Anthropology, Ethnography, And Ethnology

Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures, it is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. It is the best qualitative method for collecting data often used in the social and behavioral sciences. Data are collected through observations and interviews, which are then used to draw conclusions about how societies and individuals function

Ethnography tells about a culture and the members that comprise this culture. A definition is the scientific description of the customs and individual people of a culture. The process of doing this assignment allowed me to explore another aspect of a cultural group. I was able to learn extensively about interactions between individuals and how see them as a culture. The group that comprises my ethnography is a cultural group very common to Utah. The culture I focused on was the LDS culture, to be more specific I studied a sub-culture of this group. My subculture was a group of 12 year old adolescents that are a Sunday school class in this culture.

What is anthropology? This is a question that can be answered in numerous ways, but we are going to define it as simple as possible. If we break the word down into its two components it means the study of human beings. “Anthropo” means human beings or human kind and “logy” or “logia” is Greek for the study or knowledge of something. When we put it all together, it is the study of human beings which can be very broad. Anthropology can be broken down into four subfields: physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

Ethnographic research is the scientific description of specific human cultures, foreign to the ethnographer. Each ethnographer has his or her own way of conducting research and all of these different ideas can be transmitted and understood in a number of different ways. Because there is no one set idea of how an ethnographer should go about his or her research, conflicts arise. In Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow uses a story like process to discuss his experiences during his research in Morocco. This makes it easier for the reader to understand his ideas then just having a technical book about the many different aspects of Moroccan life that he may have discovered. In Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of

Use the three articles that were assigned to you in the Article Selector Quiz. Review the tutorials on Finding an article in the AU Library and Finding thesis statements.

James P. Spradley (1979) described the insider approach to understanding culture as "a quiet revolution" among the social sciences (p. iii). Cultural anthropologists, however, have long emphasized the importance of the ethnographic method, an approach to understanding a different culture through participation, observation, the use of key informants, and interviews. Cultural anthropologists have employed the ethnographic method in an attempt to surmount several formidable cultural questions: How can one understand another's culture? How can culture be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed? What aspects of a culture make it unique and which connect it to other cultures? If

Ethnography is a qualitative method of research in which the researcher takes part in the activities of a group such that they are able to complete their observations over a period of time in a natural, real-life environment.

As we begin to go on an excursion through literature, it is important to understand the concept of what an ethnography is. Ethnography is known to be a descriptive type of work that analyzes culture and customs of individual people. James Clifford has implemented this work into his studies and has influenced many others to do the same. I saw through the books I have read, ethnography makes these books become vivacious for a reader.

Ethnographic methodology provides rich and complex data (Brownlow, 2012). In the ethnographic approach a researcher joined the studied group in their natural environment, stayed as a part

An anthropologist usually, at the beginning of their career, conduct ethnographic research in a foreign country or remote location to validate themselves as a “bonafide anthropologist” (Brondo 43). Eventually however, the anthropologist will return home often to conduct research around their own familiar ethnic group. Tsuda refers to the anthropologists return to familiar territory as an “Ethnographic homecoming” (Brondo 44). The use of ethnographic methods in the anthropologist’s home or familiar environment is what Tsuda means by “native anthropology”.

The purpose of this reading was to introduce what ethnography is and what exactly do anthropologists do. Ethnography is based on the fact that in order to fully understand a culture, it is best to observe the culture itself and to interact with them over a long period of time. The authors, Monaghan and Just, do fieldwork. Fieldwork is commonly done in small communities with very simplistic lifestyles so to say. In the first chapter, Peter Just did his fieldwork in the Village of Dorro Ntika. In order to be successful with this research, Peter had to build trust and create a good relationship with the people of the native tribe. Meaning Peter was able to learn well beyond the superficial facts. To be an ethnographer one must commit to years

An example of how ethnographers do their fieldwork can be found in the article

“Ancestral lines” by John Barker is a book about the anthropologist’s experience in the Uiaku village located in Papua New Guinea. In the first chapter, Barker tells his readers briefly about him and his education, his and his wife’s experience with the Maisin community, and talks in great detail about the Maisin and their culture in the Uiaku village.

Indigenous knowledge, has peculiar methods of telling, teaching, and how it disseminates information (in some cases in its own distinct ways and in others unconventionally) all of which are continuum (Kovach, 2009) and may be beyond the purview of western understanding or explanation. Given that Knowledge gathering methods and the gathering protocols are integral part of knowledge generation, the application of methods that allow the sharing of intellectual information, spiritual values and emotional issues (Lambert, 2014:64) between the researcher and the researched that an indigenous research achieve a tribal-centered meaning, relevance and validity.

Cultural anthropology is a social science that studies the origins and development of human societies (History World International, 2001). Many theories to explain cultural variations among humans have emerged. As a result, numerous anthropological schools of thought have been established based on these theories since the nineteenth century. These schools of thought encompass the dominant beliefs about culture during a time period and are constantly changing as new knowledge is acquired. As schools of thought develop, ethnographic methods have changed and developed as well. Fieldwork is an ethnographic method that has been implemented in all anthropological schools of thought. It involves gathering data and information about a specific