unit 4

unit 4

1. rapport

   • building trust. relationships and respect.
   • more valuable and clear results because of

2. reflexive

   • awareness of the impact you may be having
   • put aside your own bias
   • your interpretation will be coloured by your own values.
   • reflection on your own assumptions

3. Verstehn

   • objective of participant obs
   • essentially translates into 'empathy'

4. positivism

   • scientific approach within anthropology
   • focused on facts, evidence, objectivity
   • pioneered by Malinowski and Boas

5. objectivity

   • avoiding bias and pre-conceptions
   • covering full extent of information from a culture
   • all aspects studied
   • trobriand islanders- full immersion in culture
   • associated with positivist methods

6. gate keepers

   • someone who grants you access to a community and has high authority.
   • takes you into consideration and other factors.
   • they have their own reasons for granting you access

7. personal feelings

   • the experience of psychological trauma when doing fieldwork with an unknown or new culture.
   • it involves paranoia, anxiety, nausea, homesickness
   • the next stage is culture shock- cant cope with the change of culture.
     • Napoleon Chagnon: Yanomami
       • privacy
       • agressive demands of him- nothing more than a source of desirable items
       • lonely- no family = depression
       • diet
       • getting in and staying in

8. language, proficiency, cost, finding and time

   • antro relies on funding from government, unis, cooperations and associations
   • people giving funding may affect the results
     • inusufficient finding may lead to poor quality research
   • language barrier- use of an interpreter may mean that anthro doesnt get the cultural context of language, cant always convey emotion.

9. personal characteristics

   • how ones ethnicity, gender, social class etc may help/ hinder.
   • may act as a barrier when trying to gain access

10. field roles playing it native

    • researchers aim to be an 'acceptable incompetent'
    • maintaining your naiveete is harderto do in own culture
    • but naive novice is not always the best to play

11. interpretavists/ post modernist

    • qualative data
    • participants own words
    • objective reality debate
    • more sensitive to indiviual factors

12. ethics

    • Deception
      • Nancy Shaper hughes
    • Right to withdraw
      • Bourgois: drugs
        • high as their mental state informed consent.
    • Informed consent
    • Privacy
    • Saftey

13. GETTING IN AND STAYING IN

    • funding, cost and time
      • spending enough time interacting to get the needed data
        • spend enough time both building rapport and observing or participating for a long enough period
    • Language preparation and competence
      • lack of fluency in the local language can constrain the effectiveness of data
        • linguistic interpreter can hinder emotional value
    • field roles
      • 'acceptable incompetent'- maintaining a marginal position by providing access to participant perspectives whilst minimalising the dangers of over-rapport.
      • maintaining Naivete
        • develop your skill at being a novice- someone who genuinely wants to learn a new culture
        • hard to do in your own culture
        • Micheal Agar- heroine addicts in New York
    • building trust
      • 'be themsleves' in front of you
        • dont necessarily have to be viewed as a complete insider- inspire enough trust to enable participants to act as they would if researcher werent there.
      • depending on amount and natre of research funding an anthropologist may be an important economic resource
        • paying wages to interpreter and transport- provide needed transport for members of the community.
        • being amusing
        • source of information about the outside world
    • Gatekeepers
      • Sabine Luning
        • depend on this person to 'guide' the researcher to new contacts. strategic position.
          • gatekeepers become partners in conversations that may lead to shift in defining the object of research
        • Strathern
          • the object of research is always formulated in 'company'
          • we should study the social process of setting up and carrying out research.- the beginning starts before the beginning.
        • mining gatekeepers
    • personal feelings and attitudes
      • what circumstances should and anthropologist if ever, attempt to intervene and try to impose his or her cultural standards on the members of another society
    • culture shock
      • Napoelen Chagnon
      • language
      • psychological trauma
      • alien architecture
      • disorientation
      • highly traumatic -therefore most anthropologists view feild work as a right of passage