethnography suggests that it has existed precisely to place the observed in a specific way, as Europe's others. According to Barfield anthropology is inseparable from the history and practices of colonialism in a double sense. Firstly anthropologists were frequently in the employ of the colonial state itself and secondly the science of race and of races was an integral part of the ways in which colonial powers represented themselves and non-European Others in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is with the tensions and contradictions within various colonial projects that much recent anthropological work has concerned itself. Richard Fardon writes:
"Anthropology
necessarily reproduced versions of assumptions deeply embedded in
a predatory European culture…..to counterpose to an enlightened Europe, we
produced an African heart of darkness; to our rational, controlled west
corresponded an irrational and sensuous Orient; our progressive civilization
differed from the historical cul-de-sacs into which Oriental despots led their subjects."
The crisis surrounding the discipline of anthropology as a result of these criticisms leaves one wondering what the future will be. Is there a place for anthropology and if so how can it reconcile its difficult past with the tenets of colonialism? Clifford suggests that there is a need for a form of ethnographic writing that not only takes into account but also overcomes its colonial history. There are several strands to this anthropological re reading of colonialism. Firstly it has the ability to reclaim the lost voices, the silences of the imperial record, of the struggles and resistances of subaltern groups. Secondly to recognize the reclamation of such subalterity is to throw colonial hegemony into a different light. Colonialism can be refigured and replaced by an awareness and sensitivity to local cultures as sites of struggle within these systems. In a postcolonial view of anthropology, one can promote the “colonial others” in a larger story of European domination. Ethnography and anthropology are also now moving towards a reassessment of the discipline by looking at the culture closer at hand now. Up until fairly recently the main distinction between sociology and anthropology was that the former dealt with ‘us' and the latter through ethnographies dealt with ‘them'.
The boundaries between the two are now becoming blurred with the reinvention of anthropology to look at our own societies. In the past few decades ethnographies are dealing with issues other than the so-called 'primitive tribes' such as the Bush people of Namibia or the Yanomamo . Lawrence Taylor a celebrated American anthropologist lecturing in Ireland has compiled ethnographies on the border people in Mexico as well as an anthropology of Irish Catholics. The internationalization of the discipline means that there are a large number of Indian, South African, Nigerian, Brazilian and Indonesian anthropologists. Abdullai El Tom from Sudan lectures on the MacDonaldisation of the world at NUI Maynooth.This reflects the fact that the space which the discipline of anthropology and hence ethnography inhabit, is fast changing and dynamic.
[1] Barfield, Thomas. Ed. The Dictionary of Anthropology. London: Blackwell, 2001.
[2] Ibid. p .157
[3] ibid. p. 158
[4] Ashcroft, Bill., Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 1998. p. 85
[5] Prichard, James. Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. London: Arch (3 rd rev. edn. 1973 reprinted University of Chicago Press) p. 231
[6] Penniman, Thomas K., One Hundred Years of Anthropology. London: Duckworth, 1935. p. 53
This page was written by Elizabeth Laragy. Email me with your comments.
