On Ethnography, Chapter 3

Key Issues:

1) Ethnography involves a continuous interaction between field notes and literature review. It is also "dialogic between existing explanations and judgments (held by scholars, outsiders, or insiders) and ongoing data collection and analysis."

2) Ethnographic fieldwork "involves a series of choices" ranging from surveys and focus groups to spatial maps and network analysis.

3) Literature reviews should "ensure that current work builds from existing knowledge" and they usually require the ethnographer to do a comprehensive and "interdisciplinary" reading of and synthesizing various sources relevant to the topic under study. In a literature review "never cite references that you have only found in someone else's bibliography."

4) Ethnographers "do not begin their research with a clearly defined research question or ...hypothesis."

Question: How does this concept fit in with the the authors' statement that "we study something because we know something"?

Equally important is defining unknown terminology in an ethnographic study. For instance, as stated by the authors, "any study examining bilingual and multilingual speakers should clarify what is meant by terms such as translation and interpretation."

Reflection and Question:

As I was reading this quote, I could not help but think about ESL speakers and bilinguals in this country and how some native speakers of English erroneously, or perhaps intentionally, use both terms interchangeably, not realizing that they are not synonymous with each other. They refer to bilinguals as ESL speakers or visa versa. This issue ties in with Kumaravadivelu's statement about the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese "all thrown into a single cultural basket labeled Asian."

How would native speakers of English react to being referred to as Catholic when in fact they are Protestant?