15 Chapter 15: Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Discuss what is unique about ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology.
• Identify historical approaches to conducting ethnographic fieldwork.
• Explain contemporary approaches to ethnographic fieldwork techniques and perspectives.
• Discuss some of the ethical considerations in doing anthropological fieldwork.

When we began this anthropological journey, we learned that various cultures around the globe have similarities and differences that cultural anthropologists seek to better understand. They suspend their own sense of what is “normal” and conduct participant-observation fieldwork: a method that involves living with, observing, and learning from the people that one studies. The central way that this is done is through ethnography, interviewing informants and using a variety of mostly qualitative techniques. Qualitative research in anthropology aims to comprehensively describe human behavior and the contexts in which it occurs, while quantitative research seeks patterns in numerical data that can explain aspects of human behavior.

What is Ethnography?

The word ethnography can be sometimes confusing when used in anthropological contexts. This is because someone can be an ethnographer, writing an ethnography, after they have conducted ethnographic fieldwork. In cultural anthropology, our fieldwork is referred to as ethnography, which is both the active process of conducting fieldwork and also the end result of cultural anthropological research. The word ethnography itself comes from two Greek words: “Ethnos”, meaning people & “Graphein”, meaning writing. Ethnographers write about what they have learned from the people that they have been working with often use a research method known as participant-observation. Participant Observation is a technique of field research used in anthropology by which an anthropologist studies the life of a group by sharing in its activities. Once fieldwork is completed, the ethnographic information can be shared in a number of ways and take many different forms. Articles, journals, podcasts, ethnographic films and documentaries are just a few of the many forms that ethnographic information can be conveyed. A very common form is an ethnographic book written by the ethnographer which provides descriptive accounts of culture that weave detailed observations with anthropological theory.

What is Ethnology?

Sometimes research questions arise which cannot be answered by examining a single culture or peoples. When a cultural anthropologist studies more than one culture then they are said to be conducting ethnology, which is the comparative study of two or more cultures. Ethnology often utilizes the data taken from ethnographic research and applies it to a single cross cultural topic, often comparing and contrasting various cultures. Anthropologists who focus on one culture are called ethnographers while those who focus on several cultures are called ethnologists.

Ethnology can be used to identify and attempt to explain cross cultural variation in a number of topics or cultural elements such as: marriage, religion, subsistence practices, political organization, and parenting, just to name a few. An example of this can be seen in Munroe et. al. (1983) when the amount of time spent performing universal activities such as food preparation, child rearing and hygiene are compared between the Canchinos (a Quechua-speaking people in Peru), the Kikuyu (a Bantu-speaking people in Kenya), the Logoli (also a Bantu-speaking people in Kenya) and suburban upper-middle class Americans who lived in Los Angeles County.

What is the “field”?

In contrast to work in a laboratory environment, fieldwork is done in real-world settings. Originally cultural anthropologists conducted fieldwork within small-scale, relatively isolated cultural groups. Typically, those groups had somewhat simple agrarian or foraging economies and limited access to larger, more industrialized societies (more on these differences in chapter 16). Early cultural anthropologists (ethnographers) sought to understand the entirety of a particular culture (e.g. holism). They spent months to years living in the community, and in that time, they documented in great detail every dimension of people’s lives, including their language, subsistence strategies, political systems, formation of families and marriages, and religious beliefs. This was important because it helped researchers appreciate the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social life. The key to the success of this ethnographic approach was not only to spend considerable time observing people in their home settings engaged in day-to-day activities but also to participate in those activities. It was hoped that this firsthand participation helped build an emic, or insiders, perspective of the culture, something that had been missing in early 20^th century social-science research.

Over the years, the goals and focus of anthropological research have changed and cultural anthropologists now study people wherever they are and however they interact with others. Think of the many ways you ordinarily interact with your friends, family, professors, and boss. Is it all face-to-face communication or do you sometimes use text messages to chat with your friends? Do you also sometimes email your professor to ask for clarification on an assignment and then call your boss to discuss your schedule? Do you share funny videos with others on TikTok and then later have a class over Zoom or use Facetime to call a relative? These new technological “sites” of human interaction are fascinating to many ethnographers and have expanded the definition and locations of fieldwork. Issues that affect cultural anthropologists in the field today can be heard on the AnthoPod episode on conducting fieldwork in the United States (Figure: 1).

