Investigacion Cualitativa 4136

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v. 40, n. 1, p. 7-16, jan./mar. 2009

Ethnography as a social science perspective: a review

Jos Gerardo Alvarado

Lupicinio iguez-RuedaUniversitat Autnoma de Barcelona

Barcelona, Espaa

ABSTRACT

This article reviews references of ethnography as a method in the social sciences gathered by using Google,EBSCO, ProQuest, REDALYC, PSICODOC, Dialnet and LATINDEX. Anthropologists postmodern self-critique hasinuenced social scientists and ethnography has increasingly become a way to explore our forms of life. This translatesinto a perspective that responds to ethical, political, cultural, and social concerns about the production of knowledge.It seeks to excise the distance between researchers, often by collaborating with consultants in research projects. Theensuing reections evoke possibilities generated from interactions in the eld and an appreciation of a complexity that

poses methodological challenges for researchers who see the eld as a space from which they cannot be extricated.Keywords: Ethnography; method; Social Sciences; database.

RESUMO

A Etngraa cm uma perspectva em Cncas Scas: Uma revs de lteratura.

Este artigo revisa as referncias que falam sobre etnograa como metodologia e que foram recopilados atravs deGoogle, EBSCO, ProQuest, REDALYC, PSICODOC, Dialnet e LATINDEX. A autocrtica dos antroplogos chegoua inuenciar os cientistas sociais e a etnograa cresceu como uma maneira de explorar nossas formas de vida. Isso setraduz em uma perspectiva que responde s preocupaes ticas, polticas, culturais e sociais acerca da produo deconhecimento. uma perspectiva que trata de evitar a distncia entre os investigadores e que costuma constituir-se em

projetos de investigao colaborativa com consultores. As reexes resultantes desta perspectiva evocam possibilidadesgeradas nas interaes no campo e de uma apreciao de uma complexidade que suscita desaos metodolgicos paraos investigadores que vem o campo como um espao a partir do qual no podem ser arrancados.

Palavras-chave: Etnograa; metodologia; base de dados; Cincias Sociais.

RESUMEN

La Etngraa cm una perspectva en las Cencas Scales: Una revsn de la lteratura

Este artculo pasa revista las referencias que versan sobre etnograa como una metodologa y que fueron recopiladosa travs de Google, EBSCO, ProQuest, REDALYC, PSICODOC, Dialnet y LATINDEX. La auto-crtica de losantroplogos ha llegado a inuir a los cientcos sociales y la etnograa ha crecido como una manera de explorarnuestras formas de vida. Esto se traduce en una perspectiva que responde a las preocupaciones ticas, polticas,culturales y sociales acerca de la produccin de conocimiento. Es una en perspectiva que trata de obviar la distanciaentre los investigadores, y que suele consistir en proyectos de investigacin colaborativos con consultantes. Lasreexiones que resultan de esta perspectiva evocan posibilidades generadas desde las interacciones en el campo yde una apreciacin de una complejidad que suscita desaos metodolgicos para los investigadores que ven al campo

como un espacio desde el cual no pueden ser extirpados.Palabras clave: Etnograa; metodologa; base de datos; Ciencias Sociales

INTRODUCTION

Ethnography has become an essential part ofscientic inquiry over the last century as researchers

have moved away from traditional methodologiesthat seek to represent the reality in which we live.

The question, What is ethnography? has become

an inquiry into how an ethnographic perspectiveinuences a social scientic academic environment that

no longer relies exclusively on realistic descriptions

or inferential practices. Epistemological debatescentered on distinguishing opinions from justied

knowledge have shifted towards debates about the

actual role of knowledge, especially of knowledge


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that is not questioned for how it participates inreproducing circumstances that are within the realmof inuence of the very act of research. Ethnography

has also grown amid a theoretical ethos that questionsthe very character of scientic inquiry where the

quantitative-qualitative divide happens to be only oneof the debates in discussions about the production of

knowledge. It shares a stage with case study, groundedtheory, phenomenology, and narrative research withinqualitative social science research, making for ve

traditions that inadvertently overlap each other at themoment of going with a method that best ts the object

of study. What emerges upon having to choose from thisshort list is the need to problematize the method-objectt. The methodological determinations researchers

are now making depend on how a method helps themnd ways of participating in the day-to-day practices

of persons to critically assess the social realities in

which we live. It is a process that is analogous to themaneuver ethnography has made from looking atprimitive peoples to answering questions about thenature of ourselves.

