Complete-member Ethnography

Abstract

Within the vast array of ethnographic research methodology, complete-member ethnography (CME) is one ethnographic inquiry whose methodological development is still in infantile in intercultural communication research. Specifically in this article, the author includes four major sections to understand and to advance CME. First, the author reviews the historical development of CME, and realizes epistemological intimacy as the core of CME and as how researchers’ complete-memberships may be established. Second, the author explains the concept and practice of epistemological intimacy in extant literature. Third, the author advances the concept of epistemological intimacy to identify and explain five contextual factors that influence a complete-member ethnographer’s complete-membership to his or her research community. The five factors include historicity of identity, institutional memory, situational (inter)subjectivity, consensual membership, and symbolic codes. In order to elucidate that said factors are essentially interrelated, the author supplements the five factors with her conceptualizations of selfhood/identity. In the end, the author discusses three potential contributions of how CME can advance critical communication research, which pertain to (a) praxis and reflexivity, (b) challenging struggles and inequalities in power and privilege, and (c) promote hopeful social justice from within.