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14 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
participant observation
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-gathering information by living as closely as possible to the people whose cultures anthropologists are studying while participating in their lives
- requires both being there and stepping back - get facts, understand, translate - NOT based on positivism (laboratory science) |
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positivism
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*- studying the world scientifically by looking for facts on the natural world
- the view that there is a reality "out there" that can be known through the sense and that there is a single, appropriate set of scientific methods for investigation that reality - opposite of participant observation - based on: materialism and reductionist reasoning |
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objective v. subjective knowledge. fact.
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objective=knowledge about reality that is absolutely true
subjective=knowledge about the world that is based on cultural experience fact= a widely accepted truth (anth embraces this fact) - thinks data distorts the reality of human experience |
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studying a persons Life History. strengths and limitations
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- strengths: get to become an insider to another person's world
- limitations: can't really generalize from one person. can one persons life really represent entire culture? - the "humanizing affects" of fieldwork |
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Inter-subjective and Interpretation
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- inter-subjective: the relationship between one persons subjective understanding and another persons subjective understanding that results through communication
- interpretation: the process of understanding cultural experience that is based on inter-subjective knowledge |
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cultural translation
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- results from inter-subjectivity
- the process of learning to describe one culture in terms that can be understood by another culture - a good translation communicates SUBTLETY the TRUE MEANING |
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the problem of going native?
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- sometimes become so wrapped up in the culture that one cannot step back out to translate it into anything meaningful for outsiders to understand
- need to step back and --understand --analyze --generalize |
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cultural essentialism
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- generalizations about culture
- problem is that all generalizations are based on distortions of reality |
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informants
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- people in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life
- but cannot really generalize from just one person.. |
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dialectic of fieldwork
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- building an understanding between informants and anthropologists
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multisited fieldwork
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- doing fieldwork at more than one site
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fieldwork
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- an extended period of close involvement with the people who the anthropologist is interested in
- the time where anthropologists collect most of their data |
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ethnography
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- an anthropologists written or filmed description of a culture
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4 types of anthropologists
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1) biological- studies the human body
2) cultural- studies cultures 3) archeology- studies fossils 4) linguistic- studies languages |