Ethnography and Sociocultural Processes: Introductory Comments

Abstract

O ~n October 30-31, 1995, the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences Research Branch of the Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Science, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), convened a workshop entitled Ethnography and the Illumination of Sociocultural Processes. The workshop was one of a series of scholarly events designed to highlight the importance of basic research on the relationship of social and cultural processes to mental health and well-being. More specifically, it emerged from an ongoing effort to revitalize the Sociocultural and Environmental Processes Program within the branch. That program, focusing on the influences of culture and social context on behavior, represents part of the broad research agenda on social influences on behavior that was seriously curtailed at the national level during the 1980s. One of the consequences of this history was the de-emphasizing of the ethnographic method(s) as a valid and valued means of understanding behavior. Indeed, many of the workshop participants in this workshop had been funded by NIMH during the 1960s and 1970s, when its research and training support of anthropology and anthropologists was considerable. The present workshop was intended to signal a more responsive concern to the field, however, and stemmed from a variety of forces inside the behavioral sciences and out. We believe that there are a number of forces within the behavioral sciences that increase the perceived contribution of ethnography to behavioral science. First, there are an increasing number of criticisms of the limited contribution of a decontextualized approach to understanding human behavior (Bronfenbrenner 1979; Sarason 1981; Schweder 1991), a perspective characteristic of the methodological traditions of psychology in particular. This critique is undergirded by the evolution of contextualist philosophies of science that support the investigation of behavior as culture and context-dependent (Cronbach 1986; Riger 1992; Rosnow and Georgoudi 1986). In addition, the exclusive reliance on quantitative