Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 72

Ethnography is the creation of a detailed account of what a group of people do and the way they live, usually entailing much more intensive, immersive, and lengthy periods of observation (sometimes participant) than traditional sociological observation requires. Researchers may live for years with the groups, tribes, or subcultures (such as gamblers) being studied. Normally ethnographies are small in scale, micro, and local. Researchers observe people, talk to them, hang out with them, sometimes live with them, and conduct formal and informal interviews with them over an extended period of time.

The ethnographic method has now been extended to the global level. Michael Burawoy (2000; see also Kenway and McCarthy 2016; Tsuda, Tapias, and Escandell 2014) argues that a global ethnography is the best way to understand globalization. This type of ethnography is grounded in various parts of the world and seeks to understand globalization as it exists in people’s social lives.

Interviews and observation are among the tools of ethnographic research. Here an ethnographer visits members of an indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Amy Toensing/National Geographic Creative