and you need to be able to analyze the behavior
of other players, as well as your own, relative to
an understanding of both the rules of play and
the social rules that constitute the larger social
and material ecology of the game.

THE PROBLEM OF OTHER CULTURES /

From this example it can be seen that bridge
players invoke close-order cultural analyses as
part of their demonstrated mastery of the game.
This notion can be extended to other games
and other kinds of socially organized activities
such that, we are all, in a sense, engaged in
practices of cultural analysis all of the time as
participants in the ongoing constitution and
coordination of our lives together. The issue for
designers—and, by extension, for all of us—is
that each of us possesses different kinds of
expertise and different areas of cultural mastery,
and while it is interesting to deepen our
understanding of those areas with which we are
already familiar, our concern is also—perhaps
predominantly—to understand the workings of
cultures, settings and ecologies of action that
are, in specific ways, different from our own.

The so-called “problem of other cultures”

is perhaps the defining problematic of
professional ethnography. In simplest form,

it consists in the idea that cultures are

relatively bounded systems and that the job of
ethnography is to assist members of one culture
to interpret and understand the practices and
their meanings of another culture through

the application of professional methods of
ethnographic inquiry and analysis.

However, as Bourdieu has pointed out, cultures
do not just sit there waiting to be understood,
they come to the table with ready-made practices
for self-representation. What he discusses

as the special position of the “informant’—a
person who is engaged by the ethnographer as
representative of the larger cultural group—is
one example of how conditions for cultural
permeability and cross-cultural understanding
are built into the local orders of practice that
ethnographers are seeking to understand in the
first place.[:2] The notion of expert “informants”
is, of course, notoriously problematic insofar as
different members of a cultural group occupy
different positions and will have different
versions of what they are up to, the meaning of
their actions, and so on. The important point
here, however, is that, in addition to what they
are doing, people are all the time reflecting on
and talking about what they are doing, and this

“discourse on practice that is built into practice”
provides an indefinitely large resource for
persons—such as ethnographers and other
novices—who are trying to understand what
the experts are up to in any given cultural
group. Indeed, were it not the case that
these kinds of resources are built into our
ordinary structures of social activity it would
be impossible for us to accomplish one of
the central tasks of any culture: To transmit
local knowledge and cultural practice to a next
generation of members.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION /

My aim in the foregoing has been to point out
that the so-called “problem of other cultures”
is not just an issue for ethnographers, it is an
issue we all face as persons who, at different
points in our lives, need to learn the language,
practices, rules and sensibilities of unfamiliar
cultural groups. We learn these things not

just by asking people to tell us what they are
up to, but by immersing ourselves in courses
of practical activity—by doing things—and by
engaging with others in constructing reflective
accounts and understandings of what we have
done. Although ethnographers have built
important specialized knowledge around these
practices of learning, in the end, these methods
represent amplifications and refinements

of practical methods of communication and
analysis that are part of the rich and complex
fabric of ordinary social life.

A further issue concerns the fact that not
all members of a specific cultural or expert
group share the same perspective, position,
knowledge, etc., vis-a-vis the system of

knowledge and practice we, as implicit

IMAGE 2 / AIGA’s Ethnography Primer.
This cover creates a visual argument
between ethnography and design.

ethnographers, are seeking to comprehend.
The issue here is more than the simple fact
that different members of a culture or area

of expertise have different versions of what
they are up to. In complex societies and
organizations, different people occupy different
roles or positions that require different sorts of
specialized knowledge and practice.

In his book Cognition in the Wild, Edwin
Hutchins provides a lengthy account of the
steering of large ocean vessels (navy ships)

An Ethnography Primer

as a highly complex achievement involving
the coordination of many different people
with very different kinds of technical
expertise. [13] Critical here is that no one
person actually possesses all of the knowledge
it takes to maneuver a ship. Rather, the ship