Compare methods

	Genealogical Method	Ethnographic Mapping
Field	Anthropology	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1910	2017
Originator	W. H. R. Rivers	Ethnographic fieldwork tradition (codified by Bernard)
Type	Systematic field procedure for collecting and reconstructing kinship genealogies	Field procedure for documenting a community's physical and social space
Seminal source	Rivers, W. H. R. (1910). The genealogical method of anthropological inquiry. The Sociological Review, 3(1), 1–12.	Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN: 9780759112421
Aliases	Genealogical Method of Inquiry, Pedigree Method, Kinship Genealogy Collection, Rivers Method	Community Mapping, Sketch Mapping, Spatial Ethnography, Field Mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	The genealogical method is W. H. R. Rivers' systematic procedure for collecting kinship genealogies in the field using a small, fixed set of questions and the community's own kin terms. By asking each informant a standard sequence — who are your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your children, and so on — and recording named individuals together with the relationship terms applied to them, the ethnographer accumulates concrete pedigrees. These pedigrees are then assembled to reconstruct descent, marriage, residence, and the broader principles of social organization.	Ethnographic mapping is a fieldwork technique in which the researcher — rather than the participants — systematically records a community's physical and social space: the layout of households, the placement of resources such as wells, markets, and fields, the boundaries people recognize, and the routine paths along which people and goods move. Sketch maps drawn in the field and georeferenced coordinates captured with GPS are treated as primary ethnographic data, not mere illustration. The resulting map anchors observation, sampling, and interpretation in the concrete geography of social life.