In the previous unit we talked about the anthropological perspective and how that is one of the things that makes anthropology a unique discipline. However there is another thing that makes anthropology unique. The second thing that makes anthropology unique from other social sciences is how we go about doing research--our methodology. As anthropologists, we want to get an understanding of how the people we are studying view the world. That is, an emic understanding. For social scientists, attempting to get this emic understanding is fairly uncommon. It is much more common and natural for scientists to take an etic approach. When taking an etic approach, instead of trying to understand the world from the "native's" or "insider's" perspective, you are interpreting what you learn through your own understanding of how the world works as an "outsider" or "scientist." Just like with cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, can we ever truly get an emic understanding? Not really. Even as anthropologists, we will always, at least on some level, import our interpretations onto what we see and what is happening, but we do strive to have that emic understanding. In attempts to get that emic understanding we have to employ some fairly unique methods.
A big part of what makes anthropology unique from other social sciences is our method. And a big part of that method is fieldwork and participant observation. Fieldwork and participant observation are the anthropologists primary tools for doing anthropology. Collectively, they are referred to as ethnographic methods because they are generally used to produce ethnography, anthropologists' primary output. Fieldwork and participant observation go hand in hand, however, they are not the same thing. While fieldwork is the time we spend "in the field," participant observation is what we do there. Fieldwork and participant observation are the crux of what make anthropology a unique discipline in the social sciences. While most social scientists sit in their offices and gather their data from books and databases, anthropologists go out into the field and collect their own primary data that they then use to test their hypotheses and develop theories. In order to collect this data, most anthropologists spend extended periods of time living among the people they are studying, usually, but not always, in some foreign country or exotic locale.
FIELDWORK
Traditionally, anthropologists have done their fieldwork among small isolated groups in exotic locations that live traditional life ways. Luci Fernandes, another faculty member here at ECU, has done just that. Luci has done some of her fieldwork among the Kichwa Indians of the Ecuadorian rain forest. She worked with the Kichwa to develop environmentally friendly economic alternatives to clear cutting the rain forest. In this picture, Luci, with the help of a research assistant, is interviewing some of the villagers on their knowledge of indigenous handcrafts, the primary economic alternative to logging. She conducted her research over three summers. For more information on how handcrafts are aiding in the conservation efforts of the region, click on the picture.
My research has been done in less traditional field sites. My primary research has been conducted in Romania on reproductive health. I was trying to understand why the majority of Romanian women choose to use abortion as their primary means of birth control when alternative forms, such as the pill, condoms, and IUDs are readily available and affordable. Although there are villages within Romania which fit the more traditional picture of an anthropological fields site, in order to address my particular research question, I had to conduct my research in a town that did have ready and reliable access to contraceptives. This is not the case for the smaller villages. So, I conducted my fieldwork over the course of a year in a town called Iasi. Iasi is the third largest town in Romania with a population of approximately 400,000. Far from being isolated, Iasi is a cultural center of Romania, an industrialized country. Iasi is very much an active large town.
Although not quite as traditional as many field sites, at least Iasi is a in a far off, foreign country. That, however, is no longer necessarily true of many anthropological field sites. Today, much anthropological research is occurring in our own back yards. Along with my collaborators Vanessa Fuller and James Boster, I have also conducted research on America's abortion debate. We were interested in the reasoning people use to support their positions as either pro-choice or pro-life. This picture was taken outside a family planning clinic in Boston, but the actual field site for this research is much more amorphous. For this research we interviewed activists throughout the Northeast as well as students in both Connecticut and North Carolina. Also, unlike the Romanian research that was intensive research that took place over the course of a year, this research started a number of years ago and is ongoing at sporadic intervals. Not so exotic, not so far a field, not so localized, but fieldwork none the less.
As the examples in the above box attest, fieldwork is as diverse as the projects being conducted. Where you go to do the fieldwork, the time you spend there, and what you do there are directed by the research questions you have. However, regardless of your research topic or field site, as an anthropologist, the way you are going to answer those research questions will involve participant observation. How can this be? So many different research questions and field sites, how can we use just one method? Well, perhaps this is a little misleading. Participant observation is not just one method of investigation, rather it is a whole group of different methods for doing ethnographic research that collectively are referred to as participant observation.The video to the left highlights and participant observation of three anthropology professors from MIT whose fieldwork was conducted in the United States. (If you do not see the video, refresh the page and allow active X content or Click Here.)