While an ethnographic perspective privileges thesocial, it does not overlook the individual; personsconstantly acting in concert with institutions of theirown making. It is a perspective in which researchersare understood as actors acting from the inside as wellas from the outside, never being completely severedfrom the object of study while always being somewhatremoved within the connes of their activity. Reection,

as part of an ethnographic perspective may simply beone of the ways through which researchers inform whatis called the social. Understood as one of the manythings an individual (inherently) does, it informs whatwe will do next. It is thought, understood as a cognition

that stays close to practices without having to alludeto mental processes. The social science perspectiveethnography offers focuses on individuals reections

without wandering away from interactions themselves,subsuming the phenomenology and the hermeneuticsof events that occur between persons and others, as

well as between persons and things.The choice of one or some combination fromthe list of methods may also emerge from being inthe eld. Deciding upon how to enter, attending to

the permanencia or the duration of stay, as well ason how to trace some sort of exit from the eld pose

methodological issues. An ethnographic perspectiveconsiders researchers active appropriation of a eld

and how this informs their study from inception todissemination. In this sense, a natural history of researchwould be more than methodological disclosure. Itwould be a report about researchers populating a eld

as much as a story about the eld folding in upon itself,

of a contestation where actors yield to and resist thevery act of research. Ensuing descriptions would thenreect a eld where persons and things are coupled

with researchers and their things (eld-book in hand).

Researchers live a sort of simultaneity, respondingto discourses about the production of knowledge andto imperatives that heed the partaking of the eld.

Entering a eld entails opening a door between thepolitical arena in which research is concocted and thepolitical realities of the eld. Sometimes investigations

revolve around expressed goals of favoring a symmetric

relationship between those researching and those beingresearched. In other cases, institutional or governmentinterests establish the engagement guidelines. As anethnographic perspective allows for reections on

discourses, imperatives and political commitmentsthat come from all sides, it can address the characterof emerging contextual differences, a process through

which it can ascertain the complexity of emergent eldevidence, from the collective to the personal, betweenhumans and nonhumans, as well as from underirreconcilable imperatives.

More than an end product, the contribution ofan ethnographic perspective hinges on presenting acomplexity that seeks to open up new ways of being.

The production of grand theory is set against Gadamers(1998) reminder of the original Greek sense of theory.It is not so much the momentary act as a way ofcomporting oneself, a position and a condition. It is abeing present in the lovely double sense that means

that the person is not only present but completelypresent (p. 31). Calling upon these ways of being inresearch, feminist scholarship, postcolonial inquiryand critical theory return once removed scientists tothe site of study as protagonists in their own right. Asa result they can no longer indiscriminately utilize

predetermined or extant categories. Immersed in a

singularity of nuances they participate of and writeabout a complexity of relationships. This can be

further exemplied by their use of the word social,

augmented from the standard usage reference as an

informal gathering to the grammatical equivalent of thenoun individual, annulling a limitation that may haveto do with a philosophical unidirectional conventionof individual-orders-social. It involves a squeezing outfrom a central or universal position of the individualthat begins to be replaced by some materializing otherresiding in the membership knowledge inherent ininteractions (Have, 2002).

