ANTH 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Ethnography, Anthropology Today, Participant Observation

• School: York University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 1120
• Professor: David Murray

Document Summary

Anth 1120: making sense of a changing world: anthropology today. Armchair anthropologists of the 19th century: taking documents from missionaries and they would analyze the documents, problematic because it might be bias using their own religious perspective to analyze other religious practice. The ethnographic method utilizes the technique of fieldwork, of which a key component is participant observation, the active participation of the observer in the lives of his or her subjects : the fieldwork process. Problem with using only a questionnaire as a research tool is because you may not get a lot of info if using yes/no answers. Questionnaire may start to limit us when we"re trying to acquire more information about who lives in a household and who does what in the home. Prior to entering the field, developing a research problem/question: may be difficult to come up with one may have to read texts to get more info about the field.