Introduction

Ethnography is an empathetic analysis of culture most often through participant observation, interviews, and archival or discourse analysis; it is the dominant methodology of anthropology. Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures describes both the aims and the activity of ethnography:

establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Ryle, “thick description”.

(1973: 6)