American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs through each of these three reckonings. This article, written by a team of cultural, biocultural, and linguistic anthropologists, outlines key connections between ethnographic methods training and the challenges facing anthropology. We draw on insights from a large-scale survey of American Anthropological Association members to examine current ethnographic methods capabilities and training practices. Study findings are presented and explored to answer three guiding questions: To what extent do our current anthropological practices in ethnographic methods training serve to advance or undermine current calls for disciplinary change? To what extent do instructors themselves identify disconnects between their own practices and the need for innovation? And, finally, what can be done, and at what scale, to leverage ethnographic methods training to meet calls for disciplinary change?

We have known since Vico to think of written text and oral traditions as two systems of culture. Social historians have long treated the rise of literacy itself as an important index of modernity, although collectors of oral traditions have typically transcribed folk songs and oral stories into text. Modern historians track the appearance of different genres of writing, from parliamentary blue books to the newspaper to the novel to published transcripts of court cases, as an index of evolving institutions and markets. And knowledge of the way that these texts circulated—whether read aloud in the post office or debated on bulletin board systems on the early internet—is often a clue to important social structures. The knowledge accessible through text does not exhaust in any way the full repository of artifacts that historians use—which of course extends to the formats of texts; to visual and audio media, which may or may not combine graphics, video, or sound with text; to the record of the built and natural environment itself; and to demographic, price, and climate data sometimes measured in nontextual ways and stored in separate repositories. Despite innovation and a plurality of possible concerns, many of our points of entry into the past remain through text.