Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ronmental policy and its reliance upon positivist methods, was well insulated from
both 1970s humanism and the broader 'cultural turn' in human geography that
would soon follow and to which ethnography was so important. Today, however,
ethnography's infl uence and use spans the breadth of human geography's subfi elds
(e.g., urban, economic, political, environmental, as well as cultural).
Ethnography's Potentials
What makes ethnography, along with other qualitative methods, a powerful research
method that is increasingly central to much human geography? How is it able to
provide insights that are largely hidden from secondary data or statistical analysis?
What issues does ethnography address that other methods cannot address? In this
section we will discuss the potentials of ethnography that, we believe, have pro-
foundly transformed the production of scholarship in environmental geography: its
emphasis on explanation, its engagement with discursive practices and everyday life,
its ability to understand the production of environmental subjectivities and govern-
mentality, its attention to issues of power and its insight into the constitution of
geographic scale.
Explanation instead of generalisation
A particular strength of ethnography is that it seeks to explain the phenomenon
observed. This is very different from quantitative research, which seeks to either
detect patterns and regularities or test a hypothesis that makes a generalised state-
ment about a relationship between variables. Note that interpreting regularities or
developing hypotheses also requires qualitative work, which is rarely acknowledged
(cf. Pavlovskaya 2006). While qualitative research, including ethnography, is often
limited to single sites or a limited number of cases, its power emerges from its ability
to construct an explanation based on an intimate and profound understanding of
the phenomena, social group or place in question. Information gathered via different
ethnographic methods (e.g., archives, interviews, participant observation) is trian-
gulated or checked for consistency allowing the connections between processes,
events and phenomena to emerge (Nightingale, 2003). That depth of understanding
allows for showing and explaining complexity, tracing connections between people
and environments and working across scales.
One example from geography is Cindi Katz' fi eldwork in Sudan. Information
gathered via interviews and participant observation over two decades allowed her
to write rich ethnographies focused on the environmental knowledge of village
youth and their families. She calls these accounts 'topographies' (Katz, 2001) and
sees them as a means to embed local environmental knowledge and practices within
local and global political economies, politics, warfare, and gender, ethnic, and race
relations. As a result, a story about a particular place in Sudan becomes a way to
understand, 'on the ground', the transformations of society and the environment
that are produced by globalisation. While not representative statistically, such an
account is representative theoretically (Pavlovskaya, 2006). To allow for this theo-
retical rigor, ethnographic explanation does not separate nature from economy or
from culture. Instead, its thick 'topographies' assemble together the relevant driving
forces, including discursive productions, and show their interplay in the constitution
of a process, a group of people or an environment.
