ANTH 103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography
Document Summary
Anthropology evolved into a different field when early researchers worked on indian (native american) reservations and traveled to remote lands to research small groups of foragers (hunters and gatherers) and farmers. The process of becoming a cultural anthropologist has historically provided a field experience in a different society. Early ethnographers had lived in relatively isolated small-scale communities with basic technology and economies. Ethnography thus originated in societies with greater cultural uniformity and less social distinction as a research technique than is found in large, modern industrial nations. Ethnographers have historically sought to understand the whole of a particular culture (or, more realistically, as much as they can, despite time and perception limitations) Ethnographers follow a free-ranging information gathering approach to achieve this goal. The ethnographer travels from setting to setting, place to place, and subject to the subject in a given society or culture, to explore the complexity and interconnectedness of social life.
