case study method in anthropology

Case study method in anthropology

Karen Sykes, Anthropology.

A paraphrase of Gluckman’s thoughts on the case study captures the essence of the method:

Anthropologists use ‘case’ in a slightly different way than some legal scholars or psychoanalysts, either of whom might use cases to illustrate their points or theories. Anthropologists often describe a case first, and then extract a general rule or custom from it, in the manner of inductive reasoning. Most often, the event is complex, or even a series of events, and we call these social situations, which can be analysed to show that the different conflictive perspectives on them are enjoined in the same social system (and not based in the assumption of cultural difference as a prima face condition of anthropological inquiry).

The case study, as a part of ‘situational analysis,’ is a vital approach that is used in anthropological research in the postcolonial world. In it we use the actions of individuals and groups within these situations to exhibit the morphology of a social structure, which is most often held together by conflict itself. Each case is taken as evidence of the stages in the unfolding process of social relations between specific persons and groups. When seen as such, we can dispense with the study of sentiment as accidental eruptions of emotions, or as differences of individual temperament, and bring depth to the study of society by penetrating surface tensions to understand how conflict constructs human experiences and gives shape to these as ‘social dramas’, which are the expressions of cultural life.

Experts/users at Manchester

The Case Study Method in Anthropology is used in many different research projects from ethnography of urban poverty, through studies of charismatic Christian movements, Cultural Property and in visual methods.

• Professor Caroline Moser  - Caroline Moser, Professor of Urban Development and Director of GURC uses variations of the case study in her uses of the participatory urban appraisal methods to conduct research into peace processes, urban violence, as well as climate change.
• Dr Andrew Irving  - Andrew Irving has used variations of the case study as social drama when examining life-events of his informants, as way to access their thoughts about immanence of death (which he calls interior knowledge).
• Professor Karen Sykes  - Karen Sykes originally experimented with the use of case study method in order to understand how people came to see cultural property rights as a legal device to protect their cultural life from exploitation. Her book “Culture and Cultural Property in the New Guinea Islands Region: Seven Case Studies” was co-authored with J. Simet and S. Kamene and features the work of five female students at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Key references

Evens, T. M. S. and D. Handelman (2007) The Manchester School: Practice and ethnographic praxis in anthropology, Oxford: Berghahn. This book deals with the Case Study method as the cornerstone of all of the Manchester School methodologies.

Turner, V. (1953) Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Manchester University Press for the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. Turner’s first use of the social drama as a version of the case study method.

Mitchell, C. (1983) Case and Situation Analysis, Sociological Review, 31: 187 – 211. The definitive paper on Situational Analysis which can be compared to van Velson on the extended case method.

Van Velson, J. (1967) The Extended Case Method and Situational Analysis in Epstein, A. L., 1967, The Craft of Anthropology, London: Tavistock. This edited book collected chapters by Manchester School members on various approaches to anthropology.

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Case Study Research

• First Online: 29 September 2022

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• Robert E. White   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8045-164X 3 &
• Karyn Cooper 4  

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As a footnote to the previous chapter, there is such a beast known as the ethnographic case study. Ethnographic case study has found its way into this chapter rather than into the previous one because of grammatical considerations. Simply put, the “case study” part of the phrase is the noun (with “case” as an adjective defining what kind of study it is), while the “ethnographic” part of the phrase is an adjective defining the type of case study that is being conducted. As such, the case study becomes the methodology, while the ethnography part refers to a method, mode or approach relating to the development of the study.

The experiential account that we get from a case study or qualitative research of a similar vein is just so necessary. How things happen over time and the degree to which they are subject to personality and how they are only gradually perceived as tolerable or intolerable by the communities and the groups that are involved is so important. Robert Stake, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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A Case in Case Study Methodology

Christine Benedichte Meyer

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration

Meyer, C. B. (2001). A Case in Case Study Methodology. Field Methods 13 (4), 329-352.

The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive view of the case study process from the researcher’s perspective, emphasizing methodological considerations. As opposed to other qualitative or quantitative research strategies, such as grounded theory or surveys, there are virtually no specific requirements guiding case research. This is both the strength and the weakness of this approach. It is a strength because it allows tailoring the design and data collection procedures to the research questions. On the other hand, this approach has resulted in many poor case studies, leaving it open to criticism, especially from the quantitative field of research. This article argues that there is a particular need in case studies to be explicit about the methodological choices one makes. This implies discussing the wide range of decisions concerned with design requirements, data collection procedures, data analysis, and validity and reliability. The approach here is to illustrate these decisions through a particular case study of two mergers in the financial industry in Norway.

In the past few years, a number of books have been published that give useful guidance in conducting qualitative studies (Gummesson 1988; Cassell & Symon 1994; Miles & Huberman 1994; Creswell 1998; Flick 1998; Rossman & Rallis 1998; Bryman & Burgess 1999; Marshall & Rossman 1999; Denzin & Lincoln 2000). One approach often mentioned is the case study (Yin 1989). Case studies are widely used in organizational studies in the social science disciplines of sociology, industrial relations, and anthropology (Hartley 1994). Such a study consists of detailed investigation of one or more organizations, or groups within organizations, with a view to providing an analysis of the context and processes involved in the phenomenon under study.

As opposed to other qualitative or quantitative research strategies, such as grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) or surveys (Nachmias & Nachmias 1981), there are virtually no specific requirements guiding case research. Yin (1989) and Eisenhardt (1989) give useful insights into the case study as a research strategy, but leave most of the design decisions on the table. This is both the strength and the weakness of this approach. It is a strength because it allows tailoring the design and data collection procedures to the research questions. On the other hand, this approach has resulted in many poor case studies, leaving it open to criticism, especially from the quantitative field of research (Cook and Campbell 1979). The fact that the case study is a rather loose design implies that there are a number of choices that need to be addressed in a principled way.

Although case studies have become a common research strategy, the scope of methodology sections in articles published in journals is far too limited to give the readers a detailed and comprehensive view of the decisions taken in the particular studies, and, given the format of methodology sections, will remain so. The few books (Yin 1989, 1993; Hamel, Dufour, & Fortin 1993; Stake 1995) and book chapters on case studies (Hartley 1994; Silverman 2000) are, on the other hand, mainly normative and span a broad range of different kinds of case studies. One exception is Pettigrew (1990, 1992), who places the case study in the context of a research tradition (the Warwick process research).

Given the contextual nature of the case study and its strength in addressing contemporary phenomena in real-life contexts, I believe that there is a need for articles that provide a comprehensive overview of the case study process from the researcher’s perspective, emphasizing methodological considerations. This implies addressing the whole range of choices concerning specific design requirements, data collection procedures, data analysis, and validity and reliability.

WHY A CASE STUDY?

Case studies are tailor-made for exploring new processes or behaviors or ones that are little understood (Hartley 1994). Hence, the approach is particularly useful for responding to how and why questions about a contemporary set of events (Leonard-Barton 1990). Moreover, researchers have argued that certain kinds of information can be difficult or even impossible to tackle by means other than qualitative approaches such as the case study (Sykes 1990). Gummesson (1988:76) argues that an important advantage of case study research is the opportunity for a holistic view of the process: “The detailed observations entailed in the case study method enable us to study many different aspects, examine them in relation to each other, view the process within its total environment and also use the researchers’ capacity for ‘verstehen.’ ”

The contextual nature of the case study is illustrated in Yin’s (1993:59) definition of a case study as an empirical inquiry that “investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context and addresses a situation in which the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.”

The key difference between the case study and other qualitative designs such as grounded theory and ethnography (Glaser & Strauss 1967; Strauss & Corbin 1990; Gioia & Chittipeddi 1991) is that the case study is open to the use of theory or conceptual categories that guide the research and analysis of data. In contrast, grounded theory or ethnography presupposes that theoretical perspectives are grounded in and emerge from firsthand data. Hartley (1994) argues that without a theoretical framework, the researcher is in severe danger of providing description without meaning. Gummesson (1988) says that a lack of preunderstanding will cause the researcher to spend considerable time gathering basic information. This preunderstanding may arise from general knowledge such as theories, models, and concepts or from specific knowledge of institutional conditions and social patterns. According to Gummesson, the key is not to require researchers to have split but dual personalities: “Those who are able to balance on a razor’s edge using their pre-understanding without being its slave” (p. 58).

DESCRIPTION OF THE ILLUSTRATIVE STUDY

The study that will be used for illustrative purposes is a comparative and longitudinal case study of organizational integration in mergers and acquisitions taking place in Norway. The study had two purposes: (1) to identify contextual factors and features of integration that facilitated or impeded organizational integration, and (2) to study how the three dimensions of organizational integration (integration of tasks, unification of power, and integration of cultures and identities) interrelated and evolved over time. Examples of contextual factors were relative power, degree of friendliness, and economic climate. Integration features included factors such as participation, communication, and allocation of positions and functions.

Mergers and acquisitions are inherently complex. Researchers in the field have suggested that managers continuously underestimate the task of integrating the merging organizations in the postintegration process (Haspeslaph & Jemison 1991). The process of organizational integration can lead to sharp interorganizational conflict as the different top management styles, organizational and work unit cultures, systems, and other aspects of organizational life come into contact (Blake & Mounton 1985; Schweiger & Walsh 1990; Cartwright & Cooper 1993). Furthermore, cultural change in mergers and acquisitions is compounded by additional uncertainties, ambiguities, and stress inherent in the combination process (Buono & Bowditch 1989).

I focused on two combinations: one merger and one acquisition. The first case was a merger between two major Norwegian banks, Bergen Bank and DnC (to be named DnB), that started in the late 1980s. The second case was a study of a major acquisition in the insurance industry (i.e., Gjensidige’s acquisition of Forenede), that started in the early 1990s. Both combinations aimed to realize operational synergies though merging the two organizations into one entity. This implied disruption of organizational boundaries and threat to the existing power distribution and organizational cultures.

The study of integration processes in mergers and acquisitions illustrates the need to find a design that opens for exploration of sensitive issues such as power struggles between the two merging organizations. Furthermore, the inherent complexity in the integration process, involving integration of tasks, unification of power, and cultural integration stressed the need for in-depth study of the phenomenon over time. To understand the cultural integration process, the design also had to be linked to the past history of the two organizations.

DESIGN DECISIONS

In the introduction, I stressed that a case is a rather loose design that requires that a number of design choices be made. In this section, I go through the most important choices I faced in the study of organizational integration in mergers and acquisitions. These include: (1) selection of cases; (2) sampling time; (3) choosing business areas, divisions, and sites; and (4) selection of and choices regarding data collection procedures, interviews, documents, and observation.

Selection of Cases

There are several choices involved in selecting cases. First, there is the question of how many cases to include. Second, one must sample cases and decide on a unit of analysis. I will explore these issues subsequently.

Single or Multiple Cases

Case studies can involve single or multiple cases. The problem of single cases is limitations in generalizability and several information-processing biases (Eisenhardt 1989).

One way to respond to these biases is by applying a multi-case approach (Leonard-Barton 1990). Multiple cases augment external validity and help guard against observer biases. Moreover, multi-case sampling adds confidence to findings. By looking at a range of similar and contrasting cases, we can understand a single-case finding, grounding it by specifying how and where and, if possible, why it behaves as it does. (Miles & Huberman 1994)

Given these limitations of the single case study, it is desirable to include more than one case study in the study. However, the desire for depth and a pluralist perspective and tracking the cases over time implies that the number of cases must be fairly few. I chose two cases, which clearly does not support generalizability any more than does one case, but allows for comparison and contrast between the cases as well as a deeper and richer look at each case.

Originally, I planned to include a third case in the study. Due to changes in management during the initial integration process, my access to the case was limited and I left this case entirely. However, a positive side effect was that it allowed a deeper investigation of the two original cases and in hindsight turned out to be a good decision.

Sampling Cases

The logic of sampling cases is fundamentally different from statistical sampling. The logic in case studies involves theoretical sampling, in which the goal is to choose cases that are likely to replicate or extend the emergent theory or to fill theoretical categories and provide examples for polar types (Eisenhardt 1989). Hence, whereas quantitative sampling concerns itself with representativeness, qualitative sampling seeks information richness and selects the cases purposefully rather than randomly (Crabtree and Miller 1992).

The choice of cases was guided by George (1979) and Pettigrew’s (1990) recommendations. The aim was to find cases that matched the three dimensions in the dependent variable and provided variation in the contextual factors, thus representing polar cases.

To match the choice of outcome variable, organizational integration, I chose cases in which the purpose was to fully consolidate the merging parties’ operations. A full consolidation would imply considerable disruption in the organizational boundaries and would be expected to affect the task-related, political, and cultural features of the organizations. As for the contextual factors, the two cases varied in contextual factors such as relative power, friendliness, and economic climate. The DnB merger was a friendly combination between two equal partners in an unfriendly economic climate. Gjensidige’s acquisition of Forenede was, in contrast, an unfriendly and unbalanced acquisition in a friendly economic climate.

Unit of Analysis

Another way to respond to researchers’ and respondents’ biases is to have more than one unit of analysis in each case (Yin 1993). This implies that, in addition to developing contrasts between the cases, researchers can focus on contrasts within the cases (Hartley 1994). In case studies, there is a choice of a holistic or embedded design (Yin 1989). A holistic design examines the global nature of the phenomenon, whereas an embedded design also pays attention to subunit(s).

I used an embedded design to analyze the cases (i.e., within each case, I also gave attention to subunits and subprocesses). In both cases, I compared the combination processes in the various divisions and local networks. Moreover, I compared three distinct change processes in DnB: before the merger, during the initial combination, and two years after the merger. The overall and most important unit of analysis in the two cases was, however, the integration process.

Sampling Time

According to Pettigrew (1990), time sets a reference for what changes can be seen and how those changes are explained. When conducting a case study, there are several important issues to decide when sampling time. The first regards how many times data should be collected, while the second concerns when to enter the organizations. There is also a need to decide whether to collect data on a continuous basis or in distinct periods.

Number of data collections. I studied the process by collecting real time and retrospective data at two points in time, with one-and-a-half- and two-year intervals in the two cases. Collecting data twice had some interesting implications for the interpretations of the data. During the first data collection in the DnB study, for example, I collected retrospective data about the premerger and initial combination phase and real-time data about the second step in the combination process.

Although I gained a picture of how the employees experienced the second stage of the combination process, it was too early to assess the effects of this process at that stage. I entered the organization two years later and found interesting effects that I had not anticipated the first time. Moreover, it was interesting to observe how people’s attitudes toward the merger processes changed over time to be more positive and less emotional.

When to enter the organizations. It would be desirable to have had the opportunity to collect data in the precombination processes. However, researchers are rarely given access in this period due to secrecy. The emphasis in this study was to focus on the postcombination process. As such, the precombination events were classified as contextual factors. This implied that it was most important to collect real-time data after the parties had been given government approval to merge or acquire. What would have been desirable was to gain access earlier in the postcombination process. This was not possible because access had to be negotiated. Due to the change of CEO in the middle of the merger process and the need for renegotiating access, this took longer than expected.

Regarding the second case, I was restricted by the time frame of the study. In essence, I had to choose between entering the combination process as soon as governmental approval was given, or entering the organization at a later stage. In light of the previous studies in the field that have failed to go beyond the initial two years, and given the need to collect data about the cultural integration process, I chose the latter strategy. And I decided to enter the organizations at two distinct periods of time rather than on a continuous basis.

There were several reasons for this approach, some methodological and some practical. First, data collection on a continuous basis would have required use of extensive observation that I didn’t have access to, and getting access to two data collections in DnB was difficult in itself. Second, I had a stay abroad between the first and second data collection in Gjensidige. Collecting data on a continuous basis would probably have allowed for better mapping of the ongoing integration process, but the contrasts between the two different stages in the integration process that I wanted to elaborate would probably be more difficult to detect. In Table 1 I have listed the periods of time in which I collected data in the two combinations.

Sampling Business Areas, Divisions, and Sites

Even when the cases for a study have been chosen, it is often necessary to make further choices within each case to make the cases researchable. The most important criteria that set the boundaries for the study are importance or criticality, relevance, and representativeness. At the time of the data collection, my criteria for making these decisions were not as conscious as they may appear here. Rather, being restricted by time and my own capacity as a researcher, I had to limit the sites and act instinctively. In both cases, I decided to concentrate on the core businesses (criticality criterion) and left out the business units that were only mildly affected by the integration process (relevance criterion). In the choice of regional offices, I used the representativeness criterion as the number of offices widely exceeded the number of sites possible to study. In making these choices, I relied on key informants in the organizations.

SELECTION OF DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURES

The choice of data collection procedures should be guided by the research question and the choice of design. The case study approach typically combines data collection methods such as archives, interviews, questionnaires, and observations (Yin 1989). This triangulated methodology provides stronger substantiation of constructs and hypotheses. However, the choice of data collection methods is also subject to constraints in time, financial resources, and access.

I chose a combination of interviews, archives, and observation, with main emphasis on the first two. Conducting a survey was inappropriate due to the lack of established concepts and indicators. The reason for limited observation, on the other hand, was due to problems in obtaining access early in the study and time and resource constraints. In addition to choosing among several different data collection methods, there are a number of choices to be made for each individual method.

When relying on interviews as the primary data collection method, the issue of building trust between the researcher and the interviewees becomes very important. I addressed this issue by several means. First, I established a procedure of how to approach the interviewees. In most cases, I called them first, then sent out a letter explaining the key features of the project and outlining the broad issues to be addressed in the interview. In this letter, the support from the institution’s top management was also communicated. In most cases, the top management’s support of the project was an important prerequisite for the respondent’s input. Some interviewees did, however, fear that their input would be open to the top management without disguising the information source. Hence, it became important to communicate how I intended to use and store the information.

To establish trust, I also actively used my preunderstanding of the context in the first case and the phenomenon in the second case. As I built up an understanding of the cases, I used this information to gain confidence. The active use of my preunderstanding did, however, pose important challenges in not revealing too much of the research hypotheses and in balancing between asking open-ended questions and appearing knowledgeable.

There are two choices involved in conducting interviews. The first concerns the sampling of interviewees. The second is that you must decide on issues such as the structure of the interviews, use of tape recorder, and involvement of other researchers.

Sampling Interviewees

Following the desire for detailed knowledge of each case and for grasping different participant’s views the aim was, in line with Pettigrew (1990), to apply a pluralist view by describing and analyzing competing versions of reality as seen by actors in the combination processes.

I used four criteria for sampling informants. First, I drew informants from populations representing multiple perspectives. The first data collection in DnB was primarily focused on the top management level. Moreover, most middle managers in the first data collection were employed at the head offices, either in Bergen or Oslo. In the second data collection, I compensated for this skew by including eight local middle managers in the sample. The difference between the number of employees interviewed in DnB and Gjensidige was primarily due to the fact that Gjensidige has three unions, whereas DnB only has one. The distribution of interviewees is outlined in Table 2 .

The second criterion was to use multiple informants. According to Glick et al. (1990), an important advantage of using multiple informants is that the validity of information provided by one informant can be checked against that provided by other informants. Moreover, the validity of the data used by the researcher can be enhanced by resolving the discrepancies among different informants’ reports. Hence, I selected multiple respondents from each perspective.

Third, I focused on key informants who were expected to be knowledgeable about the combination process. These people included top management members, managers, and employees involved in the integration project. To validate the information from these informants, I also used a fourth criterion by selecting managers and employees who had been affected by the process but who were not involved in the project groups.

Structured versus unstructured. In line with the explorative nature of the study, the goal of the interviews was to see the research topic from the perspective of the interviewee, and to understand why he or she came to have this particular perspective. To meet this goal, King (1994:15) recommends that one have “a low degree of structure imposed on the interviewer, a preponderance of open questions, a focus on specific situations and action sequences in the world of the interviewee rather than abstractions and general opinions.” In line with these recommendations, the collection of primary data in this study consists of unstructured interviews.

Using tape recorders and involving other researchers. The majority of the interviews were tape-recorded, and I could thus concentrate fully on asking questions and responding to the interviewees’ answers. In the few interviews that were not tape-recorded, most of which were conducted in the first phase of the DnB-study, two researchers were present. This was useful as we were both able to discuss the interviews later and had feedback on the role of an interviewer.

In hindsight, however, I wish that these interviews had been tape-recorded to maintain the level of accuracy and richness of data. Hence, in the next phases of data collection, I tape-recorded all interviews, with two exceptions (people who strongly opposed the use of this device). All interviews that were tape-recorded were transcribed by me in full, which gave me closeness and a good grasp of the data.

When organizations merge or make acquisitions, there are often a vast number of documents to choose from to build up an understanding of what has happened and to use in the analyses. Furthermore, when firms make acquisitions or merge, they often hire external consultants, each of whom produces more documents. Due to time constraints, it is seldom possible to collect and analyze all these documents, and thus the researcher has to make a selection.

The choice of documentation was guided by my previous experience with merger and acquisition processes and the research question. Hence, obtaining information on the postintegration process was more important than gaining access to the due-diligence analysis. As I learned about the process, I obtained more documents on specific issues. I did not, however, gain access to all the documents I asked for, and, in some cases, documents had been lost or shredded.

The documents were helpful in a number of ways. First, and most important, they were used as inputs to the interview guide and saved me time, because I did not have to ask for facts in the interviews. They were also useful for tracing the history of the organizations and statements made by key people in the organizations. Third, the documents were helpful in counteracting the biases of the interviews. A list of the documents used in writing the cases is shown in Table 3 .

Observation

The major strength of direct observation is that it is unobtrusive and does not require direct interaction with participants (Adler and Adler 1994). Observation produces rigor when it is combined with other methods. When the researcher has access to group processes, direct observation can illuminate the discrepancies between what people said in the interviews and casual conversations and what they actually do (Pettigrew 1990).

As with interviews, there are a number of choices involved in conducting observations. Although I did some observations in the study, I used interviews as the key data collection source. Discussion in this article about observations will thus be somewhat limited. Nevertheless, I faced a number of choices in conducting observations, including type of observation, when to enter, how much observation to conduct, and which groups to observe.

The are four ways in which an observer may gather data: (1) the complete participant who operates covertly, concealing any intention to observe the setting; (2) the participant-as-observer, who forms relationships and participates in activities, but makes no secret of his or her intentions to observe events; (3) the observer-as-participant, who maintains only superficial contact with the people being studied; and (4) the complete observer, who merely stands back and eavesdrops on the proceedings (Waddington 1994).

In this study, I used the second and third ways of observing. The use of the participant-as-observer mode, on which much ethnographic research is based, was rather limited in the study. There were two reasons for this. First, I had limited time available for collecting data, and in my view interviews made more effective use of this limited time than extensive participant observation. Second, people were rather reluctant to let me observe these political and sensitive processes until they knew me better and felt I could be trusted. Indeed, I was dependent on starting the data collection before having built sufficient trust to observe key groups in the integration process. Nevertheless, Gjensidige allowed me to study two employee seminars to acquaint me with the organization. Here I admitted my role as an observer but participated fully in the activities. To achieve variation, I chose two seminars representing polar groups of employees.

As observer-as-participant, I attended a top management meeting at the end of the first data collection in Gjensidige and observed the respondents during interviews and in more informal meetings, such as lunches. All these observations gave me an opportunity to validate the data from the interviews. Observing the top management group was by far the most interesting and rewarding in terms of input.

Both DnB and Gjensidige started to open up for more extensive observation when I was about to finish the data collection. By then, I had built up the trust needed to undertake this approach. Unfortunately, this came a little late for me to take advantage of it.

DATA ANALYSIS

Published studies generally describe research sites and data-collection methods, but give little space to discuss the analysis (Eisenhardt 1989). Thus, one cannot follow how a researcher arrives at the final conclusions from a large volume of field notes (Miles and Huberman 1994).

In this study, I went through the stages by which the data were reduced and analyzed. This involved establishing the chronology, coding, writing up the data according to phases and themes, introducing organizational integration into the analysis, comparing the cases, and applying the theory. I will discuss these phases accordingly.

The first step in the analysis was to establish the chronology of the cases. To do this, I used internal and external documents. I wrote the chronologies up and included appendices in the final report.

The next step was to code the data into phases and themes reflecting the contextual factors and features of integration. For the interviews, this implied marking the text with a specific phase and a theme, and grouping the paragraphs on the same theme and phase together. I followed the same procedure in organizing the documents.

I then wrote up the cases using phases and themes to structure them. Before starting to write up the cases, I scanned the information on each theme, built up the facts and filled in with perceptions and reactions that were illustrative and representative of the data.

The documents were primarily useful in establishing the facts, but they also provided me with some perceptions and reactions that were validated in the interviews. The documents used included internal letters and newsletters as well as articles from the press. The interviews were less factual, as intended, and gave me input to assess perceptions and reactions. The limited observation was useful to validate the data from the interviews. The result of this step was two descriptive cases.

To make each case more analytical, I introduced the three dimensions of organizational integration—integration of tasks, unification of power, and cultural integration—into the analysis. This helped to focus the case and to develop a framework that could be used to compare the cases. The cases were thus structured according to phases, organizational integration, and themes reflecting the factors and features in the study.

