Who should conduct ethnography?

Ethnographic research was long deemed best conducted by someone from outside the culture being researched. Outsiders don’t make assumptions about what is normal and can enquire into the most obvious aspects of social life.

So, much early ethnographic research was conducted in this fashion, often by white, middle class ethnographers, researching non-white, poor subjects. From the 1970s onwards, however, the assumption that outsiders make the best ethnographers has been strongly criticised. Particularly in the post-colonial context, the idea of white men going to study primitive people is increasingly questioned.

Ethnographies conducted in the 1940s and 1950s are criticised as biased and partial accounts, driven by the needs of the colonial administration. These criticisms were strongly influenced by Edward Said’s brilliant book, Orientalism: western conceptions of the orient (1978). Said’s book is fascinating and accessible, and he makes a compelling argument that western scholars created an image of a static, primitive, exotic ‘orient’ as a justification for colonial domination.

Through such thinking, a strong argument was made in favour of ‘native ethnographers’ or ‘insider accounts’, research conducted by those within the culture. Insiders, it is argued, are better positioned to understand a culture’s subtleties. They are, in addition, better placed to develop trust and rapport, and are less likely to exploit the participants. Some post-colonial theory is dense and is not written in the most accessible style. (Spivak 1987; 1990). But practical anthropological work, such as Renato Rosaldo’s book, Culture and Truth: the re-making of social analysis (1989), can be inspiring.

Rosaldo suggests that traditional ethnography served the interests of the colonial states and oppressed the people it studied. He argues convincingly, however, that the method can recover from its tainted past if ethnographers acknowledge its limitations and realise that what they create is an interpretation of reality, not an objective reflection of it.

How do these insider/outsider debates affect us? In the commercial world we are accustomed to thinking that we can interview anyone, or observe any social group. We don’t believe only women can interview women, only black people can interview black people, or teenagers can interview teenagers. We could, however, think about training members of a community being researched to conduct their own observations or interviews.

Most of us will have noticed that when respondents in groups talk to each other, the quality of their conversation is different from when they talk to the moderator - more natural, more relaxed, more genuinely interested. So might this be even more relevant to ethnographic observations? Perhaps the best ethnographer for a project researching eight year olds is an eight-year-old child. Maybe a project researching drug prevention is best conducted by an ex-heroin addict, rather than a middle class researcher with no experience of addiction.

Obviously, you can’t hand over the whole project to schoolchildren or drugs workers, but we could certainly make greater use of the insights they might gain and which we could not access. We might consider a more collaborative approach to ethnography, working more closely with individuals genuinely immersed in the culture of interest.
 

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