FROM A PERSPECTIVE TO THE RUB

Psychology and the other social sciences take

on research perspectives that get translated into


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PSiCo, Porto Alegre, PUCRS, v. 40, n. 1, pp. 7-16, jan./mar. 2009

techniques. These have effects that are similar to the fullappreciation of the consummate aesthetic of an artistsexpression of form that evokes others. The techniques

are judged in terms of how they are successfully utilizedto compose presentations. Beyond technical dexterity,

the difculty is in setting distinguishable generalities

and specicities of the eld to communicate something

meaningful. An ethnographic perspective nds ways ofshowing objects in their movement and the resultingrelationships that materialize. It has a quality thatMichael (2004) nds in Michel Serres exploration

of objects, pertinent to the task of making the strangefamiliar or vice versa by addressing the disparateshifting relationalities between heterogeneous entitiesthat are at once material and semiotic, objective andsubjective, human and nonhuman (p. 12).

An ethnographic perspective also maintains apragmatic approach towards the eld, a fact researchers

realize when they nd themselves saying, its all data,their theories too. It is a planing, not a landing, with vastamounts of data ying about coupled with methods that

perform the business of ontological politics (Mol ascited in Law & Urry, 2003). Moreover, in a complex

world there are no innocent methods; all involveforms of social practice that in some way or anotherinterfere with the patterns of the physical or the social.They are all part of that world (Law & Urry, 2003, p.9). As such, more than consider the ethics of researchsocial scientists need to come to grips with the politicalconstitutions of their own making.

Ethnographers that approach their workethnomethodologically attend to the politics of researchby interrupting a professional indifference to thequiddity of their work as part of that quiddity (Pollner& Emerson, 2007, p. 130). The ridiculous obviousradicalizations of this type of research heed Births(2001) warning that the danger of assuming somethingas obvious is that obvious often serves as a gloss fornever has been critically examined (p. 234). It is not

simply translating a domain of experience (Atkinson

& Delamont, 2005, p. 823). It calls upon a contextual

gesture drawing of a performance. When the politicalchampioning of a cause evokes or provokes, there isan uptake loop that consists as much of resistancesas it does of reproductions. Ethnographers who makethese productions intelligible via radicalizations drawresources and recourses. As palpable recurrences theybegin to make our very own enculturations obvious,potentially helping us evoke new possibilities.

ELBOW-TO-ELBOW

An ethnographic perspective in psychology requires

a social scientic approximation towards the eld.

While it may be a crowded place, the Spanish phrasecodo a codo refers to persons gathered together incompany or in cooperation. Together with things andirrespective of any identiable intentionality or agency

this constitutes the social. And a methodology needs tobe able to study the noise generated by a wide assortmentof actors, a task many methods texts delineate in

descriptive and reective terms. These limitations haveplaced ethnography as a method that is not reliable orvalid when compared to work done in experimental

and quantitative areas. Issues about the credibilityof descriptions, however, sometimes get overlookedwhen objectives emerge that may not be directed atproducing theory (Hammersley, 1995). Although someresearchers reluctantly say that qualitative research candetermine causality (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995),Team Ethnography is offered as a solution by somewho say having more persons in the eld facilitates the

comparing and triangulating of data (Woods et al., 2000).While some offer content analysis and complementarityin research design as solutions, Warrington (1997)argues that research also depends on knowing how topick from a gamut of available methods reminding usthat whether theory driven or methodologically dened

(Bernard, 2002), the emergent nature of eld research

will continually raise issues of credibility.Field research is a constant balancing act between its

merits and drawbacks. The solutions to administrativeand technical problems are sometimes met with areluctance to yield to overriding judgments about

how research is done (Reid & Gough, 2000). Writingeld notes is compared to learning to play a musical

instrument (van Maanen in Humphreys et al., 2003),as in the intricate conversation of jazz, creativelywriting about, engaging with, and judging the best wayto explore and interpret the eld. However, a climate of

governmental and institutional mandated peer reviews,Institutional Review Boards (IRB), and narrowinterpretations of the law have lead Nespor (2006) tosay that Hammersleys book, Reading ethnographicresearch: A crtcal gude is [a] bit fetishistic that

is, a bit too concerned with laying down the law aboutwhat should or shouldnt be allowed but a usefulshort discussion of problems in ethnographic criteriafor validity, etc. (General Texts section, 16). This

comment appears to reect the nature of the debates

about qualitative research and highlights attempts tohone description, a focus that often crosses over intodebates about ethical standards.

