Where Are You Coming From and Where Are You Going? The Reporting of Ethnographic Research

To know the history of something is to know more about it. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this essay to provide a history of the use of ethnographic research methodology in professional education. However, one has only to examine the of the American Educational Research Association to note an increase in the use of the term ethnography in the association's journals, annual programs, workshops, and communications. Of particular note in the message of the artifacts is a great debate over qualitative versus quantitative research. Perhaps because anthropologists are eclectic in their use of research methodologies (see Table 1), whether psychological, sociological, humanistic, or those of the pure sciences, they are rarely faced with this dilemma. If quantitative methods are useful in producing a more precise picture of a society, they are readily utilized. It would appear from this artifact analysis that to date little attention has been paid to the interpretation of ethnographic research. This may be because ethnography can be defined in two ways: as a methodology or as a portrait of a culture. The latter definition will be the focus of this essay. In short, what constitutes good cultural description and interpretation? In attempting to answer this question, one is immediately confronted with the question: Who is going to provide the description, the ethnographer as an observer or the natives participating in the culture? Perhaps one could suggest simplistically that there are two major views of culture, one holding that culture is the product of the carriers of the culture and the other that culture resides in the minds (psychic) of the participants. Goodenough (1964) distinguishes these two orders of reality as (a) the phenomenal order of observed events or the regulators they exhibit (ho