Ch. 3

Field Work and Ethnography:

  • spending lots of time in one area and studying how people act, do, and say which correlates to their culture and way of life, living and interacting with a community of people

    • nancy hughes researched survival strategies of mothers and children in a brazilian shanty town

      • when the cildren die the moms are not sad, in fact encouraged to not mourn, the question is why and what does that tell us about culture

        • emotions are culturally shaped

        • when she returned a few years later and the shanty towns had improved, infant mortality rate dropped so emotions go back to normal

  • Fieldwork begins with people

    • anthropologists live with those they study, participate in their activities, observe details of their daily lives, take notes, conduct interviews, record videos and more

    • seek to understand how complex systems of power shape peoples lives

    • study how local experience fit into larder global contexts

  • Fieldwork Shapes the Anthropologists

    • may experience culture shock, may experience it again when they return home

    • provides tools to empathize and to consider the full potential and diversity of human life


Fieldwork as Social Science and as Art

  • as a science

    • experimental method for testing hypotheses and building theories

  • as art

    • fieldwork depends on an anthropologists ability to negotiate interpersonal interactions, build trust, make sense of cultural patterns, contend with their biases and tell stories about subjects lives.




“Going Native:

  • his experience living in Thailand and feeling accustomed to the culture but hasn’t forgotten his roots

  • difficulty in truly going native

    • end result is a shadow play not reality


“Ethnography and Culture”

ethnography is the work of describing a culture

in order to discover the hidden principles of another way of life the researcher must become a student. the locals are teachers

  • cultural knowledge

  • when studying other cultures you must ask:

    • what people do

    • what people know/think

    • the things people make and use



  1. how long did take for MD to begin filming, why did they wait so long, how important personal relationship in doing ethnographic research


  • seven months, had to build a relationship with people because at first they weren’t very inviting, hard to build trust, very important

  • relationship is crucial for field work to proceed


  1. how did the turkana respond when the MD asked what they should fild if they want to depict how the turkana live


  • they would film their everyday lives, find out what they dont know, she would film their culture, things/objects, not the person



  1. how important is the exchange of ideas to ethnographic research, how do you think that exchange might affect the MD perception of their own culture


  • very important because it allows you to reflect back on your own culture and observe what might be the norm and what could be seen as bizarre might be seen as ordinary to another culture


“What is Language? And where does it come from?”


  • communication of words, gestures and sounds


Human Language

  • all animals communicate with one another, often relying on ca call system of sounds and gestures in response to environmental stimuli

  • human language differs from most animal communication because it uses symbols to refer to real and imaginary things in the world



languages are learned through enculturation, interacting with others

  • grew from adaptation, growth and change

  • system of symbols


origins of human language

  • anthropologists have shown that non human primates do not have the physical capacity to manipulate their vocal chords, tongues and lips to produce human language sounds

    • monkeys use asl which develops into productivity which is using known words to invent new word combinations


speech community

  • a group of people who come to share certain norms of language use through living and communicating together


descriptive language

  • study of sounds symbols and gestures of a language and their combination into forms that communicate meaning


nonverbal communication: kinesics and paralanguage


“Shakespeare in the Bush”


in african tribal village

  • party culture, one does not discuss serious matters when there is beer

  • story telling

    • people would interrupt and question

    • interpret hamlet differently