In contrast to realist approaches that favor apalpable degree of distance to assuage concerns aboutobjectivity, there are ethnographic perspectives thatrespond to critical approaches that seek to lessen

researcher distance. Concerns about the presentation


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of otherness come through in the critiques offeminist scholars (Gregorio Gil, 2005), academicsin postcolonial inquiry (Mookerjea, 2003a), criticaltheory (Sarno, 2004), as well as those critical of acolonial science (Castro-Gmez, 2005). They havedifferent ways of approaching what Hallam and Street(2000) call European cultural depictions of otherness.

However, data gathering that serves as the springboardfor writing raises the issue of the representation ofotherness, which then folds over on the question ofresearcher distance. The literary turn in ethnographicwriting has surfaced as a solution while at the sametime raising doubts about the undertaking of researchitself when it fails to maintain the tension betweentrying to understand peoples perspectives from theinside while also viewing them and their behaviourmore distantly (Hammersley, 2006, p. 11). From adifferent plane, perhaps researchers are becoming more

circumspect, effacing a boldness that adds to a tensionthat is a matter of fact in the eld.Including reections on the eld research process

has produced knowledge otherwise consideredunimportant or inaccessible. While natural historiesor research biographies offer a vicarious presencein an investigation, biographical research has beenextended to include the voices of those being studied

(Hinchman & Hinchman, 1997). Lassiter (2005) showshow Collaborative Ethnography has emerged from ananthropology replete with collaboratively conceivedand dialogically informed ethnographic projects

(p. 89) where researchers and subjects work togetherto produce texts. He reveals how Public Anthropology

relies on collaboration between the researcher and another, where the latter is approached as a consultant afterhaving been a subject or an informant. Representation isseen as a matter of action amid a multiplicity of voices,resulting in changes in the character of engagementthat have gone from the trope of rapport (p. 93) to acollaboration ... clich (p. 94) and beyond. At the centeris an ensuing dialogue about who we are and who we arebecoming, in a contemporary ethnographic perspective

where researcher privilege, the power of those whoare allowed to tell, seeks to be mitigated or put into apreventive space by a reexivity that critically assesses

what is being written. Feminist (Behar & Gordon, 1996)and critical modes of ethnography (Madison, 2005)have insisted on the political importance of narratives.Along these lines subjectivity is not an exclusiveexperience that is autobiography, travel writing, or

memoir (or what some people call autoethnography)(original italics, p. 9). An ethnographic perspectivecalls upon a transparency that reveals the underside(Fine, 1993) of researchers responses to unforeseen

issues methodological, ethical or related to failures

as opposed to simply writing reliable reports of theirreactive positioning (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995).While opening a space to discuss researcher adaptionto the contingencies of the eld (Bohannon & van der

Elst, 1998), a critical reection also brings to light

issues about the eld, about researchers responsiveness

throughout the entire research process (Evans, 2002).Perhaps the exposure Conquergood (cited in

Madison, 2005) favors in a Performance Ethnographyis a way of taking on the risks of research in a playfulspace where scholars can privilege action, agency, andtransformation (p. 149). For some, autoethnographysreective nature offers insight into the social

