Chapter Overview

Traditionally, doing anthropology has required field work in another society. The firsthand, personal study of local cultural settings is ethnography. Ethnographers work in natural communities. They form personal relationships with local people as they study their lives. Interview schedules may be used to guide interviews, ensuring that the ethnographer collects comparable information from everyone. Ethnographers work closely with key consultants on particular areas of local life. Life histories document personal experiences with culture and culture change. Genealogical information is particularly important in societies in which principles of kinship, descent, and marriage organize social life. Longitudinal research, often by a team, is the systematic study of an area or field site over time.

Archaeological anthropologists also work in teams and across time and space. Typically, archaeologists combine both local (excavation) and regional (systematic survey) perspectives. Like modern ethnographers, they recognize that sites are not discrete and isolated, but part of larger social systems. Anthroplogists recognize ethical obligations to their scholarly field, to society, and to the human species, other species, and the environment.

Traditionally, anthropologists worked in small-scale societies; sociologists, in modern nations. How does survey research, which typifies sociology, differ from ethnography? With more literate respondents, survey researchers use questionnaires, which research subjects fill out. Sociologists study samples to make inferences about a larger population. The diversity of social life in modern nations requires that even anthropologists adopt some survey procedures. However, anthropologists also retain the intimacy and firsthand investigation characteristic of ethnography.