Lecture 2
THE
Links
A good site with a compete set of anthropological field notes covering several decades of research in a Turkish Village http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Stirling
http://www.sherryart.com/women/bedouin.html
An
excellent site on fieldwork among Bedouin women in the Sinai.
If one looks at any culture from
the outside, it is apparent that very little makes any sense in terms of
adaptation to the external environment. Custom cannot be viewed -- at least on
the whole-- as necessarily sane, practical wisdom designed to help men get on
with the business of living. There is just too much in any culture which --
like the buttons on men's suit jackets-- just does not make any sense in
practical utilitarian terms.
But what then about the
anthropologist's task of demonstrating the basic "reasonableness" of
human activity.
The Natives Point of View
Customs can be viewed internally,
as part of the subjective point of view of the actor, or "native"
(remember that we, too are "natives").
This subjective point of view is
basic to anthropology because all humans share a cultural world of symbolic
meanings and shared understandings. Of course, humans live in a physical
external habitat, and this can and does have a powerful constraining influence
on his conduct, but it is the synthetic or man-made universe that can exercise
an even more powerful influence on conduct.
Example:
Eskimo Technology The degree of technological ingenuity of the Eskimo is well
known. With few resources, no metal (in former times) and very little wood they
successfully hunted whales, the worlds largest
mammals. They know in meticulous detail the habits of animals -- even to the
point of so successfully mimicking the behavior of a seal that they can creep
up close enough to score a kill. Method of taking wolves: spring of whalebone
frozen in a piece of blubber, so that when the wolf gulps it down it will
eventually melt and spring open killing it. The Eskimo
have a technological solution to almost every subsistence problem, and have
such a focus and obsession with technology that they are excellent
"natural" mechanics. But such mastery only relates to the physical
habitat.
There
is another world they must contend with, and it is mostly a product of their
fantasies, as passed down through cultural tradition. Their world is populated
with ghosts, deities, and demons of all sorts, and they believe that on the
whole man is threatened by dangerous unseen forces from all sides. The most
important means of warding off danger is the observance of a very elaborate set
of complicated taboos -- or prohibitions against certain kinds of acts or
behavior in certain contexts. Before dragging a dead seal back to camp, water
must be poured over the dead animal's snout.
How
to interpret all of this? Obvious more difficult than interpreting the
instrumental conduct associated with making a living. In case of the spring
bait trap, the anthropologist can simply describe the object, how it works, see
its practical result, and it is easy to interpret the intent. We know why
Eskimos use spring bait traps, because we can understand the cause-effect
relationship involved in a matter of fact way.
But
giving a dead seal a drink? And taking old blubber out through the window when
it makes much more sense to take it out through the door? How can these be understood?
What is the practical outcome of all this?
The
answer is that there is no practical outcome, or at least none which can be
directly observed. The best resort of the anthropologist in these instances is
to attempt to penetrate the mental world of the natives --to ask them what they
think they are up to when the do these apparently contradictory things.
So
we ask the Eskimo why he does this. He says "to please the soul of the
seal". Probing more deeply we find out that all animals have souls, and
that the soul is thought to return to the seal to be reincarnated as another
seal. If the dead animal therefore considers that if he ( the
correct English pronoun here is "it", but our language forces us to
think of animals as non-human) has been treated with respect, he will then be
more willing to become prey for the hunter again. But if the soul is insulted,
he will avoid that hunter in the future.
So
once we understand the beliefs which lie behind this kind of conduct, the
conduct seems to make sense to us.
A
great deal of anthropological explanation is just this sort of thing: finding
out the underlying premises in order to make the conduct appear reasonable to
us.
But
not everything has an explicit meaning that you can get directly at. Over the door in many Tausug houses there was
often a large shell. I was never able to
get an explicit explanation for this other than “ it
is custom” or “that’s the way the
ancestors did it”. Actually, in the
course of field work there is an awful lot of stuff that people cannot explain
except in this general sort of way. In
these instances the ethnographer must look for patterns in comparable
situations: do shells appear in other contexts and what is the meaning there? Does shell symbolism appear in poetry, for
example, or are shells used in religious rituals? Well for the Tausug the answer to these was
no, and I just never was able to figure the meaning. Perhaps, they are, after all like those
buttons on our suit jackets.
