Question

Ingold, T.2008. Anthropology is not Ethnography. The British Academy 154,pp. 69-192 what is the argues about ethnography

Answer 1

Tim Ingold’s 2008 lecture/article “Anthropology is not Ethnography” argues that what many take “ethnography” to be (a replicable method or a bundle of techniques for collecting data in the field) is a serious misunderstanding. Key points:

- Main thesis: anthropology (the discipline) should not be reduced to ethnography (the practice or genre of writing about people). Ethnography is a craft, not simply a standard method or a set of procedures.

- Ethnography as craft: Ingold stresses that ethnography is an embodied, skillful practice learned by apprenticeship—an art of attentive, sustained presence and participation—rather than a checklist of methods to be applied and then left behind.

- Against reification: he critiques tendencies to treat ethnography as a detachable instrument for producing “data” that can be analyzed separately from field-life. That view separates theory from practice and turns people in the field into objects of extraction.

- Knowledge as relation and movement: Ingold emphasizes knowing as a process of being engaged with others and with environments (wayfaring, dwelling), not as the production of static representations. Ethnographic knowledge emerges through ongoing relationships and skilled attention.

- Implications for training and writing: ethnography should be taught as craft and practiced as continuous engagement; ethnographic writing should reflect the lived, processual, relational character of the field rather than aiming only for abstracted generalizations.

If you want, I can pull out a few quoted passages from the essay or give a short outline of how Ingold contrasts older and newer uses of “ethnography” across the text.