ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how both can be understood within the ambit of an ethnographic approach to the social world. Fieldworkers understandably focus much of their attention on what people do and say. But that should not blind to the significance of other aspects of social life and sources of data, such as documents and artefacts. Documents and artefacts are as much ‘social’ as any other phenomena. They are created using socially shared cultural conventions and resources. Western societies place a particular weight on written documents, ‘official’ and ‘personal’. Documents, of whatever kind, are produced by particular people on specific occasions, for particular purposes, and aimed at some audience, or set of audiences. Sometimes documents are written with the benefit of hindsight, and are thus subject to the usual problems of long-term recall. The use of personal documents has been important from early on in the development of modern sociology.
