Lecture 2: Anthropological Fieldwork Flashcards
What is the difference between a thin description and a thick description? Use the example of a student walking out of the classroom to demonstrate.
If a student were to get up and just walk out of the room right now, how would you interpret this event? We would start with a hypothesis like something urgent game up, they were in the wrong class, had to go to the bathroom, etc. On one hand, there’s a thin description: a student gets up and leaves. But none of us stop there. We want a thick description that involves context and explanation. When we explain human action, we can’t just explain it through the observation itself. One of the challenging things about understanding culture, it’s never just about the action itself. Human life is always in context. We start to ask questions about human behaviour when they start to go against our ideas of social norms.
Why do we have to use multiple frames of interpretation when analyzing an event?
A human action always communicates. Whether or not the student intended to send a message, we just assume that human actions are some sort of communication. If you ask someone about their intent, they might tell you something that isn’t what actually happened. We all like to come up with self-justifying actions that paint us in a good light. Understanding their intent is not as simple as just asking someone what they’re doing. There are multiple frames of interpretation that we could use to understand the situation, and none of these frames may be right or wrong. Often, in order to properly interpret the event, we may have to observe it multiple times or under different circumstances.
What are the different ways that one can gather information, and the problems with each of these methods?
- You do have to do observation, but if you’re only limited to what you see at that moment, a lot of what you need to know in order to interpret the event isn’t present in that moment.
- One might also use measurement, for example seeing how often an event happens. But then you also have to consider the surrounding context, for example whether the class was large or small. You often need a thick description to even know what to measure.
- If one wants to get rid of the messiness of context, you could try to run experiments in a lab. But the problem is that the lab is a very specific environment that is not like real life.
- We could ask a key informant. But the key informant is also usually someone who is male, older, educated, and perhaps alienated or weird in their own society. So they’re someone who also has their own biases just based on who they are, and they can also tailor their answers to what they think the researcher wants to hear. You’re also only going to hear a static, categorical report rather than understanding the transitions throughout time that have a large impact on the present.
- All of the things we usually think of as making something scientific (i.e. everything we just talked about) don’t work very well when you’re working in the human domain, because humans are always in changing contexts. So you may want to conduct a survey. However, the survey is being made from the perspective of the researcher who may entirely miss the issue in the first place. You have to do a lot of thinking and research to even understand the nuances and essence of what it is you want to be looking for.
What are the things that make fieldworld scientific?
- Open ended curiosity—you don’t close yourself off to possible explanations and frameworks.
- Inductive—you start with what you see and what people say (the superficial) and then probe it. Some may say that this isn’t scientific because you don’t have a hypothesis, but in fact you are trying to remain open and only holding on to your hypothesis lightly.
- It’s also important to compare what people say to what they do—everything is data. People often present themselves in a certain way that is not consistent with what they do. It’s fine for what they say to be false, because this also tells you something about them. That’s why simply observing is limited, because you can’t always see what they do.
- During and after field work, you’re also comparing your data across contexts and perspectives.
- Embrace surprises—whenever something you don’t expect occurs, it’s an invitation for you to inquire. Surprises don’t mean that you’ve been a bad scientist, it means you have more work to do.
- These surprises also lead you to do cross checking. Your understanding is provisional, kind of like peeling an onion. The further you get into the issue, the more you realize that there are underlying factors that you’re not seeing.
- The biggest thing that people struggle with is understanding that anthropological work is not “just my opinion.” The picture is built up through careful observation and cross checking.
What is:
reflexivity
It means understanding your own positioning in terms of who you hang out with amongst your friends and family.
What is:
positioning
How other people see you, i.e. your positioning in terms of race and other power dynamics. It also affects what you see, so you have to be aware of what you can’t see.
What is:
selection
Each person sees what they want to. Two researchers can go into the same place and get completely different reports because they’re focusing on two different aspects of life. For example, one could focus on birth rituals whereas someone else looks at the economy.
What is:
framing
The way you carry out and report on your research, like the director in a movie. There’s something personal about the way you’re presenting your work, but that’s unavoidable.
What do researchers have to take into consideration in terms of ethics?
You can’t just make people your research subjects without their knowing; you have to get informed consent. This can be very difficult. For example, if you’re working with a large population, how do you get the consent of every single person in the village? It’s an ongoing effort to make sure that people remember that you’re a researcher and you’re there to gather information about them. You often have to adjust your language to the situation (since you often can’t just tell the people you’re studying that you’re a researcher writing a report) to try and give them as much information as possible. It’s not completely explicit, but consent is often given non-verbally. For example, if someone shuts their door in your face you can understand that they don’t want you to talk to them. Lastly, you have to respect their privacy and not go around telling the stories you heard from one person to other people.
What is:
cultural relativity
When you “make the familiar strange.” This means questioning something that you hold as familiar and trying to understand the reasons behind it. Additionally, doing this helps you to make the strange familiar. In other words, you have to suspend judgement and analyze the situation in its context.
What is the role of theories in fieldwork?
Theory is a way of being systematic about your assumptions, criteria, terminology, and shapes perception. Although this may lead to people just seeing what they want to see, it at least gives them a basis for interpretation and explanation. However, theories will often shift and are subject to revision. Coming into something with a rigid framework often means that you will see and experience things that don’t fit into your structure, causing it to fall apart and leading you to make new theories. Sometimes, you may also get new findings from other researchers that fill gaps in yours. Additionally, many theories change because we always have new concerns. The world is always changing, so new theories are always being made in order to test new phenomenon in our world. Theories are helpful to anthropological research and analysis, but it’s not a gospel. We must remember to always take our theories lightly and not let them blind us.
What is:
evolutionism
This was the prominent theory in the early stages of anthropology. When these early explorers visited different cultures, what they thought they were seeing were living ancestors. They ran into people who seemed to be in a different stage of evolution from the culture they came from, and thus studied them to understand where their own cultures came from. We have abandoned this approach, because these people in hunter gatherer societies obviously have their own history, just as any of us. They aren’t people who got stuck in the past and never progressed, they just progressed in a different direction.
What did the British school focus on?
They focussed on functionalism, and specifically structural functionalism. Instead of judging people for the way they live, whenever something different or strange came up, this anthropological school asked: how do the elements relate, how does it work, what does it do, etc. and tried to understand what function everything they did had in their society. There are also criticisms of functionalism, the biggest of which is that functionalism ignores history. If everything fits together in such a neat, rigid structure, you ignore how it’s changed to be what it is over time and how it is changing for the future.
What did the American school focus on?
They focussed on culture, meaning, and uniqueness. Contemporary “socio-cultural” combines both aspects from the British and American school. On the one hand, we are trying to grasp “the native’s point of view,” but we also place it in context of social, political, economic relations.
