Ethnography and Linguistic Ethnography

Ethnography and Linguistic Ethnography The ethnography is a qualitative research method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena and which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group, is also a branch of anthropology that provides scientific description of individual societies. The linguistic ethnography as a term designating a particular configuration of interests within the broader field of socio and applied linguistics, Linguistics Ethnography is a theoretical and methodological development orientating toward particular, established traditions but defining itself in the new intellectual climate of late modernity and post-structuralism.

Linguistic ethnography generally holds that language and social life are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into mechanisms and dynamics of social and cultural production in every activity. The most representative linguists of ethnolinguistics were Franz Boas and Edward Sapir.

Boas encouraged the far field concept of anthropology; he personally contributed to physical anthropology, linguistics, archeology as well as cultural anthropology. His work in these field was pioneer; in physical anthropology, he led scholars away from static taxonomical classification of race to an emphasis on human biology and evolution; in linguistics he broke through the limitations of classic philology and established some of the central problems in modern linguistics and cognitive anthropology; in cultural anthropology he (along with polish-  English anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski) established the contextualist approach to culture, cultural relativism, and the participant- observer method of fieldwork. They worked with American-Indian tribes in order to establish their theories. Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the disciplines of linguistics. With his solid linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.

This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that understanding relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in ways in which culture and society develop. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, which he elaborated for most of his professional life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages.

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