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C H A P T E R
METHOD AND THEORY IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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3. METHODS AND THEORY IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive Strategy
Ethnographic Techniques
Survey Research
Doing Anthropology Right and Wrong: Ethical Issues
Theory in Anthropology Over Time
Anthropology Today 3

4. METHODS AND THEORY IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Where and how do anthropologists do fieldwork?
What are some ways of studying modern societies?
What theories have guided anthropologists over the years?

5. ETHNOGRAPHY: ANTHROPOLOGY’S DISTINCTIVE STRATEGY
Traditionally, process of becoming cultural anthropologist required field experience in another society
Ethnography emerged as a research strategy in societies with greater cultural uniformity and less social differentiation than modern industrial nations
Try to understand the whole culture

6. ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES
Direct, firsthand observation
Conversation
The genealogical method
Detailed work with key consultants
In-depth interviewing

7. ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES
Discovery of local beliefs and perceptions
Problem-oriented research
Longitudinal research
Team research

8. OBSERVATION AND PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
Ethnographers pay attention to and record the details of daily life
Keep personal diary
Strive to establish rapport
Ethnographer cannot be totally impartial and detached

9. CONVERSATION, INTERVIEWING, AND INTERVIEW SCHEDULES
Participating in local life means constantly talking to people and asking questions
Naming phase
Ethnographic survey
Interview schedule: form used to structure a formal, but personal, interview
Questionnaire: form used by sociologists to obtain comparable information from respondents

10. THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD
Genealogical method: using diagrams and symbols to record kin connections
Prominent building block in nonindustrial societies
In many nonindustrial societies, kin links are basic to social life

11. KEY CULTURAL CONSULTANTS
Key cultural consultant: expert on a particular aspect of local life
Every community has people who can provide most complete or useful information about particular aspects of life

12. LIFE HISTORIES
Life history: a personal portrait of someone’s life in a culture
Reveals how specific people perceive, react to, and contribute to changes that affect their lives
Many ethnographers include collection of life histories as part of their research strategy

13. LOCAL BELIEFS AND PERCEPTIONS
Emic (native oriented) approach: investigates how natives think, categorize the world, express thoughts, and interpret stimuli
Cultural consultant: individual ethnographer gets to know, in the field, people who teach him or her about their culture
Etic (science oriented) approach: emphasizes categories, interpretations, and features that the anthropologist considers important

14. PROBLEM-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY
Most ethnographers enter the field with a specific problem to investigate
Researchers gather information on factors such as population density, environmental quality, climate, physical geography, diet, and land use
Local people may lack knowledge about many factors that affect their lives

15. LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH
Longitudinal research: long-term study of a community, region, society, culture, or other unit, usually based on repeat visits

16. TEAM RESEARCH Team research often used in longitudinal research
Gwembe District, Zambia

17. Figure 13.2 Location of Gwembe in Zambia17

18. CULTURE, SPACE, AND SCALE
Traditional ethnographic research focused on single community or culture
Isolated and unique in time and space
Ethnography increasingly multitimed and multisited
Kluckhohn: anthropology could provide “scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today”
Mass media oddities in culture and space

19. SURVEY RESEARCH
Survey research design: sampling, collecting impersonal data, and statistical analysis
Sample: smaller study group chosen to represent a larger population
Random sample: all members of the population have equal statistical chance of being chosen for inclusion
Variables: attributes that differ from one person or case to the next

20. SURVEY RESEARCH
The combination of survey research and ethnography can provide new perspectives on life in complex societies: large, populous societies with social stratification and central governments
In best studies, the hallmark of ethnography is that anthropologists enter the community and get to know the people

21. RECAP 13.1: Ethnography and Survey Research Contrasted21

22. DOING ANTHROPOLOGY RIGHT AND WRONG: ETHICAL ISSUES
Anthropologists must be sensitive to cultural differences and aware of procedures and standards in host country
Include host country colleagues in planning
Establish collaborative relationships with host
Include host country colleagues in dissemination of research results
Ensure something is “given back” to host country

23. THE CODE OF ETHICS
Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) recognizes anthropologists have obligations to their scholarly field, to the wider society, and to the human species, other species, and the environment
Informed consent: agreement to take part in research—after having been informed about its nature, procedures, and possible impacts

24. ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND TERRORISM
AAA deemed study of the roots of terrorism and violence of “paramount importance”
May be impossible for anthropologists in war zones to identify themselves as anthropologists
Anthropologists are asked to negotiate relations among several groups
Difficult for local people to give informed consent
Information could help target specific groups
Military may indirectly endanger research and researcher

25. THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY OVER TIME
Evolutionary perspectives (Morgan and Tylor)
Functionalists (Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown)
Historical (Boas)
Symbolic and interpretive approaches
Relation between culture and individual
Contemporary marked by specialization

26. EVOLUTIONISM
Tylor (1871–1958): offered definition of culture and proposed it as a topic that could be studied scientifically
Morgan (1870–1997): Ancient Society, The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family
The League of the Iroquois is anthropology’s earliest ethnography