(Ellis, 2004), to include intelligible portrayals ofresearchers themselves as the subjects of investigation(Holt, 2003). The reexivity elicits voicings from

marginalized representational spaces (Tierney ascited in Holt, 2003, p. 16), which may be akin to the

interstitial place colonial science critics mention intheir writings (Castro-Gmez, 2005). Yet despite theopenings offered by reexivity, it could also simply

be considered a methodological device (ESRC,2003, p. 4) for gathering information that can later beevaluated for how it effectively depicts reality, or as away to foreshadow problems in the eld to maximize

the research effort when it ofcially begins (Sampson,

2004). Indeed, limiting reexivity to these specic

uses is feasible while exploring the implications of

these focalized applications of reexivity would not

be beyond the scope of a Reexive Ethnography

(Aull Davies, 1998). By the same token, the freedomto gravitate toward any topic of concern requiresconstantly attending to what we generate in the eld

and when autoethnographers choose to use ction in

their work (Ellis, 2004), they walk the creative groundof the road of agency.

WHAT MATTERS?

Efforts aimed at eliminating the messiness ofqualitative research also offer an opportunity to

examine the imbricate character of eld researchmethodology. The ve-question method for framing

a qualitative research study ((5QM) McCaslin &Wilson Scott, 2003) presents a way to teach a graduatecourse where design issues are handled as primarycolors ... intricately blended as a holistic mural, ratherthan merely assembled side by side in a paint-by-number fashion (p. 448). In another example, The

use of qualitative research methods in student affairs:A practical Guide ((APG) Walters, 2001) is intendedfor university administrators taking on qualitativeresearcher. It rst paints a picture of the institutional

scenario and the obstacles they will face as they seek


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a practical and practicable (p. 192) path to submit acredible report. The 5QM intends to offer pedagogicalefcacy while the APG responds to administrative

efciency demands, and where the painting metaphor

is explicit in the 5QM while it is implicit in the APG.

The painting metaphor in the 5QM initially helps usconceptualize the process of developing a coherently

colored study framework (p. 450) through a series ofquestions directed at identifying a best-t method from

among the ve traditions of qualitative research. The

metaphor falls short since the different traditions arediscretely spread out as different colors, suggesting thatit may be entirely possible to paint with one color. Thedesign process, however, involves building a frame onwhich to stretch a canvas, taking a pencil and an eraserto sketch some type of perspective before reaching fora brush. There is evidence of this in the introductionto the APG. It illustrates the academic setting with

its rules, roles, and rhythms but without connectingthem to the research projects institutional pressures. Itfails to address the representation and communicationof embodied inscriptions in this social space. Anethnographic perspective would take the scenario itselfas eld data, sketching these direct lines of authority on

a canvas where everything else will be placed.Research consists of busy work, of hours spent

staring blankly at a canvas. An ethnographic perspectivecuts across the other four qualitative methods of theve traditions by giving movement to the historical

aspect of biography, to the experiential feel of

phenomenology, to the specic focus of case studiesand to the abstract lines of grounded theory. Thereis evidence of this in Walters (2001) introduction tothe APG. We start to hear the administrators initialquestions, their responses to the contingencies of theacademic setting, the collaboration they establishbetween professionals in their daily activities, how theyplan to gather data, and how they plan to train thosepersons who will actually be collecting it. The APGrecommendations, however, eschew messier researchprotocols to meet the overriding institutional demand of

fostering a stable academic environment by developingan evaluation system to replace others that often areinconsistent, predictable, and reactive (p. 184). Allof these offer insight into an institution looking atitself as it tries to identify a social haven (p. 186)where a specic population of interest can be engaged.

As such, the research itself is a device or techniquefor the tweaking of governance, and as authoritiestry to engage a specic community (of others) they

are entering into what Rose (1999) calls a eld of

contestation, an apparently natural space [where] theauthority of community authorities, precisely because

it is governed by no explicit codes and rules of conduct,

is often more difcult to contest than that of experts

and professionals (p. 189).At least two surfaces have touched. The rst

consists of administrative research efforts, wherespeaking or acting have the incipient effects ofmaterializing alterity, of subjectivities voiced fromidentities or implicit categories. The bold research

directives are designed to guarantee credibility throughmachinations such as triangulation. However, they havecosts that come from object distance requirements, ofplanning in absentia. The other surface consists ofsubjects responding to an objective inquiry produced

by efcacy, efciency and feasibility demands geared

towards the production of knowledge. The price paidfor this split has costs that an ethnographic perspectivemay be able to mitigate. While bridges, windows, orportals are designed to enter discoverable places, theydo not provide the benets of the doors of ethnography

that can be open and shut as needed. A loosely designedethnographic study responds by taking all of the actorsin the eld seriously, even to appreciate the goodness

of an authoritative other.

