ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of ethnographic practice, defines ethnography in an interpretivist context, and provides critiques of ethnography. Ethnography is usually defined as a research method in which the researcher spends a specific, usually prolonged, length of time engaging directly with a particular social group. The body of the ethnographer can be thought of as the research instrument. Ethnographers are data sieves, absorbing vitalities of sensory empirical information and reconfiguring that information into new, different forms. The history of ethnography is broad, and the author's attempt here to summarize it is necessarily underdeveloped. Ethnography as a method for understanding peoples and social interactions arose from two academic disciplines, sociology and anthropology. Denzin emphasizes the social change potential of contemporary ethnography. He writes, "Ethnography is more than record of human experience. The ethnographer writes tiny moral tales, tales that do more than celebrate cultural difference, or bring another culture alive".
