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| Kandinsky, Wassily, 1866-1944. Ludwigskirche in Munich. Oil on canvas, 1908. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.13698531. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024. |
You are being asked to write an ethnographic essay. This assignment relies on a type of social research that examines the behavior of people from a particular group, culture, or other population. For example, ethnographies have been written about native communities, youth gangs, religious cults, pop culture societies, and more. If you wonder why your professor might have assigned this kind of research, the following article may be of interest.
Kahn, Seth. "Putting Ethnographic Writing in Context." Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Parlor Pr, 2011, pp. 175–92,
writingspaces.org/past-volumes/putting-ethnographic-writing-in-context/.
Finding ethnographies in the library can be challenging. There isn't a specific Library of Congress subject heading (LCSH) that will take you directly to all of the ethnographies. The subject heading most commonly assigned is "social life and customs," but "case studies" and "ethnology" may also be used. Since ethnographic titles about a particular cultural group, region of the world, or subject area are placed with other books on those topics, you won't find all of the ethnographies shelved together in one place, either. Given these complications, here are some tips for using the Carl B.'s WorldCat Discovery library catalog to find ethnographies.
- Identify the correct Library of Congress (LC) name for your group. For example, if you would like to research a Native American group, a good search strategy would be to use the official LC subject heading "Indians of North America" and then add the name of a state or region. You might also use a more specific tribal name, such as "Spirit Lake Tribe, North Dakota." When searching for information about an African tribe called the !Kung, use "!Kung (African people)" instead of Kung Bushmen. Here are some examples of subject terms you might use to research anime fan culture: "Popular culture—Japan" or "fans (persons) AND animated films."
- Once you have the correct name of the group or subject, search that name and add the phrase "social life and customs." For example, search "Indians of North America" and "social life and customs."
- Try searching the name of the group or subject in combination with the phrase "case studies." Not all case studies are ethnographies, but some are. Closely examine the titles in your results list to determine whether or not they are ethnographies.
- Search the group name or subject with the term "ethnology." Again, carefully look at these titles to determine if they are ethnographies.
- Search the group name or subject with the truncated term "ethnograph*" (e.g., female gangs AND ethnograph*). This retrieves only books that have the word ethnography somewhere within their library catalog record (not all titles do).
- Try a keyword search combining the name of your group and an aspect of their culture (e.g., rave culture AND religion).
Borrowed from: Anthropology: Finding Ethnographies. University Libraries, University of Denver, 20 July 2020, libguides.du.edu/c.php?g=90260&p=582099.