Doing cultural anthropology --ethnographic fieldwork in 21st century America. To return here, you must click the "back" button on your browser program. All of the completely isolated societies of the past have long since been drawn into the global economy and heavily influenced by the dominant cultures of the large nations.
Many other cultural traditions will be lost as well. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists have worked diligently to study and understand this diversity that is being lost. Linguistic Anthropology. An example of nonverbal communication in modern American culture. What do you think the chief petty officer in khaki is communicating non-verbally to the sailor in this scene? Linguistic anthropologists study t he human communication process.
They focus their research on understanding such phenomena as the physiology of speech, the structure and function of languages, social and cultural influences on speech and writing, nonverbal communication , how languages developed over time, and how they differ from each other.
This is very different from what goes on in an English or a foreign language class. Linguists are not language teachers or professional translators. Most anthropological linguistic research has been focused on unwritten, non-European languages. Linguists usually begin their study of such a language by learning first hand from native speakers what its rules are for making sounds and meaning from those sounds, including the rules for sentence construction.
Linguists also learn about different regional and social dialects as well as the social conventions of speaking the language in different situations.
A hotly debated question in linguistic anthropology since the early 20th century centers on whether or not our languages predispose us to see the environment in specific ways. In other words, are languages filters for reality? For instance, if a language does not have a word for the color orange, can its speakers distinguish orange from red and yellow?
The answer to this question is not as simple as it initially seems. Archaeologists are interested in recovering the prehistory and early history of societies and their cultures. They systematically uncover the evidence by excavating, dating, and analyzing the material remains left by people in the past.
Archaeologists are essentially detectives who search through many thousands of pieces of fragmentary pots and other artifacts as well as environmental data in order to reconstruct ancient life ways. In a sense, this makes archaeology the cultural anthropology of the past. Archaeology is also related to biological anthropology in its use of the same methods in excavating and analyzing human skeletal remains found in archaeological sites.
So anthropologists look at how different groups of people get food, prepare it, and share it. Anthropologists also try to understand how people interact in social relationships for example with families and friends. They look at the different ways people dress and communicate in different societies. Anthropologists sometimes use these comparisons to understand their own society. Many anthropologists work in their own societies looking at economics, health, education, law, and policy to name just a few topics.
When trying to understand these complex issues, they keep in mind what they know about biology, culture, types of communication, and how humans lived in the past. American anthropology is generally divided into four subfields. Each of the subfields teaches distinctive skills.
However, the subfields also have a number of similarities. For example, each subfield applies theories, employs systematic research methodologies, formulates and tests hypotheses, and develops extensive sets of data. Archaeologists study human culture by analyzing the objects people have made.
They carefully remove from the ground such things as pottery and tools, and they map the locations of houses, trash pits, and burials in order to learn about the daily lives of a people. Archaeologists collect the remains of plants, animals, and soils from the places where people have lived in order to understand how people used and changed their natural environments.
The time range for archaeological research begins with the earliest human ancestors millions of years ago and extends all the way up to the present day. Like other areas of anthropology, archaeologists are concerned with explaining differences and similarities in human societies across space and time.
Biological anthropologists seek to understand how humans adapt to different environments, what causes disease and early death, and how humans evolved from other animals. To do this, they study humans living and dead , other primates such as monkeys and apes, and human ancestors fossils. The word ethnography also refers to the end result of our fieldwork. After all, anthropologists are social scientists.
While we study a particular culture to learn more about it and to answer specific research questions, we are also exploring fundamental questions about human society, behavior, or experiences. In the course of conducting fieldwork with human subjects, anthropologists invariably encounter ethical dilemmas: Who might be harmed by conducting or publishing this research?
What are the costs and benefits of identifying individuals involved in this study? How should one resolve competing interests of the funding agency and the community? To address these questions, anthropologists are obligated to follow a professional code of ethics that guide us through ethical considerations in our research. As you may have noticed from the above discussion of the anthropological sub-disciplines, anthropologists are not unified in what they study or how they conduct research.
Some sub-disciplines, like biological anthropology and archaeology, use a deductive , scientific approach. Through hypothesis testing, they collect and analyze material data e.
At times, tension has arisen between the scientific subfields and the humanistic ones. As we hope you have learned thus far, anthropology is an exciting and multifaceted field of study. Because of its breadth, students who study anthropology go on to work in a wide variety of careers in medicine, museums, field archaeology, historical preservation, education, international business, documentary filmmaking, management, foreign service, law, and many more.
Beyond preparing students for a particular career, anthropology helps people develop essential skills that are transferable to many career choices and life paths. Studying anthropology fosters broad knowledge of other cultures, skills in observation and analysis, critical thinking, clear communication, and applied problem-solving.