 

Figure 1: Conducting Fieldwork in the United States, By Marie Melody Vidal

 

Field sites are no longer exclusively located in far-flung, isolated, non-industrialized societies. Increasingly research is conducted in urban environments around the globe and digitally online. In addition to the type of field site changing, the numbers of sites able to be explored in an ethnography have also expanded. If an anthropologist studies migration, diasporas, and people in motion, they must now conduct research in multiple locations, this is known as multi-sited ethnography.

An Overview of Methodologies

After narrowing down their research interests by selecting a research question or series of questions, the ethnographer heading out into the field will rely a great deal on qualitative research methods such as: participant observation, interviews, gathering life-histories, studying genealogy/kinship, working with, photographing, and filming informants. In addition to these qualitative methods, increasingly, cultural anthropologists sometimes use quantitative research methods to complement their qualitative approaches. Quantitative patterns can be gleaned from statistical analyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions.

Anthropological nutritional analysis is an area of research that commonly relies on collecting quantitative data. Nutritional anthropologists explore how factors such as culture, the environment, and economic and political systems interplay to impact human health and nutrition. They may count the calories people consume and expend, document patterns of food consumption, measure body weight and body mass, and test for the presence of parasite infections or nutritional deficiencies. In her ethnography Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa (2013), Katherine Dettwyler described how she conducted nutritional research in Mali, which involved weighing, measuring, and testing her research subjects to collect a variety of quantitative data to help her understand the causes and consequences of child malnutrition.

Observation and Participant Observation

Of the various techniques and tools used to conduct ethnographic research, observation in general and participant observation are among the most important. Ethnographers are trained to pay attention to everything happening around them when in the field—from routine daily activities such as cooking dinner to major events such as an annual religious celebration. They observe how people interact with each other, how the environment affects people, and how people affect the environment. These experiences are rigorously documented in their field notes and personal journals.

As previously mentioned, participant observation involves ethnographers observing while they participate in activities with their informants. This technique is important because it allows the researcher to better understand why people do what they do from an emic perspective. Famously, Malinowski (1922: 25) noted that participant observation is an important tool by which “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” To conduct participant observation, ethnographers must live with or spend considerable time with their informants to establish a strong rapport with them. Rapport is a sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other and agreeable to working together.

 

Conversations and Interviews

Another primary technique for gathering ethnographic data is simply talking with people and interviewing them. This can be a casual, unstructured interview or conversation about ordinary topics or it can be a semi-structured interview where questions are prepared ahead of time but also left open going in new and unexpected directions. An ethnographer may even conduct formal interviews where all questions are prepared in advance and strictly adhered to. As we have seen, an important element for successful fieldwork is rapport. Sometimes, engaging in conversation with informants is part of establishing that rapport. Ethnographers frequently use multiple forms of conversation and interviewing for a single research project based on their particular needs. They can record these conversations and interviews with an audio recording device or simply engage in the conversation and then later write down everything they recall about it. Conversations and interviews are an essential part of most ethnographic research designs because spoken communication is central to humans’ experiences.

Gathering Life Histories

Collecting a personal narrative of someone’s life, their life history, is a valuable ethnographic technique and is often combined with other techniques. Life histories provide the context in which culture is experienced and created by individuals and describe how individuals have reacted, responded, and contributed to changes that occurred during their lives. They also help anthropologists be more aware of what makes life meaningful to an individual and to focus on the particulars of individual lives, on the tenor of their experiences and the patterns that are important to them. Researchers often include life histories in their ethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.

The Genealogical (kinship) Method

The genealogical (kinship) method has a long tradition in ethnography. Developed in the early years of anthropological research to document the family systems of tribal groups, it is still used today to discover connections of kinship, descent, marriage, and the overall social system. Because kinship and genealogy are so important in many nonindustrial societies, the technique is used to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society and to trace social relationships more broadly in communities.

Key Informants

Within any culture or microculture, there are always particular individuals, the key informants who are more knowledgeable about the culture than others and who may have more-detailed or privileged knowledge. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic research in the field often seek out such cultural specialists to gain a greater understanding of certain issues and to answer questions they otherwise could not answer. When an anthropologist establishes a rapport with these individuals and begins to rely more on them for information than on others, the cultural specialists are referred to as key informants or key cultural consultants.

Key informants can be exceptional assets in the field, allowing the ethnographer to uncover the meanings of behaviors and practices the researcher cannot otherwise understand. Key informants can also help researchers by directly observing others and reporting those observations to the researchers, especially in situations in which the researcher is not allowed to be present or when the researcher’s presence could alter the participants’ behavior. In addition, ethnographers can check information they obtained from other informants, contextualize it, and review it for accuracy. Having a key informant in the field is like having a research ally. The relationship can grow and become enormously fruitful.

