Essay about Etic vs. Emic Approaches in Anthropology

I plan to answer questions about subjects including marriage, local government, gender roles, religion/ religious beliefs; more specifically the role females play. I will be figuring these questions out by collecting data within the community and to do so properly, I will need to have an emic approach. An emic approach is how the Tingunee people think, perceive other people, how they behave, and how they imagine and explain things. I decided to take the emic approach over the etic approach because the etic approach would involve me emphasizing what I think is important about a culture after interpreting it and because the Tingunee people have not been studied before, I want other people to know their culture and thought processes without including my opinions. An emic approach will allow me to be a part of the community while taking in information without bias. After being amerced in the community with my emic approach, I will be able to determine what distinct cultural characteristics separate this culture from the rest. I plan on interviewing individual people, both male and female, to get different perspectives on everyday life within the tribe and the roles each individual plays in the community. Being a female myself will have advantages when talking to

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, I will be exploring and explaining about the culture that I am studying in

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”.

Answer: Ethnographic research is different from other social science approaches to research because it goes more in depth. With an ethnographic research you are required to eat, sleep, and breath what is being studied. In order to get a better understanding you will need to incorporate such living (as that of the culture being studied) into your life. It’s more of a research to gain the knowledge of a current situation as oppose to something that has happened in the past. For example Sterk was researching prostitution. She followed the lives of many

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

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

An anthropologist will try to read and understand the Nacirema culture with the notion of being culturally relative. With this way of thinking in mind, we could study the Nacirema peoples without any judgment. If we can come to terms with our ethnocentric views, we can quickly analyze the wrong way of thinking. Therefore, we can try to understand the Nacirema culture through their shoes. If we keep looking at their cultural in a primarily ethnocentric perspective, we would not have found the similarities between the Nacirema culture and our own.

There are multiple characteristics of ethnographic approach. This research is considered to be more of a descriptive type research approach, that is intended for “in-depth research and descriptions of ethnic groups, cultures, large organizations, and their features” (Percy, Kostere, & Kostere, 2015, p. 16). This type of research immerses its selves in the organization or culture they are reviewing, and becoming a part of the culture, so that we can learn about it from the inside out. Therefore, this methodology often involves longer time frame for information collection, and consists of researchers returning a number of times to the location where the research is to acquire more information. Some “doctoral learners tend to avoid ethnographic studies, because of the typical long time-commitments, however, it can be a fruitful approach, even in shorter periods, for understanding the customs, culture, belief systems, and implicit rules of organizations and large groups” (Percy, Kostere, & Kostere, 2015, p. 15)

they perform the bulk of their work, and what it is they do in both problem

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

Culture is one of the major influences on our lives and social interactions; culture is associated with our characteristics of religion, societal norms of behavior; moreover, culture is always changing and the influence increases. With every religion there are traditions and cultures that are a form of art as it involves many characteristics’ of individuals and their beliefs, values, and perspective, for this reason, there are various dynamics in terms of how culture is involved and the influence of our actions, such as media, peers, family, and socializations. Culture is a factor of social environment and what is modeled to us in our early years of development.