THE ETHNOGRAPHICISATION OF ANGLO-AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY:CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

Abstract

Anthropology, at least in terms of its emphasis on social and cultural life, is noted both within and outside the discipline for the quality of its ethnography. Ethnography, however, has come to mean different things within and outside anthropology. One dominant understanding is associated with ethnography as a distinct methodology involved with qualitative, local level research. Another concerns the product of such research – ethnographic accounts of social and cultural groups including the form of such texts as literary objects. How ethnography developed in the British and American traditions reveals how the discipline became more focussed on methodology and text than on theory. The contexts of this shift and its consequences for anthropological practice are considered with a suggestion that perhaps anthropologists are really ethnographers, not anthropologists, and perhaps a broader view of anthropology needs to be rediscovered.