Browsing by Subject "Ethnology -- Methodology"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    A Truth with Points of View
    (2001) Leuschke, Kate
    My fieldwork in Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas, Mexico forms the base of this text which focuses on the production of ethnographic life histories. Several excerpts from my fieldnotes are included and analyzed through traditional anthropological and literature lenses. I look at the way life histories are related to the Crisis of Representation in anthropology, to linguistics, feminism, and autoethnography. Using my own work and the published life histories of Oscar Lewis, R.M. Keesing, Vincent Crapanzano, Elisabeth Burgos-Deray, and Ruth Behar, I claim that the model of a reader-author contract from literature studies can illuminate the processes involved in the production of an ethnographic life history. This contract must be extended to take into account the agency of the subject of the life history. I examine various aspects of the contract itself, manipulations of both the form and the content of a text which represents the encounter between the anthropologist and the subject. I claim that the primary way readers are able to engage with a text is through a sense of empathy and identification with one of the "characters." This identification can allow the reader to feel that they are part of an unmediated dialogue with the subject because they inhabit the character of the anthropologist. I call attention to the problems with this assumption and the ambiguous nature of identification as a tool of interpretation. Finally, I argue that identification and therefore other basic tenets of the reader-author-subject contract must be renegotiated in order to allow conversation to occur on equal terms between subject, anthropologist and reader of life histories.
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    Staging Interventions: Limitations and Advantages of Performance as Research
    (2019) Rodine, Theodora; Culbertson, Jacob
    Performance ethnography is a new approach to anthropological research that uses theatre to identify and critically examine power structures as they exist in everyday life. Researchers using this methodology aim to work with participants from the community they’re researching to resist oppressive systems of the academy and the community. With this focus on effecting change, performance ethnographers vastly expand the reach of ethnographic projects. As a consequence, these projects may fall short of the anthropologist’s high expectations for transformative work, and run the risk of reinforcing the researcher’s power over their subjects by prioritizing their own agenda. This thesis examines methodological interventions performance offers to ethnography using a few case studies, and argues that performance ethnography is not successful when it is used mainly to transform or liberate the subjects of research. For these interventions to be effective, anthropologists should recognize their limitations and use performance ethnography as an investigative and educational tool.
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    The Breaking Point: Land use and Sustainability in the Mayan City of Caracol.
    (2019) Frye, Joshua; Šešelj, Maja
    Right now, there are more people living in cities than outside of them. At the same time, the sustainability of our cities continues to become less and less certain. Low-density urban settlements have been held up by some as a model for how we could redesign and reimagine our current cities to solve the greatest challenges of the modern urban environment. The problem with using the low-density model is the ‘collapse’ that appears to have occured in the greatest examples of theses cities, most obviously the Classic Maya, and Greater Angkor. This Thesis aims to provide insight into how the agricultural component of Mayan low-density may have been a vital component that led to the ‘collapse’ of the Classic Maya. This project argues that the rigidity of agrarian systems in the Mayan City of Caracol led to an overtaxing of the land as population levels reached their peak exhausting the soil throughout the entirety of the urban polity. At the same time, changes in the trading systems of the region and the onset of a drought that strained the entire region. The factors came together to fracture the bonds of political power, and force individuals to leave the cities altogether.ing to resist oppressive systems of the academy and the community. With this focus on effecting change, performance ethnographers vastly expand the reach of ethnographic projects. As a consequence, these projects may fall short of the anthropologist’s high expectations for transformative work, and run the risk of reinforcing the researcher’s power over their subjects by prioritizing their own agenda. This thesis examines methodological interventions performance offers to ethnography using a few case studies, and argues that performance ethnography is not successful when it is used mainly to transform or liberate the subjects of research. For these interventions to be effective, anthropologists should recognize their limitations and use performance ethnography as an investigative and educational tool.