Anthropology is the study of humanity. The hallmark of cultural anthropology as a social science is the ethnography. The ethnography is qualitative description of a culture, usually a specific aspect of a culture, based on fieldwork. Fieldwork consists of going into a culture and simply observing. This may include, but is not limited to conversations, interviews and participation in daily life in the subject culture.

The fact that anthropologists focus on qualitative information is what sets the field apart significantly from other social sciences such as sociology and psychology, both which try to focus on quantitative information (such as surveys, statistics and experiments).

One of my own professors in college, who was well respected and had done considerable research among the Trobriand Islanders, steadfastly stated that Cultural Anthropology is the study of small scale cultures by individuals in large scale industrial cultures. He was often mocked by the students for having such a narrow description. Historically, whether explicitly stated or not, this has been the case, though it is no longer. The common thread between cultural anthropologists of the past to current ones is simply the practiced of compiling information into an ethnography.

It is because the ethnography is so unique and fundamental to anthropology that it is possible to examine the general trends of anthropology by looking at the trends in ethnography.

Before anthropology was regarded as much of science, it was seen largely as a pastime for wealthy men of colonizing cultures. The first anthropologists are often referred to as "armchair anthropologists", as their study never really prompted them to leave their living rooms. They had a habit of reading other colonist memoirs of a culture and would then extrapolate, often to simply validate being a colonist.

However it did not take too long before westerners became more serious about the study of cultures. In the 19^th, as social sciences such as sociology and psychology developed into legitimate fields of research, anthropologists began to leave their parlors and directly study different cultures.

Some of the earliest anthropologists who looked at the subject cultures with respect, and not with just a voyeuristic intent, were E.E. Evans Pritchard and Franz Boas. Boas, in the late 1800s, started to live among the Native Americans of the Pacific coast. He often said that he found no information that made him believe that the lifestyles of the civilized were the least bit superior to that of the "primitive".

Though a British colonist at the time, E.E. Evans Pritchard had stated that anthropologist needed to, "get off the porch". He was one of the first to go and live in the same housing, eat the same food, etc as the people he was researching. His first work was among the Azande of the upper Nile. It was there he wrote that, "people cannot reason outside their own idiom". Such a belief is considered a given now for anthropologists, as well as most people in general, but was quite a new notion back then. These individuals took on the task of describing a culture thoroughly and without biases. The goal of the early ethnography was to be a scientific and meticulous collection of facts.

Starting in the 1950s and continuing until today the trend of ethnographies shifted toward the confessional and reflexive. Anthropologist of this era began to realize they themselves were not above cultural conditioning and as such, even with out trying, they would be giving a biased view of the subject culture because the information would invariably be filtered through their own cultural perspective. If anthropologists previous to this had sought to deliver information without biased, anthropologist in this era started to try to give the reader enough information about them to ensure the reader would have the opportunity to dissect where the cultural biases were. They can make for some interesting reads because they are similar to informational novels. Unfortunately, for every well done one their seems to be a piece that feels more like navel-gazing-self-indulgence -- where we hear more about the author than the culture.

Not only has the tone of ethnography changed throughout the years, but the subject culture has changed as well. Though not stated explicitly, historically anthropologists have been Westerners from industrialist societies studying either indigenous Westerners or Non-Westerners. This is the case less and less often though. A significant trend is now for anthropologist to study their own culture. One reason for this is the rise of individuals from developing nations getting higher degrees in anthropology and choosing to study the cultures who have traditionally been studied. The second reason is the lack of funding and grants that graduate students are able to receive. There are more people vying for grants and fewer people giving them out, and with rising college costs, fewer people can afford to fund their own ethnographic aspirations half way around the world. Phillippe Bourgois who wrote In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, was a graduate student who found his subject culture in East Harlem. The reason he chose it? He lived there due to the financial constraints of being a student and having a young family.

Cultural anthropology has changed in certain respects over the last 150 years. There was a graduate student I knew in college who was writing his thesis on how the sexual norms of Americans have changed due to the influence on the internet I'm fairly sure even 50 years ago an individual taking on such a subject would have been laughed at, or ridiculed, as this individual often was by the previously mentioned professor.

« Previous Next »