Page 1. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1977 ? 1977 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation ... more Page 1. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1977 ? 1977 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Bridging Levels of Systemic Organization1 by Robert A. Rubinstein and Charles D. Laughlin, jr. ...
Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. Edited by Rolland G. Pa... more Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. Edited by Rolland G. Paulston. New York: Garland. Xvi. 458 pp., 1996
Continuing the search for alternative forms of representation in anthropology and history that ha... more Continuing the search for alternative forms of representation in anthropology and history that has marked most of my career, and believing that there is more than one way to see and to show things, and therefore to know them, this article both cuts through and combines key elements of anthropology, history, ethnography, fiction, and poetics. The data are ethnographically correct and the lines are metered. Imagination is the glue, in this case applied precisely to personal experience with the physical landscapes described and to reporting as accurately and reliably as possible when faced with the challenges of knowing other people, especially when the prospects reach across boundaries of time and culture.
Manual de investigación cualitativa, Vol. 5, 2017 (El arte y la práctica de la interpretación, la evaluación y la presentación), ISBN 978-84-9784-312-6, págs. 164-251, 2017
A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll... more A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll. Most were presented at a symposium during the First Annual Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) meeting in 1972.
In I925, the 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on the island of Ta'u,... more In I925, the 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on the island of Ta'u, in American Samoa, to start her first fieldwork. Her ambitious project was to decide if "the disturbances which vex our adolescents [are] due to the nature of adolescence itself or to civilisation" (Mead I973 [i9281:6). She spent nine months with a study group of about 68 young Samoan girls. Recognizing the scientific control difficulties inherent in such studies and thereby reserving some rights of ceteris paribus, she concluded that Samoan youth faced nearly none of the disorientations and disruptions to life and psyche that vexed American youth in their comings of age; that this was largely to be explained by Samoans' relaxed attitudes toward adolescent sexual exploration and intercourse; that the differences between the two societies were testimony to the remarkable plasticity of human behavior; and that that plasticity was testimony to the triumph of culture over nature. Cultural anthropology, psychology, and Westem educational systems were put on notice to revise their theories and change their practices: biology was not destiny; racist theories of behavior could be abandoned; educational systems could be revised to accord with the newfound facts of this anthropological psychology; and the nature of adolescent turmoil was really the culture of adolescent turmoil set against a biological problem and therefore learned and shared behavior that could be unlearned, revised, channeled, and managed. Mead published the results of this study in i928 as Coming of Age in Samoa (see also Mead I969 [I930]). For reasons having to do less with the scientific community's satisfaction with her research than with the public flash of science in paradise,2 this book became a best seller and launched her on her career as a popular author and lecturer. In I983, Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist who has worked in another part of Samoa (the island of Savai'i, Westem Samoa) periodically since I943, published a substantive and theoretical challenge to Mead's thesis called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Although Mead had been dead for five years, her enormous popularity had kept her work in the public view. In anthropology, her Samoan research was still respected for its pioneering impact on the concept of culture and education and for its sharpening of values the field still holds today conceming culture and racism. It was also recognized as inadequate on several counts (she exaggerated the simplicity of Samoan society, for example, and her delivery of what she called "controlled comparison" science was in the best estimate weak) and had been relegated largely to discussions of disciplinary history by the time Freeman published his critique. So, contrary to Freeman (I984:I0I, I03, I05, II5), few anthropologists who knew Mead's Coming of Age were surprised when he claimed that it had "greatly underestimated the complexity of the culture, society, history, and psychology" of the Samoan people (p. 285 ).3 Whether or not it was completely wrong about Samoan adolescence was not easily established, but various critics began to draw the line when it was perceived that Freeman's criticism was itself overdrawn and, despite his disclaimers, a personal attack on Mead. Freeman found many of Mead's assertions on Samoan character, family values, and sexual behavior "preposterously false" (p. 288). He claimed that her "zealous adherence" to the procedural rule "that one should never look
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Nov 1, 2001
... BRADY, IVAN,Proem for the Queen of Spain, 520. BUI, DIEM-MY T.,Six Feet Tall: A One-Person... more ... BRADY, IVAN,Proem for the Queen of Spain, 520. BUI, DIEM-MY T.,Six Feet Tall: A One-Person Performance, 185. CLEETON, ELAINE R.,How Could a Mother...? Matricide and Text-Mediated Relations of Fam-ily Discourse, 430. ...
Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthr... more Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthropology: author-presence in ethnographic and analytic accounts and forms of ethnographic representation. Addressing both, I offer here an historical overview of my 1960s and 1970s fieldwork in the Pacific Islands country of Tuvalu in relation to (a) what I tried to accomplish at the time; (b) what actually worked out, what did not, and why; (c) what I have learned in the long run about the prospects of succeeding in those pursuits, including a sample of principles governing such narratives and how attention to them might facilitate the development of more robust and satisfying ethnographic accounts, especially when bound up in a mixed genre form I describe as an analytic memoir; and (d) comparisons with the fieldwork of Mariko Toshida, an award-winning current-generation researcher in the area.
Page 1. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1977 ? 1977 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation ... more Page 1. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1977 ? 1977 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Bridging Levels of Systemic Organization1 by Robert A. Rubinstein and Charles D. Laughlin, jr. ...
Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. Edited by Rolland G. Pa... more Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. Edited by Rolland G. Paulston. New York: Garland. Xvi. 458 pp., 1996
Continuing the search for alternative forms of representation in anthropology and history that ha... more Continuing the search for alternative forms of representation in anthropology and history that has marked most of my career, and believing that there is more than one way to see and to show things, and therefore to know them, this article both cuts through and combines key elements of anthropology, history, ethnography, fiction, and poetics. The data are ethnographically correct and the lines are metered. Imagination is the glue, in this case applied precisely to personal experience with the physical landscapes described and to reporting as accurately and reliably as possible when faced with the challenges of knowing other people, especially when the prospects reach across boundaries of time and culture.
Manual de investigación cualitativa, Vol. 5, 2017 (El arte y la práctica de la interpretación, la evaluación y la presentación), ISBN 978-84-9784-312-6, págs. 164-251, 2017
A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll... more A collection of essays that follows up on "Adoption in Eastern Oceania" by Vern Carroll. Most were presented at a symposium during the First Annual Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) meeting in 1972.
In I925, the 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on the island of Ta'u,... more In I925, the 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on the island of Ta'u, in American Samoa, to start her first fieldwork. Her ambitious project was to decide if "the disturbances which vex our adolescents [are] due to the nature of adolescence itself or to civilisation" (Mead I973 [i9281:6). She spent nine months with a study group of about 68 young Samoan girls. Recognizing the scientific control difficulties inherent in such studies and thereby reserving some rights of ceteris paribus, she concluded that Samoan youth faced nearly none of the disorientations and disruptions to life and psyche that vexed American youth in their comings of age; that this was largely to be explained by Samoans' relaxed attitudes toward adolescent sexual exploration and intercourse; that the differences between the two societies were testimony to the remarkable plasticity of human behavior; and that that plasticity was testimony to the triumph of culture over nature. Cultural anthropology, psychology, and Westem educational systems were put on notice to revise their theories and change their practices: biology was not destiny; racist theories of behavior could be abandoned; educational systems could be revised to accord with the newfound facts of this anthropological psychology; and the nature of adolescent turmoil was really the culture of adolescent turmoil set against a biological problem and therefore learned and shared behavior that could be unlearned, revised, channeled, and managed. Mead published the results of this study in i928 as Coming of Age in Samoa (see also Mead I969 [I930]). For reasons having to do less with the scientific community's satisfaction with her research than with the public flash of science in paradise,2 this book became a best seller and launched her on her career as a popular author and lecturer. In I983, Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist who has worked in another part of Samoa (the island of Savai'i, Westem Samoa) periodically since I943, published a substantive and theoretical challenge to Mead's thesis called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Although Mead had been dead for five years, her enormous popularity had kept her work in the public view. In anthropology, her Samoan research was still respected for its pioneering impact on the concept of culture and education and for its sharpening of values the field still holds today conceming culture and racism. It was also recognized as inadequate on several counts (she exaggerated the simplicity of Samoan society, for example, and her delivery of what she called "controlled comparison" science was in the best estimate weak) and had been relegated largely to discussions of disciplinary history by the time Freeman published his critique. So, contrary to Freeman (I984:I0I, I03, I05, II5), few anthropologists who knew Mead's Coming of Age were surprised when he claimed that it had "greatly underestimated the complexity of the culture, society, history, and psychology" of the Samoan people (p. 285 ).3 Whether or not it was completely wrong about Samoan adolescence was not easily established, but various critics began to draw the line when it was perceived that Freeman's criticism was itself overdrawn and, despite his disclaimers, a personal attack on Mead. Freeman found many of Mead's assertions on Samoan character, family values, and sexual behavior "preposterously false" (p. 288). He claimed that her "zealous adherence" to the procedural rule "that one should never look
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Nov 1, 2001
... BRADY, IVAN,Proem for the Queen of Spain, 520. BUI, DIEM-MY T.,Six Feet Tall: A One-Person... more ... BRADY, IVAN,Proem for the Queen of Spain, 520. BUI, DIEM-MY T.,Six Feet Tall: A One-Person Performance, 185. CLEETON, ELAINE R.,How Could a Mother...? Matricide and Text-Mediated Relations of Fam-ily Discourse, 430. ...
Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthr... more Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthropology: author-presence in ethnographic and analytic accounts and forms of ethnographic representation. Addressing both, I offer here an historical overview of my 1960s and 1970s fieldwork in the Pacific Islands country of Tuvalu in relation to (a) what I tried to accomplish at the time; (b) what actually worked out, what did not, and why; (c) what I have learned in the long run about the prospects of succeeding in those pursuits, including a sample of principles governing such narratives and how attention to them might facilitate the development of more robust and satisfying ethnographic accounts, especially when bound up in a mixed genre form I describe as an analytic memoir; and (d) comparisons with the fieldwork of Mariko Toshida, an award-winning current-generation researcher in the area.
Uploads