What Makes School Ethnography ‘Ethnographic’?

This paper began as a long memorandum to participants in a research training session on ethnograhic research conducted for the American Educational Research Association in 1972. One of the participants attending that presession was Arthur A. Katz, then one of John Singleton’s students. Katz edited my essay for publication in the Anthropology and Education Newsletter. The editing was skillful and I am grateful for that. I have made a few changes in revising the article for this reprinting. Almost all of them consist of material retrieved from the original essay, notably the references to the interdependence of ethnography and ethnology. I also have eliminated all citations, since many of the original ones are out of date. That in itself is testimony to the growth of the field in the past fourteen years. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH; ETHNOLOGY; FIELDWORK; INQUIRY PROCESS.