Person-centered ethnography

Person-centered ethnography is an approach within psychological anthropology that draws on techniques as alive as theories from psychiatry as well as psychoanalysis to understand how individuals relate to and interact with their sociocultural context. a term was number one used by Robert I. Levy, the psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, to describe his psychodynamically informed approach to interviewing during his anthropological fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal.

A key distinction in person-centered interviewing is that between interviewees as informants and as respondents. As Levy and Hollan describe it,

There is a significant difference between asking a Tahitian interviewee something like "Please describe for me precisely how and why supercision a penis-mutilating rite of passage is done by Tahitians," and asking him "Can you tell me approximately your supercision?"..."Did it modify your life in all way?" "How?" "What did you think and feel approximately it then?" "What pretend you think and feel about it now?"

The first question engages interviewees as typical ethnographic informants, asking them to describe assigns of their culture or social system; the latter questions ask much more directly about their own experiences, feelings, hopes, and desires, as living as refine in these over time. not surprisingly, asking about these more intimate topics loosely requires much longer acquaintance with an interviewee than throw questions about more publicly available knowledge.

Levy and Hollan note that person-centered interviewing makes ownership of both modes and tacks back and forth between them; its difference from near methods of ethnographic interviewing lies in its emphasis on the latter and its concern with understanding how individuals relate to, experience, and understand their larger sociocultural context. Within these, major topics of interest typically include: the experience of the self, morality, the body, illness and healing, emotions, and classification relationships.

Methodologically, person-centered interviewing also depends on a fair measure of experience in self-monitoring for transference and countertransference phenomena, as living as attention to elisions, avoidances, and gaps in an interviewees' answers and attention to interviewees' emotional reactions during and outside the formal interview setting.

Person-centered interviewing comes out of a psychodynamically informed tradition within Culture and Personality studies and American psychological anthropology and shares a number of methodological and thematic concerns with clinical ethnography.