Lecture Two
Lecture Two: Ethnography
Prof. Furuie
Housekeeping
- Syllabus: Structure of the course
- Syllabus change! Evan’s- Pritchard reading from week two has been postponed to Week three
- Week 1: module.
- Mid term assignment: due date Oct. 18th. Instructions are online, take a look and wi will explain in more detail
Ethnography is and is not. Method and voice
- Ethnography is both a way for gathering data and style of writing
- Ethnographic method and ethnographic voice
- A ritual, a thing that is happening in the real world.
- A writing genre, a genre of books
- Not fiction/essays/journalist accounts/ a newspapers piece
Triste Tropiques, Chater 27- family life
Ethnographic voice
- Ethnographic present
o The nambikwara wake up at dawn, stir the fire, warm themselves as best they can after the long cold night, then eat a light meal…the women and children like to frolic together in the water, and sometimes they light a fire and crotch in front of it afterwards to get warm, humorously exaggerating the natural tendency to shiver
o GOAL: description and obserbation.
o Nothing really changes, which is wrong because life changes, if a alien came down and studied us and only focused on brat summer or girl dinner it would highlight the whole situation.
o Use of present tense is questionable
o The people you observed don’t
- Not hard data, no statistics - doesn’t describe the relatonships within the group, i.e how family groups did they have.
- Levi-Strauss describes how mothers play with their babies, how they demonstrate affection (Delousing), what they eat and who prepares it.
- Having the ability to have family that can delouse
- Why that you sleep can also relate to your ancestors.
v LS focuses on the aspects that are different from his own experience, gamed are unknown to Nambikawara children… their life is an imintation of adult behavior, which is just games?
v Child rearing is described as almost the opposite of modern child rearing, although with a similar level to affection.
Pets
o Intimate relationship with their pets
o Can pets be part of the family?
o Can a pet be considered a person?
What is a person
- A person is a human being a Homo sapiens SCI-FI?
- Dacaurt- we have to be rational to be human.
- Animals are more like persons then we thought, have clothes, gourmet food, carts and much more.
Are animals pets or food
- In our society is mostly based on species (pigs and cows= food; dogs and cats=pets)
- In many amazonian societies, it is based on how the relationship was established. Feedin is the crucial art. It creates forms of kinship
- This is important for things such as development projects.
TLDR: We start from family relations- but gradually the description includes economic matters, gender expectations and environmental issues and metaphysics questions.
- This is a defining characteristics of ethnography (as a writing genre). It is interdisciplinary in nature, it does not respect the boundaries that organizes social life into economy, politics, religion and art.
Who gets to existed in this world?
- Objectified people i.e British, canadian,
After Objectivism, Renato Ronaldo
- Every morning the reigning patriarch, as if just in from the hunt, shouts from the kitchen. “How many people would like a poached egg” women and children take turns answering yes and no
- Parody. Why is it funny
- “Why a manner of speaking that sounds like the literal truth when used to describe distant cultures sounds terribly funny when used as a description of us??
- Ethnographic presents. What are the alternatives?
- Parades: Chicanos that are represented without a sense of humor, the ethnographer that takes everything seriously.
- “The problem is less in the use of such descriptions than in an uncritical attachment to them as sole vehicle for literal objective truth.
- Death-gap between how it is experienced and how it is represented in ethnographic descriptions
- The fact that grief is expressed in cultural terms is often represented as a cultural convention, absent of real emotion.
Chapter 30
- Feels completely different
- Starts from the first person view
- What it feels like for LS
- Telling us about the emotional aspect for him
- How food and different animals tasted.
- Everything in life has its context!!
TLDR
- Talk about how the method itself how It happed I.e How the sausage is named
- By changing the voice, by become first person, we get more close to the actions
- We need to have more voices within the enthography, it needs more perspective then possibly
- Ethnography as a research result (a piece of writing) and ethnography as a methodology do not fully map onto each other. There is always an excess, things that don’t quite fit.
- EXPERIENCE! Of it