Ethnography

Ethnography is both the fieldwork practice of living among a community to record its social life at first hand and the descriptive written account that fieldwork produces. It developed as anthropology's central method through Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork and Boas's insistence on direct observation over armchair theorizing from travelers' reports, and it remains the discipline's primary evidence gathering method, carried out through techniques including participant observation and structured and unstructured interviews.