Ethnography In Anthropology

Anthropology, which originated as the study of none industrial peoples, is a comparative science that now extends to all societies, ancient modern, simple, and complex. To become a cultural anthropologist, one must do ethnography which is the firsthand, personal study of local settings. Ethnographer is based on fieldwork requires spending a year or more in another society, living, with the local people and learning about their way of life or local behavior. The ethnographer wanted to create a holistic view, describing a culture’s whole entire, in very detail and complex way. They have developed several techniques, methods to do fieldwork.

One key method the participant observation, on one hand, is a characteristic of ethnography techniques, taking part in the events one is observing, describing, and analyzing in the daily life of a culture. The non-participant observation on the other hand, the ethnographic take part in the local life by just being around the native people to observe their normal daily.

Stephanie Kane 's article The Poisoned Water of Conceiçãozinha is a good example of ethnography she used participant observation method. Her observation about "where river meets the sea tells us that

That can be given to a sampling a relatively small study group chosen to represent a large population. Stephane Kate picked people from Conceiçãozinha to be her sampling to do ethnographic. She tells us the struggle people from Conceiçãozinha have with the authorities regarding the environment and water safety. Moreover, the focus group method usually between six or eight people that get together to talk about a specific theme. Kane tells us in her article that she was among a “group of activists, organizers, scholar and a painter-ecologist, talking about the changes, transformation of Conceiçãozinha”. She wanted to discuss about the cultural history of the