Ethnography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ethnography is the practice in cultural anthropology of writing a scientific description of an individual human society or of a situation within a society. It is also the name for the resulting text. The comparison of cultural details uncovered through ethnography is the province of ethnology. Classic ethnographies include Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski and The Nuer by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. More commonly read ethnographies include Nisa by Marjorie Shostak and Mama Lola by Karen McCarthy Brown.

Critiques of traditional ethnographic rhetoric and writing have come into increasing prominence, at least from the 1960s onwards. Critical, postmodern, and poststructural ethnographies often entail "confessional" writing, postcolonial critiques of canonical work, and literary interpretation and deconstruction.

Also used in Sociology