A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Johannesburg 2017.This research investigates how ethnography acts as an instructional tool in teaching and
learning anthropology. Through a classroom ethnography of a postgraduate anthropology
course, it illustrates how ethnography as a ‘psychological tool’ mediates anthropological
pedagogy. The author was a non‐participant observer for twelve weeks in a South African
Ethnography seminar‐course, taught by a noted South African anthropologist. In a
descriptive‐interpretive analysis of richly detailed ethnographic data, the researcher traces
the micro‐genetic processes of concept development to illustrate the role of ethnography in
mediating understanding of anthropological ways of thinking. The study is theoretically
informed by the seminal work of Lev Vygotsky’s (1987) sociocultural‐historical approach to
cognitive development and anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1988) view of ethnography as
an instrument of communication, a vehicle of thought. Vygotksy’s theory is applied and
extended in a triple‐stranded analysis incorporating neo‐Vygotskian activity‐theory
(Wertsch, 1991) and signification‐theory (Miller, 2011) as these theories are integrated by
Bakhtin’s (1986) theory of dialogicality, in a context of higher education as a community of
practice. In extending Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach to cognitive development, the
research argues that, and demonstrates that, ethnography as a psychological tool is a
‘model of’ and ‘model for’ the teaching and learning of anthropology.MT201
