ANTA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Nacirema, American Anthropologist, Ethnography
Document Summary
Ethnography serves at once to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, all the better to understand them both. It is as it were, the cannon-fodder of a critical anthropology (comaroff and comaroff 1992: The sociocultural wing of the uc davis anthropology department specializes in making the strange familiar and the familiar strange" including debunking myths that americans live by (//daviswiki. org/anthropology. In a recent review of a book about president obama"s mother, anthropologist. Catherine lutz wrote, in telling ms. dunham"s transnational story, ms. scott uses a standard anthropological gambit: she first makes kansas strange and then makes indonesia and the world of development experts in the 1970s and 1980s familiar (lutz 2011). Ethnographic method: the immersion of researchers in the lives and cultures of the people they are trying to understand in order to comprehend the meaning these people ascribe to their existence.
