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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (9844)	5/25/1999 9:25:00 PM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Well, first I have to insert a disclaimer: just as you were never fond of archaeology, I was never overly fond of ethnography. For many of the doubts you raised. Modern ethnography is really a race against the clock; it is an attempt to "preserve" disappearing cultures on paper before they are gone. This brings up what I percieve to be the central flaw of participant oberservation, a decided limitation on the time available to research, both from objective reasons (outside influences eroding tradition, and the human lifespan) as well as more subjective ones (the amount of time necessary to gain the trust of the people being studied.) Given that ethnography is aimed at recording the totality of a culture, it is not reasonable to expect that it can ever meet its expectations. Besides the necessity of restricting one's research to a specific goal or area, it takes an enormous amount of time to merely be accepted by those you are studying, which introduces a real limiting factor on how much can be recorded. Chagnon for example had to spend many years, most of his adult life, in the jungle with the Yanomamo. I think he said that he had to throw out his first three or four years worth of work because it was all false, the natives had not accepted him yet, and were "playing" with him. My professor in college who I did research with in Ecuador, had spent the past 20 years off and on in Guayaquil and still had only three families of reliable informants (hamster intestine stew, by the way, is as unpleasant as it sounds). So I think the real delineating factor in ethnographic research is just brute time. There is a limited amount of time to do a limited amount of research, and I think this is a real detriment to the field. Given that research also tends to run in "fads," like all academics, it very well may be that the sort of research you brought up has never been considered, or has not been able to get funding (aHA! the evil grant monster). Your objection is well founded though, and I agree that a lot of ethnography is centered around the old standby of kinship/worship/subsistence. But there are some very interesting "consciousness" studies, one of the more interesting I read was by a lady whose name Ive forgotten, dealing with how food reflects self-perceptions of ethnicity in south america (rice is high class and Spanish, the potato is low class Quechnya). Ive always had a more superficial interest in ethnography however, and dont know the hard literature well enough to make a defense of it. But in point, I agree with you. But I also think that the flaws come with the territory, and can be mitigated by peer review, even if that takes a generation as it has many times. Its still an infant discipline.