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150-503: The term cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of people. Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to

300-532: A British colonial possession , he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years. He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by British anthropologists, and his classic ethnographical work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through participant observation . Theoretically, he advocated

450-699: A functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs. Modern social anthropology was founded in Britain at the London School of Economics and Political Science following World War I . Influences include both the methodological revolution pioneered by Bronisław Malinowski 's process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown 's theoretical program for systematic comparison that

600-467: A "natural" setting, ethnology yields insights into the practical applications of a product or service. It is one of the best ways to identify areas of friction and improve overall user experience. Companies make increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (such as video ethnography ). The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference

750-407: A basis to criticize ethnography. Traditionally, the ethnographer focuses attention on a community, selecting knowledgeable informants who know the activities of the community well. These informants are typically asked to identify other informants who represent the community, often using snowball or chain sampling. This process is often effective in revealing common cultural denominators connected to

900-479: A brief history, and an analysis of the terrain , the climate , and the habitat . A wide range of groups and organisations have been studied by this method, including traditional communities, youth gangs , religious cults , and organisations of various kinds. While, traditionally, ethnography has relied on the physical presence of the researcher in a setting, there is research using the label that has relied on interviews or documents, sometimes to investigate events in

1050-523: A code of ethics, stating: Anthropologists have "moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession". The code of ethics notes that anthropologists are part of a wider scholarly and political network, as well as human and natural environment, which needs to be reported on respectfully. The code of ethics recognizes that sometimes very close and personal relationship can sometimes develop from doing ethnographic work. The Association acknowledges that

1200-567: A fly on the wall.” Ybema et al. (2010) examine the ontological and epistemological presuppositions underlying ethnography. Ethnographic research can range from a realist perspective, in which behavior is observed, to a constructivist perspective where understanding is socially constructed by the researcher and subjects. Research can range from an objectivist account of fixed, observable behaviors to an interpretive narrative describing "the interplay of individual agency and social structure." Critical theory researchers address "issues of power within

1350-465: A following in America , scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt , Herman Ebbinghaus , Mary Whiton Calkins , and William James would offer their contributions to the study of human cognition. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) emphasized the notion of what he called introspection : examining the inner feelings of an individual. With introspection, the subject had to be careful with describing their feelings in

1500-704: A form of "uniformity of mankind". Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural diffusionism , stating that there are three ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race [ sic ] to another." Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture as "that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of society." However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping

1650-569: A huge increase in popularity. The annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association began to host the Multispecies Salon , a collection of discussions, showcases, and other events for anthropologists. The event provided a space for anthropologists and artists to come together and showcase vast knowledge of different organisms and their intertwined systems. Cognition Cognition

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1800-491: A kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. Scholars have not settled a theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society, and their tensions reflect views which are seriously opposed. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading

1950-463: A number of variables that may have affected his ability to learn and recall the non-words he created. One of the reasons, he concluded, was the amount of time between the presentation of the list of stimuli and the recitation or recall of the same. Ebbinghaus was the first to record and plot a " learning curve " and a " forgetting curve ". His work heavily influenced the study of serial position and its effect on memory Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930)

2100-401: A philosophical approach to the study of cognition and the mind, with his Meditations he wanted people to meditate along with him to come to the same conclusions as he did but in their own free cognition. In psychology , the term "cognition" is usually used within an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions , and such is the same in cognitive engineering . In

2250-550: A refined output for various purposes. A modern example of this technology in application, is the use of captured audio in smart devices, transcribed to issue targeted adverts (often reconciled vs other metadata, or product development data for designers. Digital ethnography comes with its own set of ethical questions, and the Association of Internet Researchers ' ethical guidelines are frequently used. Gabriele de Seta's paper "Three Lies of Digital Ethnography" explores some of

2400-446: A region, winks remained meaningful in the same way. In this way, cultural boundaries of communication could be explored, as opposed to using linguistic boundaries or notions about the residence. Geertz, while still following something of a traditional ethnographic outline, moved outside that outline to talk about "webs" instead of "outlines" of culture. Within cultural anthropology, there are several subgenres of ethnography. Beginning in

2550-400: A work activity that they are studying; they may become members of a particular religious group they are interested in studying; or they may even inhabit a familial role in a community they are staying with. Robert M. Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw summarize this idea in their book Writing Ethnographic Field Notes using a common metaphor: “the fieldworker cannot and should not attempt to be

2700-492: Is Jaber F. Gubrium's pioneering ethnography on the experiences of a nursing home, Living and Dying at Murray Manor . Major influences on this development were anthropologist Lloyd Warner , on the Chicago sociology faculty, and to Robert Park 's experience as a journalist. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded such sociological ethnographies as Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine , which documents

2850-422: Is a document written about a particular people, almost always based at least in part on emic views of where the culture begins and ends. Using language or community boundaries to bound the ethnography is common. Ethnographies are also sometimes called "case studies". Ethnographers study and interpret culture, its universalities, and its variations through the ethnographic study based on fieldwork . An ethnography

3000-528: Is a specific kind of written observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ruth Fulton Benedict uses examples of Enthrotyhy in her serious of field work that began in 1922 of Serrano, of the Zuni in 1924, the Cochiti in 1925 and

3150-448: Is an effective methodology in qualitative geographic research that focuses on people's perceptions and experiences and their traditionally place-based immersion within a social group. According to John Brewer , a leading social scientist, data collection methods are meant to capture the "social meanings and ordinary activities" of people (informants) in "naturally occurring settings" that are commonly referred to as "the field". The goal

