If Anthropology Is Not Ethnography, Then What Is It?

1. Introduction

It is just over a century since Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminal 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, and just under a century since Franz Boas’ equally classic 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life [1, 2]. These two books helped settle the identity—or rather, we should say the identities—of anthropology as an ethnographic science and an applied/engaged science, respectively. Since those formative days, anthropology has donned and shed identities more than once, in a continuous (and relatively abject) history of self-criticism and reinvention.

The most recent of these calls for reinvention came with Tim Ingold’s assertion that anthropology is not ethnography, which surprised and disconcerted some practitioners of the discipline [3]. He is, of course, not the first to take this position, as he openly admits and as we will explore below. At even a cursory glance, he is self-evidently correct, if only because anthropologists are not the only scholars who do ethnography and because ethnography is not the only thing that anthropologists do. Furthermore, in the four-field version embraced by the current volume, at least two of the four (archaeology and biological/physical anthropology) are not particularly ethnographic. Finally, if we take the etymologies of the two terms seriously—anthropos + logos, the study of humanity, versus ethnos + grapho, writing about a people, nation, or folk—the difference is more apparent. Thus, the two nouns are not synonymous.

Ingold left us with some provocative but general suggestions on what anthropology distinct from or beyond ethnography is, can be, or should be. This chapter seeks to more fully realize that project, the project of anthropology’s future, which demands that we revisit anthropology’s past to (re)discover what anthropology was before it became so closely identified with/as ethnography and how it became so—if the claim or accusation is even entirely valid. This mission allows us to survey the rich but contentious history of anthropology, which is a fitting project for a volume that examines and celebrates but also interrogates the achievements and status of the discipline in the twenty-first century.

2. Ingold’s critique of anthropology as ethnography

In his 2008 essay “Anthropology is Not Ethnography” and in a series of subsequent writings, Ingold shatters the largely taken-for-granted connection between the two, which are traditionally linked by a third, namely, participant observation. In common parlance, and in standard practice, ethnography is what anthropologists do or, perhaps better yet, ethnography is what we produce as a result of our research activities. “The object of ethnography,” he writes, “is to describe the lives of people other than ourselves, with an accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and prolonged first-hand experience”; in contrast, anthropology’s objective “is to seek a generous, comparative, but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit” ([3], p. 69). For this reason, he contends that ethnography is not the method or output of anthropology but instead that they “are endeavors of quite different kinds.”

About ethnography, Ingold argues that it is in fact not a method but “a practice in its own right,” which entails various methods (some research-related, some interpretive, some literary), specifically “a practice of verbal description” ([3], p. 88). As a practice in its own right, it is surely something that (at least some) anthropologists do, but it is far from “a means to the end of anthropology,” which is a much more capacious undertaking. Anthropology, as a separate practice, is “an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world” and certainly not merely the composition of ethnographies or, worse yet, “the study of how to write ethnography” ([3], p. 89). As such, it is not a study of people but a study with people, one that precisely “opens our eyes and minds to other possibilities of being” and so approaches the deepest questions “of what it means to be a human being or a person, of moral conduct and the balance of freedom and constraint in people’s relations with others,” and such ([3], p. 82). He concludes, therefore, that anthropology is much more akin to philosophy in asking the big questions; in fact, anthropology “can do it better thanks to its embedding in our observational engagements with the world and in our collaboration and correspondences with its inhabitants” ([3], p. 90). (Ingold has, I think, been misunderstood as insisting that we “correspond” with our interlocutors in the sense of agreeing with them or sharing like minds, when it is apparent that he means “correspond” in the sense of verbal or written back-and-forth, like the exchange of letters or messages.)

In a follow-up essay, Ingold posits that anthropology is “philosophy with the people in,” which again differentiates it from both ethnography and participant observation ([4], p. 393). Here, he extends his critique of ethnography and what he calls ethnographicness, in which real-life interpersonal encounters and correspondences are treated as, or frozen or objectified into, “data.” This allows him to introduce two other cherished terms from anthropology—fieldwork and participant observation. He emphasizes and endorses that anthropological knowledge (and, even more so, anthropological skill) grows from fieldwork and participant observation, or what he calls “the crucible of lives lived with others” ([4], p. 387). But this encounter, this correspondence, as he previously dubbed it, is not “ethnographic” as such; it becomes ethnographic, or achieves ethnographicness, in retrospect, when we convert our memories and field notes “into material—sometimes spun quasi-scientifically as ‘data’—upon which you subsequently hope to draw in the project of offering an account” ([4], p. 386).

