1.1 Core terms and ideas in anthropology

Agency 

• Agency is the capacity of human beings to act in meaningful ways that affect their own lives and those of others. 

• Agency may be constrained by class, gender, religion and other social and cultural factors. 

  • This term implies that individuals have the capacity to create, change and influence events. 

Community 

• Community is one of the oldest concepts used in anthropological studies. 

• Traditionally, it referred to a geographically bounded group of people in face-to-face contact, with a shared system of beliefs and norms operating as a socially functioning whole. 

• Communities existed within a common social structure and government. 

• More recently, communities have also been defined as interest groups accessed through space, as in “Internet communities” or “communities of taste”. 

• With the advent of globalism and global studies that often question the stability of territories, space and place, community is now a highly contested concept.

Comparative 

• Anthropologists strive to capture the diversity of social action and its predictability by focusing on the way in which particular aspects of society and culture are organized similarly and differently across groups. 

• While social action is frequently innovative, there are limits to its diversity, and patterns identified in one group resemble patterns identified in another. 

Cultural relativism 

• For anthropologists, cultural relativism is a methodological principle that emphasizes the importance of searching for meaning within the local context. 

• Non-anthropologists often interpret cultural relativism as a moral doctrine, which asserts that the practices of one society cannot be judged according to the moral precepts and evaluative criteria of another society. 

• In its extreme form, this version of cultural relativism can lead to a non-analytical position that is contrary to the critical commitments of the discipline.

Culture 

• Culture refers to organized systems of symbols, ideas, explanations, beliefs and material production that humans create and manipulate in the course of their daily lives. 

• Culture includes the customs by which humans organize their physical world and maintain their social structure. 

• While many anthropologists have thought of culture simply as shared systems of experiences and meanings, more recent formulations of the concept recognize that culture may be the subject of disagreement and conflict within and among societies.

Ethnographic 

• Anthropology places considerable emphasis on its empirical foundation based on a direct engagement with particular people and their social and cultural context. 

• Ethnographic materials are usually gathered through participant observation.

Meaning 

• Meaning is both constructed and transmitted through cultural categories. 

• These attribute particular significance to persons, relations, objects, places and events. 

• This enables people to make sense of, and give order to, their experiences, which may in turn reinforce or change meaning. 

• The analysis of meaning is a principal focus of contemporary anthropological thinking.

Process 

• Social process is what humans actually do, including human action that may work against social structure. 

• Social process is the dynamic counterpoint of social structure. 

• Anthropologists who focus on processes emphasize the possibility of change over time and the importance of human agency, that is, the ability to challenge existing structures and create new structures.

Qualitative 

• The data that anthropologists gather during fieldwork comes in many forms because anthropologists are trying to capture the complexity and diversity of social life. 

• This data may be textual (oral or written), observational, or impressionistic, or may take the form of images or sounds. 

• Much of the data cannot be reduced usefully to quantitative forms without losing the essence of the material as perceived from an anthropological viewpoint.

Social reproduction 

• Social reproduction is the concept that, over time, groups of people reproduce their social structure and patterns of behavior. 

• This includes not only the enculturation of individual human beings but also the reproduction of cultural institutions, and material means of production and consumption. Social reproduction may be contested, leading to social change. 

Society 

• Society refers to the way in which humans organize themselves in groups and networks. 

• Society is created and sustained by social relationships among persons and groups. 

• The term “society” can also be used to refer to a human group that exhibits some internal coherence and distinguishes itself from other such groups.

1.2 The Construction and Use of Ethnographic Accounts 

Selection of ethnographies 

• In practice, two or more ethnographies may cover the same as well as different terms, themes and perspectives. 

  • These should include some more contemporary ethnographies. 

• Ethnographic films and other visual or virtual media may be used in the teaching of ethnography, but these must be treated in the same critical and reflective manner as the written ethnographies. 

Representation in ethnographic accounts 

• The transformation of fieldwork data into ethnographic accounts presents a variety of challenges that are commonly discussed as problems of representation. 

• The anthropologist aims to reproduce the reality of the people studied but recognizes differences between their own accounts and those of the people studied. 

• The anthropologist has the task of connecting local perceptions to their analytical framework. 

• Contemporary anthropologists recognize that the distinctions they capture should be examined critically. 

• Ethnographic materials reflect the specific perspective of an observer and are open to interpretation. 

