First take: In most cases, “ethnography” is, simply put, what anthropologists typically do: that is, they write up a descriptive account of a culture, subculture, or social group.

Deeper: If you look up the derivation of the word, an ethnography is a collective rendering of an “ethnos,” which is put into writing (from the Greek “graphe,” for writing).  An ethnography is, in other words, the byproduct or the report that results from fieldwork. In the last few decades, however, “ethnographic” has become more prominent and widely used (in this adjectival form) to refer to any attempt to write a collective depiction of a social group, or to the specific text produced; novelists and indeed some journalists are sometimes said to produce “ethnographic” accounts.  (Some U.S. narrative journalists, such as Ted Conover and Anne Fadiman, are indeed widely read in or trained in Anthropology.)

          “Ethnographic realism,” however, has a more specific, if somewhat contested meaning. Within the history of Anthropology as a scholarly field, the term is generally used to refer to the story-form into which, in the 19th and mid-20th century, classic anthropological accounts were commonly put: into a narrative that re-told the story of the anthropologist’s own initiation into the deep structures and meanings of a coherent and distinct cultural grouping.  As such, this story became a literary form generally associated with the method known as “participant observation,” and many of its conventions—for instance, the idea of culture a bounded social whole, sharing common core values, and readable through its practices and texts by a trained outside observer. These conventions have indeed migrated into many forms of narrative journalism, even as the common-sense assumptions behind them have been challenged, as they have in Anthropology itself.          

Within scholarly studies of narrative journalism, however, the term “ethnographic realism” has also developed in a second way, and somewhat independently of these meanings. In the 1980s, in particular, the term began to be used by way of contrast with a rival “phenomenological” mode within the New Journalism. Here, ethnographic realism was connected more directly with exposé, and with the journalistic assumption that there was a real world behind the images facing popular observers that could be captured in writing. In this usage, “ethnographic realism” was more connected, then, to the assumptions of empiricism within the mainstream journalism trade more generally.

Recommended Readings:  James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 21-54; Louis A. Sass, “Anthropology’s Native Problems,” Harper’s May 1986;   David L. Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World:  Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 51-65.