The Central Method of Cultural Anthropology Flashcards
culture
generally recognized to be a group’s shared values, beliefs, symbols, and practices
- needs to be shared among a group of people
fieldwork
spending time with a group in a non-laboratory environment (the real world) for purposes of studying that group
- participant observation
- interviews
- questionnaires
- non lab experiments
- and more!
what does fieldwork typically require?
- obtaining permission from the group prior to studying them
- offering incentives (money, medical aid, etc)
- spending a prolonged period of residence with the group (often a year)
- building a relationship of trust and rapport with the group
cultural relativism
the idea that a group’s culture should be understood first in its own context.
typically involves:
- initially withholding moral judgements and comparisons to one’s own culture
- attempting to learn how insiders of the group explain their own culture (why they do what they do)
- attempting to learn how elements of their culture might be connected to their immediate or historical challenges
ethnocentrism
the tendency to judge other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture
participant observation
viewing and making record of a group’s activities while also participating in that group’s activities
- typically involves living amongst the group
- the most common and important fieldwork technique used by cultural anthropologists
non-laboratory experiments
artificial situations created in the field for the purpose of testing a hypothesis
- manipulating one or more variables and measuring the outcome of the manipulation
- ex. testing whether hunters can tell which of two bows would shoot farther just by looking at them
ethnography
lengthy descriptions/ discussions of a group’s culture, typically as a book or dissertation
- fieldwork that cultural anthropologists do is sometimes called “ethnographic research”
journal articles
short descriptions/discussions of a group’s culture,
published in academic journals
proto-anthropologists
first generation of fieldworkers
- self taught and did not have university degrees
who was involved in the beginning of anthropological fieldwork?
proto-anthropologists frank cushing and matilda fox stevenson
- competing to document the culture of the zuni, a native american group
salvage anthropology
an effort to “salvage” cultures thought to be disappearing by making comprehensive ethnographies
- motivated by the idea that native peoples and cultures would soon be wiped out by more “advanced” cultures
unilineal social evolution
the idea that all societies progress through a fixed set of stages from the most primitive state to the most civilized
(most civilized state looked like the white european civilization)
- implied that small-scale societies were primitive or barbaric cultures that would be wiped out because they were intrinsically inferior
who was a well known anthropological proponent of unilineal social evolution?
lewis henry morgan
who was the most famous critic of unilineal social evolution?
franz boas; argued for a theoretical framework called historical particularism
