Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility

Abstract

There is no ethnography without a corresponding ethnographic sensibility. That is, the understanding and practice of ethnography as method, theory, and writing practice rests on the cultivation of a sense of the ethnographic as the lived expectations, complexities, contradictions, possibilities, and grounds of any given cultural group. Within anthropology, the articulation of an ethnographic sensibility has long been at the heart of our disciplinary project of documenting how people collectively organize, understand, and live in the world. As such, we consider ethnography both something to know and a unique way of knowing.