ant112 - chap 3 - doing fieldwork & methods

Genealogical Method

-long tradition in ethnography. Developed in the early years of anthropological research to document the family systems of tribal groups, it is still used today to discover connections of kinship, descent, marriage, and the overall social system. Because kinship and genealogy are so important in many nonindustrial societies, the technique is used to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society and to trace social relationships more broadly in communities. -involves using symbols and diagrams to doc- ument relationships. Circles represent women and girls, triangles represent men and boys, and squares represent ambiguous or unknown gender. Equal signs between individuals represent their union or marriage and vertical lines descending from a union represent parent-child relationships. The death of an individual and the termination of a marriage are denoted by diagonal lines drawn across the shapes and equal signs. -Kinship charts are diagramed from the perspective of one person who is called the Ego, and all of the relationships in the chart are based on how the others are related to the Ego. Individuals in a chart are sometimes identified by numbers or names, and an accompanying list provides more- detailed information.

Ethnographic fieldwork sites

-no longer exclusively located in far-flung, isolated, non-industrialized soci- eties. Increasingly, anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research in complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States and in urban environments elsewhere in the world. -multi-sited ethnography:conduct research in multiple locations

Margaret Mead

-research anthropologist -monograph Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) -Mead's mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, was a strong proponent of cultural determinism -Coming of Age in Samoa quickly became popular, launching Mead's career as one of the most well-known anthropologists in the United States and per- haps the world.

salvage Ethnography

-sought to document, photograph, and otherwise preserve cultural traditions in "dying" cultures in groups (salvage ethnography) & collected cultural artifacts, removing property from the communities and placing it in museums and private collections

Informed Consent

-the informant's agreement to take part in the study -Informants must be aware of who the anthropologist is and the research topic, who is financially and otherwise supporting the research, how the research will be used, and who will have access to it. -their participation must be optional and not coerced. They should be able to stop participating at any time and be aware of and comfortable with any risks associated with their participation. -People may not trust the state, bureaucratic processes, or authority, for example. Asking them to sign a formal legal-looking document may intimidate them. Likewise, informed consent cannot be obtained with a signed docu- ment if many in the community cannot read. The anthropologist must determine the most appropriate way to obtain informed consent in the context of the particular research setting.

Emic

~a description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider

Etic

~a description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.

Contested Identity

~a dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group

Thick description

~a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it.

Participant Observation

~a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged. -They observe how peo- ple interact with each other, how the environment affects people, and how people affect the environ- ment. It is essential for anthropologists to rigorously document their observations, usually by writing field notes and recording their feelings and perceptions in a personal journal or diary. -important because it allows the researcher to better understand why people do what they do from an emic perspective -Malinowski noted that participant observation is an important tool by which "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world." -must live with or spend considerable time with their informants to establish a strong rapport with them

Noble savage

~an inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of "civilization."

Qualitative: anthropological research

~anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.

Quantitative: anthropological research

~anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior. -patterns can be gleaned from statistical analyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions -Surveys are a common quantitative technique that usually involves closed-ended questions -can be easier to analyze than qualitative data -Surveys are also useful for gathering specific data points within a large popula- tion, something that is challenging to do with many qualitative techniques.

Kinship

~blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Land tenure

~how property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land.

Key informants

~individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist -exceptional assets in the field, allowing the ethnographer to uncover the meanings of behaviors and practices the researcher cannot otherwise understand. ---Key informants can also help researchers by directly observing others and reporting those observations to the researchers, especially in situations in which the researcher is not allowed to be present or when the researcher's presence could alter the participants' behavior. -ethnographers can check information they obtained from other informants, contextualize it, and review it for accuracy.

Remittances

~money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their home- towns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns' populations.

Indigenous

~people who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them. Other terms used to refer to indigenous people are aboriginal, native, original, first nation, and first people. Some examples of indigenous people are Native Ameri- cans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa.

Cultural relativism

~the idea that we should seek to understand another person's beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.Culture: a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all- encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways

Undocumented

~the preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state. Undocumented refers to the fact that these people lack the official documents that would legally permit them to reside in the country. Other terms such as illegal immigrant and illegal alien are often used to refer to this population. Anthropologists consider those terms to be discriminatory and dehumanizing. The word undocumented acknowledges the human dignity and cultural and political ties immigrants have developed in their country of residence despite their inability to establish formal residence permissions.