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3300-676: Is an important aspect of metacognition. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise have been studied concerning cognitive improvement. There appear to be short-term increases in attention span, verbal and visual memory in some studies. However, the effects are transient and diminish over time, after cessation of the physical activity. People with Parkinson's disease has also seen improved cognition while cycling, while pairing it with other cognitive tasks. Studies evaluating phytoestrogen , blueberry supplementation and antioxidants showed minor increases in cognitive function after supplementation but no significant effects compared to placebo . Another study on

3450-508: Is another field which prominently features ethnographies. Urban sociology , Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), and the Chicago School , in particular, are associated with ethnographic research, with some well-known early examples being The Philadelphia Negro (1899) by W. E. B. Du Bois, Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr. Well-known

3600-528: Is both a process and an outcome of the research. Studies such as Gerry Philipsen 's analysis of cultural communication strategies in a blue-collar , working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Speaking 'Like a Man' in Teamsterville , paved the way for the expansion of ethnographic research in the study of communication. Scholars of communication studies use ethnographic research methods to analyze communicative behaviors and phenomena. This

3750-419: Is closely related to the aforementioned study and conclusion of the memory experiments conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus. William James (1842–1910) is another pivotal figure in the history of cognitive science. James was quite discontent with Wundt's emphasis on introspection and Ebbinghaus' use of nonsense stimuli. He instead chose to focus on the human learning experience in everyday life and its importance to

3900-461: Is evidence of this. Ethnographers' systematic and holistic approach to real-life experience is valued by product developers, who use the method to understand unstated desires or cultural practices that surround products. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data. The ethnographic methodology

4050-518: Is gathered through observation and conscientious experimentation. Two millennia later, the groundwork for modern concepts of cognition was laid during the Enlightenment by thinkers such as John Locke and Dugald Stewart who sought to develop a model of the mind in which ideas were acquired, remembered and manipulated. During the early nineteenth century cognitive models were developed both in philosophy —particularly by authors writing about

4200-446: Is how an individual views a novel after completing it. The physical entity that is the novel contains a specific image in the perspective of the interpreting individual and can only be expressed by the individual in the terms of "I can tell you what an image is by telling you what it feels like." The idea of an image relies on the imagination and has been seen to be utilized by children in a very spontaneous and natural manner. Effectively,

4350-415: Is learned first still has to go through a retrieval process. This experiment focuses on human memory processes. The word superiority effect experiment presents a subject with a word, or a letter by itself, for a brief period of time, i.e. 40 ms, and they are then asked to recall the letter that was in a particular location in the word. In theory, the subject should be better able to correctly recall

4500-485: Is normal, what it is that people do, what they say, and how they work. Ethnography can also be used in other methodological frameworks, for instance, an action research program of study where one of the goals is to change and improve the situation. Ethnographic research is a fundamental methodology in cultural ecology, development studies, and feminist geography. In addition, it has gained importance in social, political, cultural, and nature-society geography. Ethnography

4650-406: Is not looking for generalizing the findings; rather, they are considering it in reference to the context of the situation. In this regard, the best way to integrate ethnography in a quantitative research would be to use it to discover and uncover relationships and then use the resultant data to test and explain the empirical assumptions. In ethnography, the researcher gathers what is available, what

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4800-772: Is not necessarily casting blame at ethnographic researchers but tries to show that researchers often make idealized ethical claims and standards which are inherently based on partial truths and self-deceptions. Fine also acknowledges that many of these partial truths and self-deceptions are unavoidable. He maintains that "illusions" are essential to maintain an occupational reputation and avoid potentially more caustic consequences. He claims, "Ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold". Based on these assertions, Fine establishes three conceptual clusters in which ethnographic ethical dilemmas can be situated: "Classic Virtues", "Technical Skills", and "Ethnographic Self". Much debate surrounding

4950-416: Is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnographic research methods began to be widely used by communication scholars. As the purpose of ethnography is to describe and interpret the shared and learned patterns of values, behaviors, beliefs, and language of a culture-sharing group, Harris, (1968), also Agar (1980) note that ethnography

5100-514: Is not usually evaluated in terms of philosophical standpoint (such as positivism and emotionalism ). Ethnographic studies need to be evaluated in some manner. No consensus has been developed on evaluation standards, but Richardson (2000, p. 254) provides five criteria that ethnographers might find helpful. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein's (1997) monograph, The New Language of Qualitative Method, discusses forms of ethnography in terms of their "methods talk". Gary Alan Fine argues that

5250-402: Is often characterized in the writing as attempts to understand taken-for-granted routines by which working definitions are socially produced. Ethnography as a method is a storied, careful, and systematic examination of the reality-generating mechanisms of everyday life (Coulon, 1995). Ethnographic work in communication studies seeks to explain "how" ordinary methods/practices/performances construct

5400-597: Is organized in a geriatric hospital. Another approach to ethnography in sociology comes in the form of institutional ethnography , developed by Dorothy E. Smith for studying the social relations which structure people's everyday lives. Other notable ethnographies include Paul Willis 's Learning to Labour, on working class youth; the work of Elijah Anderson , Mitchell Duneier , and Loïc Wacquant on black America, and Lai Olurode's Glimpses of Madrasa From Africa . But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography

5550-403: Is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” The cultural consensus principle is incorporated in the reasoning behind the cultural consonance model and other similar models (see cognitive anthropology ) that seek to evaluate the effects of shared cognitive structures on social life and

5700-650: Is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception , attention , thought , imagination , intelligence , the formation of knowledge , memory and working memory , judgment and evaluation , reasoning and computation , problem-solving and decision-making , comprehension and production of language . Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in

