ABSTRACT
Ethnography has come to be much discussed in education. Often enough one hears some form of the question, ‘What is ethnography?’ The National Institute of Education commissioned a report to answer the question. All this might be puzzling to an anthropologist, especially to one with an interest in the history of the subject. If one traces the history of ethnography where it leads, one goes back centuries, indeed, to the ancient Mediterranean world, and the temporary rise and fall of ethnographic inquiry there, Herodotus being its most famous, but not only, exemplar. With regard just to the Americas, one can trace a fairly continuous history of ethnographic reports, interacting with the posing of ethnological questions, from the first discovery of the New World. There is a considerable modern literature on the practice of fieldwork, both in general and with regard to specific techniques, and more recently, ethics. A book addressed to ethnography in our own society (Spradley and McCurdy, 1972) has been used by teachers of composition to stimulate topics for their students. If ethnography is new to some in education, certainly it is not new to the world. When asked, ‘What is ethnography?’, would it not be enough to provide a short reading list, or to point to the discussion in some text of what research proposals often refer to as ‘standard ethnographic method’?
