Ethnography put communities, rather than humankind, on the map.
It focused on the complexity of separate social units and intricate relations within a system.
In Sapirian linguistics, folklore and descriptive linguistics went hand in hand with linguistic classification and historical-genetic treatments of cultures and societies.
Ethnography viewed systems as non-homogeneous, composed of various features, with part-whole relationships central to interpretation and analysis.
Linguistic classification becomes a domain for articulating theories of culture and cultural dynamics.
As ethnography became more sophisticated, theories of social units like the speech community emerged (Gumperz, 1968).
Problems of interpretation, ontology, and epistemology have always been part of ethnography, along with issues of method versus interpretation.
Dell Hymes stands out in retrieving the historical roots of the larger ethnographic program.
Hymes provided a firm theoretical grounding for ethnography.
Ethnography was a 'descriptive theory': theoretical because it provided description in specific, methodologically and epistemologically grounded ways.
Ethnography's History and Anthropological Roots
A crucial element in discussing ethnography is its history, as its techniques and operation patterns contain traces of intellectual origins.
Ethnography originates in anthropology, containing ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies rooted in anthropology.
Central to this is humanism: Anthropology’s task is to coordinate knowledge about language from the viewpoint of man (Hymes, 1964: xiii).
Language is approached as relevant to humans, seen as creatures linked to society, community, the group, culture.
Language from an anthropological perspective is captured in a functionalist epistemology.
Questions about language address how it works for humans-as-social-beings.
Implications of Humanist and Functionalist Background
Language is seen as a socially loaded tool for humans, enabling them to perform as social beings.
Language is defined as a resource used, deployed, and exploited by humans in social life.
There is no 'context-less' language in the anthropological tradition in ethnography.
Language always has a particular function, shape, mode of operation, and relations between acts and wider patterns.
Language is context, the architecture of social behavior, and part of social structure and social relations.
Ethnography's roots in anthropology situate language deeply in social life, offering a distinct ontology and epistemology.
Ethnography's design fits an anthropological set of questions, important for understanding its capabilities.
Failure to remember this can confuse anthropological thinking and research (Hymes, 1964: xxvii).
Resources and Dialectics in Ethnography
Language is viewed as a set of resources available to humans in societies.
Every act of language use is assessed and weighed socially.
Language is socially and culturally embedded because it is socially and culturally consequential in use.
Hymes differentiates between a linguistic notion of language and an ethnographic notion of speech.
Language, for linguists, has little significance for language users.
Speech is language-in-society, situated in a web of power relations, availability, accessibility, and historical patterns.
Speech is language with social, cultural, political, and individual-emotional investments, brought under social control.
Studying language means studying society, addressing different meanings, effects, performativities, and functions than mainstream linguistics.
There is nothing static in the ethnographic view of language; it appears as performance.
Strict synchrony is impossible, as deploying linguistic resources is a process.
Understanding this process requires attention to 'non-linguistic' matters.
Ethnography triggered developments in sociology (Bourdieu), kinesics, non-verbal behavior, and social semiotics (Goffman, Garfinkel, Goodwin).
The distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic is artificial, as language is situated in wider patterns of human social behavior.
The ethnographic principle of situatedness specifies intricate connections between various aspects of this complex.
Critical Potential of Ethnography
Constant feedback between communicative actions and social relations involves reflections on the value of communicative practices.
Society imposes hierarchies and value scales on language.
Linguistic practice provides an image of power workings and inequality structures.
Critical studies on education have been produced using an ethnographic perspective (Cook-Gumperz, 1988; Gee, 1996; Heller, 2000; Rampton, 1995).
Critiques formulated from within ethnography against other language scholars are about the nature of language-power relationships (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000; Blommaert et al., 2001).
Central to this critique is the notion of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000; Woolard et al., 1998): sociocultural ideas of language users about language and communication that appear to direct language behavior and the interpretation of language acts, also accounting for folk and official rankings of linguistic varieties.
Object-level ('acts' themselves) and metalevel (ideas and interpretations) cannot be separated.
Social value is an intrinsic part of language usage, marking the social situatedness of acts.
Patterns of interpretation require acknowledgment and interactional co-construction.
Strict synchronicity is impossible, with a processual and historical dimension to every act of language-in-society (Silverstein & Urban, 1996).
Rankings and hierarchies of language are an area of perpetual debate and conflict (Blommaert, 1999).
The social dimension of language blends linguistic and metalinguistic levels in communication, where actions proceed with an awareness of how they should proceed in specific social environments.
Every language act is intrinsically historical.
Knowledge of language facts is processual and historical, lifting single instances of talk to a higher level of relevance.
They become indexical of wider scope patterns, part of ethnographic interpretation.
Static interpretations of context are anathema (Fabian, 1983, 1995).
Ethnographic work involves active involvement from the ethnographer.
Ethnography has a dynamic and dialectical epistemology where the ethnographer's ignorance is a crucial point of departure (Fabian, 1995).
Ethnography attributes importance to the history of 'data': the process of gathering and molding knowledge is part of that knowledge.
Fieldwork results in an archive of research, documenting the researcher’s journey through knowledge.
Knowledge of language cannot be separated from the situatedness of the object at various levels, involving knowledge production acts by ethnographers.
Ethnography as Counter-Hegemony
Ethnography has the potential to challenge established views of language and symbolic capital.
It can construct a discourse on social uses of language and social dimensions of meaningful behavior that differs from established norms.
It takes the concrete functioning of these norms as starting points for questioning them.
Central is mapping resources onto functions: how a standard variety acquires the function of 'medium of education' while a non-standard variety would not.
This mapping is socially controlled, not a feature of language but of society.
Ethnography becomes critique: the attributed function of particular resources is often a kind of social imagination, a percolation of social structure into language structure.
Ethnography deconstructs this imagination and compares it to observable real forms and functions.
Whereas most approaches aim for simplification and reduction of complexity, ethnography aims to describe and explain it.
Ethnography seeks to describe the messy and complex activities that make up social action.
The procedure is 'democratic': a mutual relation of interaction and adaptation between ethnographers and the people they work with (Hymes, 1980: 89).
The Ethnographic Argument
Ethnography is an inductive science: it works from empirical evidence towards theory.
Ethnography belongs to other scientific disciplines in which induction is the rule – history, law and archaeology are close neighbours.
Inductive sciences apply the case method: using case analyses to demonstrate theory.
A case is not simply a report of an event; it makes a theoretical claim.
Data become cases by applying theoretical models.
Generalization depends on the theoretical apparatus brought to bear onto the data (Shulman, 1986: 12).
Data framed in a Marxist perspective will focus on class distinctions, and generalizations will be about class issues.
Choices are determined by research preparation and goals.
Generalization is possible because data instantiate a case, belonging to a larger category of cases.
Unique events reveal a lot about big things in society.
The case method builds upon the 'evidential or conjectural paradigm' (Ginzburg, 1989): using facts as its point of departure.
The facts generate hypotheses that can then be verified.
This is epitomized by Sherlock Holmes, and in clinical medicine.
Ginzburg finds ancient roots in divination.
These disciplines are highly qualitative, involving the study of individual cases with a speculative margin (Ginzburg, 1989: 106).
These all fall under the umbrella of every truly social science.
Chomsky’s linguistics was an attempt to bring the study of language into the orbit of Galilean science.