Ethnography: A Theoretically Oriented Practice - Introduction

Over the last four decades, ethnography, which had long been imagined as a self-evident and unproblematic process of data collection, has become a complicated and tricky issue. This is especially true for anthropologists. The dense reflection and the vivid discussion about ethnography that emerged in the 1970–1980s inside the anthropological academic community clearly prove it. Ethnographic practice, ethnographic theory, and ethnographic writing are far from easy, epistemologically straightforward activities. Nevertheless, as a result of its widespread perception as both a powerful and easy-to-use tool to gain qualitative research data about a community, it became a privileged research method for sociologists, and also for psychologists and, finally, even for interculturally oriented scholars of any social science and humanities field (such as pedagogy).