Etnografi og kritisk humanisme: Kraften i tykke beskrivelser

Abstract

This chapter addresses three fundamental and related challenges ethnographic research faces in our own time: weakened legitimacy, thin descriptions and poverty of theory. The first mainly concerns changing views on what are considered good research ethics, something which imposes considerable restrictions on the potential of ethnography, particularly by limiting access to important arenas for fieldwork. The second – the risk that thin descriptions become dominant – is partly a consequence of the first but is also influenced by the fact that many (and probably more and more) ethnographic analyses are based on interviews alone. By theory poverty, I refer to the tendency for the understanding of ethnographic material to be to some extent disconnected from relevant theoretical reflection, and instead, for example, reduced to coding processes. I would argue that if we look at these challenges in context, we may be in a good position to recognize the need to exploit the great opportunities of ethnography even better.