11.6: Putting Ethnographic Writing in Historical Context

If ethnography isn’t science, then what is it? Why do we talk about it as research? If its primary goal—as least as I’ve been putting it—is to benefit the cultures and participants in studies, then why do ethnographers pay so much attention to procedures, kinds of data, style, voice, authority—all the academic-sounding concerns I’m raising in this essay? The answer, at least my answer, to that question is complicated. To understand it well, it’s helpful to know some history of where ethnography and ethnographic writing came from.

Most scholars in Anthropology (ethnography’s “home” discipline) agree on two predecessors of ethnography: missionary work and travel writing, beginning as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Anthropologist Dell Hymes traces the tradition back to ancient Greece, marked by the beginnings of sea-faring international commerce (21), contending that trade couldn’t happen successfully unless traders understood the cultures they were trading with. Other anthropologists (Clifford Geertz; James Clifford; George Marcus; many more) likewise describe the peak of European/Christian missionary work, claiming that missionaries had to study and document the cultures in which they worked, and that the texts they produced were often extremely detailed descriptions of cultures—structures, membership, hierarchies, value systems, rituals, customs. Missionaries’ purposes weren’t academic, i.e., their task wasn’t primarily scholarly, but they established the habit of writing up their findings.

Their writing, however, didn’t need to appeal to an especially wide audience, or an audience that needed to be convinced that the “findings” were rigorous. Their audience was themselves, their churches, and other missionaries who would follow them into similar regions. As people began traveling more in the nineteenth century, many of whom were traveling in lands that missionaries had explored and written about, a new kind of cultural document emerged: travel writing. Nineteenth-century travel writing borrowed from missionary writing the habit of presenting detailed accounts of places, people, customs, rituals, and so on, but more with an eye towards representing the exotic, exciting elements of those cultures. The purpose was to highlight the otherness of foreign cultures in order to encourage people to visit them, or to feel like they’d shared the experience of visiting them, without recognizing (or caring about) the risk of stereotyping or marginalizing those cultures.

These forms of pre-ethnographic writing were crucial to developing the discipline of Anthropology, establishing the habits of writing detailed and (ideally) interesting texts about cultures other than the writers.’ But missionary and travel writing also laid the seeds for two major ethical problems plaguing ethnographers since: the imperial and colonial critiques. The imperial critique contends that ethnographers bring cultural assumptions and agendas with us when we enter

new cultures, and (almost) inevitably try to impose those agendas and values on those cultures—which is, by definition, what missionaries do. I’m not accusing missionaries of anything insidious; I’m making the point that their understandings of other cultures are instrumental (they serve specific purposes) rather than intellectual. As an ethnographer, you’ll discover, if you haven’t already, that it’s very hard not to do this. You can’t help but see cultures in terms you’re comfortable with. For now, as long as you’re not trying to convince members of the cultures you’re studying to think like you do, to share your beliefs instead of your trying to understand theirs, you’re on the right track.

The colonial critique emerges more directly from the habits of travel writing, positing that simply taking data from a culture without giving anything back exploits the members of those cultures for personal gain (for academics, that usually means publications and conference presentations; for you, it means course credit and a good grade), leaving the cultures in the same conditions we found them. For many decades, anthropologists studied cultures that were isolated, pre-industrial, and very often on the brink of disappearing or being controlled by powerful nations. My earlier discussions of risks and benefits, especially the notions of respect and reciprocity, developed in direct response to these critiques.

With the shift away from seeing ethnography as science, possibilities for its usefulness have expanded significantly. No longer is ethnography a direct descendent of missionary work, an effort to romanticize the voyeurism of wealthy travelers, or a scientific effort to document different cultures—although it still wrestles with all of those influences. Instead, ethnography is a means of engaging and understanding cultures and cultural differences with respect and care for the members of those cultures.