ethnography

I have been trying to put ethnography, craft traditions and design in mutually complementary perspective and the emerging scenario holds promise for a new approach to look at design and craft sector from a holistic approach. By looking at ethnography and craft, many design processes can be more clearly articulated. well defined practice methodologies can be put in place with enough freedom to manoeuvre but not go astray. Ethnography emerges out of two words "ethnos' and "graph" meaning 'folk, people, nation" and "i write" respectively. As per the references available, the credit goes to Franz Boas to get ethnography discipline at the professional level and introduce a more inductive analysis and academic rigour to it, where as Bronislaw Malinowski who defined the discipline further more by introducing field work and emphasising on the same. Apart from these two mentioned names there are many more people who have worked in this area to make it into an academic discipline. Sociology and anthropology have always embraced ethnography as one of the core areas of study and practice, and many trained ethnographers today emerge out of these two discipline.