Assignment 4- Blog and Read About Ethnographies

http://www.americanethnography.com/ethnography.php

This webpage was interesting to view because it displayed the different thoughts of what ethnography is. One viewpoint was that the goal was to “grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. Researchers use this information and data to discover the substance of the group’s happiness. This seems so subjective to me, and I am not sure how this is considered a science. Perhaps an art would better describe it. This also has to bring in a lot of psychology and terminology. It would be interesting to see how people define being happy. However, one of the references mentioned that ethnographies are meant to record the possible perspectives of life and another said it was to describe the culture to others. This seems more reasonable and realistic. The different viewpoints on how to conduct ethnography probably come from the two different aspects of it – the process and the product.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography 

In the beginning, it mentions that ethnography is meant to represent people’s nature graphically and in writing. However, there were no graphics on the page, and it did not explain how these graphics are created. So, I would like to know what they are supposed to look like. Through their explanation, it is easy to understand that it is really hard to obtain unbiased data. One reason to support this claim is that participation is better than observation. Every individual would interact with the group in a different way resulting in varying data. These experiments can be performed across many types of disciplines. The one discipline that I was surprised to be connected to it was economics. For some reason, that area never crossed my mind for this type of study. When performing ethnography, it is really easy to be deceptive and may not be completely ethical. Therefore, there has been an eight page code of ethics to help researchers respect the society that they have emerged themselves into. As mentioned earlier, there is no consensus on evaluation, but five criteria were mentioned in this article including substantive contribution, aesthetic merit, reflexivity, impact, and express a reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa

Margaret Mead wrote this book, which focuses on adolescent girls in the Samoa islands. This is a really famous book in the field of anthropology. She poses the question, “Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?” Her conclusion explained that the passage from childhood to adulthood was smooth among the girls in Samoan unlike in the United States where this transition is “marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion”. I can see how the adolescents in the United States experience this stress, but I have been blessed not to have experienced this. This makes me wonder what the percentage is of people in the Unites States who has struggled with this or if that percentage has changed over time. One reason that Mead gives for this anxiety is that the American girl is bombarded with different allegiances that she should be a part of but are incompatible with one another. Even though this is one of the more popular books regarding anthropology, it was not received well. Some claim that “Mead failed to apply the scientific method and that her assertions were unsupported”, but this has been refuted over the years. This makes me curious as to whether the anthropology community today still look at Mead’s book as great research or as something in the past.