Abstract

What does it mean to be an ethnographer? What does it take to do ethnography? Being an ethnographer involves immersing oneself in the unknown, and also in the familiar. It requires ‘depth’: by doing it, one gets to learn very much about a very small world. Ethnography is about richness of description, wealth of experience, elasticity of practice. It is about adopting a genre of writing that accompanies anthropological research methods and presents fieldwork in all its complexity. It is thus part of the method but it extends beyond it (Hartmann, 2006: 253). Ethnography is a philosophy. It is disputed, contested and embraced. Indeed, it is still fairly commonplace to hear that ‘only anthropologists can claim to do real ethnography’. Adding to this rather incomplete compilation of elements and attributes, ethnography is about the everyday. Once the everyday became synonymous with the ubiquity of media presence and use, making us ‘live in media’ (Deuze, 2012), the anthropological study of media emerged, gained strength and some believe that it has now ‘boomed’. Many of us, coming from various research traditions and fields, started to be media ethnographers and to do media ethnographies by immersing ourselves in, learning, experiencing, practising and writing them.

How to Cite:

Medrado, A., (2017) “Editorial”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9(3), 1-6. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.170