Hal Foster: The Artist As Ethnographer?

You are required to discuss a work by a 20th or 21st century artist, photographer, designer, architect, film-maker, philosopher or writer and show how this work reflects, contradicts or extends theories of and attitudes to visual culture current at the time of its making.

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.

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

Anthropology is something we should value because it allows us as human beings to learn about our origins and also to understand the cultures in the world outside of our own. Anthropology uses many techniques to learn and study such cultures that we do not understand. Ethnography is the gathering and interpretation of information based on intensive firsthand study of a participation culture -or- the written report of this study.

"Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach, 5th Edition. "Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach: Margaret Lazzari, Dona Schlesier: 9781285858166: Amazon.com: Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 July

Ethnocentricity is being centred on a specific ethnic group, usually one's own. An example of ethnocentricity in the public services is in training. Every public service member is taught to not let ethnocentric views affect their behaviour towards others. Currently there has been no media reporting’s of ethnocentricity within the UK public services.

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

Required Text: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, University of California Press, 1996.

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.

Since the beginning of time, artists have labored extensively to find innovative ways to convey sentiment, passion, and feeling. Telling stories and trying to unlock the minds of people through different avenues of artistic labors. Art touches and affects people in unique ways; it can have special or unusual meaning on the person depending on how one views it. Artists’ rendering of their art is interpreted in numerous ways by others who view it unless it is explained by the artist on its meaning giving a clear example of what they are portraying. Two people looking at the same painting, sculpture, portrait, or photo may come to different views on the arts meaning even though they are looking

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

Throughout all these diverse cultures of art, I was questioning myself and started to wonder how

Philosopher Arthur Danto, author of “The Artworld,” an artistic criticism, states that “to see something as art requires something that the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (201). Artistic theory, according to Danto, requires the presence of a subject, style, rhetorical ellipses, and that of historical context. Danto is capable of developing this view on art with the aid of an imaginary character, Testadura. Testadura, however, makes mistakes, as well as corrections, about the objects before him.

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)