5850-426: Is the time it takes for a participant to identify whether a green circle is present or not, should not change as the number of distractors increases. Conjunctive searches where the target is absent should have a longer reaction time than the conjunctive searches where the target is present. The theory is that in feature searches, it is easy to spot the target, or if it is absent, because of the difference in color between

6000-459: Is to collect data in such a way that the researcher imposes a minimal amount of personal bias in the data. Multiple methods of data collection may be employed to facilitate a relationship that allows for a more personal and in-depth portrait of the informants and their community. These can include participant observation, field notes, interviews and surveys, as well as various visual methods. Interviews are often taped and later transcribed, allowing

6150-547: The Odyssey as a starting point for ancient ethnography, while noting that Herodotus ' Histories is the usual starting point; while Edith Hall has argued that Homeric poetry lacks "the coherence and vigour of ethnological science". From Herodotus forward, ethnography was a mainstay of ancient historiography . Tacitus has ethnographies in the Agricola , Histories , and Germania . Tacitus' Germania "stands as

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6300-484: The Shared intentionality approach, the mother shares the essential sensory stimulus of the actual cognitive problem with the child. By sharing this stimulus, the mother provides a template for developing the young organism's nervous system. Recent findings in research on child cognitive development and advances in inter-brain neuroscience experiments have made the above proposition plausible. Based on them,

6450-458: The history of science , psychoanalysis , and linguistics . The subject has both ethical and reflexive dimensions. Practitioners have developed an awareness of the sense in which scholars create their objects of study and the ways in which anthropologists themselves may contribute to processes of change in the societies they study. An example of this is the " hawthorne effect ", whereby those being studied may alter their behaviour in response to

6600-509: The philosophy of mind —and within medicine , especially by physicians seeking to understand how to cure madness. In Britain , these models were studied in the academy by scholars such as James Sully at University College London , and they were even used by politicians when considering the national Elementary Education Act 1870 ( 33 & 34 Vict. c. 75). As psychology emerged as a burgeoning field of study in Europe , whilst also gaining

6750-418: The psychological construct of Shared intentionality , highlighting its contribution to cognitive development from birth. This primary interaction provides unaware collaboration in mother-child dyads for environmental learning. Later, Igor Val Danilov developed this notion, expanding it to the intrauterine period and clarifying the neurophysiological processes underlying Shared intentionality . According to

6900-712: The shared intentionality hypothesis introduced the notion of pre-perceptual communication in the mother-fetus communication model due to nonlocal neuronal coupling. This nonlocal coupling model refers to communication between two organisms through the copying of the adequate ecological dynamics by biological systems indwelling one environmental context, where a naive actor (Fetus) replicates information from an experienced actor (Mother) due to intrinsic processes of these dynamic systems ( embodied information ) but without interacting through sensory signals. The Mother's heartbeats (a low-frequency oscillator) modulate relevant local neuronal networks in specific subsystems of both her and

7050-735: The " White race "—Grant, a renowned eugenicist , was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism , whose first formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau 's An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in

7200-451: The "ethos" of the culture. In his fieldwork, Geertz used elements of a phenomenological approach, tracing not just the doings of people, but the cultural elements themselves. For example, if within a group of people, winking was a communicative gesture, he sought to first determine what kinds of things a wink might mean (it might mean several things). Then, he sought to determine in what contexts winks were used, and whether, as one moved about

7350-424: The "indigenous village"; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos". Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the 19th century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form—by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of Anthropology . At

7500-468: The 15th century, where it meant " thinking and awareness". The term comes from the Latin noun cognitio ('examination', 'learning', or 'knowledge'), derived from the verb cognosco , a compound of con ('with') and gnōscō ('know'). The latter half, gnōscō , itself is a cognate of a Greek verb, gi(g)nósko ( γι(γ)νώσκω , 'I know,' or 'perceive'). Despite

7650-538: The 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories", especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from the Americas, Africa and Asia were displayed, often nude, in cages, in what has been termed " human zoos ". In 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was put by American anthropologist Madison Grant in a cage in the Bronx Zoo , labelled "the missing link" between an orangutan and

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7800-518: The 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "bio-confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques (1955) by Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis , as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen ( Laura Bohannan ). Later " reflexive " ethnographies refined

7950-546: The British anthropologist Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico , both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork , mainly the Classics (literature and history of Ancient Greece and Rome ), the work of the early European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists. Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and

8100-651: The Pina in 1926. All being people she wished to study for her anthropological data. Benedict's experiences with the Southwest Zuni pueblo is to be considered the basis of her formative fieldwork. The experience set the idea for her to produce her theory of "culture is personality writ large" (modell, 1988). By studying the culture between the different Pueblo and Plain Indians, She discovered the culture isomorphism that would be considered her personalized unique approach to

8250-598: The Tallensi , by Meyer Fortes ; well-known edited volumes include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems . Following World War II , sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school of cultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas from Claude Lévi-Strauss 's structuralism and from

8400-563: The UK and Commonwealth was founded in 1946. In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of Christianity , the growth of cultural relativism , an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic , all of which are central to modern culture." Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his students Mary Douglas and Nur Yalman , among others, introduced French structuralism in

8550-603: The Western Pacific (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski , Ethnologische Excursion in Johore (1875) by Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay , Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead , The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard , Naven (1936, 1958) by Gregory Bateson , or " The Lele of the Kasai " (1963) by Mary Douglas . Cultural and social anthropologists today place a high value on doing ethnographic research. The typical ethnography