A famous example of the central role that key informants can play in an ethnographer’s research is a man named Doc in William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943). In the late 1930s, Whyte studied social relations between street gangs and “corner boys” in a Boston urban slum inhabited by first- and second-generation Italian immigrants. A social worker introduced Whyte to Doc and the two hit it off. Doc proved instrumental to the success of Whyte’s research. He introduced Whyte to his family and social group and vouched for him in the tight-knit community, providing access that Whyte could not have gained otherwise.

Problem-Oriented Research

In the early years, ethnographers were interested in exploring the entirety (or whole) of a culture. Taking an inductive approach, they generally attempted to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. Instead, the goal was to explore the people, their culture, and their homelands and compare that to what had previously been written about them. The focus of the study was allowed to emerge gradually during their time in the field. Often, this approach to ethnography resulted in rather lengthy, general ethnographic descriptions. Today, anthropologists are increasingly taking a more deductive approach to ethnographic research. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. Rather than arriving at the field site with only general ideas about the goals of the study, they tend to select a particular problem before arriving and then let that problem guide their research.

Anthropological Theory

In addition to coming into their fieldwork with a distinct research question in mind the anthropologist will also be influenced by and use certain theoretical perspectives. But what is a theory? “Theories are analytical tools for understanding, explaining, and making predictions about a given subject matter” (Regna 2013). Theories help to direct our thinking and provide a common framework from which people can work. Oftentimes through the process of using a theoretical framework, we discover that it lacks explanatory abilities. When that happens, it is modified or even abandoned.

There are a number of theoretical approaches used in cultural anthropology. Not all theories once popular in anthropology are used any more. Social evolutionism, for example, was abandoned early on in cultural anthropology. Others, like Culture and Personality, Cultural Ecology, and Cultural Materialism have become jumping off points for more modern theoretical perspectives.

Early Armchair Anthropology

Before ethnography was a fully developed research method, anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used techniques that were much less reliable to gather data about people throughout the world. From the comfort of their homes and library armchairs, early scholars collected others’ travel accounts and used them to come to conclusions about far-flung cultures and peoples. The reports typically came from missionaries, colonists, adventurers, and business travelers and were often incomplete, inaccurate, and/or misleading, exaggerated or omitted important information, and romanticized the culture.

Early scholars such as Wilhelm Schmidt and E. B. Tylor sifted through artifacts and stories brought back by travelers or missionaries and selected the ones that best fit their frequently pre-conceived ideas about the peoples involved. By relying on this flawed data, they often drew inaccurate or even racist conclusions. They had no way of knowing how accurate the information was and no way to understand the full context in which it was gathered.

The work of James Frazer (1854–1941) provides a good example of the problems associated with such anthropological endeavors. Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist who was interested in myths and religions around the world. He read historical documents and religious texts found in libraries and book collections. He also sent questionnaires to missionaries and colonists in various parts of the world asking them about the people with whom they were in contact. He then used the information to draw sweeping conclusions about human belief systems. His most famous book, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion (2015) has been published and republished in multiple versions and editions since it’s first printing in 1890. In it he described similarities and differences in magical and religious practices around the world and concluded that human beliefs progressed through three stages: from primitive magic to religion and from religion to science. This theory implied that some people were less evolved and more primitive than others. Of course, contemporary anthropologists do not view any people as less evolved than another. Instead, anthropologists today seek to uncover the historical, political, and cultural reasons behind peoples’ behaviors rather than assuming that one culture or society is more advanced than another.

The main problem with Frazer’s conclusion can be traced back to the fact that he did not do any research himself and none of the information he relied on was collected by an anthropologist. He never spent time with the people he was researching. He never observed the religious ceremonies he wrote about and certainly never participated in them. Had he done so, he might have been able to appreciate that all human groups at the time (and now) were equally pragmatic, thoughtful, intelligent, logical, and “evolved.” He might also have appreciated the fact that how and why the information is gathered affects the quality of the information. For instance, if a colonial administrator offered to pay people for their stories, some of the storytellers might have exaggerated or even made-up stories for financial gain. If a Christian missionary asked recently converted parishioners to describe their religious practices, they likely would have omitted non-Christian practices and beliefs to avoid disapproval and maintain their positions in the church. A male traveler who attempted to document rite-of-passage traditions in a culture that prohibited men from asking such questions of women would generate data that could erroneously suggest that women did not participate in such activities. All of these examples illustrate the pitfalls of armchair anthropology.

