What Is the Difference between Anthropology and Ethnography?

(Feel free to check out my follow-up article to this one about rethinking the role of ethnography in anthropology as well.)

A friend recently asked me, “What’s the difference between anthropology and ethnography?” When I tell them I am an anthropologist, people have asked me this question – phrased in slightly different ways – enough times that I am writing this article to answer it for anyone who might be wondering what the difference is.

To situate his question, he explained how other anthropologists he had worked with would often contrast anthropological work with mere ethnography, but that he never understood the difference. That has generally been the experience of people I have talked to who have asked me this question: they have recently encountered anthropologists contrasting their work with other ethnographers, something which left them puzzled given how connected anthropology and ethnography has been in their experience.

Ethnography is anthropology’s “methodological baby,” and in my experience, the anthropology vs ethnography conversation is typically a way for anthropologists to process others’ increasing utilization of ethnography.  Thus, to those looking in from the outside like my friend, this discussion within anthropology about the differences can seem perplexing.

The Short-Answer

The short answer is that anthropology is a discipline while ethnography is a methodology. Anthropology refers to the study of human cultures and humanity in general. Ethnography is a methodological approach to learning about a culture, setting, group, or other context by observing it yourself and/or piecing together the experiences of those there (this article provides an in-depth definition of ethnography).

The field of anthropology has many subdisciplines, ranging from archaeology to linguistics, but in this article, I will focus my discussion on cultural anthropology (the subdiscipline I am a part of). Of all its subdisciplines, cultural anthropology most directly relates to ethnography.

Cultural anthropologists seek to understand contemporary living cultures and societies. They have been instrumental in developing and employing ethnography to understand cultures and other social phenomena. Ethnography has become the most common (but not only) way cultural anthropologists have sought to conduct research.

Thus, the relationship between cultural anthropology and ethnography is that between a discipline and its primary tool that has defined what it means to practice that discipline, like proofs define the field of mathematics or experimentation for the hard sciences.

This sentence sums it up:

In general, cultural anthropologists use ethnography to understand cultures.

It illustrates cultural anthropology’s who, what, and how as a discipline and how each of these key components relates to others. 

There are exceptions to this. Cultural anthropologists do not only use ethnography nor does the word culture describe everything they analyze, but this describes the general relationship between cultural anthropology and ethnography.

This is the short explanation of the difference between anthropology and ethnography. Like textbook explanations, it is accurate but abstract and simplistic. It does not get to the heart of what an anthropologist might be really getting at on when they juxtapose the two. In my experience, when people compare the two, they are reflecting on what they consider anthropological ways of thinking and ethnographic ways of thinking. Hence, here is my long answer, which gets to the bottom of what people are really trying to say.

The Long Answer

There are two angles to consider for the long answer: obstinacy towards others outside anthropology using ethnography and the potential for anthropologists to move beyond traditional ethnography. The former is something we anthropologists must overcome and the latter a set of interesting and innovative prospects for both anthropology and ethnography.

Cultural anthropologists have had a unique relationship with ethnography. The discipline has been instrumental in designing, employing, and promoting the methodology, and with the help of anthropologists, the approach has become a valuable way to understand humans, cultures, and societies. At the same time, ethnography has become increasingly popular in other fields, both academic fields like sociology and political science, and in professional fields like UX research and design, marketing, and organizational management. I think this increasing use of the anthropological tool of ethnography has been marvelous, but multiple disciplines suddenly doing “our thing” has catalyzed identity conflict among some anthropologists.

In my experience, when anthropologists make a sharp distinction between anthropology and ethnography, they are primarily processing this identity conflict. For example, in the ensuring conversation with the person I mentioned in the introduction, I learned that he had recently heard some anthropologists condemn several ethnographies in the field of design where he works as “non-anthropological,” making him wonder what on earth the difference was between being “ethnographic” and “anthropological.” Hence, when I told him I was an anthropologist, he figured he would ask me.

Even if it is at best a historical oversimplification, here is a common narrative I will hear within anthropology: several decades ago, ethnography was the primary domain of anthropologists, but now it seems to be taking on a life of its own, with many others from other fields using it. Others deploying ethnography can have fantastic or horrifying results – and everything in between, but often the implicit and/or explicit assumption in the narrative is that people from other disciplines would generally fail to be able to do as good of a job as a trained anthropologist.

Discussions within anthropology of the similarities and differences between anthropology and ethnography – or between so-called anthropological ways of thinking vs ethnographic ways of thinking, anthropological approaches vs ethnographic approaches, or anthropologists vs ethnographers – have become a major staging ground for processing this seeming recent increase in the popularity of ethnography outside of anthropology.

A few notable perspectives have emerged from these discussions. Some cultural anthropologists promote other methodologies within the discipline either in addition to or instead of ethnographic inquiries (e.g. Arturo Escobar). Others emphasize what anthropologists specifically bring to ethnographic research that others who conduct ethnographic research supposedly cannot (e.g. Tim Ingold). Among the anthropologists I have talked to at least in both the academic and professional settings, I have found the latter to be the most common response: arguing that training in anthropology brings a superior way of thinking about society, cultures, and various social phenomena, which allows trained anthropologists to conduct ethnography better.

Exploring how ethnography might be changing as a wider variety of people use it and anthropologists reflecting on how their discipline has shaped ethnography and ethnography shaped their discipline are commendable. But, this particular way of trying to do both seems like a defensive, “us vs them” response.

In addition to fact that humans seem to very frequently tell themselves “us vs them” narratives, material resources are also at play here. By portraying anthropologists as the only people able to perform “authentic” or “quality” ethnographies, anthropologists can demand competitive resources from potential funders, clients, colleagues, organizations and/or students. This could range from funding for their academic department to being the ones who win the job or contract to conduct qualitative user research at a company.

Whatever factors reinforce this type of defensive response, I believe we anthropologists should instead celebrate the increasing flowering of ethnography and embrace how others might reformulate the methodology to meet their needs. It is an opportunity to crosspollinate and enliven what it means to do ethnography.

A final response by cultural anthropologists has been to rethink traditional ethnography and/or anthropological research itself. For example, Morten Axel Pedersen has argued for a reimagining of what ethnography is in a way that could incorporate data science and machine learning techniques into the ethnographic toolkit and anthropological research (something I have argued for here, here, and here as well). I believe this reassessment of traditional ethnography has a lot of potential for innovative, outside-the-box anthropological research.

Unfortunately, the former chest-pumping explanations of why non-anthropological ethnographies are inferior to our work has been more common than (what I, at least, would consider) this more fruitful conversation. Its bombastic thunder can drawn out the other perspectives.

Conclusion

I can certainly see how non-anthropologists seeking to understand (and maybe employ) ethnography could become confused when they encounter these debates among anthropologists.

To anyone who has been so confused, I hope this article provides – what I see as at least – the wider context for why anthropologists often juxtapose their discipline with ethnography. As anthropologists process how ethnography is increasingly flowering outside of their discipline, I also hope the negative aspects of our response will not turn you away from what is a powerful methodology to understand people, cultures, and societies.

Photo credit #1: Raquel Martínez at https://unsplash.com/photos/SQM0sS0htzw

Photo credit #2: Skitterphoto at https://www.pexels.com/photo/book-page-1005324/

Photo credit #3: klimkin at https://pixabay.com/photos/hand-gift-bouquet-congratulation-1549399/

Photo credit #4: PublicDomainPictures at https://pixabay.com/photos/garden-flowers-butterfly-monarch-17057/