8700-455: The acquisition and development of cognitive capabilities. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious , concrete or abstract , as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). It encompasses processes such as memory , association , concept formation , pattern recognition , language , attention , perception , action , problem solving , and mental imagery . Traditionally, emotion

8850-1118: The attention it gives to the comparative diversity of societies and cultures across the world, and the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-American assumptions. It is differentiated from sociology , both in its main methods (based on long-term participant observation and linguistic competence), and in its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies. It extends beyond strictly social phenomena to culture, art, individuality, and cognition. Many social anthropologists use quantitative methods, too, particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local economies, demography , human ecology , cognition, or health and illness. Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as new intellectual paradigms appear; musicology and medical anthropology are examples of current, well-defined specialities. More recent and currently specializations are: The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such as philosophy ( ethics , phenomenology , logic ),

9000-420: The beginning of cognition is memory storage about the relevant ecological dynamics by the naive nervous system (i.e., memorizing the ecological condition of relevant sensory stimulus) at the molecular level – an engram . Evidence derived using optical imaging , molecular-genetic and optogenetic techniques in conjunction with appropriate behavioural analyses continues to offer support for the idea that changing

9150-451: The beginning of the sequence, called the primacy effect , and information at the end of the sequence, called the recency effect . Consequently, information given in the middle of the sequence is typically forgotten, or not recalled as easily. This study predicts that the recency effect is stronger than the primacy effect, because the information that is most recently learned is still in working memory when asked to be recalled. Information that

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9300-404: The book of British ethnographer W. H. R. Rivers titled "Kinship and Social Organisation" in 1911. Genealogy or kinship commonly plays a crucial role in the structure of non-industrial societies, determining both social relations and group relationship to the past. Marriage, for example, is frequently pivotal in determining military alliances between villages , clans or ethnic groups . In

9450-499: The code is limited in scope; ethnographic work can sometimes be multidisciplinary, and anthropologists need to be familiar with ethics and perspectives of other disciplines as well. The eight-page code of ethics outlines ethical considerations for those conducting Research, Teaching, Application and Dissemination of Results, which are briefly outlined below. The following are commonly misconceived conceptions of ethnographers: According to Norman K. Denzin, ethnographers should consider

9600-410: The construction of human thought or mental processes. Jean Piaget was one of the most important and influential people in the field of developmental psychology . He believed that humans are unique in comparison to animals because we have the capacity to do "abstract symbolic reasoning". His work can be compared to Lev Vygotsky , Sigmund Freud , and Erik Erikson who were also great contributors in

9750-407: The construction of human thought or mental processes. Research shows the intentional engagement of fetuses with the environment, demonstrating cognitive achievements. However, organisms with simple reflexes cannot cognize the environment alone because the environment is the cacophony of stimuli (electromagnetic waves, chemical interactions, and pressure fluctuations). Their sensation is too limited by

9900-520: The cultural elements and institutions fit together. The Golden Bough was abridged drastically in subsequent editions after his first. Toward the turn of the 20th century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative to them. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together in

10050-558: The daily practices of local people. This development was bolstered by Franz Boas ' introduction of the concept of cultural relativism , arguing that cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly understood in terms of their own standards and values. Museums such as the British Museum weren't the only site of anthropological studies; with the New Imperialism period, starting in

10200-424: The development of experimental forms such as 'dialogic anthropology,' 'narrative ethnography,' and 'literary ethnography', Writing Culture helped to encourage the development of 'collaborative ethnography.' This exploration of the relationship between writer, audience, and subject has become a central tenet of contemporary anthropological and ethnographic practice. In certain instances, active collaboration between

10350-633: The discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial / post-structuralist thought. "Experimental" ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig , Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun. This critical turn in sociocultural anthropology during

10500-716: The disciplines of cognitive science . Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. The term comes from the root word meta , meaning "beyond", or "on top of". Metacognition can take many forms, such as reflecting on one's ways of thinking, and knowing when and how oneself and others use particular strategies for problem-solving . There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) cognitive conceptions and (2) cognitive regulation system. Research has shown that both components of metacognition play key roles in metaconceptual knowledge and learning. Metamemory , defined as knowing about memory and mnemonic strategies,

10650-498: The distractor task, they are asked to recall the trigram from before the distractor task. In theory, the longer the distractor task, the harder it will be for participants to correctly recall the trigram. This experiment focuses on human short-term memory . During the memory span experiment , each subject is presented with a sequence of stimuli of the same kind; words depicting objects, numbers, letters that sound similar, and letters that sound dissimilar. After being presented with

10800-457: The distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and he generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural change proposed by later anthropologists. Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious beliefs in human beings, proposing a theory of animism as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components, of which he believed

10950-467: The earliest well-known studies was Lewis Henry Morgan 's The American Beaver and His Works (1868). His study closely observed a group of beavers in Northern Michigan. Morgan's main objective was to highlight that the daily individual tasks that the beavers performed were complex communicative acts that had been passed down for generations. In the early 2000s multi-species ethnography took on

11100-581: The early history of fantasy role-playing games . Other important ethnographies in sociology include Pierre Bourdieu 's work in Algeria and France. Jaber F. Gubrium's series of organizational ethnographies focused on the everyday practices of illness, care, and recovery are notable. They include Living and Dying at Murray Manor, which describes the social worlds of a nursing home; Describing Care: Image and Practice in Rehabilitation, which documents

11250-402: The effects of herbal and dietary supplements on cognition in menopause show that soy and Ginkgo biloba supplementation could improve women's cognition. Exposing individuals with cognitive impairment (i.e. dementia ) to daily activities designed to stimulate thinking and memory in a social setting, seems to improve cognition. Although study materials are small, and larger studies need to confirm