As the name implies, participant observation primarily involves participating in the society or "culture" being studied and observing the people and events within that society. It also includes various types of interviewing from very informal interviews that may take place on a street corner or in a bar, to very structured interviews such as surveys. All of this of course involves fieldwork--you have to be there in order to observe and participate and interview, but it is much more than just being there. While there, one must get involved in the community, talk to everyone and anyone who may know something of interest, observe what's going on around you, and, most importantly, record your observations, interviews, and impressions in a systematic manner. So, for example, Luci not only lived among the Kichwa, she also learned how to make some of the native crafts and observed how the money gained through the selling of the handicrafts affected their lives. For my research in Romania I spent most of my time in abortion clinics observing women's behaviors and talking to them and doctors about their views on abortion and contraception. For the research on America's abortion debate, in addition to interviews with both activists and non-activists, my colleagues and I spent time outside of family planning clinics where activists were protesting and went to both pro-choice and pro-life rallies to observe and talk to the people involved.
Why is participant observation so important? It is important because we are interested in getting that emic understanding of what is going on. In order to understand how people are viewing the world around them, we have to situate ourselves into that world and we have to ask those same people lots of questions about why they do x or what they think about y. In the end, we still inevitably impose our "outsider's" interpretation of what we observe. But by being involved with the people and being immersed in the place, our interpretations are closer to an "insider's" understanding than they would be if we just sat in our offices and tried to figure out what was going on by imposing our understanding of the world onto an unfamiliar data set collected on an unfamiliar group of people. While participant observation comprises the bulk of what anthropologists do while in the field, there are additional methods that anthropologists employ depending on their particular research interests. Be sure to read about these other methods in chapter two of Mirror for Humanity.
Anthropology in general, but applied anthropology especially, produces ethical considerations and concerns. This is of such great concern that the American Anthropological Association has developed a code of ethics that all anthropologists are supposed to abide by. As anthropologists we are entering people's communities on good faith and asking for their help in understanding what is going on in their culture. We have an obligation to these people. We must look out for the welfare of the people we work with. This ethical consideration impacts much of how we do research and the types of things we participate in. For purely academic research, this primarily becomes an issue of protecting our informants. To prevent any potentially harmful information we gather from having a negative impact on our informants we generally remove names and any information that could identify an individual. While the primary concern is informant protection, there is also a concern that the information we learn could be used against a society. This concern is based in reality. During the World Wars, the CIA employed anthropologists to learn about our enemies to figure out how to best defeat them. Today that is seen as unethical, but anthropologists are still employed to help us understand regions of the world (such as the Middle East) where there is conflict. Currently it is framed a little differently--it's not so we know what we need to do to defeat the enemy, but more so we can know how to successfully interact with these groups and hopefully avoid conflict.
Many of these same ethical issues arise with private corporations. For example, an anthropologist named Brent Berlin has been highly criticized because of his association with pharmaceutical companies. He has been accused of biopiracy, something fairly common around the world, but an uncommon event for an anthropologist. Berlin is an ethnobotanist--he studies how people use plants. He focuses on medicinal plants in particular and does his work in Chiapas, Mexico. Part of his funding comes from pharmaceutical companies to uncover plants that may eventually be used for new medicines. The controversy comes, however, in that some of the indigenous groups of the area (not the particular group Berlin worked with) feel that their intellectual property rights are being violated. Basically the controversy comes in in that while the particular group Berlin is working with benefits from the relationship with the pharmaceutical company, other groups in that region who have the same knowledge are not benefiting from their knowledge being used by these large corporations. The critique of Berlin is that he, in bringing in this large pharmaceutical company, is exploiting the native populations of the area -- a big anthropological no-no. For more information on biopiracy, click on the picture. A more recent ethical broo-ha-ha in anthropology developed with the publishing of Richard Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado.
We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology...
