Ethnography is an investigation and the systematic recording of human cultures. Culture is defined by Massey as being "...made up of certain values, practices, relationships and identifications." Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience, which is socially transmitted.
Ethnography is one of the qualitative methods used in anthropology, which is a study of human beings (in social, cultural and even biological context). As a method, it requires complete immersion of the researcher or ethnographer in the field amidst the participants s(he) is studying, for a prolonged duration.
Here ‘field’ means the natural setting that forms the place of study, while subjects or participants are the people or community or a group that you are interacting with and learning about.
The standard duration of an ethnographic study is a minimum of one year, where the researcher experiences at least one cycle of seasons. However this is not applicable when researchers are examining a particular event or activities. For example, the Ganesh festival, which is held only for 10 days, or festival of Holi, which takes place once a year for a day. In this case the researchers immerse themselves for the duration of the event but may spend a good amount of time before and after the event. Such events may be visited for several years many times to look for patterns.
Ethnographic research is synchronic, meaning observing events as they unfold in time. This method therefore becomes most suitable to study events and activities that are present, current and in vogue such as a study of artisans at work, marriage rituals etc. The study involves documentation although it goes beyond documentation to reflect on the activity and draw analysis from these reflections.
The earliest ethnographic study is attributed to Herodotus in third century BCE. Herodotus, also known as the father of history learnt about cultures by traveling extensively and documenting traditions and sociopolitical practices amongst people.
Ethnography was employed by colonists to study and understand the local populations whom they referred to as natives. Examples of British ethnographers in colonial India include John Forbes Watson, John William Kaye, Sir Herbert Hope Risley and Verrier Elwin. Ethnography is sometimes termed as exploitative because of its colonial origins but contemporary ethnographers are countering this by engaging in collaborative ethnography. That is by involving the participants themselves in the study.
When is visual ethnography most useful?
Traditionally, ethnography was referred to as writing about culture. Therefore the written description occupied an important place in an ethnographic study. Earlier, ethnographers used images as illustrations or visual proofs/evidence of events and activities. But certain topics lend themselves better to visual explanations along with written ones. Video and photography would be the most suitable to explain how artisans craft their products by hand rather than written descriptions of the same. For example, crafts like pottery or embroidery.
Visual ethnography can be explained as the use of visual methods like photography, video, sketching to gather data and express reality of a group of people. In visual ethnography you can research the visual and/or research with visuals. The objective is to describe people and their activities in natural situations. Findings of visual ethnographic research can be presented with images and media including but not limited to words.
Marcus Banks has classified visual research methods into three categories namely:
• Making visual representations (studying society by producing images)
• Examining pre-existing visual representations(studying images for information about society)
• Collaborating with social actors in the production of visual representations(also known as participatory research).
Difference between ethnography and documentation
Visual ethnography is different from documentation in its intent and requires more time. For example, to find out how an artisan works, you may request her to show you how she makes craft products and take a few pictures of it. And then you will have a documentation of how a particular craft product is made. But in the process, you may miss nuances that you were not looking for. This could possibly alter the way you looked at their craft or community. So documentation is not visual ethnography. Visual ethnography may start with documentation but goes beyond, to examine what role these artifacts play in the life of the artisans. It looks at their (artisans’) behavior, rituals, and belief systems. Once you attempt to conduct visual ethnography you will understand that it is indeed different from documentation.
Difference between ethnography and contextual inquiry
Visual ethnography may sometimes be conflated with contextual inquiry but they are different in terms of their goals. Contextual inquiry aims at uncovering specifics. The main concern for contextual enquiry is to gather data that will help designers in arriving at design solutions for a specific product or service. Visual ethnography is concerned with understanding people and activities in their cultural context rather than arriving at a design solution.
For example, while studying patterns of cell-phone usage in elderly- a contextual enquiry would focus on how and for what the elderly use cell phones. Ease of operation, difficulties of understanding or using the phone features, the most popular phone features etc. While visual ethnography is more open-ended. So for the same topic of study, a visual ethnographer may want to spend a whole day possibly longer observing the elderly in their context (or environment: whether at their house or park where they go for walks), not focusing on any particular aspect, but gathering as much data (visual/textual) about how elderly spend time, their habits, and their point of view and in that process uncover several insights about life of the elderly that go beyond cell phone usage alone. A visual ethnographer would be interested in understanding how the cell phone becomes a part of the life of elderly.
Here is an example of visual ethnography: A researcher studying non-agrarian livelihood sources amongst tribal hamlets in the Sahyadri Mountains, Western Ghats, Maharashtra is seen here participating in festivities prior to a community wedding in the village. This gives the researcher a great opportunity to break ice with women of the hamlet in their natural setting.
All the women in the picture are rolling balls of rice flour and turmeric powder called ‘Unda’ to be distributed to those who will visit the brides’ homes to offer gifts and blessings.
Picture courtesy: Ms. Lubhyathi Rangarajan