Chapter 2 Flashcards
Q: What is fieldwork?
A: An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data
Q: What are structured interviews?
A: A method for gathering information whereby an anthropologist (or another researcher). Asks a set of predetermined questions and records participants’ responses.
Q: What is a participant-observation?
A: The method anthropologist uses to gather information by living and working with the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.
Q: What is Positivism?
A: The view that there is a single reality “out there” that can be detected through the senses and that there is a single, appropriate scientific method for investigating that reality.
Q: What is the material world?
A: The physical world in all its manifestations. We experience this world through our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and movement.
Q: What is objective knowledge?
A: Knowledge about reality that is absolute and true for all people, in all times and places.
Q: What is subjective meaning?
A: Meaning that seems true to a particular person, based on his or her personal values, beliefs, opinions, and assumptions.
Q: What is intersubjective meaning?
A: Meaning rooted in the symbolic systems of a culture and shared by participants of that culture.
Q: What is reflexivity?
A: Critically thinking about the way one thinks; reflecting on one’s own experience.
Q: What is situated knowledge?
A: Knowledge that is set within or specific to a precise context or situation.
Q: What is phenomenology?
A: The study of first-person experience of consciousness in the material world, which is based on the conscious (intentional) framing of meaning or content of the observed. In different situations, people come to recognize their responses to different conditions of intentionality. These include “embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities”
Q: What is positionality?
A: A persons uniquely situated social position, which reflects his or her gender, nationality, political views, previous experiences, and so on. See situated knowledge.
Q: What is dialectic fieldwork?
A: The process of building a bridge of understanding between anthropologist and participant so that each can begin to understand each other.
Q: What is a multi-sited ethnography?
A: A method of anthropological research focused on a specific topic followed through different field situations. These field situations can be within one culture but socially distinct (social class and caste, for example) or in different geographical locations (different cultures). Data collection relies on detailed methods od survey(objective) and interviews (subjective).
Q: What is culture shock?
A: The feeling of physical and mental dislocation/discomfort a person experiences when in new or strange cultural setting
