ABSTRACT
We conclude our book by reviewing the key methods from each chapter, and by reaffirming the importance of employing methods, including but not limited to the ones presented in this book, capable of operationalizing “culture” and communicating data across disciplinary divides. We argue that the tools presented in this book not only enhance but are ethnography. For those unfamiliar with the term, “ethnography” refers to a case study account of a specific group’s practices and points of view. Historically, ethnographers have relied largely on qualitative interviews and field-based methods like “participant-observation.” Immersed as participant-observers in naturalistic social settings, ethnographers engage in typically long-term face-to-face interactions with members of a specific group, complementing firsthand experience and self-reflection with more distanced and objective observations of everyday life. We concur that qualitative interview and participatory methods provide effective ways to capture what Clifford Geertz has been famously referred to as “the native’s point of view.” But the cultural domain analysis techniques we present, when used in conjunction with ethnographic methods, can help researchers even more effectively capture local points of view. Though ethnographers have more typically eschewed numeric thinking, we instead argue in this book for the value of a “mixed” qualitative-quantitative approach to cultural research.
