Assignment #5 - Ethnography Readings

I actually took a cultural anthropology class for my cultural diversity credit, so I knew a lot of the information contained in these pages. The first half of the class covered everything in the Ethnography Wikipedia page, and then the second half of the class was all about different cultures.  

 

While the Wikipedia page was not very interesting, I know for a fact that this research can be very interesting. There are so many cultures out there that we never know about. For example, the Nacirema who have daily rituals involving putting bundles of hog hairs in their mouths and moving it around. They also actually make holes in their teeth bigger through instruments used by holy-mouth-men (See http://www.ohio.edu/people/thompsoc/body.html for more information). This sounds so crazy and disgusting to us, but is it really? It is all a matter of perception, which is formed by culture.

Ethnographies are meant to observe the culture and learn how it developed based on many factors. This is very difficult because to fully understand the culture, they have to immerse themselves in it. I found this part of the task very difficult. Cultures just don’t accept you overnight. Ethnographers sometimes have to spend years in cultures just to be accepted. I cannot imagine personally devoting such a huge chuck of my life to this pursuit. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

A lot of people do see the point though, and actually, they oftentimes become very attached to these people that they are studying. Sometimes they even want to continue living and learning in this culture beyond the timespan of the report. I can see why this is such a common thing. If you spend all your days and nights with a people, you cannot help but to see them as family. You can easily grow to love them and not want to go back to your old way of living. 

This is where a lot of biased information comes in though. You either haven’t be in a culture long enough to be accepted, so you don’t see the true meaning of an action. You would start making assumptions, and these assumptions are often wrong. The opposite side has problems too. If you are accepted into a culture enough that you see the true impact of an action or ritual, you are probably too attached to them in my opinion to give an honest unbiased description of the action.

That is why many researchers, including Gary Alan Fine, correctly claim there is no way to truly be fair and honest when completing and ethnography. People are human and can only be so unbiased. 

Thinking on all these things, I cannot help but wonder how we are expected to complete one of these in such a short amount of time. There is no way we would reach the level of acceptance that we would see all aspects of a culture in the allotted time. It should be interesting to see how far we can actually delve into a culture of our choosing, and I am excited to be actively doing what I spent a whole Christmas break learning about.