Dear Beata,

A classic thinker in cultural anthropology is the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who based his findings on field work with primitive peoples in the Brazilian Amazon. See his Elementary Structures on methodology, as well as The Savage Mind and Mythologiques. Lévi-Strauss lays the groundwork, although subsequent scholars have criticized his work as not empirically enough grounded itself.

Another classic and closer to fieldwork is Clifford Geertz (1973): The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Dear Beata, you can take a look at three different sources on the subject: a French anthropologist (Marc Augé), has carried out very interesting research on our contemporary culture. There is, of course, the classical book by Marvin Harris - The Development of Anthropology Theory-, and, on a different but very suggestive take, there is also Gregory Bateson's book on Three Steps...

To begin with…

Dear @Nelson, @Simon, @Paweł and @Carlos, 

I appreciate your answers a lot. Some indicated classical key works I already know but your entire support is indeed valuable and inspiring. Thank you :-)

Dear Beata,

In Spain, Vicente Verdú has written some interesting books on the particularities of contemporary culture and consumption. Most of them are published by Anagama. I do not know of any of them is published in English, though.

Thank you for support, dear @Luis. I'll be attentive to the name of the scientist you recommended. 

I found Clifford Geertz inspiring, Local Knowledge as well as The Interpretation of Cultures, but most important of all some decades back was Mary Douglas, with Purity and Danger and Implicit Meanings. Bourdieu's Outline of a theory of practice is seminal though a slog to read, but Nigel Barley's The Innocent Anthropologist is a pleasure. It is also helpful to get into the fieldwork monographs and experience the ways that other peoples can do and think. All the above are now rather old and may not be so exciting to younger generations, but as a historian rather than a positive scientist I think ideas retain some importance and work in layers, so are not simply 'out of date'.

Dear Peter, 

Thank you for the references and support. Your ideas seem interesting. Clifford Geertz as symbolic anthropologist is known to me but Mary Douglas and Nigel Barley not so much. Thanks again. 

Hi Beata,

Cultural anthropology is such a huge branch. I would advice you first to go through the different textbooks on cultural anthropology and focus on some basic theoretical concepts (enculturation, socialization, society, infrastructure, culture, etc.). Then, you need to find the best match of your interests in the study of culture today. In such way you will define your own approach and will build criteria which match your understanding of culture. However, you would not go deeply into cultural anthropology and its methodology if you do not have in mind your own case study.

Dear Lolita, 

Thank you for support and kind advices. As a matter of fact I'm not beginner in field preformances I mean - ethnographic researches, however I'm looking now for precise methodological references of criteria of cultural knowledge building.

I agree with your suggestions about the need of general precision own research interest and framework. Any researcher is obligated to face such issue. I'm doing field work (ethnographic researches) since 1999 in disability cultures in Poland. I'm still learnig in the field and my interest areas. 

I think there is no serious professional today you will engage him/herself with a reference to methodology of cultural knowledge building since we have been trying critically to reconsider what culture is and to build our own methodology based on our experience. It depends first of all what one understands under culture: everything what people do or only what they accept as value. Then, what is cultural knowledge? Some may believe it is just knowing the traditions of people (ethnographic approach), while other would think that knowing the traditions of people is just a background to obtain cultural knowledge, that means to analyze the meaning and function of these traditions/patterns (theoretical approach). I believe culture is really theory as science and a style of life as pattern. So, we study pattern to build culture. Then, methodology is always in a process of construction and reconstruction. If you go to my academia.edu links, there is my selected library together with my articles. One of the references there is to the philosophy of "thick and thin". Shortly, the main constructor of cultural knowledge is value. Then, probably you need the works by David Graeber who is one of the leading cultural anthropologists today.

Dear Lolita, 

I perfectly understand the process you have described as well as broad collection of culture definitions in cultural anthropology since Franz Boas. This however is not my key issue to decide me within anthropologic traditions. If there are clear criteria between theory after the research and just concept after field researches I would be delighted to know them even broader and more comprehensive  then Harry Wolcott described. He was quiet serious American anthropologist. I'm looking for such refrences. I greatly appreciate your contribution and recomendation of David Graeber. Warm Regards. Beata

While it's not directed at your question, Kenneth Pike’s Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, originally published in 1954, has a lot of valuable information on how to derive valid analytic units for specific cultures based on a combination of empirical observation and elicitation from “insiders”. This is the work where the etic/emic distinction was first proposed, but few anthropologists have read it today, which is a shame, because the distinction as Pike proposed it is far more useful than the watered down and distorted version most anthropologists end up using.

