Concepts

Ethnography

Citation Formats

General Reference

Science Atlas. "Ethnography." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/ethnography.

APA Style

Science Atlas. (n.d.). Ethnography. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/ethnography

BibTeX

@misc{scienceatlas-ethnography,
  author = {Science Atlas},
  title = {Ethnography},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/ethnography},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Ethnography is both the fieldwork practice of living among a community to record its social life at first hand and the descriptive written account that fieldwork produces. It developed as anthropology's central method through Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork and Boas's insistence on direct observation over armchair theorizing from travelers' reports, and it remains the discipline's primary evidence gathering method, carried out through techniques including participant observation and structured and unstructured interviews.

Facts

Proposed Year

1922 1

the subject's own accountYear of Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the canonical text establishing modern participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork.

Proposed Bythe subject's own account

Bronislaw Malinowski 1

Cross-Tradition Connections