Researchers must create and maintain proper relations between themselves and the host nations, regions, and communities where they work.
The American Anthropological Association's Code of Ethics states that anthropologists should recognize their debt to the people with whom they work and should reciprocate in appropriate ways.
Researchers should obtain informed consent from anyone who provides information or who might be affected by the research.
Researchers should include host country colleagues in their research planning and requests for funding.
Researchers should establish collaborative relationships with host country institutions and colleagues before, during, and after their fieldwork.
Researchers should include host country colleagues in dissemination of the research results.
Researchers should ensure that something is "given back" to host country colleagues.
Research Methods
Cultural anthropology and sociology share an interest in social relations, organization, and behavior.
Sociologists have traditionally worked in the large-scale, complex nations of the industrialized West.
Sociologists rely heavily on questionnaires and other means of collecting masses of quantifiable data.
Sampling and statistical techniques are basic to sociology.
Traditionally, ethnographers used ethnographic techniques to study small, non-literate (without writing) populations.
Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of both anthropology and sociology, compared the organization of simple and complex societies.
Ethnography: Anthropology's Distinctive Strategy
Ethnography is the firsthand, personal study of local cultural settings.
Early ethnographers conducted research almost exclusively among small-scale, relatively isolated societies, with simple technologies and economies.
Traditionally, ethnographers have tried to understand the whole of a particular culture.
In pursuit of this holistic goal, ethnographers usually spend an extended period of time in a given society or community, moving from setting to setting, place to place, and subject to subject to discover the totality and interconnectedness of social life.
Ethnographic Techniques
Observation and Participant Observation
Ethnographers are trained to be aware of and record details from daily events, the significance of which may not be apparent until much later.
Ethnographers strive to establish rapport—a good, friendly working relationship based on personal contact—with their hosts.
Participant observation involves the researcher taking part in the activities being observed.
Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules
Ethnographic interviews range in formality from undirected conversation, to open-ended interviews focusing on specific topics, to formal interviews using a predetermined schedule of questions.
Multiple conversational and interviewing methods may be used to accomplish complementary ends on a single ethnographic research project.
The Genealogical Method
The genealogical method includes procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent, and marriage, using diagrams and symbols.
Because genealogy is a prominent building block in the social organization of nonindustrial societies, anthropologists need to collect genealogical data to understand current social relations and to reconstruct history.
Key cultural consultants are particularly well-informed members of the culture being studied who can provide the ethnographer with some of the most useful or complete information.
Life Histories
Life histories reveal how specific people perceive, react to, and contribute to changes that affect their lives.
Since life histories are focused on how different people interpret and deal with similar issues, they can be used to illustrate the diversity within a given community.
Many ethnographers include the collection of life histories as an important part of their research strategy.
Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer's
An emic (native-oriented) approach investigates how local people perceive and categorize the world, what their rules of behavior are, what is meaningful to them, and how they imagine and explain things.
Cultural consultants or informants are individuals who provide the ethnographer with the emic perspective.
An etic (science-oriented) approach emphasizes the categories, explanations, and interpretations that the anthropologist considers important.
The Evolution of Ethnography
Bronislaw Malinowski is generally considered the father of ethnography.
Like most anthropologists of his time, Malinowski did salvage ethnography, studying and recording cultural diversity threatened by Westernization.
Early ethnographies were scientific accounts of unknown people and places.
Ethnographic realism was the style that dominated "classic" ethnographies.
In such works, the writer's goal was to present an accurate, objective, scientific account of a different way of life, written by someone who knew it firsthand.
Ethnographers derived their authority from their personal research experiences in alien cultures.
Malinowski believed that all aspects of culture were linked and intertwined, making it impossible to write about just one aspect of a culture without discussing how it related to others.
Malinowski argued that a primary task of ethnography was to understand the emic perspective—that is, the native's point of view.
Interpretive anthropologists believe that ethnographers should describe and interpret that which is meaningful to local people.
Interpretivists like Clifford Geertz view cultures as meaningful texts that locals constantly "read" and ethnographers must decipher.
Meanings in a given culture are carried by public symbolic forms, including words, rituals, and customs.
Experimental anthropologists have begun to question traditional goals, methods, and styles of ethnography, including ethnographic realism and salvage ethnography.
In general, experimental anthropologists view ethnographies as both works of art and works of science.
According to this view, ethnographies are literary creations in which ethnographers serve as mediators, communicating information from "natives" to readers.
In reflexive ethnography, a category of experimental anthropology, the ethnographer-writer puts her or his personal feelings and reactions to the field situation right in the text.
Early ethnographies were often written as though they were describing the ethnographic present—the period before Westernization, when the "true" native culture flourished.
Today, anthropologists recognize that the ethnographic present is an unrealistic construct because it inaccurately portrayed native societies as unchanging and isolated from the rest of the world.
Contemporary ethnographies usually recognize that cultures constantly change and that an ethnographic account applies to a particular moment.
Problem-Oriented Ethnography
Although anthropologists are interested in the whole context of human behavior, most ethnographers now enter the field with a specific problem to investigate, and they collect data relevant to that problem.
Because local people lack knowledge about many factors that affect their lives, anthropologists may also gather information on variables such as population density, environmental quality, climate, physical geography, diet, and land use.
Longitudinal Research
Longitudinal research is the long-term study of a community, region, society, culture, or other unit, usually based on repeated visits.
Longitudinal research has become increasingly common as improved transportation has allowed anthropologists to visit their research area repeatedly.
Longitudinal research is often conducted by teams of ethnographers (see team research below).
Team research involves a series of ethnographers conducting complimentary research in a given community, culture, or region.
Culture, Space, and Scale
The recognition and study of ongoing and inescapable flows of people, technology, images, and information are becoming increasingly important in anthropology.
Ethnographic fieldwork is becoming more flexible, large-scale, multi-timed, and multi-sited.
Anthropologists are paying more attention to "outsiders" (e.g., migrants, refugees, tourists, developers) who impinge on the places they study; to external organizations and forces, such as governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations; to the effects of power differentials on cultures; and to diversity within cultures and societies.
Increasingly, the electronic mass media shape local cultures and perspectives by exposing people to global images and information.
Anthropologists increasingly study people in motion, such as those living on or near national borders, nomads, seasonal migrants, homeless and displaced people, immigrants, and refugees.
Survey Research
Anthropologists working in large-scale societies are increasingly using survey methodologies to complement more traditional ethnographic techniques.
Survey involves drawing a study group or sample from the larger study population, collecting impersonal data, and performing statistical analyses on these data.
By studying a properly selected and representative sample, social scientists can make accurate inferences about the larger population.
Survey research is considerably more impersonal than ethnography.
Survey researchers refer to the people who make up their study sample as respondents.
Respondents answer a series of formally administered questions.
The personal, firsthand techniques of ethnography can be used to supplement and fine-tune survey research, thereby providing new perspectives on life in complex, large-scale societies.
Anthropology Today: Even Anthropologists Get Culture Shock
Like all people, anthropologists can experience culture shock—a feeling of alienation, of being without some of the most ordinary, basic cues of one's own culture—when they visit other societies.
In this section, Conrad Kottak describes some of his initial impressions, and the culture shock that he felt, the first time he visited Arembepe, Brazil, in 1962.
