Chapter 3: Ethics and Methods

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Chapter 3 Ethics and Methods

• CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
• 1. Be very familiar with the AAA Code of Ethics.
• 2. Understand what is required in crafting a
  research proposal.
• 3. Be able to identify and distinguish between
  the major ethnographic techniques and what kinds
  of information they collect. You should also be
  familiar with the history and development of
  ethnography and how anthropologists study
  cultures.
• 4. Know how ethnography and survey research
  differ in terms of methods, goals, and kinds of
  societies in which they are used.

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Ethics

• The AAA Code of Ethics states that
  anthropologists have ethical obligations to their
  scholarly field, to the wider society and
  culture, to the human species, other species, and
  the environment. http//www.aaanet.org/
• To work in a host country and community,
  researchers must obtain the informed consent from
  all affected parties.
• Before the research begins, people should be told
  about the purpose, nature, and procedures of the
  research.
• Also, people should be told of the potential
  costs and benefits of the research before the
  project begins.

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Academic reciprocity

• The AAA Code states that researchers should
  reciprocate in appropriate ways.
• Include host country colleagues in your research
  plans and funding requests.
• Establish collaborative relationships with those
  colleagues and their institutions.
• Include host country colleagues in the
  publication of the research results.
• It should not be forgotten that the researchers
  primary ethical obligation is to the people being
  studied.

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Research Proposals

• Anthropologists need funding to support their
  research in the field.
• There are a series of agencies that support
  anthropological research.
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
• Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
  Research
• In order to receive funding from any of these
  institutions, anthropologists must write grant
  proposals that summarize what questions are going
  to be addressed, where the research will be
  conducted, and how it will be done.

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Good Grant Proposals

• Good grant proposals must address several key
  questions.
• What is the topic to be investigated?
• Why is this research important?
• Where and when will it happen?
• Whats going to be tested and how?
• Is the person proposing the research qualified to
  do it?

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Ethnography

• Ethnography Is the Firsthand Personal Study of a
  Local Cultural Setting
• Ethnographers try to understand the whole of a
  particular culture, not just fragments (e.g., the
  economy).
• In pursuit of this holistic goal, ethnographers
  usually spend an extended period of time living
  with the group they are studying and employ a
  series of techniques to gather information.
• Key cultural consultants are particularly
  well-informed members of the culture being
  studied that can provide the ethnographer with
  some of the most useful or complete information.

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Ethnographic Methods

• Participant Observation
• Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview
  Schedules
• Life Histories
• The Genealogical Method
• Unobtrusive Data Collection

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Participant Observation

• Ethnographers are trained to be aware of and
  record details from daily events, the
  significance of which may not be apparent until
  much later.
• Participant observation, as practiced by
  ethnographers, involves the researcher taking
  part in the activities being observed.
• Unlike laboratory research, ethnographers do not
  isolate variables or attempt to manipulate the
  outcome of events they are observing.

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Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview
Schedules

• Ethnographic interviews range in formality from
  undirected conversation, to open-ended interviews
  focusing on specific topics, to formal interviews
  using a predetermined schedule of questions.
• Increasingly, more than one of these methods are
  used to accomplish complementary ends on a single
  ethnographic research project.

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Life Histories

• Life histories are intimate and personal
  collections of a lifetime of experiences from
  certain members of the community being studied
• Life histories reveal how specific people
  perceive, react to, and contribute to changes
  that affect their lives.
• Since life histories are focused on how different
  people interpret and deal with similar issues,
  they can be used to illustrate the diversity
  within a given community.

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The Genealogical Method

• Early anthropologists identified types of
  relatedness, such as kinship, descent, and
  marriage, as being the fundamental organizing
  principles of nonindustrial societies.
• The genealogical method of diagramming such kin
  relations was developed as a formalized means of
  comparing kin-based societies.

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Unobtrusive Data Collection

• Archival Research
• historical documents
• movies
• internet
• brocures
• Archaeological Research
• material culture

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Emic vs. Etic

• Local Beliefs and Perceptions and the
  Ethnographers
• An emic (native-oriented) approach investigates
  how natives think, categorize the world, express
  thoughts, and interpret stimuli.
• Emic native viewpoint
• Key cultural consultants are essential for
  understanding the emic perspective.
• An etic (science-oriented) approach emphasizes
  the categories, interpretations, and features
  that the anthropologist considers important.

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Bronislaw Malinowski

• Bronislaw Malinowski is generally considered the
  father of ethnography.
• He did salvage ethnography, recording cultural
  diversity that was threatened by westernization.
• His ethnographies were scientific accounts of
  unknown people and places.
• Malinowski believed that all aspects of culture
  were linked and intertwined, making it impossible
  to write about just one cultural feature without
  discussing how it relates to others.
• Malinowski argued that understanding the emic
  perspective, the natives point of view, was the
  primary goal of ethnography.

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Other Influential Early Anthropologists

• Franz Boas Images
• (Early American Ethnography)
• Alfred Kroeber Another
• Margaret Mead Another
• Ruth Benedict
• Zora Neale Hurston
• A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

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Writing an Ethnography

• Ethnographic realism
• The writers goal was to produce an accurate,
  objective, scientific account of the study
  community.
• The writers authority was rooted in his or
  her personal research experience with that
  community.
• Reflexivity
• How much autobiographical information is
  appropriate?

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Evolution of Ethnography

• Interpretive anthropologists believe that
  ethnographers should describe and interpret that
  which is meaningful to the natives.
• Geertz argues that cultures are texts that
  natives constantly read and that ethnographers
  must decipher.
• Meanings in a given culture are carried by public
  symbolic forms, including words, rituals, and
  customs.
• Experimental anthropologists, like Marcus and
  Fischer, have begun to question the traditional
  goals, methods, and styles of ethnographic
  realism and salvage ethnography.
• Ethnographies should be viewed as both works of
  art and works of science.
• The ethnographer functions as the mediator who
  communicates information from the natives to the
  readers.

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Anthropological Theories

• What is the cultural anthropologists theoretical
  toolkit?
• Why theory anyway?
• Basic Assumptions
• Culture is the sum of structured schema
• Cultural behaviors are integrated
• Cultures change all the time
• Theory Families
• Historical particularism and evolutionary
  theories
• Functional theories (Malinowski vs
  Radcliffe-Brown)
• Cultural Materialism (Harris)
• Cultural Ecology (Lansing)
• Interationist (Mauss)
• Symbolic/Interpretive theories (Geertz)