Ethno-cultural studies are the research and study of human groups, their cultural patterns, their values, attitudes, world-view, ways of life, institutions, modes of adaptation, arts, religion, foods, technologies, as all these aspects are situated in both place and time, both in relation to other contemporaneous groups in a larger inter-group context, and in relation to the literary framework of understanding which surrounds and informs the understanding of these people. It studies people in both place and through time, as groups change over the generations in adaptation and response to relations with alternate groups.

Ethnocultural studies is to Cultural Anthropology what Ethnohistory is to History in the general sense of the term. In fact, ethnocultural studies borrows its methods not only from cultural anthropology, including ethnographic description and ethnology, but it also borrows from historical research and ethnohistorical approaches. Ethnocultural studies also entails certain distinct methods of its own, including life-history, culture historical methods of detailed hermeneutic and critical philology, textual analysis, existential & phenomenological ethnography, and scientific methods of systematic frame elicitation and naturalistic behavioral observation and description.

Ethnocultural studies place an emphasis on the position of the individual as both culture-bearer and member of a group, and as an independent actor and shaper of the cultural values in the on-going performance, articulation and transmission of ethnoculture. Particular, ethnocultural studies seeks to understand and explain the relations between the lived subjective experiences of the individual and the larger patterning of the group in relation to the framework of the larger historical and acculturative patternings that affect and change them.

Ethno-cultural Studies exists to promote this form and style of scholarship in the world and to provide a context for the further development of Ethno-cultural studies beyond conventional academic boundaries, both in research and in application of knowledge to real world contexts and situations.

Ethno-cultural studies are deemed important and vital to the more realistic and better understanding of persistent ethnic identities and inter-ethnic differences that underlie many inter-group relations in the world and that often result in so much violence and bloodshed.