The Strengths And Weaknesses Of European Ethnography And / Or Science

Finney started off talking about how the Pacific Islanders wound up coming to the pacific islands, then how they started to immigrate to other island along with some examples of their successes and

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.

1. Based on reading this selection, how is ethnographic research different from other social science approaches to research?

The long history between Native American and Europeans are a strained and bloody one. For the time of Columbus’s subsequent visits to the new world, native culture has

American history frequently centers on the issues of ethnic diversity and resource allocation. In the contemporary, we begin to see the experiences of the Native inhabitants of the Americas in contrast to European settlers and colonizers, is a prime example of this process in motion. When European settlers first arrived to the New World in the 15th century, firstly the Spanish, they brought with them a material cultural based upon an economic standard of resource exploitation, which in a sense was hostile to most of the Native peoples of the Americas. For instance, as Blackhawk notes that, Europeans built permanent settlements consisting of immovable structures, whereas many of the Great Basin peoples were semi-migratory in nature. Additionally, as Europeans claimed possession over the land, its resources, and began a process of territorial delimitation, Native peoples whose lives

The people of Hawaii and other Pacific Island Nation groups have experienced great injustice from their colonial powers and the acts of imperialism. Lands were seized, cultural practices banned, language lost, and people were even forced to move away from their homes for the purpose of bomb testing. The United States and other countries abroad sent out representatives to do their work for them; in return their future actions would be justified in describing the Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders as savages that need to have wider powers enforced upon them; thus resulting in a tangled web of political mythologies.

The influence of the “Manifest Destiny” and the possible economic rewards were the driving force behind Jefferson’s desire to send Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to go on a three year expedition westwards to the Pacific Ocean in August of 1803. While the journey to the West provided Lewis and Clark was one that was both fascinating and difficult, the journey back home was one that was filled with obstacles. Some of the difficulties faced on the journey home can be attributed to the climate and topography of the land which are recorded in the journals of Lewis and Clark.

Once voyages to North America became profitable, European nations looked to capitalize in any way possible. The nations really had to sell the idea of starting a new life from scratch thousands of miles away to their constituents. This was not easy as the voyage in it of itself could be deadly, not to mention the only thing guaranteed in return was an allocation of land and a chance at earning large sums of money. The difficult nature of recruitment often led to deliberately bias accounts of North American lands (Cronon 1983). The bias accounts often amounted to over hyping the abundance of resources in the mysterious “New World.” Not only did this lead to ultimately more colonizers making the voyage, but it also influenced their mindset and interactions with the natural world upon their arrival. The influence of bias accounts led to environmentally disconnected practices.

conquering of the Incas, and his help at discovering the great, big, blue of what we know as the Pacific

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Europeans and Americans competed for economic dominance of the entire globe. The majority of Western European powers had ultimately claimed and colonized much of the known world, establishing guarded trade routes that traversed the Atlantic Ocean. These trade routes linked the raw resources of the colonized territories in Africa, Asia and South America with the profitable markets in Europe and Eastern North America. American Expansion in Hawaii: 1842-1898 by Sylvester K. Stevens credits Hawaii’s economy and business for the United States interest in such a diverse kingdom. Furthermore, Stevens discusses the missionaries and their role in spreading the American influence. By the 1800’s, American

Europeans explored the world for new territory since the early 1500s with the idea of conquering new land and spreading religion. Many explorers had the idea of whatever new land that was discovered must be conquered, but Cook did not see it that way. Although he was ordered to not conquer unless first asking permission he did something no other explorer did. Cook learned from the natives. He learned new techniques to navigate and view the ocean. Although Cook did learn from the Polyneasians the impact that the Europeans had on the Polynesians was catastrophic and detrimental to their survival.

In addition to social structure, another aspect of the European misconceptions towards the Natives is they also strive to procure the Natives’ local resources. In 1492, Columbus arrives in North America. He is determined to take the Natives’ gold from their land. “I... strove to learn if they had any gold...About sunset we anchored near the cape...to enquire for gold...” (Columbus 6 & 7).

In addition, the second issue that appear when I was reading the article was the difficulty that Pacific Islander encounter in a country. They always have a tough time of getting acceptance from other civilize residents. For example,

In this article, Professor Walker discusses Hawai’i in the early 1900s, and how it became a “contested domain, a place where colonial men challenged Native respite and Native surfers vehemently fought haole over waves, women, and beach properties”. He discusses the constant fight put up by the Hawaiian men to defend their land, beaches, families, and most importantly, their waves. “On land, Hawaiians were increasingly marginalized from political, social, and economic spheres in the twentieth century. Yet in the ocean, Native surfers secured a position on top of a social hierarchy. Because Hawaiian surfers contended for this autonomous cultural space, they had the freedom to defy colonial prescriptions for how Hawaiian men should behave. As they transgressed haole expectations and categories in the waves, Hawaiian surfers simultaneously defined themselves as active and resistant Natives in a colonial history that regularly wrote them as otherwise. I argue that these men were empowered in the Hawaiian surf

The Pacific Ocean was a world waiting to be explored and conquered for the Europeans during the 1700s. Willing to undertake the challenge of the Pacific, Captain James Cook successfully completed two circumnavigations while mapping various islands, conducting astronomical research, and developing friendly relationships with the Pacific’s island natives. Cook approached the natives cautiously in order to avoid any unwanted, or unneeded, confrontations that could potentially ruin the accessibility of both the Pacific and the specific island itself. The positive connection that Captain Cook established with the natives was due to Cook treating the natives as equals, or at least as people who required equal amounts of respect as the Europeans.