most closely associated with the discipline
of sociocultural anthropology, and withpar-
ticipant observation and long-term, in-
depth engagement with specificcommunities
orsocieties. It refers to both a set of research
methods and to the written product.
Ethnography has often come under attack
for its role in British colonial efforts to produce
detailed knowledges about native populations
in order to govern and control them. Yet
the meanings, practices and uses of ethno-
graphy are multiple and contentious, and
have shifted radically over time. In recent
years, sociologists, historians and geographers
have joined with anthropologists to focus on
how ethnography can be used to forge politi-
cally enabling understandings of processes
glossed by the term ‘globalization’ and to
illuminate the possibilities for social change.
Relational conceptions of the production
of space andscale associated with Henri
Lefebvre (1991b) are becoming increasingly
important in efforts to construct a project of
critical ethnography.
During the 1980s, ethnography came under
sharp attack from within anthropology.
In Writing culture(1986), Clifford, Marcus
and others challenged presumptions of ‘ethno-
graphic authority’, and propelled what has
been termed the reflexive turn (seereflexi-
vity). Instead of simply discovering or reflect-
ing culture, they argued, ethnographers
actually write or produce it. Since the 1980s
there have also been a number of feminist
critiques of ethnography, some of them simul-
taneously critical of the sort of experimental
writing and textual strategies promoted by
authors of the reflexive turn (e.g. Behar and
Gordon, 1995). In another set of anthropo-
logical critiques, Appadurai (1988) and others
condemned traditional ethnographies through
which mobile anthropologists produce know-
ledge that incarcerates ‘natives’ in bounded
localities, and map essentialized cultures on
to boundedterritories. He insisted on eth-
nography that is not so resolutely localizing,
while others proposed themetaphorof travel
as a means of escape for the ethnographer
from the ‘incarceration of the local’ and the
supposed stasis ofspace.
By the 1990s, growing numbers of anthro-
pologists were calling for critical understand-
ings of space,placeand culture that went
beyond metaphors of travel,flowsand deter-
ritorialization. InCulture, power, place: exp-
lorations in critical anthropology, Gupta and
Ferguson pointed to the necessity of ‘explor-
ing the processes ofproductionofdifference
in a world of culturally, socially and economically
interconnected and interdependent spaces’
(1997, p. 43), and the ethnographic essays in
their volume exemplify that argument. In
Ethnography through thick and thin (1998),
Marcus sought to update his earlier critique
of cultural anthropology with a call for multi-
sited ethnography. The bringing together of
ethnography and history by the Comaroffs
(1992), Cooper and Stoler (1997b) and others
was also an important development in the
1990s. Relational understandings of space and
place are implicit in some of this work.
From within sociology, a significant strand
of scholarship that is moving towards critical
understandings ofspatialityis the project of
global ethnography spearheaded by Michael
Burawoy and his students (2000). While eth-
nography has generally occupied a marginal
position in sociology, it formed the basis of
thechicago schoolof urban sociology that
goes back to the 1920s. A partial descendant
of the Chicago School, Burawoy has shifted
sociological deployments of ethnography in
radically new directions. In their ‘Manifesto’
that launched the journalEthnography, Willis
and Trondman (2000) echo Burawoy’s
emphasis ontheoryas a ‘precursor, medium
and outcome of ethnographic study and
writing’. They propose time (theoretically
informed methodology for ethnography) as
an appropriate acronym, as well as being
relevant in a non-acronym sense.
These moves to redefine ethnography are
further enriched by more explicit attention to
a conception of space (or space–time) and
scaleas actively produced through situated,
embodied material practices and their associ-
ated discourses and power relations
(Lefebvre, 1991b). For example, there remains
a widespread tendency to conceive of ‘place’
as concrete, and ‘space’ as abstract – in other
words, a notion of place as space made mean-
ingful. A Lefebvrian understanding of thepro-
duction of space decisively rejects this
distinction. Instead, space and place areboth
conceived in terms of embodied practices and
processes of production that are simultan-
eously material and discursive. From this per-
spective, place is most usefully understood as
nodal points of connection in widernetworks
of socially produced space – what Massey
(1994b) calls an extroverted sense of place. If
spatiality is conceived in terms of space–time
and formed through social relations and inter-
actions at all scales, then place can be seen as
neither a bounded enclosure nor the site of
meaning-making, but rather as ‘a subset ofGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 218 1.4.2009 3:17pmETHNOGRAPHY