I took all these steps to become more familiar with each case as an individual entity. According to Eisenhardt (1989:540), this is a process that “allows the unique patterns of each case to emerge before the investigators push to generalise patterns across cases. In addition it gives investigators a rich familiarity with each case which, in turn, accelerates cross-case comparison.”

The comparison between the cases constituted the next step in the analysis. Here, I used the categories from the case chapters, filled in the features and factors, and compared and contrasted the findings. The idea behind cross-case searching tactics is to force investigators to go beyond initial impressions, especially through the use of structural and diverse lenses on the data. These tactics improve the likelihood of accurate and reliable theory, that is, theory with a close fit to the data (Eisenhardt 1989).

As a result, I had a number of overall themes, concepts, and relationships that had emerged from the within-case analysis and cross-case comparisons. The next step was to compare these emergent findings with theory from the organizational field of mergers and acquisitions, as well as other relevant perspectives.

This method of generalization is known as analytical generalization. In this approach, a previously developed theory is used as a template with which to compare the empirical results of the case study (Yin 1989). This comparison of emergent concepts, theory, or hypotheses with the extant literature involves asking what it is similar to, what it contradicts, and why. The key to this process is to consider a broad range of theory (Eisenhardt 1989). On the whole, linking emergent theory to existent literature enhances the internal validity, generalizability, and theoretical level of theory-building from case research.

According to Eisenhardt (1989), examining literature that conflicts with the emergent literature is important for two reasons. First, the chance of neglecting conflicting findings is reduced. Second, “conflicting results forces researchers into a more creative, frame-breaking mode of thinking than they might otherwise be able to achieve” (p. 544). Similarly, Eisenhardt (1989) claims that literature discussing similar findings is important because it ties together underlying similarities in phenomena not normally associated with each other. The result is often a theory with a stronger internal validity, wider generalizability, and a higher conceptual level.

The analytical generalization in the study included exploring and developing the concepts and examining the relationships between the constructs. In carrying out this analytical generalization, I acted on Eisenhardt’s (1989) recommendation to use a broad range of theory. First, I compared and contrasted the findings with the organizational stream on mergers and acquisition literature. Then I discussed other relevant literatures, including strategic change, power and politics, social justice, and social identity theory to explore how these perspectives could contribute to the understanding of the findings. Finally, I discussed the findings that could not be explained either by the merger and acquisition literature or the four theoretical perspectives.

In every scientific study, questions are raised about whether the study is valid and reliable. The issues of validity and reliability in case studies are just as important as for more deductive designs, but the application is fundamentally different.

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

The problems of validity in qualitative studies are related to the fact that most qualitative researchers work alone in the field, they focus on the findings rather than describe how the results were reached, and they are limited in processing information (Miles and Huberman 1994).

Researchers writing about qualitative methods have questioned whether the same criteria can be used for qualitative and quantitative studies (Kirk & Miller 1986; Sykes 1990; Maxwell 1992). The problem with the validity criteria suggested in qualitative research is that there is little consistency across the articles as each author suggests a new set of criteria.

One approach in examining validity and reliability is to apply the criteria used in quantitative research. Hence, the criteria to be examined here are objectivity/intersubjectivity, construct validity, internal validity, external validity, and reliability.

Objectivity/Intersubjectivity

The basic issue of objectivity can be framed as one of relative neutrality and reasonable freedom from unacknowledged research biases (Miles & Huberman 1994). In a real-time longitudinal study, the researcher is in danger of losing objectivity and of becoming too involved with the organization, the people, and the process. Hence, Leonard-Barton (1990) claims that one may be perceived as, and may even become, an advocate rather than an observer.

According to King (1994), however, qualitative research, in seeking to describe and make sense of the world, does not require researchers to strive for objectivity and distance themselves from research participants. Indeed, to do so would make good qualitative research impossible, as the interviewer’s sensitivity to subjective aspects of his or her relationship with the interviewee is an essential part of the research process (King 1994:31).

This does not imply, however, that the issue of possible research bias can be ignored. It is just as important as in a structured quantitative interview that the findings are not simply the product of the researcher’s prejudices and prior experience. One way to guard against this bias is for the researcher to explicitly recognize his or her presuppositions and to make a conscious effort to set these aside in the analysis (Gummesson 1988). Furthermore, rival conclusions should be considered (Miles & Huberman 1994).

My experience from the first phase of the DnB study was that it was difficult to focus the questions and the analysis of the data when the research questions were too vague and broad. As such, developing a framework before collecting the data for the study was useful in guiding the collection and analysis of data. Nevertheless, it was important to be open-minded and receptive to new and surprising data. In the DnB study, for example, the positive effect of the reorganization process on the integration of cultures came as a complete surprise to me and thus needed further elaboration.

I also consciously searched for negative evidence and problems by interviewing outliers (Miles & Huberman 1994) and asking problem-oriented questions. In Gjensidige, the first interviews with the top management revealed a much more positive perception of the cultural integration process than I had expected. To explore whether this was a result of overreliance on elite informants, I continued posing problem-oriented questions to outliers and people at lower levels in the organization. Moreover, I told them about the DnB study to be explicit about my presuppositions.

Another important issue when assessing objectivity is whether other researchers can trace the interpretations made in the case studies, or what is called intersubjectivity. To deal with this issue, Miles & Huberman (1994) suggest that: (1) the study’s general methods and procedures should be described in detail, (2) one should be able to follow the process of analysis, (3) conclusions should be explicitly linked with exhibits of displayed data, and (4) the data from the study should be made available for reanalysis by others.

In response to these requirements, I described the study’s data collection procedures and processing in detail. Then, the primary data were displayed in the written report in the form of quotations and extracts from documents to support and illustrate the interpretations of the data. Because the study was written up in English, I included the Norwegian text in a separate appendix. Finally, all the primary data from the study were accessible for a small group of distinguished researchers.

Construct Validity

Construct validity refers to whether there is substantial evidence that the theoretical paradigm correctly corresponds to observation (Kirk & Miller 1986). In this form of validity, the issue is the legitimacy of the application of a given concept or theory to established facts.

The strength of qualitative research lies in the flexible and responsive interaction between the interviewer and the respondents (Sykes 1990). Thus, meaning can be probed, topics covered easily from a number of angles, and questions made clear for respondents. This is an advantage for exploring the concepts (construct or theoretical validity) and the relationships between them (internal validity). Similarly, Hakim (1987) says the great strength of qualitative research is the validity of data obtained because individuals are interviewed in sufficient detail for the results to be taken as true, correct, and believable reports of their views and experiences.

Construct validity can be strengthened by applying a longitudinal multicase approach, triangulation, and use of feedback loops. The advantage of applying a longitudinal approach is that one gets the opportunity to test sensitivity of construct measures to the passage of time. Leonard-Barton (1990), for example, found that one of her main constructs, communicability, varied across time and relative to different groups of users. Thus, the longitudinal study aided in defining the construct more precisely. By using more than one case study, one can validate stability of construct across situations (Leonard-Barton 1990). Since my study only consists of two case studies, the opportunity to test stability of constructs across cases is somewhat limited. However, the use of more than one unit of analysis helps to overcome this limitation.

Construct validity is strengthened by the use of multiple sources of evidence to build construct measures, which define the construct and distinguish it from other constructs. These multiple sources of evidence can include multiple viewpoints within and across the data sources. My study responds to these requirements in its sampling of interviewees and uses of multiple data sources.

Use of feedback loops implies returning to interviewees with interpretations and developing theory and actively seeking contradictions in data (Crabtree & Miller 1992; King 1994). In DnB, the written report had to be approved by the bank’s top management after the first data collection. Apart from one minor correction, the bank had no objections to the established facts. In their comments on my analysis, some of the top managers expressed the view that the political process had been overemphasized, and that the CEO’s role in initiating a strategic process was undervalued. Hence, an important objective in the second data collection was to explore these comments further. Moreover, the report was not as positive as the management had hoped for, and negotiations had to be conducted to publish the report. The result of these negotiations was that publication of the report was postponed one-and-a-half years.

The experiences from the first data collection in the DnB had some consequences. I was more cautious and brought up the problems of confidentiality and the need to publish at the outset of the Gjensidige study. Also, I had to struggle to get access to the DnB case for the second data collection and some of the information I asked for was not released. At Gjensidige, I sent a preliminary draft of the case chapter to the corporation’s top management for comments, in addition to having second interviews with a small number of people. Beside testing out the factual description, these sessions gave me the opportunity to test out the theoretical categories established as a result of the within-case analysis.

Internal Validity

Internal validity concerns the validity of the postulated relationships among the concepts. The main problem of internal validity as a criterion in qualitative research is that it is often not open to scrutiny. According to Sykes (1990), the researcher can always provide a plausible account and, with careful editing, may ensure its coherence. Recognition of this problem has led to calls for better documentation of the processes of data collection, the data itself, and the interpretative contribution of the researcher. The discussion of how I met these requirements was outlined in the section on objectivity/subjectivity above.

However, there are some advantages in using qualitative methods, too. First, the flexible and responsive methods of data collection allow cross-checking and amplification of information from individual units as it is generated. Respondents’ opinions and understandings can be thoroughly explored. The internal validity results from strategies that eliminate ambiguity and contradiction, filling in detail and establishing strong connections in data.

Second, the longitudinal study enables one to track cause and effect. Moreover, it can make one aware of intervening variables (Leonard-Barton 1990). Eisenhardt (1989:542) states, “Just as hypothesis testing research an apparent relationship may simply be a spurious correlation or may reflect the impact of some third variable on each of the other two. Therefore, it is important to discover the underlying reasons for why the relationship exists.”

Generalizability

According to Mitchell (1983), case studies are not based on statistical inference. Quite the contrary, the inferring process turns exclusively on the theoretically necessary links among the features in the case study. The validity of the extrapolation depends not on the typicality or representativeness of the case but on the cogency of the theoretical reasoning. Hartley (1994:225) claims, “The detailed knowledge of the organization and especially the knowledge about the processes underlying the behaviour and its context can help to specify the conditions under which behaviour can be expected to occur. In other words, the generalisation is about theoretical propositions not about populations.”

Generalizability is normally based on the assumption that this theory may be useful in making sense of similar persons or situations (Maxwell 1992). One way to increase the generalizability is to apply a multicase approach (Leonard-Barton 1990). The advantage of this approach is that one can replicate the findings from one case study to another. This replication logic is similar to that used on multiple experiments (Yin 1993).

Given the choice of two case studies, the generalizability criterion is not supported in this study. Through the discussion of my choices, I have tried to show that I had to strike a balance between the need for depth and mapping changes over time and the number of cases. In doing so, I deliberately chose to provide a deeper and richer look at each case, allowing the reader to make judgments about the applicability rather than making a case for generalizability.

Reliability

Reliability focuses on whether the process of the study is consistent and reasonably stable over time and across researchers and methods (Miles & Huberman 1994). In the context of qualitative research, reliability is concerned with two questions (Sykes 1990): Could the same study carried out by two researchers produce the same findings? and Could a study be repeated using the same researcher and respondents to yield the same findings?

The problem of reliability in qualitative research is that differences between replicated studies using different researchers are to be expected. However, while it may not be surprising that different researchers generate different findings and reach different conclusions, controlling for reliability may still be relevant. Kirk and Miller’s (1986:311) definition takes into account the particular relationship between the researcher’s orientation, the generation of data, and its interpretation:

For reliability to be calculated, it is incumbent on the scientific investigator to document his or her procedure. This must be accomplished at such a level of abstraction that the loci of decisions internal to the project are made apparent. The curious public deserves to know how the qualitative researcher prepares him or herself for the endeavour, and how the data is collected and analysed.

The study addresses these requirements by discussing my point of departure regarding experience and framework, the sampling and data collection procedures, and data analysis.

Case studies often lack academic rigor and are, as such, regarded as inferior to more rigorous methods where there are more specific guidelines for collecting and analyzing data. These criticisms stress that there is a need to be very explicit about the choices one makes and the need to justify them.

One reason why case studies are criticized may be that researchers disagree about the definition and the purpose of carrying out case studies. Case studies have been regarded as a design (Cook and Campbell 1979), as a qualitative methodology (Cassell and Symon 1994), as a particular data collection procedure (Andersen 1997), and as a research strategy (Yin 1989). Furthermore, the purpose for carrying out case studies is unclear. Some regard case studies as supplements to more rigorous qualitative studies to be carried out in the early stage of the research process; others claim that it can be used for multiple purposes and as a research strategy in its own right (Gummesson 1988; Yin 1989). Given this unclear status, researchers need to be very clear about their interpretation of the case study and the purpose of carrying out the study.

This article has taken Yin’s (1989) definition of the case study as a research strategy as a starting point and argued that the choice of the case study should be guided by the research question(s). In the illustrative study, I used a case study strategy because of a need to explore sensitive, ill-defined concepts in depth, over time, taking into account the context and history of the mergers and the existing knowledge about the phenomenon. However, the choice of a case study strategy extended rather than limited the number of decisions to be made. In Schramm’s (1971, cited in Yin 1989:22–23) words, “The essence of a case study, the central tendency among all types of case study, is that it tries to illuminate a decision or set of decisions, why they were taken, how they were implemented, and with what result.”

Hence, the purpose of this article has been to illustrate the wide range of decisions that need to be made in the context of a particular case study and to discuss the methodological considerations linked to these decisions. I argue that there is a particular need in case studies to be explicit about the methodological choices one makes and that these choices can be best illustrated through a case study of the case study strategy.

As in all case studies, however, there are limitations to the generalizability of using one particular case study for illustrative purposes. As such, the strength of linking the methodological considerations to a specific context and phenomenon also becomes a weakness. However, I would argue that the questions raised in this article are applicable to many case studies, but that the answers are very likely to vary. The design choices are shown in Table 4 . Hence, researchers choosing a longitudinal, comparative case study need to address the same set of questions with regard to design, data collection procedures, and analysis, but they are likely to come up with other conclusions, given their different research questions.

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Christine Benedichte Meyer is an associate professor in the Department of Strategy and Management in the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen-Sandviken, Norway. Her research interests are mergers and acquisitions, strategic change, and qualitative research. Recent publications include: “Allocation Processes in Mergers and Acquisitions: An Organisational Justice Perspective” (British Journal of Management 2001) and “Motives for Acquisitions in the Norwegian Financial Industry” (CEMS Business Review 1997).

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White, R.E., Cooper, K. (2022). Case Study Research. In: Qualitative Research in the Post-Modern Era. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85124-8_7

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18 Case Study Method

Ms. Beliyaluxmi Devi

1. Introduction

2. Case Study

3 Techniques used for case studies

4 Sources of data for case studies

5 Types of case Studies

6 Advantage and limitation

Learning Objectives:

•  To learn what is case study and distinction from case history; identify the application of case study;
•  To discuss how to plan case study; and
•  To understand the advantage and limitation of case study
• Introduction

Among the various methods of data collection, case study is certainly one popular form of qualitative analysis involving careful and complete observation of a case. A case is a social unit with a deviant behavior, and may be an event, problem, process, activity, programme, of a social unit. The unit may be a person, a family, an institution, a cultural group, a community or even an entire society (Kothari, 2014). But it is a bounded system that has the boundaries of the case. Case Study therefore is an intensive investigation of the particular unit under consideration. It is extensively used in psychology, education, sociology, anthropology, economics and political science. It aims at obtaining a complete and detailed account of a social phenomenon or a social event of a social unit. In case study, data can be collected from multiple sources by using any qualitative method of data collection like interviews, observation and it may also include documents, artifacts etc. Case study method is a type of data collection that goes in depth understanding rather than breadth. Case study can be descriptive as we observe and write in description as well as it can also be an exploratory that is we wrote what was said. Pierre Guillaume Frederic Le Play (1855), a mathematician and natural scientist, is considered as the founder of case study method as he used it for the first time in his publication Les Ouvriers Europeens.

2.1 Definitions of Case Study Methods

Case study has been defined differently by different scholars from time to time. Some of them are presented below.

• Young, P.V. (1984): Case study is a comprehensive study of a social unit, be it a person, a group of persons, an institute, a community or a family.
• Groode and Hatt (1953): It is a method of exploring and analyzing the life of a social unit
• Cooley, C.H. (2007): Case study depends our perception and gives clear insight into life directory.
• Bogardus, E. S. (1925): The method of examining specially and in detail a given situation
• Robson C. (1993): A strategy for doing research which involves an empirical investigation of a particular contemporary phenomenon within its real life context using multiple sources of evidence.

So critical analysis of these definitions, reveal that case study is a method of minute and detail study of a situation concerning a social unit in an intensive and comprehensive manner in order to understand the personal as well as hidden dimensions of human life.

2.2 Characteristics of Case Study

The main characteristics of the case study are (www.studylecturenotes.com):

A descriptive study:

• The data collected constitute descriptions of psychological processes and events, and of the contexts in which they occurred.
• The main emphasis is always on the construction of verbal descriptions of behavior or experience but rarely quantitative data may be collected. In short case study is more of a qualitative method rather than quantitative method.
• High levels of detail are provided.
• The behavior pattern of the concerned unit is studied directly wherein efforts are made to know the mutual inter-relationship of causal factors.

Narrowly focused:

• Typically a case study offers a complete and comprehensive description of all facets of a social unit, be it a single individual or may be a social group.
• Often the case study focuses on a limited aspect of a person, such as their psychopathological symptoms.

Combines objective and subjective data:

Researchers may combine objective and subjective data. Both the data are regarded as valid data for analysis. It enables case study to achieved in-depth understanding of the behavior and experience of a single individual.

Process-oriented:

• The case study method enables the researcher to explore and describe the nature of processes, which occur over time.
• In contrast to the experimental method, which basically provides a stilled ‘snapshot’ of processes, case study continued over time like for example the development of language in children over time.

2.3. Difference between Case Study and Case History

The Case study method helps retaining the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real life events – such as individual life cycles, small group behavior, etc. It is like a case history of a patient. As a patient goes to the doctor with some serious disease, the doctor records the case history. Analysis of case history helps in the diagnosis of the patient’s illness (http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-case-study-and-vs-case-history).

Although most of us confuse case study and case history to be the same, however, there exists a difference between these two terms. They are being used in many disciplines and allow the researcher to be more informative of people, and events. First, let us define the word case study. A case study refers to a research method where a person, group or an event is being investigated which is used by researchers whereas a case history, on the other hand, refers to a record of data which contributes to a case study; usually case history is used by doctors to investigate the patients. This is the main difference between a case study and case history.

(i) What is a Case Study?

A case study is a research method used to investigate an individual, a group of people, or a particular phenomenon. The case study has been used in many disciplines especially in social science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science. A case study allows the researcher to gain an in-depth understanding of the topic. To conduct a case study, the researcher can use a number of techniques. For example, observation, interviews, usage of secondary data such as documents, records, etc. It usually goes on for a longer period because the researcher has to explore the topic deeply.

The case study method was first used in the clinical medicine so that the doctor has a clear understanding of the history of the patient. Various methods can be used in a case study for example a psychologist use observation to observe the individual, use interview method to broaden the understanding. To create a clear picture of the problem, the questions can be directed not only to the individual on whom the case study is being conducted but also on those who are related to the individual. A special feature of case studies is that it produces qualitative data that are rich and authentic.

(ii) What is a Case History?

Unlike the case study that refers to a method, a case history refers to a record of an individual or even a group. Case histories are used in many disciplines such as psychology, sociology, medicine, psychiatry, etc. It consists of all the necessary information of the individual. In medicine, a case history refers to a specific record that reveals the personal information, medical condition, the medication that has been used and special conditions of the individual. Having a case history can be very beneficial in treatment of disease. However, a case history does not necessarily have to be connected to an individual; it can even be of an event that took place. The case history is a recording that narrates a sequence of events. Such a narrative allows the researcher to look at an event in retrospect.

• Techniques used for Case Studies

The techniques of case studies includes –

(i) Observation

It is a systematic data collection approach. Researchers use all of their senses to examine people in natural settings or naturally occurring situations. Observation of a field setting involves: prolonged engagement in a setting or social situation.

(ii) Interview

It is questioning and discussing to a person for the purpose of an evaluation or to generate information. (iii) Secondary Data

Secondary data refers to data that was collected by someone through secondary sources. (iv) Documents

Any writing that provides information, especially information which is of official in nature.

(v) Records

Anything that provides permanent information which can rely on or providing an evident officially.

• Sources of Data for Case Study

In case study, information may be collected from various sources. Some of the important sources include:

• Life histories
• Personal documents
• Letters and records
• Biographies
• Information obtained through interviews
• Observation
• Types of Case Study

The following are the types of case study according to the Graham R Gibbs (2012) –

• Individual case study: This study was first done by Shaw, Clifford R. (1930). In individual case study, life of a particular person, his activities and his totalities were accompanied.
• Set of individual case study: Group of person that practice different culture was studies. As for instance those lives in rural area and those living in urban area there will different cases between them.
• Community studies: In community studies, it may include hundreds of people from a community that picked upon for some reason.
• Social Group Studies: Group of people that defined their social position, for example a group of musician or a group of drugs taker
• Studies of organizations and institutions: Study for a particular organizations or an institutions
• Studies of events, roles and relationships: Similar to individual case study but more focus on events, roles and relationships that involved. For example we can take the role of a housewife.

Identifying a Case Study:

Determine if a case study will answer your research question

Identify the case and find out what type of case study method or technique will be employed

When the researcher makes interpretations, the researcher should be able to learn the meaning of the case data while interpreting

How to plan a case study?

The following points are required to plan a case study such as –

Conceptual Framework: based on the theory it displays the important features of a case study and show relationships between features.

Research Questions: Consist of conceptual framework which is consisting of focused and answerable questions.

Research Design: Plan out of what to include or what not to include before data collection

Methods and Instruments: an appropriate method should be employed to answer the research question

Analysis of Data and interpretation: Collected information should be analysed using statistical tools and interpret the findings incorporating the ideas and knowledge gathered during data collection

• Advantages and Limitations

6.1 Advantages of Case Study

The following are some of the advantages of case study –

a) It facilitates intensive study and in-depth analysis of a social unit which help in contradicting established theory.

b) In-depth and comprehensive information are collected through this method which helps in stimulating new research.

c) It is suitable for collecting data pertaining to sensitive areas of a social phenomenon.

d) It helps to collect details regarding the diverse habits, traits and qualities of the unit under investigation (Kothari, 2014).

e) The researcher can understand better the social change of different facets of a social unit every now and then.

f) This study can be a means to understand the past of a social unit because of its emphasis of historical analysis.

g) The researcher can used any type of methods like interview, questionnaire, documents, self-reports etc.

h) Case study enables to generalize the knowledge amusing from the information collected.

i) A real personal experience can be recorded which enlighten and reveal the real man’s inner determined.

j) The data obtained through case study is useful for formulation of hypothesis and preparation of schedule and questionnaire for such types of study and for further research (Kothari, 2014).

k) It helps in enhancing his/her experience, ability and skill in content analysis of the data.

l) It is useful for therapeutic and administrative purposes, particularly in diagnosis, treatment and therapy etc.

6.2 Limitations of Case Study

a) Case history records could be open to errors due to faulty selection of case and inaccurate observation (Kothari, 2014).

b) There are chances of inaccuracy of the data as no uniform and standardized system of recording case histories has been developed.

c) Data collected from case study usually based on several assumptions which may not be very realistic at times

d) This method is mainly qualitative rather than quantitative, hence there may be question of subjectivity.

e) It is very difficult to draw generalizations on the basis of a few cases.

f) Sampling is not possible in case study as this method can be used only in a limited unit.

g) The information collected from case study is incomparable since each informant gives his/her own opinion. Therefore, replication is not possible.

h) Since this method is fully based on the informant, sometimes the informant himself thinks that he/she have the full knowledge and the information given by them may include some fake also.

i) The investigator’s bias might distort the quality of the case study (Kothari, 2014).

j) Case Study is time-consuming and costly in certain cases.

k) This method cannot be effectively used in big and complex societies (Kothari, 2014).

Case study is an important method employed for collection of qualitative data for an in depth, intensive and comprehensive scientific study of a social unit. This social unit can be an individual, a family, a community, a group or even an entire society. Case study is quite different from the case history which focuses on the recording of personal information. Different methods of case study such as individual, community, social group, organization and events using appropriate techniques (observation, interview, secondary data like documents and records) are used based on the objectives of the research problem. The main sources of data in case studies includes life histories, personal documents, letters and records, biographies, information obtained through interviews and observation. Case studies facilitate intensive study and in-depth analysis of a social unit contradicting established theory. It helps in contradicting established theory and stimulating new research. However, difficulties arises in case studies due to a number of reasons which includes inconsistency in data, not possible to replicate the findings, interviewing key and right informants, expertise of the investigator, constant monitoring of interaction between the theoretical issues being studied and collected data, and interpretation of the data needs to be carefully considered.

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Original research article, an anecdotal case study in psychological anthropology of two retired middle school teachers’ perceptions of classroom life in the united states.

