ABSTRACT
The objective of anthropology, I believe, is to seek a generous, comparative but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit. The objective of ethnography is to describe the lives of people other than ourselves, with an accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and prolonged first-hand experience. My aim, in this final chapter, is to demonstrate that anthropology and ethnography are endeavours of quite different kinds. This is not to claim that the one is more important than the other, or more honourable. Nor is it to deny that they depend on one another in significant ways. It is simply to assert that they are not the same. Indeed this might seem like a statement of the obvious, and so it would be were it not for the fact that it has become commonplace – at least over the last quarter of a century – for writers in our subject to treat the two as virtually equivalent, exchanging anthropology for ethnography more or less on a whim, as the mood takes them, or even exploiting the supposed synonymy as a stylistic device to avoid verbal repetition. Many colleagues to whom I have informally put the question have told me that in their view there is little if anything to distinguish anthropological from ethnographic work. Most are convinced that ethnography lies at the core of what anthropology is all about. For them, to suggest otherwise seems almost anachronistic. It is like going back to the bad old days – the days, some might say, of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. For it was he who, in laying the foundations for what – in the early decades of the twentieth century – was the new science of social anthropology, insisted on the absolute distinction between ethnography and anthropology.