Napolean Chagnon has been a figure in the field of anthropology for decades. He began working with the Yanomamo people of the Amazon Basin of Brazil in 1964 and continues to be involved with research on this group. His primary research interests involve inter-tribal warfare and kinship. You will be reading about Chagnon and the Yanomami in your Culture Sketches chapter for this week. As you will read in that chapter, the health and welfare of the Yanomamo have been severely compromised. Published in November of 2000, Patrick Tierney's book, Darkness in El Dorado calls into question Chagnon's and other anthropologists role in contributing to the current challenges faced by the Yanomamo people.
Patrick Tierney is an investigative reporter who explored, as the title of his book claims, "How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon." A large portion of his manuscript focused on the work of James Neel (a geneticist), and a number of anthropologists including Napolean Chagnon and Timothy Asch. One of the more serious accusations made by Tierney was that the vaccination campaign developed by the research team of Chagnon and Neel (conducted in 1968) actually did more to worsen the measles epidemic that eventually devastated the population than it did to help prevent it. In fact, Tierney alludes to the idea that they actually started the epidemic by using vaccines too virulent for that particular population. Tierney accuses Neel of purposely starting this epidemic so he could observe the effects of an epidemic on a population and to study some of his ideas about eugenics. Chagnon was maligned by association--saying that his studies supported Neel's eugenics agenda. Tierney also accuses Chagnon of manufacturing and misinterpreting data to support his theories about human nature. Basically Chagnon was looking to show that fierceness in Yanomami society reflected reproductive success by showing that men who kill more also reproduce more and have more female partners. Tierney also claims that Chagnon did not stop at just misinterpreting his data, but that he actually provoked violent conflicts himself so he could observe and record the behavior. Tierney claims that "The Axe Fight," a well known documentary recorded by Chagnon is a result of such manipulations. If you'd like to take a look for yourself, here's an unedited unnarrated version of the film. (If you do not see the video, refresh the page and allow active X content or Click Here.)
Although the veracity of the claims made by Tierney has come into question with groups such as the American Academy of Sciences denouncing Tierney's claims as unsubstantiated, it still has had a huge impact on the field of anthropology. The American Anthropological Association, in their report on El Dorado, stated that regardless of the degree to which Tierney's critiques are accurate, the greatest value of Tierney's book and the subsequent frenzy that developed from it is "to provide opportunities for all anthropologists to consider the ethics of several dimensions of the anthropological enterprise." For a very thorough collection of information about the El Dorado controversy, visit Doug Hume's The Anthropological Niche.
When working in applied anthropology ethical concerns are compounded by the question of "who cares about this?" The issues that outsiders such as policymakers and governments are concerned with aren't always the concerns of the people involved. As anthropologists we must go in and listen to the concerns of the people and try to address those issues, not necessarily the things we, or outside agencies, see as the important issues. So, for example, it is hard to promote the use of contraception that comes at an extra cost to the people when their primary concern is using that money to put food on the table. This is the type of thing that is more likely to come about in class based societies, such as our own or any other developed country. Often the goals of the state or one or another class are in conflict with underprivileged populations. Without an advocate, these underprivileged populations generally do not have a voice. The same types of issues arise when dealing with indigenous populations and the governments of the countries where those populations reside. There are always conflicts of interest, and some would say that as anthropologists, ethically, we need to support the needs of the people we work with--which generally means supporting the indigenous group. You'll be reading about some of these issues in your Culture Sketches chapter for this unit.
The Yanomamo (Culture Sketches, Ch. 15)
Recently there has been great controversy surrounding ethnographic work among the Yanomamo, including questions about the introduction of disease, these accuracy of reported violence, and the role of social scientists who witness political and economic victimization of indigenous peoples. These issues bring to the fore many important questions about ethnographic fieldwork and the role of the anthropologist. Napoleon Chagnon has said that the Yanomamo stand as a symbol for tribal peoples everywhere. What are some of the ethical issues involved in fieldwork among peoples who have had very little previous contact with outsiders? Does this differ from ethnographic work carried out in an industrialized setting? What is the role of the anthropologist in conflict between indigenous peoples and the governments of the countries in which the reside? Should an anthropologist be an objective observer, an advocate, or neither of these? What are some of the difficulties involved in choosing a position?
