"If armchair anthropology was a product of colonialism, then design ethnography is a product of capitalism", writes Anne Galloway, inspired by Jan Chipchase's post on Tour Bus Ethnography:
Looking at my travel schedule for the next few months I'm left wondering what can I expect to learn from the relatively short amounts of time spent the field in different countries? At what point does spending a few days in a culture become nothing more than tour bus ethnography?
Galloway comments:
When I read posts like the one above, I remember being taught how the discipline of anthropology really only emerged when we gave up the colonial past-time of "armchair" anthropology and actually got out in the field ourselves.
But spending too much time analysing data outside the field might have some other implications:
When scholars were tasked with making sense of all the data brought back from the colonies, they had plenty of time to reflect on it. (In fact, I've always suspected that the sheer amount of "down" time and distance from the people studied actually encouraged anthropologists to come up with those complex hierarchies of cultural traits that became so instrumental in the administration of the colonies and the oppression of so many people. You know, idle hands and all...)
>> read her whole post "Design ethnography and the crisis of time"
Jan Chipchase (seems in fact to be his real name) reveals some of his field technics >> read his post "Tour Bus Ethnography"
This entry was posted by admin and filed under technology, design anthropology, applied anthropology, fieldwork / methods. 
yeah, for sure this post-colonialism time has changed our way of doing ethnographies, after all, there wasnt just a post-colonial time, but also a post-primitive time and a pre-development time for those places where less then 100 years ago there were just tents, fires and tradition. But now, today we have drunked people, fires (it looks like this is the only thing that we can still find on those places) and capitalism (what seems to be the next tradition).
So, if all our “fields” changed so much, dont we need to change also? our way to do ethnographies, our way to look to the other - that now it’s more than a informant, it’s a colaborator.
For sure we need to change, at least it’s what I can see on this - also - few months I have for my fieldwork.