My Thoughts on Agar's Ethnography Description

I found Agar's description of ethnography quite interesting and enlightening actually, perhaps because I have never thought of ethnography as a discipline that relies on observing "local particulars" (4858). Does this mean that an ethnographer observes a community or specific group of people and then applies the findings to a broader domain or society of which the observed community is a part?

How do the cultural practices of a marginalized group fit in with our understanding of a culture as a unified entity?

My understanding of ethnography was that of a social science that studies different cultures as a whole. Prior to reading this article, I thought ethnography was a branch of traditional science, involving both qualitative and quantitative research, dependent and independent variables, and controlled, or structured, environments, null hypotheses.

Some of the key issues that I thought were important for laying a foundation for ethnographic research as a separate and valid methodology were perhaps the differences between ethnography and traditional science. The former, as Agar states, is an adaptable research process, dynamic, and continuously changing, whereas traditional science is more structured and rigid, linear, and relies on universal laws.

Another aspect of Ethnography is that it is "both a science and a humanity. It is related to the humanities, such as philosophy, history, journalism, and second-language learning. Yet it also deals with issues related to social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, economics, and political science" (4858).