Ethnography

was grappling with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the author was commissioned by the war department to conduct a study on the Japanese society and culture so as to familiarize the military with its enemy. However, unable to carry out her ethnography project using field work, Benedict uses “culture at a distance”, a sort of comparative technique to identify patterns of behavior and clear misconceptions existing in American society about the Japanese people. The author describes order and…

Structural violence occurs when social institutions cause harm to people by way of preventing them from meeting their basic human needs through institutionalized inequalities. Farmer outlines that there is a “strong association with poverty and social inequalities to an understanding of how such inequalities are embodied as differential risk for infection and among those already infected, for adverse outcomes including death.” In other words An Anthropology of Structural Violence, sets out to…

first outside perspectives written about life in this region. A small village, Peihotien, was a perfect example of authentic country life. While Margaery Wolf does not have an anthropological background, her time with the Lim family reads like an ethnography. During the Wolf’s residency in Taiwan, Confucian ideals were at the forefront of family structure.…

When talking about the topic of anthropology, most people think of exploring distant lands, abstruse theories detached from any sensitive significance, or Indiana Jones. Aside from the all too familiar movie references to adventure, perilous, intrigue temples, anthropology has many beneficial applications that are relevant to today’s world. Anthropology in itself, is the study of understanding ourselves in relation to others. It is the study that helps us understand what it means to be human.…

This article was originally published in 1962, by American Anthropologist; it studies the agriculture in the Maya Lowlands during the 1960’s to better understand the agriculture techniques of the ancient Mayan civilization. In addition, the study utilized the data to explain why the decrease in the Mayan population over time. It was determined that prior to performing the study that the climate was that of a tropical rainforest and that the climate had no changes from ancient Mayan time until…

In Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing echoes calls to move away from human exceptionalism and toward a type of anthropology that thinks about non-human beings seriously. The matsutake mushroom, a Japanese delicacy and coveted global fungi, is our guide into the complex entanglement of humans and non-humans in a landscape defined by capitalist ruin. We transverse not only the boundary between nature and culture but also temporal and spatial orders, as the “matsutake forests in Oregon…

(2011), as both of them have worked with the youth and in classroom setting, and deconstructed presuppositions that both had or encountered. What is interesting, and perhaps related to my situation, is that Mendoza was categorized as doing “auto-ethnography”, which is in my case critical, and thus not showcasing my optionality will be detrimental to my research. Starting with a surface deconstruction of the sign system used to differentiate different groups, and then moving on to elaborate…

Groups are dynamic arrangements that are always existent in society and have a strong connection with identity and behaviours (Turner et al, 1987). There are many groups that are associated with youth, including; football hooligans, political and educational, friends and peers and charities. It has been said that social identity can have an effect on the behaviour of a group (Crisp and Turner, 2010). The term street gang is best described as a number of people who form a group, who all have…

Previous and current research confirms that students are still subjects of teacher discrimination on a variety of grounds. However, research into teacher discrimination is not rigorous. Part of this lack of rigor might originate from the interdisciplinary nature of the concept and phenomenon of discrimination in that discussions concerned with discrimination often fall within areas as diverse as critical discourse analysis, critical applied linguistics, power relations, and identity…

*Glennie and Thrift 1) Glennie and Thrift discuss the topic of time and the disjuncture between historical general accounts and recent writings about time. The authors ask how much of Thompson’s theory of time is accurate and what changes have occurred in the writing about time since Thompson’s theory was conceived. Glennie and Thrift argue that there have been several major and interrelated modifications in the documentation and questions of time contrary to what Thompson believed. 2)…