• Department of Teaching and Learning, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN, United States

In this qualitative study, interviews of two former middle school teachers were conducted and analyzed for how they fostered a supportive classroom environment in the United States despite the national stress of the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Half a century later in 2020-2021, similar trends seem to remain just as important in society though the context has shifted. Implications for social-emotional learning from then and now are discussed. Each of the two participants in this study established centralized control through slightly different means and both used written guidelines and rules while emphasizing prosocial behaviors. Three themes emerged: 1) a syllabus was important in management style, 2) sports, and 3) the national social context—such as the Vietnam War—manifested itself in the discourse of the social environment to affect classroom life. Implications for the socio-spatial context of school architectural layout are explored.

Introduction

This case study provides an answer to the question: What was a perspective of middle school classroom life and management from the Vietnam War era? This question was asked because of the approaching fifty-year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This seemed like a historical moment to get the recollections of former middle school teachers as a snapshot in time and for their implications for middle school classroom life. The interviews that are the focus of this paper are of two former middle school teachers who taught in the late 1960s to early 1970s.

The purpose of this study was to explore the research question: What changes or continuities in middle school classroom management were there in America from a case study perspective of former in-service middle school teachers? The assumption is that there are generational cultural cycles. This is a qualitative case study in psychological anthropology, what Stein (1985) , Rosa (1996) called psychoanthropology. According to Stromberg (2009) , psychological anthropologists “are interested in many of the same questions as Psychologists, except that we PAs (psychological anthropologists) always try to think about the possibility that human activity is based not only in personality or the nervous system but also in a person’s culture and social environment” (para. 2). Two former middle school teachers who taught between the years 1967–1971 agreed to interview for this study. The semi-structured interviews were transcribed. The difference in time and age is an intentional component of the study because this is a case study comparison ( Stake, 1995 ) between two former middle school teachers. Discussion will include the importance of architecture and classroom organization to the social process of teaching and learning.

Literature Review

The concept of middle school has undergone changes in the late 20th century as “middle school” replaced “junior high school” in many districts in the United States ( Tamer, 2012 ). The language used to describe the middle grades suggests how education is conceptualized ( Wortham, 2008 ). The junior high school tended to be more focused on subject matter content, while the concept of middle school attempts to balance subject matter content with social-emotional development that educational psychologists suggested is important for the age group in grades 6–8 ( Roeser et al., 2000 ).

Managing the middle school classroom was also increasingly viewed as distinct from elementary school and high school in the late 20th century and twenty-first century. While fostering positive relationships between students and teachers has long been established as important at every grade level, the middle school context of early adolescence requires its own strategy of relationship-building. According to Beaty-O’Ferrall et al. (2010) : “Teachers who adopt a relationship-building approach to classroom management by focusing on developing the whole person are more likely to help students develop positive, socially-appropriate behaviors” (p. 5). This is not a different process from high school, but it can include a different level of quasi-parental perspective as it is the transitional age group between child and adolescent ( Akmal and Larsen, 2004 ). Related to these observations through a social cognitive lens is the role that the coach identity can have in potentially supporting teacher authority which often seem to be anecdotal, yet influential ( Cossentino, 2004 ; Pope et al. 2014 ; Dervent and Inan 2015 ).

Social support in school promotes student retention and graduation across student groups ( Demir and Leyendecker, 2018 ). The middle school sets the stage for students going into high school, so the ways in which middle schools are structured socially and psychologically can either incentivize or disincentivize prosocial and academic development ( Beaty-O’Ferrall et al., 2010 ). Middle school design can facilitate co-regulation skills in students so that the teacher is more a facilitator of learning than behavior manager. As Quackenbush and Bol (2020) concluded in their study of the social dynamic of co-regulation blurring together with social regulation between teacher and students in a middle school mathematics classroom: “In these two cases, the teachers were effectively but implicitly sparking socially-shared regulation of learning among teams of students” (p. 7). Such a process can be seen throughout modern schooling going back at least to the mid-twentieth century. This study provides another vantage point of discussion for this concept of social regulation and co-regulation in the middle school classroom.

Each generation has its own context while also having many continuities from previous generations that overlap. The Vietnam War was a time of socio-political change and civil rights marches. This context affected the students, families, teachers, and administrators in schools across the United States. One of the many effects of the Vietnam War legacy was, in part, its influence on immigration to the United States. For example, English language learning (ELL) began to be implemented more widely and systematically in the 1970s to meet the needs of language learners, especially those who were refugees from the Vietnam War that decade ( McCall and Vang, 2012 ). The increased attention to ELL in American public schools in the 1970s was caused, in part, because of the socio-political changes of the Vietnam War ( Nguyen, 2018 ).

Using the life-history method, Nguyen (2018) interviewed three individuals who were English language learners in Vietnam to explore their perceptions and experiences of school. The Vietnam War influenced perceptions; influencing geopolitics that affected teachers as well as students. According to Nguyen (2018) , “Drawing on the narratives of the participants, we can see that this language conveyed political implications specific to the socio-historical milieu of Vietnam during the 1975–1990 period” (p. 624). The Vietnam War had a lasting influence on socio-political contexts of school in both Vietnam and the United States and, thus, is an important reference point in time for the study of schools and educational context. Lessons from those influences are important in the study of change and continuity of school structure.

Conceptual Framework

This is a case study of two former middle school teachers’ perspectives of their time teaching in the United States from 1967 to 1971. This case study method is based in part on the sociocultural approach of Bartlett and Vavrus (2014) that situates a study across micro-level to macro-level contexts. This type of multidisciplinary approach is what Stromberg (2009) called psychological anthropology. The interview method was informed by Sawyer and Norris (2013) concept of duoethnography in which the two participants are the case study. Semi-structured interviews were used as this gathers primary information for analysis ( Briggs, 2007 ). This study is a combined conceptual framework similar to a prism in that the output is a result of analyzing separate components of the data that are connected yet different in their implication.

This case study addresses an aspect of social-emotional development for the middle school classroom environment as seen through the lens of two retired middle school teachers who taught during a time of social change in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The two teachers in this study addressed social-emotional learning in different ways for social studies and science classes, respectively. The interviews were recorded and transcribed manually. On the qualitative spectrum, this study is part of a hermeneutical understanding of school environments based on a semi-structured interview protocol of individual perception in context of larger social phenomena (e.g., the context of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and that the socio-spatial structure of schools affects individual roles (see Appendix ).

Research Design

After reading the informed consent statement as approved by this researcher’s Institutional Review Board, the two participants were given the semi-structured interview protocol ahead of the interviews ( Stake, 1995 ). The interviews were voice recorded and transcribed by this researcher. The voice recorder was placed on the table in between the researcher and participant after acknowledging that the interview was being recorded for this study in accordance with the informed consent statement. Participants were given their transcribed interviews after completion for them to review. Anonymity was ensured by redacting any personal information in the transcription.

This researcher interviewed the two participants with a voice recorder and then transcribed the recording manually. The transcripts were given to the participants to review before finalizing and to ensure that identifying information was redacted. Themes were derived by this researcher manually without software based on a modified duoethnography model ( Sawyer and Norris, 2013 ). The modification to the Sawyer and Norris (2013) model is that instead of this researcher entering a dialogue with another researcher about the interviews, this researcher entered dialogue with the participants directly to check for thematic agreement (e.g., the importance of the Vietnam War on the social-emotional context of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s). The participants reviewed the transcript prior to writing the paper and then read the first draft of the paper prior to submission. As part of the purpose of this study was to explore anecdotal perception of classroom life from recollections of the Vietnam War era in the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War legacy on social-emotional development emerged as a theme. The role of sports in middle grades social-emotional development also emerged during the interviews. Likewise, this researcher was interested in the transition from the junior high school model to the middle school model and what potential insights individuals who were teachers during the late 1960s and 1970s might have that could provide further understanding of this thematic shift in the structure of early adolescent education. As such, this study is a psychological-anthropological case study in anecdotal experience that provides anecdotal insights into middle grades educational continuity and change based on a larger social context.

The transcripts that are analyzed from the two retired middle school teachers’ interviews are like narration ready for unpacking to understand what Pinar et al. (1995) suggested were the heretofore hidden “stories that never end, stories in which the listener, the ‘narratee,’ may become a character or indeed the narrator, in which all structure is provisional, momentary, a collection of twinkling stars in a firmament of flux” (p. 449). In other words, individual narratives are as important as large data sets, though different in how they are used for recommendations for curricular practice. Interview data presents a story that would otherwise go unread.

This study focuses on the interview data as a case study exploring the concept of middle school classroom life from a snapshot in time. This case study being structured on an interview of two former middle school teachers allows for reflection on their teaching practice based on the things that most imprinted on their memories. The individual within the larger school culture emerged as important. The years 1967–1971 are emphasized because of an interest in commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. With sociopolitical unrest leading to social change, there are parallels that an anecdotal case study can illuminate for discussion.

Findings and Discussion

The findings from each of the two interviews were more different than similar. As a case study using a semi-structured interview protocol, the individual participants determined what they saw as personally important. Although both schools that the participants taught at were urban and during the same time frame, the two schools were on different coasts of the United States, had different population composites, different sizes, different emphasis on sports, and different classroom management styles because of local culture. Three themes emerged: 1) a syllabus was important in management style, 2) sports were important in social cohesion and the absence of sports was seen as a deficit, and 3) the national social context—such as the Vietnam War—manifested itself in the discourse of the classroom environment to affect classroom management practice.

Participant 1—a male social studies teacher—noted that although his mentor teacher during his student teaching practicum was authoritarian, Participant 1 considered himself to be “cooperative” and not “assertively authoritative.” He seemed to reference his role as a football coach as one that was more pastoral than authoritarian. Participant 1 noted that this style of management worked because:

(Participant 1) My style was more to be in a partnership with the students—more or less informal and not particularly disciplinarian—but demanding academically. And it worked with my particular students. It would not have worked in many other school atmospheres in my opinion, but it certainly worked in the school I was in and the students I was teaching.

This suggests that because he was of the same culture as the majority, that there was a cultural understanding in which the dominant culture of the area expected a somewhat “informal” approach to discipline. Rules, in other words, did not necessarily need to be written and posted on the wall. This seems to be in keeping with what Caughlan (2005) observed of “pastoral power,” as well as what Pope et al. (2014) suggested about the importance of the coach identity as a role of social importance in communities.

Both participants indicated that they provided a syllabus to their seventh-grade students at the beginning of the school year. Participant 1 noted:

(Participant 1) Well, I did have a syllabus. Let me back up a little bit; I certainly had a syllabus, but I didn’t have specific rules for behavior in the classroom. But I did have a specific syllabus that I handed out at the beginning of the year, the academic period.

Participant 2 (a female science teacher from the east coast) on the other hand indicated that explicitly spelled-out rules were needed—because of experience.

(Interviewer) Did you have written rules and guidelines?

(Participant 2) Not the first year.

(Interviewer) And the second year?

(Participant 2) The second year I did.

(Interviewer) And how did you go about constructing those rules?

(Participant 2) I thought about it over the summer—I mean always had a syllabus, but I think what you’re talking about are other expectations.

(Interviewer)Yes.

(Participant 2) What I came to understand my first year is that children that age want rules; they want structure—they want to know what the expectation is. Because, as I said, seventh grade is such an extremely difficult year. My experience in the area where I was, was that students needed and wanted to be told by an adult that they trusted what the expectation was. They did not want to make those decisions for themselves—for the most part. And so, over the summer, when I thought about the challenges I had for the first year, I spent a great deal of time thinking about how I would structure my approach during the second year. So, I did, I had rules—hopefully not too many rules, but just basically what the rules were. You know, about speaking or, you know, what would seem now to be maybe insignificant—but, chewing gum or where you sit or things like that. That was all set out, because I just found that kids that age in that area wanted to know exactly what was expected of them.

Participant 2’s experience in her first year of teaching prompted her to change from the relatively informal management style (as outlined by Participant 1) to the more formal management style of rules to be documented in the syllabus like a contract. Participant 2 suggested that implementing the formal rules in her next year of teaching seemed to be an integral part of fostering a stable learning environment. Both participants had protocols, but they manifested differently. Participant 2, the science teacher, began this way in the second year after adapting her management style from what she learned her first year of teaching:

(Participant 2) They came in, I let them sit where they wanted to sit, and told them very specifically to choose carefully because they were not going to be able to change seats at all the whole year. I then made a seating chart and made sure that I memorized the name of every student. I found that is amazing for having a calm class—is to be able to redirect a student by immediately calling them by name, not having to walk over to them or talk to them or anything—simply calling them by name calmly, clearly calmly redirecting conduct.

(Participant 2) Okay, my second year, I felt like I had no disciplinary problems. And, as I said, I think the reason for that was that I made sure I knew every child’s name by the second day in class. And so I tried to exude self-confidence and was very clear and directive when I spoke to them. So, I just think that created an atmosphere where the student knew what was expected of him or her—including the fact that I set forth the rules from the start. The first year I thought I did have some discipline problems with the one class that I was warned that I would (laughter), and, I’m not sure that I ever did—I don’t think it was until the end of the year that I ever felt that things calmed down in that class at all.

Keeping the seventh-grade classes under control seemed to be a constant process of negotiation. Mediating venues that were attached to the school but not class, such as sports events, seemed to be a part of that negotiation process. Sports—football in particular—seemed to be a means that Participant 1 could use as a mode of amplifying his negotiating authority, because of his status as the assistant coach for what he noted was a “very successful” football program. Participant 1 noted that the authority of a football coach was a special type of authority different from the authority he had as a teacher:

(Participant 1) That’s easy because if you’re a coach you are the authority. And, you demand discipline. Any athletic endeavor demands discipline. If the individuals don’t conform to that discipline then they’re benched—they’re marginalized. And no student really wants to be marginalized, particularly when they are all out competing for a position on the football team—a successful football team. If the program is successful, if the athletic endeavor is successful, and it garners a lot of positive reaction from parents, students, coaches, the public in general, then it has an inherent discipline all of its own. It’s easy to get the kids to cooperate—it’s never a problem in a successful athletic endeavor—it’s never a problem.

This extra type of authority seemed to amplify his authority as a teacher. Participant 2, however, taught at a school that did not have any after-school sports programs. Perhaps this missing layer of school-sponsored sports removed a potential additional source of authority from teachers. Participant 1 suggested that motivation was the key factor surrounding sports and that the motivation within sports could be complimentary to motivating academic performance.

Individual students seemed to respect Participant 1’s authority as the football coach and teacher combined. The combination of roles as football coach and teacher reinforced each other to augment the teacher’s classroom authority. This seems to support Dervent and Inan (2015) social cognitive theory of football coaches’ influence on student-athletes’ academic success and social development through the concept of social role modeling. The coach identity can be an important component of a teacher’s management effectiveness inside and outside the classroom ( Pope et al., 2014 ). Similarly, Cossentino (2004) noted that the coach identity can be an important way for teachers to reinforce their pedagogical authority.

Participant 1 indicated that his football team was considered successful and that some of the players were also students in his classes. Classroom management overlapped with football field management and the combination seemed to be an effective means of generating self-contained respect in which students respected him as a teacher-coach without needing any assistance from administration. In other words, Participant 1 was a nearly self-contained figure of authority from the beginning.

(Interviewer) How often did you have to involve administration in disciplinary issues?

(Participant 1) Very rarely; I rarely bothered them. The students were full of energy, but they were never hostile. So, and they were never really hostile toward each other either. They were just full of energy or they were emotional over something—could be a positive emotion, could be a negative one—but there was no real friction on a personal ad hominem level, detectable by myself. And if there ever was ever anything like that, particularly with the 11th graders, if they were interested in football, I would resolve it on the football field. … Everybody would have a laugh. It was never hostile. I was never assertively authoritative—I didn’t try to heavily assert my authority. I would just say that it’s time for you to calm down and it’s time to cooperate.

This further suggests Participant 1’s authority as both coach and teacher in effectively maintaining a goal-oriented management approach for social studies similar to the goal-oriented approach in football discussed by Dervent and Inan (2015) . His identity as football coach and teacher created additional strategies for maintaining authority in which the football field was a second classroom. The two fields—classroom and football—reinforced the teacher’s authority. This was done in what Jansen and Kiefer (2020) discussed as a social-emotional development approach relevant to middle school students to meet them where they are and to encourage prosocial skills within school environments that include the classroom and the sports field.

Participant 2, the female science teacher, although in a different context from the male social studies teacher, also exuded a sense of self-contained authority who very rarely needed administrator assistance with discipline. Without an identity of a sports coach, she seemed to rely more on the structure of written and spoken rules at the beginning and on the basis of scientific process. Even without the additional identity of sports coach, Participant 2 seemed to utilize the subject—science—as a way to establish a method for students to follow. Every student had an assigned seat, for example, and so that established a set routine that they could follow the entire year. They had set times for lecture, discussion, and interactive laboratory work. Again, a methodological structure was established by Participant 2 so that students “knew what was expected of him or her—including the fact that I set forth the rules from the start” (Participant 2 interview note).

National-level political and social movements seemed to affect teacher practice on a nearly continual basis. The school was not isolated from larger political and social situations. Both participants spoke of their experience teaching during what became known as the height of the Vietnam War. Both participants mentioned the Vietnam War throughout their interview as it related to classroom topics and behavior. Sometimes, the conflict in Vietnam would be discussed in class, especially if Participant 1 thought students were distracted:

(Participant 1) So, I tried to gauge: What was on the minds of these students today? Was it a headline about something in Civil Rights, a headline about the [Vietnam] War? Or some other headline that dominated television or their parents’ conversation? And try to relate that to the subject matter during that classroom time. On the other hand, if it was something that had happened at school that they didn’t like or that they were puzzled over or that it was concerning to them, then we would talk about it—we would just stop the academic side of class for 10 min and I’d just let them talk. Then I would bring it back and I tried never to take a position on those things and explain it as best I could.

This was a management tactic to redirect potentially disruptive behavior into a productive activity within the context of the course. In other words, this teacher did not blame the student for being distracted. Instead, the social dynamics of society were acknowledged and allowed to be discussed within the learning environment. This acknowledgment validated students as stakeholders in their own education.

Participant 2, who was teaching on a military base, suggested an even more pronounced affect that the conflict in Vietnam had on student—and teacher—behavior. One of the main affects seemed to be a feeling of uncertainty in which the concept of home moved:

(Participant 2) This was a large urban school. It was on a very large military installation. So to that extent it was probably different from many other large urban schools, and because it was during the height of the Vietnam War people were constantly moving. The teachers moved in and out, the students were moving in and out. And more to the point, I think that the students had more challenges than students at other schools, because most of those students had a father who was absent fighting in the Vietnam War, and had a mother who was working and trying to keep things together at home.

To compensate for the uncertainty, Participant 2 indicated that having delineated rules and expectations on a syllabus and through repetition of example fostered a sense of calm. Participant 2 had a seating chart where each student was assigned a seat for the whole year. This seemed to be a tactic for (re)establishing a sense of home or stability—in a subtle but identifiable way—so that students would come to school knowing that they could always go to the same seat in the same classroom with the same teacher and have a sense of affirming structure. Establishing routine through structured social protocols was important because of relatively low parent involvement.

(Interviewer) Were there any specific curricular guidelines given to you?

(Participant 2) We were given the books that we were supposed to use. And I had two books to use—one book to be used for, as I say, the more gifted students. And a different book for those who were more challenged. We were told what we were supposed to cover. The type of curriculum it was is there were reading assignments—I would give homework assignments—and we would have discussions, lectures and discussion. And because it was a science class, I also would have a lab. Because money was so tight in this particular area, in fact, I bought a lot of my own supplies for the labs. If I wanted to do particular labs, the school often times didn’t have the materials and so I purchased them myself. (pause) Very different from the tax base that we have now for some of our K-12 schools, and (State redacted) was very different from (State redacted). (State redacted) had much more of a focus on the tax base for schools; in (State redacted) that just wasn’t the case, at that time.

Money was a much more pronounced issue for Participant 2 than Participant 1 because the local school district in Participant 2’s areas was economically depressed.

(Interviewer) Were you an advisor for any extracurricular activities?

(Participant 2) No, and the reason for that is that these kids did not have a parent who could pick them up after school. So, there virtually were no after-school activities. They either got on the bus or if they were lucky enough to have a parent who could pick them up they could. But, there was no ability to keep a child after school either voluntarily or involuntarily. So, anything that needed to be done in terms of communicating with a child or parent needed to be done during the structured school day.

External financial constraints and the Vietnam War draft was a major cause for parent detachment from their children’s school. Parent support is important for student success. If parent support is missing, then it is up to school staff to step in as a local quasi-parent ( Akmal and Larsen, 2004 ). This seemed to be the case during the Vietnam War era, too, as suggested in this interview. Parent support did not seem to be a problem for Participant 1 on the west coast. The contrast is particularly remarkable as well because Participant 2’s school did not have after-school sports.

In the context of the late 1960s and 1970s, the United States middle grades system was largely organized into what where called “junior high schools.” Starting in the late 1980s junior high schools started to be reorganized into middle schools. Some districts still retained the junior high school model into the 2010s. The junior high school tended to be grades 7–8 while middle schools tended to be grades 6–8. Sometimes, a junior high school was grades 7–9 in which case the high school included only grades 10–12 and called a senior high school ( Tamer, 2012 ). These organizational shifts to the middle grades structure are important because of their reflection of the changing understandings regarding developmental psychology and educational psychology.

As much as the changes were psychological, they were also linguistic for cultural appeal. The term middle school infers something different than junior high school. As Tamer (2012) suggested, middle school infers a more student-centered approach while junior high school suggests a more content-driven approach. While a generalization, it does frame the context for why the change in structure of grades 6–8 shifted. While psychological, the labels were also sociocultural and affected the way that middle grades education was conceptualized and taught. Even the design of the school buildings changed so that the architecture reflected the apparent shift in focus of the middle school in comparison to the junior high school.

The language used to describe the middle grades is important because the language use can be what Wortham (2008) called “social action in practice.” Here is where the transition from educational psychology to educational anthropology takes place—it is in the social practice of teaching and learning in the middle grades where student social development is as important as their academic development. These concepts are present in the background of interviews with middle school teachers who must consider many different variables of curriculum design and implementation within the changing social context of early adolescent learners in the middle grades.

The physical design of the learning space affects classroom management practice. Social action in practice for management and organization of schools also took the form of changes in the physical design of middle schools. The architecture and layout of a school suggests the priorities and function of the teaching and learning space. Among the spectrum of school designs, there is variation from the traditional segmented, rigidly separate rooms with disciplinary boundaries to the open concept plans that foster interdisciplinary collaboration. Floorplans and architectural design can influence social cognitive process, according to Dovey and Fisher (2014) .

While classroom management in the middle grades has often been analyzed from psychological perspectives, there is much to be learned from anthropological research methods in conjunction with the psychological study of the middle school environment ( Jansen and Kiefer, 2020 ). The shift in focus from the junior high school model to the middle school model can be inferred in the physical design of the school buildings. The physical redesigns that began to emerge in the late 1970s infer the curriculum reforms. The junior high school layout tended to emphasize content-focused instruction.

The middle school layout tended to emphasize the concept of student-centered instruction. The hybrid instructional format would become more common in which there is a balance between these two models. With the blending of content-focused and student-centered instruction came the blending of the physical layout of the school building itself. The architecture was partially a reflection of the instructional type. The student-centered or hybrid models tended to reflect what Dovey and Fisher (2014) discussed as the renewed interest in the role of socio-spatial variables in teaching and learning.

The two interviews analyzed in this qualitative study suggest that each of the two former middle school teachers interviewed fostered an inclusive and supportive classroom environment in different ways depending on their local school social context. The importance of national social trends (e.g., politics in the Vietnam War), classroom structuring from the start of the year (e.g., syllabus and classroom rules), and the importance of the coach identity manifested differently. These seem to be common themes across classrooms and time, anecdotally substantiating studies by Pope et al. (2014) and Dervent and Inan (2015) on the coach identity in which they concluded that such an identity can augment the teacher’s authority because of social modeling in social cognitive theory in which students look up to a coach as a role model or figure of authority. Each of the two participants in this study established centralized control through slightly different means and both used written guidelines and rules. But the reliance on written rules varied based on each teacher’s assessment of the social-emotional development of their students at that time and within the larger community context.

The divergence in the two participants’ experiences with sports was perhaps the largest contrast. The social studies teacher was also the assistant football coach, and this added to his authority. The science teacher was at a school where parent involvement was relatively low because of external financial and work constraints coupled with the school not having sports programs. There was a code of conduct, but that code seemed to be based mostly on unwritten principles of respect and conventions of interpersonal conduct through personality, constructs of protection or safety (such as defending each other for team cohesion on and off the field), and the negotiation between individual and team in which the individual has more freedom up to the point where that freedom intersects the team goal.

Data Availability Statement

The interview data from this study is quoted in this article. The raw interview data may be made available upon request. Identifying information is redacted in accordance with the approved research protocol.

