Ethnographic Practice Research Articles

Not burning, but rebuilding: The ABCS of anthropology using multimodal methodologies and DEAF values

In 2019, Ryan Cecil Jobson made the case for ‘letting anthropology burn’, arguing that: “the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon” (2019:328). In this article, Robinson upholds Jobson’s mandate to adopt a radical humanism, though not by burning, but methodologically rebuilding anthropology using multimodal ethnographic praxis, drawing on learnings from time spent working and learning from DEAF spaces. She charts her intellectual and affective journey from working with deaf artists and educators, through studies in anthropology, and towards transformative encounters with multimodal social semiotics. Through learning to listen and evaluate in DEAF ways, she found that non-deaf, majority-centred ways of conducting research naturally receded, thereby re-scaffolding ethnographic methods, proffering a ready-made approach to inclusive anthropological knowledge-making and a potential means for democratising anthropology from the ground up. Robinson argues that approaching ethnographic praxis in a way that both de-prioritises English-text and prioritises participant-led approaches by default reshapes what constitutes valuable anthropological knowledge, facilitating broader participant inclusion and legibility, while also rendering more apparent entrenched power hierarchies and epistemic imbalances.

Doing urban research on ‘hard-to-reach’ populations during the COVID-19 pandemic: advantages and ethical dilemmas using digital ethnography as a new alternative

This paper presents insights on conducting urban research amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the adoption of digital ethnography as an innovative and flexible approach. Drawing from an expanding body of literature on fieldwork among 'hard-to-reach' populations during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we share our experiences from a study on the socio-economic impacts of mandatory lockdowns on poor urban residents in Harare, Zimbabwe. Our research highlighted several methodological benefits of digital ethnography, including its non-intrusive and non-intimidating nature, cost and time efficiency, ability to increase participant diversity, assurance of respondent safety, research flexibility, and the generation of impactful data. Unlike traditional immersive ethnography, digital ethnography proved adept at navigating the complexities of the 'global', 'local', and 'trans-local' dimensions of contemporary urban research subjects. However, this approach also presents several ethical challenges. These challenges include obtaining informed consent, ensuring confidentiality and anonymity, participants' potential misunderstanding of the research context, the risk of exacerbating stress during crises, and respecting privacy in digital spaces. Urban researchers must carefully consider these ethical issues before undertaking their studies. In conclusion, virtual environments have become integral to modern life and represent essential avenues for urban researchers, particularly during periods of limited physical interaction and when studying populations that are difficult to reach in person but more accessible online. Further, the adoption of digital ethnography, extends beyond the necessity imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects an ongoing evolution in ethnographic practices, adapting to the realities of a digitally connected world. We suggest that urban researchers should think of digital ethnographic ethics from the point of view of reciprocal and mutual collaboration with participants. With this thinking, urban research subjects become co-participants and co-researchers rather than subjects of exploitation in the expanding and complex digital space.

The Integration of Ethnoscience and Technology: A Review

This literature review critically examines the integration of ethnoscience and technology, highlighting the transformative impact of this amalgamation on the field of social sciences. Ethnoscience, with its focus on understanding the diverse ways in which human communities perceive and interact with their world, and ethnography, a methodology for the immersive study of cultures and social interactions, together provide a robust framework for exploring human cognition, behavior, and societal constructs. The review delves into the key principles of ethnoscience, emphasizing the development and significance of ethnography in anthropological research and the methodological flexibility required to address contemporary challenges. This study further explores the integration of technological innovations such as wearables, digital traces, and information and communication technology (ICT) into ethnographic studies, underscoring the opportunities and challenges presented by the digital era. The paper argues that the incorporation of technology not only expands the methodological toolkit available to researchers but also enhances the depth and breadth of ethnographic insights into socio-economic, policy, and environmental factors influencing technology adoption across various sectors. Despite the methodological, socio-economic, and infrastructural hurdles, the integration offers unprecedented opportunities for understanding complex social phenomena, contributing significantly to policy-making, community development, and technological innovation. This review underscores the necessity of evolving ethnographic practices to keep pace with technological advancements, fostering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the intricacies of human life in the digital age.

Concealment and Care in Deathcare During COVID

ABSTRACT: During the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, photojournalistic depictions of the havoc wreaked by the virus became ubiquitous. Images of physically distanced funerals and large-scale body disposal populated newsfeeds, but the labor and experiences of those working within these images—people handling bodies and guiding bereaved families—remained largely hidden from public view. Even before the pandemic, visibility and public recognition were complicated matters for the “deathcare” sector, as professionals cautiously constructed and defended the line separating the family-facing frontstage and industry-insider backstage. Our engagement with this sector through photography was motivated by a desire to illuminate the experiences of those working in deathcare during COVID outbreaks and lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. Reflecting on photography as method in the study of death, we think through the complexities of seeing and unseeing, exposure and concealment in contemporary death rituals. The pandemic exposed certain realities of death and dying to the public but obfuscated others. Further, our ethnographic practice of portraiture revealed concealment to be a key element of the caring labors that deathcare workers perform.

