The ethnographic method is to encourage yourself to leave the comfort of the office and put your feet in the mud of the ground, in order to understand how you live and think, feel and create a human group. To achieve this, the ethnographer must appear in person before the members of that group and maintain prolonged contact with them, talking and sharing social activities as varied as cooking, dancing or playing football, provided that their conditions of gender, age, ethnic group and general competence make it admissible. The secret? Maintain a delicate balance between watching and participating.
In this book, Rosana Guber reviews the basic elements of this approach, starting with the fruitful relationship between the researcher and the natives, those others always exotic and familiar at the same time, This explains the incidence of prejudices and the laborious construction of mutual trust, and describes key aspects of ethnographic research: the forms of registration, the different types of interview and the decisive instance of writing.
Perhaps it highlights the human measure of the process of knowledge, ethnography gives those who investigate social life, and not only sociologists and anthropologists, a power of understanding that does not offer other resources available in the repertoire of social science methods.