ABSTRACT
Ethnography has become a popular term in both the social sciences and the humanities. In sum, ethnography is a description of social behaviour in a particular culture, which results from extended and usually face-to-face fieldwork. To do ethnography is more than the conceptual learning that mediates between academic theoretical knowledge and knowledge of other cultures; it also implies learning to do research through the acknowledgement of native methodologies that render meaning to social life. Any technique, in-depth interviews, participant observation, rightly applied may be useful regardless of the topic of research or of the researcher's persona, as long as it fits the principles of reliability and validity. Techniques are said to gather, but ethnographers can learn about their research topics by analyzing the ways in which techniques are used in specific social situations. Information thus gathered becomes data that constitute the evidence of a thesis as portrayed by the ethnographic text.
