The basic claim made for ethnographic method in general is that ‘[I]t captures the meaning of everyday human activities’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983, 2). It encourages the researcher to get out there and see what actors are thinking and doing. It produces descriptive accounts valuable in their own right (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983, 237). It is exploratory and encourages fresh lines of thought. Research strategies and ideas can be adapted quickly. And for those who are so inclined, it can be used to test theory; by, for example, the detailed study of key cases (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983, 24).

For Clifford Geertz (1973, chapter 1), humans live suspended in the webs of significance they have spun. Anthropologists practice ethnology to discover the relevant weaves of meaning. Doing ethnography involves using techniques such as transcribing texts and keeping a diary. More important, it is about ‘thick descriptions’, about explicating ‘our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’. The everyday phrase is ‘seeing things from the other’s point of view’. The key point is that ethnographers provide their own interpretation of what the informants believe they are up to, so these accounts are second or even third order interpretations.

Ethnographic description has four characteristics; it is interpretive; it interprets the flow of social discourse; it records that discourse commonly by writing it down; and it is microscopic. It is a ‘soft science’ that guesses at meanings, assesses the guesses and draws explanatory conclusions from the better guesses. Yet it is still possible for ethnographers to generalise. Theory provides a vocabulary with which to express what symbolic action has to say about itself. Although ethnography rarely aims at prediction, theory still has to ‘generate cogent interpretations of realities past’ and ‘survive realities to come’. The task of the ethnographer is to set down the meanings that particular actions have for social actors and then say what these thick descriptions tells us about the society in which they are found. And this analysis is always incomplete.

An Englishman (in India) who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked … what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’.

The ethnographer will never get to the bottom of anything. Ethnographic anthropology is a science ‘marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate’ — ‘what gets better is the precision with which we vex each other’.

I agree with Fenno (1990, 128) ‘that not enough political scientists are presently engaged in observation’ and I adapt his stricture to political biography. Biography of living subjects is one opportunity for observation and the tools of ethnography provide the means. To the archival skills of the historian we must now add the participant observation and field notes skills of the anthropologist (on which see Sanjek 1990).^[2]