Ingold resists this objectification and datafication of the lived encounter in the field, which is less grist for ethnographic writing than an “education” for the anthropologist. In fact, he explicitly opines that “there are good grounds for substituting the word ‘education’ for ‘ethnography’ as the most fundamental purpose of anthropology,” that is, to see anthropology “as a practice of education” ([4], p. 388). Participant observation is how the anthropologist undergoes this education; it is a practice “that calls upon the novice anthropologist to attend: to attend to what others are doing or saying and to what is going on around and about; to follow along where others go and to do their bidding,” and thereby to open oneself to the “becomings” of others and self ([4], p. 389). The one thing that exasperates him is the recent (since the 1980s) obsession with the craft of writing itself; he declares himself “sick and tired” of “the conceit that turns the project of anthropology into the study of its own ways of working” ([4], p. 383), especially the fretting and navel-gazing about the process of turning the fieldwork encounter into anthropological knowledge and that knowledge into textual form. Ethnography, in the sense of “a craft of writing,” is not even quite a method in its own right in his eyes and certainly not one that can be “applied in the service of some greater end,” namely, the anthropological end. Rather, he concludes, “Ethnography is not a prelude to anthropology, as fieldwork to writing up. If anything, it is the other way around. The ethnographer writes up; the anthropologist—a correspondent observer at large—does his or her thinking in the world” ([4], p. 391).

He returns to the subject one more time in a 2017 essay, “Anthropology contra Ethnography.” Here, we get clear definitions: anthropology “is a generous, open-ended, comparative, and yet critical inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the one world we all inhabit,” whereas ethnography is about “render[ing] an account—in writing, film, or other graphic media—of life as it is actually lived and experienced by a people, somewhere, sometime” ([5], pp. 21–2). He clarifies that he is not opposed to ethnography, so long as we recognize it as “an end in itself” and “not a means to anthropological ends.” Similarly, reiterating his earlier point, participant observation is to be understood as “an anthropological way of working, not a method of ethnographic data collection,” making the essence of anthropology “not so much ethnographic as educational” ([5], p. 21).

Furthermore, the importance of participant observation resides not in being “a technique for data gathering but an ontological commitment,” specifically a commitment to living and studying with others; it is “a way of learning” and thus a process of education and transformation ([5], p. 23). His analogy is school, where we take classes with teachers and masters: “We do so in order that we may grow in wisdom and maturity, in our powers of observation, reason, and critical thinking, in the hope and expectation that we can bring these powers to bear on whatever problems we may tackle in the future” ([5], p. 23). This ultimately returns him to philosophy, now that anthropology has been rediscovered as “fundamentally a speculative discipline,” one “akin to philosophy” but also open to and collaborating with art, archaeology, history, and all the social sciences and humanities.

3. Radcliffe-Brown’s and Leach’s critique of anthropology as ethnography

Ingold’s original 2008 essay refers liberally to Radcliffe-Brown, even at one point calling itself a “defense” of the ancestor, which is unsurprising and entirely fitting as the occasion for the paper was the 2007 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture. To be sure, Radcliffe-Brown voiced some of the same objections to anthropology as ethnography more than half a century earlier but in a distinctly different register.

In an essay originally published in 1923, the year after the publication of his ethnography The Andaman Islanders, which was coincidentally the same year of Malinowski’s grand ethnography, Radcliffe-Brown noted the inconsistent usage of the terms “ethnology” and “anthropology.” Invoking a division between two methods—the “historical” or particularizing and the “inductive” or generalizing—that would inform all of his future work, he characterized ethnology as “the study of culture by the method of historical reconstruction” in contrast to anthropology as “the study that seeks to formulate the general laws that underlie the phenomena of culture” ([6], p. 8). As the “study of ‘peoples,’” ethnology describes and classifies particular (usually “primitive”) groups, but, he subsequently wrote, anthropology uses this information “to establish valid and significant generalizations about social phenomena,” which makes it “a kind of sociology” ([6], p. 138). Because of this unequal hierarchy, he reckoned that anthropology could function without ethnology but not vice versa, a claim we will assess below.

In his famous 1940 paper “On Social Structure,” he took the stronger stance that anthropology is “a branch of natural science,” specifically “the theoretical science of human society, that is, the investigation of social phenomena by methods essentially similar to those used in the physical and biological sciences,” rendering it “comparative sociology” ([7], pp. 1–2). Since social phenomena are merely a type of natural phenomena, then ethnographies constitute “the intensive study of single societies,” which is only the prelude to the task of anthropology, which is again “the systematic comparison of many societies”; in other words, the first order of business is to acquire knowledge about “the varieties, or diversities” of social systems through “field research” ([7], p. 5). Therefore, the work of ethnology precedes that of anthropology, which makes it difficult to accept that anthropology could advance without ethnology.