Ethics Statement

This study involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the Austin Peay State University Institutional Review Board. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Semi-structured interview protocol

To Participant (“interviewee,” also addressed as “you” or “your”):

This interview is intended for former school teachers and in-service teachers. You have been asked to participate in this study because of your status as a former or current school teacher (including any grade level in K-12). Interviews will be voice recorded and transcribed. Results will be published in the researcher’s dissertation and potentially other scholarly venues, including but not limited to scholarly journals and books. Any personally identifiable information from the participants (interviewees) will be redacted for publication to maintain interviewee anonymity. You may stop your interview at any time. Your transcribed interview is available upon request from the researcher conducting the interview.

The purpose of this interview is to add to the field of educational research on school and classroom life and management. The questions in this survey are designed to specifically 1) identify the manners that characterized classrooms and schools by 2) saving your first-person account of your experience as a K-12 teacher.

The researcher (interviewer) will publish in whole or in part your interview (with any personally identifiable information redacted) and will analyze your interview and other participants’ interviews with the purpose of adding to the literature on classroom life and management and any other applicable fields of educational research. Interview questions:

1. What grade levels did you teach? What year(s) did you teach? How would you generally describe the school—urban or rural, et cetera?

2. How would you characterize students’ manners in your school?

a. Did you have a specific idea of your classroom management plan at the beginning of the school year?

b. What was your philosophy of authority and management in the classroom? In extracurricular activities?

i. Did you try to instill specific manners in your classroom management plan?

ii. How would you characterize the ways in which students interacted with each other in your classroom?

iii. Were there significant differences between genders in their manners?

c. How would you characterize teachers’ manners in your school?

Keywords: classroom life, middle school teachers, semi-structured interview, social-emotional development, socio-spatial context, psychological anthropology, Vietnam War legacy, coach identity

Citation: Attwood AI (2021) An Anecdotal Case Study in Psychological Anthropology of Two Retired Middle School Teachers’ Perceptions of Classroom Life in the United States. Front. Educ. 6:655457. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.655457

Received: 18 January 2021; Accepted: 15 June 2021; Published: 02 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Attwood. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Adam I. Attwood, [email protected]

Methods and Techniques in Anthropology

• Post author: Disha Singh
• Post published: 17 June 2022
• Post category: Anthropology
• Post comments: 0 Comments

Table of Contents

• 1 What are Techniques in Anthropology?
• 2 Methods and Techniques in Anthropology
• 3.1 Uncontrolled Observation
• 3.2 Controlled Observation
• 4.1 Major Sources of Case Study
• 4.2 Advantages of Case Study in Anthropology
• 4.3 Limitations of Case Study
• 5 Genealogical Method in Anthropology
• 6.1 Characteristics of Survey Method
• 6.2 Types of Surveys in Anthropology
• 6.3 Advantages of Survey Method
• 6.4 Disadvantages of Survey Method
• 7.1 What are methods and techniques in anthropology?
• 7.2 What is Case Study?
• 7.3 What are the 4 types of surveys?

What are Techniques in Anthropology?

In Anthropology a researcher may use comparative, historical and cross-cultural methods. The comparative method refers to the method of comparing different societies, groups or social institutions within the same society to show whether and why they are similar or different in certain aspects.

Cross-cultural comparison is a method of studying cultural phenomena across cultures of the same period. In the historical method, the origin, development and gradual evolution of institutions, societies and cultures are studied.

The ethnographic method is the core of anthropological research which is essentially based on fieldwork. A researcher has to collect reliable and accurate data systematically. The following are different types of data such as primary data, secondary data, qualitative data and quantitative data.

Primary data is collected by the researcher directly from the field. Secondary data are the data collected by someone other than the researcher. The qualitative data are expressed in the form of words, whereas quantitative data are expressed in the form of numbers.

Following are the methods and techniques in anthropology explained below:

Observation as a Method

Case study method in anthropology, genealogical method in anthropology, survey method in anthropology.

In the contemporary western world, the people are under constant observation wherever they go, as they come under the close circuit television. The non-western world is also fast catching up with it. Observing and being observed are two important features of modern society.

It is said that ours is becoming an observation society (Silverman; 25, 2012). In social research, one of the most important and extensively used methods is observation. All observations are not scientific. An observation becomes scientific only if it is planned and executed systematically.

This may take place in a real-life setting or in a laboratory. An anthropologist as an ethnographer observes individual and collective behaviour in real-life settings. Hence, Herskovits, the American Anthropologist terms the field as the ‘ethnographer’s laboratory’.

There are several types of field observation have been used in anthropological research. A researcher can observe the day-to-day life of the group under study either by participating or without participating in it. Observation is categorised mainly into two types:

Uncontrolled Observation

Controlled observation.

Uncontrolled observation is a type of observation which is made in the natural environment without being influenced by outside control or external factors. Most of the knowledge about social phenomena is generally derived through uncontrolled observation.

The following are two types of uncontrolled observations, participant observation and non-participant observation.

• Participant Observation: When a researcher actively participates in the activities of the group under investigation, This is known as participant observation. In the extreme level of participant observation, the researcher might conceal one’s identity. This can be called total participant observation. Such kind of observation is resorted to when the researcher intends to keep the natural setting intact, without any kind of disturbance. In situations in which one’s role is confined to that of a researcher and it is openly declared, is known as quasi-participant observation.
• Non-participant observation: When an observer does not actively participate in the activities of the group and simply observes them as a total outsider, it is called non-participant observation. It can be conducted by the researcher either by keeping away from the group, without revealing the identity to the subjects or by being present in the group, but without involving in their activities. Sometimes, this is impossible for a non-participant observer to be totally passive and therefore might try to associate with the group. In such an event, a Non-participant observer would be moving from a total non-participation to becoming a Quasi-participant observer.

In this form , an attempt is made to exercise control over the phenomena or observation. It is done according to a particular plan. Thus, This is possible to make an objective study and keep the observation free from biases and prejudices.

As it is difficult to impose control on the phenomena in Anthropological observation, generally controls are imposed on the observer. Such controls increase precision, ensure reliability and increase objectivity.

The devices used for making control over the observer are given below. Could you complete the list?

• Detailed observation plan
• Use of schedules and check-lists
• Use of socio-metric scales
• Use of hypothesis
• Mechanical instruments like

Though anthropologists widely make use of observation for data collection, many other data collection methods are also extensively employed. A case study is one such method which is used by Anthropologists to undertake an exhaustive study of a person, a group or institution, a place or an event. Case study research in social Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology consists of intensive periods of ethnographic field work.

A case Study means an intensive study of a case. A case is a social unit with deviant behaviour. It is a method of qualitative analysis. This is extensively used in psychology, education, sociology, anthropology, economics and political science.

Which aims at obtaining a complete and detailed account of a social phenomenon or a social unit, which may be a person, family, community, an event, or institution.

Important characteristics of the Case Study are:

• It is an intensive, comprehensive and detailed study of a social unit.
• It helps to understand the person as well as the hidden dimensions of human life.

The Case study method helps retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events such as individual life cycles, small group behaviour, etc. It is like a case history of a patient.

As a patient goes to the doctor with some serious disease, the doctor records the case history. Analysis of case history helps in the diagnosis of the patient’s illness. Anthropologists study the case history of a group.

Case history may be obtained, using a combination of different methods and techniques such as interviews, participant observation etc. However, the questionnaire and schedule are highly ineffective in the Case Study.

Major Sources of Case Study

These are the major sources of case studies for the collection of important information:

• Life histories
• Personal documents, letters and records
• Biographies
• Information obtained through interviews
• Observation.

Advantages of Case Study in Anthropology

The following are some of the advantages of a Case Study :

• A Case Study helps to probe the in-depth analysis of a social unit.
• This is suitable for collecting data pertaining to sensitive areas of a social phenomenon.
• This helps to collect details regarding the diverse habits, traits and qualities of the unit under investigation.
• The data obtained through Case Study is useful for the formulation of the hypothesis and also to provide clues for further research.

Limitations of Case Study

These are some limitations of the case study :

• Case history records could be open to errors due to faulty selection of cases and inaccurate observation.
• This is very difficult to draw generalisations on the basis of a few cases.
• No uniform and standardised systems have been developed for recording case history.
• The investigator’s bias might distort the quality of the Case Study.
• Case Study is time-consuming and costly in certain cases.

Genealogy is the study of one’s ancestors parents, grandparents great grandparents and so on. The genealogical method was originally developed by W.H.R. Rivers during the Torres Straits expedition of 1898-99. Later this became one of the standard procedures adopted in ethnographic research in Social Anthropology .

The primary aim of the genealogical method is the analysis of the social organisation, i.e. the interpersonal relations and living arrangements between members of society. The method required extensive interviewing of individuals in order to record their descent, succession and inheritance.

The genealogical method was used, along with the observation method census and settlement plans, first by W H R Rivers in field research and produced his classical monograph on the Todas, and later by many anthropologists.

A genealogical method is very much helpful in studying kinship , and thereby in understanding the social structure or network of relationships among individuals. This is done through the collection of demographic and social data and by charting pedigrees and mapping residence details.

In the studies of migration and to trace out early migrants, the genealogical method is found very useful. Internationally accepted simple sets of kinship symbols are used in Anthropology to draw kinship diagrams or genealogical charts.

The survey method is a systematic collection of data from a population or sample of the population through the use of personal interviews, questionnaires, schedules or other data gathering tools/devices.

This is the most traditional and common form of the data collection method. Through surveys, a researcher can elicit the views, attitudes, perceptions and sometimes behaviour of different groups or individuals.

Surveys are the only data collection method through which desired information can be obtained more easily and less expensively from a large population. Usually, in a survey method , data can be collected through either conducting an interview or administering a questionnaire. You shall familiarise yourself with interview and questionnaire techniques in the latter part of this unit.

Characteristics of Survey Method

Following are the characteristics of the survey method :

• A survey mostly involves a representative sample of a population and enables to describe and generalise the entire population.
• Survey seeks responses directly from the respondents.
• Conclusions are drawn from the data collected from the sample population.

Types of Surveys in Anthropology

A survey method is used to cover a wider geographical area involving various languages, customs, races etc. On the basis of the subject matter and technique of data collection, this may be classified under the following heads:

• General Survey: In this survey, data are collected in a general manner without any specific objective.
• Specific Survey: Specific survey is just the reverse of a general survey. When the survey is conducted for testing the validity of some hypothesis, it is called a specific survey.
• Regular Survey: When the survey is conducted at regular intervals it is called a regular survey. Banking, marketing and economic institutions generally conduct this type of survey to frame and implement their policies and programmes concerning economic matters.
• Sample Survey: When the survey is done only among a fraction of a total population, it is called a sample survey. This is applied when one studies a very large population where house to house survey is not possible. Samples are the representative unit of the total population. A generalisation can be made on the basis of a sample survey.

Advantages of Survey Method

Following are the advantages of the survey method :

• Data could be collected from a large population covering an extensive area.
• Survey research has its broadest application in public issues.
• This also has a great impact on political research, especially in the area of voting studies. This is also used to study community and market behaviour.
• Data obtained through this method are considered as more reliable and valid because survey method is based on statistical analysis, which is an objective method of data collection.

Disadvantages of Survey Method

Following are the disadvantages of survey method :

• Low response rate or non-response rate where the questionnaires are mailed to respondents.
• Possibility of recording biased responses, especially if the interviewer is inexperienced.
• Historical events cannot be studied through this method.
• Sampling error might affect the results of the research.
• Survey method consumes a longer time and greater human resources.

FAQ Related to Methods and Techniques in Anthropology

What are methods and techniques in anthropology.

Following are the methods and techniques in anthropology explained below: 1. Observation as a Method 2. Case Study Method in Anthropology 3. Genealogical Method in Anthropology 4. Survey Method in Anthropology etc.

What is Case Study?

What are the 4 types of surveys.

Following are the 4 types of surveys: 1. General Survey 2. Specific Survey 3. Regular Survey 4. Sample Survey etc.

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Anthropology and Epidemiology: learning epistemological lessons through a collaborative venture

Dominique pareja béhague.

1 Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E7HT, United Kingdom

2 Department of Social Medicine, Federal University of Pelotas, Pelotas, RS, Brazil

Helen Gonçalves

Cesar gomes victora.

DP Béhague conducted the literature search and wrote the paper. H Gonçalves commented on a draft of the paper, and wrote certain sub-sections of the paper. CG Victora commented on a draft of the paper, and edited sections of the paper.

Collaboration between anthropology and epidemiology has a long and tumultuous history. Based on empirical examples, this paper describes a number of epistemological lessons we have learned through our experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Although critical of both mainstream epidemiology and medical anthropology, our analysis focuses on the implications of addressing each discipline’s main epistemological differences, while addressing the goal of adopting a broader social approach to health improvement. We believe it is important to push the boundaries of research collaborations from the more standard forms of “multidisciplinarity,” to the adoption of theoretically imbued “interdisciplinarity.” The more we challenge epistemological limitations and modify ways of knowing, the more we will be able to provide in-depth explanations for the emergence of disease-patterns and thus, to problem-solve. In our experience, both institutional support and the adoption of a relativistic attitude are necessary conditions for sustained theoretical interdisciplinarity. Until researchers acknowledge that methodology is merely a human-designed tool to interpret reality, unnecessary methodological hyper-specialization will continue to alienate one field of knowledge from the other.

Introduction

As applied medical anthropology has become a more central discipline in public health over the last 30 years, challenges and debates relating to cross-disciplinary collaboration, particularly with epidemiologists, have come to the fore 1 . The demand for anthropological input in public health emerged less from academic epidemiology and more from the limitations that professionals in leading organizations, such as the World Heath Organization and bilateral donor agencies, experienced when relying solely on epidemiology for improving program development, evaluation and implementation 2 . As a result, a certain template for expected ways of collaborating developed. Most commonly, applied epidemiological projects now generally incorporate sub-studies based on use of “qualitative methods,” usually in a so-called “formative phase,” to be carried out by anthropologists. In this template, the anthropologist’s role has consisted largely of helping epidemiologists adapt standardized measurement tools to specific contexts, providing a descriptive narrative of patients’ subjective experiences, or explaining the reasons for the failure of a particular programmatic initiative.

While this form of collaboration is generally deemed useful, in a general sense, the inclusion of qualitative components in public health research initially proved difficult. The merits of including qualitative studies have not always been widely endorsed, and more than once, the authors of this paper noted comments made by colleagues that multidisciplinarity has been engaged in more out of lip-service to donors than real analytical need. For many anthropologists, in turn, the development of applied medical anthropology within the larger public health and epidemiological framework belittled the potential of anthropological contributions, a view that polarized the anthropological community. While many anthropologists embraced the challenge of working in public health, others rightly highlighted that applied anthropology has more often than not been used in a superficial way, devoid of theory and reduced to an over-simplified methods “toolkit” 3 , 4 . Fundamental and insurmountable epistemological differences between the two disciplines have rarely been acknowledged outside academic settings, to the extent that collaboration between the two disciplines has occurred in a parallel, rather than cross-fertilizing, fashion 5 .

Under the pressure of study funders, the authors of this paper began to collaborate in multidisciplinary projects in the beginning of the 1990s, at a time when the inclusion of anthropology and other disciplines in public health had become an entrenched expected norm, even while the debates described above had also reached a disharmonious peak. In many regards, we were directly influenced by these debates and certainly experienced a degree of disharmony. From the epidemiologist’s perspective, anthropological works were found to be verbose, excessively anecdotal, inappropriately based on small sample sizes selected according to convenience rather than random allocation. In sum, anthropology was seen to besubjective and un-scientific. The anthropologists in turn, often felt frustration with epidemiology’s biological bias, reductionism, tendency to homogenize and simplify reality, lack of theoretical sophistication, and black-boxing of the culture concept, referred to only when needing to explain unexpected or atypical epidemiological findings.

With time and many discussions, however, we discovered that these perceptions of each others’ approaches were inaccurate depictions of our actual epistemological positions. Often, they resulted from a misunderstanding of what each other’s discipline was seeking to achieve, emerging from too much attention technical differences relating to methodology and not enough attention to conceptual and analytical similarities. Indeed, critics within both anthropology and epidemiology have highlighted the futility of applying methods without a strong theoretical framework, arguing that the predominant focus on methodological specialization in both fields has inhibited the use of shared conceptual models and theoretical interests 6 , 7 . A recent study of professionals engaged in multidisciplinary public health research demonstrates the emergence of parallel debates occurring in both anthropology and public health which call for more critical examination of biomedicine and its dominant role in conceptualization of public health. These developments represent potential common ground that could be capitalized upon in moving towards greater conceptual - rather than methodological - collaboration between disciplines 8 .

Using empirical examples from our work, this paper aims to describe the epistemological lessons we have learned through our collaboration. Our analysis focuses on the methodological and theoretical implications of actively addressing assumptions regarding our disciplines’ main differences, while focusing on the mutual goal of adopting a broader social approach to population health improvement. Although the analysis presented below is at times critical of both mainstream epidemiology and medical anthropology, such critiques are not gratuitous but aimed ultimately at enriching multidisciplinary collaboration for the purposes of improving public health practice. As our paper will demonstrate, we believe it is important to push the boundaries of research collaborations from the more standard forms of “multidisciplinarity,” or the process whereby professionals of different disciplines participate in a single project, to “interdisciplinarity,” or the process where by professionals from distinct disciplines work together to generate novel concepts and integrate different levels and forms of explanation 9 .

Empirical examples of the collaboration: lessons learned

Using examples from our own research, this section will describe a number of areas where we have found convergence between our respective disciplines to be particularly fruitful and focused on theoretical, rather than simply methodological, exchange. Underlying all the forms of exchange we highlight below is an iterative process, whereby lines of inquiry, methodological developments, conceptual models, and the analysis and interpretation of data used in both disciplines feed into one-another.

Questionnaire design and improving acceptability of epidemiological surveys

A traditional form of collaboration between the two disciplines consists of using ethnographic insight to better develop questionnaires for quantitative surveys, primarily by improving the wording and social suitability of questions as dictated by formative ethnographic research exploring local taxonomies and illness categories 10 . For example, our research in Northeast Brazil showed that the word “canseira” appropriately captured the “rapid or difficult breathing” concept that characterizes pneumonia in small children with a respiratory infection. Incorporation of this term in the questionnaire - instead of the more complex expression “respiração rápida ou difícil” — helped improve its validity. Throughout our collaboration, we also discovered that anthropological insight can also increase local understanding of the objectives of the research, as well as respondent’s acceptability and compliance with the surveyors’ requests.

In our work, we took this form of collaboration further, and used it to refine our theoretical and interpretive understanding of phenomenon in question by using ethnographic insight to introduce unexpected questions into our research proposals. Frequently, for example, we have developed new questions to be used in our quantitative designs to help explain larger well-known epidemiological associations. For example, studies of teen pregnancy have frequently found that if the mothers of young girls were themselves teen-mothers, their children are more likely to themselves become pregnant as teens. Using an ethnographic approach, we explored the role of the family further and in a more detailed fashion, and found that some parents actively “pressure” their children to engage in serious romantic relationships at an early age. In a subsequent case-control study, we then included this phenomenon as a quantitative measure and found that young girls who had experienced this sort of pressure, as subjectively described by them, were more likely to become pregnant as teens 11 . Our ethnographic research also suggested that if a girl’s mother had children by more than one father, the risk of teenage pregnancy was increased. This hypothesis, which was unlikely to have arisen from epidemiological investigation, was confirmed in the quantitative analyses of the whole sample 12 .

Without such an iterative process in which one discipline influences the thematic content of the other, we are unlikely to have been able to advance our theoretical and explanatory understanding of particular phenomenon in question. However, in our experience, cross-disciplinary fertilization did not simply occur at the level of influencing or improving the content and mechanics of the research process. Rather, as the following sections will demonstrate, we found that theoretical interdisciplinarity was more likely to unfold if we actively challenged each disciplines’ epistemological assumptions and limitations.

Use of epidemiological results to frame anthropological studies

Medical anthropologists often focus their research on describing “discourses” and “worldviews” that develop around a particular concept, disease or widespread phenomenon. Such studies are often based implicitly on the underlying aim of representing the “voices” of marginalized sub-populations, and thus, have tended to produce descriptive results that aim to explore locally salient cultural “constructs.” While interesting and providing a useful starting point, these studies can prove to be analytically direction-less, as they do not tend to be structured around a specific set of focused questions. Also, because epidemiology has a strong biomedical bias, and because biomedicine is typically interventionist, many epidemiologists have little patience with what they see as unfocussed research that will not lead to concrete public health improvement.

In response to this critique, we found that designing an anthropological study around questions emerging from epidemiological results adds a qualitatively different kind of analytical slant to our ethnographic approach. While applied anthropology has not routinely engaged in the use of comparison groups for the purposes of explaining the reasons for health phenomena (and anthropologists’ attempts to do so have often been brandished “reductionistic” by their peers), we found that working alongside epidemiologists pushed us towards focused exploration and explanation. To better address explanation through the use of comparison groups, we increased our ethnographic sample sizes and used randomly selected sub-samples from the larger epidemiological studies within which we conducted our research (specifically, the 1993 and 1982 cohorts). Random stratified sampling was deemed necessary not to conduct probabilistic analyses, but to learn about the range of experiences among what is in Brazil, a socially and economically highly heterogeneous population and through this, to identify locally salient subgroups for analytical comparison. This sampling scheme also led to the inclusion of both introverted and socially sheltered participants, as well as those who spent very little time in or near their homes, something that certainly a convenience sample, which tends to favor extroverted informants, would not have captured 13 - 16 .

Using a comparative analytical framework facilitated by this methodological approach, one of our studies, for example, focused on trying to explain the reasons for Brazil’s world-renown high cesarean section rates, as found in epidemiological studies, by comparing subgroups of women experiencing and actively seeking both csections and normal births 17 , 18 . Similarly, another study explored why certain subcategories of mothers identified in epidemiological studies - namely, white women and those with male infants 19 - wean their children substantially sooner than other women. This study revealed an unexpected set of influences, emerging from the medical establishment’s use of growth charts, that push women to wean their children early because of heightened concerns that their infants were not growing well 20 .

The concurrent use of comparison groups in inter-linked epidemiological and anthropological studies has proved particularly useful. For example, one study on the relationship between teen pregnancy and both employment and education used an epidemiological case-control study of teen pregnancy by 18-19 years of age, together with an allied ethnographic study using the same comparative groups. Ethnographic results demonstrate that youth who became pregnant had had school difficulties and failure before falling pregnant. In addition, young girls were found to value forging a lasting bond with their partners, for this also provided them with social status and upward mobility, without having to submit to the rules of educational institutions 11 , 21 . In terms of practical implications, these analyses suggested that it is not merely the lack of access to or information on contraception that leads to high rates of teen pregnancy, pointing to the need to take the broader sociocultural dimensions of pregnancy in youth into account. Even if sexual education were effective, this is usually provided between the 5 th and 8 th grades, and our study showed that girls who are likely to get pregnant are either dropping out before reaching this grade or are retained in lower grades due to repeated school failure. Therefore, targeting sexual education classes by age rather than grade would definitely make more sense 12 .

Use of ethnography for the interpretation of epidemiological results

Epidemiologists are becoming more and more aware of their discipline’s analytical and interpretive limitations 22 . Although epidemiology is meant to be rigorously based in hypothesis testing, whereby the associations to be tested are based on clearly postulated and plausible hypotheses derived either from the literature or clinical knowledge, this is not always the case. Rather, epidemiologists often test multiple hypotheses without being able to fully explain the reasons for the association in question. This is particularly so as epidemiology moves away from studying only biological phenomenon and towards exploring societal patterns and contexst, where causal pathways are likely to be longer, more complex, diverse, and even cyclical 23 .

In this regard, the use of ethnography for the interpretive enrichment of epidemiological results has proved to be fruitful form of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Unexpected epidemiological findings particularly benefit from additional anthropological insight when it come to analyzing subsidiary hypotheses and conducting subgroup analysis. In a recent study, for example, we used ethnography to explore and explain possible reasons for the associations established through statistical analysis. Looking specifically at quantitative results from two studies, one on determinants of mental morbidity and the other on age of sexual initiation, we used ethnographic data to elucidate the way that statistical associations are comprised of multiple pathways of influence that correspond to the unique experiences of specific subgroups. In exploring these pathways, we highlight the importance of an additional set of mediating factors that account for epidemiological results relating to both types of outcomes; these include the awareness and experience of inequities, young men and women’s reactions to the role of violence in everyday life, traumatic life events, increasing social isolation and introversion as a response to life’s difficulties, and differing approaches towards socio-psychological maturation 24 . Although these factors are difficult, if not impossible, to capture in a quantitative survey, they represent key aspects that should be included in public health initiatives aiming to mental health. In many ways, this goes contrary to the norm in public health, which tends to structure interventions according to quantitative indicators that have been “proven” to be causally salient in epidemiological studies, often without explicitly exploring the underlying phenomenon such indicators are likely to indicate.