Anthropology encourages us to extend our perspectives beyond familiar social contexts to view things from the perspectives of others. A lot of issues we have today racism, xenophobia, etc. Some students decide to major in anthropology and even pursue advanced academic degrees in order to become professional anthropologists. We asked three cultural anthropologists — Anthony Kwame Harrison, Bob Myers, and Lynn Kwiatkowski — to describe what drew them to the discipline and to explain how they use anthropological perspectives in their varied research projects.
From the study of race in the United States, to health experiences on the island of Dominica, to hunger and gender violence in the Philippines, these anthropologists all demonstrate the endless potential of the discipline.
I like to tell a story about how, on the last day of my first year at the University of Massachusetts, while sitting alone in my dorm room waiting to be picked up, I decided to figure out what my major would be. So, I opened the course catalogue—back then it was a physical book—and started going through it alphabetically. In truth, I also considered Zoology.
I was initially drawn to anthropology because of its traditional focus on exoticness and difference. I was born in Ghana, West Africa, where my American father had spent several years working with local artisans at the National Cultural Centre in Kumasi.
My family moved to the United States when I was still a baby; and I had witnessed my Asante mother struggle with adapting to certain aspects of life in America. Studying anthropology, then, gave me a reason to learn more about the unusual artwork that filled my childhood home and to connect with a faraway side of my family that I hardly knew anything about.
I never imagined I would earn a Ph. Through my anthropological training, I have made a career exploring how race influences our perceptions of popular music.
I have written several pieces on racial identity and hip hop—most notably my book, Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. In all these efforts, my attention is primarily on understanding the complexities, nuances, and significance of race. I am currently the Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech—a school that, oddly enough, does not have an anthropology program. One of the most important things that anthropology does is create a basis for questioning taken-for-granted notions of progress.
Does the Gillette Fusion Five Razor, with its five blades, really offer a better shave than the four-bladed Schick Quattro? Expanding out to the latest model automobile or smartphone, people seem to have a seldom questioned belief in the notion that newer technologies ultimately improve our lives. Anthropology places such ideas within the broader context of human lifeways, or what anthropologists call culture. What are the most crucial elements of human biological and social existence?
What additional developments have brought communities the greatest levels of collective satisfaction, effective organization, and sustainability? All of this is to say that anthropology offers one of the most biting critiques of modernity, which challenges us to slow down and think about whether the new technologies we are constantly being presented with make sense.
Similarly, the anthropological concept of ethnocentrism is incredibly useful when paired with different examples of how people define family, recognize leadership, decide what is and is not edible, and the like. Using my own anthropological biography as an illustration, I want to stress that the discipline does not showcase diverse human lifeways to further exoticize those who live differently from us.
In contrast, anthropology showcases cultural variation to illustrate the possibilities and potential for human life, and to demonstrate that the way of doing things we know best is neither normal nor necessarily right. It is just one way among a multitude of others. My undergraduate experience significantly shaped my attitudes about education in general and anthropology in particular.
This led me to pursue graduate work in anthropology despite the fact that I had taken only one anthropology course in college. While in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I became fascinated with Caribbean history and migration and spent almost two years doing doctoral fieldwork and research on the island of Dominica. Observations of an impoverished health system in Dominica and family health experiences with dysentery during fieldwork led me toward medical anthropology and public health and so I completed a M.
I probably learned more anthropology in Nigeria than in all of graduate school, including examples of the power of a traditional kingdom and the ways large families enable members to manage in distressing economic conditions. Then I went back to the U. To offset the absence of other anthropologists, colleagues in religious studies and I created a major called Comparative Cultures and later, with colleagues in modern languages, environmental studies, and political science, a Global Studies major, a perfect multi-disciplinary setting for anthropology.
Anthropology is the broadest, most fundamental of academic subjects and should be at the core of a modern undergraduate education. An anthropological perspective is. To me, an anthropological perspective combines a comparative cross-cultural , holistic view with a sense of history and social structure, and asks functional questions like what effect does that have? How does that work? How is this connected to that? All this contributes to the theme I stress that everything is culturally constructed.
Another goal I have in my teaching is to illustrate that an anthropological view is useful for better coping with the world around us especially in our multi-culture, multi-racial society where ethnic diversity and immigration are politically charged and change is happening at a pace never before experienced.
I stress themes of storytelling and interpretation throughout the semester. One of the most effective writing exercises I give students allows them to examine an essential part of their lives, their cell phones. Students have described how their personal relationships evolved as their phone types changed; how social media connections reduced isolation by enabling them to find like-minded friends; one described a journey exploring gender, another how the new technology expanded his artistic creativity.