Off the Veranda

Fortunately, the reign of armchair anthropology was brief. Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists trained in the natural sciences began to reimagine what a science of humanity should look like and how social scientists ought to go about studying cultural groups. Some of those anthropologists insisted that one should at least spend significant time actually observing and talking to the people studied. Early ethnographers such as Franz Boas and Alfred Cort Haddon typically traveled to the remote locations where the people in question lived and spent a few weeks to a few months there. They sought out a local Western host who was familiar with the people and the area (such as a colonial official, missionary, or businessman) and found accommodations through them. Although they did at times venture into the community without a guide, they generally did not spend significant time with the local people. Thus, their observations were primarily conducted from the relative comfort and safety of a porch—from their verandas.

Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1884–1942) pioneering method of participant observation fundamentally changed the relationship between ethnographers and the people under study (Figure 2). In 1914, he traveled to the Trobriand Islands and ended up spending nearly four years conducting fieldwork among the people there. In the process, he developed a rigorous set of ethnographic techniques he viewed as best-suited to gathering accurate and comprehensive ethnographic data. One of the hallmarks of his method was that it required the researcher to get off the veranda to interact with and even live among the natives. In a well-known book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski described his research techniques and the role they played in his analysis of the Kula ceremony, an exchange of armbands and necklaces among members of the social elite. He concluded that the ceremonies were at the center of Trobriand life and represented the culmination of an elaborate multi-year venture called the Kula Ring that involved dangerous expeditions and careful planning. Ultimately, the key to his discovering the importance of the ceremony was that he not only observed the Kula Ring but also participated in it. This technique of participant observation is central to anthropological research today. Malinowski did more than just observe people from afar; he actively inter-acted with them and participated in their daily activities. And unlike early anthropologists who worked through translators, Malinowski learned the native language, which allowed him to immerse himself in the culture. He carefully documented all of his observations and thoughts. Malinowski’s techniques are now central components of ethnographic fieldwork.

 

Salvage Ethnography

Despite Malinowski’s tremendous contributions to ethnography and anthropology generally, he was nevertheless a man of his time. A common view in the first half of the twentieth century was that many “primitive” cultures were quickly disappearing, and features of those cultures needed to be recorded (salvaged) before they were lost. Anthropologists such as Malinowski, Franz Boas, and many of their students sought to document, photograph, and otherwise preserve cultural traditions in “dying” cultures in groups such as Native Americans and other traditional societies experiencing rapid change due to modernization, dislocation, and contact with outside groups. They also collected cultural artifacts, removing property from the communities and placing it in museums and private collections.

Others who were not formally trained in the sciences or in anthropology also participated in salvage activities. For instance, in his “documentary” film Nanook of the North(1922) (Figure 3), Robert Flaherty filmed the life of an Inuit man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. In an effort to preserve on film what many believed was a traditional way of life soon to be lost, Flaherty took considerable artistic license to represent the culture as he imagined it was in the past, including staging certain scenes and asking the Inuit men to use spears instead of rifles to make the film seem more “authentic.”

Today, anthropologists recognize that human cultures constantly change as people respond to social, political, economic, and other external and internal influences—that there is no moment when a culture is more authentic or more primitive. They acknowledge that culture is fluid and cannot be treated as isolated in time and space. Just as we should not portray people as primitive vestiges of an earlier stage of human development, we also should not romanticize a culture or idealize another’s suffering as more authentic or natural.

Cultural Relativism and Objectivity

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor view other cultural ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

Cultural relativism is an important methodological consideration when conducting research. In the field, anthropologists must temporarily suspend their own value, moral, and esthetic judgments and seek to understand and respect the values, morals, and esthetics of the other culture on their terms. This can be a challenging task, particularly when a culture is significantly different from the one in which they were raised. Despite the importance of cultural relativism, it is not always possible and at times is inappropriate to maintain complete objectivity in the field. Researchers may encounter cultural practices that are an affront to strongly held moral values or that violate the human rights of a segment of a population. In other cases, they may be conducting research in part to advocate for the rights of a marginalized group.

Take, for example, the practice of female genital cutting (FGC), also known as female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that is common in various regions of the world, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Such practices involving modification of female genitals for non-medical and cultural reasons range from clitoridectomy (partial or full removal of the clitoris) to infibulation, which involves removal of the clitoris and the inner and outer labia and suturing to narrow the vaginal opening, leaving only a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid Anthropologists working in regions where such practices are common often understandably have a strong negative opinion, viewing the practice as unnecessary medically and posing a risk of serious infection, infertility, and complications from childbirth. They may also be opposed to it because they feel that it violates the right of women to experience sexual pleasure, something they likely view as a fundamental human right. Should the anthropologist intervene to prevent girls and women from being subjected to this practice?

