Ethnography (
Greek ????? ethnos = people and
???fe?? graphein = writing) is a genre of writing that uses
fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnography presents the results of a
holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to
travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the
constructivist and
relativist paradigms, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many
cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.
[citation needed]Cultural anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz and Xavier Andrade, study and interpret cultural diversity through ethnography based on field work. It provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought.
Psychology, economics, sociology and cultural studies also produce ethnography. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, although some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Caton) were influenced by an anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago, and by sociologist Robert Park whose earlier career had included journalism. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
Ethnographic methods have been used to study business settings. Groups of workers, managers and so on are different social categories participating in common social systems. Each group shows different characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and values.