Most are surprised at the far-flung origins of what they wear. Yes, anthropology helps to see the familiar in a new light. Lots of what we do in class stays with students beyond graduation. For all of these reasons, studying anthropology is the most broadly useful of undergraduate disciplines.
Living in societies throughout the world, and conducting research with people in diverse cultures, were dreams that began to emerge for me when I was an undergraduate student studying anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the early s.
After graduating from college, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer where I worked in primary health care in an upland community in Ifugao Province of the Philippines. Following my Peace Corps experience, I entered graduate school in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and became a cultural anthropologist in the mids, specializing in medical anthropology.
While I was a graduate student, I returned to the community in which I lived in Ifugao Province to conduct research for my dissertation which focused on malnutrition, particularly among women and children. I studied ways that hunger experienced by Ifugao people is influenced by gender, ethnic, and class inequality, global and local health and development programs, religious proselytization, political violence, and the state.
I lived in Ifugao for almost four years. I resided in a wooden hut with a thatched roof in a small village for much of my stay there, as well as another more modern home, made of galvanized iron. I also periodically lived with a family in the center of a mountain town. I participated in the rich daily lives of farmers, woodcarvers, hospital personnel, government employees, shopkeepers, students, and other groups of people.
I conducted interviews and surveys and also shared daily and ritual experiences with people to learn about inadequate access to nutritious food, and social structural sources of this kind of health problem. Participant observation research allows anthropologists to obtain a special kind of knowledge that is rarely acquired through other, more limited research methods.
This type of research takes a great amount of time and effort but produces a uniquely deep and contextual type of knowledge. I am exploring the impacts of this violence on the health and well-being of women and the intersecting global and local sociocultural forces that give meaning to and perpetuate gender violence in Vietnam.
To address these issues, I am researching the abuse of women by their husbands, and in some cases their in-laws as well, in northern Vietnam. I also explore the ways in which abused women, and other Vietnamese professionals and government workers, contest this gender violence in Vietnamese communities.
In Vietnam, I have had the opportunity to live with a family in a commune in Hanoi, and in nearby provinces. I learned about the deep pain and suffering experienced by abused women, as well as the numerous ways many of these women and their fellow community members have worked to put an end to the violence. Marital sexual violence is an important but understudied form of domestic violence in societies throughout the world, including in Vietnam.
In recent decades, anthropologists have been reflecting on the significance and relevance of anthropological research. Some anthropologists have called for greater efforts to share our anthropological findings with the public in order to try to solve significant historical, social, biological, and environmental problems. Examples of these problems include the impacts of climate change on the health and welfare of diverse peoples throughout the globe; and social structural reasons for nutritional problems, as well as cultural meanings people give to them, such as undernutrition, and illnesses related to increasing weights of people in societies globally.
I hope my research on wife abuse will contribute to the emergence of a deeper understanding of the social and cultural sources of gender violence in order to end this violence, and greater awareness of its scope and its negative effects on women. Through their research, anthropologists contribute unique and important forms of knowledge and information to diverse groups, including local communities, nations, and global social movements, such as feminist, racial, indigenous, environmental, LGBTQ, and other social movements.
The fieldwork and participant observation research methods provide cultural anthropologists the opportunity to live with a group of people for several months or years. Applying the results of our ethnographic research and making our research accessible to our students and the public can make the research of anthropologists useful toward alleviating the problems people face in our society, and in countries globally.
The particular way that cultural anthropologists do their research is important to our results. Through my research experiences I have participated in the rich daily lives of farmers, woodcarvers, hospital personnel, government employees, shopkeepers, students, and other groups of people.
This type of research takes a great amount of time and effort, but produces a uniquely deep and contextual type of knowledge. Ethnographic research can help us to understand the extent of a global problem such as gender violence, the everyday experiences of those facing abuse, and the struggles and accomplishments of people actively working to improve their societies. Deductive : reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning.
Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings. Enculturation : the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group. Ethnography : the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people. Sapiens - a digital magazine about the human world with a range of accesible articles.
A series of tutorials on biological and cultural anthropology created by Dr. Dennis O'Neil. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth - The ASA aims to promote the study and teaching of social anthropology, to present the interests of social anthropology and to maintain its professional status.
The European Anthropological Association — a scientific organisation which aims to promote research and teaching in anthropology in the different European countries and to promote exchanges of information, workshops, scientific congresses, and schools at postgraduate level. The European Association of Social Anthropologists — a professional association open to all social anthropologists either qualified in, or working in, Europe. The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences IUAES - a world organization of scientists and institutions working in the fields of anthropology and ethnology, but also of interest to archaeologists and linguists, among others.
The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland RAI - is the world's longest-established scholarly association dedicated to the furtherance of anthropology the study of humankind in its broadest and most inclusive sense.
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