Lecture Two - The Serendipity of Method

Summary

Our discipline was arguably founded to understand the concept of culture. And yet, over the last fifty years, culture is a formulation that has fallen out of favor in anthropological circles. This is a paradox indeed. How did we arrive at a juncture where the very subject that we study is out of fashion? But we have created an unnecessary conundrum. Let us take a step back, inhale a deep breath, and see if we can rechart our course.

Today I want to trace the genealogy of our distinguished hallmark method – the one we came up with to study that construction of culture: ethnography. We might differ on the extent to which ethnography is anthropology's to claim, or whether it matters if ethnography belongs to our discipline or is a method that is more widely used in the social sciences and even humanities, but I am inclined to call it our own. Ethnography as it has been practiced for the last century is our discipline's great innovation, our superlative methodological tool. Others may borrow it, as well they should, but in good faith they should recall where it comes from: sociologists; behavioral scientists; mass marketers; public policy experts; students of law, finance, journalism, business; education experts; development experts; geographers – all of them claim to do ethnography. But ethnography proper is ours, and I would argue that what we do with it is unique in our intent to describe, explain, and consider the dimensions of culture in action. In anthropological hands, ethnography does not simply mean “fieldwork” or conducting “qualitative interviews,” or even living with informants, for a few weeks or months, to participate and observe. It means immersing oneself within the rhythms and the pacing, the meanings and the logics, of a specific cultural setting – whether “someone else’s,” if you will, or one's “own,” perhaps, but with new lenses – so that we can know what life looks and feels like in situ.

Much as we may debate subjectivity and objectivity; presentation, representation, and self-representation; the third-person or the first-person; contestation and translation; or the epistemology of the “other,” no serious anthropologist has ever doubted the sheer and incomparable capacity of ethnography as a method to understand a cultural lens, in the sense of an on-the-ground context.