ANTH 100 Week 5 Notes

ANTH 100 Week 5 (Ethnography) 6 February Final project ● Abstract → March 1 ○ Explain the concepts, who and why the target audience, and initial thoughts about the last question ○ 150-200 words ● Deadline → April 19 ○ Create a poster and explain concepts Gillian Crease Takeaway ● Migration right is not an easy process ● Racialized migrations face different challenges ● To study racialization study both people's experiences in the present and the history of a place ● Ethnographic approach (brings present and historical approach) Harrison - Ethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research ● Guides new researchers in designing ethnographic projects ● Serving as a resource for evaluating ethnographies of others ● Correct misconception that ethnography is something everyone can do regardless of training, reflection, and accountability ● What is ethnography according to the book ○ A tradition of research and mode of representing social life (writing is the dominant medium) ○ Study, describe, represent, and theorize (with a certain degree of particularity) a culture or social world → contextualize ○ Planted in the fields of anthropology and qualitative sociology ● Contemporary anthropology ○ Less focused on specific societies → tend not to believe that societies live in a bubble/bounded ○ Consider culture in a broader term within particular moments in time, recognize things change over time

○ Rooted in classical anthropological question → how people in a given space define a situation, make sense of their everyday lives, and develop symbols, ideas, and frameworks to explain and inhabit their world. ● Principles ○ Accept that culture encompasses practices, categories, and symbols that organize human activity and how humans find meaning in the world ○ Defamiliarize that which is taken for granted ○ Illustrate how ideas, practices, categories and symbols are socially constructed ○ Understand how communities are different rather than locating one universal principle that encompasses all communities ■ How difference is produced over time through systems and processes ● Methods ○ Data collection tools ■ Participant observation ■ Fieldnotes ■ Interviews ○ Data analysis ○ Written analysis ■ Articulate data as part of a broader context ■ Trace how particular social phenomena unfold over time ○ The individual as the research medium ■ Self-reflection ■ Relationships between anthropologists and the people they study are different ■ Different insights and recognize how the environment conditions it ● Ethics ○ Principal ethical obligation to their research participants/interlocutors ■ Avoid harm to the people being studied ○ Make conscious decisions about what to report and what to leave out ■ The way you represent the community has consequences ■ Think whether you are reinforcing the stereotypes ■ Need to have understanding of the history ○ Think carefully about power relations ■ Being transparent about what allows you to study ■ financial capital, linguistic ○ Preserve anonymity ○ Topic and question choice → report building before doing the research; make sure the community allows you ○ Reflexivity without navel-gazing (self-indulgent)