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ANTH 101 Ethnography Notes
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- Queens College
This is a comprehensive and detailed note on ethnography for Anth 101. *For you!!
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Enthography (participant-observation field work) The detailed study of the life, actions, of a group of people done over a long period of time, The
anthropologists observes, takes field notes and participates in the daily life of that group.
Main methodology anthropologists used through which data is collected
Armchair anthropologists - based their accounts on second-hand SUBJECTIVE sources of
ppl who went off to these second-hand cultures. E.g christian missionaries, western colonial
officials. Produced written accounts of their travels. Anthropologists collected these reports.
o Relied on people who were not anthropologists
o Referred to the people as primitive people/cultures.
o Automatically assumed the cultural superiority of western culture
o Earliest writings were ethnocentric
o Edward Tylor
1896 - first person to be appointed as a anthropologist professor
Used secondary source material
Book published called ‘primitive culture’
Examined cultural survival - cultural traits that lost their original function in
society but continued to exist. He believed he could reconstruct human
evolution.
Known for his definition of culture “Culture… complex whole”
o James Frazer
Published ‘the golden bough’
Comparative analysis of the origins, myths and religious practices of the
primitive ppl in non-western societies
Concluded that all human societies go through a 3 stage process of cultural
evolution (Magic to Religion to Science) beginning with an early magical stage
that advanced to a more religious stage and ended with a final scientific stage.
He assumed that a final scientific stage would completely replace an earlier
religious stage in human evolution (common belief that human society was
destined to evolve from religion to science)
o Lewis Henry Morgan
Published ‘ancient society’
Proposed a 3-stage model of human evolution, beginning in a stage of savagery
to barbarism and finally to civilization =.
He talked to these ‘primitive people’
o These guys shared a grand theory of human evolution from a less advanced to more
advanced stage
o Based on unsystematic data, highly misinformed by ethnocentric and Eurocentric ideas
o Grand synthesizers
Armchair Anthropologists to Functionalism
2 anthropologists that helped overturn this and invent ethnographic fieldwork
Both cultural outsiders
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