ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the power of doing ethnography in gender and natural resource management research contexts, and its capacity to understand the plurality of knowledges and with that, bridge diverse groups’ understandings of society in interaction with the natural world. Ethnography is a research approach integral to the discipline of anthropology, which typically relies on the researcher’s immersion in social settings through a sustained engagement with people’s complex, everyday lives. In technical research environments, such as forest research institutes, ethnographers have to wear their ‘boots-on-the ground’ and engage with local communities, whilst at the same time collaborating with professional teams from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. A perennial challenge for anthropologists working in interdisciplinary development contexts is to develop knowledge that ‘works’ within the logics of dominant networks within the organisation and/or project in which they are based: a challenge that is also faced in gender research.