11400-637: The emerging cultures of cyberspace , and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments. British and American anthropologists including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory. Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate

11550-498: The entire process of conducting ethnographies, including the design, implementation, and reporting of an ethnographic study. Essentially, Fine maintains that researchers are typically not as ethical as they claim or assume to be — and that "each job includes ways of doing things that would be inappropriate for others to know". Also see Jaber F. Gubrium concept of "site-specificity" discussed his book co-edited with Amir Marvasti titled CRAFTING ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK. Routledge, 2023. Fine

11700-528: The ethnographer cannot escape the personal viewpoint in creating an ethnographic account, thus making any claims of objective neutrality highly problematic, if not altogether impossible. In regards to this last point, Writing Culture became a focal point for looking at how ethnographers could describe different cultures and societies without denying the subjectivity of those individuals and groups being studied while simultaneously doing so without laying claim to absolute knowledge and objective authority. Along with

11850-659: The expedition set new standards for ethnographic description. A decade and a half later, the Polish anthropology student Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of fieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in New Guinea . As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on

12000-882: The field of epistemology the term is used to characterize the philosophical method employed by such writers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault . Digital ethnography is also seen as virtual ethnography. This type of ethnography is not so typical as ethnography recorded by pen and pencil. Digital ethnography allows for a lot more opportunities to look at different cultures and societies. Traditional ethnography may use videos or images, but digital ethnography goes more in-depth. For example, digital ethnographers would use social media platforms such as Twitter or blogs so that people's interactions and behaviors can be studied. Modern developments in computing power and AI have enabled higher efficiencies in ethnographic data collection via multimedia and computational analysis using machine learning to corroborate many data sources together to produce

12150-488: The field of developmental psychology. Piaget is known for studying the cognitive development in children, having studied his own three children and their intellectual development, from which he would come to a theory of cognitive development that describes the developmental stages of childhood. Studies on cognitive development have also been conducted in children beginning from the embryonal period to understand when cognition appears and what environmental attributes stimulate

12300-473: The field, and can be found in several universities around the world. The field of social anthropology has expanded in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for example in the subfield of structure and dynamics . [REDACTED] Media related to Social anthropology at Wikimedia Commons Ethnographic Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures . Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from

12450-439: The fields of linguistics , musicology , anesthesia , neuroscience , psychiatry , psychology , education , philosophy , anthropology , biology , systemics , logic , and computer science . These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied cognition ) are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science , a progressively autonomous academic discipline . The word cognition dates back to

12600-592: The followers of Max Gluckman , and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks. Together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University , collectively known as the Manchester School , took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to

12750-471: The following seven principles when observing, recording, and sampling data: Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. According to Adams et al., autoethnography Bochner and Ellis have also defined autoethnography as "an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting

12900-966: The formal sciences. Material culture, technology, and means of subsistence are usually treated next, as they are typically bound up in physical geography and include descriptions of infrastructure. Kinship and social structure (including age grading, peer groups, gender, voluntary associations, clans, moieties, and so forth, if they exist) are typically included. Languages spoken, dialects, and the history of language change are another group of standard topics. Practices of child rearing, acculturation, and emic views on personality and values usually follow after sections on social structure. Rites, rituals, and other evidence of religion have long been an interest and are sometimes central to ethnographies, especially when conducted in public where visiting anthropologists can see them. As ethnography developed, anthropologists grew more interested in less tangible aspects of culture, such as values, worldview and what Clifford Geertz termed

13050-475: The function and capacity of human memory. Ebbinghaus developed his own experiment in which he constructed over 2,000 syllables made out of nonexistent words (for instance, 'EAS'). He then examined his own personal ability to learn these non-words. He purposely chose non-words as opposed to real words to control for the influence of pre-existing experience on what the words might symbolize, thus enabling easier recollection of them. Ebbinghaus observed and hypothesized

13200-444: The human condition beginning from the onset of cognitive development. The major part of social and cognitive anthropology concepts (e.g., Cultural consonance, Cultural models, Knowledge structures, Shared knowledge etc.) seem to rely upon broad pervasive, unaware interactions between society members. Research shows that unconscious remembering increases recall efficiency over time and yields greater confidence in that thought. According to

13350-1097: The idea of the image is a primary tool for ethnographers to collect data. The image presents the perspective, experiences, and influences of an individual as a single entity and in consequence, the individual will always contain this image in the group under study. The ethnographic method is used across a range of different disciplines, primarily by anthropologists/ethnologists but also occasionally by sociologists. Cultural studies , occupational therapy , economics , social work , education , design , psychology , computer science , human factors and ergonomics , ethnomusicology , folkloristics , religious studies , geography , history , linguistics , communication studies , performance studies , advertising , accounting research , nursing , urban planning , usability , political science , social movement , and criminology are other fields which have made use of ethnography. Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts, which are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of

13500-428: The interview to proceed unimpaired of note-taking, but with all information available later for full analysis. Secondary research and document analysis are also used to provide insight into the research topic. In the past, kinship charts were commonly used to "discover logical patterns and social structure in non-Western societies". In the 21st century, anthropology focuses more on the study of people in urban settings and

13650-565: The introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin and the German variant by A. F. Thilo in 1767. August Ludwig von Schlözer and Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer of the University of Göttingen introduced the term into the academic discourse in an attempt to reform the contemporary understanding of world history. According to Dewan (2018), the researcher

13800-610: The issue of ethics arose following revelations about how the ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon conducted his ethnographic fieldwork with the Yanomani people of South America. While there is no international standard on Ethnographic Ethics, many western anthropologists look to the American Anthropological Association for guidance when conducting ethnographic work. In 2009, the Association adopted

