Ethnography
/ɛθˈnɒɡrəfi/noun
The close description of a living community, written from long firsthand observation.
The Greek roots
Literally: “writing about peoples”
The story of the word
ἔθνος was looser than nation. Homer uses it of a body of companions, a swarm of bees, a crowd of the dead. Scholars in eighteenth-century Göttingen pressed it into service for the systematic description of peoples, and Ethnographie crossed from German into English in the following century. The discipline's insistence on living somewhere for a year first came from Malinowski in the Trobriands, not from the word, which promises only writing about peoples.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German scholarly coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
In a sentence
Her ethnography of night-shift nurses ran to four hundred pages of notes before a line of it was written up.
He spent eighteen months in the village and refused to call the result an ethnography.