Diaspora

~the scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations. Examples of people living in the diaspora are Salvadorian immigrants in the United States and Europe, Somalian refugees in various countries, and Jewish people living around the world

Ethnocentrism

~the tendency to view one's own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Polyvocalic Texts

-A polyvocal text is one in which more than one person's voice is presented, and its use can range from ensuring that informants' perspectives are presented in the text while still writing in the researcher's voice to including informants' actual words rather than paraphrasing them and co-author- ing the ethnography with an informant. -By using polyvocality, researchers can avoid writing from the perspective of the ultimate ethno- graphic authority. A polyvocal style also allows readers to be more involved in the text since they have the opportunity to form their own opinions about the ethnographic data and perhaps even critique the author's analysis. It also encourages anthropologists to be more transparent when presenting their methods and data.

ethnography of communication

-Anthropologists use ethnography to study people wherever they are and however they interact with others. Think of the many ways you ordinarily interact with your friends, family, professors, and boss. Is it all face-to-face communication or do you sometimes use text messages to chat with your friends? Do you also sometimes email your professor to ask for clarification on an assignment and then call your boss to discuss your schedule? Do you share funny videos with others on Facebook and then later make a Skype video call to a relative? These new technological "sites" of human interaction are fascinating to many ethnographers and have expanded the definition of fieldwork.

Life History

-Collecting a personal narrative of someone's life is a valuable ethnographic technique and is often combined with other techniques. Life histories provide the context in which culture is experienced and created by individuals and describe how individuals have reacted, responded, and contributed to changes that occurred during their lives. They also help anthropologists be more aware of what makes life meaningful to an individual and to focus on the particulars of individual lives, on the tenor of their experiences and the patterns that are important to them. Researchers often include life histories in their ethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.

Inductive and Deductive Research Strategies

-In the early years, ethnographers were interested in exploring the entirety of a culture. Taking an inductive approach, they generally were not concerned about arriving with a relatively narrow prede- fined research topic. Instead, the goal was to explore the people, their culture, and their homelands and what had previously been written about them. The focus of the study was allowed to emerge gradually during their time in the field. Often, this approach to ethnography resulted in rather general ethnographic descriptions. -Today, anthropologists are increasingly taking a more deductive approach to ethnographic research. Rather than arriving at the field site with only general ideas about the goals of the study, they tend to select a particular problem before arriving and then let that problem guide their research.

Interpretive Anthropology

-Interpretive anthropology treats culture as a body of "texts" rather than attempting to test a hypothesis based on deductive or inductive reasoning. -The texts present a particular picture from a particular subjective point of view. Interpretive anthropologists believe that it is not necessary (or even possible) to objectively interrogate a text. Rather, they study the texts to untangle the various webs of meaning embedded in them. Consequently, interpretive anthropologists include the context of their interpretations, their own perspectives and, importantly, how the research participants view themselves and the meanings they attribute to their lives.

Argonauts of the Western Pacific

-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's (1884-1942) -In 1914, he traveled to the Trobriand Islands and ended up spending nearly four years conducting field- work among the people there. In the process, he developed a rigorous set of detailed ethnographic tech- niques he viewed as best-suited to gathering accurate and comprehensive ethnographic data. One of the hallmarks of his method was that it required the researcher to get off the veranda to interact with and even live among the natives. -In a well-known book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski described his research techniques and the role they played in his analysis of the Kula ceremony -He concluded that the ceremonies were at the center of Trobriand life and represented the culmination of an elabo- rate multi-year venture called the Kula Ring that involved dangerous expeditions and careful planning -also participated in it (Kula Ring)

Malinowski

-Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's (1884-1942) pioneering method of participant observation fundamentally changed the relationship between ethnographers and the people under study. -book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) -This technique of participant observation is central to anthropological research today. Malinowski did more than just observe people from afar; he actively interacted with them and participated in their daily activities. -unlike early anthropologists who worked through translators, Malinowski learned the native language, which allowed him to immerse himself in the culture. -carefully documented all of his observations and thoughts. Malinowski's techniques are now central components of ethnographic fieldwork.

Ethical Guidelines

-The American Anthropological Association has developed a Code of Ethics that all anthropologists should follow in their work. Among the many ethical responsibilities outlined in the code, doing no harm, obtaining informed consent, maintaining subjects' anonymity, and making the results of the research accessible are especially important responsibilities.

