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Ethnography is a qualitative orientation to research that emphasises the detailed observation of people in naturally occurring settings. The ethnographic approaches currently used in HCI clearly have their origins in social anthropology. The move towards naturalistic observational methods in anthropology is generally attributed to Malinowski and popularised by other anthropologists such as Boas, and, more controversially perhaps, Margaret Mead (see Freeman 1999; Shankman 2000). These early anthropologists were convinced that only through living with and experiencing'native'life could a researcher really understand that culture and that way of life, changing the perception of anthropology from being mere'strange tales of faraway places.'Ethnography also has carved a place within sociology (eg, the Chicago School. See Hammersley 1990), though it has often been presented as a methodology of last resort-used for obtaining information about deviant groups and cultures-sometimes characterised as' nuts, sluts and perverts'-that are impossible to investigate in other ways. It has been put to the service of any amount of theoretical work, including feminism, Marxism, actor network theory, activity theory, distributed cognition, symbolic interactionism, grounded theory, and so on ad nauseam. In addition, of course, although ethnography proper is associated with anthropology and sociology,'fieldwork'can be traced just as easily through cognitive science, Swedish and German work science, and so on.