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¶ … Anthropologists to conduct such in-depth fieldwork/Research? Give an example or two.
Why is it so important for anthropologists to conduct such in-depth fieldwork/research?
Anthropology is the study of human cultures of the past and present. Culture is revealed through the mechanisms of human life, not simply through academic research. Very often what people say and what they do manifests a profound disconnect between thought and behavior. For example, the way that a myth is interpreted by an indigenous people in ritual may be very different than how it 'sounds' on paper, when an anthropologist reads a transcript of the myth in his or her study. Within American culture, common myths such as the myth that 'everyone can succeed if he or she really works hard' are very different in the ways they function in lived experience, in culture, versus how they are portrayed in the media or even how people articulate these myths in everyday speech. A person may proudly describe himself as a 'self-made man' because he owns his own business, even though the money he obtained was inherited from a wealthy parent. The value of anthropology is its ability to provide an outsider's perspective from someone living within a culture.
Anthropologists who do insufficient fieldwork leave their work open to criticism. For example, Margaret Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa, suggested that adolescent sexual experimentation was relatively unproblematic and free of angst for Samoans. But Mead's methodology and conclusions were debunked by Derek Freeman, an anthropologist at the Australian National University at Canberra. Freeman pointed out that Mead only stayed in Samoa for six months, never learned the language, and never resided with the Samoan people. Instead, she conducted a series of interviews with her subjects under highly artificial conditions (Christensen 2000). Today, anthropologists usually live with their subjects, conduct intensive interviews, learn the native language, and attempt to place the lives and artifacts they encounter in a meaningful cultural context. Meaning and interpretation are always contextual, and to understand the context requires fieldwork and research.
Work Cited
Christensen, Jean. "Mead work named the worst of the century." The Los Angeles Times.
January 2, 2000. November 24, 2009. http://www.3ammagazine.com/short_stories/fiction/margaret_mead/page2.html
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