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Many qualitative studies in journalism and mass communication research draw on ethnographic methods that originated in anthropology and sociology. These methods involve studying people within their own cultural environment through intensive fieldwork; they emphasize the subjects' frames of reference and understandings of the world. This article uses a comparison between journalism and ethnographic research as a framework for highlighting common problems with manuscripts using this method. It offers veteran ethnographers' tips about what they look for in a manuscript and identifies three ethnographies that are examples of successful application of the method to topics of interest to journal readers.

Der Beitrag behandelt eine besondere Art der soziologischen Ethnographie, die vor allem, aber nicht ausschließlich in der angewandten Forschung eingesetzt wird. Es wird vorgeschlagen, diese Art der Ethnographie als "fokussierte Ethnographie" zu bezeichnen. Die fokussierte Ethnographie wird vor dem Hintergrund der herkömmlichen Formen der Ethnographie beschrieben. Sie bildet weniger einen Gegensatz als eine Ergänzung zu diesen herkömmlicheren Formen, da sie sich besonders für die moderne differenzierte Gesellschaft eignet. Der Beitrag skizziert die Hintergründe wie auch die wesentlichen methodologischen Merkmale der fokussierten Ethnographie, wie etwa kurzfristige Feldaufenthalte, Datenintensität und Zeitintensität, um damit die Möglichkeiten für weitere Forschungen zu ebnen.

Ethnographers, like other researchers, currently have a broad range of media at their disposal for conducting fieldwork, for aiding analysis and, most challengingly, for representing their completed work. These include digital media such as photographs, video film, audio-recordings, graphics and others besides. Through the computer 'writing space', these media can be integrated together, alongside more conventional written interpretation, into hypermedia environments. However, integration poses a number of potential problems, which this article addresses through a discussion of the semiotics of multimedia. In particular, it argues that different media can be seen to 'afford' different kinds of meaning. The integration of different media, therefore, has potentially significant implications for ethnography. Rather than seeing these media forms as discrete, we suggest an approach to ethnographic work which sees meaning as emerging from the fusion of differently mediated forms into new, 'multi-semiotic' modes. We therefore recognize the need to go beyond the current interest in visual methods, and instead to develop ways of understanding what kinds of meanings are produced in multimodal ethnographic work.

An honest statement to begin with would be that the place of anthropology in Russian society is something of a relativity puzzle. Some can define its place but are not sure what exactly anthropology is. Others can define what anthropology is but are not quite sure what place it occupies. A few suppose they know both. The majority are not aware that either exists.The issue is a complex one, and I do not have a handy equation to reduce it to a single meaningful set of answers, but I will try to delineate some of the facets that shape its general contours.