the history of Ethnography

read Bob Anderson's "Work, Ethnography and System Design"

Suchman's book "Plans and Situated Actions" made the social science, in particular ethnography a subject of much fascination, when another emerging trend was from the development of domain called CSCW, to which Suchman is an early contributor. Then CSCW became the paradigm arena for design-oriented ethnogrpahic work to be done. CSCW itself was the consequence of a number of radical changes within computers sciences - design sytems from for single user to for collocated or distributed collaborative work groups. To solve the paradox that huge investation in information and communication technology didn't result in the improvement of productivity. Social science was introduced to reorient the understanding of CSCW and other interactive systems, such as participatory design and socio-technical systems approaches.

To be able to fully understand how social science can actually contribute to design, Bob proposes that we need to apprecaite the heritage of social science, and the issues social scientists are facing. Here comes this paper, which is a description of one element in social science - ehtnography.

The history of Ethnography:
A. Inventing the Professional Stranger:
Bronislaw Malinowski invented it in 1915, until then ethnography and anthropology were bookish in extreme. It was Malinowski who invented the modern form of "fieldwork" as a social science investigative technique and ethnography as its analytic complement by living in the Trobriand Islands. The intimate familiarity became neccesary to integrate and correlate various types of data, which could be categorized into three: synoptic chart, detailed description of day to day life and stories, myths, .... The motivation for ethnography is to look behind the appearance, which means they should not just describe what thing are, but to colligate them with evidence, and set all these evidences in a frame, in which accidental forms are explicated in terms of universal needs. The forms are those of social life and the needs are those of social structure.

But ethnography and functionalism are not identical, and other theoretical frameworks can be invoked. What Malinowski solved was "credentialisation" problem. "fieldwork" becomes de rigeur.

American anthropology is different from British by its interdisciplinary outlook such as Psychology and Psychiatry, instead of Biology. American Athropologists instinctively compare what they found "over there" to what was left "at home". Gregory Bateson bridged American and British traditions.

European ethnographers tended to focus around institutional and hence "objective matters", Americans often oriented towards experiential and hence "subjective matters", which was refined into a whole paradim called "interpretative Anthropology".

In the late 1970's, the authority of Ethnographer's experience was undermined by "de-constructionism", with assertions about ethnography's "perspectivalism", "constructivism", "ahistoricalism " and the like.

The encounter with desconstructionism has made ethnographers unconsciously self-conscious about their "place on the scene".

The ethnography in University of Chicago used ethnography to turn a mirror on American society.Here comes the important point to note for ethnography, that is "they" are "us".

Another step to connect ethnography to system design is the rediscovery of culture as "communities of practice". Becomming a member of culture - moving from the peripher of the culture to its centre - involves a complex process of assimilation and learning. But the legitimate peripheral participation is one of the crucial elements constituting the communities of practice which make up a culture. This notion of communities of practice has been deployed by many ethnographers to counter the overly cognitivist interpretation of learning which was dominated current thinking. An alternative to this cognitive model is "distributed cognition", which became of a key notion for CSCW.

The final step is about "context", the "situated ", "local" and "occasional" appropriateness from "Ethnomethodology", another branch of sociology created b Garfinkel.