CLIMBING OUT OF THE FOLD

Taking an ethnographic tradition and kneadingit into a framework for thinking about the world(Sigman cited in Ellis, 2004, p. 26) requires a sensitiveadaptability that includes excising an analytical distance

from the eld. Reporting the results of the messy

methods we enact as participative and interpretiveactors (Law & Urry, 2003) entails meeting the challengeof communicating an intelligibility of complexity.

There is a long history of debates about ethnographythat highlight the importance of collaborative eld

engagement in anthropology (Tani, 2004; Lassiter,2005), in a move from cultural assessments of globaldifferences to studying the local, and includingacademic past and present views of ethnography sinceresearchers cannot simply paint over stains on a canvas(Castro Meira, 2005).

Concerns about the appropriateness of makingstudents objects of study appear in the initial use ofethnography by education researchers. The growinginterest in ethnography was made possible by a groupof activist education scholars (LeCompte, 2002) whohad ideas that were initially resisted in academia.The growing interest in what was happening in theclassroom developed qualitative research methodologyin the discipline (Smith, 1978), around the same timeresearchers began to write in terms of sociology of theclassroom (Cohen, 1972). It was a movement that alsoencouraged educators to reach out beyond the school

building (Erickson, 1984).


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In the 80s, various edited books were publishedcovering the research process, from eld methods,

to ethnography, and about the ethics of research inschools (Ball, 1983; Atkinson, 1984; Hargreaves,1987). Despite a growth in the ethnographicmethodology literature, there was a continuedresistance to the method (Heath, 1982), or concernsabout its supercial application (Ogbu, 1981). Duringthe same period, Murray (1986) looked for ways tone tune methodology in special education research

by contrasting ethnography, micorethnography, andethnology. Life histories were explored as a way to

do school research (Ball, 1983) given the politicalproblems of institutional research addressed by thosedoing evaluative ethnographies (Fetterman & Pitman,1986). Educators also began to explore other social

science disciplines (Delamont & Atkinson, 1980), andcritical approaches to ethnography were recommended

for research in minority communities (Anderson, 1989)following a similar move in the area of comparativeeducation (Masemann, 1982).

A more recent Hammersley and Atkinson (1995)edition of an ethnographic manual rst published in

1983 shows an education research methodology trendof writing for other disciplines, similar to work done byVelasco (1997) who rst wrote a general ethnography

manual with Daz de Rada and later wrote one forresearch in schools. This evidence of a cross fertilizationin the 90s emphasizes the qualitative researchtraditions shared by education and other disciplines

(Lancy, 1993). While sociologists conceptualized theinuence of sex, age and income level in educational

settings (DeMarrais & LeCompte, 1998), a culturalapproach revealed the workings of social privilege inschools (Jones, 1991). Inuenced by the trend, Scollon,

Bhatia, Li, and Yung (1999) combined sociolinguisticswith qualitative research methods to delve intostudents world of discourse practices proving therelevance of educational research to other disciplines(Heath, 1999). In the process, Hammersley & Atkinson(1995) remained concerned about developing theory

and evidence to effectively serve the public. The eldcontext became more signicant in education research

and allowed for less rigid explorations (Nicholls

& Hazzard, 1993) throughout the time educationalqualitative and ethnographic design were gettingcarried over to other disciplines. A concern aboutlabeling began to grow, as when researchers implementinclusive programs without considering importantaspects of the community context (Zollers et al., 1999).

