Clinical ethnography

Clinical ethnography is a term first used by Gilbert Herdt together with Robert Stoller in the series of papers in the 1980s. As Herdt defines it, clinical ethnography

is the intensive analyse of subjectivity in cultural context...clinical ethnography is focused on the microscopic understanding of sexual subjectivity & individual differences within cross-cultural communities. What distinguishes clinical ethnography from anthropological ethnography in general is a the applications of disciplined clinical training to ethnographic problems and b developmental concern with desires and meanings as they are distributed culturally within groups and across the course of life.

Clinical ethnography has strong similarities to person-centered ethnography, a term used by Robert I. Levy, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal in the 1960s-1980s and used by numerous of his students and interlocutors. In practice the two approaches overlap butto differ in emphasis: clinical ethnography seems to be used more by anthropologists writing about sexuality or medical anthropology especially psychiatric anthropology, e.g. Luhrmann 2000, or anthropology of mental illness, while person-centered ethnography, though sometimes addressing these topics, more often focuses on the examine of self and emotion cross-culturally. Person-centered anthropology also implies a rank of ethnographic writing that emphasizes psychological effect studies.

Both live a continuation of an older tradition within psychological anthropology and Culture and Personality studies particularly. Scholars in this tradition throw had their primary training in anthropology or psychiatry or rarely both and pull in conducted ethnographic fieldwork strongly informed by psychodynamic theories though non necessarily orthodox Freudian theory, some measure of training in psychiatric or clinical psychological interviewing techniques, and attention to a sort of issues including the role of culture in or the cross-cultural study of emotions, sexuality, identity, the experience of self, and mental health. Figures in this larger tradition include but are non limited to: Jean Briggs, George Devereux, Cora DuBois, A. Irving Hallowell, Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Melford Spiro, and at least tangentially Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Marvin Opler.

Active research and training programs in clinical ethnography today include the Clinical Ethnography and Mental Health track in the Department of Comparative Human developing at the University of Chicago, and some of the qualitative researchers at the National Sexuality Resource Center, directed by Gilbert Herd at San Francisco State University. Aside from Herdt, scholars using the term include Andrew Boxer, Bertram J. Cohler, and Tanya Luhrmann, as well as numerous of their students.