• Any ethnographic writing or reading should be examined with the following observations in mind:

  • social groups are internally diverse and have a variable sense of identity 

  • different anthropologists may see and represent the same group differently 

  • actors and observers always operate within a social context 

  • anthropologists make decisions about what is studied and how it is studied 

  • all anthropological accounts are produced for a particular audience.

Decisions 

• Ethnographic accounts are often the product of many years of work, from the initial observation to field notes, analysis and the written report. 

• Today, most contemporary ethnographic accounts focus on a specific set of questions but necessarily link their particular focus to broader patterns at play in the society in question and beyond. 

• At all stages, what is recorded or what is not recorded is the product of decisions. 

• Anthropologists differ in the extent to which they allow these decisions to be stated in the ethnographic accounts they produce. 

• Decisions are influenced by the anthropologists’ theoretical orientation, the audience served by the research and the goals of the research. 

Reading ethnography 

• Each ethnography presents a point of view, which may be explicit or implicit. 

• When reading ethnography, the student needs to identify the claims, examine the evidence and evaluate whether the data supports the claims and conclusions. 

• Evaluation of evidence requires clear definitions of concepts and variables to support claims and theories. 

• Ethnographic findings can be validated by comparison within a society, within a region or by cross-cultural comparison.

1.3 Methods and data collection 

Fieldwork 

• Anthropological accounts are based on detailed and wide-ranging data collected over a substantial period of time. 

• The time that an ethnographer spends studying a group is a process called “fieldwork”. 

• Fieldwork with a particular group often takes place more than once and involves a long-term personal engagement between the ethnographer and the group. 

• However, in many contemporary fieldwork settings ethnographers cannot have direct face-to-face contact over a prolonged period with any group. 

• For example, work in densely populated urban settings or in a virtual environment requires a rethinking and reconceptualizing of the relations between ethnographers and the group being studied.

Participant observation 

• In the course of fieldwork, many ethnographers become involved as fully as possible in the activities that they study, rather than acting as detached bystanders. 

• At the same time they must seek to preserve some analytical distance. 

• The extent of their participation and its effect on the activity depend on a variety of factors, including the nature of the activity, the rapport between observers and the particular members of the group being studied or “actors”, and the goals of the research. 

• Participant observation has traditionally been the main method in anthropological fieldwork.

Collection of data 

• Ethnographers use a broad variety of techniques in collecting data, including interviewing, observation, note-taking, audio and visual recording, discussing recordings with members of the group being studied, keeping journals, collecting censuses, life histories, questionnaires, archival materials, material culture and genealogies. 

• Data may also be collected in a variety of forms that illustrate different aspects of a given society and culture at a given time and place. 

  • These may include expressive forms and internal accounts such as music, lyrics, literature, letters, stories and films/movies. 

• The nature of the data and the techniques used to collect it depend on the goals of the research. 

• Each technique provides a partial view and therefore cannot stand alone, nor be used uncritically. 

  • It is essential that any such material should be examined from an anthropological perspective. 

• The body of data collected during fieldwork is often substantial, and is used selectively in analysis and in writing up the results of the fieldwork. 

• Fieldwork data is often supplemented with the materials gathered in libraries and museums.

Qualitative and quantitative data 

• Qualitative data consists of texts, lists and recordings, which do not lend themselves to numerical representation, while quantitative data can be expressed in numbers. 

• For most anthropologists, qualitative data is more crucial than quantitative data, although the quantitative often provides useful support for the qualitative.

Analysis and interpretation 

• The analysis of anthropological data consists of discovering consistencies and other recurrent patterns in the data. 

• This discovery process often relies heavily on the anthropologist’s theoretical framework and on the relevant works of other anthropologists. 

• Anthropologists recognize that description and analysis are never free of theoretical and personal biases but always involve selection and interpretation.

Ethical issues 

• Ethnographers are bound by ethical principles governing their conduct as fieldworkers and as professional practitioners. 

• Among other things, these principles dictate that the ethnographer respects the dignity of the members of the group being studied, gives attention to the possibility that any disseminated information may be used against the best interests of those being studied, and recognizes any power differentials between the parties involved in fieldwork. 

• Ethics is also concerned with the relationship between ethnographers and their colleagues, students and audiences. 

  • What constitutes ethical conduct is often the subject of debate and is best understood in context.