On Ethnography, Chapter 2

Key issues:

1) Nothing is certain in ethnographic undertaking as the ethnographer continuously strives for discovering "what is happening in the field site(s) s/he has chosen."
2) Ethnography differs from qualitative research in that the former "relies on anthropology and linguistics," whereas the latter uses epistemological methods such as interviewing. The former is "constructed through detailed systematic observing, recording, and analyzing of human behavior in specifiable spaces and interactions."
3) Ethnography "makes public the private..." by "entering into the life of the individual, group, or institutional life of the 'other' "
4) Ethnographic research has been equated with "making the familiar strange."
5) "Remember always that we study something because we already know something."
6) The "constant comparative perspective" [I think] refers to the "multiple ways or directions" the ethnographer takes into account in observing individuals in relation to contextual or institutional factors, for instance.
7) The ethnographer uses a discursive method in that s/he continuously shifts back and forth between observing, noting, reading, thinking, observing, and noting.
8) The fieldworker, or the participant observer, is interested in "co-occurrences, that is, patterns that lie outside either the consciousness or the concern of locals, who often view as self-evident and foolish the work that ethnographers undertake to unravel patterns of behavior and their contexts"

Discussion Questions:
1) If all ethnographic research is "inherently interpretive and subjective," how can we rely on the results of an ethnographic study? How reliable and valid are the results? How consistent are the results across similar groups?
2) How can an individual's behavior be representative of institutional norms or policies?
3) If "we study something [it is because] we know something," then why are we doing research?