Any anthropologists out there?
Jun. 9th, 2010 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushnerAfter 3 days of intense & furious editing of everyone else's Bordertown stories, I am now working on my own. My character is a grad student in cultural anthropology, who had the bright idea of going to B'town to do field work among the elves (or Truebloods, as they call themselves). Ideally he'd go right into the Realm, but of course no human can pass the Border into there. It is known that elves living in B'town themselves cannot speak of certain details about their home (in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeem 's wonderful new story, this is referred to as "the Silencing") - but my guy is sure a Trained Anthropologist can ask the questions right and get real answers.
He is, unfortunately, wrong.....
But never mind that for now. My question: What is his Research Topic for his thesis? (I thought of "Kinship Systems amongst the Elves" - but then I'd have to write about Kinship systems, which was my least favorite class for the 2 yrs I did anthro as an undergrad). And how long would be reasonable for him to take doing fieldwork before he was expected to write it?
Also: this story takes place ca. 1998. Was there a fashionable area of research then? He's basically a fantasy geek who wants an excuse to go meet elves - but needs to impress his thesis advisor (so "kinship systems" would be hilariously apt, as it's dry as dust - but then I'd have to write about it - see above.)
coffeeem 's wonderful new story, this is referred to as "the Silencing") - but my guy is sure a Trained Anthropologist can ask the questions right and get real answers.He is, unfortunately, wrong.....
But never mind that for now. My question: What is his Research Topic for his thesis? (I thought of "Kinship Systems amongst the Elves" - but then I'd have to write about Kinship systems, which was my least favorite class for the 2 yrs I did anthro as an undergrad). And how long would be reasonable for him to take doing fieldwork before he was expected to write it?
Also: this story takes place ca. 1998. Was there a fashionable area of research then? He's basically a fantasy geek who wants an excuse to go meet elves - but needs to impress his thesis advisor (so "kinship systems" would be hilariously apt, as it's dry as dust - but then I'd have to write about it - see above.)
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 11:11 pm (UTC)(Came here via
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:16 pm (UTC)An Examination of The Silencing And It's Effect On Diffusion vs. Cultural Invention Disparities
Symbolism in Bordertown's Institutions
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:21 pm (UTC)Obviously, you know enough about the topic. But a layman reader is more interested about how the characters deal with the subject matter than the matter itself. :-)
Does that make sense? I hope so!
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:21 pm (UTC)If you're into bio-anth, you could go along the bent of their systems of healing?
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:34 pm (UTC)Or "Myths of the Elven People". Because everyone knows gods are mythical, right? (heh)
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:37 pm (UTC)Am I right in thinking that he needs to have a Thesis Topic, or is it enough for him to be doing fieldwork & hoping for something he'll be able to write up?
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 11:55 pm (UTC)Personally, I'd write this with the guy having the wrong end of the stick about some push-button issue (say, incest!) and the elves deciding to take the piss out of him by feeding him a long, long line of sensationalist rubbish. (Think Margaret Mead.)
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:58 pm (UTC)I suspect that would be "Semiotics".
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Date: 2010-06-09 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 12:01 am (UTC)(I want to say something kind of the equivalent of the "overseas business community of" but I'm blanking. But I like the cultural loadedness of dealmaking.)
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Date: 2010-06-10 12:01 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borderland_Series
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Date: 2010-06-10 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 12:05 am (UTC)And do you need a grant while you're there?
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Date: 2010-06-10 12:08 am (UTC)So he has his dodgy, all-wrong thesis subject, and he's convinced that he can find data to support it by actually going to Bordertown and doing Field Research. He has only read about Bordertown before.
Snigger.
Pick a subject that will not be obviously immediately wrong to the readers and it's even better ("Oh my god! I never even suspected the elves would do that!")...
(Btw, speaking of field researchers, have you guys read Otoyomegatari?)
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Date: 2010-06-10 12:12 am (UTC)Jiveacademic"no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 12:16 am (UTC)You need some kind of grant to support you, unless you're independently wealthy.
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Date: 2010-06-10 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 12:30 am (UTC)Queer Theory and economies were big research topics in the 90s-2000s and the use of kinship ties to manipulate power structures is always interesting. We also call it politics.
Anon
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Date: 2010-06-10 01:23 am (UTC)Don't make it kinship systems!