Dear Arle, 

Thank you for comment. I appreciate greatly you answer. 

Dear researcher Lommel,

In fact when we read the popular writers from 20th century, in almost every one author's works we can find something valuable (as an original idea or reproduction). My understanding was that Beata was looking for a new complete concept and I tried to explain that there is no such in cultural anthropology (the contemporary writers mostly replicate or prefer case studies with specific theoretical applications). Now the question sounds to me more like references "to which key words" that will help her to gather historiography for eventual critical analysis. I believe very production will be cultural cognition since this term has been used by different disciplines including but not limited to critical cultural studies, anthropology, theory, etc. The other key word which may bring good amount of partially contributing works  is socialization. I will not include culture since this is an ocean and just the definition of culture needs today multivolume encyclopedia. Etic/emic is also a cross-disciplinary opposition and new works from the field of education and psychology may help cultural anthropology.

L.

Dear Lolita, 

Well, the answer of @Arle and his understanding is valuable and he seems reading between lines. Btw. perhaps I should formulate my question in different way. My analysis are not concerning  de facto historiography and it's critical  analysis but epistemological and methodological issues of theories  or concepts produced after field research (as for ex. participant observations,ethnographies) from emic/etic persppectives. Both of your comments - your and Arle's are interesting and provoking thinking. Thank you.

Thank you Beata,

I was indeed trying to read between the lines on this question a bit :-)

I should add that what is valuable in Pike’s methodology is that he provides methodological considerations for how to identify relevant categories and distinctions in a culture with the materials at hand. While Pike was opposed to the dominant behaviorist/positivist strain in anthropology and linguistics of his time (for instance, he considered elicitation a perfectly valid tool in fieldwork at a time when most researchers thought that elicitation “contaminated” their findings), his methods are actually well suited for analyzing culture after field work since he proposes formal characteristics of conceptual distribution that are well worth considering when assessing the validity of concepts produced after field work when you are trying to make sense of what you have seen.

Contrary to almost universal belief, Pike did not propose etic and emic as a dichotomy and did not tie the concepts to outsiders and insiders directly, but rather proposed the distinction as being between description of observable behavior (accessible to outsiders, of course) and the meaningful distinctions within a system of behavior. He was actually very careful to point out that insiders might not be the best judges of behavior in all cases and that operative cultural distinctions might be opaque to insiders, so when he spoke of emic concerns he was actually speaking of system-internal understanding, but with the system given a positive ontological status, even if it is not understood by anyone who lives within it. This is an important point that most of those who have applied his concepts have missed, and that is why I think returning to his writings may be very useful to your question, since his distinction has a direct methodological bearing on your question. His guidelines for evaluating proposed distinctions and understanding relations apply to any sort of material that is presumed to reflect a system of behavior.

Dear Beata,

We may need a video-conference for this issue. How will you go in field without knowing the basic theories and methodologies? We always go in the field with our methodology and theories where we test what we know and update what does not fit our theory/methodology. Participant observation, ethnographies, emic/etic are all theories that are known, have been tested and updated in the field. After the field work of course, everybody makes models, so the general term is modeling - modeling culture from the perspectives of the new field results. But to model culture, one needs theoretical components. Exactly these theoretical components are different through time and historiographies. So, if you want to construct new cultural knowledge based on field research, it can happen through a critical analysis of selected cultural concepts (e.g. materialism vs cognition) and embedding the results into the theoretical models of interpretation of the field world. Anthropological approach is different than ethnographic, for instance. If you want to construct anthropological models, you will be interested in the universal components as cross-cultural/universal as the main constructors of the cultural knowledge. If you want to construct ethnographic models, then, you will reveal the ethnical component of the culture. Don't forget, that ethnography was a traditional discipline in the communist education (because of the ideology of multicultural nation), while today is getting popular in West, but in many cases the researchers use the world ethnography for cases which are cultural anthropology.

Thanks,

Lolita

Dear Arle, 

Excellent comment. I'm very happy with the informations and considerations made by Pike as well as with your interpretations of his research and scientific attitudes to data, field and cultural knowledge productions. I'm already seeking Pike's book to buy. :-)

His book is more focused on linguistic behavior than on anthropology writ large, so it won't seem to be a “how-to guide” for this topic, but still, the concepts are quite useful when extrapolated (as he intended them to be). You just have to look past his specific application to see how he is using the concepts methodologically.

