Within the field of anthropology and other social sciences, ethnography is a genre of writing used to describe human social and cultural interactions. Ethnographic realism is a style of ethnographic writing that narrates the author's experiences and observations as if the reader was witnessing or experiencing events first hand. A work written using ethnographic realism may be referred to as a realist ethnography, and classified as a subgenre of ethnography.
George Marcus and Dick Cushman described and categorized realist ethnographies under certain characteristics.