The goal of ethnographic field-work must be approached through three avenues:

• 1. The organization of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, statistical documentation is the means through which such an outline has to be given.
• 2. Within this frame, the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behavior have to be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life.
• 3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents (Malinowski [1922] 1961: 24)

"The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world." (Malinowski [1922] 1961: 25)

What is the goal of ethnography? Is it the exact reconstitution of what happened, or what is happening in the society studied? To answer this affirmatively would be to forget that we are confronted here to systems of representations that differ for each member of the group and that, together, differ from the representations of the investigator. The best ethnographic study will never transform the reader into a native. The Revolution of 1789 as lived by an aristocrat is not the same phenomenon as the Revolution of 1789 as lived by a sans-culotte, et neither one nor the other would ever correspond to the Revolution of 1789 as conceived by some one like Michelet or Taine. All that an ethnographer can do, and all that one should ask of them, is to broaden a particular experience into a general, or more general, one, and, in so doing, makes this experience available as experience to people of other places or times (Lévi-Strauss [1958] 1963: 17)