His thoughts on the topic continued to develop and crystallize throughout his life, culminating in two pieces in the early 1950s. In the introduction to his 1952 Structure and Function in Primitive Society, he proposed the distinction between “idiographic” and “nomothetic” inquiry, equivalent to his previous historical versus inductive methods. The former strives for “factual propositions or statements,” in this case regarding society, compared to the latter’s goal of “general propositions” or, dare we say, laws ([8], p. 1). Ethnography, obviously, qualifies as idiographic, since its mission is “to give acceptable accounts of [primitive or backward peoples] and their social life” ([8], p. 2). Anthropology differs in being a “theoretical” rather than descriptive discipline and, therefore, by his account, a branch of comparative sociology. To be more precise, anthropologists are not ultimately interested in particular societies or cultures but in what he dubs “social process.” Perhaps his 1951 Huxley Lecture on the comparative method is his clearest and strongest statement on the topic. There, after again defining anthropology (or comparative sociology) as “the theoretical study of human social phenomena,” he bemoaned the fact that, partly under the influence of Boas, the discipline had come to concentrate on “the reconstruction of history” or what he considered the idiographic project of ethnology, to the exclusion of “the study of discoverable regularities in the development of human society insofar as these can be illustrated or demonstrated by the study of primitive peoples” ([9], p. 54). This had led to “a relative neglect” of the comparative or nomothetic method, which had become pejoratively associated with “armchair” or library anthropology. Resisting the tide of the profession, he advocated a combination of field/descriptive and armchair/theoretical methods, with a definite division of labor: ethnology should be “the historical [i.e., particular and idiographic] study of primitive societies,” freeing anthropology for the “systematic comparison” of those societies, for the purpose of elucidating “a general, or preferably a universal, tendency in human societies” ([9], p. 68).

If Radcliffe-Brown was critical of the abandonment of generalizing anthropology in favor of particularizing ethnology, his contemporary, Edmund Leach, was passionately opposed to it. In his 1961 Rethinking Anthropology, he orated on page one that, “Most of my colleagues are giving up the attempt to make comparative generalizations; instead they have begun to write impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples” ([10], p. 1). Leach blamed much of the “strength of the empirical bias” on Malinowski, but surprisingly, he did not adopt Radcliffe-Brown’s attitude toward comparison. Indeed, he explicitly expressed his “dislike” for his peer’s approach, which he contrasted with true and meaningful generalization: comparison, he gesticulated, “is a matter of butterfly collecting—of classification, of the arrangement of things according to their types and subtypes. The followers of Radcliffe-Brown are anthropological butterfly collectors and their approach to their data has certain consequences” ([10], p. 2).

For Leach, then, Radcliffe-Brown’s allegedly nomothetic method was not generalizing at all but merely amounted to arranging societies into types and subtypes, which Leach judged as tautological. True and meaningful generalizing, in his view, was muscularly nomothetic in the sense of deriving “mathematical patterns” and “possible general laws.” Revealingly, Leach confessed that he was trained as an engineer, which may have influenced his anthropological thinking. At any rate, what he mainly warned against was imposing our own cultural and linguistic assumptions on our ethnographic data: ethnographic facts, he ruled, are better understood “if we approach them free of all such a priori assumptions” (a message that ontological anthropologists would echo decades later), and “If you feel you must start with assumptions then let them be logical (that is mathematical) assumptions” ([10], p. 27).

4. Anthropology before ethnography, ethnography before anthropology

From this brief survey, we can see that the project to separate anthropology from ethnography long predates Ingold, reaching back—even before the 1950s—at least to Radcliffe-Brown’s earliest work a century ago. Moreover, scholars of the highest caliber have taken conflicting and sometimes idiosyncratic positions on the question, with little substantial agreement other than that at least two different things are going on, and that, of those things, anthropology is the grander and more ambitious. However, in actuality, the problem of anthropology versus ethnography extends back much further, arguably another century before Malinowski, Boas, and young Radcliffe-Brown. Through this history, we can observe anthropologists grappling for self-definition, while anthropology and ethnography follow relatively independent and occasionally competitive courses.

The understandable and perhaps inevitable split between anthropology and ethnography reflects the actual dualism of human nature. This was recognized by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, who broached the subject in his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Arising from his years of lecturing on the subject, he taught that a formal discipline of humankind would necessarily follow two dimensions, because humans themselves were dual—at once a physiological study of humans as biological beings like all others and a “pragmatic” or practical (in the surprisingly modern sense of “practice”) study of humans as free, non-biologically determined beings who make themselves and their social relations through their particular, local practices, or what we now call culture.

