Let’s reboot ethnography: the case for anthropography

When ever you set off to conduct ethnographic research you don’t just set off with a set of methods for data collection, you also set off with a baseline set of assumptions that guide your interpretation of your data.  

What do I mean?  Let’s very quickly break down ethnography as a practice.  There’s more to it than conducting interviews!

Ethnography all the way down to its greek roots assumes the following: 

1. communities, usually in a fixed setting (ex: traditionally an island, in more modern practice an ethnic group, a factory workforce, a rural town) have a shared experience

2. the individual is a reflection of an immediate social group as a whole.

3. shared experiences (imagined or real) are illuminated through establishing patterns in day-to-day interactions, material culture, and language

4. researcher reflexivity, participant observation and interviewing are the most dependable methods of data collection for revealing a shared experience.

Ethnography becomes less and less useful as an approach when applied to 21st century personhood.  People in the 21st century are significantly less physically bound to place.  We mentally and psychologically traverse transnational digital environments constantly, casually.  Our current communities and users are constantly on the move and constantly redefine their relationships to others.  Our constructions of selfhood are nuanced and increasingly self-relational. The individual is in a constant state of flux.

Now, how do classical ethnographic assumptions mesh with the accelerando of 21st century cultures?  How can personhoods constantly on the move, constantly being reconceptualized, be effectively captured by ethnographic assumptions and research practices?

Maybe we need something more flexible than ethnography that more appropriately reflects both the methodologies and the fundamental assumptions of the present day.

Let’s go big.  Researchers should do away with the concept of ethnography and instead approach human subject research as anthropographers.

I first came across the term anthropography as an undergraduate via E. Valentine Daniel’s haunting ethnohistorical accounts of the Sri Lankan civil war: Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence.   I’ve dug the term anthropography ever since.  I think it fits here for a few key reasons.

Mainly, it begins with the individual as the social unit and the setting where “culture” happens.  It is the individual-centered study of how one person establishes a sense of self by way of interacting among and identifying with a variety of culturally-defined social groups, assemblages of cross-cultural content, and disparate ideas.

Anthropography reflects the way the 21st century individual makes, remakes, or imagines the group.  It also assumes by default, that the individual’s own assessments of selfhood are neither atypical nor typical because they correspond to one individual as opposed to being applies across a group.  

Anthropography better reflects both 

1. the ways present individuals conceptualize themselves in relation to groups/communities

2. the needs of the researcher to understand individual experiences as the relate to larger social trends. It also better reflects the nature of digital personhood and digital community-making and membership.

I’m reasonable.  I know we’re not going to toss out the concept of ethnography.  But I DO think we can all afford to experiment with knew research assumptions and approaches.  I DO think researchers need to be in a constant state of challenging their own assumptions and methods.  Anthropography is one concept that checks these boxes and offers a path forward.