ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how ethnographers identify and differentiate key details of their fieldwork. In 1901 British colonial troops overran the West African kingdom of Asante, amalgamating it into the colony of Gold Coast. Twenty-six years later, Captain Robert S. Rattray, anthropologist and officer in the British administration in West Africa, published an ethnographic monograph, Religion and Art in Ashanti. By ‘differentiation’ mean, then, the way certain features are distinguished and highlighted as having an integral importance within the overall interpretation, while other aspects are left in a more indistinct background. Ethnographers foreground and isolate those specific features that bear on the question in hand, describing only those aspects of experience that they think are significant for understanding a practice, a belief or a people. Ethnography is built out of a reflection on fieldwork. The experience of fieldwork is inherently diverse in its potential.