5. Was anthropology ever ethnography?

From that moment, Radcliffe-Brown would have us believe, the grander calling of anthropology was lost in the collapse of anthropology into ethnography. He gave the impression that no one after 1922 did anthropology, becoming instead enamored of narrow ethnographic studies of particular peoples. So complete, the story goes, was this absorption of anthropology into ethnography that, a half-century later, Clifford Geertz could assert that they were one and the same thing. In his classic The Interpretation of Cultures, he announced:

The very essence of anthropology, its definition as a “kind of intellectual effort,” was thus ethnographic representation, or what he memorably and influentially called thick description.

As recently as 2018, Rees concurred that during the twentieth century, “most anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers,” that is, that their business was “the careful, fieldwork-based description of faraway others” ([20], p. 1). But we should ask, is this true today? Was it true at the time of Geertz’s writing, or even of Radcliffe-Brown’s? Ironically, the chapter in which Geertz made his pronouncement was not an ethnographic chapter, nor were most in that volume, which includes theoretical and conceptual essays like “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,” “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” and the celebrated “Religion as a Cultural System.” Surely, Geertz did ethnography, but clearly much of his most important work was not ethnographic.

Looking back at the three decades between Radcliffe-Brown’s first statement on anthropology-versus-ethnography (1923) and his last (1952), we can confess that ethnography moved conspicuously to the top of the anthropological agenda. This is understandable and laudable: anthropology prior to the 1920s operated too much on the basis of superficial and amateur cultural information. Boas was correct that the discipline needed to refrain from theorizing until it had better data. But Radcliffe-Brown’s (and still more so Leach’s) blanket condemnation of ethnography seems exaggerated, for at least two reasons. The first is that anthropologists during those decades were doing non-ethnographic or supra-ethnographic work alongside ethnography. This 30-year period featured Boas’ aforementioned 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life near the start and David Bidney’s 1950 Theoretical Anthropology near the end, both of which took a much broader view of the discipline. In between, anthropologists considered big questions, as in Paul Radin’s 1927 Primitive Man as Philosopher, Edward Sapir’s various writings on anthropology, language, and psychiatry, Leslie White’s attempt to redefine anthropology in his 1949 The Science of Culture, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s first foray into structuralism in his 1949 The Elementary Structures of Kinship, not to mention less savory but still ambitious works like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, which only hit the Anglophone world in 1926 as How Natives Think but was originally published in 1910.

Anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century had not utterly surrendered to ethnography. And even when they indulged in it, those writings were not always what we might call description for description’s sake, which is what Radcliffe-Brown seems to object to (he and like thinkers held up Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 The Nuer as a singular betrayal). Instead, a significant amount of ethnographic writing during the period (and beyond) could be classified as description for a purpose, the purpose being either to make a comparison or to test a theory. Under the latter heading, we would include Malinowski’s 1927 Sex and Repression in Savage Society, explicitly testing Freud’s Oedipus theory in Trobriand society. Among the former, arguably the most important, and certainly the most famous, is Ruth Benedict’s 1934 Patterns of Culture, which compared three societies (Pueblo, Dobu, and Kwakiutl) to draw out theoretical lessons; this was followed immediately by Margaret Mead’s similarly-oriented 1935 Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, and then two volumes edited by psychiatrist Abram Kardiner: 1939’s The Individual and His Society and 1945’s The Psychological Frontiers of Society, which combined multiple ethnographic case studies (Marquesas and Tanala/Madagascar, both provided by Ralph Linton, in the former; Comanche by Linton, Alor by Cora Du Bois, and “Plainsville, USA” by James West in the latter) with psychological analysis. This comparative-ethnographic approach continued outside the critical time period, for instance, in Beatrice Whiting’s 1963 Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing.

The years since Radcliffe-Brown’s final statement have seen, if anything, a greater liberation of anthropology from ethnography or a greater or higher-level synthesis of ethnographic knowledge. In the introduction to the 2021 edited volume Anthropology and Ethnography are not Equivalent, directly addressing Ingold, Irfan Ahmad lists some prominent examples, like Arjun Appardurai’s 1996 Modernity at Large, Talal Asad’s 1993 Genealogies of Religion and 2003 Formations of the Secular, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s 1995 Silencing the Past, and Peter van der Veer’s 2001 Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, not to mention Eric Wolf’s 1982 Europe and the People Without History ([21], p. 6). This practice has only expanded, with, for instance, Michael Fischer’s 2003 Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Other anthropologists do not write ethnography at all but instead investigate and inscribe the history of anthropology, foremost among them George Stocking and Regna Darnell.

