Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures through immersive fieldwork. The method is simple to describe and hard to do well. A researcher spends months or years living among the people being studied, learning their language, participating in daily life, and taking detailed notes. The goal is a thick description: not just what people do, but what it means to them.

Bronisław Malinowski is often credited with establishing the modern method during World War I in the Trobriand Islands. He argued that anthropologists should live in the village, not on the veranda. Since then, ethnography has spread beyond anthropology into sociology, education, and industry. Tech companies now hire ethnographers to study how people actually use products, which is often not how designers assumed.

What it involves

• Long-term residence in the community.
• Language learning and participant observation.
• Interviews, life histories, and genealogies.
• Careful field notes and reflexive analysis.

Good ethnography does not claim neutrality. It acknowledges the researcher's presence and the relationships that shaped what was learned.