Anthropology: Field Work Ethics Ch. 3

Qualitative:

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

Allowing one's field research to refine and guide the research question or problem is an approach called

deductive.

Ethnographers tend to write two kinds of field notes:

descriptive field notes and personal observations.

The ________ perspective focuses on how people perceive and categorize their own culture and experiences.

emic

Salvage ethnography was an approach that emphasized

preserving and collecting "authentic" and traditional ways of life that were disappearing.

Sometimes an anthropologist does research on a particular group in order to lend their expertise to help fight for justice and equality for that group. In your text, this approach to research is called

Activist Anthropology.

Contested identity:

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

Chapter author Katie Nelson conducted her first fieldwork among

an Indigenous community of northeastern Brazil called the Jenipapo-Kanindé.

Horace Miner's essay Body Rituals of the Nacirema (1956) was written as a satire to

have readers examine the way that early anthropological descriptions made other people seem exotic and strange.

All of the following are true about Sir James Frazer EXCEPT

he concluded that all religious systems were equally developed but had different manifestations.

Chapter author Nelson tells the story of her fieldwork experience in two Mayan villages in highland Chiapas in order to describe

how learning to weave helped her understand her ethnographic research in a new way.

Malinowski is known to have done all of the following EXCEPT

marrying a Native Trobriand woman.

Remittances:

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

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.

Ethnography:

the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

Undertaking a period of fieldwork in cultural anthropology typically requires

1. interacting on a daily basis with a group of people to learn about them. 2. spending a few months to a few years living among the research participants. 3. the anthropologist to go to where the people of the research study are. 4. all of the answer choices are correct.

Suitable field sites for conducting ethnography include

1. isolated, non-industrialized societies. 2. urban environments, such as a city in the U.S. 3. multiple locations, especially when gaining a full understanding of an issue requires traveling to different locations. 4. all of the answer choices are correct.

In recent years, anthropologists have expressed concern about the authoritative voice in their publications. Which of the following statements best reflects their concern?

Anthropologists feel it is important to share the authoritative voice of their publication with the words and perspectives of their informants.

Noble savage:

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

Quantitative:

anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.

The idea that we should seek to understand another person's beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own is called

cultural relativism.

Before beginning fieldwork, researchers usually must submit their plans to an Institutional Research Board (IRB). The role of the IRB is to

ensure that study participants are aware they will not be harmed by the research.

Key Informants:

individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist.

The research technique in which an ethnographer records their own observations and thoughts, as well as what they do while engaging in daily community activities, is called

participant observation.

Bronislaw Malinowski is best known in anthropology for

pioneering fieldwork methods, including participant observation.

A sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other is referred to as having

rapport.

Deductive:

reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings.

Which of the following methods would an ethnographer use specifically to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society?

genealogical method.

The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics stresses which of the following ethical responsibilities?

1. Do no harm 2. Obtain informed consent 3. Make results accessible 4. All of the answer choices are correct

An etic perspective would include which of the following?

Analyzing a cultural practice by examining how it fits into the recent economic practices of a region

What was the problem with Flaherty's "documentary" film, Nanook of the North?

He staged certain scenes and provided traditional props to recreate an imagined past for the Inuit.

After studying Hopi language, linguistic anthropologists Sapir and Whorf concluded that

Hopi speakers understand time in a fundamentally different way than English speakers.

Land tenure:

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

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.

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.

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.

Inductive:

a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings.

Kinship:

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

The four-fields approach in the anthropology of the United States includes_____________.

culture, biology, language, and archaeology.

The tendency to view one's own culture as more important and correct than any other culture is called

ethnocentrism.

The in-depth study of everyday practices and lives of a people is referred to as

ethnography.

An approach to culture that emphasizes the interrelationships between all aspects is referred to as

holistic.

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 Americans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa.

Linguistic anthropologists Sapir and Whorf's main argument was that

the language one speaks plays a critical role in how one thinks about the world.

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.