Then there is the fact, which was true already in Radcliffe-Brown’s day and more than ever the case today, that many, if not most, anthropologists are not ethnographers by any means. It is common knowledge that, in the twenty-first century, the majority of anthropologists are not academics but are “applied” professionals, lending their skills to such domains as government, law, business, medicine, the military, development planning, indigenous rights, and many others. These applied jobs often if not typically do not entail ethnography, at least in the familiar academic sense; known by various titles such as applied, practicing, engaged, activist, etc., anthropologists, these individuals may write reports or other documents for their employers or they may lead focus groups, advise colleagues, do training, or run organizations or consulting firms, but they are not principally writing ethnography (some, admittedly, do compose ethnographies about their practical activities).

Furthermore, this is not a new circumstance. Anthropologists were intimately involved in colonial administration, military affairs, and business during and before Radcliffe-Brown’s time, which could not have been unknown to him. By World War I, anthropologists were already disseminating propaganda, contributing geographic and ethnographic knowledge to the war effort, and practicing anthropometry on soldiers and prisoners [22]. Indeed, so enmeshed in the conflict were anthropologists that Boas issued a stinging rebuke in his 1919 “Scientists as Spies.” World War II absorbed nearly all anthropologists: Margaret Mead advocated a national morale program, Cora Du Bois applied her area expertise to the Southeast Asian Branch of the American Office of Intelligence, Ruth Bunzel translated messages from Spain, and Clyde Kluckhohn participated in the Strategic Bombing Survey. On the English side, Evans-Pritchard did military service in Libya and saw military action in Ethiopia and Sudan, Leach joined the Burma Rifles and trained and led local resistance, Raymond Firth worked in the British Naval Intelligence Division, and S. F. Nadel rose to Secretary for Native Affairs in Eritrea. Meanwhile, to mention just one more application in the corporate world, in the 1930s W. Lloyd Warner studied worker productivity at the Western Electric Company and in 1946 joined some other experts in establishing Social Research Incorporated, an anthropological consulting firm with such clients as Sears, Roebuck and Company.

Finally, it is neither pedantic nor trivial to emphasize that anthropological research and writing have not been primarily or exclusively ethnographic in the strict sense for a long time. If we take the term literally (ethnos + grapho), ethnography means writing about an ethnos, that is, a people, a nation, a folk. Hence, classic studies about the Toda or the Nuer, or the Andaman Islanders are ethnographic. Today, what Bourdieu dubbed “synoptic” studies of (purportedly) an entire society or ethnos are largely a thing of the past. Instead, anthropologists tend to write about particular settings (say, Kazakhstan’s capital city of Astana [23] or a Sarajevan apartment building [24]), particular events (say, the Arab spring), or particular groups or subcultures (say, homeless youths, rock musicians, or cancer patients) within a society, people, or nation. Anthropology has long since outgrown the constricting confines of traditional ethnography.

6. Resetting the relation between anthropology and ethnography (and other terms)

In other words, as the previous section reveals, anthropology has never been synonymous with ethnography, and not all anthropologists have been ethnographers, nor has all of their work been ethnographic. Both Radcliffe-Brown’s and Ingold’s critiques of anthropology as ethnography are late and overstated.

What, then, is anthropology, if not ethnography? Radcliffe-Brown, Leach, and Ingold offered their opinions, as have others. One additional perspective, contemporaneous with Radcliffe-Brown and Leach, was that of Lévi-Strauss, who broached the subject in a 1949 essay subsequently anthologized in his epochal Structural Anthropology. He took the position that ethnography refers to observations “of human groups considered as individual entities”: ethnography, or perhaps better an ethnography, “aims at recording as accurately as possible the respective modes of life of various groups” ([25], p. 2). He then stipulated that ethnology is the enterprise that puts that knowledge to use, implying that the ethnologist and the ethnographer are different people. Also, he suggested that ethnology roughly corresponds to anthropology. In a 1954 essay that closes the volume, he refined his thinking somewhat, propounding that ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology are three sequential stages in an intellectual process. Ethnography, as the first stage, entails “observation and description,” which takes place in the field, resulting in a monograph on a specific social group. Ethnography, therefore, also designates “the methods and techniques connected with field work” ([25], p. 355). As the next stage, ethnology is the first step of “synthesis,” which comes in three flavors—geographical, historical, or systematic. Finally, anthropology represents a third stage and a second level of synthesis that, with ethnographic and ethnological data in hand, “aims at a global knowledge of man.”

