Fieldwork in Various Anthropological Schools of Thought Essay

Cultural anthropology is the study of human beliefs and values. It is a way of learning and understanding how humans act in different countries and cultures. Ethnography is one of the main key method used to conduct research in cultural anthropology. Ethnography is designed to observe other people’s lifestyles and understands from the people natives’ point of view. The researchers went into the area to study and learn on their own about the culture of the people instead of just reading about

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

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

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

This book has been molded to be a breakdown of how various fields in science have progressed over centuries as mankind has advanced. The book starts off introducing the idea that the telling of natural history has changed numerous times as humans have evolved. We also learn to agree that our knowledge has been shaped by the tools available and the perceptions of its users. In the earliest stages of life, Muehlbauer states “…observers of the natural world had only their senses to work with, and were limited to visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory descriptions perceived by the unaided

Historical arguments are seldom proved without controversy, while there are certain historical methods that, if not dissipating all questions, give enough credibility to a theory or argument for us to call it proven. In Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, the author linked history development with well-recognized evolution theory and other biological knowledge to back his argument. He also employed the strategies of traditional historians, which included dealing with primary documents from multiple sources, evaluating different explanations as well as appealing to common sense and deduction to support his view.

First, the debate of what the nature of anthropology could be said to begin in the era of Franz Boas. Franz Boas stated how he expected anthropologists

Although Charles Darwin is usually just looked at in the light of purely biology, his work that impacted other fields such as psychology or his work that lead to the rapid expansion of certain fields such as ethology, is often looked over. Darwin’s work impacted these fields both directly and indirectly at such a level of influence that some people believe that psychology should be looked at as pre- and post-Darwin. On the Origin of Species, while being primarily about biological phenomena and theories, was one of these works that impacted psychology indirectly. Other than giving a new perspective for psychologists to possess when contemplating different ideas, Darwin’s work on natural selection lead to the creation of evolutionary psychology.

During the Age of Discovery Europeans travelled to foreign lands and encountered different people who presented evident phenotypic variations. Authors like Malik (1996) suggest that racial prejudice and superstition were common and found in most ethnically homogenous, socially conservative communities of the time. During this period equality, reason and humanity were unknown ideas and people who spoke different languages, worshiped different God’s or had different skin complexion were treated with distrusts and irrationality, created by the fear of the unknown (Brown, 2010). In their travels Europeans quite frequently depicted the non-white people they encountered on other continents like in Africa as savages, apes and monsters (Brown, 2010). Philosophers like Bodin (1530-1596) conducted geographic classifications of the known populations of humans based on the colour of their skin, his basic classification used descriptive terms such as “duskish colour, farish & white” to categorise the appearance of different peoples (Barnes, 2007. Pg 42). In an attempt to determine the meaning and value of life, Brown (2010) suggests that upon its founding human sciences have pursued the fundamental meaning of human diversity and therefore modern sciences and the history or race have interlaced histories. This paper aims to explore the genealogy of race through the monogenist, polygenist and Darwinian paradigms by exploring the development and implementation of racial mechanisms that were

1. In which region and in what country is San Basilio located? What is the language of the linguistic minority in this region? What are the cultural advantages of being in this linguistic minority?

Evolution refers to "change over time". In terms of physical anthropology, evolution is changes over time in living organisms. This means that living things have passed their traits from one generation to the next. There are very little changes that occur with each generation, but over time these changes accumulate in each living organism. It is believed that all life on Earth has common ancestry that lived more than 3.5 billions of years ago (Park, 2008).

Humans are an interesting species because of the strong need humans have to fully understand what it truly means to be human. Many fields such as history, psychology, and sociology all offer a perspective in the study of humanity, but there are distinguishable from anthropology. Anthropology differs from other humanities fields due to its holistic nature, comparative research methods, and the strong emphasis on fieldwork and participant interaction. Anthropology is the study of people throughout the world, their evolutionary history, how they behave, adapt to different environments, communicate and socialize with one another. In order for anthropologists to examine the full scope of human life, they employ the four field approach that embodies the holistic nature of the field.

It may be argued that the Boasian example is not indicative of a paradigm shift, as anthropology itself was too new a field to have a consensus. Whether or not the data gathered resulted from anomalies in his working paradigm is a consideration. Boas does appear to have stepped outside the bounds of the paradigm from the start, never attempting to fit his data into the existing evolutionary

Sydel Silverman, in One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology, clarified how Franz Boas (1858 – 1942), the founder of anthropology in the United States, trained the major figures of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century (Silverman: 2005, 258). Boas started a critique to evolutionary theory and a move to the institutionalization of cultural anthropology in universities and museums. Boas and his students started to layout American anthropological landscape with questions about culture and meaning. He established culture as a core concept in anthropology challenging the social-structural emphasis of the British Social Anthropology (258). Interestingly enough, how Silverman suggested that the understanding of American anthropology trajectory should not be in terms of Boas’s school of thought, but more like an arena of “debate, conflict, and differences in many kinds – theoretical, social, political, cultural, and institutional” (258).

Franz Boas is a German anthropologist, he is known as the “Founder of Anthropology” or the “Father of American Anthropology”. Boas rejected orthogenesis, but he did not reject Charles Darwin’s theory. Boas took the idea of evolution and made his own theory, from Darwin and made a theory that stated that we are slightly different because of our unique adaptations. “ When Boas applied this to anthology he introduced the principle of Cultural Relativism, the principle stated