Causal inference in ethnographic research: Refining explanations with abductive logic, strength of evidence assessments, and graphical models.

In their classic accounts, anthropological ethnographers developed causal arguments for how specific sociocultural structures and processes shaped human thought, behavior, and experience in particular settings. Despite this history, many contemporary ethnographers avoid establishing in their work direct causal relationships between key variables in the way that, for example, quantitative research relying on experimental or longitudinal data might. As a result, ethnographers in anthropology and other fields have not advanced understandings of how to derive causal explanations from their data, which contrasts with a vibrant "causal revolution" unfolding in the broader social and behavioral sciences. Given this gap in understanding, we aim in the current article to clarify the potential ethnography has for illuminating causal processes related to the cultural influence on human knowledge and practice. We do so by drawing on our ongoing mixed methods ethnographic study of games, play, and avatar identities. In our ethnographic illustrations, we clarify points often left unsaid in both classic anthropological ethnographies and in more contemporary interdisciplinary theorizing on qualitative research methodologies. More specifically, we argue that for ethnographic studies to illuminate causal processes, it is helpful, first, to state the implicit strengths and logic of ethnography and, second, to connect ethnographic practice more fully to now well-developed interdisciplinary approaches to causal inference. In relation to the first point, we highlight the abductive inferential logic of ethnography. Regarding the second point, we connect the ethnographic logic of abduction to what Judea Pearl has called the ladder of causality, where moving from association to intervention to what he calls counterfactual reasoning produces stronger evidence for causal processes. Further, we show how graphical modeling approaches to causal explanation can help ethnographers clarify their thinking. Overall, we offer an alternative vision of ethnography, which contrasts, but nevertheless remains consistent with, currently more dominant interpretive approaches.

What is action ethnography? Reconsidering our intentions for impact in ethnographic practice

What is action ethnography? Reconsidering our intentions for impact in ethnographic practice

Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.

Data mining, research ethics and practice: A view from Italy

This article explores the intersection of ethics and methodology in anthropological research, focusing on squats in Rome. It juxtaposes traditional ethnographic practices with contemporary ethical regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to examine the nuanced relationship between researchers and their subjects in socially vulnerable and legally sensitive environments. The article critiques the reductionist view of ethnographic data as mere information to be extracted, arguing for a more engaged and reciprocal approach to anthropology that respects the agency of research subjects and emphasizes the co‐production of knowledge. The document challenges conventional ethical frameworks and advocates for anthropology's commitment to listening and giving voice to marginalized communities through examining interactions with squatters and the Roma population. This enquiry scrutinizes the bureaucratic imposition on ethnographic research and reaffirms the discipline's role in contributing to a broader understanding of ethics in anthropological practice.

Claiming breathing space for anthropology: Ethnographic responsibility in changing times

This article explores the challenges of maintaining ethical ethnographic practices amid the evolving bureaucratic regulations of research ethics. Drawing on the author's fieldwork experiences in Lesvos, Greece, during different periods, including the recent European ‘refugee crisis’, it reflects on the deep ethics inherent in the ethnographic encounter, shaped by long‐term commitments and mutual exposure between the researcher and interlocutors. It critiques the bureaucratization of research ethics, arguing that legalistic guarantees, such as consent forms, undermine the nuanced, context‐dependent nature of ethnographic work. By contrasting engagements with locals, activists and professional humanitarians, the author highlights the tensions between bureaucratic regulation and the need for a flexible, situated approach to ethics, calling for a critical assessment of ethical frameworks to preserve the ‘breathing space’ essential for responsible and insightful ethnography. The article advocates for resistance against one‐size‐fits‐all ethical regulations constraining the rich potential of ethnographic research.

Deep hanging out, mixed methods toolkit, or something else? Current ethnographic practices in US anthropology

AbstractWe use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open‐ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community‐based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant‐observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever‐changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students.

Excavating Whiteness in the African Archive: The Story of Amandus Johnson's 1920s Expedition to Angola for the Penn Museum

AbstractAs we further seek to “decolonize” museum images of Africa, the museum archives of African Collections—the correspondence, ledgers, diaries, photographs, and other documents of White explorers working in Africa—suture the colonial practices that produced ways of seeing Africa—and Blackness more broadly—back onto the objects that museums maintain and display today. As increasing scholarly attention seeks to rectify the anti‐Black colonial violence of the archive, this research aims to situate the pedestrian colonial ethnographic practices and spectacular African explorer mythmaking found in museum archives within the foundation of museum anthropology and the museum itself. It also looks to the possibilities of contemporary museum practice to reframe and repair colonial museum constructions of Africa.

