Ethnography
Both the method and the written product of close, extended, judgment-suspending study of a culture, traditionally produced through direct fieldwork. Bronisław Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork and Clifford Geertz's Balinese cockfight essay are the discipline's founding examples; the Writing Culture critique of the 1980s later insisted that every ethnography is also a constructed text, shaped by the author's own position and literary choices, not a transparent window onto its subject.