Ethnographic Analysis Essay

In this study I looked into the physical locations surrounding the home I grew up in. I analyzed the tree growth, pattern and conditions of the roads, and observed the formation of houses in my area. This research is important because it shows how people in rural central Maine live. While studying these locations, I was able to practice and hone my observation skills that will become useful when completing my ethnographic study later in the semester. As an ethnography is described, it is a study into particular ways of human life. While we are not directly studying human nature or human past, we are able to observe different ways of life in a specific human society in this assignment, training us to look at what they see as normal as something they have never seen before. Using Google Earth to locate and describe an area each person knows very well, but from a different view, allows the young researchers to look at the area in a unique perspective. All of the buildings, fields and forests I describe in this study I have seen before from a different view. Forgetting what is known and purely describing what you see causes the familiar to become unfamiliar and the researcher can discover new things they knew existed.

The site chosen for this ethnographical study was The Square on downtown Arcata, California. This location was selected based on what we speculate is an increased population of transient individuals. Many Humboldt State University students and faculty are represented in this area due to its close proximity. The question this study will address the question of what it means to be a member of the transient community and how it is that they interact with the permanent residents or students of Arcata. This question will be examined by analyzing information collected in the field while observing and interviewing members of transient and non-transient populations.

Manitoba is divided by three of Canada’s seven physiographic regions; Canadian Shield, interior plains, and Hudson Bay Lowland. The Division No. 18 located in the Interior plains. The physical features of the Interior plains are vast areas of low-lying lands with permafrost, vast size treeless tundra and spruce forests. The interior Plains are mainly flat, but the landscape composed of some rolling hills, and deep, wide river valleys. The land slopes in Manitoba gently downward from west to east. In addition, the Plains consist of large sand deposits, freshwater rivers that support tremendously in the biological environment; animals and plants. The surface of the Plains’ landscape is covered with meandering channels of rivers and shallow lakes.

The Dobe Ju/’hoansi are located in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa which is on the border of Botswana and Namibia. Here, they live together and travel around often to new locations because they are foragers. A forager is someone who goes around from

The San people of the Kalahari Desert were ‘discovered’ by the outside world in the 1950s. The San are one of the oldest indigenous populations on earth. They have been around for 20, 000 years or more, with a history of living in small family bands. They were a people that never cared about riches or personal possessions as everything was shared among their people. Their populations survived through hunting and gathering in the desert and semi-desert environment of the Kalahari. Things have changed with the advent of the modern world and “civilization”. Today, most San live scattered over many Southern African countries, far away from their original traditional hunting grounds. Some of them are city “squatters”, some farm laborers, and

The Bushmen go out to collect food around every third day throughout the year. Anthropologists thought when they went out to get food, the !Kung people went hunting. This was not the case. It was proven that around 60 to 80 percent of their diets were comprised of vegetation from the area surrounding the camp. This can be partially attributed to the fact that the men are not always successful when they go to hunt, and it also involves the fact that there is a large variety of vegetation available to the people. Previously, anthropologists thought that in a hunter-gatherer society,

The article by Peter Benson (2008) takes place in North Carolina where there were 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in order to understand the agriculture workers who worked on tobacco farms. The purpose of the article is to expose farm labor conditions since the conditions have remained hidden from the public. The farmworkers of the fields experience low wages, poverty, limited access to healthcare, as well as a constant fear of deportation. Their migrant housing was in deplorable conditions. Farm labors are among the worst housed group in the U.S. The fact that farmworker camps were located in very rural and isolated areas basically invisible to the general public creates suffering, disease, and often times were overlooked because

Richard Lee traveled to the Dobe area with the intention of counting the people, learning their language, finding out what they ate and what ate them, and making sense of the paradoxes of generosity and selfishness that seems to lurk beneath the surface of their lives. The Ju/’hoansi are San people who live in the Dobe area of the Kalahari Desert. They were virtually unknown to scientist until the 1950s. Because they’re a foraging society and each member is part of the collective Ju do not have to work very hard to make a living. The central organizing principle of the Ju/’hoansi is kinship, it is very important in creating order to interpersonal relationships, inheritance, and marriage. In times of need the different bands have come together