A dataset without a code book: ethnography and open science.

This paper reflects upon calls for "open data" in ethnography, drawing on our experiences doing research on sexual violence. The core claim of this paper is not that open data is undesirable; it is that there is a lot we must know before we presume its benefits apply to ethnographic research. The epistemic and ontological foundation of open data is grounded in a logic that is not always consistent with that of ethnographic practice. We begin by identifying three logics of open data-epistemic, political-economic, and regulatory-which each address a perceived problem with knowledge production and point to open science as the solution. We then evaluate these logics in the context of the practice of ethnographic research. Claims that open data would improve data quality are, in our assessment, potentially reversed: in our own ethnographic work, open data practices would likely have compromised our data quality. And protecting subject identities would have meant creating accessible data that would not allow for replication. For ethnographic work, open data would be like having the data set without the codebook. Before we adopt open data to improve the quality of science, we need to answer a series of questions about what open data does to data quality. Rather than blindly make a normative commitment to a principle, we need empirical work on the impact of such practices - work which must be done with respect to the different epistemic cultures' modes of inquiry. Ethnographers, as well as the institutions that fund and regulate ethnographic research, should only embrace open data after the subject has been researched and evaluated within our own epistemic community.

Dynamics of Disruption: Ethnographic Practice in Contemporary Turkey

This roundtable explores how recent social and political upheavals in Turkey have impacted ethnographic research in and about the region. We propose that an analysis of ethnographers’ experiences in contexts of disruption and uncertainty can offer important insights into both research methodologies and contemporary politics and society in Turkey. The past twenty years have been a time of transformation and, arguably, disruption in the Republic of Turkey. In 2003, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) rose to power under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As the following decade heralded a period of rapid economic growth and development, social and political changes also began to reshape institutions in consequential ways. In 2008, top military leaders were charged with participating in a conspiratorial deep state in what would come to be known as the Ergenekon trials. While these prosecutions were framed by the ruling party as critical to securing democratic governance in Turkey, they also marked a turning point in the AKP's efforts to secure and consolidate its hold on the state. After the AKP won its third general election in 2011, their efforts to consolidate power grew, and over the following decade Turkey would devolve from being recognized as a model Middle Eastern democracy to an illiberal democracy and finally an authoritarian regime. This political transformation was punctuated by key events, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the attempted coup of July 2016 to the resumption of armed conflict with the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê PKK) in 2015 and the government's crackdown on Academics for Peace.

Shadowing and gendered fieldwork roles in the Brussels Bubble

This article contributes to wider methodological discussions about gender and undertaking fieldwork in and around European Union institutions, by focusing on shadowing as a particular ethnographic practice and the performance of gendered roles in fieldwork. The article is based on two ethnographic research projects and 16 shadowing placements, which were conducted in and around European Union institutions (2018–2020). As co-authors, we reflect on what our respective shadowing experiences reveal about gendered roles in fieldwork and how these are performed in the ‘Brussels Bubble’. We show how the fieldwork roles emerged at different stages of shadowing, how we performed them dynamically and what they reveal about gendered micropolitics in the ‘Brussels Bubble’. We call on researchers to be intentionally reflexive when doing shadowing as part of their fieldwork, to avoid uncritically performing the types of gendered roles that typically emerge within institutional settings and interpersonal relations.

The ethnographer and the paradox of emotional closeness. An autoethnography of shame in accounting research

Purpose This paper aims to explore the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic practice in accounting research. This paper focuses on shame as an emotion that lingers on, despite the efforts to work through those emotions. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a collective autoethnography to make sense of the fieldwork and after-fieldwork emotions and their consequences. This autoethnography began with the three authors discovering their shared feeling of shame. Findings Building on Hochschild’s theory (1979, 1983) on emotional labor, the authors demonstrate how shame emerged as a central and lingering emotion of the ethnographies beyond an emotional labor process. The authors show how a double shame appeared toward the field participants and the academic accounting community, affecting the writing and the work. Originality/value The authors demonstrate that the perception of the research community’s rules of feelings gives rise to emotions that ultimately change the work. The authors show how collective autoethnography can help accounting research to acknowledge and give room to emotions.

Examining the Relevance of Ethnographic Practices in Researching Teacher Identity in Preservice Teacher Education

This paper advocates the relevance of ethnography as a methodology for researching preservice teacher education. The research underpinning this paper demonstrates the importance and relevance of the ethnographic imagination for examining the formation and development of preservice teacher identity, offering a means of capturing the lived experience of learning to teach from the perspective of those entering the profession. The experience of learning to teach on three graduate-level teacher education pathways in the South of England is explored using ethnographic methods. The yearlong immersion in three different research sites and subsequent thematic analysis of the generated data gives insight into the formation of the teacher identity, foregrounding the importance of place in the experiential journey of the preservice teacher. The comprehensive data generated from this study gives unique insight into how ethnographic practices can reveal the developmental process of teacher identity and has relevance for teacher educators and researchers internationally.

