Quotes About Ethnography

All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

In the early 20th century, one of the most popular visitor attractions in Paris was a human zoo, which millions of people visited every year to see 'specimens' from Madagascar, India, China, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and the Congo.

Germania of Tacitus

you will see this framework at work when ethnographers employ both quantitative (e.g., surveys) and qualitative data collection (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999) and when case study researchers use both quantitative and qualitative data (Luck, Jackson, & Usher, 2006; Yin, 2009).

Los heterosexuales occidentales tienen tendencia a encasillar a los varones homosexuales en el estereotipo de lo afeminado. Sin embargo, desde los puntos de vista histórico y etnográfico, la forma más frecuente de relación homosexual institucionalizada se da entre hombres instruidos no para ser peluqueros o decoradores, sino guerreros.

Caesar had a shrewd eye for his public image, and the Commentaries is a carefully contrived justification of his conduct and parade of his military skills. But it is also an early example of what we might call imperial ethnography.

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

learn to behave like an anthropologist who observes groups of people in natural settings. You cannot simply ask people questions; you must watch how they behave.

Anthropology is the only discipline that can access evidence about the entire human experience on this planet.

The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.

Musee de l'Homme.