Anthropologist Janice Boddy (2007) studied FGC/FGM in rural northern Sudan and sought to explain it from a culturally relativistic perspective. She found that the practice persists, in part, because it is believed to preserve a woman’s chastity and curb her sexual desire, making her less likely to have affairs once she is married. Boddy’s research showed how the practice makes sense in the context of a culture in which a woman’s sexual conduct is a symbol of her family’s honor, which is important culturally. Boddy’s relativistic explanation helps make the practice comprehensible and allows cultural outsiders to understand how it is internally culturally coherent. But the question remains. Once anthropologists understand why people practice FGC/FGM, should they accept it? Because they uncover the cultural meaning of a practice, must they maintain a neutral stance or should they fight a practice viewed as an injustice? How does an anthropologist know what is right? Unfortunately, answers to these questions are rarely simple, and anthropologists as a group do not always agree on an appropriate professional stance and responsibility.

Field Notes

Field notes are indispensable when conducting ethnographic research. Although making such notes is time-consuming, they form the primary record of one’s observations. Generally speaking, ethnographers write two kinds of notes: field notes and personal reflections. Field notes are detailed descriptions of everything the ethnographer observes and experiences. They include specific details about what happened at the field site, the ethnographer’s sensory impressions, and specific words and phrases used by the people observed. They also frequently include the content of conversations the ethnographer had and things the ethnographer overheard others say. Ethnographers also sometimes include their personal reflections on the experience of writing field notes. Often, brief notes are jotted down in a notebook while the anthropologist is observing and participating in activities. Later, they expand on those quick notes to make more formal field notes, which may be organized and typed into a report. It is common for ethnographers to spend several hours a day writing and organizing field notes.

Ethnographers often also keep a personal journal or diary that may include information about their emotions and personal experiences while conducting research. These personal reflections can be as important as the field notes. Ethnography is not an objective science. Everything researchers do and experience in the field is filtered through their personal life experiences. Two ethnographers may experience a situation in the field in different ways and understand the experience differently. For this reason, it is important for researchers to be aware of their reactions to situations and be mindful of how their life experiences affect their perceptions. In fact, this sort of reflexive insight can turn out to be a useful data source and analytical tool that improves the researcher’s understanding.

The work of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo provides a useful example of how anthropologists can use their emotional responses to fieldwork situations to advance their research. In 1981, Rosaldo and his wife, Michelle, were conducting research among the Ilongot of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Rosaldo was studying men in the community who engaged in emotional rampages in which they violently murdered others by cutting off their heads. Although the practice had been banned by the time Rosaldo arrived, a longing to continue headhunting remained in the cultural psyche of the community.

Whenever Rosaldo asked a man why he engaged in headhunting, the answer was that rage and grief caused him to kill others. At the beginning of his fieldwork, Rosaldo felt that the response was overly simplistic and assumed that there had to be more to it than that. He was frustrated because he could not uncover a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Then, on October 11, 1981, Rosaldo’s wife was walking along a ravine when she tripped, lost her footing, and fell 65 feet to her death, leaving Rosaldo a grieving single father. In his essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” Rosaldo (2004) later wrote that it was his own struggle with rage as he grieved for his wife that helped him truly grasp what the Ilongot men meant when they described their grief and rage:

Only through the very personal and emotionally devastating experience of losing his wife was Rosaldo able to understand the emic perspective of the headhunters. The result was an influential and insightful ethnographic account.

Ethical Guidelines

From the earliest days of anthropology as a discipline, concern about the ethical treatment of people who take part in studies has been an important consideration. Ethical matters are central to any research project and anthropologists take their ethical responsibilities seriously. As discussed throughout this chapter, anthropologists are oriented toward developing empathy for their informants and understanding their cultures and experiences from an emic perspective. Many also have a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of the local people with whom they work in the field.

The American Anthropological Association has developed a Code of Ethics that all anthropologists should follow in their work. Among the many ethical responsibilities outlined in the code, doing no harm, obtaining informed consent, maintaining subjects’ anonymity, and making the results of the research accessible are especially important responsibilities.

