Ethnography question?

Question

I have a project to come up with three ideas for a short ethnographic research project. I have limited resources and i am confined to suburban wisconisin. Any idea or method for discovering one would be appreciated

Answer 1

Please disregard Brennus's above answer. If you were to turn in the result of any of those suggestions as an "ethnography project," you would surely recieve a failing grade. I suggest that you look around you community for things that you find interesting but aren't really familiar with or a part of already. You could do a small ethnographic project with an environmental group, in a soup kitchen, a doctor's office, a church, a farm, really any time of place where there are people. Or, you could follow a certain group of people for a few days--like farm workers, a lawyer, a plumber, a priest, etc. to see how they live their lives and not just their job. Short duration ethnographic research projects are always tough because they're really just practice interviews and people-watching, but with the expectation that you produce some sort of results; ethnographic research usually takes a very long time, and has often been done in faraway places that require alot of adjustment on the part of the researcher. However, it is becoming more common for ethnography to be done within the researcher's own country. I think that's because anthropologists have realized that the US isn't a homogeneous geographic area. Best wishes!

Answer 2

The geography section of your local public library probably has enough information for you to do your project. If you could get to either the geography or sociology section of a college or university library that might be better.

Actually, You don't have to read the whole books. When you find one about an ethnic group you'd like to report on. Just look for chapters and topic sentences that are related to your subject and apply that information. Atlases often have interesting tidbits of information about ethnography and human populations which can be useful too.

Finally, don't rule out googling and the Internet to find information. Even though copyright laws prevent some of the best information from getting on the Internet, there is probably still lots of satisfactory information about anthropology, geography and ethnology on there.