I was reading recently in Weiss’ book Learning From Strangers, and was struck by one simple passage at the start of its second chapter. Put simply, it stated that the goal of any research, ethnography included, was to answer a question - to provide some information that wasn’t previously known.

This is a common-sensical statement in the context of most research, but I think ethnography is different. In the last 30 years or so, anthropologists (especially applied anthropologists) have developed the habit of delivering the final ethnography to the group under study, and gathering their reactions as a sort of postscript. When I have done this in the past, I have encountered a reaction that I think many ethnographers have: the study participants all say ‘Duh! We knew that!’

In the context of ethnography I consider this the mark of success, not of failure. Here’s why:

1. The goal of ethnography should be to write down things that the people themselves would have written down if they’d tried. It’s the mark of having successfully gained insight into the true nature of a culture.

2. Someone who can recognize a true thing when they see it couldn’t necessarily write it down if you asked them to. Ethnographers help to codify the tacit knowledge that people act on in the course of everyday life. In this sense they are not creating new knowledge, but instead putting it into a new form.

3. Ethnography is holistic, comparative, and contextual. By synthesizing mulitple views and highlighting cultural contrasts, ethnographers can aggregate new understandings from existing knowledge. This is the true contribution of the ethnographer, I think, and it’s reflected in the title of Michael Agar’s fantastic book The Professional Stranger. Ethnographers ride a fine edge between participating enough in a culture to begin understanding it as a native would, while at the same time maintaining enough distance to maintain perspective.

I suppose in the end you could argue that this is indeed creating new knowledge… but not in the sense that other research does. It’s convenient for those in other fields (especially people who frown on qualitative methods) to suggest that ethnography produces nothing. But I doubt those same people get the satisfaction that I do when someone reads what I’ve written, and says ‘Duh!’