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The ethnographic approach to studying people in their social and cultural context has a long history, most readily traced back to the work of social and cultural anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; where anthropological scholars became concerned with studying and understanding ‘other’ societies through close, lived engagement. For example, scholars in the first quarter of the twentieth century, among them the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the English social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, developed the idea of immersion and engagement in a setting in order to understand the human condition. Reflecting their time, such scholars drew on particular understandings and experiences of colonial life, undertaking anthropological fieldwork, often for extended periods of time, in places such as Africa and the Pacific Islands, in order to examine the ways in which ‘other’ societies functioned and were structured. The approach they took was, at the time in question, a significant departure in relation to researching traditional cultures, representing a move away from an evolutionary approach to societal development, towards a more detailed exploration of the everyday, practical accomplishment of social life through institutions and relationships. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that colonial influences had significant impact on the ways in which these ‘traditional’ societies operated, and indeed came to be understood by anthropological inquiry. That is, there is a persuasive argument that the anthropological gaze served to compound some of the very impact of colonial rule; extended anthropological field trips, often including long periods of residence, arguably did much to perpetuate the colonial ‘othering’ of particular cultures and people. A specific example of this is Malinowski’s ethnographies of the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean, of which one of the most cited works was titled The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929); such a title is almost unthinkable in contemporary postcolonial times.

In North America, the anthropological interest at the turn of the twentieth century was somewhat closer to home. Rather than focusing on distant ‘other’ cultures and societies, North American scholars developed a social–cultural anthropological approach to studying (and in some ways reconstructing) the cultural life of ‘native’ American peoples. One such researcher, Franz Boas, a German physicist turned US anthropologist, was particularly influential in developing the anthropological interest in culture and language. Dismissive of what were then evolutionary approaches to the study of culture (and indeed also of biological–scientific racism), Boas articulated more nuanced understandings of difference between societies or social groups as a result of social learning – that is, as differences of culture rather than of biology. In so doing, Boas developed the important anthropological concept of cultural relativism – which might usefully be described as both an imperative and a willingness to suspend one’s own cultural assumptions in order to understand social structures, belief systems and practices from within a culture. Cultural relativism provided a framework for studying and seeking to understand a culture on and in its own terms through its own cultural frame of reference. Boas helped to shape cultural anthropology in the USA and across the world, with many of his students, such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, going on to influence the discipline over the course of the twentieth century.

While there were differences in the development of the social and cultural anthropological traditions across both sides of the Atlantic, in relation to both choice of sites for study and the lens through which societies were seen, there were also considerable similarities of practice. These early pioneers of what came to be identified as ethnography advocated a prolonged engagement with the society or culture to be studied, with immersion of the researcher held up as a standard to which ethnographers should aspire. That is, there was recognition of fieldwork in the setting as a means to understanding the everyday practices in and of that setting. Ethnographic research does not have to involve extended engagement, perhaps over several months or years, or full participation and immersion on the part of the researcher within the culture. However, the very idea of understanding a setting from the point of view of those engaged in that setting, and doing so through on the ground engagement in and with that setting, remains a powerful underpinning of contemporary ethnographic approaches.

The School of Sociology at the University of Chicago is often credited with bringing ethnography to wider sociological attention, drawing on anthropological sensibilities in more mundane research settings. Founded in 1892, the Chicago School was the first dedicated university department of sociology, and is responsible for helping to shape the social sciences, both empirically and methodologically. With an emphasis on urban sociology, The Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s theorized about the city, drawing on ethnographic research of Chicago and its environs. Chicago scholars encouraged their students to get first-hand experience of social life in different parts of the city. To do so they adapted the idea of engaged fieldwork, including participant observation, to study the contemporary urban cityscape. The journalist Robert Park, alongside Ernest Burgess and W.I. Thomas, was a key figure in the development of the Chicago School, bringing with him an early interpretation of investigative journalism, relying on ethnographic methods of sorts – listening, experiencing, asking questions and observing social life first-hand. This brought anthropological ethnographic methods ‘home’, using participant observation to study familiar and everyday settings on the doorstep, as opposed to the study of the ‘exotic’ or ‘different’ that had been favoured by early social and cultural anthropologists.

Park and his colleagues transformed the study of the city, through close and varied empirical and ethnographic inquiry. Following the Second World War, this influence endured, with students learning about and practising interpretative sociology and ethnographic methods with scholars such as Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer. This ‘second’ Chicago School was a key influence in shaping the development of post-war American sociology, and indeed the discipline more generally (Fine, 1995). The Chicago School approach is credited with influencing the ways in which social institutions are studied and understood by sociologists; this influence has been wide reaching, including in fields such as health care and education, as well as organizational studies more generally. The way was also paved for the wider adoption of qualitative research methods in the medium term, grounded in and emergent from ethnography. This influence though was not just in relation to methods of inquiry, but also relatedly to sociological theory and methodology. The Chicago School was pivotal in the development of the theoretical perspective and frameworks of symbolic interactionism. Drawing on the philosophical work of George Herbert Mead, symbolic interactionism focused on shared meanings that are generated and maintained through social interaction. While not exclusively so, symbolic interactionism has been particularly associated with ethnography and qualitative research methods, with its emphasis on meaning and process, and ‘where acts, objects and people have evolving and intertwined local identities that may not be revealed at the outset or to an outsider’ (Rock, 2001, p. 29). In the next section the theoretical and methodological frames of and for ethnography are further explored.