Chapter 3: Doing Anthropology

I. Ethics and Anthropology

A. Researchers must create and maintain proper relations between themselves
and the host nations, regions, and communities where they work.
B. The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics states that
anthropologists should recognize their debt to the people with whom they
work and should reciprocate in appropriate ways.
C. Researchers should obtain informed consent from anyone who provides
information or who might be affected by the research.
D. Researchers should include host country colleagues in their research
planning and requests for funding. Researchers should establish
collaborative relationships with host country institutions and colleagues
before, during, and after their fieldwork.
E. Researchers should include host country colleagues in dissemination of
the research results.
F. Researchers should ensure that something is "given back" to host country
colleagues.
II. Research Methods
A. Cultural anthropology and sociology share an interest in social relations,
organization, and behavior.
B. Sociologists have traditionally worked in the large-scale, complex nations
of the industrialized West.
C. Sociologists rely heavily on questionnaires and other means of collecting
masses of quantifiable data.
D. Sampling and statistical techniques are basic to sociology.
E. Traditionally, ethnographers used ethnographic techniques to study small,
non-literate (without writing) populations.
F. Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of both anthropology and sociology,
compared the organization of simple and complex societies.
III. Ethnography: Anthropology's Distinctive Strategy
A. Ethnography is the firsthand, personal study of local cultural settings.
B. Early ethnographers conducted research almost exclusively among small-
scale, relatively isolated societies, with simple technologies and
economies.
C. Traditionally, ethnographers have tried to understand the whole of a
particular culture.
D. In pursuit of this holistic goal, ethnographers usually spend an extended
period of time in a given society or community, moving from setting to
setting, place to place, and subject to subject to discover the totality and
interconnectedness of social life.
IV. Ethnographic Techniques
A. Observation and Participant Observation
1. Ethnographers are trained to be aware of and record details from
daily events, the significance of which may not be apparent until
much later.
 2. Ethnographers strive to establish rapport—a good, friendly
working relationship based on personal contact—with their hosts.
3. Participant observation involves the researcher taking part in the
activities being observed.
B. Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules
1. 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.
2. Multiple conversational and interviewing methods may be used to
accomplish complementary ends on a single ethnographic research
project.
C. The Genealogical Method
1. The genealogical method includes procedures by which
ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent,
and marriage, using diagrams and symbols.
2. Because genealogy is a prominent building block in the social
organization of nonindustrial societies, anthropologists need to
collect genealogical data to understand current social relations and
to reconstruct history.
D. Key cultural consultants are particularly well-informed members of the
culture being studied who can provide the ethnographer with some of the
most useful or complete information.
E. Life Histories
1. Life histories reveal how specific people perceive, react to, and
contribute to changes that affect their lives.
2. 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.
3. Many ethnographers include the collection of life histories as an
important part of their research strategy.
F. Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer's
1. An emic (native-oriented) approach investigates how local people
perceive and categorize the world, what their rules of behavior are,
what is meaningful to them, and how they imagine and explain
things.
2. Cultural consultants or informants are individuals who provide the
ethnographer with the emic perspective.
3. An etic (science-oriented) approach emphasizes the categories,
explanations, and interpretations that the anthropologist considers
important.
G. The Evolution of Ethnography
1. Bronislaw Malinowski is generally considered the father of
ethnography.
a. Like most anthropologists of his time, Malinowski did
salvage ethnography, studying and recording cultural
diversity threatened by Westernization.
 2. Early ethnographies were scientific accounts of unknown people
and places.
3. Ethnographic realism was the style that dominated "classic"
ethnographies.
a. In such works, the writer's goal was to present an accurate,
objective, scientific account of a different way of life,
written by someone who knew it firsthand.
4. Ethnographers derived their authority from their personal research
experiences in alien cultures.
5. Malinowski believed that all aspects of culture were linked and
intertwined, making it impossible to write about just one aspect of
a culture without discussing how it related to others.
a. Malinowski argued that a primary task of ethnography was
to understand the emic perspective—that is, the native's
point of view.
