Quotes About Ethnography

Strabo also described the sexual mores of the mountain tribes of Media (northwestern Iran): the men have up to five women and 'likewise the women believe it honorable to have as many men as possible and consider less than five a calamity.

Imagine if we natives went to the cemeteries in your cities and dug up your beloved relatives, pulled off rings, watches, and clothes, and called them artifacts, then carried the bones over to the university for study so we could understand you. Consider that there are more bones of native people in universities and museums for study, than there are those of us living.

I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human beings go about organizing political, economic, or family life, it's always the anthropologist who shows up to point out that there are people in Samoa or Tierra del Fuego or Burundi who do things exactly the other way around.

No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.

The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing."16

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.

Written with grace and thoroughly researched, One People, One Blood is an ethnography with a lot of heart that also sheds new light on a fascinating and fraught chapter in recent Jewish history.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head

spaces," places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of businesses because they want to generate income. But in the process, as close observers of the city such as Jane Jacobs and the Yale ethnographer Elijah Anderson have discovered, they help produce the material foundations for social life.

Why, then, is it so crucial to have ethnographies of urban policing? The answer to this question certainly becomes clearer now. It is not simply that ethnography provides a sort of immersion in the world of law enforcement, allowing us to understand what happens when the police are in the field. It is perhaps more importantly that it produces a vision of a world that has been made either invisible or opaque to most of us.

The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.

Sometimes an ethnographic inquiry will lead to new ways to use an existing technology or will generate new technologies.

the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.

Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as "portable ecology

In short, race making in the nineteenth century is also an artisanal project, as indebted to ornamental practice and material making as it is to the pseudobiology of early ethnography.

Pese a un mapamundi totalmente nuevo, el cometido de observar, examinar, interpretar y describir la filosofía y la existencia, el pensamiento y las condiciones de vida de tres cuartas partes de la humanidad, sigue -igual que en el siglo XIX- en manos de un reducido grupo de especialistas: antropólogos, etnógrafos, viajeros, periodistas…

I'm not sure that I care for the idea of strangers examining my daily habits and folkways, studying my language, inspecting my costume, questioning me about my religion, classifying my artifacts, investigating my sexual rites and evaluating my chances for cultural survival. So I lived alone.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

anthropology

field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones)

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas