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Let me say, from the outset, that I have nothing against ethnography. The aim of ethnography, as I understand it, is to render an account—in writing, film, or other graphic media—of life as it is actually lived and experienced by a people, somewhere, sometime. Good ethnography is sensitive, contextually nuanced, richly detailed, and above all faithful to what it depicts. These are all admirable qualities.
What I am against, then, is not ethnography as such, but its portrayal as the be-all and end-all of the discipline of anthropology. I believe this collapse of anthropology into ethnography has deflected the discipline from its proper purpose; it has hamstrung anthropological efforts to contribute to debate on the great questions of our time, and compromised its role within the academy. It is vital for the future [22]of the discipline, I contend, that we stop being so evasive and come clean about the difference between anthropology and ethnography. This, of course, means being clear about the definition and purpose of the discipline of anthropology.
So here’s my definition. Anthropology, I maintain, is a generous, open-ended, comparative, and yet critical inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the one world we all inhabit. It is generous because it pays attention, and responds, to what other people do and say. In our inquiries we receive in good grace what is given rather than seek by subterfuge to extract what is not, and we are at pains to give back what we owe to others for our own moral, intellectual, and practical formation. This happens, above all, in participant observation, and I shall return to this. Anthropology is open-ended because we do not seek final solutions but rather ways along which life can keep on going. We are committed in this sense to sustainable living—that is, a form of sustainability that that does not render the world sustainable for some through the exclusion of others but rather has a place for everyone and everything. Anthropology is comparative because we are aware that for any path life might take, it could have taken other paths. No path is preordained as the only one that is “natural.” Thus the question, “why this way rather than that?” is always uppermost in...