The subject matter of
anthropology has undergone many changes and so the research methods and
evidence collection methods. Ethnography, which shows the way of life of the
people, was first introduced into the social sciences by the anthropologists
for the study of small-scale, pre- industrial societies. Malinowski is regarded
as the one who brought ethnography in the realm of anthropology while studying
Trobriandars. The initial debate in anthropology was related to the use of the
methodologies and various questions were posed before the anthropologists like
should anthropology use natural science methods or it is not science at all. In
the intellectual tradition, there was division between ‘Nomothetic’ and
‘Ideographic’ disciplines on the line of Kantian division of knowledge. German
intellectual tradition developed by Kant and Hegel out rightly rejected the
polarisation of disciplines into two different blocks. Hegel says that all
branches of knowledge developed out of the human consciousness. Therefore, one
cannot make the distinction between natural and social sciences. Neo-kantian
scholars like Windelband and Ricket indicate that there is a logical gap
between ‘what it is’ and ‘what it ought to be’. So, when science studies ‘what
it is’ then social sciences should study ‘what it ought to be’. Therefore,
natural sciences are objective, factual ant they can go for qualitative
analysis. This theory has a profound effect on postmodern anthropology. They
further said that natural sciences are nomothetic discipline and social
sciences are ideographic discipline. Hence, division of discipline can be done
on the basis of theory, methods, and subject matters.
Radcliff Brown considers that
comparative anthropology is a nomothetic discipline that is different from
other social sciences. When the wave of
positivism started in France then it also left imprints on the methodologies of
various British and German intellectuals, which can be seen in the works of
Brown, Malinowski, Pritchard. But, first time Malinowski gave deep thoughts on
the research methods and techniques in his work on Trobriander islands, where
he suggested “imponderabilia of everyday life“and importance of it in the
understanding of different cultures. He stated that the goal of the
anthropologist, or ethnographer, is "to grasp the native's point of view,
his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world"
(Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Dutton 1961 edition,
p. 25.). So, ethnography for the first time got established in the
discipline of anthropology.
Ethnography can take different
forms and can be used by different types of anthropologists. It is widely used
by interactionists and critical ethnography is a common type of study amongst
critical social scientists (Haralambos et al. 1013-14). Ethnography can take
different qualitative research methods but the common amongst them is
participant observation, interview and biography. However, participant
observation is one of the most common practices among the ethnographers of the
various schools.
Participant observation has a
wide history of usage in the discipline of anthropology. First, the functionalist
scholars used it as a tool for knowing qualitatively the culture of the tribal
or the primitive people as Radcliff’s study of aborigines, Pritchard’s study of
Nuer tribe, Malinowski in Trobiarand Island.
However, the ethnography’s relationship with the anthropology took a
turn after the work of Clifford Geertz.
Clifford Geertz used the concept of “Thick Description” and started a
new paradigm in the field of ethnography. Interactionists are mainly concerned
about the social reality of the social construct and they do not pay so much
attention towards cause-effect relationships as positivists are. Geertz
advocates explaining the ‘reality’ through thick description rather using ‘thin
description’. Thick description explains various conceptual frameworks,
structure and meaning while thin description is mainly about the facts and
empirical data. He finds thin description as the misleading one and says that
ethnographer’s task is to find the meaning structures and to find meaning
structures, one need to find out the meaning attached with the data, its
interpretation and interpretations of the interpretation. He postulates four
parameters for thick description in his book “Thick Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of Culture”. These four parameters are the followings:-
- Interpretative study:- ethnographers has to find the manners of the meanings and it can only be find out through interpretation.
- The subject of interpretation is the flow of social discourse:- Ethnographers has to provide the code to decode the facts and data.
- Interpretation deals with extrovert expressions:- extrovert expressions of the culture is necessary to unravel the data of the informants.
- Ethnographic description is microscopic:- local behaviours and truth are described by the ethnographic data and here contextualizing and finding specified happenings can provide the thick descriptions.
Geertz also added the literary
approach to his writings and his ethnographies are filled with the rhetoric. A
new insight into the ethnography changed the classical narratives of writing
ethnography. However, later James
Clifford in his work ‘writing Cultures’ tried to present the discussions on the
various schools of thought and problems and development of various paradigms
like Literary, post-literary, postmodern etc. . James Clifford says that
ethnographic writings can be determined in at least 6 ways contextually,
rhetorically, institutionally, generically, politically, and historically. He
says that ‘these determinations govern the inscription of coherent ethnographic
fictions.’(Clifford, page-6). Further,
he pressed the point that ethnographies are the “partial truths” and he focuses
on the representation of ‘truth’, which later constructed as a paper by Paul
Rabinow in the same book. He also talks about the fictionalised sense of
ethnographic text. For Clifford, culture is composed of seriously contested
codes and representations and poetic and politics are inseparable. For him,
search of the culture is not so important but the representations. He divides
the ethnography in phases i.e. from Heroic ethnography to crude ethnography to
realistic ethnography and says that realistic ethnography is the only way to
find the truth attached with the culture.
