Definition of "ethnography" [eth•nog•ra•phy]

• The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "If "ethnography" is the only way by which literature and literary criticism can be incorporated into a college curriculum or into academic scholarship, best to leave them be."
• "The second of these, however, is utterly compelling reading, a great piece of ethnography from the projects of Chicago and in the life of the Black Kings street gang."
• "27Another way that ethnography is useful, particularly when it is representative of the societies of speakers whose languages are being reconstructed, is that after vocabulary data sets and fieldwork interviews are completed, the ethnographic details of particular events that occurred in recent times can be assessed as expressions of a societal feature whose occurrence has been shown to belong to a proto-language society."