Ethnography and reflexivity

This brief article seeks to contribute to the debate about what ethnography means and what doing ethnographic research implies. There is no single way to produce a research in general and ethnography, in particular. However, besides the different ethnographic styles that we can find we have to assume that the ethnographic approach makes us deal with some difficulties. According to Guber (2001), ethnography is also the field, the method and the reflexivity. In this sense, “going and returning” to the field and the complementation between theory and empiricism, makes us forget the pretension of achieving “neutral research”. We have to recognise and admit our political and social perspectives and the assumptions that we make. When we enter a field in order to study it, we become part of it. That operation does not transform us into “natives” but our presence there implies that we are part of it and this is an assumption that we cannot forget during our research. Through this ongoing and dynamic process we dialogue with real people. Not only with the persons that we can find in the field, but also with other academic partners that become part of the research. Furthermore, we discuss with ourselves as long as we have different and plural allegiances. In order to define the instances of research we can assume that there are three of them. In social sciences, these instances are not previously defined because the process is dynamic and we can go and return from an idea to a previous one as part of our investigation. That is why we have to introduce them as logical moments of our research. The first is the one during which we think about our object of research; a second one particularly centre in the workfield and the last one, when we analyzed the results of our research. The consequences of ethnographic research are much clearer during the second instance and we could also identify them when we analyzed the results. However, the bibliographic discussions that we have when we are thinking about the object of our investigation are not as recognizable as during other instances. According to this, we have to apply a continued “epistemological vigilance” process (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, Passeron: 2002) during all the research. Last but not least, we have to consider the way we describe a field because this also consists in a specific approach about our research process. This not only implies a methodological consideration but also a theoretical perspective assumption.