Ethnographic approaches

Anthropology comes in many guises, often referred to as the four pillars of archaeology, physical anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. For the study of politics, the most relevant pillar is cultural anthropology. But what is cultural anthropology? The usual answer is a puzzle – ‘ethnography is what cultural anthropologist do’. However, the practices of ethnography are not confined to anthropology. It is a major approach in sociology. Irrespective of discipline, everyone employing ethnography owes a major debt to the Chicago School and Whyte’s (1993 [1943] famous study of Street Corner Society. In both these disciplines, ‘ethnography does not have a standard, well-defined meaning’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 2).