Critiques of Methods in Anthropology

Critiques of Methods in Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humans in past and present. It examines the cultures of mankind and how we all come to be where we are. It studies all facts of society and culture. To study the human culture and society anthropologist use verities of methods There are two general strategies used to study culture in anthropology, one is ethnography, in short the detailed study of one culture and the other is ethnology the comparative study of cultures ethnographies provide the data; ethnology draws generalizations.

New methods developed in anthropology. Anthropologists have been prodigious consumers and adapters of research methods, but have made important contributions to the big social science toolkit as well. Cluster analysis, for example, was developed first by anthropologists. It was quickly advanced by psychologists and is now used in all the sciences. The consensus model of culture was developed in the 1980s by two anthropologists and a psychologist and is used today in nursing, water management, civil engineering, and psychology.

The False Quall–Quant divided

There has always been a certain tension between those who would make anthropology a quantitative science and those whose goal it is to produce documents that convey the richness indeed, the uniqueness of human thought and experience. Alfred Kroeber’s son, Karl, recalls his father characterizing anthropology as the most humanistic of the sciences, while also the most scientific of the humanities a theme that Eric Wolf echoed in his wonderful overview of the field (1964, 88). For generations, students of cultural anthropology were asked early in their training to take a stand for interpretivism or positivism, humanism or science, qualitative or quantitative research. The mixed methods movement across the social sciences is this generation’s response to this false choice.

Romancing the Methods

Malinowski’s introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). It is justly famous because, as Musante says, it established the importance of long-term participant observation as a strategic method for field research on other cultures. No peering off the veranda at the natives for Malinowski. Participant observation is an important method in anthropology but, as Musante points out, it is one of many methods used in fieldwork. By the time Malinowski went to the Trobriands, Notes and Queries on Anthropology the fieldwork manual produced by the Royal Anthropological Institute. The book is still full of useful, late-model advice about how to conduct a census and what questions to ask about sexual orientation, infanticide, food production, warfare, art. The book is just a treasure—must reading for anyone interested in learning about field methods.

Anthropology- The Original Research Methods Discipline:

In the 1920s, leading sociologists were concerned with moving their discipline away from an emphasis on social reform—away from the study of what ought to be and toward the study of what is. If the public were ever to trust social science, said Carl Taylor, then the emphasis had to be on “exact and quantitative expressions and measurements. This, he said, required “technologies which will reduce observations to a comparative basis”. The technology of choice, said Taylor, was the social survey, a method dating at least to John Howard’s monumental, comparative study of prisons. Rivers continued his work in anthropology and his development of the genealogical method with his research on the Toads of India (Rivers 1906). He developed what he called the “method of indirect corroboration. This method involves “obtaining the same information first in an abstract form and then by means of a number of concrete instances. Rivers discussed his selection of informants, how he came to know that one of his informants had lied to him, the pros and cons of paying informants for their time, the need for getting information from many informants rather than just from a trusted few, and the importance of using the native language in field research. In this point by the time the first Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology was published in 1970, the concern for methods in anthropology, including survey methods, was already a hundred years old.

Methods Belong to All of Us

The tradition continues today in the pages of the journal Contemporary Ethnography, which began in 1972 under the title Urban Life and Culture. Participant observation today is absolutely ubiquitous in the social sciences. It has been used in recent years by political scientists. Among the salutary results of this disciplinary free-for-all is a continually growing body of literature, including a lot by anthropologists, about participant observation itself. There are highly focused studies, full of practical advice, and there are poignant discussions of the overall experience of fieldwork.

Anthropologists today are more likely to study investment bankers on Wall Street (Ho 2009) or open-air markets in Italy (Black 2012) or urban gangs than they are to study isolated tribal peoples. Today, the differences within anthropology and sociology with regard to methods are more important than the differences between the social sciences. There is an irreducible difference, for example, between those of us for whom the first principle of inquiry is that reality is constructed uniquely by each person and those of us who start from the principle that external reality awaits our discovery through a series of approximations. There is also an important difference between those of us who seek to understand human phenomena in relation to differences in beliefs and values and those of us who seek to explain human thought and behavior as the consequence of external forces.

Anthropology: The Humanistic, Positivistic, Interpretive Science

Anthropology was built by empiricists, including many who understood that reducing people to words was no better than reducing them to numbers and who did both with aplomb. Franz Boas took his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Kiel, with mathematics and geography as his minors. When he turned his attention to anthropology, he advocated a historical, particularizing approach, but he did not abandon numbers. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative is often used as a cover for talking about the difference between science and humanism, but that’s a mistake. Lots of scientists do their work without numbers, and many scientists whose work is highly quantitative consider themselves to be humanists. Neither quantitative nor qualitative researchers have the exclusive right to strive for objectivity; neither humanists nor scientists have a patent on compassion, and empiricism is as much the legacy of interpretivism and idealists as it is of positivists and materialists.

Humanism is often used as a synonym for humanitarian or compassionate values and a commitment to the amelioration of suffering. The myth that science is the absence of these values is truly pernicious. Humanism sometimes means a commitment to subjectivity—that is, to use our own feelings, values, and beliefs to achieve insight into the nature of human experience. This kind of humanism is, of course, the foundation of many clinical disciplines as well as the foundation of participant observation ethnography. It is not something apart from social science. It is a method used by idealists and materialists alike. Humanism sometimes means an abiding appreciation of and search for the unique the unique in human experience and the unique in culture. If the rest of social science was the search for regularities, then anthropology was the search for exceptions. It is a trim that one cannot fully know someone else’s life without living that person’s life.

Permanent Methodological Eclecticism

Anthropology has always been an eclectic discipline with regard to methods, but anthropologists increasingly adopted the full range of social research methods after 1970. This was not an accident. In 1970, most Ph.D.-level anthropologists went into academic jobs; by 1975, most did not, and nonacademic employment has been the norm ever since.

the expansion was irrepressible. By 1970, the number of anthropology Ph.D. had jumped to a heady 195, but that was just the beginning. By 1974, all those new Ph.D.-granting departments were filled with assistant professors training thousands of graduate students—and awarding over 400 Ph.D. degrees per year. With the expansion complete, all those assistant professors were in place and there were no new jobs in the academy. The thousands of Ph.D. in anthropology who were not in academe were not out of work. On the contrary. During the early, tough years of the 1970s and 1980s, young Ph.D. anthropologists from all four fields knocked on and eventually opened, many doors. They rewrote their résumés and competed successfully for jobs in medical schools, business schools, schools of agriculture, and other parts of the university. They also competed successfully for jobs in industry and government. They joined consulting firms and opened their own firm, specializing in international market research, in training executives for overseas assignments, in rapid rural assessment for health care delivery programs, in developing ecotourism the list is as big as the hunger and imagination of the pioneers themselves.

The 1970–2000 drought in academic jobs was as severe in sociology as it was in anthropology, but in sociology, the effects were quite different. As anthropologists competed for nonacademic jobs, they were forced to be more explicit about their methods. Program administrators were accustomed to hiring social scientists whose methods and products were known commodities. It was the anthropologists who had to make the adjustment, not the sociologists, psychologists, and economists.

By and large, the result was a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative approaches a synthesis that we see accelerating today under the rubric of “mixed methods” In the absence of, say, a few thousand new academic jobs for anthropologists, the continued move toward sophisticated methodological eclecticism is permanent.