So one major
criterion of anthropological field research is always to try to grasp the point
of view of the native actors.
This is not actually such a unique method as one might think. If you think
about it, all social scientists, implicitly or explicitly attribute a point of
view and interpretations to the people whose actions we analyze. In one way or
another we always describe how people interpret the events they participate in,
so the question is not whether we should look at things from the native point
of view, but how accurately we do it .
We can find out, perhaps not with
perfect accuracy, but better than zero, the meanings people give to the objects
and events in their lives and experiences.
The major technique for this is usually
referred to as participant observation: by talking to people in formal
and informal interviews, and in the various interchanges in which we
participate and observe their ordinary activities, and by watching and
listening as they go about their business. In the practice of any social
science or social interpretation, if you do not get the meanings from the
people themselves, you inevitably will bootleg them into your analysis. This
happens all the time, because we are usually not the people we study and we do
not live in their circumstances. And it is very tempting, if we do not have
data as to how the people themselves give meaning to their conduct, to
attribute it to them. To take the easy way out and attribute to them the
meanings that we would give if we were in their circumstances, which of
course we are not. Thus if a sociologist, comes up with some comparative data
on, say, teen age pregnancy, or adolescent delinquency or drug use, as
correlated with, say, the presence or absence of a father or male role model in
the household, it is very tempting to simply read into our data assumptions
about what the people involved "must have been thinking" in order to
behave that way. And most of the time our assumptions will be wrong, or at
least misleading. (see generally Becker: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/hbecker/qa.html.)
This brings up the problem of
questionnaires and quantitative and statistical data generally.
[ a word on "official statistics" --
data produced by officials in the course of their duties. Most official
statistics tell the ethnographer very little except how the officials keep
their records. Thus, official police statistics can only be relied on to tell
you how the cops write their reports - everything else should be very carefully
scrutinized. There are exceptions to this, of course (some parts of the
Sometime cultural anthropologists
do compile census and other statistical data for very specialized purposes. I
did a house by house census of all the houses in the Tausug community in which
I worked, mainly because that we the only way one could find out household
composition patterns, who typically lived with whom, marriage residence
patterns (where newly married couples reside) and so forth. But even here you
don’t always know at the beginning what to look for. I assumed at first (based
upon a knowledge of similar cultures in the area) that it might be nice to know
the bridewealth( a payment made by the boy’s kin to the girl’s kin on
marriage) given for each marriage in the household, as well as the bridewealth given for the parents and grandparents. Most
people were polite enough to try to answer this, even if they didn’t know, but
one man, impatient with my apparently silly question, made the remark "How
the **** do I know the bridewealth of my grandmother,
and who cares?" I that point I realized that the question had no cultural
relevance.
Questionnaire methods, which are
often used by pollsters and sociologists, thus present some problems, Not that
they do not have their use in some circumstances.
I very frustrated when telemarketers employed
by market research firms doing a survey in which I am asked questions which I
know are irrelevant to what I think is the purposes of the survey.
Salvage ethnography
Not all traditional
anthropological ethnographic research can involve participant observation
method. Sometimes (this was especially true in the early history of American anthropology)
one is interested in reconstructing the nature of the society and culture which
has in many important respects ceased to function in its traditional way. Many
American Indian cultures were first encountered by ethnographers after they had
been conquered, reduced to poverty, and put on reservations, etc.
The ethnographer is thus faced
with the problem of reconstructing some picture of the culture as it once was
from the remembrances of (usually) old people. At its best this involved going
to the reservation, engaging in participant observation as best one could, and
spending time collecting such remembrances as one could find. At its ethical
worse it involved getting a drunk Indian in a hotel
room and getting what you could. This
is really bad method and even worse ethics, and fortunately did not happen too
often.
What are some problems with this
approach?
[aside: the term “custom”
is used when we encounter a bit of culture in which what people do is more or
less what they say they should do, like the expectation that people will courteously
greet each other by shaking hands or whatever.]
This is not to disparage salvage
ethnography—much of our knowledge of traditional pre contact American Indian
societies would not exist if it were not for this method. Good participant
observation has been done with many of the Indian societies in the American SW
(Hopi, Navaho, Zuni, etc.) which have kept their societies more or less intact.