Lévi-Strauss was onto something, but we cannot quite be satisfied with his treatment. In his analysis, too, we see confirmed the judgment of Hockey and Forsey that “Anthropology, ethnography, and participant observation slip and slop around contemporary anthropological discourse as interchangeable terms” or at least as less than fully conceived and delimited ones ([26], p. 72). We should add to this list ethnology and fieldwork. So let us attempt a clarification and delimitation of all of these terms. Ethnography we will reserve, hopefully not completely pedantically, for written accounts of a specific sociocultural group (an ethnos or some more specific subgroup). Ethnography is not, on this analysis, a method but rather a product. It is one of the things that anthropologists produce from their experience with other people. Nor is ethnography the only product emanating from fieldwork. Ethnography, or an ethnography, is one medium to represent, or if we prefer to avoid that loaded word, to communicate or convey, the knowledge that fieldworkers gain from their experiences. Writing is the preferred medium of scholarship—in that regard, the fact is that academic anthropologists write because academics write, writing being the most respected form of academic productivity—but ethnographers also render or communicate their knowledge in other ways, such as film, photography, posters, classroom lectures, and conference presentations. Conversely, not all anthropological writing is ethnographic; I think, for instance, of Paul Stoller’s blogs for Huffpost, which he assembled into his 2018 book Adventures in Blogging, full of commentary on major topics of the day.

Ethnography is, therefore, not synonymous with fieldwork or participant observation (if for the simple reason that a researcher may conduct fieldwork and never write it up into an ethnography). Again, ethnography is a product distilled from fieldwork. It is a project and a skill in its own right, and, apparently contra Ingold, shifting the conceptual load from ethnography to anthropology does not ameliorate any of the problems of the creation or communication of anthropological knowledge. All of the challenges concerning “writing culture” remain. At any rate, fieldwork or participant observation is methodological, although neither is a method, or better yet, a method. In reality, fieldwork is the umbrella term for all the things researchers do in the field, that is, when interacting or corresponding with others. Participant observation is one of those things—or, more likely, a set of things, including at least watching people, joining in with people, and asking people what they are doing. Other methods under the fieldwork umbrella include taking field notes, constructing genealogies, making quantitative measurements, conducting interviews, reading documents, and, doubtless, many more. (In other words, to borrow from Ingold, fieldwork is not [exclusively] participant observation.)

What is the relationship between fieldwork and ethnography, then? If pressed to give it a name, we could call it conversion: by some means (what Malinowski labeled “the ethnographer’s magic”), experiences in the field—ideally, lived alongside local people—are converted or transformed into a written document. This will and can never be a simple, straightforward move.

Ethnology, a term that gets neglected these days but was part of the debate for most of anthropology’s history, is therefore the science of peoples, folks, or nations. Lévi-Strauss was probably right to distinguish it from ethnography, but probably not as a second stage or synthesis after ethnography. Ethnology proceeds via ethnography but also precedes it; ethnography is the outcome of particular ethnological research. Some might be ready to dispense with the term, but if Ingold (and presumably Radcliffe-Brown and Leach) have something higher or grander in mind for anthropology, then it arguably still has its uses. Furthermore, ethnology is not necessarily purely descriptive, nor is any particular ethnography; as we witnessed above, an ethnography may have a profound comparative or theoretical point, whether it is Margaret Mead’s ethnography of Samoan girls or Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of Azande witchcraft.

In sum, we can agree with Hockey and Forsey that “ethnography is a documentary product capturing the dynamic interactions of a particular people in a particular time and place (or places), and that participant observation is but one way to arrive at ethnographic knowledge” ([26], p. 84). Accordingly, anthropology is neither of those things, and Ingold is justified in positing that anthropology is not ethnography (or ethnology or fieldwork or participant observation). But does that mean that anthropology could be or should be detached and freed from ethnography? Rees weighs the possibility and benefit if we were to “cut loose the former from the latter” ([20], p. ix), and Aishima ponders “what an anthropological work would look like after removing ethnographic details from its writing” ([27], p. 20). Surely, Ingold never intended that, and even Radcliffe-Brown mobilized considerable ethnographic material to arrive at his generalizations and laws; indeed, it is inconceivable that anthropologists could do comparative analysis without something to compare.

What Ingold seems most disturbed about is treating the ethnographic encounter as a mere source of “data,” yet surely too, (a) no sincere anthropologist or ethnographer is so indifferent to the interpersonal, reflexive aspects of fieldwork and the documenting of the experiences thereof and (b) once documented, those experiences are data, although always deeply human data. Part of the problem lies in Ingold’s apparent presumption that generosity, openness, and critical inquiry are unique to anthropology, while in reality, the entire project of fieldwork, participant observation, and ethnography from its first moments until its consummation is suffused with them. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine good fieldwork and good ethnography that are not “ontological commitments,” without generosity, openness, and critical inquiry, the last of these into our interlocutors and ourselves.

