Mention the word ‘ethnography’ and a tribe in a faraway place comes to mind. But couldn’t it just as well apply to us moderns, with our own myths, rituals, assumptions, customs, and oddball ideas of the world? Here is Scott McLemee on anthropologist Karen Ho’s ethnography of bankers, traders and analysts, the tribe of elites who shape our world in the image of ‘Wall Street’s bulimic culture of expediency’.

Each social group has its particular mixture of small-scale habits, large-scale rationalisations and everyday assumptions about the how the world really works. Like a good journalist, the ethnographer will find and describe telling details about what goes on within a subculture. But the ethnographer takes an additional few steps by trying to understand how even the most taken-for-granted aspects of behaviour within a group reflect a set of powerful but largely implicit rules and beliefs. Daily experience tends to reinforce the subculture’s shared outlook in ways that make it seem inarguable.

It’s one thing to do this with, say, Albanian shepherds – and something else to attempt it with those financial titans who Tom Wolfe once satirically called the Masters of the Universe. But the same general principles apply. The ethnographer has to spend time observing what the Albanian shepherd expects from the sheep, and from himself – and also figuring out how either may be different from what a Greek shepherd expects. A significant part of Wall Street’s outlook is available in documents, of course, unlike with a rustic subculture; but the really interesting dimension of Liquidated comes from its account of how the financial sector’s members understand their own daily experience.

More here (via 3QD). I wonder if anyone has done a similar ethnography of today’s professional scientists (esp. the neo-atheist type).