13950-446: The knowledge that they are being watched and studied. Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including the study of Classics , ethnography , ethnology , folklore , linguistics , and sociology , among others. Its immediate precursor took shape in the work of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory during

14100-506: The letter when it was presented in a word than when it was presented in isolation. This experiment focuses on human speech and language. In the Brown–Peterson cohomology experiment , participants are briefly presented with a trigram and in one particular version of the experiment, they are then given a distractor task, asking them to identify whether a sequence of words is in fact words, or non-words (due to being misspelled, etc.). After

14250-602: The methodological questions more central to a specifically ethnographical approach to internet studies, drawing upon Fine's classic text. Multispecies ethnography in particular focuses on both nonhuman and human participants within a group or culture, as opposed to just human participants in traditional ethnography. A multispecies ethnography, in comparison to other forms of ethnography, studies species that are connected to people and our social lives. Species affect and are affected by culture, economics, and politics. The study's roots go back to general anthropology of animals. One of

14400-412: The mid-1980s can be traced to the influence of the now classic (and often contested) text, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , (1986) edited by James Clifford and George Marcus . Writing Culture helped bring changes to both anthropology and ethnography often described in terms of being 'postmodern,' 'reflexive,' 'literary,' 'deconstructive,' or 'poststructural' in nature, in that

14550-404: The mind. The development of Cognitive psychology arose as psychology from different theories, and so began exploring these dynamics concerning mind and environment, starting a movement from these prior dualist paradigms that prioritized cognition as systematic computation or exclusively behavior. For years, sociologists and psychologists have conducted studies on cognitive development , i.e.

14700-528: The most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with the study of religion , mythology , and magic . His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough , analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly interested in fieldwork , nor were they interested in examining how

14850-411: The most objective manner possible in order for Wundt to find the information scientific. Though Wundt's contributions are by no means minimal, modern psychologists find his methods to be too subjective and choose to rely on more objective procedures of experimentation to make conclusions about the human cognitive process. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) conducted cognitive studies that mainly examined

15000-478: The name under which they were founded. Long-term qualitative research , including intensive field studies (emphasizing participant observation methods), has been traditionally encouraged in social anthropology rather than quantitative analysis of surveys, questionnaires and brief field visits typically used by economists , political scientists , and (most) sociologists . Cognitive anthropology studies how people represent and think about events and objects in

15150-443: The nature of ethnographic inquiry demands that researchers deviate from formal and idealistic rules or ethics that have come to be widely accepted in qualitative and quantitative approaches in research. Many of these ethical assumptions are rooted in positivist and post-positivist epistemologies that have adapted over time but are apparent and must be accounted for in all research paradigms. These ethical dilemmas are evident throughout

15300-514: The nervous system of the fetus due to the effect of the interference of the low-frequency oscillator (Mother heartbeats) and already exhibited gamma activity in these neuronal networks (interference in physics is the combination of two or more electromagnetic waveforms to form a resultant wave). Therefore, the subliminal perception in a fetus emerges due to Shared intentionality with the mother that stimulates cognition in this organism even before birth. Another crucial question in understanding

15450-419: The neural system. By bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives, we can assess shared cultural knowledge – understand processes underlying unspoken social norms and beliefs, as well as study processes of shaping individual values that together constitute societies. Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by its holistic range and

15600-456: The noise to solve the cue problem–the relevant stimulus cannot overcome the noise magnitude if it passes through the senses (see the binding problem ). Fetuses need external help to stimulate their nervous system in choosing the relevant sensory stimulus for grasping the perception of objects. The Shared intentionality approach proposes a plausible explanation of perception development in this earlier stage. Initially, Michael Tomasello introduced

15750-783: The oldest paradigms is the leveling and sharpening of stories as they are repeated from memory studied by Bartlett . The semantic differential used factor analysis to determine the main meanings of words, finding that the ethical value of words is the first factor. More controlled experiments examine the categorical relationships of words in free recall . The hierarchical structure of words has been explicitly mapped in George Miller 's WordNet . More dynamic models of semantic networks have been created and tested with computational systems such as neural networks , latent semantic analysis (LSA), Bayesian analysis , and multidimensional factor analysis. The meanings of words are studied by all

15900-519: The ordinary actions used by ordinary people in the accomplishments of their identities. This often gives the perception of trying to answer the "why" and "how come" questions of human communication. Often this type of research results in a case study or field study such as an analysis of speech patterns at a protest rally, or the way firemen communicate during "down time" at a fire station. Like anthropology scholars, communication scholars often immerse themselves, and participate in and/or directly observe

16050-595: The organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry. Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs , economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange , kinship and family structure, gender relations , childbearing and socialization , religion , while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues of globalism , ethnic violence, gender studies , transnationalism and local experience, and

16200-443: The particular social group being studied. The American anthropologist George Spindler was a pioneer in applying the ethnographic methodology to the classroom. Anthropologists such as Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption. In this sense, Tony Salvador, Genevieve Bell , and Ken Anderson describe design ethnography as being "a way of understanding

16350-648: The particulars of daily life in such a way as to increase the success probability of a new product or service or, more appropriately, to reduce the probability of failure specifically due to a lack of understanding of the basic behaviors and frameworks of consumers." Sociologist Sam Ladner argues in her book, that understanding consumers and their desires requires a shift in "standpoint", one that only ethnography provides. The results are products and services that respond to consumers' unmet needs. Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services. By assessing user experience in

