What is the difference between Ethnography and Anthropology?

Ethnography and Anthropology are terms that sometimes get confused in the public's mind. This is in part due to the role ethnography plays in cultural and social anthropological research. And in part by the dominance of the socio-cultural sub-field in the organization and teaching of anthropology. What I want to do here is attempt to clarify the difference and interdependence of these two terms. 

Ethnography is a method of study and data collection involving a trained observer documenting the life of an extant people or group using a participant/observe strategy. It also refers to the product of such research which takes the form of a monograph organizing, describing, and analyzing the data collected. Ethnography is the method most common used by social and cultural anthropologist to collect qualitative data, although it is also used by archaeologist and biological anthropologist for certain types of problem that require data from living people or people living in a natural environment.

Anthropology is the scientific discipline that focuses on the human species, its origins, its evolution, distribution, commonalities and diversity in the way human organize and adapt over time and space. It is self reflective since humans are both the subject of the study and the instigators of the study. Anthropology is the coalescence of the social science movement begun in the late 18th and early 19th century when Western (European) society began to apply the ideal of science to study itself. That is when social philosophy began to shift from a subjective focus to an objective one regarding mankind. Anthropology took on the problem of the study of the non-European and non-literate (no written history) peoples that Europeans encountered in their commercial and imperial expansion out of Europe.

Ethnography became the method adopted to gather first hand information to document the lives,societies, and cultures of the peoples encountered. In a way it is the same approach as a field biologist or primatologist uses except that human have language and express both their emotions and the reasoning through language. Fieldworkers who learn the language are capable of participating as well as observing the life and culture of their subjects. Language also enables a degree of interaction between observer and subject that is not possible in the case of field biologist. Thus the anthropologist can, through ethnography gain a deeper understanding of his/her subject than the field biologist, At the same time, the ethnographer can never be certain how much of what is observed is as meaningful to the subjects as it may seem to the observer since the observed is also observing the observer and reacting to him/her. This is a far more intimate relationship than one finds in most science. It might be equated to the medical researcher using her/himself as the guinea pig.

Short answer Anthropology is a discipline Ethnography is a method

How do we measure culture -- a layman's approach

Culture is a difficult concept even among anthropologists because we all have our own way of trying to define and describe it. Yet, there are certain features of the phenomena which are objective. And from an economist's or other social scientist's point of view, it can be measurable


Defining Culture 

1. Culture is a product of social/collective behavior.
2. Culture is the result of human activity that organizes the environment into meaningful units for the members of society.
3. Culture is a learned and shared set of meanings passed on from generation to generation (generation here can be biologically or socially defined).
4. Culture is the unifying force that binds generations and individuals together into social groups for collective purposeful action.
5. Culture has both a material and a metaphysical substance.
       a. The material is what is found in an archaeological site or simply observed in the material world in which people interact. 
       b. It is metaphysical in the sense that there is a unique set of purposeful meanings for carrying out and achieving the social goals that are shared and understood by the members of the social system.


Macro and Micro Cultural Measurement

      Culture can be measured on the macro scale in terms of energy use and efficiency to achieve culturally defined purposes. A culture can be compared to another culture if we are talking about the same purpose. For example: Using man hours and calories per person as the metric, two cultures might be compared in terms of the number of man hours required to produce a week's worth of food to insure that each person has the opportunity of obtain 1500 calories per day. 

       Culture is measured on the micro-level using the anthropological approach. This is done by looking at ALL of the human and societal activities that the culture demands to achieve the purpose -- not just money and labor but also government activity, social recruitment, organization and behavior to implement the activity and its management, religious sanctions and interpretations of the rightness of the activity, family and individual resources and commitments required to participate in the process. These activities are largely organized as traditions that are passed down from generation to generation. For example, how your mother puts together your favorite meal which she learned from her mother and she from her mother.


 Measuring Culture from the applied anthropologist's perspective


Over the past forty years I have been defining culture from the applied anthropological perspective.  These are the steps that I find work, if the client is serious about solving the problem. That is, by serious I mean that the client is prepare to pay for the service, and dedicate time and effort to solving it. 

When I have been asked to help solve a client's problem, I always begin by studying my client's current practices and their behaviors associated with "the problem". First, I observe and record what they are doing and watch to see where there is a problem or if the problem is really a problem and not just a symptom of something bigger.

Then I ask them " Why do you think this is a problem?" and "Why do you do what you  are doing?" That is, I ask them to explain what they are doing and why? I want to know what their meanings are for doing things that are creating their problem.

Once I understand that, I can then discuss what it is they think they are doing and what it is they want to do.
After this, and only after this, can we begin to look for metrics to measure what it is that they real want to do or achieve. 

Metrics are Cultural Phenomena

The metric is the cultural phenomenon -- it is how the client values the activity and its outcome. If I impose my own metric, it may become interesting to me and my colleagues, but be meaningless to the client.
Econometric models are interesting to economists and some policy makers and totally meaningless to the general public who are asked to respond to the results of the analysis. The results have to be translated into meaningful, i.e. culturally relevant, policies.

How does one define the Superorganic?

Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth century evolutionist, coined the term "super-organic." to focus on social organization In the first chapter of his Principles of Sociology , entitled "Super-organic Evolution", he argues for a distinction between the organic and the social domains. He does this by exploring the holistic nature of society as a social organism. He distinguishes how society do not behave like a biological organism. For Spencer, the super-organic was an emergent property of interacting organisms, such as human beings, as distinguished from being a transcend property of the individual.

The American anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) defined "super-organic" as certain cultural aspects that do not directly originate from individuals within the society.

The question is: What is the relationship between the organic and super-organic, as they relate to the concept of life? Is the super-organic alive? Is it an emergent phenomenon at the organic level which provides the foundation for the emergent super-organic life forms?

The requirements for life are, according to Paul Davis (1998, The Fifth Mircle) and Peter Ward (2005, Life as we don’t know it)

Life metabolizes
Life has complexity and organization
Life reproduces
Life develops
Life evolves
Life is autonomous

By these criteria culture, as a super-organic form, is an emergent life form. Existing in a non-physical form but impacting the physical world, cultures have a display all of the requirements.

Super-organic entities, or cultures, or socio-cultural systems (however one calls them)

metabolize — economic and technological systems
complexity and organization — individual roles and status bound in institutional structures

Reproduce — recruit children born to members or acculturate individuals brought into the group via biological or social means

Develop — enculturating new born or acculturating new recruits to prevailing rules and behavioral through an educational process

Evolve — societies and cultures have demonstrate their ability and inability to adapt to their changing environment(s) [Ecological and archaeological studies prove this]

Autonomy — super-organic institutions claim and defend their sovereign right to exist and do so by requiring its human members, and social members to subordinate themselves to the institution by separating themselves from other competing institutions. Super-organic institutions demand loyalty.

Rather than a transcendental or metaphysical phenomena, culture defined in a super-organic sense is a legitimate subject for scientific investigation. This is especially true with modern computer modeling and practical experiments such as in the social networking taking place on the Internet.