During Hurricane Maria, a father who had flown over with his daughter to Puerto Rico conducted an ethnographic research study documenting his observations of the effects the hurricane had on the community. He documented the effects from the hurricane and the damage such as closed roads, fallen trees, debris, and missing streetlights. However, when interviewing residents about the hurricane and the political and historical contexts of traditional herbal practices, he realized he was engaging in a form of Eurocentric ethnography which is a very colonized form of ethnography. Due to this, he shifted his ethnographic research approach from interviewing to instead writing their stories without interviewing.

Composition II Autobiography – Google Docs

Ethnography is harmful in some ways. It can encourage false stereotypes and hate even. This can be spread if a researcher is prejudice or unethical. We saw this when we discussed in class in an article with a researcher classifying African American culture as a coping mechanism and as violent. Ethnography itself isn’t harmful but we learned in class today that sometimes, the researcher can have harmful or biased opinions that they implement into their research.