Ethnography is the accountancy of the data observed in field work. Field work and Ethnography cannot be dissociated from each other. If going to the people, participation in their lives with the intention of collection reliable data and information is field work, then writing a coherent account of people on the basis of whatever has been observed listened and learned by the field worker is Ethnography.
As such, Ethnography is defined as a descriptive account of the way of life of people living at a time in a particular society.
All social-cultural anthropology is fundamentally based upon Ethnographic data. It provides the raw material of theory building and testing that makes anthropology a science. It thus provides the facts with which both ethnology and social anthropology have to deal.
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Old Ethnography:
The word ‘old ethnography’ came in to light first time in the mid 19th century. In his book, ‘The Natural History of Man’ (1943), J. C. Pritchard distinguished the descriptive study of Ethnography from the history of nations he termed as Ethnology.
E. B. Tylor in his book ‘Primitive Culture’ (1871) did not maintain the distinction clearly though, he described the development of culture as ‘a branch of Ethnological Research’.
But A. H. Kane (1896) described that the various groups of peoples taken independently one of the other constituted the subject matter of Ethnography which was purely descriptive and dealt with the characteristics, usages social and political conditions of peoples irrespective of their possible physical relations or affinities.
Earlier, ethnographers and socio-cultural anthropologists or ethnologists need not be the strata persons. The 19th century ethnologists used ethnographic descriptions of exotic people provided by the missionaries, administrators and travelers.
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These descriptions were often inaccurate and unreliable. But today field work for the social anthropologist means becoming an ethnographer. Ethnography thus refers to the in-depth study of a single people or a small number of related peoples.
After a prolonged stay in the field and collecting all detailed information and facts, he returns back to his study to get busy with writing the account of the people he has studied and setting his data in theoretical framework where he is working as an ethnologist. Ethnology as such, is a comparative study of people from the ethnographies that have been produced about them.
Social anthropologists are more than ethnographers and even more than ethnologists. Besides translating their field data and comparing with such data provided by other ethnographers (Social Anthropologies), they adopt scientific method for presenting has conclusions. This is the way most of the data obtained from consistent field work and ethnographic descriptions became the basis for anthropological theory.
New Ethnography:
Cognitive anthropology resembles with ‘ethno science’ or even with ethno-semantics. This entails a relatively new and some controversially perspective in cultural and social anthropology.
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Its major emphasis is on the development of structuralism, but it accords crucial importance to the empirical data as well as theoretical abstraction. Its conceptual mould is adopted from ‘Phonemics’, the branch of linguistics that seeks an objective, value free means of recording the sound systems of language.
Ethno science has important epistemological links with ethno-semantics as they both entail extensive methodological attention to asserting the meaning ascribed to the various aspects of culture or elements of language by the natives themselves i.e., by the participants of culture and users of the language begin studied.
A major objective in this ethnographic approach is the development of an ethnography that states the rules of appropriate or acceptable cultural behaviour in much the same way as a grammar can be used to state and predict linguistic behaviour.
The adequacy of the anthropologists’ ethnographic description is measured by the extent to which it provides an accurate and economical basis for prediction of natives’ responses under all culturally possible circumstances.
In the 20th century, many prominent spokesmen, representing a nominally vide variety of theoretical positions; have exhorted anthropologists to give priority to ’emic’ analysis. While Lowic stressed upon understanding ‘the inwardness’ of the beliefs and practices of the people being studied by a field worker, Kluckhohn talked about ‘setting down of events as seem by the people under study’ as the primary task of anthropologists.
In the same vein, Malinowski wrote about ‘grasping natives’ point of view ‘as the final goal of the ethnographer’. In British social anthropology, the over whelming commitment to the analysis of descent, infirmity filiations prescriptive and preferential alliances sufficiently establish the ’emic thrusts’ of their research interests.
The emic bias of New Ethnography got infused with a mentalist of recent origin. Linguistics was the source of this mentalism. Del Hymes has traced this influence in terms of sapir’s ‘complimentary distribution’, Jochkobson’s ‘distinctive features’ and ‘Chomskyian generative grammar’. The linguistic model has also influenced French and British anthropologists who are converging towards an emic strategy where logic and reason have upper hand replacing empathic humanist emic approach.
The mentalist of Levi-Strauss and his American counterparts, stressing upon logical functions of mind as opposed to emotional and irrational components, have shown a departure from the previous emic approaches.
This new approach has also the notion as it’s basis that anthropology must be emic if it is to be any thing at all. In new ethnography, culture is a timeless system of logical categories.
The Ethnosemantists insist that the cultural field of inquiry is only definable in emic terms, emic in new linguistic sense. Thus, the goal of New Ethnography is to arrive at a description and analysis of a culture as a member of that culture would see it free from the biases of the outsider.