Ingold’s objection is not to ethnography but to the idea of ethnography as “the be-all and end-all” of anthropology ([5], p. 21), and that we can hardly dispute. However, we can and must take exception to the suggestion, made by Radcliffe-Brown and echoed by others, that anthropology could function without ethnography, whereas ethnography could not function without anthropology. The exact opposite is the case: our survey of early and amateur ethnographic work indicates that authors can write about other peoples and cultures for many reasons other than anthropology (e.g., administration, scientific knowledge, popular entertainment, sheer curiosity), but how would anthropology operate without ethnographic knowledge? That is, if anthropology is to be an inquiry “into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the one world we all inhabit” ([5], p. 21), then a prerequisite for such a discipline is precisely knowledge of those conditions and possibilities, which comes from the ethnographic encounter.

If anthropology and ethnography are indeed distinct enterprises, what is the relation between them? Whereas fieldwork and ethnography are linked by conversion, we might regard anthropology as linked to ethnography by inspiration or transcendence. That is to say, anthropology goes beyond particular accounts of circumscribed groups but is in no way independent of them; from this accumulated acquaintance with humanity in all its diversity, the anthropologist extracts lessons or draws out implications. But these lessons, implications, or inspirations are only possible in the light of the fullness of the knowledge of humankind. Hence, rather than “data,” it is fruitful to regard the knowledge gained in ethnographic encounters and shared in ethnographic documents as what Mattingly rightly calls “perplexing particulars”—about any subject, from kinship terminologies or food practices to religious beliefs—that have the capacity to alert us to unforeseen and unimagined conditions and possibilities, to “disrupt” and unfreeze or “defrost” our previously unquestioned and taken-for-granted realities ([28], p. 415).

This is probably, and hopefully, what Ingold means by anthropology as “education,” specifically an education or reorientation of “our perception of the world [that] opens our eyes and minds to other possibilities” ([3], p. 82). (Is there a modicum of selfishness in this project, using other people’s lives as fuel for our own improvement and advancement? Further, does this not presuppose a value judgment that our way of being needs other possibilities? Those are questions that anthropologists should contemplate.) Ultimately, what is anthropology supposed to learn about the world—and perhaps more importantly, how is it supposed to convey this knowledge or perception to others beyond the discipline, since the goal must not be just to educate ourselves but our neighbors and our entire society? One way to restate the question is to ask, along with Walton, “if not ethnography, what sort of –graphy should we practice?” ([29], p. 54). Anthropology and social science in general have long since forsaken generalization of the sort perpetrated in the nineteenth century, especially ostentatious narratives of unilinear evolution of specific cultural institutions or of culture (or Culture) as a whole; the idea of “laws” in society or culture is also anachronistic.

If we take seriously Ingold’s suggestion that anthropology is or should be philosophy, albeit with “the people in,” then it seems that anthropological writing (for, as we all understand, writing remains the chief medium of scholarship) will more resemble philosophical writing. Some movement in this direction has already happened: versions or variants of anthropology have adopted some of the terms and concepts of philosophy, such as ontological anthropology, phenomenological anthropology, or even existential anthropology. These approaches and theories ask many of the same questions as philosophy, the principal difference being that the anthropological incarnation tends to activate ethnographic knowledge in its ruminations. For example, Jackson invoked Australian Aboriginal culture in his 1995 At Home in the World, and, within 20 years, his work was profoundly phenomenological or existential, incorporating terms like “lifeworlds” (introduced to philosophy by Husserl) and directly referring to Heidegger and the study of “being.” Like Ingold, he identifies the goal of ethnography (Jackson says “ethnography” rather than “anthropology”) as metanoia, self-change, transformation, or Ingold’s “education” [30].

