Key points
Macro and micro, emic and etic
Method is ideology in overalls (Mason Cooley). Say what you can see from inside and what you can compare from outside.
- Positivism / macro: society as fact, general laws, numbers, value-neutral claim (Durkheim lineage).
- Phenomenology / micro: meaning, context, qualitative, no universal law of the village.
- Kenneth Pike: emic from phonemic (insider categories); etic from phonetic (outsider comparative grid).
- Morgan’s kinship types and Murdock’s HRAF are etic machines; Geertz’s cockfight is emic thick description.
Emic
- Native words and logic
- Hard to compare
- Fieldwork first
Etic
- Analyst’s grid
- Comparison, HRAF
- Risk of imposing English
Thinker
Fieldwork tradition
- Boas: Baffin (1883–84), later Kwakwaka’wakw — relativism plus texts.
- Malinowski: long stay, vernacular, tent in the village — the myth of the method, plus the diary problem.
- Mead vs Freeman: same island, two Samoas — method, gender of the ethnographer, and theory all leak into ‘data’.
- Ethics: consent, anonymity, Barnes’s reminder that research is a relationship. CAQDAS (NVivo, Atlas.ti) is a tool, not a fieldwork substitute.
- Four fields in the field: blood and primates; excavation; speech; participant observation.
Methods
Tools and sampling
- Observation: uncontrolled / participant / non-participant. Interview: structured to life-history. Questionnaire vs schedule (who holds the pen).
- Case study: Kula, cockfight, Ndembu — depth, weak sampling.
- Genealogy (social structure) vs pedigree (alleles).
- Sampling: random, stratified, cluster, snowball, purposive. Focus groups: voice plus dominance bias.
- RRA / PRA: post-war rapid rural tools — speed versus depth.
- Analysis: themes, content, discourse; then interpretation without fake universals.
Key points
Kinds of ethnography now
- Realist vs experiential (first person). Multi-sited (Marcus). Multispecies (Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World).
- Ethnology: comparative, often library-based on other people’s ethnographies.
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