16500-492: The past such as the NASA Challenger disaster . There is also a considerable amount of 'virtual' or online ethnography, sometimes labelled netnography or cyber-ethnography . The term ethnography is from Greek ( ἔθνος éthnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω gráphō "I write") and encompasses the ways in which ancient authors described and analyzed foreign cultures. Anthony Kaldellis loosely suggests

16650-424: The period 1890–1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic study of social behavior in natural settings, and the introduction of French and German social theory. Polish anthropologist and ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski , one of the most important influences on British social anthropology, emphasized long-term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the vernacular and immerse themselves in

16800-442: The personal to the cultural." They further indicate that autoethnography is typically written in first-person and can "appear in a variety of forms," such as "short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing, and social science prose." The genealogical method investigates links of kinship determined by marriage and descent . The method owes its origin from

16950-431: The perspectives of participants, and to understand these in their local contexts. It had its origin in social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century, but spread to other social science disciplines, notably sociology, during the course of that century. Ethnographers mainly use qualitative methods, though they may also employ quantitative data. The typical ethnography is a holistic study and so includes

17100-518: 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. As a form of inquiry, ethnography relies heavily on participant observation —on the researcher participating in the setting or with the people being studied, at least in some marginal role, and seeking to document, in detail, patterns of social interaction and

17250-500: The present ( synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Cort Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist, William Rivers , as well as a linguist, a botanist, and other specialists. The findings of

17400-464: The product of biological and cultural factors that manifest in individual brain development, neural wiring, and neurochemical homeostasis. According to received view in neuroscience, an observed human behavior, in any context, is the last event in a long chain of biological and cultural interactions. The brain´s anatomy is subject to neuroplasticity and depends on both, contextual (cultural) and historically dependent (previous experience) mechanisms to shape

17550-592: The received view in cognitive sciences , cognition begins from birth (and even from prenatal) due to motive forces of shared intentionality : unaware knowledge assimilation. Therefore, mechanisms of unaware interactions at the onset of life, one of the focuses of research in cognitive sciences, have become the central research issue in social and cognitive anthropology. Another intersection of these two disciplines appears in neuroscience research. Behavioral propensities (an exteriorization of Cultural models, Schemata, etc.; see key concepts of cognitive anthropology ) are

17700-455: The researcher(s) and subject(s) has helped blend the practice of collaboration in ethnographic fieldwork with the process of creating the ethnographic product resulting from the research. 1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville  ·  Marx ·  Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto ·  Tönnies · Veblen ·  Simmel · Durkheim ·  Addams ·  Mead · Weber ·  Du Bois ·  Mannheim · Elias Sociology

17850-402: The researcher-researched relationships and the links between knowledge and power." Another form of data collection is that of the "image". The image is the projection that an individual puts on an object or abstract idea. An image can be contained within the physical world through a particular individual's perspective, primarily based on that individual's past experiences. One example of an image

18000-484: The results, the effect of social cognitive stimulation seems to be larger than the effects of some drug treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been shown to improve cognition in individuals without dementia 1 month after treatment session compared to before treatment. The effect was not significantly larger compared to placebo. Computerized cognitive training, utilizing a computer based training regime for different cognitive functions has been examined in

18150-412: The same for letters that sound dissimilar and short words. The memory span is projected to be shorter with letters that sound similar and with longer words. In one version of the visual search experiment , a participant is presented with a window that displays circles and squares scattered across it. The participant is to identify whether there is a green circle on the window. In the featured search,

18300-465: The social organization of patient subjectivity in a physical rehabilitation hospital; Caretakers: Treating Emotionally Disturbed Children, which features the social construction of behavioral disorders in children; and Oldtimers and Alzheimer's: The Descriptive Organization of Senility, which describes how the Alzheimer's disease movement constructed a new subjectivity of senile dementia and how that

18450-460: The social system to keep it functioning harmoniously. His structuralist approach contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later French structuralism , which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This

18600-485: The sole surviving full-scale monograph by a classical author on an alien people." Ethnography formed a relatively coherent subgenre in Byzantine literature. While ethnography ("ethnographic writing") was widely practiced in antiquity, ethnography as a science ( cf. ethnology ) did not exist in the ancient world. There is no ancient term or concept applicable to ethnography, and those writers probably did not consider

18750-407: The stimuli, the subject is asked to recall the sequence of stimuli that they were given in the exact order in which it was given. In one particular version of the experiment, if the subject recalled a list correctly, the list length was increased by one for that type of material, and vice versa if it was recalled incorrectly. The theory is that people have a memory span of about seven items for numbers,

18900-448: The strength of connections between neurons is one of the major mechanisms by which engrams are stored in the brain. Two (or more) possible mechanisms of cognition can involve both quantum effects and synchronization of brain structures due to electromagnetic interference. The Serial-position effect is meant to test a theory of memory that states that when information is given in a serial manner, we tend to remember information at

19050-400: The study of social cognition , a branch of social psychology , the term is used to explain attitudes , attribution , and group dynamics . However, psychological research within the field of cognitive science has also suggested an embodied approach to understanding cognition. Contrary to the traditional computationalist approach, embodied cognition emphasizes the body's significant role in

19200-480: The study of anthropology using ethnographic techniques. A typical ethnography attempts to be holistic and typically follows an outline to include a brief history of the culture in question, an analysis of the physical geography or terrain inhabited by the people under study, including climate , and often including what biological anthropologists call habitat . Folk notions of botany and zoology are presented as ethnobotany and ethnozoology alongside references from