Another study similarly explored epidemiologically-established gender differences in physical activity in the 1993 cohort, which showed that girls are more sedentary than boys. In-depth ethnographic research found that for a number of social and cultural reasons, the frequency with which young men socialised outside the school and home settings was higher than for girls. These behaviours were subsequently asked about in the quantitative survey, and analyses shows that this forms of sociability was associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Further ethnographic work enriched our explanatory understanding of the reasons for this gender difference. Young men are encouraged by their parents to engage in a number of physical activities outside the home in order to develop their masculinity, maturity, and identity. In contrast, young girls’ behaviour are actively controlled, to the extent that they are kept inside the home as a way of protecting them against the many dangers that they are perceived to be particularly at risk of experiencing, including physical violence 25 .

Hypothesis raising, sub-group analysis and effect modification

The ethnographer’s ability to discern differences and patterns according to subgroups represents an underutilized yet important area of convergence with epidemiology. In one of our anthropological studies, we used both qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore how some women living in shantytowns resist the negative depictions widely made of their social class standing by actively rejecting antenatal care provided in their local primary health care centre. These women considered such services to be a poor substitute for what the wealthy take for granted. Being particularly attuned to the values of upward mobility, several of these women invested their household’s scarce resources in travelling to public primary level facilities situated in richer neighbourhoods or tertiary level facilities, and at times, in paying for private sector care 26 . In many ways, this study lay the theoretical ground-work for distinguishing between subgroups of shantytown dwellers according to key attitudes relating to economic inequities, upward mobility, and normative society.

The ethnographic focus on discerning social patterns according to subgroups also holds great potential for the epidemiological exploration of effect modification. A recent analysis using ethnographic insight, for example, found that the statistical association between early teen pregnancy and mental morbidity in adulthood not only holds after controlling for confounders, but is modified by social class, such that the negative impact of pregnancy on mental morbidity is significantly more pronounced amongst the poor than the rich. The use of ethnographic case-studies in this analysis enabled us to clearly explore the mechanisms that account for these epidemiological findings. The ethnographic study found that the association between pregnancy and mental morbidity is more pronounced amongst a subgroup of poor women who feel marginalized from mainstream society. These women are highly politicised and particularly sensitive to the social stigma associated with teen pregnancy in poor youth. Because of this, some reject what they identify as upper class values, which includes the view that teen-pregnancy should be avoided. For these girls, teen-pregnancy represents a desired state that reaffirms their pride as members of the working class. Even so, these girls suffer considerable psychological strain ensuing from the social prejudice that their reproductive decisions stimulate 27 .

Similarly, another study on the relationship between pacifier use and breastfeeding duration used focused comparative ethnography to guide epidemiological subgroup analysis and consideration of effect modifiers. Ethnographic insight proved fundamental to teasing out whether or not pacifier use was causality related to breastfeeding duration, and to discern in which subgroups of women the relationship proved to be more strongly associated 28 . Although the ethnographic study was based on a small sample, the social patterning it uncovered guided the epidemiological identification of effect modifiers, bringing a level of analytical nuance to the epidemiological analysis that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. In this cases, it is particularly interesting to note that - whereas epidemiological studies alone showed a strong association between pacifier use and short breastfeeding duration - the combination with ethnographic analyses suggested that association was not causal. After this study was published, a randomized controlled trial supported the lack of a causal association 29 .

Contrary to common depictions of the limitations of ethnographies based on small samplesizes, these studies show the power that in-depth anthropological analysis has for discerning patterns within a small sample size, which can later be confirmed in quantitative survey work. In our work, we have found that a remarkably high proportion of the effect modifications (or interactions) suggested by small ethnographic studies are likely to be confirmed as statistically significant in epidemiological analyses.

These experiences demonstrate the importance of having in-depth knowledge of local conditions, practices and realities for improving the interpretive caliber of epidemiological research. Indeed, a growing concern amongst social epidemiologists no longer working within a biological conceptual framework is the relative lack of a rigorous conceptual basis upon which epidemiological hypotheses and analyses are conducted. Related to this is the need some social epidemiologists identify to ground their work more fully within local contextual knowledge 7 , 30 - 32 .

Our experiences with the above collaborative ventures has not always been easy, nor has it developed without some degree of professional risk. While a template of sorts was developed in early days for the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods, those seeking to engage in conceptual interdisciplinarity have been required to chart new ground. This not only brings with it a number of communicative difficulties, it holds important implications for publication. Although a number of epidemiological and public health journals now accept and encourage publication of studies using qualitative components, this is certainly a minority occurrence, and still heavily focused on the addition of “qualitative methods,” rather than true disciplinary theoretical exchange. Furthermore, many public health journal require studies reporting on ethnographic findings to starkly separate a “neutral” description of results from their discussion, even though this is antithetical to the analytical and interpretive frameworks most often required in anthropology. Journals publishing in medical and social anthropology, in turn, have as of yet failed to fully explore the benefits of considering anthropological studies that include quantitative analyses. Remarkably few journals are rigorous on both accounts, to the extent that in our experience, reviewers’ comments can often be quite polarized, depending on their disciplinary orientation. In an amusing albeit somewhat offensive review, one of our paper combining ethnographic and epidemiological results was described as follows “this material is thrown together as a Spanish paella in that ‘anything that ever swum the seas’ can go in it: it is tasty; but no one knows what is in it or its nutritional value.”

To remedy this constraint, we believe greater attention should be given to the conceptual and theoretical bases for interdisciplinary exchange, a type of exchange that requires an explicit consideration of the epistemological boundaries of each of our respective disciplines. In our experience, engaging with substantive analytical questions centered our discussion around conceptual models, and charting the hierarchical pathways of influence from one set of social determinants to various health outcomes in question 33 . Epistemological convergence was facilitated through a three specific foci which were in actuality facilitated, rather than inhibited, by the “applied” nature of our work.

First, the need in public health is to not simply describe phenomena, but to explain the reasons for their appearance and to propose ways to change them. This requirement of developing research questions within a problem-solving framework demands a more sophisticated and explicit theoretical orientation, one that is geared towards generating understandings of causality and mechanisms of change. To fulfill this objective, both methodological and epistemological modifications are required 34 , to which both epidemiology and anthropology have the potential to contribute. In our view, so central is this type of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization that most of our studies - even those headed by anthropologists — now comprise both an epidemiological and anthropological approach.

Second, while discussions around methods often constituted the starting-point of our collaboration, our mutual interest in explanation lead us to focus less on methodological refinement and specialization, and more on challenges in the interpretation of data and meaning attributed to our analytical conclusions. As some authors have claimed, debates around the limitations of statistical measurements have severely restricted theoretical developments. Authors critique the excessive amount of attention that is often given to developing more specific and sophisticated measurement techniques at the expense of using good but simple “summary measures” to advance theoretical premises and hypotheses 35 , 36 . As Frohlich et al. argue, the fundamental barrier to better exploring the relationship between structure, local context and ill-health is the dominance of black box “risk factor” epidemiology that couches theoretical limitations under methodological sophistication 37 . Similar critiques have been leveled at applied anthropologists, who have developed highly sophisticated methodological how-to manuals for conducting formative anthropological research within specific disease programs, often putting forth intricate interviewing techniques (e.g. pile sorting or ranking) that in fact do not originally belong to anthropology and that do little to advance understandings of social change 4 .

Third, as the focus moves away from describing the differences between the two disciplines solely in terms of methods, unhelpful dichotomies are deconstructed. As some authors have pointed out, stereotyped dichotomies often put forth in debates on interdisciplinary collaboration - including deductive-inductive, natural-artificial, specific-generalisable - are not necessarily (or simplistically) determined by methods used 38 , 39 . Hammersely, for example, has shown how in-depth case study methods and large-scale multivariate survey research can - depending on how they are used — share the similar underlying aim of developing a conceptual model on how variables are related, taking time and place into consideration 40 . In other words, open-ended qualitative methods can be just as reductionistic as quantitative surveys, and a cross-sectional survey can be equally as inductive as participant-observation.

Our concern with highlighting the interdisciplinary basis upon which epistemological assumptions can be challenged and collaboration improved is not an academic exercise, but one that has significant consequences for public health research and practice. The more disciplines can converge and modify standardized ways of knowing, the more they will be able to provide in-depth and contextually sensitive explanations for the emergence of disease-patterns and thus, to problem-solve.

Despite many advances in multidisciplinary collaboration, the relationship between epidemiology and anthropology has yet to develop fully. Today, there are a great number of useful publications on how anthropology can better contribute to epidemiology, than vice versa 1 . This probably reflects the excessive focus that exists on the exchange of methods, the relative subordinate position of anthropology to epidemiology within public health, and the subsequent need anthropologists have to demonstrate and prove their discipline’s relevance. To modify this and other power balances, many questions regarding cross-disciplinary fertilization still need answering. What contributions can epidemiology still make to anthropology? How would an anthropology influenced by epidemiology be different from an epidemiology influenced by anthropology? What professional and institutional conditions would be necessary for further developing a conceptual and interdisciplinary - rather than simply multidisciplinary — approach to researching health problems?

In our experience, the importance of institutional support for in-depth and sustained interdisciplinary collaboration cannot be under-estimated. At both the Department of Social Medicine (DSM) at the Federal University of Pelotas and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) (two institutions that have influenced each-other positively with regards to our own interdisciplinary collaboration), significant efforts have been made to include and maintain marginal disciplines such as anthropology. At the DSM, the only opening for a junior faculty position in several years was allocated to an anthropologist, quite a development in a department hitherto restricted to medical doctors and epidemiologists. At the LSHTM, in turn, the numbers of anthropologists who have joined and remained at the school has quadrupled since the late 1980s.

In addition to institutional factors, a fundamental quality contributing to the success of our collaboration has been the adoption of a relativistic and open stance regarding the epistemological limitations of both disciplines. In our experience, such relativism initially manifested itself in a mutual interest in devoting considerable time to learning about the methods and terminology of each-others’ disciplines, but with time, this learning process quickly lead to the development of a fruitful and yet critical perspective on the limits of disciplinary specialization for generating new knowledge. As Van der Geest has argued, disciplinary specialization and “ethnocentrism” is at the core of inhibited cross-disciplinary research 41 . Until each discipline demonstrates greater humility and realizes that disciplines are merely humanly-designed tools to study and interpret and explain reality, unnecessary hyper-specialization will continue to alienate one field of knowledge from another.

Acknowledgements

The research upon which our collaboration has developed has been supported by the European Union, the National Program for Centers of Excellence - PRONEX (Brazil), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), and the Ministry of Health (Brazil), the PanAmerican Health Organization, the World Health Organization, Rio Grande do Sul State Research Foundation (FAPERGS), and The Wellcome Trust. At earlier points, training fellowships were provided by The US National Science Foundation (for DP Béhague) and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (for H Gonçalves). D Béhague was supported by a Wellcome Trust post-doctoral fellowship during the completion of some of the research cited in this paper, as well as during the preparation of this manuscript.

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3 Doing Fieldwork: Methods in Cultural Anthropology

Katie nelson, inver hills community college [email protected] http://kanelson.com/.

Learning Objectives

Discuss what is unique about ethnographic fieldwork and how it emerged as a key strategy in anthropology.

Explain how traditional approaches to ethnographic fieldwork contrast with contemporary approaches.

Identify some of the contemporary ethnographic fieldwork techniques and perspectives.

Discuss some of the ethical considerations in doing anthropological fieldwork.

Summarize how anthropologists transform their fieldwork data into a story that communicates meaning.

FINDING THE FIELD

My first experience with fieldwork as a student anthropologist took place in a small indigenous community in northeastern Brazil studying the Jenipapo-Kanindé of Lagoa Encantada (Enchanted Lake). I had planned to conduct an independent research project on land tenure among members of the indigenous tribe and had gotten permission to spend several months with the community. My Brazilian host family arranged for a relative to drive me to the rural community on the back of his motorcycle. After several hours navigating a series of bumpy roads in blazing equatorial heat, I was relieved to arrive at the edge of the reservation. He cut the motor and I removed my heavy backpack from my tired, sweaty back. Upon hearing us arrive, first children and then adults slowly and shyly began to approach us. I greeted the curious onlookers and briefly explained who I was. As a group of children ran to fetch the cacique (the chief/political leader), I began to explain my research agenda to several of the men who had gathered. I mentioned that I was interested in learning about how the tribe negotiated land use rights without any private land ownership. After hearing me use the colloquial term “ índio ” (Indian), a man who turned out to be the cacique’s cousin came forward and said to me, “Well, your work is going to be difficult because there are no Indians here; we are only Brazilians.” Then, abruptly, another man angrily replied to him, stating firmly that, in fact, they were Indians because the community was on an Indian reservation and the Brazilian government had recognized them as an indigenous tribe. A few women then entered the rapid-fire discussion. I took a step back, surprised by the intensity of my first interaction in the community. The debate subsided once the cacique arrived, but it left a strong impression in my mind. Eventually, I discarded my original research plan to focus instead on this disagreement within the community about who they were and were not. In anthropology, this type of conflict in beliefs is known as contested identity .

I soon learned that many among the Jenipapo-Kanindé did not embrace the Indian identity label. The tribe members were all monolingual Portuguese-speakers who long ago had lost their original language and many of their traditions. Beginning in the 1980s, several local researchers had conducted studies in the community and had concluded that the community had indigenous origins. Those researchers lobbied on the community’s behalf for official state and federal status as an indigenous reservation, and in 1997 the Funai ( Fundação Nacional do Índio or National Foundation for the Indian) visited the community and agreed to officially demarcate the land as an indigenous reservation.

More than 20 years later, the community is still waiting for that demarcation. Some in the community embraced indigenous status because it came with a number of benefits. The state (Ceará), using partial funding from Funai, built a new road to improve access to the community. The government also constructed an elementary school and a common well and installed new electric lines. Despite those gains, some members of the community did not embrace indigenous status because being considered Indian had a pejorative connotation in Brazil. Many felt that the label stigmatized them by associating them with a poor and marginalized class of Brazilians. Others resisted the label because of long-standing family and inter-personal conflicts in the community.

Fieldwork is the most important method by which cultural anthropologists gather data to answer their research questions. While interacting on a daily basis with a group of people, cultural anthropologists document their observations and perceptions and adjust the focus of their research as needed. They typically spend a few months to a few years living among the people they are studying.

The “field” can be anywhere the people are—a village in highland Papua New Guinea or a supermarket in downtown Minneapolis. Just as marine biologists spend time in the ocean to learn about the behavior of marine animals and geologists travel to a mountain range to observe rock formations, anthropologists go to places where people are.

Doing Anthropology In this short film, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, three members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Anthropology Department, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork .

Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange

The cultural anthropologist’s goal during fieldwork is to describe a group of people to others in a way that makes strange or unusual features of the culture seem familiar and familiar traits seem extraordinary. The point is to help people think in new ways about aspects of their own culture by comparing them with other cultures. The research anthropologist Margaret Mead describes in her monograph Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) is a famous example of this. In 1925, Mead went to American Samoa, where she conducted ethnographic research on adolescent girls and their experiences with sexuality and growing up. Mead’s mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, was a strong proponent of cultural determinism, the idea that one’s cultural upbringing and social environment, rather than one’s biology, primarily determine behavior. Boas encouraged Mead to travel to Samoa to study adolescent behavior there and to compare their culture and behavior with that of adolescents in the United States to lend support to his hypothesis. In the foreword of Coming of Age in Samoa , Boas described what he saw as the key insight of her research: “The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.” [1]

Mead studied 25 young women in three villages in Samoa and found that the stress, anxiety, and turmoil of American adolescence were not found among Samoan youth. Rather, young women in Samoa experienced a smooth transition to adulthood with relatively little stress or difficulty. She documented instances of socially accepted sexual experimentation, lack of sexual jealousy and rape, and a general sense of casualness that marked Samoan adolescence. Coming of Age in Samoa quickly became popular, launching Mead’s career as one of the most well-known anthropologists in the United States and perhaps the world. The book encouraged American readers to reconsider their own cultural assumptions about what adolescence in the United States should be like, particularly in terms of the sexual repression and turmoil that seemed to characterize the teenage experience in mid-twentieth century America. Through her analysis of the differences between Samoan and American society, Mead also persuasively called for changes in education and parenting for U.S. children and adolescents.

Another classic example of a style of anthropological writing that attempted to make the familiar strange and encouraged readers to consider their own cultures in a different way is Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema (1956). The essay described oral hygiene practices of the Nacirema (“American” spelled backward) in a way that, to cultural insiders, sounded extreme, exaggerated, and out of context. He presented the Nacirema as if they were a little-known cultural group with strange, exotic practices. Miner wrote the essay during an era in which anthropologists were just beginning to expand their focus beyond small-scale traditional societies far from home to large-scale post-industrial societies such as the United States. He wrote the essay primarily as a satire of how anthropologists often wrote about “the Other” in ways that made other cultures seem exotic and glossed over features that the Other had in common with the anthropologist’s culture. The essay also challenged U.S. readers in general and anthropologists in particular to think differently about their own cultures and re-examine their cultural assumptions about what is “normal.”

Emic and Etic Perspectives

When anthropologists conduct fieldwork, they gather data. An important tool for gathering anthropological data is ethnography —the in-depth study of everyday practices and lives of a people. Ethnography produces a detailed description of the studied group at a particular time and location, also known as a “ thick description ,” a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe this type of research and writing. A thick description explains not only the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it. Such descriptions help readers better understand the internal logic of why people in a culture behave as they do and why the behaviors are meaningful to them. This is important because understanding the attitudes, perspectives, and motivations of cultural insiders is at the heart of anthropology.

Ethnographers gather data from many different sources. One source is the anthropologist’s own observations and thoughts. Ethnographers keep field notebooks that document their ideas and reflections as well as what they do and observe when participating in activities with the people they are studying, a research technique known as participant observation . Other sources of data include informal conversations and more-formal interviews that are recorded and transcribed. They also collect documents such as letters, photographs, artifacts, public records, books, and reports.

Different types of data produce different kinds of ethnographic descriptions, which also vary in terms of perspective—from the perspective of the studied culture ( emic ) or from the perspective of the observer ( etic ). Emic perspectives refer to descriptions of behaviors and beliefs in terms that are meaningful to people who belong to a specific culture, e.g., how people perceive and categorize their culture and experiences, why people believe they do what they do, how they imagine and explain things. To uncover emic perspectives, ethnographers talk to people, observe what they do, and participate in their daily activities with them. Emic perspectives are essential for anthropologists’ efforts to obtain a detailed understanding of a culture and to avoid interpreting others through their own cultural beliefs.

Etic perspectives refer to explanations for behavior by an outside observer in ways that are meaningful to the observer. For an anthropologist, etic descriptions typically arise from conversations between the ethnographer and the anthropological community. These explanations tend to be based in science and are informed by historical, political, and economic studies and other types of research. The etic approach acknowledges that members of a culture are unlikely to view the things they do as noteworthy or unusual. They cannot easily stand back and view their own behavior objectively or from another perspective. For example, you may have never thought twice about the way you brush your teeth and the practice of going to the dentist or how you experienced your teenage years. For you, these parts of your culture are so normal and “natural” you probably would never consider questioning them. An emic lens gives us an alternative perspective that is essential when constructing a comprehensive view of a people.

Most often, ethnographers include both emic and etic perspectives in their research and writing. They first uncover a studied people’s understanding of what they do and why and then develop additional explanations for the behavior based on anthropological theory and analysis. Both perspectives are important, and it can be challenging to move back and forth between the two. Nevertheless, that is exactly what good ethnographers must do.

TRADITIONAL ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Early armchair anthropology.

Before ethnography was a fully developed research method, anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used techniques that were much less reliable to gather data about people throughout the world. From the comfort of their homes and library armchairs, early scholars collected others’ travel accounts and used them to come to conclusions about far-flung cultures and peoples. The reports typically came from missionaries, colonists, adventurers, and business travelers and were often incomplete, inaccurate, and/or misleading, exaggerated or omitted important information, and romanticized the culture.

Early scholars such as Wilhelm Schmidt and Sir E. B. Tylor sifted through artifacts and stories brought back by travelers or missionaries and selected the ones that best fit their frequently pre-conceived ideas about the peoples involved. By relying on this flawed data, they often drew inaccurate or even racist conclusions. They had no way of knowing how accurate the information was and no way to understand the full context in which it was gathered.

The work of Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) provides a good example of the problems associated with such anthropological endeavors. Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist who was interested in myths and religions around the world. He read historical documents and religious texts found in libraries and book collections. He also sent questionnaires to missionaries and colonists in various parts of the world asking them about the people with whom they were in contact. He then used the information to draw sweeping conclusions about human belief systems. In his most famous book, The Golden Bough , he described similarities and differences in magical and religious practices around the world and concluded that human beliefs progressed through three stages: from primitive magic to religion and from religion to science. This theory implied that some people were less evolved and more primitive than others. Of course, contemporary anthropologists do not view any people as less evolved than another. Instead, anthropologists today seek to uncover the historical, political, and cultural reasons behind peoples’ behaviors rather than assuming that one culture or society is more advanced than another.

The main problem with Frazer’s conclusion can be traced back to the fact that he did not do any research himself and none of the information he relied on was collected by an anthropologist. He never spent time with the people he was researching. He never observed the religious ceremonies he wrote about and certainly never participated in them. Had he done so, he might have been able to appreciate that all human groups at the time (and now) were equally pragmatic, thoughtful, intelligent, logical, and “evolved.” He might also have appreciated the fact that how and why the information is gathered affects the quality of the information. For instance, if a colonial administrator offered to pay people for their stories, some of the storytellers might have exaggerated or even made up stories for financial gain. If a Christian missionary asked recently converted parishioners to describe their religious practices, they likely would have omitted non-Christian practices and beliefs to avoid disapproval and maintain their positions in the church. A male traveler who attempted to document rite-of-passage traditions in a culture that prohibited men from asking such questions of women would generate data that could erroneously suggest that women did not participate in such activities. All of these examples illustrate the pitfalls of armchair anthropology.

Off the Veranda

Fortunately, the reign of armchair anthropology was brief. Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists trained in the natural sciences began to reimagine what a science of humanity should look like and how social scientists ought to go about studying cultural groups. Some of those anthropologists insisted that one should at least spend significant time actually observing and talking to the people studied. Early ethnographers such as Franz Boas and Alfred Cort Haddon typically traveled to the remote locations where the people in question lived and spent a few weeks to a few months there. They sought out a local Western host who was familiar with the people and the area (such as a colonial official, missionary, or businessman) and found accommodations through them. Although they did at times venture into the community without a guide, they generally did not spend significant time with the local people. Thus, their observations were primarily conducted from the relative comfort and safety of a porch—from their verandas .

Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1884–1942) pioneering method of participant observation fundamentally changed the relationship between ethnographers and the people under study. In 1914, he traveled to the Trobriand Islands and ended up spending nearly four years conducting fieldwork among the people there. In the process, he developed a rigorous set of detailed ethnographic techniques he viewed as best-suited to gathering accurate and comprehensive ethnographic data. One of the hallmarks of his method was that it required the researcher to get off the veranda to interact with and even live among the natives. In a well-known book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski described his research techniques and the role they played in his analysis of the Kula ceremony, an exchange of coral armbands and trinkets among members of the social elite. He concluded that the ceremonies were at the center of Trobriand life and represented the culmination of an elaborate multi-year venture called the Kula Ring that involved dangerous expeditions and careful planning. Ultimately, the key to his discovering the importance of the ceremony was that he not only observed the Kula Ring but also participated in it. This technique of participant observation is central to anthropological research today. Malinowski did more than just observe people from afar; he actively interacted with them and participated in their daily activities. And unlike early anthropologists who worked through translators, Malinowski learned the native language, which allowed him to immerse himself in the culture. He carefully documented all of his observations and thoughts. Malinowski’s techniques are now central components of ethnographic fieldwork.

Salvage Ethnography

Despite Malinowski’s tremendous contributions to ethnography and anthropology generally, he was nevertheless a man of his time. A common view in the first half of the twentieth century was that many “primitive” cultures were quickly disappearing and features of those cultures needed to be preserved (salvaged) before they were lost. Anthropologists such as Malinowski, Franz Boas, and many of their students sought to document, photograph, and otherwise preserve cultural traditions in “dying” cultures in groups such as Native Americans and other traditional societies experiencing rapid change due to modernization, dislocation, and contact with outside groups. They also collected cultural artifacts, removing property from the communities and placing it in museums and private collections.

Others who were not formally trained in the sciences or in anthropology also participated in salvage activities. For instance, in his “documentary” film Nanook of the North (1922), Robery Flaherty filmed the life of an Inuit man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. In an effort to preserve on film what many believed was a traditional way of life soon to be lost, Flaherty took considerable artistic license to represent the culture as he imagined it was in the past, including staging certain scenes and asking the Inuit men to use spears instead of rifles to make the film seem more “authentic.”