Date: 2010-06-10 01:25 am (UTC)Kinship systems weren't much talked about when I was in, so I figure you have two choices: go with something that's recently big, or make up your own.
It depends if your guy's an asshat or pretty good at his own culture. My own fondness is for marxian anthro, which focuses on families --started with Engels. In that case, it'd be the economic: how do elves divide labor, for example, or how are they changing as a result of... contact with Bordertown? The increase/decrease of child labor? whatever; I haven't seen the world building.
Oh, and just saw the fieldwork comment. Fieldwork would actually be much safer; anthropologists go into the field, do the work, and then come up with something they noticed. Which does NOT say they go in neutral. (one of my anthro profs told us that one out of three candidates go into the field and never come back; anthro majors have the worst record of "finishing' of any field.)
Or communication, anthro's historical base: something bland, like naming differences and political control or something. (ie Do different classes/genders/races/ages of elves have different courtesy terms,or do they pay attention to inflection etc. I'm a cultural studies person myself, so I'd be interested in, say, how art and cultural artifacts position elves in the world. (And yes, "position" is a verb for cultural studies folks, alas.)
I'd say choose the area of how humans live which interests you most and is plausible for your character, and then go from there concerning the questions. Then you'll give him questions the rest of us would perhaps see as reasonable and be surprised at the culture clash, and bingo! audience culture clash.
As to thesis -- is this master's or PhD? Because usually humanities degrees involve dissertation, and only master's students have theses. And those who have terminal degrees of PhDs wouldn't be impressed much at a master's thesis, though that fact might be useful to you.
Sorry this is so extensive -- I trod the mysterious culture of academia too many years.
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Date: 2010-06-10 01:49 am (UTC)Some ideas:
Language learning/Socialization was big recently (and I think continues to be so). Every culture has its own habits on how to teach children to speak (i.e., do you use baby-talk or not? Do you deliberately try to teach them words, or just let them pick it up by listening?), and different ideas of what is a "normal" rate of learning.
Sexuality is big.
There's a lot of people in my department are studying "media production" (though that may be a result of my department, rather than a discipline-wide trend, I'm not sure), which seems to mean studying art, documentaries, films, news, and other areas like that, people's relationship to them, how they're created and circulated, etc.
Medical anthropology is big. Different cultures have different ideas of what is a "disease" and what is "normal", how you should treat diseases, different expectations of what is and is not acceptable results, etc. This can also shade into studying effective ways to get medical knowledge out- for example, what is the best way to explain to different groups of people effective HIV prevention? This can also include specifically reproductive medicine- what do people think of birth control, abortion, fertility treatments, etc.
Nationalism processes- so, how do people come to think of themselves as a "nation"? Or an "ethnicity"? How does this change over time? This is especially popular in post-colonial situations.
Memory- how do people talk about important historical events? How "accurate" is it? What gets forgotten, and what gets remembered? In what ways is it remembered (official holidays, family stories, textbooks, novels, etc)?
Diasporas/migration - how do people who have left home talk about their old home vs their new home? Which place do they consider themselves part of? How do they differ from those who didn't leave (for instance, sometimes the people who leave are much more patriotic/conservative than people who stay, because they have an idealized version of "how it used to be")? How do they change to fit in?
Those are some of the big ones right now. Let me know if any of these sound interesting, and I can tell you more about them!
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Date: 2010-06-10 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 08:27 am (UTC)Material Culture is the thing!
Date: 2010-06-10 10:14 am (UTC)Also growing was war and refugee studies, so movements of displaced peoples (I think it was a bit early for tourism and eco-stuff), which would work with doing fieldwork at the border (not that I know a thing about this place), and also some attempts to pass through the border without permission for comparison purposes.
But the most fun was material culture studies, which draws conclusions about a society via their material artifacts. Read Howard 'Morphology' Morphy on the subject. Nicely familiar with the postmodern stuff, not enslaved to it, also writes well. The good thing about material culture is that you have an opportunity to draw all kinds of far-fetched and highly theoretical explanations about the use of an object, or just be very practical, and the amount of fieldwork could be short because you would want to collect a lot of objects to examine later (or photographs, which was the ethical thing to do).
Traditionally you would want to be 18 months to 2 years in the field, but the trend was certainly starting back then for very short, focused bursts of fieldwork, and also 'fieldwork at home', which was, of course, a lot cheaper.
