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knowledge that privilege direct and allegedly objective observation (for an overview
see Crang, 2002; 2003; Cloke et al., 2004). While geographers rarely engage with
traditional forms of ethnographic research, it is their continued (and renewed)
presence in 'the fi eld' - interacting with research subjects and places, searching for
multiple ways in which realities are constituted by both the researcher and the sub-
jects of research - that aligns them with contemporary ethnography (cf. Madison,
2006). In this sense, the emergent interest in ethnography signals a shift in meth-
odological possibility across a variety of subfi elds in geography. This is particularly
true for those subfi elds that were once distant from ethnography (e.g., economic,
urban, political or environmental geography) but are now open to ethnographic
approaches as a way to operationalise epistemological innovations such as feminism
or post-structuralism.
Environmental geography is focused on understanding the interactions between
environmental and human processes rather than other societies or cultures
per se
and, as a result, has rarely relied upon traditional ethnographic methods or modes
of explanation that privilege observation of and interaction with subjects. Recent
changes in ethnographic practice have, however, made it more amenable to the
varied objectives of environmental geography. Yet, the adoption of ethnographic
methods by environmental geographers also implies a change in environmental
geography. While the broad interests of environmental geographers remain the same
(i.e., understanding human/environment interactions), the mode of understanding
has changed given, among other things, critical social theory approaches that stress
local knowledges, micropolitical processes, identity politics, the positionality of
various actors and agents and the social construction of nature generally (Castree,
2003). While the traditional interests of environmental geography and those of
ethnography have served to distance them from each other, the gap is now closing
as both are transformed in new directions that make their combination in critical,
interdisciplinary and multi-method approaches both possible and useful.
In this chapter, our primary goal is to consider the nature of and the potential
for ethnography in environmental geography. While we are interested to see envi-
ronmental geographers adopt ethnographic methods, we will not discuss individual
methods themselves because there is already a large geographical literature on the
subject (Crang, 2003; Cloke et al., 2004). We begin by briefl y looking into ethnog-
raphy's origins in anthropology, its relationship to geography, and its recent trans-
formation via critical social theory. We then discuss the potentials of ethnography
and what ethnographic methods can offer to environmental geographers: we do so
by identifying some of the important theoretical and empirical questions that these
methods promise to illuminate. Finally, we examine issues related to the practice of
ethnography as it relates to environmental geography; in particular, we address the
question of politics and the rise of mixed methods in geographic research.
Ethnography's Transformations
Like geography, anthropology has a complicated heritage in which the heroics of
'discovery' and travel are mixed with the colonial practices of gathering information
about peoples and territories that were to become subject to imperial power (Blunt
and Rose, 1994). As such, much early anthropological and geographical work, using
ethnographic methods, generated representations of 'primitive' societies in distant
(global South) locations in need of European 'civilisation'. In the global North, early
