Field Of Ethnography Research Articles

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF ETHNOGRAPHY

In concluding our term as editors, we review the submissions we have received over the last eight years and offer some insight into recent demographic trends in the field of ethnography, including who is conducting research, how they are doing it, and where they are focusing their attention. We compare these findings to previous speculations and assumptions, and to demographic trends in the field more generally. We also offer an analysis of the standards by which reviewers assessed articles submitted and the characteristics of articles that were likely to yield various dispositions.

An anthropologist's work between moving genres*

Anthropologists who have worked in recent decades experienced the breakdown of a dominant methodological and theoretical ethos. The author relates his pains and delights as he moved away from the Jerusalem “modernization” grand theory sociological paradigm of the 1960s to the Manchester School compelling fieldwork doctrine. And he relates his later attraction to the Geertzian genre and the more recent encounters with the mixed blessing of reflexivity and “post‐modernism”. The latter have opened new fields for exploration and liberated the anthropologist from strict disciplinarian borders and ideological taboos. But the new genres seem also to jeopardize the raison d'être of the ethnographic project. The author associates his changing loyalties and tastes with his choice of ethnographic fields.

Using Depth Psychology Constructs to Accurately Interpret Native Symbolism: An Examination of the Tolowa "Catching the White Bird" Myth

T HE ETHNOGRAPHIC, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND anthropological fields have historically generated innumerable volumes of studies which have reinforced erroneous claims of cultural dysfunction-extinction of tribal groups. Significant numbers of social scientists have used reductionistoriented techniques to chronicle with voluminous examples the supposed aberrant or dysfunctional personality development of American Indians.

Who Studies Humanity?: The Scope of Anthropology

Who Studies Humanity?: The Scope of Anthropology

George Comer (1858-1937)

... George Comer was a professional whaleman whose career spanned the final decades of whaling in Hudson Bay. Success in whaling alone would probably justify his inclusion in this series of biographical sketches, but Comer's achievements went far beyond the sufficiently challenging tasks of pursuing whales, navigating small sailing vessels among pack ice, and wintering in the Arctic. He was a friend to the Inuit and a dedicated student of their culture, an amateur archaeologist, a scientific collector in the fields of ethnography and natural history, and a recognized arctic authority to whom a number of prominent scientists and writers owed much. ...

Training the instructional development specialist to work in unfamiliar content areas

Most ID practitioners face the challenge of designing instruction in a content area about which they have little personal knowledge. To obtain a rudimentary understanding of the content, some peruse texts and journals and others interview experts in the field. But little is known (or at least published) about the specific techniques developers employ to gain an understanding of unfamiliar content or ways to teach such skills to ID graduate students. This article explores the ID skill of comprehending unfamiliar, specialized, and sophisticated subject matter by first noting the nature and characteristics of disciplines and knowledge. Second, self-reports of experienced developers are presented, particularly from those who employ the interview approach to gather information. Finally, the relatively new field of ethnography is examined for heuristics that may be helpful to developers who interview clients for information about content areas.

Precolonial Markets in Bunyoro-Kitara

One of the weaknesses of students of African development studies has been their inability to speak in the idiom of Africans. Anthropologists, despite their often magnificent contributions of earlier times in the field of ethnography must find a new role in the present state of African studies. The tendency to conceive precolonial developments in Africa in terms of primitivity, tribality, and feudality, has conveyed the erroneous impression that Africa is characterized by the static nature of its past. In other words, the dynamics of the growth of African societies has traditionally not been their concern. Unfortunately, the African historian who should have been particularly concerned with this aspect of study has, until recently, proved to be of little help. He has first to win the battle of African history, the mopping up operations of which are still going on. But he, too, must now realize that a history of specifically political developments is an anachronism: precolonial Africa had no clear-cut distinction between the political, the economic, and the social. To be meaningful, history must be conceived in its totality. Finally, the economist seems to speak least in the idiom of theAfrican. It is ‘fashionable’ for him, it has been pointed out, to assume that ‘the African economy’ ought not to work in a basically dissimilar fashion from ‘the Western economy’ and that something is wrong with it if it does. The problem of the African economist, then, is that of relevance, a problem that has to be satisfactorily solved if his readiness to offer his services as the specialist ‘doctor’ of African economic problems is to be taken seriously.

The Subject Matter and Methodology of Ethnographic Study of the Soviet Working Class

The problem of the culture and mode of life of the working class is increasingly attracting the attention of Soviet researchers. In recent years considerable progress has been made in their study. This work is also proceeding actively in the people's democracies. (1) Nevertheless, it must be recognized that this field of ethnography continues to lag. Pre-Marxist, and particularly prerevolutionary Russian ethnography, did not set itself the task of studying the working class. It regarded the working class as a uniform mass without specific ethnic characteristics, and saw the peasantry as the sole bearer of national culture. As a consequence, a substantial portion of the population of a particular nationality, not engaged in agriculture or the fishing and hunting occupations, remained outside the purview of ethnographic study. This not only impoverished but distorted the general picture of the development of the folk way of life, the folk culture.

Several Problems in the Study of Kinship Systems

Previous articleNext article No AccessSeveral Problems in the Study of Kinship SystemsD. A. OlderoggeD. A. Olderogge Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 2, Number 2Apr., 1961 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/200170 Views: 10Total views on this site Copyright 1961 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.