Women’s work for the Lower Arafundi involved washing sago flour, collecting firewood, making salt, cooking, sewing sago leaves into thatch and cleaning. Men’s tasks were warfare, hunting, catching fish and making houses or canoes. Men often took up gardening and clearing their settlements of grass. Men also participated in trade in the West, primarily with Yimas. Their trade included sago, sago grubs, pandanus, aibika, tobacco, betelnut, bow and arrows, and stone for pots and pans as well as shell necklaces. Both sexes shave the head back to the crown and on ceremonial occasions women painted faint designs on the exposed front. Men wore their hair in strands, about twenty centimeters long, and both sexes put mud in their hair for the ‘stringy’ effect. Women wore long skirts; shell encrusted belts, arm and leg bands as well as chest bands.

participant observational studies of the !Kung Bushman showed that they placed more importance on gathering than hunting to sustain their dietary needs, even though there is only six to nine inches of rainfall per year in the region. These dry conditions help keep the !Kung Bushmen’s living space isolated from neighboring communities, which allows them to ration an abundant amount of food within their own community. Women are responsible for gathering food, which accounts for 60-80% of their diet by weight. The most abundant crop is the mongongo nut. It consist of 50% of the vegetable crop and remains abundant throughout years of drought. In comparison to diets based on cultivated food, the Dobe-area Kung’s diet, which is heavily reliant on mongongo nuts, is more reliable. They also eat 29 species of assorted fruits and 30 species or roots. A male hunter of the !Kung works an average of 12-19 hours per week and rarely travels more than 12 miles

in wealth between the rich anthropologist- who maintained a two month inventory of canned goods- and the Bushmen- who rarely had a day's supply of food on

While others claim that photography captures the inner soul of a person, or deliberately defines it as painting or writing with light, but in my case, it is just simply a newfound love hobby. I undeniably adore and look up to expert photographers I encounter down the road may it face-to-face or the other way around. In my heart, I silently desire that someday, with hard work, determination, and perseverance, I will become professional and famous as they are. Since my husband bought a Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) as an anniversary gift, my penchant for photography commenced and ignited. Let me detail the essential truths behind my passion over photography.

The first step of trekking to the Kalahari Desert to live the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen, I must first come to understand the basics of their culture, and environment they live in. Traditional semi-nomadic Ju/'hoansi Bushmen were foragers that lived in the Kalahari Desert in southwestern Africa. They are a type of band society with a very small population. According to Raymond Supin, Ju/’hoansi diets consist mostly of nuts, fruits, roots and occasional meat (2012:153). In Ju/'hoansi San society, it is prominently the woman who do the gathering of food while, the men spend most of their time preforming rituals and ceremonies (2012:153). The Kalahari desert has a moderate climate with very little rain falls. With the knowledge of the culture and environment

can irrigate to grow crops and feed the livestock so they produce food for the population and be traded for in the big cities around Bamako and Kita.In these places the population is more dense however in places like the Sahara Desert and the Northern Sahel the water supply is much lower and the sand is an infertile soil which cannot be used to grow cops as there are so many rocks.

Among the Mbuti, gathering as a mode of subsistence occupies a place of relatively little importance. But net hunting, in groups, takes up the greater portion of daily activity time. The Mbuti do not engage in much gathering of wild plants probably as a result of 400-500 years of contact with the agricultural Bantu. The Mbuti of today have little need to gather wild plants because they exchange game caught during their hunts for metal implements and agricultural produce [banana, cassava, sweet potato, rice, etc.]…The Mbuti divide into two groups; one is a group which uses bows, arrows, and spears as its basic method of hunting, and the second which uses nets. (Tanaka, 1978)