Finding ethnographies is not a straight forward process. There is no one single way to ensure that you have located all of them. Below are several approaches you may need to try to locate ethnographies for your research. These books may be located in multiple parts of the library using different terminology, and ultimately you will need to look at the book individually to make that determination yourself by checking the research method.
When an anthropologist describes a single culture after living with them. It differs from other descriptions of culture in that the primary method is participant-observation.
Our catalog uses something called the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to organize books. Subject headings are a sort of official tag that can bring multiple names under the same umbrella to make results more complete in a search. This means that sometimes the name you have heard most often may not always be the official name in the Library of Congress. For example, if you were researching the !Kung culture, the subject heading in LCSH is "!Kung (African people)" not Kung Bushmen; likewise, "Navajo Indians" is the correct LCSH, not Navajos or Navajo People.
Once you have the right name you can add some additional phrases to narrow the results down. Again, there is not one single phrase to do this, as ethnographies do not always include ethnography in the title. Some additional phrases to try are:
