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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Simply History: A Review Of Recent Thought On Ethnography, Reflexivity And Auto/Ethnography, Denice J. Szafran
Simply History: A Review Of Recent Thought On Ethnography, Reflexivity And Auto/Ethnography, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Since its inception as a discipline, anthropology utilized fieldwork with methodologies of participant-observation, surveys/interviews, and archival research, to record information on cultures. Traditionally the researcher disseminated this information in the form of a monograph, theoretically framed and laden with data, aimed almost exclusively at interested parties within academe. Informants spoke to researchers, who in turn "translated" what they heard into information on the varied and various traits of that culture, conflating methodology with presentation into the concept of ethnography. The debate about how best to represent ethnographic realism as a totality of cultural experience began in the discipline several decades …
Reclaiming The Concept Of Culture: A Review Of Recent Thoughts On Cultural Invention And Cultural Change, Denice J. Szafran
Reclaiming The Concept Of Culture: A Review Of Recent Thoughts On Cultural Invention And Cultural Change, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Defining culture as the capacity for humans to symbolically classify, codify, and communicate their common experiences, Boas' "genius of a people" (Bunzl 2004), has yielded to popular understandings of culture as a bounded entity that exists discretely in the world. These latter notions are constructs arising from the imposition of Western cultural notions on examined societies. The concept of culture, once the exclusive tool of anthropological investigations and explanations, finds itself arrogated by "everybody everywhere," facing devaluation of its meaning and rendering it ineffective as an analytical tool, (Marcus 2008) yet reclaiming the more nebulous meanings of the term culture …