Reflexivity and Modern Works of Anthropology
The role of reflexivity in Anthropology has changed a great deal over time. The effects of doing ethnography on the ethnographer was not considered an important mode of inquiry in the past. While inevitably, going to far distant lands and living with a culture so different from your own will at least cause the ethnographer to reflect on personal issues but most likely will cause profound changes in the way he or she will view the world. But in the past these changes were not important. What was necessary for the ethnographer to do in the past was to document a culture break it down structurally and quantify the observations made. The reflexive nature of his or her experiences were of little or no importance to the anthropological community. But over the years this has changed tremendously and Anthropology concerns itself more and more with the interactions between the ethnographer and his or her informants and the changes that occur in both due to the research being conducted. The scope of this paper will be to show this transition and also why it occurred.
The role of the Anthropologist in the past has been to document other cultures in order so the colonial authorities could better know how to rule them this is apparent in Bronislaw Malinowski's essay on the Trobriand islanders. He said, "The ethnographer has in the field, according to what has just been said, the duty before him of drawing up all the rules and regularities of tribal life; all that is permanent and fixed; of giving an anatomy of their culture, of depicting the constitution of their society. But these things, though crystallized and set, are nowhere formulated. There is no written or explicitly expressed code ...
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... not to say that a "scientific" documentation of the structure of the culture being studied should be forgotten about. But rather instead of being the main point of concern (as with Malinowski) it should be used to strengthen the arguments expressed by the author. Also as done with many other forms reflexivity should be able to be expressed in more abstract ways instead of just simply stating how you were effected and vice versa. But overall I think reflexivity is a good thing for Anthropological writing.
In conclusion, anthropology has come long way in the past few generations, at least in the sense of the writings produced by the students of this field. But perhaps this is due to the audience who reading the works and not the anthropologists doing the research. In any case reflexivity is definitely more openly expressed in the more modern works of Anthropology.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is about a girl who struggles finding her true self. Esperanza sees the typical figures like Sally and Rafaela. There is also her neighbor Marin shows the “true” identity for women on Mango Street. She also sees her mother is and is not like that at the same time. The main struggle that Esperanza has is with beauty. This explains why most of the negative people that Esperanza meets on Mango Street, and her gender, helped her see the mold she needed to fill in order to give herself an identity.
In the book titled Around the World in 30 Years, Barbara Gallatin Anderson’s makes a precise and convincing argument regarding the acts of being a cultural anthropologist. Her humor, attention to detail, and familiar analogies really allow for a wholesome and educating experience for the reader. Her credible sources and uniform writing structure benefits the information. Simply, the book represents an insider’s look into the life of a cultural anthropologist who is getting the insider’s look to the lives of everybody
Overall, Esperanza experienced multiple events that shaped her into the person she is. The experiences she had built the foundation for what she values by exposing her to the world around her. By moving to the house on Mango Street and experiencing the traumatic events along with the social norms Esperanza became the person she wanted to be even when the circumstances weren’t in her
Discrimintaion and equality in society is faced amongst people every day. One certain subject that seems to get most of this attention is whether or not homosexual couples should be able to adopt. Same sex couples should be able to adopt children for many reasons. Children that are raised by same sex parents are predominantly taught to be more open minded, have a greater sense of tolerance, and are thought of to be role models for equality in relationships and life. Most would say that these children will face issues regarding their parents sexual orientation, but this is not so. Children of same sex parents have studied to show very few differences in achievement, mental health, and social function as a child that is raised in a heterosexual household. Same sex parents will allow their child to express themselves through different talents and other attributes that there child seems to be indulged in. These children are often showing more loving, nurturing ,and outgoing behaviors that is exposed to them through gay parenting.
Anthropological researchers have considerable moral and ethical standards by which their work must be conducted in order to preserve the accuracy and the posterity of the information gathered during the study and also to the persons or cultures of which they study. These two important parts of anthropology – the research and those being researched – can be conflicting. The Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association presents itself as a body of guidelines for discussing these ethical and moral conflicts. This allows for researchers in the field of anthropology to have a foundation for understanding what decisions must be made regarding these ethical and moral conflicts and to whom the disclosures of those decisions should be made.
Social rejection can be a very important topic to look at when making your decision towards gay and lesbian adoption, but another thing that also needs a lot of focus the behavior of the child. Will the change make him/her grow in a positive way, or will it simply make them take wrong actions.
In recent years, same-sex relationships have become more encompassing in US society. State legislation is changing such as accepting gay marriages, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and legal gay adoptions; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is becoming public. Gay-headed families, like heterosexuals, are diverse and varying in different forms. Whether a created family is from previous heterosexual relationships, artificial insemination, or adoption, it deserves the same legal rights heterosexual families enjoy. Full adoption rights needs to be legalized in all states to provide a stable family life for children because sexual orientation does not determine parenting skills, children placed with homosexual parents have better well-being than those in foster care, and there are thousands of children waiting for good homes.
