Ethnography and Knowledge Production

Vocabulary flashcards covering ethnographic methodology, fieldnotes, reflexivity, situated knowledge, and the colonial history of academic knowledge production.

Ethnography

The close qualitative, empirical study of a community's everyday practices and rituals.

Participant Observation

The practice of traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives.

Fieldnotes

Qualitative notes that ethnographers write during and/or shortly after the observation of a specific social encounter or space that they are studying.

Headnotes

Any systematic attempt to remember the details of what you're observing, before writing them down immediately when you can.

Semi-Structured Interview

A qualitative interview process that is more dialogical than traditional interviews, incorporating both predetermined questions and extemporaneous questions.

The View from Nowhere

A concept originating in Enlightenment-era empirical knowledge production claiming value-neutrality, disinterestedness, and objectivity while obscuring its own positionality and historical ties to colonialism.

Crisis of Representation

A movement in anthropology during the 1980s-90s that questioned traditional authority, power dynamics, and the methods of representing research subjects.

Situated Knowledge

The theoretical stance articulated by Donna Haraway asserting that all knowledge is situated, partial, and incomplete.

Reflexivity

The thoughtful consideration and explicit acknowledgement of one's own biases, assumptions, and positionality as a researcher.

Studying Up

Ethnographic research conducted on elite people, powerful figures, and privileged spaces.

Engaged Anthropology

An approach to ethnographic research conducted as solidarity and activism in support of the community being studied.

Boasian Anthropology

An anthropological paradigm, associated with Franz Boas, that disproved the scientific rationale for nineteenth-century colonialism.