ABSTRACT
My introduction to ethnography came as a first-year social anthropology undergraduate. My first week of lectures was on Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (see Young 1979), given by a deeply charismatic lecturer who had spent years doing ethnographic field research in the Amazon. By the end of that week, I had learnt two basic ‘truths’: first, that ethnographic field research was what social anthropologists ‘did’ and, second, that Malinowski was the ‘founding father’ of all things ethnographic. Furthermore, ethnography entailed long-term participant observation in farflung, ‘exotic’ places, where the researcher might even ‘go native’ (that is over-identify with the research participants and thus lose all sense of objectivity), and that was not necessarily a bad thing. To my class of first-year social anthropologists it all seemed exciting, glamorous and far superior to anything the sociology or psychology students were doing with their questionnaire-based surveys or lab experiments. At that stage, we did not see that these established ‘truths’ were more akin to ‘myths’ and highly problematic in relation to representation, power, ethics, and many other related methodological (and political) issues. We had not yet read Malinowski’s diary (1967) or engaged with the debates that ensued within the discipline (see for example Okely 1975 and Geertz 1984). Also, we had not yet come across ethnography in other social science disciplines: we thought ethnography was purely the domain of the social anthropologist.
