11.1: Introduction

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Seth Kahn

If you’re like most students, you may wonder why your writing instructor is asking you to do ethnographic writing.* You may have a vague idea of what ethnography is—what anthropologists do when they live in faraway places for long stretches of time, trying to understand what makes a culture unique or interesting. You may wonder what studying cultures in detail, conducting fieldwork and interviews, has to do with writing papers for your college classes.

Anthropologists James Spradley and David McCurdy answer the question concisely when they say, “A good writer must be a good ethnographer” (4). Ethnographic writing challenges you to consider everything that’s interesting and difficult about writing; it pushes you to generate, collect, analyze, and synthesize more material than you’ve probably had to work with in one paper before. Moreover, because ethnographies are about actual people, the assignment makes you think about ethics (how you’re presenting information, how that information might affect people if made public, being as accurate as you can) and knowledge (what it is you really know at the end of the project and how you present that knowledge without sounding more confident than you should). And finally, because these projects generally take a long time and you write constantly while doing them, you’ll have plenty of time to reflect on and understand how you’re learning and changing as writers along the way.

Along with the benefits to your writing, ethnography really highlights and emphasizes human relationships: between participants and researchers; between writers and readers of ethnographic narratives/reports; between students and teachers in classrooms. If all goes well, you’ll find that your writing helps you navigate those relationships. That is, ethnographic writing can, when it works well, do more than produce interesting papers: it can improve your understanding of people and their ways of thinking/talking; it can improve the lives of the people you write about; it can help you reflect on your own positions within cultures.

One big lesson you should learn is that ethnographic writing, when it works well, does not—in fact cannot—follow a conventional formula for essays. It requires you to experiment with style, voice, structure, and purpose in ways you probably haven’t before. To help you see what I mean by that, I’ll at times evoke my own experiences as an ethnographer and teacher of ethnographic writing; the mixture of narrative and analysis should give you an idea—not necessarily a model—of the ways that traditional and non-traditional academic writing conventions work for this kind of project.