Photographers and artists have likewise attempted to capture and preserve traditional indigenous life in paintings and photographs. Renowned painter George Catlin (1796–1872), for example, is known to have embellished scenes or painted them in ways that glossed over the difficult reality that native people in the nineteenth century were actively persecuted by the government, displaced from their lands, and forced into unsustainable lifestyles that led to starvation and warfare. Photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) has been criticized for reinforcing romanticized images of “authentic” native scenes. In particular, he is accused of having perpetuated the problematic idea of the noble savage and, in the process, distracted attention from the serious social, political, and economic problems faced by native people. [2]

Today, anthropologists recognize that human cultures constantly change as people respond to social, political, economic, and other external and internal influences—that there is no moment when a culture is more authentic or more primitive. They acknowledge that culture is fluid and cannot be treated as isolated in time and space. Just as we should not portray people as primitive vestiges of an earlier stage of human development, we also should not romanticize a culture or idealize another’s suffering as more authentic or natural.

In the throes of salvage ethnography, anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century actively documented anything and everything they could about the cultures they viewed as endangered. They collected artifacts, excavated ancient sites, wrote dictionaries of non-literate languages, and documented cultural traditions, stories, and beliefs. In the United States, those efforts developed into what is known today as the four-field approach or simply as general anthropology. This approach integrates multiple scientific and humanistic perspectives into a single comprehensive discipline composed of cultural, archaeological, biological/physical, and linguistic anthropology.

A hallmark of the four-field approach is its holistic perspective: anthropologists are interested in studying everything that makes us human. Thus, they use multiple approaches to understanding humans throughout time and throughout the world. They also acknowledge that to understand people fully one cannot look solely at biology, culture, history, or language; rather, all of those things must be considered. The interrelationships between the four subfields of anthropology are important for many anthropologists today.

Linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, for instance, examined interrelationships between culture, language, and cognition. They argued that the language one speaks plays a critical role in determining how one thinks, particularly in terms of understanding time, space, and matter. They proposed that people who speak different languages view the world differently as a result. In a well-known example, Whorf contrasted the Hopi and English languages. Because verbs in Hopi contained no future or past tenses, Whorf argued that Hopi-speakers understand time in a fundamentally different way than English-speakers. An observation by an English-speaker would focus on the difference in time while an observation by a Hopi-speaker would focus on validity. [3]

In another example, Peter Gordon spent many years living among the Pirahã tribe of Brazil learning their language and culture. He noted that the Pirahã have only three words for numbers: one, two, and many. He also observed that they found it difficult to remember quantities and numbers beyond three even after learning the Portuguese words for such numbers. [4]

Pirahã Numerical Terms

In this short film, linguist Daniel Everett illustrates Pirahã numerical terms .

Although some scholars have criticized Whorf and Gordon’s conclusions as overly deterministic, their work certainly illustrates the presence of a relationship between language and thought and between cultural and biological influences. Words may not force people to think a particular way, but they can influence our thought processes and how we view the world around us. The holistic perspective of anthropology helps us to appreciate that our culture, language, and physical and cognitive capacities for language are interrelated in complex ways.

ETHNOGRAPHY TODAY

Anthropology’s distinctive research strategy.

Ethnography is cultural anthropology’s distinctive research strategy. It was originally developed by anthropologists to study small-scale, relatively isolated cultural groups. Typically, those groups had relatively simple economies and technologies and limited access to larger, more technologically advanced societies. Early ethnographers sought to understand the entirety of a particular culture. They spent months to years living in the community, and in that time, they documented in great detail every dimension of people’s lives, including their language, subsistence strategies, political systems, formation of families and marriages, and religious beliefs. This was important because it helped researchers appreciate the interconnectedness of all dimensions of social life. The key to the success of this ethnographic approach was not only to spend considerable time observing people in their home settings engaged in day-to-day activities but also to participate in those activities. Participation informed an emic perspective of the culture, something that had been missing in earlier social science research.

Because of how useful the ethnographic research strategy is in developing an emic perspective, it has been adopted by many other disciplines including sociology, education, psychology, and political science. Education researchers, for example, use ethnography to study children in classrooms to identify their learning strategies and how they understand and make sense of learning experiences. Sociologists use ethnography to study emerging social movements and how participants in such movements stay motivated and connected despite their sometimes-conflicting goals.

New Sites for Ethnographic Fieldwork

Like the cultures and peoples studied, anthropology and ethnography are evolving. Field sites for ethnographic research are no longer exclusively located in far-flung, isolated, non-industrialized societies. Increasingly, anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research in complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States and in urban environments elsewhere in the world. For instance, my doctoral research took place in the United States. I studied identity formation among undocumented Mexican immigrant college students in Minnesota. Because some of my informants were living in Mexico when my fieldwork ended, I also traveled to Veracruz, Mexico, and spent time conducting research there. Often, anthropologists who study migration, diasporas , and people in motion must conduct research in multiple locations. This is known as multi-sited ethnography.

Anthropologists use ethnography to study people wherever they are and however they interact with others. Think of the many ways you ordinarily interact with your friends, family, professors, and boss. Is it all face-to-face communication or do you sometimes use text messages to chat with your friends? Do you also sometimes email your professor to ask for clarification on an assignment and then call your boss to discuss your schedule? Do you share funny videos with others on Facebook and then later make a Skype video call to a relative? These new technological “sites” of human interaction are fascinating to many ethnographers and have expanded the definition of fieldwork.

Problem-Oriented Research

In the early years, ethnographers were interested in exploring the entirety of a culture. Taking an inductive approach, they generally were not concerned about arriving with a relatively narrow predefined research topic. Instead, the goal was to explore the people, their culture, and their homelands and what had previously been written about them. The focus of the study was allowed to emerge gradually during their time in the field. Often, this approach to ethnography resulted in rather general ethnographic descriptions.

Today, anthropologists are increasingly taking a more deductive approach to ethnographic research. Rather than arriving at the field site with only general ideas about the goals of the study, they tend to select a particular problem before arriving and then let that problem guide their research. In my case, I was interested in how undocumented Mexican immigrant youth in Minnesota formed a sense of identity while living in a society that used a variety of dehumanizing labels such as illegal and alien to refer to them. That was my research “problem,” and it oriented and guided my study from beginning to end. I did not document every dimension of my informants’ lives; instead, I focused on the things most closely related to my research problem.

Quantitative Methods

Increasingly, cultural anthropologists are using quantitative research methods to complement qualitative approaches. Qualitative research in anthropology aims to comprehensively describe human behavior and the contexts in which it occurs while quantitative research seeks patterns in numerical data that can explain aspects of human behavior. Quantitative patterns can be gleaned from statistical analyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions. Surveys are a common quantitative technique that usually involves closed-ended questions in which respondents select their responses from a list of pre-defined choices such as their degree of agreement or disagreement, multiple-choice answers, and rankings of items. While surveys usually lack the sort of contextual detail associated with qualitative research, they tend to be relatively easy to code numerically and, as a result, can be easier to analyze than qualitative data. Surveys are also useful for gathering specific data points within a large population, something that is challenging to do with many qualitative techniques.

Anthropological nutritional analysis is an area of research that commonly relies on collecting quantitative data. Nutritional anthropologists explore how factors such as culture, the environment, and economic and political systems interplay to impact human health and nutrition. They may count the calories people consume and expend, document patterns of food consumption, measure body weight and body mass, and test for the presence of parasite infections or nutritional deficiencies. In her ethnography Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa (1993), Katherine Dettwyler described how she conducted nutritional research in Mali, which involved weighing, measuring, and testing her research subjects to collect a variety of quantitative data to help her understand the causes and consequences of child malnutrition.

Mixed Methods

In recent years, anthropologists have begun to combine ethnography with other types of research methods. These mixed-method approaches integrate qualitative and quantitative evidence to provide a more comprehensive analysis. For instance, anthropologists can combine ethnographic data with questionnaires, statistical data, and a media analysis. Anthropologist Leo Chavez used mixed methods to conduct the research for his book The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (2008). He started with a problem: how has citizenship been discussed as an identity marker in the mainstream media in the United States, especially among those labeled as Latinos. He then looked for a variety of types of data and relied on ethnographic case studies and on quantitative data from surveys and questionnaires. Chavez also analyzed a series of visual images from photographs, magazine covers, and cartoons that depicted Latinos to explore how they are represented in the American mainstream.

Mixed methods can be particularly useful when conducting problem-oriented research on complex, technologically advanced societies such as the United States. Detailed statistical and quantitative data are often available for those types of societies. Additionally, the general population is usually literate and somewhat comfortable with the idea of filling out a questionnaire.

ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES AND PERSPECTIVES

Cultural relativism and ethnocentrism.

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism —the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor view other cultural ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things.

Cultural relativism is an important methodological consideration when conducting research. In the field, anthropologists must temporarily suspend their own value, moral, and esthetic judgments and seek to understand and respect the values, morals, and esthetics of the other culture on their terms. This can be a challenging task, particularly when a culture is significantly different from the one in which they were raised.

During my first field experience in Brazil, I learned firsthand how challenging cultural relativism could be. Preferences for physical proximity and comfort talking about one’s body are among the first differences likely to be noticed by U.S. visitors to Brazil. Compared to Americans, Brazilians generally are much more comfortable standing close, touching, holding hands, and even smelling one another and often discuss each other’s bodies. Children and adults commonly refer to each other using playful nicknames that refer to their body size, body shape, or skin color. Neighbors and even strangers frequently stopped me on the street to comment on the color of my skin (It concerned some as being overly pale or pink—Was I ill? Was I sunburned?), the texture of my hair (How did I get it so smooth? Did I straighten my hair?), and my body size and shape (“You have a nice bust, but if you lost a little weight around the middle you would be even more attractive!”).

During my first few months in Brazil, I had to remind myself constantly that these comments were not rude, disrespectful, or inappropriate as I would have perceived them to be in the United States. On the contrary, it was one of the ways that people showed affection toward me. From a culturally relativistic perspective, the comments demonstrated that they cared about me, were concerned with my well-being, and wanted me to be part of the community. Had I not taken a culturally relativistic view at the outset and instead judged the actions based on my cultural perspective, I would have been continually frustrated and likely would have confused and offended people in the community. And offending your informants and the rest of the community certainly is not conducive to completing high-quality ethnography! Had I not fully understood the importance of body contact and physical proximity in communication in Brazil, I would have missed an important component of the culture.

Another perspective that has been rejected by anthropologists is ethnocentrism —the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as a stick by which to measure all other cultures. People who are ethnocentric view their own cultures as central and normal and reject all other cultures as inferior and morally suspect. As it turns out, many people and cultures are ethnocentric to some degree; ethnocentrism is a common human experience. Why do we respond the way we do? Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we believe what we believe? Most people find these kinds of questions difficult to answer. Often the answer is simply “because that is how it is done.” They believe what they believe because that is what one normally believes and doing things any other way seems wrong.

Ethnocentrism is not a useful perspective in contexts in which people from different cultural backgrounds come into close contact with one another, as is the case in many cities and communities throughout the world. People increasingly find that they must adopt culturally relativistic perspectives in governing communities and as a guide for their interactions with members of the community. For anthropologists in the field, cultural relativism is especially important. We must set aside our innate ethnocentrisms and let cultural relativism guide our inquiries and interactions with others so that our observations are not biased. Cultural relativism is at the core of the discipline of anthropology.

Objectivity and Activist Anthropology

Despite the importance of cultural relativism, it is not always possible and at times is inappropriate to maintain complete objectivity in the field. Researchers may encounter cultural practices that are an affront to strongly held moral values or that violate the human rights of a segment of a population. In other cases, they may be conducting research in part to advocate for a particular issue or for the rights of a marginalized group.

Take, for example, the practice of female genital cutting (FGC), also known as female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that is common in various regions of the world, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Such practices involving modification of female genitals for non-medical and cultural reasons range from clitoridectomy (partial or full removal of the clitoris) to infibulation, which involves removal of the clitoris and the inner and outer labia and suturing to narrow the vaginal opening, leaving only a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid  Anthropologists working in regions where such practices are common often understandably have a strong negative opinion, viewing the practice as unnecessary medically and posing a risk of serious infection, infertility, and complications from childbirth. They may also be opposed to it because they feel that it violates the right of women to experience sexual pleasure, something they likely view as a fundamental human right. Should the anthropologist intervene to prevent girls and women from being subjected to this practice?

Anthropologist Janice Boddy studied FGC/FGM in rural northern Sudan and sought to explain it from a culturally relativistic perspective. She found that the practice persists, in part, because it is believed to preserve a woman’s chastity and curb her sexual desire, making her less likely to have affairs once she is married. Boddy’s research showed how the practice makes sense in the context of a culture in which a woman’s sexual conduct is a symbol of her family’s honor, which is important culturally. [5]

Boddy’s relativistic explanation helps make the practice comprehensible and allows cultural outsiders to understand how it is internally culturally coherent. But the question remains. Once anthropologists understand why people practice FGC/FGM, should they accept it? Because they uncover the cultural meaning of a practice, must they maintain a neutral stance or should they fight a practice viewed as an injustice? How does an anthropologist know what is right?

Unfortunately, answers to these questions are rarely simple, and anthropologists as a group do not always agree on an appropriate professional stance and responsibility. Nevertheless, examining practices such as FGC/FGM can help us understand the debate over objectivity versus “activism” in anthropology more clearly. Some anthropologists feel that striving for objectivity in ethnography is paramount. That even if objectivity cannot be completely achieved, anthropologists’ ethnography should be free from as much subjective opinion as possible. Others take the opposite stance and produce anthropological research and writing as a means of fighting for equality and justice for disempowered or voiceless groups. The debate over how much (if any) activism is acceptable is ongoing. What is clear is that anthropologists are continuing to grapple with the contentious relationship between objectivity and activism in ethnographic research.

Science and Humanism

Anthropologists have described their field as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. Early anthropologists fought to legitimize anthropology as a robust scientific field of study. To do so, they borrowed methods and techniques from the physical sciences and applied them to anthropological inquiry. Indeed, anthropology today is categorized as a social science in most academic institutions in the United States alongside sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. However, in recent decades, many cultural anthropologists have distanced themselves from science-oriented research and embraced more-humanistic approaches, including symbolic and interpretive perspectives. Interpretive anthropology treats culture as a body of “texts” rather than attempting to test a hypothesis based on deductive or inductive reasoning. The texts present a particular picture from a particular subjective point of view. Interpretive anthropologists believe that it is not necessary (or even possible) to objectively interrogate a text. Rather, they study the texts to untangle the various webs of meaning embedded in them. Consequently, interpretive anthropologists include the context of their interpretations, their own perspectives and, importantly, how the research participants view themselves and the meanings they attribute to their lives.

Anthropologists are unlikely to conclude that a single approach is best. Instead, anthropologists can apply any and all of the approaches that best suit their particular problem. Anthropology is unique among academic disciplines for the diversity of approaches used to conduct research and for the broad range of orientations that fall under its umbrella.

Science in Anthropology For a discussion of science in anthropology, see the following article published by the American Anthropological Association: AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology .

Observation and Participant Observation

Of the various techniques and tools used to conduct ethnographic research, observation in general and participant observation in particular are among the most important. Ethnographers are trained to pay attention to everything happening around them when in the field—from routine daily activities such as cooking dinner to major events such as an annual religious celebration. They observe how people interact with each other, how the environment affects people, and how people affect the environment. It is essential for anthropologists to rigorously document their observations, usually by writing field notes and recording their feelings and perceptions in a personal journal or diary.

As previously mentioned, participant observation involves ethnographers observing while they participate in activities with their informants. This technique is important because it allows the researcher to better understand why people do what they do from an emic perspective. Malinowski noted that participant observation is an important tool by which “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” [6]

To conduct participant observation, ethnographers must live with or spend considerable time with their informants to establish a strong rapport with them. Rapport is a sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other and agreeable to working together.

Participant observation was an important part of my own research. In 2003, I spent six months living in two Mayan villages in highland Chiapas, Mexico. I was conducting ethnographic research on behalf of the Science Museum of Minnesota to document changes in huipil textile designs. Huipiles (pronounced “we-peel-ayes”) are a type of hand-woven blouse that Mayan women in the region weave and wear, and every town has its own style and designs. At a large city market, one can easily identify the town each weaver is from by the colors and designs of her huipiles . For hundreds of years, huipil designs changed very little. Then, starting around 1960, the designs and colors of huipiles in some of the towns began to change rapidly. I was interested in learning why some towns’ designs were changing more rapidly than other towns’ were and in collecting examples of huipiles to supplement the museum’s existing collection.

I spent time in two towns, Zinacantán and San Andrés Larráinzar. Zinacantán was located near the main city, San Cristóbal de las Casas. It received many tourists each year and had regularly established bus and van routes that locals used to travel to San Cristóbal to buy food and other goods. Some of the men in the town had worked in the United States and returned with money to build or improve their family homes and businesses. Other families were supported by remittances from relatives working in the United States or in other parts of Mexico. San Andrés, on the other hand, was relatively isolated and much further from San Cristóbal. Most families there relied on subsistence farming or intermittent agricultural labor and had limited access to tourism or to outside communities. San Andrés was also the site of a major indigenous revolt in the mid-1990s that resulted in greater autonomy, recognition, and rights for indigenous groups throughout Mexico. Politically and socially, it was a progressive community in many ways but remained conservative in others.

I first asked people in Zinacantán why their huipil designs, motifs, and colors seemed to change almost every year. Many women said that they did not know. Others stated that weaving was easy and could be boring so they liked to make changes to keep the huipiles interesting and to keep weaving from getting dull. When I asked people in San Andrés what they thought about what the women in Zinacantán had said, the San Andrés women replied that “Yes, perhaps they do get bored easily. But we in San Andrés are superior weavers and we don’t need to change our designs.” Neither response seemed like the full story behind the difference.

Though I spent hundreds of hours observing women preparing to weave, weaving, and selling their textiles to tourists, I did not truly understand what the women were telling me until I tried weaving myself. When I watched them, the process seemed so easy and simple. They attached strings of thread vertically to two ends of the back-strap looms. When weaving, they increased and decreased the tension on the vertical threads by leaning backward and forward with the back strap and teased individual threads horizontally through the vertical threads to create the desired pattern. After each thread was placed, they pushed it down with great force using a smooth, flat wooden trowel. They did the entire process with great ease and fluidity. When I only watched and did not participate, I could believe the Zinacantán women when they told me weaving was easy.

When I began to weave, it took me several days simply to learn how to sit correctly with a back-strap loom and achieve the appropriate tension. I failed repeatedly at setting up the loom with vertically strung threads and never got close to being able to create a design. Thus, I learned through participant observation that weaving is an exceptionally difficult task. Even expert weavers who had decades of experience sometimes made mistakes as half-finished weavings and rejected textiles littered many homes. Although the women appeared to be able to multi-task while weaving (stoking the fire, calling after small children, cooking food), weaving still required a great deal of concentration to do well.

Through participant observation, I was able to recognize that other factors likely drove the changes in their textiles. I ultimately concluded that the rate of change in huipil design in Zinacantán was likely related to the pace of cultural change broadly in the community resulting from interactions between its residents and tourists and relatively frequent travel to a more-urban environment. Participant observation was an important tool in my research and is central to most ethnographic studies today.

Conversations and Interviews

Another primary technique for gathering ethnographic data is simply talking with people—from casual, unstructured conversations about ordinary topics to formal scheduled interviews about a particular topic. An important element for successful conversations and interviews is establishing rapport with informants. Sometimes, engaging in conversation is part of establishing that rapport. Ethnographers frequently use multiple forms of conversation and interviewing for a single research project based on their particular needs. They sometimes record the conversations and interviews with an audio recording device but more often they simply engage in the conversation and then later write down everything they recall about it. Conversations and interviews are an essential part of most ethnographic research designs because spoken communication is central to humans’ experiences.

Gathering Life Histories

Collecting a personal narrative of someone’s life is a valuable ethnographic technique and is often combined with other techniques. Life histories provide the context in which culture is experienced and created by individuals and describe how individuals have reacted, responded, and contributed to changes that occurred during their lives. They also help anthropologists be more aware of what makes life meaningful to an individual and to focus on the particulars of individual lives, on the tenor of their experiences and the patterns that are important to them. Researchers often include life histories in their ethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.

The Genealogical Method

The genealogical (kinship) method has a long tradition in ethnography. Developed in the early years of anthropological research to document the family systems of tribal groups, it is still used today to discover connections of kinship , descent, marriage, and the overall social system. Because kinship and genealogy are so important in many nonindustrial societies, the technique is used to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society and to trace social relationships more broadly in communities.

When used by anthropologists, the genealogical method involves using symbols and diagrams to document relationships. Circles represent women and girls, triangles represent men and boys, and squares represent ambiguous or unknown gender. Equal signs between individuals represent their union or marriage and vertical lines descending from a union represent parent-child relationships. The death of an individual and the termination of a marriage are denoted by diagonal lines drawn across the shapes and equal signs. Kinship charts are diagramed from the perspective of one person who is called the Ego, and all of the relationships in the chart are based on how the others are related to the Ego. Individuals in a chart are sometimes identified by numbers or names, and an accompanying list provides more-detailed information.

Key Informants

Within any culture or subculture, there are always particular individuals who are more knowledgeable about the culture than others and who may have more-detailed or privileged knowledge. Anthropologists conducting ethnographic research in the field often seek out such cultural specialists to gain a greater understanding of certain issues and to answer questions they otherwise could not answer. When an anthropologist establishes a rapport with these individuals and begins to rely more on them for information than on others, the cultural specialists are referred to as key informants or key cultural consultants.

Key informants can be exceptional assets in the field, allowing the ethnographer to uncover the meanings of behaviors and practices the researcher cannot otherwise understand. Key informants can also help researchers by directly observing others and reporting those observations to the researchers, especially in situations in which the researcher is not allowed to be present or when the researcher’s presence could alter the participants’ behavior. In addition, ethnographers can check information they obtained from other informants, contextualize it, and review it for accuracy. Having a key informant in the field is like having a research ally. The relationship can grow and become enormously fruitful.

A famous example of the central role that key informants can play in an ethnographer’s research is a man named Doc in William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943) . In the late 1930s, Whyte studied social relations between street gangs and “corner boys” in a Boston urban slum inhabited by first- and second-generation Italian immigrants. A social worker introduced Whyte to Doc and the two hit it off. Doc proved instrumental to the success of Whyte’s research. He introduced Whyte to his family and social group and vouched for him in the tight-knit community, providing access that Whyte could not have gained otherwise.

Field Notes

Field notes are indispensable when conducting ethnographic research. Although making such notes is time-consuming, they form the primary record of one’s observations. Generally speaking, ethnographers write two kinds of notes: field notes and personal reflections. Field notes are detailed descriptions of everything the ethnographer observes and experiences. They include specific details about what happened at the field site, the ethnographer’s sensory impressions, and specific words and phrases used by the people observed. They also frequently include the content of conversations the ethnographer had and things the ethnographer overheard others say. Ethnographers also sometimes include their personal reflections on the experience of writing field notes. Often, brief notes are jotted down in a notebook while the anthropologist is observing and participating in activities. Later, they expand on those quick notes to make more formal field notes, which may be organized and typed into a report. It is common for ethnographers to spend several hours a day writing and organizing field notes.

Ethnographers often also keep a personal journal or diary that may include information about their emotions and personal experiences while conducting research. These personal reflections can be as important as the field notes. Ethnography is not an objective science. Everything researchers do and experience in the field is filtered through their personal life experiences. Two ethnographers may experience a situation in the field in different ways and understand the experience differently. For this reason, it is important for researchers to be aware of their reactions to situations and be mindful of how their life experiences affect their perceptions. In fact, this sort of reflexive insight can turn out to be a useful data source and analytical tool that improves the researcher’s understanding.

The work of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo provides a useful example of how anthropologists can use their emotional responses to fieldwork situations to advance their research. In 1981, Rosaldo and his wife, Michelle, were conducting research among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Rosaldo was studying men in the community who engaged in emotional rampages in which they violently murdered others by cutting off their heads. Although the practice had been banned by the time Rosaldo arrived, a longing to continue headhunting remained in the cultural psyche of the community.

Whenever Rosaldo asked a man why he engaged in headhunting, the answer was that rage and grief caused him to kill others. At the beginning of his fieldwork, Rosaldo felt that the response was overly simplistic and assumed that there had to be more to it than that. He was frustrated because he could not uncover a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Then, on October 11, 1981, Rosaldo’s wife was walking along a ravine when she tripped, lost her footing, and fell 65 feet to her death, leaving Rosaldo a grieving single father. In his essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” Rosaldo later wrote that it was his own struggle with rage as he grieved for his wife that helped him truly grasp what the Ilongot men meant when they described their grief and rage.

Only a week before completing the initial draft of an earlier version of this introduction, I rediscovered my journal entry, written some six weeks after Michelle’s death, in which I made a vow to myself about how I would return to writing anthropology, if I ever did so, by writing Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage . . . My journal went on to reflect more broadly on death, rage, and headhunting by speaking of my wish for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So, I need a place to carry my anger – and can we say a solution of the imagination is better than theirs? And can we condemn them when we napalm villages? Is our rationale so much sounder than theirs? All this was written in despair and rage. [7]

Only through the very personal and emotionally devastating experience of losing his wife was Rosaldo able to understand the emic perspective of the headhunters. The result was an influential and insightful ethnographic account.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Ethical guidelines.

