What is ethnography?

Question

and how can i use it to look at a long-dead race of people??

Answer 1

Ethnography is what social anthropologists do and produce - i.e. they do participant observation (usually or some other methods maybe) to find something out which gets written up.  So its the method and the product.  I'm not sure how you'd use it to look at a "long-dead" "race" of people ... I suppose you'd have to explain how they're "long-dead" first and then what you mean exactly by race - as Ethnography is mainly about cultural forms rather than "races" these days - well supposedly, i mean there are still a few archaic anthropologists out there. I think you're probably better of looking at archaeology.

Answer 2

It can be used to look at older culture if there are living remnants of that culture.

As an example take stone tool use amongst indigenous Australians.Archaeologists will find some stone tools and compare them with ethnographic accounts to establish continuity of culture.

One tenet of anthropology /archeology is that the present is a window on the past.

Answer 3

Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline

Answer 4

Ethnography is two things:

(1) the fundamental research method of cultural anthropology, and

(2) the written text produced to report ethnographic research results.  

Ethnography as method seeks to answer central anthropological questions concerning the ways of life of living human beings.  Ethnographic questions generally concern the link between culture and behavior and/or how cultural processes develop over time.  The data base for ethnographies is usually extensive description of the details of social life or cultural phenomena in a small number of cases.

Answer 5

Ethnography and ethnological epistomologies are pretty much the essence of cultural anthropology theory and research and constitute over two thirds of sociological paradigms.

It's as if you aim to view the social world and social interaction through a glass window, completely objective and void of any preference, it's highly debatable as to if this is possible and many post-modernists and phenomonoglists have backlashed against it to great lengths.

If youre not looking at something in a contemporary climate you should adapt theory from the relavent epoch, what you're wanting to do sounds more theoretically interpretive, Id start with Max Weber, I used him all the time when I was doing Cultural Anthropology, Just make sure you get a good understanding of his work before you transfer it. He's that much of a genius that people who are familiar with him really know everything there is to know about him, if you put the effort in it'll pay off bigtime.