Evgeniy Kazantsev

Ethnography, descriptive study of a particular human society or the process of making such a study. Contemporary ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork and requires the complete immersion of the anthropologist in the culture and everyday life of the people who are the subject of his study.

There has been some confusion regarding the terms ethnography and ethnology. The latter, a term more widely used in Europe, encompasses the analytical and comparative study of cultures in general, which in American usage is the academic field known as cultural anthropology (in British usage, social anthropology). Increasingly, however, the distinction between the two is coming to be seen as existing more in theory than in fact.

Ethnography, by virtue of its intersubjective nature, is necessarily comparative. Given that the anthropologist in the field necessarily retains certain cultural biases, his observations and descriptions must, to a certain degree, be comparative. Thus the formulating of generalizations about culture and the drawing of comparisons inevitably become components of ethnography.

The description of other ways of life is an activity with roots in ancient times. Herodotus, the Greek traveler and historian of the 5th century BC, wrote of some 50 different peoples he encountered or heard of, remarking on their laws, social customs, religion, and appearance. Beginning with the age of exploration and continuing into the early 20th century, detailed accounts of non-European peoples were rendered by European traders, missionaries, and, later, colonial administrators. The reliability of such accounts varies considerably, as the Europeans often misunderstood what they saw or had a vested interest in portraying their subjects less than objectively.

Modern anthropologists usually identify the establishment of ethnography as a professional field with the pioneering work of both the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia (c. 1915) and the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose first fieldwork was in Samoa (1925). Ethnographic fieldwork has since become a sort of rite of passage into the profession of cultural anthropology.

Many ethnographers reside in the field for a year or more, learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible, participating in everyday life while at the same time maintaining an observer’s objective detachment. This method, called participant-observation, while necessary and useful for gaining a thorough understanding of a foreign culture, is in practice quite difficult.

Just as the anthropologist brings to the situation certain inherent, if unconscious, cultural biases, so also is he influenced by the subject of his study. While there are cases of ethnographers who felt alienated or even repelled by the culture they entered, many—perhaps most—have come to identify closely with “their people,” a factor that affects their objectivity. In addition to the technique of participant-observation, the contemporary ethnographer usually selects and cultivates close relationships with individuals, known as informants, who can provide specific information on ritual, kinship, or other significant aspects of cultural life.

In this process also the anthropologist risks the danger of biased viewpoints, as those who most willingly act as informants frequently are individuals who are marginal to the group and who, for ulterior motives (e.g., alienation from the group or a desire to be singled out as special by the foreigner), may provide other than objective explanations of cultural and social phenomena. A final hazard inherent in ethnographic fieldwork is the ever-present possibility of cultural change produced by or resulting from the ethnographer’s presence in the group.

Contemporary ethnographies usually adhere to a community, rather than individual, focus and concentrate on the description of current circumstances rather than historical events. Traditionally, commonalities among members of the group have been emphasized, though recent ethnography has begun to reflect an interest in the importance of variation within cultural systems.

Ethnographic studies are no longer restricted to small primitive societies but may also focus on such social units as urban ghettos. The tools of the ethnographer have changed radically since Malinowski’s time. While detailed notes are still a mainstay of fieldwork, ethnographers have taken full advantage of technological developments such as motion pictures and tape recorders to augment their written accounts.

Ethnology started in the eighteenth century as a systematic attempt to acquire and compare information on those nonEuropean populations who did not possess written records of their history and cultural heritage. Coined as a derivation of the Greek word ‘ethnos,’ meaning ‘a people,’ the term ‘ethnology’ in its most general meaning indicates a scholarly interest in how aggregations of human beings are distinct from each other in terms of material culture, language, religion, moral ideas, or social institutions. Early developments in ethnology also included speculative theories on assumed interrelations between cultural and biological group differences.

Ethnology was first considered to be a subfield of anthropology. In the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the umbrella term of anthropology was applied to a much broader domain of scholarly interest than today and included physical anthropology, linguistics, and archeology along with ethnology. Because what has become known as Cultural Anthropology in the USA, and as Social Anthropology in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries, grew out of earlier ethnological concerns, ethnology is also regarded as the predecessor of Anglo–American anthropology.

By the end of World War II, the meaning of ‘ethnology’ had contracted to define but one of the scholarly practices that form the anthropological enterprise. Ethnography was understood as data-gathering in a single society, usually in a spatially and temporally bounded situation, such as when the fieldworker spends one year as a participant observer in a local community and later writes up the findings in a stand-alone, case study-type monograph (also called ethnography). Ethnology, by contrast, utilizes the information collected in a number of ethnographies in order to engage in systematic cross-cultural comparisons between two or more societies.

In recent decades, the term ethnology has acquired yet another meaning. In a number of European countries, ethnology is prefixed with European and replaces earlier approaches to the study of folklore and the investigation of national culture history.

Political science, the systematic study of governance by the application of empirical and generally scientific methods of analysis. As traditionally defined and studied, political science examines the state and its organs and institutions. The contemporary discipline, however, is considerably broader than this, encompassing studies of all the societal, cultural, and psychological factors that mutually influence the operation of government and the body politic.

Although political science borrows heavily from the other social sciences, it is distinguished from them by its focus on power—defined as the ability of one political actor to get another actor to do what it wants—at the international, national, and local levels. Political science is generally used in the singular, but in French and Spanish the plural (sciences politiques and ciencias políticas, respectively) is used, perhaps a reflection of the discipline’s eclectic nature.

Although political science overlaps considerably with political philosophy, the two fields are distinct. Political philosophy is concerned primarily with political ideas and values, such as rights, justice, freedom, and political obligation (whether people should or should not obey political authority); it is normative in its approach (i.e., it is concerned with what ought to be rather than with what is) and rationalistic in its method. In contrast, political science studies institutions and behaviour, favours the descriptive over the normative, and develops theories or draws conclusions based on empirical observations, which are expressed in quantitative terms where possible.

Although political science, like all modern sciences, involves empirical investigation, it generally does not produce precise measurements and predictions. This has led some scholars to question whether the discipline can be accurately described as a science. However, if the term science applies to any body of systematically organized knowledge based on facts ascertained by empirical methods and described by as much measurement as the material allows, then political science is a science, like the other social disciplines.

In the 1960s the American historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn argued that political science was “pre-paradigmatic,” not yet having developed basic research paradigms, such as the periodic table that defines chemistry. It is likely that political science never will develop a single, universal paradigm or theory, and attempts to do so have seldom lasted more than a generation, making political science a discipline of many trends but few classics.