Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 22
Ethnography
Kevin St. Martin and Marianna Pavlovskaya
Introduction
Ethnography has recently emerged as a powerful descriptive and explanatory
approach within critical human geography. It has also become important to envi-
ronmental geographers, particularly political ecologists, who increasingly employ it
in fi eldwork projects in both the global North and South. Traditionally, ethnogra-
phy was closely associated with anthropology but it has also long intersected with
geography, especially its cultural ecology tradition (Livingstone, 1992, chap. 8). In
addition, since the expansion of humanistic approaches in human geography in the
1970s, ethnography emerged as central to cultural geography and its critical response
to positivist and structural forms of explanation. The current
tour de force
of eth-
nography in critical human, and increasingly environmental, geography is, however,
most clearly a product of the turn in social science towards critical social and
cultural theory, especially feminism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism (e.g.,
Aunger, 2004; Noblit et al., 2004; Madison, 2005).
Ethnography is the direct observation and documentation of some group or com-
munity, their practices and habits, and, primarily, aspects of their culture. Generally,
participant observation, or living among other people for a prolonged period, pro-
vides the foundation for writing a detailed anthropological monograph about the
culture or community studied (e.g., the great ethnographies of Malinowski, Boas or
Mead). It seeks to explain social and cultural phenomena via a holistic understand-
ing that comes from the researcher's immersion and time spent in the fi eld. While
this sort of ethnography is certainly still practiced, 'ethnography' has come to mean
considerably more. Indeed, the ethnography being adopted by geographers today
cannot reduce to a single method or a single form of writing around which a
research project is organised.
While geographers often label their work 'ethnographic' as a way to characterise
the extended and immersed nature of one's research in place, their research is
increasingly likely to include a plurality of qualitative methods beyond participant
observation (e.g., in-depth interviewing, focus groups, oral history, archival research
or map biographies) and to break from traditional correspondence theories of