 

 

Do No Harm

First and foremost, anthropologists must ensure that their involvement with a community does not harm or embarrass their informants. Researchers must carefully consider any potential harm associated with the research, including legal, emotional, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, and take steps to insulate their informants from such harm. Since it is not always possible to anticipate every potential repercussion at the outset, anthropologists also must continually monitor their work to ensure that their research design and methods minimize any risk.

Today, Do No Harm is a central ethical value in anthropology. However, it can be difficult to predict every challenge one may encounter in the field or after the work is published. Anthropologists must continually reevaluate their research and writing to ensure that it does not harm the informants or their communities. Before fieldwork begins, researchers from universities, colleges, and institutions usually must submit their research agendas to an institutional review board (IRB). IRBs review research plans to ensure that the proposed studies will not harm human subjects. In many cases, the IRB is aware of the unique challenges and promise of anthropological research and can guide the researcher in eliminating or mitigating potential ethical problems.

Informed Consent

In addition to taking care to do no harm, anthropologists must obtain informed consent from all their informants before conducting any research. Informed consent is the informant’s agreement to take part in the study. Originally developed in the context of medical and psychological research, this ethical guideline is also relevant to anthropology. Informants must be aware of who the anthropologist is and the research topic, who is financially and otherwise supporting the research, how the research will be used, and who will have access to it. Finally, their participation must be optional and not coerced. They should be able to stop participating at any time and be aware of and comfortable with any risks associated with their participation.

In medical and psychological research settings in the United States, researchers typically obtain informed consent by asking prospective participants to sign a document that outlines the research and the risks involved in their participation, acknowledging that they agree to take part. In some anthropological contexts, however, this type of informed consent may not be appropriate. People may not trust the state, bureaucratic processes, or authority, for example. Asking them to sign a formal legal-looking document may intimidate them. Likewise, informed consent cannot be obtained with a signed document if many in the community cannot read. The anthropologist must determine the most appropriate way to obtain informed consent in the context of the particular research setting.

Maintain Anonymity and Privacy

Another important ethical consideration for anthropologists in the field is ensuring the anonymity and privacy of informants who need such protection. Sometimes an informant’s legal status can put them at considerable physical or legal risk and in cases such as this it may be appropriate to sue pseudonyms, even when writing field notes. Informants’ names, their relatives, friends, schools, and work places are changed to protect them from being identified. Maintaining privacy and anonymity is an important way for anthropologists to ensure that their involvement does no harm.

Make Results Accessible

Finally, anthropologists must always make their final research results accessible to their informants and to other researchers. For informants, a written report in the researcher’s native language may not be the best way to convey the results. Reports can be translated or the results can be converted into a more accessible format. Examples of creative ways in which anthropologists have made their results available include establishing accessible databases for their research data, contributing to existing databases, producing films that portray the results, and developing texts or recommendations that provide tangible assistance to the informants’ communities. Though it is not always easy to make research results accessible in culturally appropriate ways, it is essential that others have the opportunity to review and benefit from the research, especially those who participated in its creation.

 

Terms You Should Know

Qualitative research

Quantitative research

Ethnography

Participant Observation

Ethnology

Fieldwork

Multi-sited ethnography

Inductive approach

Deductive approach

Theory

Armchair anthropology

Salvage ethnography

cultural relativism

field notes

rapport

Hawthorne effect

Unstructured interview

Semi-structured interview

Formal interviews

Life-history

genealogical (kinship) method

Key Informants

Institutional Review Board

Informed consent

 

References

Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Dettwyler, Katherine A. 2013. Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, 20th Anniversary Edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Flaherty, Robert, dir. 1922. Nanook of the North. Pathé Exchange.

Frazer, James George. 2015. The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. United States: Enhanced Media Publishing.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

Regna, Darnell. 2013. “Historical Particularism.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, edited by R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, 397-401. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference.

Rosaldo, Renato. 2004. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” in Violence in War and Peace, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Munroe, Ruth H., Robert L. Munroe, Carol Michelson, Amy Koel, Ralph Bolton and Charlene Bolton. 1983.“Time Allocation in Four Societies”. Ethnology. 22 (4): 355–70.

Wolcott, Harry F. 2008. Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Whyte, William Foote. 1993 [1943]. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

A derivative work adapted from:

Brown, Nina, McIlwraith, Thomas and Tubelle de González, Laura. 2020. Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.

Evans. 2020. Cultural Anthropology. Lumen Learning

Hasty, Jennifer, Lewis, David G. and Snipes, Marjorie M. 2022. Introduction to Anthropology.

Little, William and McGivern, Ron. 2016. Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Edition