Ethnography Quotes

“I want to understand the world from your point of view. I want to know what you know in the way you know it. I want to understand the meaning of your experience, to walk in your shoes, to feel things as you feel them, to explain things as you explain them. Will you become my teacher and help me understand?”
― James P. Spradley

“As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.”
― Dan Smith, The State of the World Atlas

“Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology.”
― Tim Ingold

“Yes, it is true that one generally needs to speak to the members of the key audience for a product or service. But as we are not trying to plumb an individual psyche for psychological motivation, but are rather trying to elucidate the relevant symbolic cultural meanings and practices, information garnered from those who do not like something is also relevant to understanding the cultural picture. In fact, contestation between points of view and meanings is a crucial aspect of the social dynamic. These nodal points of disagreement and different points of view can be precisely the most intriguing domains of cultural movement and thus new opportunities.”
― Patricia L. Sunderland, Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research

“[...] ethnography is what you do when you try to understand people by allowing their lives to mold your own as fully and genuinely as possible.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“In considering the question, how do our presumptions about gender affect the way we hear sounds? I have cast my net rather wide and have mingled evidence from different periods of time and different forms of cultural expression-in a way that reviewers of my work like to dismiss as ethnographic naïveté. I think there is a place for naïveté in ethnography, at the very least as an irritant. Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think I know. It is surprising what you learn that way. Some of the words turn out to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound can make you ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.”
― Anne Carson

“It is surprising how few people really understand or see what goes on around them, and how many fewer can recall it later on. The key is to practice your observational skills.”
― Leticia Supple, Music Journalism 101: The definitive resource for new and established writers

“A ten days’ journey from the Garamantes there is another salt hill and spring. It is the home of the Atarantes, who alone of all known nations use no names. (Collectively they are known as the Atarantes, but no individual is given a particular name.) They curse the sun when it rises high, and abuse it in the foulest terms, because it burns and wastes both the people themselves and their land.”
― Herodotus, Histories

“In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them.
Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.”
― Philippe Descola, The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle

“Some individuals came right out and accused me of being a Neo-Orientalist (in a pejorative Edward Said sense of the term). So of course eventually I bristled at the questions themselves. They seemed to stem from an obsessive political correctness that wished to brand every Western photographer working in Asia as a neo-colonialist, an ethnographer, or a culprit secretly advancing a hegemonic agenda. The idea that people of one culture cannot create valid art in another I found ludicrous and restrictive to say the least.”
― Waswo X Waswo, Men of Rajasthan

“Thus the writing of ethnography becomes a magical act, no less than the creation of a ritual, the making of a spell, or the manufacture of a sacred object: the ethnographer is by definition a magician.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“...tales in search of an excuse for their telling.”
― John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography

“We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.”
― Theodore C. Bestor, Doing Fieldwork in Japan

“In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“Instead of man being the aim of production, production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production, instead of tools and the productive mechanism in general liberating man from the slavery of toil, man has become the slave of tools and the industry has become synonymous with business and people have been duped into asking, “what’s good for business?” instead of, “what is business good for?”
― Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

“You still need to be able to write, and to have a habit of writing - and if you can do this creatively, so much the better.”
― Leticia Supple, Music Journalism 101: The definitive resource for new and established writers

“Ethnography is something you have actively be aware of doing; it's not passive work. It takes considerable conscious effort to do it well.”
― Leticia Supple, Music Journalism 101: The definitive resource for new and established writers

“Although these techniques require that the fieldworker approach his people with the sympathy of a friend, the intuition of an artist, and the objectivity of a scientist, the data gathered may be as reliable and as directly related to the central problem of inquiry as in the laboratory sciences.”
― Julian H. Steward

“Hoʻokahi o kuʻu noi i ka poʻe: e mālama i ko lākou moʻolelo, ma kahi e mau ai...nā moʻopuna aku ana, nā kualua, a makemake nā moʻopuna, e lohe i ko kākou leo.

I have only one favor to ask of people: to take care of their stories, let them be kept in a permanent place...so that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren can come and hear our voices.”
― Mary Kawena Pukui

“Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) once described a field trip to the interior of Brazil, where he met natives who were so close he could touch them, and yet they seemed infinitely far away; he could not understand them (Lévi-Strauss 1976 [1955]).”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Geertz (1973) describes how his wife and he were unable to establish a sensible relationship with the villagers in Bali because they were suspected of being government spies.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In Samoa, ... children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“In Samoa, [Margaret Mead] argued, children were given love and encouragement, and they were subjected to few prohibitions. They therefore grew up to be more harmonious and happy than the cowed, disciplined and sexually frustrated American adolescents.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Whereas Radcliffe-Brown's structure is a social one, Lévi-Strauss's structure is mental or cognitive; ... Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Shortly before his death in 1955, Radcliffe-Brown confessed in a letter to Lévi-Strauss that he would never understand the Frenchman's use of the term structure.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“Døving (2001), has similarly shown, in a study based on fieldwork in south-eastern Norway, that it may be extraordinarily impolite to ask for ‘just a glass of water’ when one is visiting. In his example, the hosts do everything they can to make the guest accept beer, a soft drink, coffee, tea, even herbal tea, to avoid the horror of having her sit there drinking tap water. As Mauss could have commented; refusing to receive a gift may be the ultimate offence. It is tantamount to refusing sociality.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?