Ethnography

Throughout my life, I was a part of a female league soccer team. I have seen myself as an aggressive and competitive player and have always wanted to be a part of the male team. I use to always want to play on a co-ed team, where both men and women compete with each other, but society expects males and females to fulfill specific gender roles and stereotypes. This is a culture shock for me because society expects males to be athletic, independent, and strong, whereas females are expected to be…

In the year 1989, a controversial spotlight was aimed towards Brazil and its people, through the publication of Nancy Scheper-Hughes ethnography, Death Without Weeping. Undeniably horrific, the collected accounts of Scheper-Hughes has raised multiple questions regarding the health, government, and most significantly, infant mortality, as related to the people of Timbaúba. Through Scheper-Hughes experiences, as both a Peace Corps volunteer and social anthropologist later on, Death Without…

Among one of his earliest empirical studies in sociology was The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899. In this research, Du Bois studies the urban lifestyle in America. His is a classical work of urban ethnography and urban ecology. Other historians identify the work as a definitive study of racial relations at that time. In his letter of credentials, Du Bois revealed that he intended to conduct research on the living conditions and social setting of the colored people that lived in the Seventh…

Iconography: Iconography is the practice of perceiving a visual work for more than what it is plainly seen as. Through different lenses a viewer can assume more deeper meanings about the artwork. These assumptions can be related to many areas such as: time period, how it relates to literature, social classes, culture, values, and the relationship between the artist and his/her subject. An example of how we learned, as a class, to use iconography was with our observation of Jan Van Eyck’s…

Culture is a way of life for a group of people—behaviors, beliefs and values are all shaped by culture. Culture is a relative concept because different cultural groups think, feel and act differently. There is no scientific way of proving one group is superior or inferior to another. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz described culture as a “web of significance”—what he means by this is that culture is a semiotic concept. Culture, as seen by Geertz, is not “complexes of concrete behavior patterns”…

John Bowen ethnography, Muslims through Discourse, takes a deep look at the Islam Religion in the Gayo highlands located in Indonesia. Although he desires to investigate the social structure and history, through his field work he examines the local forms of Islam. Bowen constructs two categories to define the ideologies of Islam represented, which are traditionalist (stemming from rural communities) and modernist (rooted in urban society). Each have distinctive histories that influence and shape…

While anthropological film and photograph have been used to document cultures that are consider “other” in hopes for a better understand of that culture by anthropologist alike there has been studies to show that they are not conducive of good field work. An assortment of photographs and films of a culture for a period of time allows for not much more than and interpretation of those works. In the film “The Viewing Room” it depicts Anthropologist Robert Garner answering questions about his film…

framed through supplementary differences such as race, class, and age. Scorpio Rising rose to this challenge by altering the pre-existing cinematic elements so that it would serve representational purposes. Montage in the film enabled experimental ethnography to interrupt the assumptions of the dominant form of sexuality. In one scene of the film, we see a couple of rough looking biker boys slowly getting dressed to Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. There is a close up of one boy with his…

While Foucault identifies history with the past and the documents containing such information, Taylor (n.d) identifies history as a field correlated to the trauma that forms part of human existence. According to Taylor (n.d) history is part of human existence and it should be referenced according to the events that took part in the past years. This means that it should never be separated in terms of durations of discontinuities, but it should rather form part of the existence. Unlike Foucault…

IDEO IDEO is a creativity factory. About 350 people working in a network of offices stretching from San Francisco to London to Tokyo pump out over 100 new products each year. The 24-year-old firm is credited with envisioning and implementing a stupendous list of firsts in a wide variety of fields: the first computer mouse, the first laptop computer, the first stand-up toothpaste tube. It helped design Polaroid’s I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V organizer, portable defibrillators, flexible…