This trend got translated into concerns about the ethicsof recording students in ethnographic research (Tobin& Davidson, 1990), while methods such as journaling

began to be used to meet data gathering demands and to

foster community members educational partnerships(Shockley et al., 1995). Some researchers began to useexpressive writing for research and community building

(Ellis & Bochner, 1996) amid increased concerns aboutresearch ethics in a climate of growing institutionalreviews of research projects. What surfaced was ageneral tendency for ethnographic research in education

to move away from strict methodology (Wolcott, 1999),having taken anthropologys lead to look for new waysof doing research and setting new sights for creativeentries into the quotidian (Parra Sabaj, 1998).

Since the last decade and despite the prominenceof traditional methodology in education research,researchers have continued to seek ways to respond tocomplex eld contexts such as team research that seeks

to meet traditional requirements while simultaneouslycarving out new modes of inquiry (Woods et al., 2000).On a grander scale, the ethnography of the university

at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(EOTU, 2009) makes the educational site the subjectof inquiry for students as well as for academics. Itcalls to mind the pervasiveness of education in ourlives and its research trajectory parallels the trendof ethnographers to engage in social transformation(LeCompte, 2002). However, ethnographys growthas a perspective has had problems, especially in caseswhere issues of difference meet institutionalizededucational practices (Evans, 2002). At the same time,the critical work that stirs debates about othernesshas moved the discipline towards appreciating the

weight of its own production of knowledge (Pasco,2003). This has taken education researchers and eventeachers towards using ethnography it in their work(Velasco Orozco, 2003), responding to an ethnographicperspective that has taken the discipline to a place whereit adeptly entertains debates about what counts asresearch (Smith, 2004). These are ways of respondingto Garnkels (2002) reection on the nuance in one

of Durkheims aphorisms. In contrast to the sensethat the objective reality of social facts is sociologysrst principle, there are many sociologists who are

instead saying that the objective reality of social factsis sociologys fundamental phenomenon.Concerns about the development and legitimacy

of qualitative research has led clinical psychologyresearchers to propose a set of research guidelinesto review qualitative manuscripts in the interest ofquality control (Elliott et al., 1999). Campbell, Poundet al. (2003) examined Meta-ethnography as a way

to synthesize qualitative research ndings and make

them more accessible to medical researchers. Withrespect to actual ethnographic studies in healthcare,Savage (2000) has raised concerns about the intensive

supervision required and the limited generalizability


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of the studies while recognizing that ethnographyoffers insights for conventional research methods. Interms of methodological issues, Sorrell and Redmond(1995) recommend interview techniques for nursingresearch, noting the importance of the interviewer andefforts to individualize the technique. Along these linesCallejo Gallego (2002) poses the problem of what is

silenced when researchers observe, interview, and rundiscussion groups while Maggs-Rapport (2000) arguesfor the combination of methods in ethnographic andinterpretive phenomenology research, focusing onthe importance of triangulation in establishing thetrustworthiness of nursing research.

Although ethnographic research can also be foundin Geography, Communication and Media Studies,Political Science, and Business Administration, I willclose this section by focusing on the eld of Science

and Technology Studies. It is a branch of social

psychology greatly inuenced by Actor-NetworkTheory that approaches ethnography in a manner thatappears to be once removed from cultural inquiry,perhaps with the hope of making the cultural intelligiblewithout explicitly looking for it. Research that looks

at the implications for patients who have access tomedical care technology installed in their homes useethnography to study the inuence of technology in

our lives (Lpez Gmez, 2005). There is also Hines(2000) contribution to Virtual Ethnography and otherstudies that look at the social networks formed throughthe Internet (Glvez Mozo, 2005).