6. Interpretive anthropologists believe that ethnographers should
describe and interpret that which is meaningful to local people.
a. Interpretivists like Clifford Geertz view cultures as
meaningful texts that locals constantly "read" and
ethnographers must decipher.
b. Meanings in a given culture are carried by public symbolic
forms, including words, rituals, and customs.
7. Experimental anthropologists have begun to question traditional
goals, methods, and styles of ethnography, including ethnographic
realism and salvage ethnography.
a. In general, experimental anthropologists view
ethnographies as both works of art and works of science.
b. According to this view, ethnographies are literary creations
in which ethnographers serve as mediators, communicating
information from "natives" to readers.
8. In reflexive ethnography, a category of experimental anthropology,
the ethnographer-writer puts her or his personal feelings and
reactions to the field situation right in the text.
9. Early ethnographies were often written as though they were
describing the ethnographic present—the period before
Westernization, when the "true" native culture flourished.
10. Today, anthropologists recognize that the ethnographic present is
an unrealistic construct because it inaccurately portrayed native
societies as unchanging and isolated from the rest of the world.
11. Contemporary ethnographies usually recognize that cultures
constantly change and that an ethnographic account applies to a
particular moment.
H. Problem-Oriented Ethnography
1. Although anthropologists are interested in the whole context of
human behavior, most ethnographers now enter the field with a
 specific problem to investigate, and they collect data relevant to
that problem.
2. Because local people lack knowledge about many factors that
affect their lives, anthropologists may also gather information on
variables such as population density, environmental quality,
climate, physical geography, diet, and land use.
I. Longitudinal Research
1. Longitudinal research is the long-term study of a community,
region, society, culture, or other unit, usually based on repeated
visits.
2. Longitudinal research has become increasingly common as
improved transportation has allowed anthropologists to visit their
research area repeatedly.
3. Longitudinal research is often conducted by teams of
ethnographers (see team research below).
a. Team research involves a series of ethnographers
conducting complimentary research in a given community,
culture, or region.
J. Culture, Space, and Scale
1. The recognition and study of ongoing and inescapable flows of
people, technology, images, and information are becoming
increasingly important in anthropology.
2. Ethnographic fieldwork is becoming more flexible, large-scale,
multi-timed, and multi-sited.
3. Anthropologists are paying more attention to "outsiders" (e.g.,
migrants, refugees, tourists, developers) who impinge on the places
they study; to external organizations and forces, such as
governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations; to
the effects of power differentials on cultures; and to diversity
within cultures and societies.
4. Increasingly, the electronic mass media shape local cultures and
perspectives by exposing people to global images and information.
5. Anthropologists increasingly study people in motion, such as those
living on or near national borders, nomads, seasonal migrants,
homeless and displaced people, immigrants, and refugees.
K. Survey Research
1. Anthropologists working in large-scale societies are increasingly
using survey methodologies to complement more traditional
ethnographic techniques.
2. Survey involves drawing a study group or sample from the larger
study population, collecting impersonal data, and performing
statistical analyses on these data.
3. By studying a properly selected and representative sample, social
scientists can make accurate inferences about the larger population.
4. Survey research is considerably more impersonal than
ethnography.
 5. Survey researchers refer to the people who make up their study
sample as respondents.
6. Respondents answer a series of formally administered questions.
7. The personal, firsthand techniques of ethnography can be used to
supplement and fine-tune survey research, thereby providing new
perspectives on life in complex, large-scale societies.
V. Anthropology Today: Even Anthropologists Get Culture Shock
A. Like all people, anthropologists can experience culture shock—a feeling
of alienation, of being without some of the most ordinary, basic cues of
one's own culture—when they visit other societies.
B. In this section, Conrad Kottak describes some of his initial impressions,
and the culture shock that he felt, the first time he visited Arembepe,
Brazil, in 1962.