Chp 3 Ethnography: Studying Culture

Ethnohistory

________ combines ethnographic and cultural approaches to understanding how cultures change through time.

Ethnohistorical research

________ is especially important in studying nonliterate communities, where history is rarely recorded.

Lewis Henry Morgan

________ gathered kinship data from around the world by mail and published his results in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871)

Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)

________: a comparative anthropological database that allows easy reference to coded information about several hundred cultural traits for more than 350 societies.

Ethnographers

________ can understand how age affects typical social roles by recording multiple life histories within a society.

Rapid appraisal

________- short-term, focused ethnographic research, typically lasting no more than a few weeks, about narrow research questions or problems.

Intersubjectivity

________- the realization that knowledge about other people emerges out of their relationships with and perceptions of each other.

Interview

________- any systematic conversation with an informant to collect field research data, ranging from a highly structured set of questions to the most open- ended ones.

Anthropologist Johannes Fabian

________ (1971) suggested that obtaining objective data is not the goal of fieldwork.

Fieldwork

________: long-term immersion in a community, normally involving firsthand research in a specific study community or research setting where the researcher can observe people's behavior and have conversations or interviews with members of the community.

Participant observation

________ and unstructured open-ended interviews are the basis of cultural anthropological fieldwork.

genealogical method

The ________ was first used by English anthropologist William H.R.

Anthropology

________ is generally less well known than other social sciences, like psychology, economics, or political science.

quantitative data

Anthropologists often use ________ comparable to other social sciences, but cultural anthropology is the most qualitative of the social sciences.

long-term immersion

In anthropology, ________ and participation in a community (at least a year or more) and the application of open- minded cultural relativism yield insights that would be thwarted by preconceived ideas.

Ethnographic methods

________, which have been around for the better part of a century, have proven to be effective tools for helping anthropologists understand the social complexities they study.

Anthropologists

________ are obligated to protect their informants, but field data are subject to a subpoena from a court in criminal investigations.

Life history

________- any survey of an informants life, including such topics as residence, occupation, marriage, family, and difficulties, usually collected to reveal patterns that can not be osberved today.

Tunnel vision

________ is not unique to Europeans and Americans.

Emic perspective

________- a cultural insiders perspective on his or her culture.

Etic perspective

________- an outside observers perspective on a culture.

Sol Tax

In the 1950s, American anthropologist ________ advocated for action anthropology: research in which the goal of a researchers involvement in a community is to help make social change.

comparative method

The ________, comparing data from many different cultures, has always been a part of anthropology.

Ethnohistory

________ "may also refer to a view of history from the cultural insiders point of view, which often differs from an outsiders view.

Participant observation

________ is a key element of anthropological fieldwork: the standard research method used by sociocultural anthropologists that requires the researcher to live in the community he or she is studying to observe and participate in day- to- day activities.

headnotes

Anthropologists also often record ________: the mental notes an anthropologist makes while in the field, which may or may not end up in formal field notes or journals.

Genealogical method

________- a systematic methodology for recording kinship relations and how kin terms are used in different societies.

rapid appraisal

While ________ may only provide opportunities for short-term fieldwork, sometimes anthropologists are unable to travel to the field at all, owing to war or political repression.