Download Chapter 3 - Ethics and Methods in Cultural Anthropology

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Supplements
The following students supplements are available with the
textbook:
• The Kottak Anthropology Atlas, available shrink-wrapped
with the text, offers 26 anthropology related reference
maps.
• The Student's Online Learning Center features a large
number of helpful study tools and self quizzes, interactive
exercises and activities, links, readings and useful
information at www.mhhe.com/kottak.
• PowerWeb, available via a link on the Student's Online
Learning Center, offers help with online research by
providing access to high quality academic sources."
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Overview
This chapter introduces students to the field methods and research
methods employed by cultural anthropologists. It pays special
attention to the field methods of ethnographers, the history of
ethnography and the ethics that apply to cultural anthropologists.
Methods and Ethics in Cultural
Anthropology
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Ethics
• The AAA Code of Ethics states that anthropologists have ethical
obligations to their scholarly field, to the wider society and culture, to
the human species, other species, and the environment.
• To work in a host country and community, researchers must obtain the
informed consent from all affected parties.
• Before the research begins, people should be told about the purpose,
nature, and procedures of the research.
• Also, people should be told of the potential costs and benefits of the
research before the project begins.
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Academic reciprocity
• The AAA Code states that researchers should reciprocate in
appropriate ways.
• Include host country colleagues in your research plans and funding
requests.
• Establish collaborative relationships with those colleagues and their
institutions.
• Include host country colleagues in the publication of the research
results.
• It should not be forgotten that the researcher’s primary ethical
obligation is to the people being studied.
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Proposing Research
• Anthropologists need funding to support their research in the field.
• There are a series of agencies that support anthropological research.
– National Science Foundation (NSF)
– Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
– Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
• In order to receive funding from any of these institutions,
anthropologists must write grant proposals that summarize what
questions are going to be addressed, where the research will be
conducted, and how it will be done.
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Good Grant Proposals
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Good grant proposals must address several key questions.
What is the topic to be investigated?
Why is this research important?
Where and when will it happen?
What’s going to be tested and how?
Is the person proposing the research qualified to do it?
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Ethnography
• Ethnography Is the Firsthand Personal Study of a Local Cultural
Setting
• Ethnographers try to understand the whole of a particular culture, not
just fragments (e.g., the economy).
• In pursuit of this holistic goal, ethnographers usually spend an
extended period of time living with the group they are studying and
employ a series of techniques to gather information.
• Key cultural consultants are particularly well-informed members of the
culture being studied that can provide the ethnographer with some of
the most useful or complete information.
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Life Histories
• Life histories are intimate and personal collections of a lifetime of
experiences from certain members of the community being studied
• Life histories reveal how specific people perceive, react to, and
contribute to changes that affect their lives.
• Since life histories are focused on how different people interpret and
deal with similar issues, they can be used to illustrate the diversity
within a given community.
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Observation and Participant
Observation
• Ethnographers are trained to be aware of and record details from daily
events, the significance of which may not be apparent until much later.
• “Participant observation,” as practiced by ethnographers, involves the
researcher taking part in the activities being observed.
• Unlike laboratory research, ethnographers do not isolate variables or
attempt to manipulate the outcome of events they are observing.
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Conservation, Interviewing, and
Interview Schedules
• Ethnographic interviews range in formality from undirected
conversation, to open-ended interviews focusing on specific topics, to
formal interviews using a predetermined schedule of questions.
• Increasingly, more than one of these methods are used to accomplish
complementary ends on a single ethnographic research project.
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The Genealogical Method
• Early anthropologists identified types of relatedness, such as kinship,
descent, and marriage, as being the fundamental organizing principles
of nonindustrial societies.
• The genealogical method of diagramming such kin relations was
developed as a formalized means of comparing kin-based societies.
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Emic vs. Etic
• Local Beliefs and Perceptions and the Ethnographer’s
• An emic (native-oriented) approach investigates how natives think,
categorize the world, express thoughts, and interpret stimuli.
– Emic = “native viewpoint”
– Key cultural consultants are essential for understanding the emic
perspective.
• An etic (science-oriented) approach emphasizes the categories,
interpretations, and features that the anthropologist considers
important.
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Bronislaw Malinowski
• Bronislaw Malinowski is generally considered the father of
ethnography.
• He did salvage ethnography, recording cultural diversity that was
threatened by westernization.
• His ethnographies were scientific accounts of unknown people and
places.
• Malinowski believed that all aspects of culture were linked and
intertwined, making it impossible to write about just one cultural
feature without discussing how it relates to others.
• Malinowski argued that understanding the emic perspective, the
native’s point of view, was the primary goal of ethnography.
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Ethnographic realism
• The writer’s goal was to produce an accurate, objective, scientific
account of the study community.
• The writer’s authority was rooted in his or her personal research
experience with that community.
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Evolution of Ethnography
• Interpretive anthropologists believe that ethnographers should describe
and interpret that which is meaningful to the natives.
– Geertz argues that cultures are texts that natives constantly “read” and that
ethnographers must decipher.
– Meanings in a given culture are carried by public symbolic forms,
including words, rituals, and customs.
• Experimental anthropologists, like Marcus and Fischer, have begun to
question the traditional goals, methods, and styles of ethnographic
realism and salvage ethnography.
– Ethnographies should be viewed as both works of art and works of
science.
– The ethnographer functions as the mediator who communicates
information from the natives to the readers.
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Ethnographic Present
• The early ethnographies were often written in the ethnographic
present, a romanticized timelessness before westernization, which gave
the ethnographies an eternal, unchanging quality.
• Today, anthropologists understand that this is an unrealistic construct
that inaccurately portrayed the natives as isolated and cut off from the
rest of the world.
• Ethnographers today recognize that cultures constantly change and that
this quality must be represented in the ethnography.
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Problem-Oriented Ethnography
• Ethnographers typically address a specific problem or set of problems
within the context of broader depictions of cultures.
• Variables with the most significant relationship to the problem being
addressed are given priority in the analysis.
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Longitudinal Research
• Longitudinal research is the long-term study of a community, region,
society, or culture based on a series of repeated visits.
• Longitudinal research study has become increasingly common among
ethnographic studies, as repeat visits to field sites have become easier.
• Such studies may also encompass multiple, related sites.
• Team research involves a series of ethnographers conducting
complementary research in a given community, culture, or region.
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Survey Research
• Anthropologists working in large-scale societies are increasingly using
survey methodologies to complement more traditional ethnographic
techniques.
– Survey involves drawing a study group or sample from the larger study
population, collecting impersonal data, and performing statistical analyses
on these data.
– By studying a properly selected and representative sample, social
scientists can make accurate inferences about the larger population.
• Survey research is considerably more impersonal than ethnography.
– Survey researchers call the people who make up their study sample
respondents.
– Respondents answer a series of formally administered questions.
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Anthropology in Complex Societies.
• Anthropologists rely increasingly on a variety of different field
methodologies to accommodate a demand for greater breadth of
applicability of results.
• Kottak argues that the core contribution of ethnology remains the
qualitative data that result from close, long-term, in-depth contact
between ethnographer and subjects.
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