Tina (FOAF)
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Date: 2010-06-10 11:54 am (UTC)I'm a Ph.D. candidate in folklore, which shares some territory with anthropology, so yes, I was going to say that this student would probably be using participant observation as one of his methods (also cutely described as "deep hanging out," or spending a lot of time with people, observing them and doing what they do, with an emphasis on analyzing their customs and beliefs and the underlying "why" of everything). It is common for people doing fieldwork--the process of gathering data in "the field," which can be a research location near or far from home--to use tape recorders or other recording devices when doing interviews or observing events, and then later transcribe those recordings (transcription is its own rite of passage, ugh!). Fieldworkers also generally keep field notes or a field journal, usually some kind of notebook in which they jot down names, native terms, the order in which events occur, and anything else they might need to clarify for the interviews or other information they're recording in a more "official" manner.
I also agree on the title, with Clever Phrase: Explanation in Longer Academese as the structure.
In addition to experiential and reflexive approaches, one research focus to incorporate might be native strategies, the idea that people use cultural traditions as strategies to navigate everyday life and specific events. So your student might discuss creative strategies for negotiating differential identities in Bordertown, meaning by that the residents (presumably elves) would have native terminology, stereotypes, and other ways of assessing insider vs. outsider (or local vs. global) identities when encountering people not from their ethnic group.
Which reminds me, another way of explaining what it is that cultural anthropologists and folklorists do is to try to understand the "insider" perspective and then analyze it using "outsider" terms. Ethnography--the process of writing about culture, usually informed by fieldwork--is essentially a special method for navigating distance and intimacy, playing between the two as a way of understanding other cultures (and our own).
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Date: 2010-06-10 01:00 pm (UTC)"The edge of the powerless: family, gender and labor among the elves of Bordertown".
Re: Material Culture is the thing!
Date: 2010-06-10 01:19 pm (UTC)I think Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, those types of places, were hot for fieldwork in the 1990s.
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Date: 2010-06-10 01:22 pm (UTC)E.g. Gender identity in Borderland and The Other: an analysis of X, Y and Z.
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Date: 2010-06-10 01:40 pm (UTC)Sprinkle in bits about how that might tie into the nature of B-Town itself, and that could be quite fascinating both story-wise and fictional thesis-wise. (Well, to me it would be.)
Former Cultural Anthropology Major here - how about collecting elf tales?
Date: 2010-06-10 04:55 pm (UTC)At any rate - my suggestion to you is that you have the guy travel to bordertown to collect oral narratives or stories. He should be a linguist - that was my problem, I'm not, so I ran into hurdles.
Also, I had to switch from fairy stories to ghost stories - because I couldn't get that many fairy stories.
There are a lot of cultural anthropologists who become trained folklorists. I know of one in South Carolina who collects Gullah stories.
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Date: 2010-06-10 05:44 pm (UTC)Re: Material Culture is the thing!
Date: 2010-06-10 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 11:59 pm (UTC)These days, I'd say an anthro thesis/dissertation would be structured less around a subject matter (e.g. kinship) and more around a theoretical project (e.g. postcolonialism). Borders are a fairly big concept, actually; I'd love to see a story that's about someone anthropologically exploring concepts of liminality, transgression, identity formation, etc, in the context of Bordertown.
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Date: 2010-06-12 09:09 am (UTC)Also, he's one of the first guys to do Field Work in B'town w/elves, so he thinks he's hot stuff & is about to blow the lid off modern anthro with this new "tribe" . . . .
excellent interesting cultural anthropology article from 1996
Date: 2010-06-12 04:35 pm (UTC)suggests topics family-influenced mating taboos and weapon + self defense ["Elf Defense" sorry :D] styles
even fashion as related to mixes of family
-jay sheckley
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Date: 2010-06-12 07:39 pm (UTC)Also typical cultural anthropology dissertation research time is a minimum of 10 months, from personal observation and peer chatter. It can go longer depending on the question, often developing relationships with local groups and individuals takes time before research can be adequately addressed.
I was an archaeology/biological anthropology grad student. I will think a bit more, see if anything else occurs to me, but I'm happy to talk further if you'd like.
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Date: 2010-07-27 06:59 am (UTC)e
(e-mail me directly at Kushner.Ellen at the usual gmaildotcom)