Coming of Age in Samoa

-The research anthropologist Margaret Mead describes in her monograph Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) is a famous example of this (describe a group of people to others in a way that makes strange or unusual features of the culture seem familiar and familiar traits seem extraor- dinary. The point is to help people think in new ways about aspects of their own culture by comparing them with other cultures) -In 1925, Mead went to American Samoa, where she conducted ethnographic research on adolescent girls and their experiences with sexuality and growing up. -Mead's mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, was a strong proponent of cultural determinism, the idea that one's cultural upbringing and social environment, rather than one's biology, primarily determine behavior. -Boas encouraged Mead to travel to Samoa to study adolescent behavior there and to compare their culture and behavior with that of adolescents in the United States to lend support to his hypothesis. -Boas described what he saw as the key insight of her research: "The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization." -Mead studied 25 young women in three villages in Samoa and found that the stress, anxiety, and tur- moil of American adolescence were not found among Samoan youth. Rather, young women in Samoa experienced a smooth transition to adulthood with relatively little stress or difficulty. -documented Doing Anthropology In this short film, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, three members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Anthropology Department, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork. 48 PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY instances of socially accepted sexual experimentation, lack of sexual jealousy and rape, and a general sense of casualness that marked Samoan adolescence -Coming of Age in Samoa quickly became popular, launching Mead's career as one of the most well-known anthropologists in the United States and per- haps the world. The book encouraged American readers to reconsider their own cultural assumptions about what adolescence in the United States should be like, particularly in terms of the sexual repres- sion and turmoil that seemed to characterize the teenage experience in mid-twentieth century America. Through her analysis of the differences between Samoan and American society, Mead also persuasively called for changes in education and parenting for U.S. children and adolescents.

Rosaldo

-The work of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo provides a useful example of how anthropologists can use their emotional responses to fieldwork situations to advance their research. -In 1981, Rosaldo and his wife, Michelle, were conducting research among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. -Rosaldo was studying men in the community who engaged in emotional rampages in which they violently murdered others by cutting off their heads. Although the practice had been banned by the time Rosaldo arrived, a longing to continue headhunting remained in the cultural psyche of the community. -Whenever Rosaldo asked a man why he engaged in headhunting, the answer was that rage and grief caused him to kill others. -At the beginning of his fieldwork, Rosaldo felt that the response was overly simplistic and assumed that there had to be more to it than that. He was frustrated because he could not uncover a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Then, on October 11, 1981, Rosaldo's wife was walking along a ravine when she tripped, lost her footing, and fell 65 feet to her death, leaving Rosaldo a grieving single father. -In his essay "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," Rosaldo later wrote that it was his own struggle with rage as he grieved for his wife that helped him truly grasp what the Ilongot men meant when they described their grief and rage. -Only a week before completing the initial draft of an earlier version of this introduction, I rediscovered my journal entry, written some six weeks after Michelle's death, in which I made a vow to myself about how I would return to writing anthropology, if I ever did so, by writing Grief and a Headhunter's Rage . . . My journal went on to reflect more broadly on death, rage, and headhunting by speaking of my wish for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So, I need a place to carry my anger - and can we say a solution of the imagination is better than theirs? And can we condemn them when we napalm villages? Is our rationale so much sounder than theirs? All this was written in despair and rage. -Only through the very personal and emotionally devastating experience of losing his wife was Ros- aldo able to understand the emic perspective of the headhunters. The result was an influential and insightful ethnographic account.

Kula Ring

-Trobriand Islands -Kula ceremony, an exchange of coral armbands and trinkets among members of the social elite

Holistic Perspective

-anthropologists are interested in studying everything that makes us human. Thus, they use multiple approaches to understanding humans throughout time and throughout the world. They also acknowledge that to understand people fully one cannot look solely at biology, culture, history, or language; rather, all of those things must be considered. -helps us to appreciate that our culture, language, and physical and cognitive capac- ities for language are interrelated in complex ways.

Four-field approach to anthropology

-anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century actively documented anything and everything they could about the cultures they viewed as endangered. They collected artifacts, excavated ancient sites, wrote dictionaries of non-literate languages, and documented cultural traditions, stories, and beliefs -In the United States, those efforts developed into what is known today as the four-field approach or simply as general anthropology. -This approach integrates multiple scientific and humanistic perspectives into a single comprehensive discipline composed of cultural, archaeological, biological/physical, and linguistic anthropology. -A hallmark of the four-field approach is its holistic perspective

Ethnographic research strategy

-ethnography -developed by anthropologists to study small-scale, relatively isolated cultural groups (Typically, those groups had relatively simple economies and technologies and limited access to larger, more technologically advanced societies) -sought to understand the entirety of a particular culture. -spent months to years living in the community, and in that time, they documented in great detail every dimension of people's lives, including their language, subsistence strategies, political systems, formation of families and marriages, and religious beliefs. (This was important because it helped researchers appreciate the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social life) -The key to the success of this ethnographic approach was not only to spend considerable time observing people in their home settings engaged in day-to-day activities but also to participate in those activities. (informed an emic perspective of the culture) -Because of how useful the ethnographic research strategy is in developing an emic perspective, it has been adopted by many other disciplines including sociology, education, psychology, and political science.