Culture is beautifully complex. Cultural practices naturally, therefore, are made up of intricate implicit and explicit thoughts and behaviours. Participant-observation is at the centre of anthropological research because it allows the anthropologist to experience rather than read. Bronislaw Malinowski, regarded as the father of participant-observation, created a scientific framework for how research could be conducted in the field. This framework has evolved as anthropology has changed over the ages. In this essay, I will compare and contrast the central premises of Malinowski’s 1922 book Argonauts of the Western Pacific and a contemporary anthropologist Nancy Kalow’s article Living Dolls which reflects on the participant-observation she carried
“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and how we grow through our life experiences. In her personal, Cisneros depicts Esperanza Cordero’s coming-of-age through a series of vignettes about her family, neighborhood, and personalized dreams. Although the novel does not follow a traditional chronological pattern, a story emerges, nevertheless, of Esperanza’s search to discover the meaning of her life and her personal identity. The novel begins when the Cordero family moves into a new house, the first they have ever owned, on Mango Street in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza is disappointed by the “small and red” house “with tight steps in front and bricks crumbling in places” (5). It is not at all the dream-house her parents had always talked about, nor is it the house on a hill that Esperanza vows to one day own for herself. Despite its location in a rough neighborhood and difficult lifestyle, Mango Street is the place with which she identifies at this time in her life.
Homosexuality is becoming more and more accepted and integrated into today’s society, however, when it comes to homosexuals establishing families, a problem is posed. In most states, homosexuals can adopt children like any other married or single adult. There are many arguments to this controversial topic; some people believe that it should be legal nationally, while others would prefer that is was banned everywhere, or at least in their individual states. There are logical reasons to allow gays to adopt children, but for some, these reasons are not enough. The main issue really is, what is in the best interest of the child? This type of problem isn’t really one with causes, effects, and solutions, but one with pros and cons. Like any other adoption situation, a parent prove themselves to be responsible and capable enough to raise a child on their own, or with a spouse.
While studying history, and even while living life in the present, considering and understanding perspective is of the utmost importance. Every individual carries with them biases, biases that affect and are affected by the experiences they have. Groups of individuals’ biases collectively join and form ethnocentrism, a seemingly inescapable phenomenon existing in the 16th century as well as the 21st. Perspective has the ability to warp one’s take on the smallest of issues; however, instead of rejecting a culture that through one’s perspective seems foreign, odd, wrong, one can utilise it to find some greater truth about their own culture.
“The anthropologist is a human instrument studying other human beings”. This quote can only be described as extremely relevant when reading McHugh’s ethnography, a detailed analysis on the Gurung people of Nepal. She involved herself emotionally, physically, and mentally during her stay, portraying what it’s like and what it takes to study other people from an outsider’s point of view. The relationships McHugh created throughout her stay deepened her understanding and paved the way for her fieldwork as she dived into the unknown.
Marcus and Fischer dismiss these practices and suggest using “multiple other-cultural references” to prevent “simplistic better-worse” judgements (1986:139). In order to evoke a “common capacity for communication” and “shared membership in a global system”, Marcus and Fischer propose two techniques for cultural criticism (1986:139): defamiliarization by epistemological critique and defamiliarization by cross-cultural juxtaposition (1986:137-38). The authors emphasize the importance of ethnographies that are “equally committed in their own contexts and equally engaged in cultural criticism” (Marcus and Fischer 1986:139). Marcus and Fischer coincide with critiques of early anthropology, as they call out the importance of equal study of cultures within a global context and not solely singular studies of ‘exotic’ or ‘inferior’ cultures. Marcus questions previous modes of anthropological study as James Clifford does in his inquiry into “ethnographic authority” (Clifford 1983:121). Clifford states, the “predominant mode of modern fieldwork authority is signaled: “You are there, because I was there”” (1983:118). Clifford dispels this dominating you vs. me opposition between
Since its inception, the academic discipline of anthropology has gone through constant paradigm shifts. In the nineteenth century, anthropology began as a nomothetic study based upon the development of cultures and societies through the process of evolution. Later on, several anthropologists particularly Franz Boas shifted the nomothetic approach of American anthropology into an idiographic approach, which focuses on assessing the development of cultures individually as their own separate entity. (Moore 2012:161) In the twentieth century, however, anthropology ushered in another paradigm shift. Several American anthropologists during this time, valued empirical data rather than applying the idiographic or the “Boasian” approach into their
Cultural relativism has long ben a key concept in anthropology. This term asserts the idea that because each culture holds its own values and practices. The most important aspect of cultural relativism is that one should not make any value judgments concerning cultural differences. Those in the field of anthropology stress that the study of customs and norms should be value-free, and that the appropriate role of the anthropologist is that of the observer and the recorder. When in the field it is imperative to withhold one’s own values and control one’s spontaneous reactions to a number of exotic phenomena. If an anthropologist in the field simply can not keep their own values and reactions to themselves, they will truly not learn or understand