The paper proposes a definition of ethnography in Rickert's terms: an anthropological narrative that is a "synthesis of reality", or rather a "concept of reality". Its function is to reduce the complexity of reality in order to allow it to be perceived and to be thought. In this sense, all ethnography is a "reduction"; an efficient tool for the anthropologist who recognizes the problem of the relationship between explanation and unpredictability of reality, but who refuses to give up the idea of science as a way of organizing knowledge.
anthropological narrative; ethnography; "synthesis of reality"; theory