Paul Rabinow talks in detail
about the ‘representations’ and compare it with the social facts. Post modern
school, which do not have belief in finding the objective reality and believes
that objectivity is impossible. They also find fieldwork unnecessary and say
that all interpretations of the culture and history are valid and equal.
Further, he talks about the problems of epistemology and interactionists
school’s method, ideological biasness, role of ideologies in ethnography and
new issues arising out of use of ethnography in the discipline of anthropology.
Representation is a word which
has a very deep history in philosophical discourses. From Aristotle to modern
day western scholars have used this word. For Aristotle, there was no sharp
division between external and internal reality. So, the representations were
not observable. Descarte took a plunge in the Aristotlic view and gave
representation an internal reality, so, making it quasi-observable. But, epidemiological doctrines are itself a product of certain civilization, having
history in certain territory can be a source of biasness in the social
research. So, ethnography through the epidemiological research could not show
us a way to find the anthropology a ethnographic process. Pragmatic school of
thought tried to develop psychological epistemology of research but they were
not able to provide a way out from the epidemiological age. Reason and logic
cannot show us the truth the absolute truth because reason is itself founded on
the historical processes and sometimes it creates beautiful myths, which are
unable to falsify. So the problem is not falsification as Karl Popper thinks
but it is the representation. Scientific methodologies which are too much
concerned about value-neutrality finds itself in the trap of the value of
‘value-neutrality’.
Foucault finds ‘a kind of
nostalgia for a quasi transparent form of knowledge’ behind the curtain of
ideology (1980: 117) and relates ideology as the close kin of epistemology. He
gives three interrelated characteristics of modern form of ideology:-
- Opposed to something like ‘truth’ so, the false representation.
- Produced by a subject in order to hide the truth and fitting data into the researcher’s frame of ideology,
- Secondary to something more ‘real’ and an infrastructural dimension.
He rejects all these three
claims. So, he takes post-modern framework of ‘discovering something which is
neither true nor false’ (1980; 131-133) and he proposes to study the regimes of
truth ‘’ as an effective component in the constitution of social practices”. His
regime is neither ideological nor structural rather the condition for the
development of ideas. Further, he proposes the hypothesis of using power
dimension in circular relationship with the system.
Ian Hacking in his famous work
“Language, Truth and Reason” gives a new concept of ‘truth’ vs. ‘style of
thinking’ in opposition to “Truth vs. Falsity” and says that logic cannot be
the source of the truth. He is not against the ‘logic’ but he finds the domain
of logic very limited. So, he says that “Hence although whichever propositions
are true may depend upon the data, the fact that they are the candidates for
being true is a consequence of an historical events”(56). So, a relativist
position is acquired by Hacking in sort of accepting the subjectivism and
denying Popperian claim of truth.
So, we have found out till now that how the
representations can play a crucial role in determining the truth and earlier
methods of ethnography has certain inherent ‘falsity’ in the very structure of
the methodologies. Representations can work as the social facts if the
ideological biases and epistemological biasness can be curtailed. Also, epistemology
is the product of historical events and the indigenous epistemological theory
cannot be the solution and also Occidentalism cannot be seen as the replacement
of Orientalism.
Anthropology has seen the waves
of scientific ethnography in classical times to the denial of any role of
ethnography in post modern era. Ethnography, as process, tried to simulate the
anthropological discourse on the culture in a fashioned way of natural science
and the distinction of nomothetic and ideographic disciplines, however short
lived, shaped the future advancement of the discipline. The problem in initial
days was to prove it an objective discipline so the ethnography became the
process and the product of the anthropology. But, after the advent of interactionist
school, it took a leap towards representation and these representations were
‘voluntaristic’, which created a new age in ethnography. Further, the
superstructure-infrastructure notions of feminist works were refuted by various
schools for not having requisite ethnographic evidences. So, history and development
of anthropology can be summed in the changing meanings of ethnography.
In the latter half of the 20th
century, the book “Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography”
started a fresh debate on the ethnography. Various scholars from the field of
anthropology, history and literature started a new paradigm in the ethnography.
However, post-modern thoughts are more prevalent in the discussions but these
post-modern thoughts are the product of the inadequacies of the ‘modern’
ethnographic systems. The power and political dimensions are given importance
in the interpretation of ethnographic data, and also, the subjective
orientation of the results was justified in the discipline of social sciences.
Objectivity is a myth and it can only give the false representation or partial
representations.
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