ethnography

is a fiction, which is not a falsehood, per se, but something systematic and exclusive which is made or fashioned against the backdrop of the partiality of cultural and historical truths.

To call ethnographies fictions may raise empiricist hackles. But the word as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive. Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of 'something made or fashioned,' the principal burden of the word's Latin root, fingere. But it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real. (Fingere, in some of its uses, implied a degree of falsehood.) Interpretive social scientist have recently come to view good ethnographies as 'true fictions,' but usually at the cost of weakening the oxymoron, reducing it to the banal claim that all truths are constructed. (6)

is a field of study whose findings are not privileged, just particular.

Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular' (1973c 23).

is a kind of inquiry that aims to describe specific instances and particular facts of past and present lives. It contrasts with 'anthropology' which is after more general laws.

Nomothetic refers to the general rather than the specific, e.g., the search for regularities or general laws rather than the description of specific instances (cf. ideographic).. . . An idiographic inquiry, Radcliffe-Brown explained, aims to document the particular facts of past and present lives, whereas the aim of nomothetic inquiry is to arrive at general propositions or theoretical statements. Ethnography, then, is specifically a mode of idiographic inquiry, differing from history and archaeology in that it is based on the direct observation of living people rather than on written records or material remains attesting to the activities of people in the past. Anthropology, to the contrary, is a field of nomothetic science. As Radcliffe-Brown declared in his introduction to Structure and Function in Primitive Society in a famous sentence that, as an undergraduate beginning my anthropological studies at Cambridge in the late 1960s, I was expected to learn by heart 'comparative sociology, of which social anthropology is a branch, is . . . a theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim is to provide acceptable generalisations.' (ingold radcliffe-brown lecture)

is a matter of putting forward a number of hypotheses, each of which taken alone carries little weight, but which, when considered together, may be found to have some significance.

Up to this point we feel sure of our facts.

is a medium whereby cultural facts tend to be posited via a visual idiom as things observed, rather than, for example, heard, invented in dialogue, or transcribed.

Ong's work has been mobilized as a critique of ethnography by Johannes Fabian (1983), who explores the consequences of positing cultural facts as things observed, rather than, for example, heard, invented in dialogue, or transcribed.

is a method of being at risk in the face of the practices and discourses into which one inquires.

Haraway (1997) argues that 'ethnography is a method of being at risk in the face of the practices and discourses into which one inquires' (p. 190). ...

is a methodology well suited to strategies of coincidence insofar as it counts as an open-ended mode of study that permits one to recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose.

For all the important problematizations of ethnography (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986), it remains a useful tool for the temporally conscious investigation of culture because it is an 'open-ended mode of study' that permits one to 'recover the antecedents of future crises from material not collected for the purpose' (Strathern 2004:7). This is what Strathern terms 'anticipation by default' (7).

is a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact.

Anthropologist deploy open-ended, non-linear methods of data collection which they call ethnography... I refer particularly to the nature of ethnography entailed in anthropology's version of fieldwork. Rather than devising research protocols that will purify the data in advance of analysis, the anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact. (5-6)

ethnography, n.All

ethnography