From the earliest days of anthropology as a discipline, concern about the ethical treatment of people who take part in studies has been an important consideration. Ethical matters are central to any research project and anthropologists take their ethical responsibilities particularly seriously. As discussed throughout this chapter, anthropologists are oriented toward developing empathy for their informants and understanding their cultures and experiences from an emic perspective. Many also have a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of the local people with whom they work in the field.

The American Anthropological Association has developed a Code of Ethics that all anthropologists should follow in their work. Among the many ethical responsibilities outlined in the code, doing no harm, obtaining informed consent, maintaining subjects’ anonymity, and making the results of the research accessible are especially important responsibilities.

First and foremost, anthropologists must ensure that their involvement with a community does not harm or embarrass their informants. Researchers must carefully consider any potential harm associated with the research, including legal, emotional, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, and take steps to insulate their informants from such harm. Since it is not always possible to anticipate every potential repercussion at the outset, anthropologists also must continually monitor their work to ensure that their research design and methods minimize any risk.

Regrettably, the proscription to do no harm is a deceptively complex requirement. Despite their best efforts, anthropologists have run into ethical problems in the field. Work by Napoleon Chagnon among an isolated indigenous tribe of the Amazon, the Yonomami, is a well-known example of ethical problems in anthropological research. In his groundbreaking ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968), Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as an intensely violent and antagonistic people. The ethnography was well received initially. However, not long after its publication, controversy erupted. Anthropologists and other scholars have accused Chagnon of encouraging the violence he documented, staging fights and scenes for documentary films and fabricating data.

Today, Do No Harm is a central ethical value in anthropology. However, it can be difficult to predict every challenge one may encounter in the field or after the work is published. Anthropologists must continually reevaluate their research and writing to ensure that it does not harm the informants or their communities. Before fieldwork begins, researchers from universities, colleges, and institutions usually must submit their research agendas to an institutional review board (IRB). IRBs review research plans to ensure that the proposed studies will not harm human subjects. In many cases, the IRB is aware of the unique challenges and promise of anthropological research and can guide the researcher in eliminating or mitigating potential ethical problems.

Obtain Informed Consent

In addition to taking care to do no harm, anthropologists must obtain informed consent from all of their informants before conducting any research. Informed consent is the informant’s agreement to take part in the study. Originally developed in the context of medical and psychological research, this ethical guideline is also relevant to anthropology. Informants must be aware of who the anthropologist is and the research topic, who is financially and otherwise supporting the research, how the research will be used, and who will have access to it. Finally, their participation must be optional and not coerced. They should be able to stop participating at any time and be aware of and comfortable with any risks associated with their participation.

In medical and psychological research settings in the United States, researchers typically obtain informed consent by asking prospective participants to sign a document that outlines the research and the risks involved in their participation, acknowledging that they agree to take part. In some anthropological contexts, however, this type of informed consent may not be appropriate. People may not trust the state, bureaucratic processes, or authority, for example. Asking them to sign a formal legal-looking document may intimidate them. Likewise, informed consent cannot be obtained with a signed document if many in the community cannot read. The anthropologist must determine the most appropriate way to obtain informed consent in the context of the particular research setting.

Maintain Anonymity and Privacy

Another important ethical consideration for anthropologists in the field is ensuring the anonymity and privacy of informants who need such protection. When I did research among undocumented Mexican immigrant college students, I recognized that my informants’ legal status put them at considerable risk. I took care to use pseudonyms for all of the informants, even when writing field notes. In my writing, I changed the names of the informants’ relatives, friends, schools, and work places to protect them from being identified. Maintaining privacy and anonymity is an important way for anthropologists to ensure that their involvement does no harm.

Make Results Accessible

Finally, anthropologists must always make their final research results accessible to their informants and to other researchers. For informants, a written report in the researcher’s native language may not be the best way to convey the results. Reports can be translated or the results can be converted into a more accessible format. Examples of creative ways in which anthropologists have made their results available include establishing accessible databases for their research data, contributing to existing databases, producing films that portray the results, and developing texts or recommendations that provide tangible assistance to the informants’ communities. Though it is not always easy to make research results accessible in culturally appropriate ways, it is essential that others have the opportunity to review and benefit from the research, especially those who participated in its creation.

WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY

Analysis and interpretation of research findings.

Once all or most of the fieldwork is complete, ethnographers analyze their data and research findings before beginning to write. There are many techniques for data analysis from which to choose based on the strategy and goals of the research. Regardless of the particular technique, data analysis involves a systematic interpretation of what the researcher thinks the data mean. The ethnographer reviews all of the data collected, synthesizes findings from the review, and integrates those findings with prior studies on the topic. Once the analysis is complete, the ethnographer is ready to write an account of the fieldwork.

Ethnographic Authority

In recent years, anthropologists have expressed concern about how ethnographies should be written in terms of ethnographic authority: how ethnographers present themselves and their informants in text. In a nonfiction text, the author is a mediator between readers and the topic and the text is written to help readers understand an unfamiliar topic. In an ethnography, the topic is people, and people naturally vary in terms of their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and perspectives. That is, they have individual voices. In the past, anthropologists commonly wrote ethnographic accounts as if they possessed the ultimate most complete scientific knowledge on the topic. Subsequently, anthropologists began to challenge that writing style, particularly when it did not include the voices of their informants in the text and analysis. Some of this criticism originated with feminist anthropologists who noted that women’s experiences and perspectives frequently were omitted and misrepresented in this style of writing. Others believed that this style of writing reinforced existing global power dynamics and privileges afforded to Western anthropologists’ voices as most important.

Polyvocality

In response to criticisms about ethnographic authority, anthropologists have begun to include polyvocality. A polyvocal text is one in which more than one person’s voice is presented, and its use can range from ensuring that informants’ perspectives are presented in the text while still writing in the researcher’s voice to including informants’ actual words rather than paraphrasing them and co-authoring the ethnography with an informant. A good example of polyvocality is anthropologist Ruth Behar’s book Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993). Behar’s book documents the life story of a Mexican street peddler, Esperanza Hernández, and their unique friendship. Large sections of the book are in Esperanza’s own words and discuss issues that are important to her. Behar also includes pieces of her own life story and an anthropological analysis of Esperanza’s story.

By using polyvocality, researchers can avoid writing from the perspective of the ultimate ethnographic authority. A polyvocal style also allows readers to be more involved in the text since they have the opportunity to form their own opinions about the ethnographic data and perhaps even critique the author’s analysis. It also encourages anthropologists to be more transparent when presenting their methods and data.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity is another relatively new approach to ethnographic research and writing. Beginning in the 1960s, social science researchers began to think more carefully about the effects of their life experiences, status, and roles on their research and analyses. They began to insert themselves into their texts, including information about their personal experiences, thoughts, and life stories and to analyze in the accounts how those characteristics affected their research and analysis.

Adoption of reflexivity is perhaps the most significant change in how ethnography is researched and written in the past 50 years. It calls on anthropologists to acknowledge that they are part of the world they study and thus can never truly be objective. Reflexivity has also contributed to anthropologists’ appreciation of the unequal power dynamics of research and the effects those dynamics can have on the results. Reflexivity reminds the ethnographer that there are multiple ways to interpret any given cultural scenario. By acknowledging how their backgrounds affect their interpretations, anthropologists can begin to remove themselves from the throne of ethnographic authority and allow other, less-empowered voices to be heard.

Discussion Questions

What is unique about ethnographic fieldwork and how did it emerge as a key strategy in anthropology?

How do traditional approaches to ethnographic fieldwork contrast with contemporary approaches?

What are some of the contemporary ethnographic fieldwork techniques and perspectives and why are they important to anthropology?

What are some of the ethical considerations in doing anthropological fieldwork and why are they important?

How do anthropologists transform their fieldwork data into a story that communicates meaning? How are reflexivity and polyvocality changing the way anthropologists communicate their work?

Contested identity: a dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group. Cultural relativism : the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own. Culture : a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways. Deductive : reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings. Diaspora: the scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations. Examples of people living in the diaspora are Salvadorian immigrants in the United States and Europe, Somalian refugees in various countries, and Jewish people living around the world. Emic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider. Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures. Ethnography: the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people. Etic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider. Indigenous: people who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them. Other terms used to refer to indigenous people are aboriginal, native, original, first nation, and first people. Some examples of indigenous people are Native Americans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa. Inductive: a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings. Key Informants: individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist. Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups. Land tenure: how property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land. Noble savage : an inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of “civilization.” Participant observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged. Qualitative : anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior. Quantitative : anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior. Remittances: money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their hometowns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns’ populations. Thick description: a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it. Undocumented: the preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state. Undocumented refers to the fact that these people lack the official documents that would legally permit them to reside in the country. Other terms such as illegal immigrant and illegal alien are often used to refer to this population. Anthropologists consider those terms to be discriminatory and dehumanizing. The word undocumented acknowledges the human dignity and cultural and political ties immigrants have developed in their country of residence despite their inability to establish formal residence permissions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

She received her B.A. in anthropology and Latin American studies from Macalester College, her M.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.A. in education and instructional technology from the University of Saint Thomas, and her Ph.D. from CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Socia l –Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology), based in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Katie views teaching and learning as central to her practice as an anthropologist and as mutually reinforcing elements of her professional life. She is the former chair of the Teaching Anthropology Interest Group (2016–2018) of the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association and currently serves as the online content editor for the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal . She has contributed to several open access textbook projects, both as an author and an editor, and views the affordability of quality learning materials as an important piece of the equity and inclusion puzzle in higher education. [8]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story . Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993.

Boddy, Janice. Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Chagnon, Napoleon. Yanomamö: The Fierce People . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Dettwyler, Katherine A. Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa . Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2014

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion . London: Macmillian Press, 1894.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays . New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gordon, Peter. “Numerical Cognition without Words: Evidence from Amazonia.” Science 306 no. 5695 (2004): 496–499.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea . London: Kegan Paul 1922.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization . New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928.

Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58 no. 3 (1956): 503-507.

Nelson, Katherine. 2015. Between Citizenship and Alienage: Flexible Identity Among Informally Authorized Mexican College Students in Minnesota , USA. PhD diss., CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social – Institute for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology).

Rosaldo, Renato. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” in Violence in War and Peace, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois, 150-156.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Saints, Scholars, Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. “Science and Linguistics.” MIT Technology Review : 42 (1940): 229–248.

Whyte, William Foote. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993[1943].

• Franz Boas, “Foreward,” in Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (New York: William Morrow, 1928). ↵
• Examples of Curtis’ photography can be found in Edward Curtis, The North American Indian: The Photographic Images (New York: Aperture, 2005). ↵
• Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” MIT Technology Review 42 (1940): 229–248. ↵
• Peter Gordon, “Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” Science 306 no. 5695 (2004): 496-499. ↵
• Janice Bodd, Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). ↵
• Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 25. ↵
• Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” in Violence in War and Peace , ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe I. Bourgois (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 171. ↵
• See: http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ and https://textbooks.opensuny.org/global-perspectives-on-gender/ ↵

People who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them.

How property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land.

A dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group.

The in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

A term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it.

A type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

A description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider.

A description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.

An inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of “civilization.”

The preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state

The scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations.

A type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis

Reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning.

Anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.

Anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.

The idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

The tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their hometowns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns’ populations.

Blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist.

Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition Copyright © 2020 by American Anthropological Association is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Historical Method of Research

• Last Updated: Jun 22, 2023

The historical method is a systematic approach used by anthropologists to study and understand the past. It involves the critical examination and interpretation of historical sources such as documents, artifacts, oral traditions, and other forms of evidence to reconstruct events, processes, and patterns of human behavior. The purpose of the historical method is to gain insights into the dynamics of societies and cultures over time, allowing anthropologists to analyze continuity and change, identify patterns of social, economic, and political development, and comprehend the complexities of human experiences in different historical contexts [1] .

Importance in Anthropology

The historical method holds significant importance in anthropology as it provides a framework for investigating and comprehending the cultural, social, and environmental factors that have shaped human societies. By employing this method, anthropologists can gain a deeper understanding of how past events and processes have influenced contemporary societies and shed light on the roots of cultural practices, social structures , and belief systems. It allows for the identification of long-term trends, cultural interactions, and the impact of colonization, migration, and globalization on diverse communities.

Evolution of the Historical Method

The historical method has evolved over time, reflecting changes in theoretical perspectives and advancements in research techniques. Early anthropologists primarily relied on written documents and archaeological findings to reconstruct history. However, with the emergence of postmodern and critical approaches, the historical method expanded to include the perspectives and experiences of marginalized groups, challenging dominant narratives and incorporating oral history and alternative sources.

For instance, in studying the history of indigenous communities, anthropologists have incorporated indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, and communal memory alongside conventional written sources. This anthropologically acceptable approach acknowledges the agency and voices of indigenous peoples, contributing to a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of history.

Furthermore, the integration of interdisciplinary approaches, such as ethnography and historical archaeology, has enriched the historical method. Ethnographic studies provide valuable insights into the social and cultural contexts of past events, complementing traditional historical sources. Historical archaeology allows anthropologists to unearth material remains and artifacts, providing tangible evidence to corroborate or challenge historical narratives.

Overall, the historical method is a vital tool in anthropological research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the past and uncover the complex interplay of social, cultural, and environmental factors. By adopting an anthropologically acceptable approach, incorporating diverse sources and perspectives, anthropologists can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of history and its implications for contemporary societies.

Key Concepts in Historical Methodology

Primary sources.

Primary sources are original records or artifacts that provide firsthand information about past events, cultures, and individuals. They serve as direct evidence of the historical period being studied. Anthropologists utilize various types of primary sources to reconstruct and interpret history.

• Written Documents: These include letters, diaries, official records, and manuscripts. For example, the letters exchanged between anthropologists and indigenous informants provide valuable insights into cultural practices and social dynamics.
• Oral Traditions: Oral histories, myths, legends, and songs are examples of oral traditions that transmit knowledge across generations. Anthropologists carefully analyze and interpret these narratives to understand cultural beliefs and historical events.
• Material Culture: Artifacts, architecture, tools, and other physical remains are essential primary sources. They offer tangible evidence of past activities, technologies, and social practices. For instance, the analysis of pottery fragments helps reconstruct trade networks and cultural interactions.

Reliability and Limitations

While primary sources are valuable, they also possess inherent limitations and biases. Anthropologists critically evaluate their reliability by considering factors such as the context of production, the intentions of the creator, and potential distortions over time.

For instance, written documents may reflect the perspectives of the dominant group or contain biases and omissions. Researchers must assess the author’s background, purpose, and potential political or social agenda. Additionally, oral traditions may undergo changes during transmission, making it crucial to consider the context and cultural meanings embedded within the narratives.

Secondary Sources

Importance and usage.

Secondary sources are works that analyze and interpret primary sources. They include scholarly books, journal articles, and historical accounts written by other researchers. Secondary sources provide valuable insights, interpretations, and analyses, making them essential in historical research.

Anthropologists use secondary sources to gain a broader understanding of historical contexts, theories, and debates. They help situate primary sources within larger frameworks and provide interpretations that go beyond individual perspectives. For example, secondary sources may offer comparative analyses of similar historical events in different regions, shedding light on patterns and trends.

Evaluating Secondary Sources

Anthropologists must critically evaluate secondary sources to ensure their accuracy, objectivity, and relevance to their research. They assess the author’s qualifications, methodology, and potential biases. It is important to consider multiple perspectives and compare findings from different secondary sources.

Moreover, the citation and referencing of primary and secondary sources are crucial in maintaining academic integrity and acknowledging the contributions of previous scholars. Proper citation allows for the traceability of information and facilitates the verification of claims and arguments.

Hence, primary and secondary sources are fundamental concepts in historical methodology. Anthropologists employ primary sources, such as written documents, oral traditions, and material culture, to reconstruct the past. They critically evaluate their reliability and limitations. Secondary sources play a crucial role in providing interpretations and analyses of primary sources. Evaluating secondary sources and properly citing all sources contribute to the rigor and credibility of anthropological research.

Analyzing and Interpreting Historical Data

Contextualizing historical events, social, political, and cultural contexts.

Contextualizing historical events is a crucial step in anthropological research, as it involves understanding the social, political, and cultural factors that shaped and influenced these events. Anthropologists recognize that historical events do not occur in isolation but are interconnected with broader social dynamics. By examining the social context, they aim to identify the power structures, social hierarchies, and societal norms that played a role in historical developments [1] .

For example, when analyzing a historical conflict between indigenous communities and colonial powers, anthropologists consider the complex social dynamics at play. They examine how colonial policies, economic interests, and ideologies influenced the interactions between these groups. This analysis helps to understand the motivations, strategies, and outcomes of the conflict.

Furthermore, understanding the cultural context is essential for interpreting historical events. Anthropologists delve into the beliefs, values, and practices of the societies under study. For instance, analyzing religious rituals, artistic expressions, and social customs can provide valuable insights into the cultural worldview of a particular time period. By considering the cultural context, anthropologists can uncover the meanings and symbolism associated with historical events.

Comparative Analysis

Anthropologists often engage in comparative analysis to gain a broader perspective on historical events. By examining similar events or phenomena across different regions or time periods, they can identify patterns, similarities, and differences. Comparative analysis allows anthropologists to discern the factors that are specific to a particular context and those that are more universal or recurrent.

For example, anthropologists studying the impact of industrialization on different societies may compare the experiences of communities in various regions. They can examine the social, economic, and environmental consequences of industrialization and identify common patterns of transformation, as well as unique responses and outcomes.

Constructing Narratives

Narrative structures.

Constructing narratives is a fundamental aspect of analyzing and interpreting historical data in anthropology. Anthropologists create narratives to make sense of the complex historical data, weave together various sources, and present a coherent and comprehensive account of events. Narratives provide a framework for organizing and communicating historical knowledge.

Narrative structures may vary depending on the research focus and theoretical perspectives. Some anthropologists may adopt chronological narratives, presenting events in a sequential order to highlight temporal changes and continuity. Others may emphasize thematic narratives, focusing on specific themes or issues that cut across different time periods. The choice of narrative structure depends on the research questions and the significance of the historical data being analyzed.

The Role of Interpretation

Interpretation is a critical component of analyzing historical data in an anthropologically acceptable way. Anthropologists recognize that historical sources are subject to multiple interpretations and that their own biases and perspectives can influence the interpretation process. They strive to engage in reflexive analysis, acknowledging their own positionality and the potential limitations of their interpretations.

Anthropologists may employ theoretical frameworks, such as postcolonial or feminist perspectives, to bring attention to marginalized voices, challenge dominant narratives, and offer alternative interpretations. They also engage in dialogue with other researchers, fostering discussions and debates that enrich the interpretation of historical data.

Analyzing and interpreting historical data in an anthropologically acceptable way involves contextualizing historical events within their social, political, and cultural contexts. Comparative analysis allows for a broader perspective and identification of patterns. Constructing narratives provides a framework for organizing historical knowledge, while interpretation recognizes the multiple perspectives and engages in critical reflexivity.

Case Studies: Application of the Historical Method

Case study 1: understanding cultural change through historical analysis.

One powerful application of the historical method in anthropology is the examination of cultural change over time. By analyzing historical data, anthropologists can gain insights into the factors and processes that contribute to cultural transformations. A case study that exemplifies this approach is the analysis of the changing gender roles in indigenous communities.

Anthropologists studying the Matriarchal societies of the Minangkabau people in West Sumatra, Indonesia, have utilized the historical method to understand the shift from matriarchy to a more patriarchal system over several centuries [2] . Through the examination of historical documents, oral histories, and material culture, researchers have traced the influence of colonialism, Islamization, and economic changes on the restructuring of power dynamics and gender roles within the society.

By contextualizing historical events within the social, political, and cultural contexts of the Minangkabau, anthropologists have uncovered the complexities and nuances of this cultural change. Comparative analysis with other matrilineal societies in the region further contributes to understanding the specific factors that have shaped the Minangkabau society’s transformation [2] . This case study demonstrates how the historical method can provide valuable insights into cultural change and challenge essentialist assumptions about cultural practices.

Case Study 2: Uncovering Hidden Narratives through Archival Research

Archival research is a vital component of the historical method, allowing anthropologists to access and analyze primary sources that might shed light on hidden or marginalized narratives. A compelling case study demonstrating the power of archival research is the examination of the experiences of enslaved African people in the Caribbean.

Anthropologists have delved into colonial archives, plantation records, and slave narratives to reconstruct the lived experiences and resistance strategies of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade [3] . By examining these historical documents, researchers have been able to challenge dominant narratives that have minimized the agency and resilience of enslaved individuals.

For example, the examination of plantation records and court documents in Jamaica revealed instances of enslaved people actively engaging in resistance, such as running away, sabotage, and the formation of maroon communities [3] . This archival research highlights the importance of incorporating multiple perspectives and sources to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the experiences of enslaved Africans.

By applying the historical method and critically analyzing archival sources, anthropologists have been able to uncover hidden narratives, challenge historical silences, and give voice to marginalized groups. This case study demonstrates the significance of engaging with primary sources and employing an anthropologically acceptable approach to historical research.

The application of the historical method in anthropology is exemplified through case studies that highlight the understanding of cultural change and the uncovering of hidden narratives. These examples showcase how the historical method, through careful analysis of historical data and engagement with primary sources, allows anthropologists to explore the complexities of the past, challenge dominant narratives, and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of human societies. 

In anthropology, the historical method is a key strategy that facilitates the advancement of understanding of human civilizations and cultures over time. Anthropologists use this approach to examine and interpret historical evidence in order to obtain understanding of social, cultural, and political processes. Anthropologists contribute to a thorough understanding of the complexity of the past through contextualization, comparative study, and the creation of narratives.

In order to confront biases and constraints, anthropologists practice reflexive practices and acknowledge the interpretive nature of historical study. They are aware of their own positions and how their viewpoints may affect how historical data are interpreted. Anthropologists draw attention to underrepresented voices and contest prevailing narratives by using theoretical frameworks like postcolonial or feminist viewpoints. A more robust and varied understanding of the past is facilitated by discussion and debate with other academics.

Finally, it can be said that the historical method is a cornerstone of anthropology and a vital way for learning about human communities and cultures across time. Anthropologists contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies of the past by contextualizing historical events, participating in comparative analysis, crafting narratives, and embracing reflexivity. The historical approach promotes multidisciplinary dialogue and enriches anthropological understanding by allowing for critical examination, challenging essentialist presumptions, and revealing hidden histories.

[1] Smith, C. (2007). What is historical anthropology? Cambridge: Polity Press.

[2] Blackwood, E. (2006). Anthropology and cultural history in West Sumatra. Journal of Social History, 40(4), 901-926. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4632103/

[3] Hall, G. (2011). Slavery and the archives: The making of the ‘silenced archive’. Left History, 15(1), 1-20.

Vasundhra, an anthropologist, embarks on a captivating journey to decode the enigmatic tapestry of human society. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, she unravels the intricacies of social phenomena, immersing herself in the lived experiences of diverse cultures. Armed with an unwavering passion for understanding the very essence of our existence, Vasundhra fearlessly navigates the labyrinth of genetic and social complexities that shape our collective identity. Her recent publication unveils the story of the Ancient DNA field, illuminating the pervasive global North-South divide. With an irresistible blend of eloquence and scientific rigor, Vasundhra effortlessly captivates audiences, transporting them to the frontiers of anthropological exploration.

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Article contents

Business anthropology.

• Ann T. Jordan Ann T. Jordan Professor Emerita, University of North Texas
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.4
• Published online: 30 October 2019

Business anthropology is a fast-evolving field. Social sciences such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology each have a unique set of constructs and theories for studying human behavior and each brings special insights to understanding business. Anthropologists are skilled in observing and learning from the rich interaction of social beings in their environment. With methods based in techniques for first-hand observation and interviewing of participants, and with theoretical knowledge gleaned from studying human societies across the world, anthropologists are the social scientists uniquely situated by training to analyze the social milieu and group-patterned interaction in any human setting.

Simply, business anthropology is the use of anthropological constructs, theory, and methods to study its three subfields: organizations, marketing and consumer behavior, and design. Organizational anthropology is the study of complex organizations from an anthropological perspective to solve organizational problems or better understand the nature and functioning of the organizational form within and across organizations. In marketing and consumer behavior anthropology’s methods allow one to get close to consumers and understand their needs, while anthropology’s theoretical perspectives allow one to understand how human consumption plays out on the world stage. In the design field anthropologists use their methods to observe and learn from the detailed interaction of social beings in the designed environments in which we all live. They use their theoretical perspectives to develop a holistic analysis of the rich data to develop new products and evaluate and improve existing ones whether they be refrigerators or office buildings.

The field of business anthropology is difficult to define because the moniker “business anthropology” is a misnomer. This field, as most anthropologists practice it, is not limited to work in for-profit businesses. Business anthropologists work with for-profit organizations, but also non-profit ones, government organizations and with supranational regulatory bodies. In addition to working for a business, an organizational anthropologist might be working in a non-profit hospital to improve patient safety, a design anthropologist might be working for an NGO to develop a less fuel-intensive cooking system for refugee camps and an anthropologist in marketing might be working in a government agency to develop ways to advertise new vaccines.

