1. Doing Cultural Anthropology
Chapter 3
Doing Cultural Anthropology

2. Chapter Outline Fieldwork in Indonesia A Little History
Anthropological Techniques
Changing Directions and Critical Issues in Ethnography

3. Chapter Outline Ethical Considerations in Fieldwork
New Roles for the Ethnographer
Bringing it Back Home: Anthropologists and Human Rights

4. Fieldwork Firsthand exploration of a society and culture
Reveals the differences between what people say they do and what they do

5. Fieldwork
Fieldwork is an essential component of the anthropological experience.
As Simon’s description of his first field experiences at Bukittinggi, Indonesia show, fieldwork can bring confusion, strangeness, alienation, and a host of challenges and dilemmas.

6. Ethnography
Gathering and interpretation of information based on intensive, firsthand study
The major research tool of cultural anthropology
Includes both:
fieldwork among people in a society
the written results of the fieldwork

7. History of Anthropology
The first scholars who called themselves anthropologists worked in the second half of the 19th century.
The most famous were Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Louis Henry Morgan.
They saw themselves as compilers and analysts of ethnographic accounts, rather than field researchers (“armchair anthropologists”).

8. Evolutionary Anthropology
Morgan and Tylor relied on the writings of travelers, explorers, missionaries, and colonial officers for their data.
They used data from archaeological finds and colonial accounts of current day peoples to produce evolutionary histories of human society.
They used technology types and social institutions to place each society on an evolutionary scale of increasing complexity.

9. Franz Boas A critic of evolutionary anthropology
Insisted that grasping the whole of a culture could be achieved only through fieldwork
Believed that anthropologists must live among the people they study, observing their culture and participating in it.
Boas’s style of fieldwork became known as participant observation.

10. Participant observation
Fieldwork technique that involves gathering cultural data by observing people’s behavior and participating in their lives
Anthropologists work with respondents who guide them and offer insights into the culture.

11. Ethnocentrism
The belief that one’s own culture is better than any other
Ethnocentrism can lead members of one culture to force their ways of life on another.

12. Racism
Racism is beliefs, actions, and patterns of social organization that exclude individuals and groups from the equal exercise of human rights and freedoms.
Belief that some human populations are superior to others because of inherited, genetically transmitted characteristics
The transformation from ethnocentrism to racism underlies much of the structural inequality found in modern history.

13. Boas and Cultural Relativism
Boas insisted that anthropologists approach each culture on its own terms, in light of its own notions of worth and value.
This came to be known as cultural relativism, and is one of the hallmarks of anthropology.
Boas argued that all human beings have equal capacities for culture, and that although human actions might be considered morally right or wrong, no culture was more evolved or of greater value than another.

14. Bronislaw Malinowski
One of the most prominent students of the Torres Straits scholars (Alfred Cort Haddon et al.)
Malinowski began work in the Trobriand Islands and was unable to leave because of WWI.

15. Bronislaw Manlinowski
His long period of fieldwork was a signal moment in anthropology.
His work emphasized the notion of function in culture.
He strongly endorsed the idea that native ways werecompletely logical, even though different from his own.

16. Anthropological Techniques
Questionnaires
Open ended questions
Structured interviews
Mapping
Photography
Observation
Measurement

17. Anthropologist and Informant
What kind of relationship would you expect between an anthropologist and his or her primary informant?

18. Culture Shock
The feelings of alienation, loneliness, and isolation common to one who has been placed in a new culture
Most researchers experience some degree of culture shock

19. Cross-Cultural Comparison
British and European anthropologists were interested in ethnology, the attempt to find general principles or laws that govern cultural phenomena.
In the 1860s, Herbert Spencer began to develop a way of organizing, tabulating, and correlating information on a large number of societies, a project he called Descriptive Sociology.

20. Cross-Cultural Comparison
William Graham Sumner, Albert Keller, and George Murdock brought Spencer’s ideas about cross-cultural comparison to the United States.
In the late 1930s, Murdock and Keller created a large, indexed ethnographic data base at Yale University.
In the late 1940s the project was expanded to include other universities and its name changed to the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF).

21. Feminist Anthropology
Questions gender bias in ethnography and cultural theory
Men, who had limited access to women’s lives, performed much early fieldwork.
Ignoring women’s perspectives perpetuates the oppression of women.
By the 1970s more female anthropologists were joining university faculties.

22. Postmodernism Theory that focuses on issues of power and voice
Postmodernists suggest that anthropological accounts are partial truths reflecting the background, training, and social position of their authors.

23. Collaborative Ethnography
Ethnography that gives priority to cultural consultants on the topic, methodology, and written results of ethnographic research

24. Native Anthropology Study of one’s own society
Anthropologists must maintain the social distance of the outsider.
Becoming more common as native cultures disappear

25. Ethical Fieldwork Anthropologists must:
Obtain consent of the people to be studied.
Protect them from risk.
Respect their privacy and dignity.

26. Project Camelot
Mid-1960s U.S. military project that used anthropologists to achieve foreign policy goals
Anthropologists seen as spies in host countries
American Anthropological Association members raised concerns about the ethics of the project.

27. Anthropology in the Military
Today, anthropologists still work in the military, usually in one of two positions:
On military bases, training officers or analyzing military culture
On the ground in active conflict zones, collecting data on local peoples (Human Terrain Systems)

28. Quick Quiz

29. 1. Participant observation
means that people who are the subjects of a study observe their own behavior.
is carried out in a laboratory setting.
is an intensive field research method, in which the investigator lives among the subjects of study.
is another way of describing a telephone survey technique of collecting data.

30. Answer: c
Participant observation is an intensive field research method, in which the investigator lives among the subjects of study.

31. 2. The philosophy that there is no single objective reality but rather many partial truths or cultural constructions, depending on one's frame of reference is known as
holism.
postmodernism.
globalism.
fundamentalism.
positivism.

32. Answer: b
The philosophy that there is no single objective reality but rather many partial truths or cultural constructions, depending on one's frame of reference is known as postmodernism.

33. 3. The ethnographic database used most frequently to statistically test relationships between two or more culture traits across world cultures is
the Human Relations Area Files.
the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
the Smithsonian Records.
the National Institute of Mental Health.

34. Answer: a
The ethnographic database used most frequently to statistically test relationships between two or more culture traits across world cultures is the Human Relations Area Files.