27. EVOLUTIONISM
Morgan: human society has evolved through savagery, barbarism, and civilization (unilinear evolutionism)
Subdivided savagery and barbarism into three substages each: lower, middle, upper
Tylor proposed a unilinear path: animism, polytheism, monotheism, and science

28. THE BOASIANS Four-field anthropology
Franz Boas was father of four-field U.S. anthropology
Contributed to cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology
Showed that human biology was plastic
Ruth Benedict: civilization is the achievement of no single race

29. HISTORIC PARTICULARISM
Historical particularism (Boas): histories are not compatible; diverse paths can lead to same cultural result
Rejected comparative method

30. INDEPENDENT INVENTION VERSUS DIFFUSION
Evolutionists stressed independent invention to explain cultural generalities
Boasians stressed diffusion
Culture trait
Trait complexes
Culture area
Historical particularism and diffusion were complementary

31. FUNCTIONALISM
Functionalism: an approach focusing on the role of sociocultural practices in social systems
Malinowski
Customs and institutions in society are integrated and interrelated
Needs functionalism: based on belief that humans have a set of universal biological needs

32. CONJECTURAL HISTORY
Radcliffe-Brown: social anthropology could never discover histories of people without writing
Advocated that social anthropology be synchronic (studying societies as they exist today) rather than diachronic (studying societies across time)

33. STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM
Associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard
Customs (social practices) function to preserve the social structure
Radcliffe-Brown: social systems are comparable to anatomical and physiological process

34. DR. PANGLOSS VERSUS CONFLICT
Panglossian functionalism: the tendency to see things as functioning to maintain system in the most optimal way possible
Manchester school: examined how rebellion and conflict were regulated and dissipated, thus maintaining the system

35. FUNCTIONALISM PERSISTS
Functionalism persists in views that:
Elements of social and cultural systems are functionally related so that they covary
When one part changes, others also change
Some elements more important than others

36. CONFIGURATIONALISM
Configurationalism: the view of culture as integrated and patterned
Benedict and Mead
Traits might not spread if they met environmental barriers or were not accepted by a culture
More interested in describing how cultures are uniquely patterned or configured than in explaining how they got that way

37. NEOEVOLUTIONISM
White and Steward (1950) reintroduced evolution with the study of culture
White: general evolution—energy capture is the main measure and cause of cultural advance
Steward: In multilinear evolution, culture evolved along different lines
Also a pioneer in cultural ecology, known as ecological anthropology

38. CULTURAL MATERIALISM
Cultural materialism: cultural infrastructure determines both structure and superstructure
Harris adapted multilayered model
All societies have infrastructure
Structure: social relations grow out of the society’s infrastructure
Superstructure: religion, ideology, and play are all determined by structure and infrastructure

39. SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM
Mead: cultural determinism
Human nature blank slate
Culture powerful; can change expression of biological stages

40. CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Culturology
Cultural forces have been so powerful that individuals have made little difference
The superorganic: cultural realm, whose origin converted an ape into an early hominin (Kroeber)
Culture as basis of new science of cultural anthropology

41. DURKHEIM
Durkheim called for new social science to be based in the conscience collectif
Durkheim is a common father of anthropology and sociology

42. SYMBOLIC AND INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
Turner: recognized links between symbolic anthropology (the study of symbols in their social and cultural context) and social psychology, psychology, and psychoanalysis
Geertz: interpretive anthropology defines culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols

43. STRUCTURALISM
Lévi-Strauss: human minds have certain universal characteristics originating in common features of Homo sapiens’ brain
One tale can be converted into another:
Convert a positive element into a negative
Reverse the order of elements
Replace a male hero with a female one
Preserve key elements

44. PROCESSUAL APPROACHES
Agency: actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities
Practice theory: individuals in a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence
Leach: focused on how individuals work to achieve power and how their actions can transform society

45. WORLD SYSTEM THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Emphasizes economics, politics, and history
Wolf: Europe and the People without History focuses on Native Americans in the context of world-system events

46. WORLD SYSTEM THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Mintz: Sweetness and Power focuses on political economy, the web of interrelated economic and power relations
Political economy: web of interrelated economic and power relations in society
Wallerstein: world-system theory
Criticized in anthropology for overstressing the influence of outsiders

47. CULTURE, HISTORY, POWER
Theorists have focused more on local agency, transformative actions, and groups within colonized societies
Gramsci: hegemony (a stratified social order in which subordinates internalize their rulers’ values)
Bourdieu and Foucault: easier to dominate people’s minds than control their bodies
Stoler: systems of power, domination, accommodation, and resistance

48. ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Increasing specialization
Cultural anthropologists now head for the field with a specific problem in mind, rather than with goal of producing a holistic ethnography
Ethnography has expanded to include regional and national systems and the movement of people

49. ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
Witnessed crisis in representation—questions about the role of the ethnographer and the nature of ethnographic authority
Must stay aware of our biases and our inability to totally escape them

50. RECAP 13.2: Timeline and Key Works in Anthropological Theory50