Editing Ethnography (section)

==Origins==
[[File:Gaius Cornelius Tacitus.jpg|thumb|The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a prolific ethnographer in antiquity.]]
The term ''ethnography'' is from [[Greek language|Greek]] ({{lang|grc|ἔθνος}} ''éthnos'' "folk, people, nation" and {{lang|grc|γράφω}} ''gráphō'' "I write") and encompasses the ways in which ancient authors described and analyzed foreign cultures.{{sfn | Almagor | Skinner | 2013 | p=}}{{sfn | Redfield | 2019 | p=}}{{sfn | Skinner | 2014 | pp=171–203}}{{sfn | Redfield | 2019 | p=}}{{sfn | Woolf | 2011 | p=}} Anthony Kaldellis loosely suggests the ''[[Odyssey]]'' as a starting point for ancient ethnography, while noting that [[Herodotus]]' ''[[Histories (Herodotus)|Histories]]'' is the usual starting point; while [[Edith Hall]] has argued that Homeric poetry lacks "the coherence and vigour of ethnological science".{{sfn | Almagor | Skinner | 2013 | p=6}}{{sfn | Kaldellis | 2013 | p=vii}} From Herodotus forward, ethnography was a mainstay of ancient [[historiography]].<ref name="Dench 2017 pp. 471–480">{{cite book | last=Dench | first=Emma | title=A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography | chapter=Ethnography and History | publisher=Blackwell Publishing |location=Oxford, UK | date=2017-09-12 | doi=10.1002/9781405185110.ch51 | pages=471–480| isbn=978-1-4051-8511-0 }}</ref>

[[Tacitus]] has ethnographies in the ''[[Agricola (book)|Agricola]]'', ''[[Histories (Tacitus)|Histories]]'', and ''[[Germania (book)|Germania]]''. Tacitus' ''Germania'' "stands as the sole surviving full-scale monograph by a classical author on an alien people."<ref name="CHAPTER SIX. Tacitus on the Germans 2010 pp. 159–178">{{cite book | title=Rethinking the Other in Antiquity | chapter=CHAPTER SIX. Tacitus on the Germans | publisher=Princeton University Press | date=2010-12-31 | doi=10.1515/9781400836550.159 | pages=159–178| isbn=978-1-4008-3655-0 }}</ref> Ethnography formed a relatively coherent subgenre in Byzantine literature.{{sfn | Kaldellis | 2013 | p=vii}}

===Development as a science===
{{see also|Off the verandah}}
While ethnography ("ethnographic writing") was widely practiced in antiquity, ethnography as a science ([[cf.]] [[ethnology]]) did not exist in the ancient world.{{sfn | Almagor | Skinner | 2013 | p=133}} There is no ancient term or concept applicable to ethnography, and those writers probably did not consider the study of other cultures as a distinct mode of inquiry from history.{{sfn | Almagor | Skinner | 2013 | p=2}}
[[Gerhard Friedrich Müller]] developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the [[Second Kamchatka Expedition]] (1733–43) as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated ''Völker-Beschreibung'' as a distinct area of study. This became known as "ethnography", following the introduction of the Greek neologism ''ethnographia'' by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin and the German variant by A. F. Thilo in 1767.<ref name=":0" /> [[August Ludwig von Schlözer]] and [[Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer]] of the [[University of Göttingen]] introduced the term into the academic discourse in an attempt to reform the contemporary understanding of world history.<ref name=":0">Vermeulen, Han F., 2008, ''Early History of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment'', Leiden, p. 199.</ref><ref name="Vermeulen">{{cite book|last = Vermeulen|first = Hans|title = Early History of Ethnograph and Ethnolog in the German Enlightenment: Anthropological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1710–1808|year = 2008|publisher = Privately published|location = Leiden}}</ref>