Lecture 2 ARM Flashcards
(18 cards)
Seeing - Amitav Ghosh
Seeing is extremely important in fieldwork
- how to watch interactions with people
- how to listen to conversations
- how to look for hidden patterns
What is ethnography?
1) Both a process and the product
a. usually written but also film,
artwork
2) Encompass long, embedded research periods
3) Study of the everyday
4) Use of a variety of data sources
5)Micro-scale
6) Looking for interpretation and meanings
Meaning - Clifford Geertz
Analogy of man as a meaning-making creature, as a spider in a web of meaning that he has woven himself in.
Go beyond description to interpret the subjective meanings
Three Key ethnographic methods
- Participant observations
- Writing and making fieldnotes
- Interviews and conversations
Positivism
- Methodological model for social science research, comes from physical sciences where goal is universal or statistical laws - labs, experiments, controlled experiments and conditions
- Observation - as a foundation of science - anthropology does this too
- Testing theories and hypothesis
- Assumption that this method is “theory-neutral” - “objective”
Still influences anthropological methods
Naturalism (in art)
- Idea that we should study the social environment in situ - in the nature, not a lab
- not influencing your object in research, researcher is marginal - gather absolute truth from that
- took human agency seriously
Example of Naturalism
Chicago school of sociology - 1940s /50s
- focused on migrant / marginalized communities
- Italian / American gangs
Treated as an “ecosystem” - talked about in a culturally essentialised way, as if isolated to the outer world
Realism
- assumes direct relationship between researcher and observed
- phenomena exists and the researcher does not influence the things it observes (similar naturalism)
- descrpiption and represetnation - idea that we can speak for the people we study (put reseracher in priviliged position)
- ethnographer disappear from text - voice is neutral
Positivism, Naturalism and Realism common ground
- Dualistic - researcher and researched. clear separation
- Goal of science is discovery and analysis (colonial, imperialist logic)
- Hierarchy of knowledge production - researcher has a higher position
The world as a map (Gupta and Ferguson)
An example of how to see the world in a objectified, seeing, classified ways - seen as separate from each other through national borders
Problem:
- not accurate - reifies cultural differences, overlooks interconnection and how frictions occur through global connections
- assumes places as there, isolated, not as historically embedded.
- hierarchy embedded in notion of map - core and periphery
Billiard ball model of society
EricWolf
Critiquing naturalist community studies due to it seeing world as a set of billiard ball
Bounded, closed, homogenous
Change hits only when external change hits an isolated society - no internal change
There is no such thing as a bounded community!
Challenge to views - Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy)
- Intercultural, multilingual region in atlantic ocean where trade occurred cross-continent
-blackness not only tied to Africa, but emerged in transnational space - black can be related to domination, slavery etc, but also positive things like notions for social equality, connections, fight for democracy etc
Critique of diaspora (Paul Gilroy)
Identity-linked idea that there was an original, imagined homeland, sense of nostalgia
Problem - essentializes where people are from, seeming people to “belong” in only one place - how can you talk about a community when people are dispersed over multiple places. discourse becomes problematic, as a way to exclude people from the place they come from - eg antisemittism in Europe, jews do not belong here.
Global histories of sugar (Sidney Mintz)
Following commodity of sugar, people from different countries connected to one commodity
- also coffee, tea, rubber
Constructionism
Knowledge in reality is socially and historically constructed.
Not a given - closer to anthropological thinking today.
Ethnographers construct stories today by writing things into existence
Examples:
death
childhood
youth
mental illness
menopause
race
selfhood
Malinowski, Trobriands and Gender
Kula trade systems only done by men - increased value as it passed on
Women completely disregarded until a woman ethnographer pulls up and could access the women’s side of it - included too, through textiles. Part of the artist stayed in the textile when these were traded. (inalienability)
All knowledge is mediated
We have our biases, which can make us blind to certain aspects of knowledge gathering
Seeing
Seeing is constructed by our backgrounds. Eg “nude” and “nakedness” are not the same
