ABSTRACT
Ethnography as a method is integral to anthropological research. The present chapter focuses on ethnography, tracing its origin to European Enlightenment and growth of sciences. The chapter argues how colonialism came in handy enabling conditions of governance under which ethnography’s interest in the quintessential other or other cultures grew. Apart from providing a brief overview of ethnography’s emergence in the Indian context, the chapter also documents the debates – debates of the late eighties when ethnography as a positivist practice came under the scanner – which occasion a critical rethinking of ethnography as an instrument of anthropological imagination.