19350-410: The study of cognition. James' most significant contribution to the study and theory of cognition was his textbook Principles of Psychology which preliminarily examines aspects of cognition such as perception, memory, reasoning, and attention. René Descartes (1596–1650) was a seventeenth-century philosopher who came up with the phrase "Cogito, ergo sum", which means "I think, therefore I am." He took

19500-500: The study of other cultures as a distinct mode of inquiry from history. Gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–43) as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as a distinct area of study. This became known as "ethnography", following

19650-959: The style of Claude Lévi-Strauss . In countries of the British Commonwealth , social anthropology has often been institutionally separate from physical anthropology and primatology , which may be connected with departments of biology and zoology ; and from archaeology , which may be connected with departments of Classics , Egyptology , Oriental studies , and the like. In other countries (and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of cultural studies , ethnic studies , folklore , human geography , museum studies , sociology , social relations , and social work . British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics. The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

19800-414: The subject is presented with several trial windows that have blue squares or circles and one green circle or no green circle in it at all. In the conjunctive search, the subject is presented with trial windows that have blue circles or green squares and a present or absent green circle whose presence the participant is asked to identify. What is expected is that in the feature searches, reaction time, that

19950-536: The target and the distractors. In conjunctive searches where the target is absent, reaction time increases because the subject has to look at each shape to determine whether it is the target or not because some of the distractors if not all of them, are the same color as the target stimuli. Conjunctive searches where the target is present take less time because if the target is found, the search between each shape stops. The semantic network of knowledge representation systems have been studied in various paradigms. One of

20100-459: The technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz , Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow , The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within

20250-428: The text helped to highlight the various epistemic and political predicaments that many practitioners saw as plaguing ethnographic representations and practices. Where Geertz's and Turner's interpretive anthropology recognized subjects as creative actors who constructed their sociocultural worlds out of symbols, postmodernists attempted to draw attention to the privileged status of the ethnographers themselves. That is,

20400-483: The time, the field was dominated by "the comparative method". It was assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils" that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It

20550-469: The topic being studied. Ethnography relies greatly on up-close, personal experience. Participation, rather than just observation, is one of the keys to this process. Ethnography is very useful in social research. An inevitability during ethnographic participation is that the researcher experiences at least some resocialization. In other words, the ethnographer to some extent “becomes” what they are studying. For instance, an ethnographer may become skilled at

20700-529: The two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily reflect fully the content of the disciplines these cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford), changed their name to reflect the change in composition; others, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, became simply Anthropology. Most retain

20850-588: The use of kinship charts is seldom employed. In order to make the data collection and interpretation transparent, researchers creating ethnographies often attempt to be "reflexive". Reflexivity refers to the researcher's aim "to explore the ways in which [the] researcher's involvement with a particular study influences, acts upon and informs such research". [Marvasti, Amir & Gubrium, Jaber. 2023. Crafting Ethnographic Fieldwork: Sites, Selves & Social Worlds. Routledge. Despite these attempts of reflexivity, no researcher can be totally unbiased. This factor has provided

21000-454: The ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities. During this period Gluckman was also involved in a dispute with American anthropologist Paul Bohannan on ethnographic methodology within the anthropological study of law. He believed that indigenous terms used in ethnographic data should be translated into Anglo-American legal terms for the benefit of the reader. The Association of Social Anthropologists of

21150-497: The word cognitive itself dating back to the 15th century, attention to cognitive processes came about more than eighteen centuries earlier, beginning with Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his interest in the inner workings of the mind and how they affect the human experience. Aristotle focused on cognitive areas pertaining to memory, perception, and mental imagery. He placed great importance on ensuring that his studies were based on empirical evidence, that is, scientific information that

21300-408: The work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss , Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders ) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known as structural functionalism , which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in

21450-415: The world. It links human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture. The scopes of these two disciplines intersect in the field of cognitive development . The following part of the section shows the significance of their co-research for understanding the processes that constitute society. According to Sir Edward Tylor: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense,

21600-547: Was a movement known as cognitivism in the 1950s, emerging after the Behaviorist movement viewed cognition as a form of behavior. Cognitivism approached cognition as a form of computation, viewing the mind as a machine and consciousness as an executive function. However; post cognitivism began to emerge in the 1990s as the development of cognitive science presented theories that highlighted the necessity of cognitive action as embodied, extended, and producing dynamic processes in

21750-419: Was an influential American pioneer in the realm of psychology. Her work also focused on human memory capacity. A common theory, called the recency effect , can be attributed to the studies that she conducted. The recency effect, also discussed in the subsequent experiment section, is the tendency for individuals to be able to accurately recollect the final items presented in a sequence of stimuli. Calkin's theory

21900-452: Was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim ’s sociology . Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon , whose orientation reflected the contemporary Parapsychologies of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolf Bastian , and Sir E. B. Tylor , who defined anthropology as a positivist science following Auguste Comte . Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as

22050-651: Was during this time that Europeans first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean for instance—although some of them believed it originated in Egypt . Finally, the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify—and rank—human beings based on difference. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and James George Frazer (1854–1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropologists in Great Britain . Although

22200-541: Was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteen European countries , supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences and by editing its academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologies Social . Departments of Social Anthropology at different universities have tended to focus on disparate aspects of

22350-482: Was not thought of as a cognitive process, but now much research is being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research is also focused on one's awareness of one's own strategies and methods of cognition, which is called metacognition . The concept of cognition has gone through several revisions through the development of disciplines within psychology. Psychologists initially understood cognition governing human action as information processing. This

22500-506: Was particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the British Empire and Commonwealth . From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies include The Nuer , by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard , and The Dynamics of Clanship Among

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