Copies of the book (long out of print) are quite expensive (I've seen some for as much as ~200€, and others for perhaps 40€), but Google has scanned it and you should see if any library consortia you have access to might have it as an electronic text. I'm working with some people to try to get a free edition released, but that would be some months away at the very earliest. Good luck in getting a copy.

Dear Arle, 

Thank you for informations. Perhaps the libraries would have Pike's book. Warm Regards, Beata 

Dear Beata

I am late to your question, but not for lack of having pondered whether I should add my two cent's worth since mentioning one's own work is considered by academe a matter of 'self-advertising'. I finally decided to address your excellent question regardless the strictures and regardless the hazards.

Your question distinguishes, as indeed it should, between ethnography and ethnology, where you are concerned to ask about the role and kinds of methodology available to, and useful for for, ethnology. You could not possibly be more correct and more wise as well.

But academe, especially American academe, has proven yo be your, and my, worst enemy in this regard. Americans, ignorant of advances they themselves helped to usher forth in metaphysics, have since early last century curtailed any reliance on 'typology' on the seemingly reasonable premise that it is by definition 'static' and thus not able to properly and usefully model real issues, especially in culture.

When Mead and Benedict advanced their shame-guilt thesis in the 1930's they took care even then to avoid having it referred to as a 'typology', well aware of academic attitudes. And despite folks like E. R. Dodds (of cult classic The Greeks and the Irrational fame) who devoted two full chapters to their ideas as necessary for understanding the cultural changes in early Greek history, American academe torpedoed the entire project. I mean, they erased it from the earth and salted the ground that gave it rise. No one is allowed to venture into a typological (especially when based on dichotomies such as shame-guilt) methodology.

The political scientist husband of the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrum twice in a single short interview counseled against use of 'dichotomies' in the social sciences. Yet in the late nineteenth century the American philosopher Charles Peirce demonstrated that a recursive paradigm could be utilized as a DYNAMIC typological methodology that avoided the defects of the static progenitor. Coming to Harvard in his retirement, Alfred North Whitehead independently arrived at the same discovery of Peirce. So impressed was he that he found two of the best at Harvard and asked them to edit the Peirce papers, then in serious disarray. One of those two, Charles Hartshorne, allowed this author to stay  with him through the summer of 1997  at his home in Austin.

But American departments of philosophy proved even more conservative than their peers in other disciplines and refused to acknowledge, let alone advertise, the fruits of methodological advance of two of their own. Whence no one else in academe was wiser for their ignorance. I was to be the third person to independently arrive at the recursive dynamic typology and to write reams of material in its justification and unlike the prior two, establish its value in several signal contributions, not the least of which is the resurrection of the Mead-Benedict work in the modified form of an Honor-Dignity typology.

Now that I am officially a 'bad' person, please accept my apologies as I ask you to review three articles available here on my RG homepage: 1) An Honor-Dignity Binary (largely a survey of comparative cultural methodologies available); 2) The Belief-Reliance System (the mythic foundation giving rise to this typology) and 3) A New Cultural Binary (a content analysis of honor-based and dignity-based approaches from leaders of representative cultures from UN addresses).

I urge you also to examine answers I offer to questions, since typically I address those offering an opportunity to utilize the typology to illustrate cultural trends and tendencies that are necessary if we are to correctly address any number of cultural matters. The most recent is instructive, in response to Gwendolyn Alexis' question on Globalization and Regionalism.

I appreciate your interest in this area.

Charles

Dear Charles, 

Thank you for great answer with many issues inside. I need more time to think about, analyze and answer to your comment. I'll also read and review with pleasure papers, you indicated.

Warm Regards,

Beata 

Thank you for inspiration and support, dear Michelle. 

You might try my daughter, Mieka Ritsema, a Yale PhD in cultural anthropology.

Her email is [email protected].

Great idea dear Marc :-)

Sometimes also called social anthropology, cultural anthropology to the study of culture and human society deals.

Dear Beata.

It took me some time to finish this text thinking about this question. I hope this text will also be useful for you. (Sorry it's in Spanish)

Best wishes

Hugo 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311515465_Condiciones_para_hablar_de_ergodicidad_de_la_accion_un_estudio_sobre_las_propiedades_estadisticas_de_la_accion_con_respecto_a_sistemas_de_saberes_etico-ideologicos_y_a_otras_construcciones_notico-cult

Conference Paper Condiciones para hablar de ergodicidad de la acción: un estu...