An ethnographer is a person whose work is ethnography: a careful, often long, description of how a group of people live. Older dictionary lines say “different races of people,” but though actually, today’s ethnographers usually talk about culture, community, and daily practice, not race as a scientific type. The typical picture is someone who stays with a group, watches, listens, and writes what ordinary life is like — meals, work, jokes, rules — rather than only counting heads from far away. It is a specialist word from anthropology and nearby fields; you meet it in university courses and research, not at the dinner table. An ethnographer is the writer or fieldworker; ethnography is the writing or the method; ethnographic is the adjective. People sometimes stretch it to anyone who describes a scene in that close, lived-in way, including makers of ethnographic film.

民族誌學者