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Trail-2-6
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| Quote One | You can observe a lot by just watchin' (attributed to Yogi Berra). | |
| Quote
Two
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Some social scientists will do any mad thing rather than study men at first-hand in their natural surroundings (attributed to George Homans). | |
| Brief History of Ethnographic Research | Qualitative > Ethnographic>Action Research>Field Work | |
| Ethnography is very closely associated with "Action Research" | ||
| Action Reseach: The Researcher is often directed inolved in trying to accomplish a particular goal. | ||
| Ethnography = The Researcher, although part of the community in which she studies, does not take such an active role in the activities | ||
| Ethnographies first arose out of researchers sitting in deepest Africa... | Field
work is the research undertaken by an anthropologist in a particular community.
When anthropology emerged as a discipline, such societies tended to be
tribal or remote, but field work is now often undertaken in urban societies
or among minority groups or subcultures.
Field work relies on the principle of participant-observation--the anthropologist shares the life of a community, participating as well as observing, in order to experience and understand it in as much detail as possible. An anthropologist is expected to learn the language proficiently and spend at least a year 'in the field'. Presuming that problems of translation, both linguistic and cultural, can be overcome, field work produces careful descriptions of specific communities. Anthropological facts are actually lived experiences turned into sociological facts through the process of observing and questioning. The anthropologist gleans information through a select number of people (termed informants). Despite the anthropologist's status as both participant and observer, understanding is inevitably limited to some extent by the personal views of the informants. Male anthropologists, for example, often fail to elicit the alternative models of society proposed by women, as well as other interest groups in the community. Unless the anthropologist is careful, the views represented in his or her writing exclusively reflect the views of an élite, or those of marginal groups, depending on their choice of informants. Bad: The multiplicity of versions or models of reality tend to be reduced to a one-dimensional study of society. Anthropologists are increasingly aware of the problems inherent in the methodology of participant-observation. Most anthropologists now write explicitly about their own position within the community, so that readers can evaluate the information for themselves. |
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| Somebody got the bright idea that Anthropological Ethnography could be conducted right here in American Classrooms! | The traditional concern of educational sociologists with pupil attainment, in which the pupil's social background or individual psychology were the main explanatory variables, gave way in the 1970s to the investigation of educational institutions themselves and the way they shape educational outcomes. Using the techniques of ethnography investigators analysed the social interactions and values (often implicit rather than formally acknowledged) that made up the social system of the classroom or school | |
| Tools of the Trade | The
nature of a particular mediation [fieldwork encounter] will depend on the
nature of the traditions that are in contact during fieldwork. The received
view's concept of "objectivity" becomes obsolete. Ethnography no longer
claims to describe a reality accessible by anyone using the right methods,
independent of the historical or cultural context of the act of describing.
On the other hand, there is no justification for the complete relativism of what Hirsch (1976) calls "cognitive atheism" either. There is a human group out there who lived in a world before the ethnographer appeared and who will continue to do so after he or she leaves. The research is a function of the group studied as well (Agar 1986:19). Michael Agar points out that the result of ethnography-the ethnographic description or monograph-is a result of a complex interaction between informants, field researcher, and the audience. Ethnography is a multifaceted method and makes for a theoretically complex topic. The word is used to label a "complex whole," made up of grab-bag of separate interviewing, observational, archival, and other methods. These methods are tied together by the goal of constructing a way for the reader to understand a world view or social organization that may be quite different from his or her own. These techniques are designed around the ideal of seeing these things from the "native's point of view." |
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| All the pictures from Trail 2 are of Lake Chelan, in Eastern Washing State, the place I spent summers while growing up. |  |
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