Ethnography
According to MALINOWSKI (2018), Ethnography is a fieldwork methodology aimed at conducting participant observation, with a detailed description of the social and cultural structures of a place, along with a clear distinction between the author’s descriptions and inferences.
Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with definitively popularizing Anthropology, elevating it to the status of a science, as required by modern Enlightenment science, by publishing his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, under what was then called the Functionalist perspective.
For many decades until the 1990s, despite various debates, ethnographic work assumed participant observation, meaning fieldwork to create ethnographies, or at least the re-reading of previously conducted fieldwork.
Documentary Ethnography
This changed, as FERREIRA (2020) summarizes, with the possibility of conducting ethnographies using documents as fields of inquiry and ethnographic artifacts.
HULL (2012), in his work, highlights the positive aspects of documentary ethnography, particularly arguing that documents are not merely representative entities of other ethnographic sources, but can play a central role in ethnographic work.
This discovery paves the way for one of my research projects, which focuses on an ethnography of the official and unofficial bureaucracy of the Brazilian Empire from an ethnic-racial perspective during the abolitionist and post-abolitionist periods.
Stay tuned to my blog for upcoming articles.
References
MALINOWSKI, BronisĹ‚aw. Argonautas do PacĂfico Ocidental. SĂŁo Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2018.
FERREIRA, LetĂcia. Encontros etnográficos com documentos burocráticos: estratĂ©gias analĂticas da pesquisa antropolĂłgica com papĂ©is oficiais. Revista EtnografĂas Contemporáneas, v. 6, n. 11, 2020. DisponĂvel em: https://revistasacademicas.unsam.edu.ar/index.php/etnocontemp/article/view/1220/3010. Acesso em: 28/08/2024.
HULL, Matthew S. Documents and Bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology, v. 41, p. 251-267, 2012. DisponĂvel em: www.annualreviews.org. Acesso em: 27 set. 2012.