The house as a moving story: An ethnography of Andean domestic architecture

Abstract

Ethnography has been defined as a research method, as an approach and as a text. Its conceptualization as an approach assumes a conception of knowledge that “seeks to understand social phenomena from the perspective of its members” (Guber 2001:13). Ethnography allows us to place on the center of the stage the local points of view, the conceptions and definitions from the same people that exercise the studied practices. Ethnography is a process of interpretation rather than explanation (Clifford 1995). No attempts to capture a series of events that are outside of the existence of the researcher, instead the ethnographic experience involves the creation of a significant common universe. The ethnographic description is not a portrait supposedly objective, rather than a “thick description” (Geertz 2005) which seeks to consider the practices within the interpretive frameworks of its actors. This work involves an effort to call into question our own knowledge, to approach, and recognize, other possible conceptions. Indeed, one of the characteristics of ethnographic description is that it is “microscopic” (Geertz 2005). It seeks to understand local realities and practices, rather than global, through deep immersion in the field, through the extended stay in place and participant observation.