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Ethnography
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Ethnography is a method of studying and learning about a person or group of people. Typically, ethnography involves the study of a small group of subjects in their own environment. Rather than looking at a small set of variables and a large number of subjects ("the big picture"), the ethnographer attempts to get a detailed understanding of the circumstances of the few subjects being studied. Ethnographic accounts, then, are both descriptive and interpretive; descriptive, because detail is so crucial, and interpretive, because the ethnographer must determine the significance of what she observes without gathering broad, statistical information. Clifford Geertz, whose thoughts about culture are excerpted in the Other Important Definitions of Culture, is famous for coining the term "thick description" in discussing the methodology of the ethnographer.
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Ethnography is the practice in cultural anthropology of writing a scientific description of an individual human society or of a situation within a society. It is ... the name for the resulting text. The comparison of cultural details uncovered through ethnography is the province of ethnology. Classic ethnographies include Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski and The Nuer by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. More commonly read ethnographies include Nisa by Marjorie Shostak and Mama Lola by Karen McCarthy Brown.
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As of January 2004, the entire HRAF Collection of Ethnography (paper, microfiche, & Web combined) contains nearly 400 cultures and over one million pages. However, the electronic eHRAF Collection of Ethnography, available on the Web since 1997, is a subset of the entire collection and, as of January 2004, contains ca. 137 cultures and over 350,000 pages of indexed ethnographic information. In the spring of each year, 10 to 15 cultures and 40,000 pages (converted from microfiche plus new material) are added to this growing cross-cultural database.
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The Team-Based Ethnography enables project teams to get to know users and to design for their needs. It lets teams adjust basic project management processes instead of adding new activities onto the existing workload. The approach focuses on
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The HRAF Collection of Ethnography collection began to be built in 1949 in paper. From the 1950s until 1993, the annual installments of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography were distributed on microfiche. In 1993, with installment 42, microfiche production ended. Materials since 1994 (as well as retrospective conversions and updates of existing materials) are available in electronic form only (CD-ROM installments 43-49 & Web installments 43-current). Cultures in the microfiche and electronic versions are not covered in the same ways; the electronic versions include more recent source materials and not all the older sources are retained.
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Within each file of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography, source documents have been indexed at the paragraph level using OCM codes. In other words, HRAF staff have assigned OCM codes to all paragraphs within a source document, such as an unpublished dissertation. Users can then look under an OCM code within a file to find information from a variety of sources on a particular cultural variable.
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Ethnography