And (recognizing that the colonial situation does impose some restrictions)
much decent ethnography based on participant observation has been done in
Pitfalls of "Going
Native"
Participant observation means
getting as involved in things as possible. But there is a pitfall if one gets
so involved that one literally becomes part of the group itself in every
respect. There may be some loss of objectivity.
F.H Cushing was an ethnographer
sent out by the BAE (Bureau of American Ethnology) in the 1880’s to work with
the Zuni. He eventually pretty much went native(for a
while – he eventually left) and was actually inducted as a priest in one of
their secret religious societies. If you read his reports back to the BAE they
seem to get more and more unintelligible as he began to identify more and more
as a Zuni.
Another problem: Some people
absolutely will not let you participate in some or many of their activities,
while others insist that you live exactly as they do. Both extremes present
problems for the ethnographer. I was fortunate with the Tausug – there was very
little in their culture that was regarded as "secret" and I could participate as much as a wanted. Yet if there was anything I
did not want to do, it was enough to simply say, "Well, that it not an
American custom" and they would accept that. I suspect that Malinowski in his Trobriand work had somewhat the same
experience.
Ethnocentrism and Cultural
Relativity
Taking
the "natives point of view" requires many things from the
anthropologist, and it is not usually all that easy just to ask people what
things means and get intelligible answers. But it requires at the very minimum
that the anthropologist (or whoever ) minimize the
amount of ethnocentrism and adopt-- as far as possible--an attitude of cultural
relativity .
When
we are studying other people it is very difficult to avoid strong feeling about
our subjects, unlike the physicist who can usually be pretty unemotional about
his subject.
ethnocentrism -- the belief that ones own culture, or
group, is more important, valuable, truthful, etc. than any other. Positively,
it refers to the pride which most peoples take in their own
customs most of the time. But it can take the form of negative value judgments
in which the conduct of others is interpreted through the bias and blinders of
ones own culture: "The Arabs smell bad", "The Tausug have bad
tempers" "Those people over there are cannibals" "Those
people have sex with their mothers" "The Dutch are moneygrubbers"
etc. All cultures are ethnocentric in some degree but usually in different and
various domains of culture. And people in most cultures will admit that other
cultures may be superior to them in certain domains.
Cannibalism
and incest are common ways of negatively identifying "the others". In
many non literate societies, the name for one's own group turns out to be just
a name for "people" or "man" -- the implication being that
others are not quite people.
[cannibalism, by the way, has been more often described than
observed. Many of the accounts of cannibalism among tribal peoples (by
missionaries, anthropologists, travelers, etc) are descriptions what group A thinks group B does, not what the observer has actually
seen. Cannibalism, usually religious, does actually occur, however].
cultural relativity - idea that all
cultures are equally good or bad, or actually that one should make not
judgments at all. "Different strokes for different folks"
The
one problem with cultural relativity as an idea is that if pushed to extremes
it comes against some of the same logical problems as ethical relativism in
philosophy. If everything is culturally relative, then the very idea of
cultural relativism itself (which is a product of our culture, after all) is
itself culturally relative. Any consistent relativism eventually turns on
itself in this way and becomes logically suspect.
But
the anthropological use of cultural relativity is mainly a methodological
stance -- it is a tactical device in which the anthropologist asserts -- with
good reason -- that if one does not clear ones mind of as many biases as
possible you may miss important things. (It is, of course, impossible not to be
"biased" to some degree, if only because our scientific interests
always influence the kinds of things we look for, and further, the
anthropologist’s own personality influences what he "sees". But I am
in total disagreement with the view recently espoused by some so called
"post-modern" anthropologists that any ethnography is just nothing
more than a introspective personal travelogue hyped up
as science. Nonetheless, it is the duty of any ethnographer to make the
circumstances and possible biases of his work clear, insofar as he is aware of
them.)
We can see this clearly in contrast
between ethnographic perspectives in the study of topics in our culture which
we generally understand to be "social problems."
One
anthropologist did a study of heroin addicts in NYC in shooting galleries. He
assumed that the conduct he was observing was normal, and tried to understand
what is going on. Or the same for the study of drunks in
During the second hour we
saw the film "Off the Verandah". Using old footage and photographs,
interviews with former students, and some good recent footage of the Trobriands, the film attempts to present Malinowski"s innovative techniques of field research.