Traditionally, anthropologists have done their fieldwork among small isolated groups in exotic locations that live traditional life ways. Luci Fernandes, another faculty member here at ECU, has done just that. Luci has done some of her fieldwork among the Kichwa Indians of the Ecuadorian rain forest. She worked with the Kichwa to develop environmentally friendly economic alternatives to clear cutting the rain forest. In this picture, Luci, with the help of a research assistant, is interviewing some of the villagers on their knowledge of indigenous handcrafts, the primary economic alternative to logging. She conducted her research over three summers. For more information on how handcrafts are aiding in the conservation efforts of the region, click on the picture.
My research has been done in less traditional field sites. My primary research has been conducted in Romania on reproductive health. I was trying to understand why the majority of Romanian women choose to use abortion as their primary means of birth control when alternative forms, such as the pill, condoms, and IUDs are readily available and affordable. Although there are villages within Romania which fit the more traditional picture of an anthropological fields site, in order to address my particular research question, I had to conduct my research in a town that did have ready and reliable access to contraceptives. This is not the case for the smaller villages. So, I conducted my fieldwork over the course of a year in a town called Iasi. Iasi is the third largest town in Romania with a population of approximately 400,000. Far from being isolated, Iasi is a cultural center of Romania, an industrialized country. Iasi is very much an active large town.
Although not quite as traditional as many field sites, at least Iasi is a in a far off, foreign country. That, however, is no longer necessarily true of many anthropological field sites. Today, much anthropological research is occurring in our own back yards. Along with my collaborators Vanessa Fuller and James Boster, I have also conducted research on America's abortion debate. We were interested in the reasoning people use to support their positions as either pro-choice or pro-life. This picture was taken outside a family planning clinic in Boston, but the actual field site for this research is much more amorphous. For this research we interviewed activists throughout the Northeast as well as students in both Connecticut and North Carolina. Also, unlike the Romanian research that was intensive research that took place over the course of a year, this research started a number of years ago and is ongoing at sporadic intervals. Not so exotic, not so far a field, not so localized, but fieldwork none the less.
Napolean Chagnon has been a figure in the field of anthropology for decades. He began working with the Yanomamo people of the Amazon Basin of Brazil in 1964 and continues to be involved with research on this group. His primary research interests involve inter-tribal warfare and kinship. You will be reading about Chagnon and the Yanomami in your Culture Sketches chapter for this week. As you will read in that chapter, the health and welfare of the Yanomamo have been severely compromised. Published in November of 2000, Patrick Tierney's book, Darkness in El Dorado calls into question Chagnon's and other anthropologists role in contributing to the current challenges faced by the Yanomamo people.
Patrick Tierney is an investigative reporter who explored, as the title of his book claims, "How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon." A large portion of his manuscript focused on the work of James Neel (a geneticist), and a number of anthropologists including Napolean Chagnon and Timothy Asch. One of the more serious accusations made by Tierney was that the vaccination campaign developed by the research team of Chagnon and Neel (conducted in 1968) actually did more to worsen the measles epidemic that eventually devastated the population than it did to help prevent it. In fact, Tierney alludes to the idea that they actually started the epidemic by using vaccines too virulent for that particular population. Tierney accuses Neel of purposely starting this epidemic so he could observe the effects of an epidemic on a population and to study some of his ideas about eugenics. Chagnon was maligned by association--saying that his studies supported Neel's eugenics agenda. Tierney also accuses Chagnon of manufacturing and misinterpreting data to support his theories about human nature. Basically Chagnon was looking to show that fierceness in Yanomami society reflected reproductive success by showing that men who kill more also reproduce more and have more female partners. Tierney also claims that Chagnon did not stop at just misinterpreting his data, but that he actually provoked violent conflicts himself so he could observe and record the behavior. Tierney claims that "The Axe Fight," a well known documentary recorded by Chagnon is a result of such manipulations. If you'd like to take a look for yourself, here's an unedited unnarrated version of the film. (If you do not see the video, refresh the page and allow active X content or 