Inconsequential Denunciations to the Holy Office in Maranhão (1708-1743): Inquisitorial Sources as Ethnographic Practices

RESUMO O presente artigo aborda as ações de comissários do Tribunal do Santo Ofício da Inquisição de Lisboa no Estado colonial do Maranhão e Grão-Pará durante a primeira metade do século XVIII. Objetiva-se analisar as inquirições ocorridas nas diligências desses comissários por vilas e cidades daquele Estado entre 1708 e 1743. Para tanto, utilizam-se documentos digitais do Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT) referentes à Inquisição de Lisboa, bem como documentos digitais do Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU) e do Arquivo Público do Estado do Maranhão (APEM). A metodologia consiste na análise das redes de denunciantes e denunciados. Ao cruzar as fontes por meio dos indícios dos nomes, obteve-se uma conjuntura das informações que circulavam no Estado colonial do Maranhão e Grão-Pará e no Reino sobre as práticas religiosas dos Andrades e a influência dos membros dessa família na administração pública local.

ON THE BORDER OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY: FIRE STRIKERS IN HUNGARY

The aim of my study is to present the types of fire-strikers that were once used in the Hungary and Carpathian Basins, their general forms and dating problems. Most of the types were in continuous use from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century, but Hungarian archaeology and ethnography know little about each other's results in this case, moreover, archaeological literature is not uniformised in terminology either. It is worth taking the names of object types and their parts from common ethnographic practice and applying them to the material recovered from excavations. The typology follows a fairly simple and logical structure, but the chronology is complicated by the lack of material communication. In connection with Biedermeier animal-shaped chirpers, earlier research has suggested medieval or even Roman dating, but this is clearly refuted by the research. In addition to their functionality, these objects are sometimes very ornate, even with scratched the year of production. In addition to everyday life in Hungary, fire-strikers also play a significant role in folk tradition, as an accessory to wedding ceremonies, folk medicine (analogical magic) or religiosity of certain groups. Although we know the European parallels relatively well, the results of the Asian research did not have a great impact on the examination of this topic in Hungary, so our further goal is to get acquainted with the material here.
 Materials and methods of research. The research materials were chairs from the archaeological and ethnographic collections of museums in Hungary.
 The research methodology is based on scientific approaches and principles; the following were applied: logical, systematic, comprehensive, comparative historical and archaeological-ethnographic approaches using interdisciplinary research.
 The work is based on an integrated approach to the object of study. During the study, a typological and chronological analysis of artifacts was carried out. Using the comparative typological method, an analysis of archaeological and ethnographic types of armchairs was carried out, and common and distinctive features were identified. For a systematic description of the artifacts, a formal typological method of studying the iconography of forms and images, supplemented by stylistic analysis, was used. To identify historical, archaeological and ethnographic connections, the historical-comparative method was used. Chronological attribution of artifacts was carried out using relative and absolute dating.

Personal and community values behind sustainable food consumption: a meta-ethnography

Various aspects of sustainable food consumption have been studied within the Social Sciences in the last years. Specifically, the analysis of motivations and determinants behind alternative economic practices has gained prominence in disciplines such as Sociology, Psychology, Economics and Marketing, seeking to understand, measure and calculate consumers’ decision-making processes and actions through the application of cognitive theories and qualitative predictive models. Anthropology—more specifically through the practice of ethnography—, has also made significant contributions, mostly toward the analysis and description of contemporary cooperative experiences, both in rural and urban settings. However, within this field, few studies have focused on the underlying values, as well as the symbolic, emotional/affective, and identity-based incentives that exist behind the participation in sustainable, pro-environmental, organic, and fair-trade food initiatives. This kind of perspective might help in comprehending how different people or social groups conceptualize their habits and link them to certain representations or beliefs. At the same time, it can provide information about the way in which action-related values appear in discourse and become embodied, whether they are uniform, conflicting, precede practice or emerge as a post-personal reflection of those involved. Through a review, synthesis, and analysis of qualitative literature—meta-ethnography—this paper seeks to present an overview of available academic work on the social, political, personal, material, and ethical reasons associated with partaking in alternative food networks. The findings will be analyzed and discussed in relation to a constructivist perspective, as well as debates around identity, social distinction, and gender.

Ethnography and ethical life

AbstractThis is a reflection on the relationship between ethnography (as practice and as product) and ethical life. I suggest that there are values internal to the practice of ethnography as fieldwork, as writing, and as reading, irrespective of the historically situated objects and values of ethnography external to it. I summarize my understanding of ethical life as it emerged from my ethnographic experience and reading, focusing on acts of practical judgment and their consequences. I reflect briefly on the ethical nature of ethnographic practice itself.