ABSTRACT
We have referred at various points in this book to ethnographic work and its value in making sense of the creative aspects of culture as lived and experienced by specific social groups. In this chapter we elaborate on ethnography as a methodology as a way of identifying and gathering ‘data’ to empirically inform our understanding of lived cultural experience. We comment on the fruitfulness of ethnography in the study of sport, and on the value of a ‘culturalist’ inflection to ethnography as a mode of inquiry.Within this discussion we locate ethnography within Cultural Studies, while making relevant connections to the closely related sociological tradition of ethnography. Our considerations of empirical examples and possibilities from sport cover sport spectator and supporter and sport participant contexts. We believe that the discussion indicates not only that sport is an important area of cultural life that should be studied by ethnographic means, but also that debates that have occurred between ethnographers focusing on sporting contexts have significant implications for the controversies that rage on within ethnography about such issues as the biographical positioning of the researcher, the authorial status of the ethnographer and the ethics of fieldwork. The chapter commences with a consideration of ethnography within the culturalist tradition and provides evidence of a culturalist ethnographic influence within writing on sport.We then move on to discuss the knowledge status of ethnographic research with a view to assessing the ability of ethnography to inform us about what is going on in particular cultural domains and how people engage with sporting cultures in ways meaningful to them.
