What is ethnography?

Ethnography is a methodology based on direct observation. Of course, when doing ethnography, it is also essential to listen to the conversations of the actors ‘on stage’, read the documents produced in the field under study, and ask people questions. Yet what most distinguishes ethnography from other methodologies is a more active role assigned to the cognitive modes of observing, watching, seeing, looking at and scrutinizing. Ethnography, like any other methodology, is not simply an instrument of data collection. It is born at particular moment in the history of society and embodies certain of its cultural features. The end of this chapter, embracing a theory of method, focuses upon why (right now, notwithstanding more than a century of history) ethnography has come into fashion.