Related Research Articles
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research and ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, usually over an extended period of time.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or field observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
In the social sciences and related fields, a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well, so that it can be better understood by an outsider. A thick description typically adds a record of subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behaviors, making the collected data of greater value for studies by other social scientists.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research.
Grounded theory is a systematic methodology that has been largely applied to qualitative research conducted by social scientists. The methodology involves the construction of hypotheses and theories through the collecting and analysis of data. Grounded theory involves the application of inductive reasoning. The methodology contrasts with the hypothetico-deductive model used in traditional scientific research.
Narrative inquiry or narrative analysis emerged as a discipline from within the broader field of qualitative research in the early 20th century, as evidence exists that this method was used in psychology and sociology. Narrative inquiry uses field texts, such as stories, autobiography, journals, field notes, letters, conversations, interviews, family stories, photos, and life experience, as the units of analysis to research and understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.
Online ethnography is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.
Institutional ethnography (IE) is an alternative approach of studying and understanding the social. IE has been described as an alternative philosophical paradigm, sociology, or (qualitative) research method. IE explores the social relations that structure people's everyday lives, specifically by looking at the ways that people interact with one another in the context of social institutions and understanding how those interactions are institutionalized. IE is best understood as an ethnography of interactions which have been institutionalized, rather than an ethnography of specific companies, organizations or employment sectors, which would be considered industrial sociology or the sociology of work. For the institutional ethnographer, ordinary daily activity becomes the site for an investigation of social organization. IE was first developed by Dorothy E. Smith as a Marxist feminist sociology "for women, for people"; and is now used by researchers in social sciences, education, nursing, human services and policy research as a method for mapping the translocal relations that coordinate people's activities within institutions.
Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. Ethnographic video, in contrast to ethnographic film, cannot be used independently of other ethnographic methods, but rather as part of the process of creation and representation of societal, cultural, and individual knowledge. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, visual ethnography and cultural studies. Uses of video in ethnography include the recording of certain processes and activities, visual note-taking, and ethnographic diary-keeping.
Nasir Uddin is a cultural anthropologist, post-colonial theorist and prolific writer on topics ranging from human rights, Adivasi issues, rights of non-citizens, refugees, and stateless people, common forms of discrimination, government in everyday life, media, democracy, and the state-society relations in Bangladesh and South Asia. Uddin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chittagong.
Herbert S. Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught from 1963 to 1998. He has conducted extensive field research in Ethiopia and Israel and worked with Oneida Indian Nation of Wisconsin. Aside from publications based on ethnographic field research he has written theoretical works about political leadership and systems, ethnicity, cultural evolution. Since the late 1990s he has published extensively about the history of anthropology, much of it offering new insights into the work and thought of Franz Boas.
Jean J. Schensul is a medical anthropologist and senior scientist at The Institute for Community Research, in Hartford, Connecticut. Dr. Schensul is most notable for her research on HIV/AIDS prevention and other health-related research in the United States, as well as her extensive writing on ethnographic research methods. She has made notable contributions to the field of applied anthropology, with her work on structural interventions to health disparities leading to the development of new organizations, community research partnerships, and community/university associations. Schensul’s work has been dedicated to community-based research on topics such as senior health, education, and substance abuse, among others.
Oswald J. Werner, better known as Ossy Werner, was a Czechoslovakian-born American linguist. He was Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics for thirty years at Northwestern University and retired in 1998 as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Linguistics. During this period he researched the Navajo language and culture. Although specializing in their medicine and science, he impacted anthropology, linguistics, ethnography, ethnographic methodology, ethnoscience, and cognitive anthropology.
Martyn Hammersley is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences.
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Brazil and Indonesia.
References
- 1 2 3 Soyini Madison, D. (2005). Critical ethnography: method, ethics, and performance. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/4957_Madison_I_Proof_Chapter_1.pdf
- 1 2 Thomas, J. (1993). Doing critical ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
- 1 2 3 Simon, R. I., & Dippo, D. (1986). On critical ethnographic work. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 17(4), 195-202.
- ↑ Thomas, J. (2003). Musings on critical ethnography, meanings, and symbolic violence. In R.P. Clair (Ed.), Expressions of Ethnography. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 45-54.
- ↑ Noblit, G. W., Flores, S. Y., & Murillo, E. G. (2004). Postcritical ethnography: An introduction. Cress, NJ: Hampton Press.
- ↑ Appleton, N. S. (2022). "Critical ethnographic respect: Womens' [sic] narratives, material conditions, and emergency contraception in India". Anthropology & Medicine. 29 (2): 141–159. doi:10.1080/13648470.2020.1778427. PMID 32838541. S2CID 221308850.
- ↑ Gill (2007), 78 Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and ‘Choice’ for Feminism: A Reply to Duits and van Zoonen. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 14(1), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506807072318
- ↑ Appleton, (2020) 146