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ethnographies were also about 'others', albeit in select urban areas (e.g., poor neigh-
borhoods) or rural locations (e.g., Appalachia).
While ethnographies of peripheral peoples and places are still common (and,
indeed, vitally important when re-cast as distinctly post-colonial projects), ethno-
graphic research now encompasses studies of governing elites, environmental NGOs,
transnational development agencies, and complexly positioned subjects across scales
and sites in both the global North and South.
Instead of a royal road to holistic knowledge of 'another society,' ethnography is begin-
ning to become recognizable as a fl exible and opportunistic strategy for diversifying
and making more complex our understanding of various places, people, and predica-
ments through an attentiveness to the different forms of knowledge available from
different social and political locations. (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997, p. 37)
Ethnography has been transformed such that 'the fi eld' for ethnographic research
has been not only expanded but 'decentred'; ethnography has been broadened and
blurred beyond participant observation in a single community to a suite of methods
applicable across a variety of sites and open to a variety of social science disciplines
(Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).
Ethnography's transformation is largely due to the infl uence of contemporary
critical theory that works to deconstruct assumed subject positions, blur the bound-
aries between centres and peripheries, disrupt the distancing of 'others' and reveal
the intermingling of local and global processes. As such, critical theory initially
provided strong theoretical tools to critique ethnography's role in the construction
of colonial and neocolonial subjects as well as the European appropriation of
resources (including human labour and knowledge). More recently, however, it has
served to recast ethnography itself as a key method for producing intersubjective
and situated understandings of other people and their environments and has even
repositioned ethnographic research as a tool for local interventions that counter
global hegemonic power.
While ethnography has had a long presence in geography, it is fair to say that
at each point of intersection with the discipline it was understood differently and
offered different potentials. Initially, ethnography was very popular with geogra-
phers, particularly those aligned with the cultural ecology tradition, in the fi rst
half of the 20th century. Its popularity waned, however, due to its association
with an overly ideographic regional geography (Livingstone, 1992, chap. 9; Cloke
et al., 2004). The post-WWII rise of spatial scientifi c methods relegated ethnog-
raphy, along with the description of specifi c places and peoples, to the margins
of human geography. Ethnography was seen as primarily a descriptive approach
that was unable to explain geographic (particularly spatial) phenomena. It was
not until the advent of new humanistic approaches in the 1970s that ethnographic
methods became a mainstay of cultural geography and its critical response to
the excesses of both positivist and structural approaches (e.g., Ley and Samuels
1978). Ethnography would be recast as able to provide unique insight into
human 'lifeworlds', how people actually experienced and related to places and
environments.
The humanistic approaches of the 1970s and their interest in ethnography were
infl uential but more as critique than as a new model for human geography research
(Cloke et al., 1991; Livingstone, 1991). The specifi city of what ethnography revealed
