ANTHROPOLOGICAL METHODS

Participant Observation

Notes and Queries on Anthropology

Haddon – Torres Straits expeditions (1888-9 and 1898)

The Notes and Queries methodology

1. Imposed ethno-centric assumptions and blinded researchers to contrary evidence

2. Represented social reality as “static” - neglected ambiguity, contradiction and change

3. Failed to recognize the relationship between attitudes/norms and behaviour

Bronislaw MalinowskiThe ‘inventor’ of the concept of participant-

observation’

Participant observation produces ethnography

But there are different ways of ‘doing’ PO  

Malinowski privileged observationGeertz privileged participation

PO does not create conflict between qualitative and quantitative methods

– but establishes a productive context for applying them appropriately

Participation

• ‘the ethnographers’ workshop is their own self and the relations that they have managed to establish between this self and some members of a society’

Descola 2005

Participation and role management

• Does getting ‘the native’s point of view’ mean ‘going native’?

• Rabinow – one is always an outsider and an observer

• Katy Gardner – learning another culture involves bodily transformation

• The importance of REFLEXIVITY

Observation

• ‘in a science where the observer and the observed share common properties, description is never simple’ (Descola 2005)

• No neutrality • Not possible to provide a faithful copy of observed

reality• Requires reflexivity

Field notes

To explain deductively• 1. isolate a certain class of reputedly recurring

phenomena;

• 2. making hypotheses as to the relations existing between these phenomena; and

• 3. elaborating a model of these relations in order to study their formal properties.

• According to markers the biggest failing of Masters dissertations is the lack of connection between

(i) The data collected, (ii) its theoretical significance and(iii) Analysis (its relation to current debates in

the literature)

Advice on fieldwork• Westermarck – ‘don’t converse with an

informant for more than twenty minutes because if you aren’t bored by that time he will be’

• Seligman – ‘take 10 grams of quinine a night and keep off women’

• Malinowski – ‘don’t be a bloody fool’

Ba-Li Ethnographic Experiment Instructions

Your tasks are to:• 1. Learn your ‘new culture’ as a BA or a LI.

Obviously time does not permit us to learn a real culture, therefore we have created two caricatured cultures that we hope will permit you to gain some experience of what it feels like to try and understand a different culture.

• 2. Make a short field trip to the other ‘culture’.We will simultaneously exchange small groups of ‘researchers’ to do fieldwork among the other ‘culture’.

• When you are not researching on a field trip you will be BA-ing or LI-ing, depending on your culture.

• Everyone will have the opportunity of visiting the other culture and writing fieldnotes.

• Students decide when and how to take fieldnotes.

Afterwards your tasks are to:

• 3. Organise and write up your field-notes in two parts:

• 3.1 Write a report of your fieldwork experience and the culture you studied (maximum 300 words).You might try and answer such questions as: – What matters most in the society visited?– How is it exhibited?– How is the society organised?

• 3.2 Write 150 words (max) on ‘what have you learned about doing ethnography?’

• 4. Discuss.

What did you learn from this activity?What do you think are the anthropological reasons for doing this exercise?

MEET IN THE DARYL FORD SEMINAR ROOM, 14 TAVITON

STREET

@ 14:00 hours

(Do not go to the class rooms you will normally attend)

Duration

• When is enough enough?

• When do you know that you know?