Critical ethnography builds upon conventional ethnography. Conventional ethnography involves learning from people in order to understand their culture. Roper and Shapira (2000) suggest that in this methodology the researcher’s perspective becomes that of both an ‘insider’ (emic) and an ‘outsider’ (etic). These authors also give a definition of culture that involves how a group behaves, what they value and what they believe, though these components have been further subdivided by many ethnographers. By taking this emic and etic perspective, one may develop a holistic understanding of the culture of study. However, conventional ethnography is not sufficient to shed light on issues of power and oppression. Critical ethnography takes the conventional methodology of ethnography and incorporates the tenets of critical theory in order to critique the culture (Thomas, 1993). Critical ethnography is premised upon the assumption that culture can produce a false consciousness in which power and oppression become taken-for-granted ‘realities’ or ideologies. In this way, critical ethnography goes beyond a description of the culture to action for change, by challenging the false consciousness and ideologies exposed through the research. Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = people and graphein = writing) refers to the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. ... Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning to cultivate), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... False consciousness is the Engelsist hypothesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat — and perhaps the other classes — over the nature of capitalism. ...