ABSTRACT
Positivism has a long history in philosophy, but in methodological terms it reached its high point in the ‘logical positivism’ of the 1930s and 1940s. Ethnography is one of many methodological approaches that can be found within social research. This chapter explores and assess a number of methodological ideas that have shaped ethnography over the course of its history. It looks at some more ideas that have shaped the thinking and practice of ethnographers. There is no sharp distinction even between ethnography and the study of individual life histories, as the example of ‘auto/ethnography’ shows; this referring to an individual researcher’s study of her or his own life and its context, with a view to illuminating more general social processes. Furthermore, in the later decades of the twentieth century, ethnography spread even further, for example into psychology and human geography, in the company of other qualitative methods.
