Lecture 2: Ethnographic Fieldwork Flashcards
ethnography
- based on fieldwork and ‘provides an account of a particular community, society, or culture’
- long-term residence (new language, intimate relationships with people unlike you)
- works through a series of reversals (F->S S->F)
ethnology
- based on cross-cultural comparison and ‘examines, compares, analyzes, and interprets the results of ethnography
- more directly compared
Malinowski
• Trobriand islands
• western pacific coast of Papua New Guinea
• 1) cut yourself off from your own kind of people
• 2) immerse yourself in the social world you’re
studying
• 1) find patterns, structures, ‘anatomy’ of social life
•2) fill in details of everyday life, ‘imponderabillia’
• 3) collect a set of telling examples, ‘corpus
inscriptionum’
• to ‘grasp the native’s point of view, relation to life, and realize his/her vision of the world’
ethnographer techniques
• participant observation, rapport, key cultural consultants
• genealogical method
• ethnographers discover and record connections of
kinship, descent, marriage, using diagrams and
symbols
• life history
Emic
• local perspective
•
Etic
• external, more analytical
research models
- problem-oriented
- investigates one or more specific topic or problem
- longitudinal
- long-term study of an area or population
- team research
- multi-sited ethnography
informed consent
• agreement to take part in research after the people being studied have been informed about the nature and purpose
Dr. Berk
• Tasmania, Australia (Hobart)
• ancestors inhabited around 40,000 yrs ago
• at end of the last ice age (12,000 yrs ago) they were
separated from mainland
• considered extinct as of 1876
• demanded federal recognition as aboriginal people in
1970s
• language is English, but different context
Hobart, Tasmania
•Dr. Berk conducted
• education programs
• birding
• mittens (shell accumulation from arriving feast)
• public displays
• bushwalking (walabee’s are marsupials)
• shell collection
• exhibition design (tayenebe project- kelp weaved
baskets)
• Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal
Tasmania
qualitative vs quantitative
• more depth driven; less focused on data
vs
• number driven science
participant observation
•a characteristic ethnographic technique; taking part in the events one is observing
rapport
•good, friendly working relationship with the people you are working with (hosts)
genealogical method
• ethnographers discover and record connections of
kinship, descent, marriage, using diagrams and
symbols
key cultural consultants
• key informants; people who will help teach you; power is associated
life history
- cultural biography looking in depth
* can speak to the culture as a whole
forensic anthro
•special sub-field of physical anthropology (the study of human remains) that involves applying skeletal analysis and techniques in archaeology to solving criminal cases.
longitudinal research
•involves repeated observations of the same variables over short or long periods of time
problem-oriented research
•tries to solve larger social issues
multi-sited ethnography
•having program with multiple sites
team research
•teams of scientists working together
ethics
•anthropologists have a duty to their field of study and must follow code of morals
naïve realism
•assuming everyone thinks with equality/on the same level on certain social issues/cultures
applied anthro
• application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify and assess contemporary social problems
ex: applied medical anthropology