Speaking of Husserl and Heidegger, the question that anthropology shares with philosophy, at least philosophy of a certain stripe, is the nature of human beings, or we might say the nature of being human. Accordingly, anthropologists could start with phenomenologists, ontologists, and existentialists, who attack these issues head-on. Husserl gives us the concepts of intentionality and, as mentioned, lifeworld. Intentionality designates how humans reach out to the Other (other people, other species, other objects) through meanings, categories, interests, and commitments; consciousness or knowledge, he teaches, is always consciousness/knowledge of something, and the possible “somethings” are shaped by cultures or ontologies. The lifeworld is the taken-for-granted, “natural” realm of experience and meaning, but Husserl had to concede that there is not a single human lifeworld but many with their own truths which “are by no means the same as ours” ([31], p. 139). Therefore, we students of humanity must always “bracket” or set aside our own “natural standpoint,” which only seems natural to us. Heidegger’s Being and Time confronts the problem of humanness squarely, accusing anthropology by name of commencing the study of anthropos, basically through the empirical device of ethnology, without first answering—or even asking—“the questions about the kind of Being which belongs to those entities which we ourselves are” ([32], p. 75). For Heidegger, the quality of being distinct to humans is Dasein, being-there, being-in-the-world, which is inherently and unavoidably “historical” or, as anthropologists say, particular or cultural. Echoing Husserl and anticipating 1970s practice anthropology, he added that human being is human doing: “the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts,” which are also always performed with an other—ideally, attentive to the care of the other—who are “bound together by the unity of meaning” (p. 73). As he also stated, “The essence of Dasein,” this special way of being human, “lies in its existence” (p. 67), foreseeing Sartre’s mantra that existence precedes essence, that human being is fundamentally human becoming.

If anthropology is going to become more philosophical—and I personally welcome the development—then anthropologists will need to be better versed in this and associated philosophical thinking. One place where this is called for is ontological anthropology, the prime advocates of which, such as Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro, construe it as strictly methodological (and therefore ethnographic rather than anthropological), without a deeper appreciation for the stakes of ontology in philosophy (not to mention in “applied ontology” in the natural and information sciences). For such purposes, then, I would recommend more training in philosophy—including and especially comparative or non-Western philosophies—for anthropologists in doctoral programs. It would also be valuable for anthropological training to include and respect applied or engaged anthropology, not only because this is valid anthropology or because it is the direction that many of their careers will take but because it would help establish that ethnography (in the conventional academic sense) is certainly not the be-all and end-all of the discipline.

Finally, the overt message can and should be communicated that ethnography is not the only worthwhile thing that anthropologists do, encouraging students and mature scholars to explore the potential of their discipline more fully. (I have a dream of an anthropological journal that accepts anything but ethnographies, providing a place to publish non-ethnographic anthropology and to help legitimate it. I actually pitched the idea to a major publisher once, which fretted that anthropologists might not submit work to it and that tenure committees might not value it. That is exactly the challenge we face.) Meanwhile, students will and should continue to learn the skills of doing fieldwork and writing ethnographies, including usually as a requirement for the doctorate, not only as a rite of passage but because this is where and how they acquire and perfect the ontological commitment, the generosity and openness, on which anthropology thrives.

Can anthropology complete this task? Can it ever be finished? Probably (and hopefully) not, and not just so that our employment persists. Rather, as Geertz, who also learned from philosophers such as Ryle and Langer, declared, humankind is an unfinished animal—in Kant’s words, biological yet biologically undetermined beings—and as long as humans finish themselves diversely, culturally, ontologically, and as long as these finishings implicate fellow humans, non-human species, and non-biological objects and technologies, there will be new manifestations of humanity to describe and understand. Ethnography will continue to serve these emerging lifeworlds at the table of anthropology, which will continue to metabolize them (in the deepest sense of the term) into ever-richer self-knowledge.

7. Conclusion

Anthropology is not ethnography. Ingold is correct about that, as were Radcliffe-Brown and Leach, a generation or two before him. This chapter has argued that, while ethnography became a major preoccupation of anthropology by the second quarter of the twentieth century, the distinction between the two has a much longer history. Anthropology was not originally ethnography: ethnography or writing about peoples occurred well before professional anthropology was organized and was often, or usually, conducted for nonacademic purposes, and anthropology was initially focused on biological or racial matters, which were not conducive to ethnographic investigation. However, despite their complaints, anthropology during the 1900s was not limited to ethnography, with anthropologists experimenting not only with other forms of representation, but with various theories and comparative (not to mention practical and engaged) activities.

The long view of anthropology illustrates that anthropology has never been (exclusively) ethnography, but that, untethered to concrete empirical observations, some anthropological (i.e., comparative, generalizing, or nomothetic) thinking wandered far from the facts. The turn to ethnography was no misstep; it was an essential corrective to fanciful theorizing. But anthropologists always had their eyes on the bigger questions, even if, occasionally, it appeared that they had traded the forest for the trees. However, the forest of humanity consists precisely of the trees of humanity’s diverse instantiations; to paraphrase Heidegger, the essence of humanity lies in its multiple and evolving experiences, which are its local cultural experiences. Thus, to know humanness generously, openly, critically, and philosophically is to be conversant with its many actual and potential ways of be(com)ing. We already see, and applaud, the expansion of anthropology into the glorious science of humanity as it was originally conceived.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.