Ethnographies

I really enjoyed the first two presentations on cultural groups, both here at AU and also off campus. And I started to think about the term itself, ethnography. It breaks down to ethnos, which means people and then graphy or graphein which means writing. It is about observing other cultures and people in their "natural" setting or whichever setting you want to observe them in, work, social life, etc. It is a given then that because there is no empirical evidence, that the findings are subjective. And although I knwo most researchers try and eliminate their bias, it is hard to elimante something you are unaware of. If one of your own cultural beliefs is ingrained in you, then you might be focusing on the lack of it in otehr group unknowingly. Or when looking at groups of a different race, there has been so much institutionalized racism in our society we might over look that we are placing that bias on people. I found that these concerns most definitely affect students like us who are approaching this for the first time. We don't really know what to block our from our own perceptions or how to tell if others are aware of our presence. For instance, in our own ethnography we were looking at a group of people we knew little about structural and could not get an indepth view on without approaching them so once they were aware f our presence they coudl have very well changed how they reacted to proposed situations. Or in the Howard example, I am curious to see if another group of students from GW or georgetwon went to Howard, would they have acted the same?
Therefore I think ethnographies present a good starting point for oberving culture and drawing conclusion, but there are so many things to take into consideration that would alter those resutls, I question its efficiency.