PLANINGS

Given the varied applications of ethnography it isdifcult to land on a precise method or elucidate an

overarching perspective. However, as anthropologistshave started to move out of their respectable andcomfortable places in the academic ivory tower (lowerlevels of) and back into the middle of the very world theystudy, they are embracing a spirit that characterized thediscipline when it had been circumscribed to museums

(Lassiter, 2005). Similar to what the philosopher FlixDuque (2002) says, one starts to get fed up with somany shibboleths (my translation, p. 17), theoreticaland methodological classications that say little about

what is studied. Instead, a collaborative repositioningresponds to the ethical, political, cultural, and socialconcerns about the production of knowledge. Whenconsultants participate in thinking about the broaderimplications of their actions, the knowledge that is

produced disseminates a reality that is reective of

a creative process of research in which a successfultranslation of life into text requires an eloquence

that seeks to seed or evoke possibilities. More than

simply describing, the process reects a move towards

a problematization couched in terms of a curiosityevoking the care one takes of what exists and what

might exist (Foucault, 1984, p. 328).

An example of a problematization would be a

questioning of an inherently anthropological focus onculture by those concerned about how culture gets used

(Geertz, 1986), not in terms of a contentious debate butas a way of jointly working out the detailed instances ofthe asymmetric positionings of cultural difference. Theperspective of ethnography assumes the responsibilityof the knowledge produced by offering ideas to thinkwith (Eisenhart, 2001). How culture is used is similarto studies that focus on how reality is created by socialaction in the form of language, where psychologicalresearch methodology entails drawing limitations of away of living or a grasping of meaningful culturalworlds (Ortner as cited in Eisenhart, 2001, p. 187).

When Bartolom (2003) defends ethnography, he islinking it with studying the apparent parallel processesof hegemony and differentiation of globalization. CastroMeira (2005) shows why transnational theory needsto recognize the past and present academic views ofethnography, a perspective that is akin to Mookerjeas(2003b) concern about simple reductions of meaningand action into information.

If we were to study the activity of ethnographers,autoethnography would be a way of understandingtheir practices of representation and legitimation asmembers of a research culture (Holt, 2003, p. 4)

and when Fonseca (2005) looks at how ethnographersapproach class she is questioning how they resolvetheir transformative endeavors in research. Amidthis activity some might argue that ethnography haswon a methodological war and can now withstandthe suggestion of a narcissistic turn (Leicht cited inEllis, 2004) some sociologist autoethnographers hadto withstand. Having seriously taken a variety of turns(linguistic, literary, critical, performative, rhetorical,discursive, etc.) and venturing into the spaces of aconversational turn as when Ellis says that written

dialogue can stand in for pages of description (p. 343),ethnographers have accumulated the intellectual gristto entertain discussions about knowledge and itsveridicality. What still loom, however, are the settleddiscourses or pronouncements of knowledge. Thanksto the image of historians tripping over themselves tounleash the complexities of the past, ethnographers

recognize how their activity affects a complexity that has

continually suffered the subsuming forces of scientic

productions of knowledge; forms of life translated intotexts. Instead of pitting methods against each other,

an ethnographic perspective in the social sciences

takes on the responsibility to those studied through


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a constant assessment or reexivity on how some

voices are presented above others. This very exercise

of reviewing a sundry list of references and sources(using Google, EBSCO, ProQuest, REDALYC,PSICODOC, Dialnet, and LATINDEX) reects one

approximation of ethnography as a method in the social

sciences. As such, it may only reect its pulse at rest

but the evidence of efforts to think creatively about ourforms of life show that ethnography is hardly waitingaround to get noticed.

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Recebido em: 22/20/2008. Aceito em: 26/03/2009.Autores:

Jos Gerardo Alvarado Mster en Psicologa Social (UAB). Postgraduatestudent at Estudios de Doctorado en Psicologa Social, Departament dePsicologa Social, Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, Espaa.Lupicinio iguez-Rueda Doctor en Psicologa Social. Catedrtico dePsicologa Social, Departament de Psicologa Social, Universitat Autnoma deBarcelona, Espaa.

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