Tim Ingold begins his article That’s enough about ethnography with his objections and criticisms of what constitutes “ethnography”. He notes that the word “ethnographic”, as well as its lexical counterparts, have become so overused in the discipline of anthropology itself, as well as other disciplines within the social sciences, that it has gotten to the point of “doing great harm” (2014, 383). The overuse of the word “ethnographic” has gotten to the point that it has become synonymous with distinctly disciplinary processes such as fieldwork, which has inherently become increasingly problematic. Despite these problems, Ingold notes that he specifically does not want to do away with ethnography altogether, but would rather take this opportunity to “narrow ethnography down so that those who ask us, in good faith, what it means, we can respond with precision and conviction” (2014, 384), so as to avoid the subsumption of anthropology at the hands of ethnography.…show more content… He argues that the term “ethnographic” has become erroneously associated with interacting with other people in a way that generates new information about them and their lives. Ingold uses the example of the academy as a way to illustrate why this association is problematic. Students are not said to be doing ethnography when interacting with more senior scholars (2014), and vice versa, and yet these interactions are mutually generating new information about them and their lives. That is to say, ethnography “is always going on somewhere else” (2014, 385). Why is ethnography always happening someplace else, someplace other than within academia? Why is it that the individuals associated with ethnography are always those outside of the academic’s