• anthropology
• business anthropology
• organizational anthropology
• design anthropology
• anthropology and consumer behavior
• anthropology of marketing
• enterprise anthropology
• ethics in anthropology
• value of anthropology to business

Introduction to Business Anthropology

The field of business anthropology is fast-evolving and difficult to define. The moniker “business anthropology” was first applied in the 1980s to refer to anthropologists based in both academia and in business who studied business. Simply, business anthropology is the use of anthropological constructs, theory, and methods to study its three subfields: organizations, marketing and consumer behavior, and design. Just as there are many definitions of “anthropology,” there are many definitions of the anthropology of business. 1 One reason for this is that the field has developed in fits and starts. New areas of concern have been added, old interests have grown to include new subject matter, and all has become blurred, overlapping, and dynamic.

One source of confusion regarding this field is the use of the term, “business.” While the field dates to the 1920s and 1930s, the term “business anthropology” did not appear in general usage to denote this domain of anthropology until the 1990s. An earlier popular moniker was “industrial anthropology” which reflected the importance of industry during the years of its popularity, the 1920s through the 1950s. Other names include enterprise anthropology (a commonly used term in Asia), anthropology of work (an anthropological field that predates business anthropology but has sometimes been included under the business anthropology umbrella due to its overlapping subject matter), economic anthropology (another older field with overlapping subject matter), and applied/ practicing anthropology (two fields with their own definitional differences and confusions, and of which business anthropology is considered to be a part).

Adding to the confusion, the name, business anthropology, does not accurately reflect all the work subsumed under it. While it initially dealt with for-profit business, it quickly became clear that anthropologists were studying and working in other organizational forms as well. This field, as most anthropologists practice it, is not limited to work in for-profit businesses. Business anthropologists work with for-profit organizations, but also nonprofit ones, as well as with government organizations at the local, state, and federal level and with supranational regulatory bodies. Another distinction is the difference between the anthropology of business defined as academic research on business and the anthropology for business defined as practitioners working in business. 2

History of Business Anthropology

Between 1924 and 1933 , Chicago was the location of possibly the most famous human relations study in a business setting in all North American organizational research. Through a collaboration that ultimately involved the Western Electric company, the National Academy of Sciences, and Harvard School of Business Administration, a research project was conducted from 1927 to 1932 at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, a manufacturing plant in Chicago. The researchers were conducting the first qualitative study of informal social organization in the work setting. Research there led to the identification of the Hawthorne effect and eventually to the creation of human relations as a field of study. It is the human relations school that gave us the concept of informal organization (Gamst, 1977 ).

During the 1940s, the specialty of industrial anthropology spread to universities around North America. Theoretically, the work made use of the functionalist paradigm; methodologically, it combined both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Case studies were the predominant data-gathering approach. Whyte ( 1961 ) wrote a seminal book, Men at Work , that included studies of the restaurant, hotel, steel, automobile, glass, and petroleum industries. Gardner ( 1949 ) published a textbook on human relations that was significant in the field. Other publications included studies on technology change on an assembly line at IBM’s Endicott plant (Richardson & Walker, 1948 ) , leadership and change in Eastern Corporation’s Lakeshore Mill (Sayles, 1952 ) , and informal relations on an automotive assembly line (Walker & Guest, 1952 ). In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists from the Manchester School were studying work on the shop floor with a focus on conflict and the problems of analyzing context. For example they studied the Citroën works from three perspectives: managers, the assembly shop and the machine shop (Emmett & Morgan, 1982 ).

From the 1960s through the 1980s, interest in business anthropology decreased in both the US and Europe due to concerns about the ethical nature of the work. By the 1980s however, large numbers of anthropologists were again working in applied fields in a wide variety of contexts. Business leaders and the popular press took a sudden interest in subjects in which anthropologists had expertise. The term culture became popular in business literature in the 1980s. On the surface it appeared that this clamor among business analysts regarding culture in organizations was largely a result of the American response to Japanese business success.

Anthropologists were now working in the fields of international business consulting (Terpstra & David, 1985 ) and intercultural training (Ojile, 1986 ), conducting research on American and Japanese organizational and cultural interactions (Hamada, 1991 ) and employed by corporations to conduct in-house research (Briody, 1988 ). The surge of interest in organizations by anthropologists in the 1980s was tied to the surge of interest in anthropology by organizational behaviorists. The possibility for cross-fertilization was great (Walck & Jordan, 1993 ). In the Netherlands, Tennekes ( 1995 ), Koot ( 1989 ) and others were establishing the field of business anthropology in organization studies while in the UK, Bate was defining the difference between the anthropological perspective on organizations and that of other organization specialists (Bate, 1997 ), and in France, Francois Chanlet was publishing on the multiple layers of culture in organizations (Chanlat, 1994 ).

In 1987 , the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), funded from a variety of sources including the Xerox Foundation, was founded. While the work at IRL was purposefully interdisciplinary and drew from fields such as economics, statistics, psychology, and computer science, it was heavily influenced by anthropology from the beginning. The theoretical paradigm on which IRL work was based was the notion that learning does not occur in a passive situation where an instructor places knowledge in the head of a student but in a larger, interactive environment. The research at IRL has impacted anthropology and our understanding of how humans learn. The research included the work practices of claims processors at an insurance company, of workers in the communications and control center of an airline’s ground operations, and of technicians who repair copy machines. The analysis provided insights into ways to improve work performance by increasing learning of key information. The work attracted attention in the fields of marketing, consumer behavior, and product design and was instrumental in anthropologists becoming involved in those fields. In the 1990s, anthropologists moved into the field of design. The anthropologists at Xerox were influential in the adoption of ethnographic techniques in this field. Doblin Group, E-Lab, Sapient and other design firms employed anthropologists (Jordan, 2013 ).

World-Wide Growth of Business Anthropology

Since 2000 , the fields in business anthropology have further crystallized and grown. In 2005 anthropologists Arnould and Thompson ( 2005 ) published a seminal article in the Journal of Consumer Research in which they reviewed 20 years of consumer research, identified a research tradition that they called Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), and explained how this research studied the cultural dimensions of the consumption cycle. Arnould and Sherry were then instrumental in developing the CCT Conference, first held at University of Notre Dame in 2006 . In design anthropology, a similarly significant conference to the CCT Conference is the annual Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) begun in 2005 . This conference was again started by a group of anthropologists to include Anderson at Intel, Lovejoy at Microsoft, Blomberg at IBM, and Wasson at University of North Texas, and promoted the use of ethnography in business.

In Europe the increased interest in the field is demonstrated by added training programs, for example at University College, London; the Sorbonne; the University of Copenhagen; the University of Southern Denmark, and Maynooth University, Ireland. Ethnography is being introduced in business in the Czech Republic (Ailová, Cír, & Gillárová, 2014 ) and in Hungary workshops are being conducted on business anthropology through the Central European University (Central European University, 2018 ). The estimates of Podjed, Gorup, and Mlakar ( 2016 ) suggest that of the applied anthropologists in Europe, over half are working in business anthropology. 3 The European Association of Applied Anthropologists’ Applied Anthropology Network annually organizes the “Why the World Needs Anthropologists” event which is spearheaded by business anthropologist Podjed (see Podjed et al., 2016 ). In the United Kingdom, the Design Council and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts encouraged research focused on product and service design. In 2005 , anthropologist Hilary Cottam was awarded UK Designer of the Year for design work in public service reform (Roberts, 2014 ). In France, there has been “a full- fledged development of professional anthropology” primarily in consumption and innovation, intercultural applications for organizations, and immigration (Desjeux, 2014 ).

The growth of business anthropology in Asia over the past 15 years is significant for the field. The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences includes the Commission on Enterprise Anthropology begun by Hamada Connolly and Zhang Jijiao. Business anthropology conferences are being held across Asia. Yasunobu Ito describes the importance of Fujitsu’s collaboration with Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Hakuhodo advertising company’s collaboration with IDEO, both occurring in the mid-2000s, as an impetus for the popularity of ethnography in Japan (Ito, Japan Institute of Science and Technology, unpublished manuscript “How Ethnography Infiltrated the Japanese Business Scene: A Case Study.” The first International Forum on Business Anthropology was held at the Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, in 2010 , and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences has held numerous conferences that include enterprise anthropology, for example in China in 2009 and Japan in 2018 . Additionally, Tian has organized conferences in China, beginning with the First International Conference of Business Anthropology held at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong in 2012 (Chen & Zhou, 2013 ; Tien, 2013 ) and has promoted the teaching of business anthropology across Chinese universities. In India anthropologists are pushing to increase the training in business anthropology in departments across the country. As one of the world’s largest consumer bases, India attracts multinational corporations and global business. Khan ( 2017 ) notes that business anthropologists can be helpful to consumers and businesses alike in maneuvering in this environment, a view propounded by M. R. Singh in his 2016 manuscript, “Business Anthropology: New Direction of in Research in India.”

A further sign of the maturity of the field and its international nature is the birth of two journals of business anthropology. The International Journal of Business Anthropology sponsored by the University of Sun Yat-Sen, China and VU University, Amsterdam, is the result of the work of Tian; it published its initial issue in 2010 . The Journal of Business Anthropology , an open access journal initially hosted by the Copenhagen Business School, published its first issue in 2011 and is the result of the efforts of Moeran and Garsten.

The Power of the Culture Construct

The construct “culture” is a building block of theory and method in anthropology and important to the work that business anthropologists conduct. Anthropological definitions are legion but, “culture” can simply be defined as an integrated system of shared ideas (thoughts, ideals, attitudes), behaviors, and material artifacts that characterize a group. 4 Culture is shared, learned, symbolic and adaptive. Hamada Connolly suggests culture “is an amalgam of historically derived meanings that include values, conventions, artifacts, norms, discursive practices, power-relations, and institutional habitus, which together constitute daily social realities for individual people” (Hamada Connolly, 2015 , p. 125).

Understanding cultural groupings is a unique contribution business anthropology makes to the fields of organization studies, design, and marketing and consumer behavior. For example, organizational behavior specialists’ training is typically based in psychology and sociology. While many of these organizational specialists use the term culture in their analysis of organizations (since the publication of Deal and Kennedy’s book, Corporate Culture in 1982 ), the term has common usage in organization studies), they define the term in a way that gives it less explanatory power. Culture, from the organization studies perspective, represents one of the characteristics of an organization at the organizational or macro level analysis. Culture is seen as something an organization has that can be manipulated by the singular efforts of leaders. It is additive, one more characteristic of an organization.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, see the organization as a culture and all the components of the organization’s structure, reward system, rules of behavior, and goals, are parts of the culture. An organization is also a web of interacting cultures (see Figure 1 ) which can be internally nested, cross-cutting and overlapping, and the organization is a subculture within larger cultural units. In addition, individuals are members of ethnic, regional, gender, and professional cultures outside of the organization. Cultures are shared and negotiated, not dictated by leaders. Every individual worker contributes to multiple cultural groupings in the organization and, along with the CEO, is a “culture producer.” Power is never absolute, since subordinates create culture and hold power just as leaders do, although typically not to the same degree.

Figure 1: Anthropological perspective on culture and organization.

Another use of culture in business anthropology is the study of culture flow. Urban defines culture as “whatever is transmitted via social processes in which people “(1) acquire knowledge, skills, practices, habits, values, stories, beliefs and the like from other people: and (2) transmit what they have learned . . . to others.” (Urban, 2016 , p. 323) He describes commodified culture flows in which commodities carry culture and culture increases the value of commodities. A diamond, for example, is valued for the cultural belief in its ability to confer status on its wearer. Non-commodified culture flows also exist. The assembly line process copied around the world is an example. A non-commodified flow can become commodified if it can be prevented from “flowing” as is the case with a patent on a new drug which prevents other drug companies from producing it (Urban, 2016 ).

Consequently, as anthropologists define it, culture is the recognition and study of patterned group behavior and its use provides a unique edge. It is a powerful construct to use in analyzing human behavior in all three domains of business anthropology: organizational, marketing and consumer behavior, and design.

Organizational Anthropology

Organizational anthropology is the study of complex organizations from an anthropological perspective to solve organizational problems or better understand the nature and functioning of the organizational form within and across organizations. While the missions of complex organizations may differ, a review of organizational anthropology shows that complex organizations face similar problems in management, work processes, and mission fulfillment no matter the organization type. Anthropologists are working in corporations (Ho, 2009 ), small and medium scale businesses (Caulkins & Weiner, 1998 ), government agencies (Neyland, 2013 ), military organizations (Ben-Ari & El-Ron, 2002 ), educational institutions , Hamann, Vandeyar, & Garcia, 2013 ) labor unions (Durrenberger & Erem, 2013 ), non-profit organizations (Fiske, 2008 ; Shaffer, 2008 ), indigenous organizations (Novo, 2013 ), virtual organizations (Wasson, 2013 ), and health care organizations (Sobo, Bowman, & Halloran, et al., 2008 ). They are working across multiple organizational types and amassing a body of knowledge about how organizations work. While some anthropologists are conducting these studies for research purposes, others are working directly for the organization to solve its problems. In addition, anthropological research demonstrates the global nature of organizational networks. For example, the work of both Briody ( 2013 ) and Ho ( 2009 ) work demonstrate how complex organizations of varied types are connected around the world in multiple ways. Work in organizational anthropology is not just about understanding issues internal to an organization but also about understanding the ways in which organizations partner and interact to impact communities, nation-states, and world economics and politics. In other words, organizational anthropology is also about global processes.

Theory in Organizational Anthropology Research

Since its rebirth in the 1980s and with the inception of journals dedicated to business anthropology, published work and presentations on organizational anthropology have not only increased but the topics have broadened. Responding to the interests of clients, much of the early work focused on internal organizational processes, organizational culture and change, and cultural diversity. It made use of the basics of anthropological research: ethnographic methods, the culture construct, holism and integration. Examples of the work on organizational culture change include Krause-Jensen’s study of the Bang & Olufsen company’s attempt to change its culture by focusing on values rather than products. He describes the resulting employee frustration with changes that seemed vague, abstract, and out of touch with reality (Krause-Jensen, 2010 ). Other work on culture change is that of Briody, Trotter, and Meerwarth ( 2010 ) who provide a history of culture change in automobile manufacturing plants, analyze the important issues in culture transformation, and provide lessons for success in organizational change through their work on the Ideal Plant Culture project at General Motors. As organizational anthropology has matured, work on processes, diversity and change continue to be bedrock in the field, but the 21st century brings additional concerns about globalization, technology, capitalism, and power.

Anthropologists are conducting more work that focuses on the large and complex internal and external environment of the organization . Baba, Blomberg, LaBond, and Adams ( 2013 ) propose applying new institutional theory to the study of organizations. They state that, “(n)ew institutional theory, with its focus on processes of institutionalization, could be an interdisciplinary approach to address major societal and economic issues.” Institutional analysis does not require the traditional perspective of a focal subject or a singular point of view but instead allows for actor–actor and translocal interactions and can reflect divergent perspectives and possible oppositional forces. They explore three analytical dimensions of an anthropological approach to new institutionalism: actors, interactions, and multiple perspectives. Three types of actors are found in institutional theory: Individuals, organizations, and societies (usually nation-states). Baba et al. suggests that rather than limiting anthropology to its traditional role in institutional research of exploring rational choice explanations, its role should expand to analyzing different societal problems from an institutional perspective. They emphasize that “anthropologists could contribute to understanding behavior by examining each of the diverse perspectives attendant to a set of actor-actor and/or translocal interactions and their consequences at various levels of analysis” (Baba et al., 2013 , p. 74).

Others are working with complexity theory . For Darrouzet, Wild, and Wilkinson, “the situation of complexity needs to be recognized as the empirical and epistemological background of most ethnographic anthropological work” ( 2009 , p. 63). Just as complexity is a diagnostic characteristic of weather patterns or sand dunes, where one cannot predict when a sand hill will start to slide, it is also a diagnostic of sociocultural phenomena. In organizations, for example, cultural and societal dimensions are distinct from the formal organizational system with its regulations, policies, and pay grades. They are the informal part of the organization and complexity theory is useful for analyzing these informal organizational systems. Sobo, Bowman, and Gifford ( 2008 ), in a study of how implementation scientists in the VHA health care organization approach their work and what issues they encounter, describe the health care organization as a complex adaptive system and explain the competing agendas of the implementation scientists and those their research impacts. “Complex adaptive system” describes a structural type used in complexity theory. Podjed ( 2011 ) uses complexity in the study of a birdwatching association and declares that the complexity paradigm integrates functionalist, interpretive, radical structuralist, and radical humanist paradigms into a coherent unit. Anthropologists are trained to place the phenomena they study in larger context. Complexity theory gives them a tool for explaining the interactions with and importance of the larger context.

New work also analyses global organizing . Extending the use of complexity theory to look at organizational action on the global level, Jordan ( 2011 ) studied complex adaptive systems centered on health care and the oil industry where the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was one institutional partner. Complex organizations, including nation-state governments, transnational businesses, and supranational regulatory bodies, are important, not just for their economic might and consequent political power, but also for the ways in which they combine in intraorganizational arrangements. As a result, we experience a web of interconnected organizations all acting in their own interest. However, they achieve their self-interest through partnerships with other organizations and other networks and through adaptations that appear beneficial to all network partners. Complex adaptive systems are a significant form of global organizing. Garsten and Jocobsson ( 2011 ) suggest that regulation is moving toward post-political forms of regulation based on consensual relationships. They explain how, in an interdependent world, the forms of governance are changing. In addition to political actions of nation states negotiating relationships, transnational organizations use a model of consensus building to regulate member interactions. The presupposition of consensus results in the hiding of differences in interest and power resources among the members so that unequal power relations become almost invisible. They cite the Open Method of Coordination of the European Union as an example of this new governance process. Evidence of the same process can also be found in other supra-regulatory organizations such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

Human–technology interaction has become standard fare for business anthropologists in all three domains of the field. Suchman’s 1987 work on human–machine interaction was an important early step. For example, she demonstrated the need for a simple, obvious copy button because copiers had become too complex for non-experts to operate. Batteau and Villegas ( 2016 ) tell us that “tools encode multiple cultural values, including magic, identity, the authority of the state, and class domination.” New forms of organization are enabled by the rise of the internet (Wasson, 2013 ) and researchers are using Actor–Network Theory and Assemblage Theory for their ability to analyze human–machine interaction (McCabe & Briody, 2018 ).

Work on valuation is developing out of all three subfields of business anthropology and overlaps with economic anthropology. Batteau and Psenka ( 2012 ) suggest that business anthropology is well suited to further the study of how “economic progress” has brought normative instability to societies and flexible deprivation to workforces and consumers. Business anthropology can contribute to studying this by the “development of the concept of value,” the study of the “growth of tightly coupled networks circulating not only information and objects across the world, but also value and authority,” and the “analysis of authority” ( 2012 , pp. 75–76). Moeran and Garsten make a case for the anthropological study of assemblages of worth in a special issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology . They reflect on how humans and organizations valuate and evaluate their lives and assert that “the study of culture—is a study of the values that constitute a particular configuration of culture and the evaluations that are practiced by, and negotiated among, people” (Moeran & Garsten, 2013 , p. 1). Social organization, religious beliefs, artistic forms, trading relations, and so on are all cultural forms based on values and evaluation. Røyrvik ( 2013 ) writes on managing corporate values in Hydro, a Norwegian multinational, and Ailon ( 2013 ) describes the increasing importance of shareholder value instead of profit as the measure of corporate success. Garvey ( 2013 ) focuses on consumption and material culture in a study describing the relational values and “having, wearing, and showing” in furniture and clothing, for example the relationship between Ikea furniture and H&M clothing.

Other work demonstrates the continuing viability of anthropological theoretical stalwarts. Mary Douglas’s theoretical contribution to the study of organizations, typically called either cultural theory or group/ grid theory , has proven robust and continues to be used by organizational anthropologists. Mars ( 2013 ) describes how Douglas’s theory has been expanded from a static to a dynamic model by arguing that in social units with enough size or duration, all four solidarities (isolates, hierarchy, individualism, and enclaves) are present in differing degrees and compete. Mars considers group/ grid theory not only useful for understanding organizations but practical as well, and describes a wide range of cases in which it has been applied.

Another frame used by anthropologists is cultural ecology . Organizations adapt to their environments, which are likely to include multiple influences, from capitalist markets and government regulation to societal norms. Successful adaptation to these external forces is necessary for organizational sustainability and growth. Jordan ( 2013 ) provides an example of a merger in which the merged companies could not settle on common practices because each original company was adapted to success in a different market environment. Adaptation can be used to study the internal dynamics of an organization as well. Baba ( 1995 ) used human and cultural ecology and conceptualized the internal environment of the corporation as an ecological system to study work group responses to an organizational change in communication tools and methods.

A common thread across many organizational anthropology studies is the significance of relationships, stakeholder perspectives , and trust. In work on exchange systems, the work of both Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss provides insights. Negotiating trust among numerous stakeholders with different cultural perspectives and interests is a common subject. Friberg ( 2017 ) describes the position of Swedish mediator companies which mediate between universities and businesses. Using Marilyn Strathern’s theory of “cutting the flow,” he studies how the flow of knowledge in a laboratory can be stopped, cut, and remade. Wan and Ip ( 2014 ) discuss how the Chinese practice of guanxi (built on family ties, principles of Confucianism and favoring personal bonds) impacts relationship marketing in China’s foreign banks.

Other work reflects the new organizational forms that upend our understanding of organizations in the 21st century . A variety of different organizational types are explored by anthropologists as they describe in Garsten and Nyqvist’s edited volume ( 2013 ) how, as researchers, they enter complex organizations. In describing modern organizational forms, network methodology looms large (Ofem, Floyd,& Borgatti, 2013 ). In understanding global organizing, it is a key factor. Gluesing ( 2013 ) uses it in understanding post-industrial or post-bureaucratic organizing enabled by information technology. Jordan ( 2017 ) uses it to describe a local political advocacy organization in Texas. Analysis of virtual organizations provides significant insight into new organizational structures in the 21st century (Wasson, 2013 ).

More work uses assemblage theory as a guiding theoretical perspective. McCabe and Briody ( 2018 ) edit a volume describing the interaction among consumers, corporations, and nonprofit organizations in the United States, China, India, Cambodia, and Nigeria. McCabe explains the use of assemblage theory to theorize culture change emphasizing agency. At its heart, assemblage theory allows one to analyze how people, objects, practices, discourses, and institutions align, disperse, and coalesce to form new, often temporary, arrangements. From this perspective, culture change is the movement in these assemblages. Assemblage theory is useful in all three subfields of business anthropology. Examples include: Delcore’s ( 2018 ) study of designing new educational offerings by analyzing an assemblage of discourses on educational equity, technology, and student and faculty ways of dealing with education; Onomake and Ejiro ( 2018 ) analysis of a brokerage assemblage in a Nigerian–Chinese business relationship; and Aiken’s assemblage analysis of the shift to human-centered design for spacecraft at the National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) (Pahl, Ramer, & Aiken, 2018 ). Aiken documents the shift occurred when NASA focus moved from short-duration flights such as those on the Space Shuttle to long-duration flights such as travel to the International Space Station (ISS) and astronaut comfort became more important (see Figure 2 ).

Figure 2: Anthropologist’s field notes showing assemblage analysis of organizational culture shift at NASA. Image courtesy of Jo Aiken.

Future of Organizational Anthropology

Darrah and Dornadic advocate “working on work organizations” by which they mean “(e)verything from information systems to built environments, from accounting practices to incentive systems can be the object of design, with professions and occupations testing the limits of linking intention to implementation” ( 2013 , p. 257). This means increasing the importance of “in situ” studies, learning to conduct ethnography on the “material,” identifying, developing and articulating ideas for new work processes and new organizational arrangements, and being conversant in multiple forms of data-collection and representation including video, screen-capture software, and workshop tools ( 2013 ).

The organizational form is everywhere in today’s world. Anthropologists bring an important skill set to its study. Our focus on social processes, power, context, technology interaction, integration, and global organizing and governance allow us to provide important information about how the modern world works and make a valuable contribution to the discipline of anthropology as well as to business anthropology.

Anthropology of Marketing and Consumer Behavior

In marketing and consumer behavior anthropology’s methods enable one to get close to consumers and understand their needs while anthropology’s theoretical perspectives enable one to understand how human consumption plays out on the world stage. For the anthropologist, marketing and consumption are important forces in human behavior, and understanding these forces is essential to understanding political economy and world systems. Anthropologists view consumer behavior in a cultural, historical, and global context. As Denny of Practica Group explains, “My work is in decoding the meaning of brands, bringing the consumers of products and services to life as cultural beings, understanding the role of products, brands or services in the context of everyday life, where meaning is produced and consumed. It is at heart a cultural analysis” (Denny, 2002 , p. 148)

Anthropologists working in the field of consumer behavior not only provide insights that are useful to their clients but make a substantial contribution to anthropological theory. Miller ( 1998 ) suggested that in our theoretical understanding of the processes at work in society, anthropologists had been slow to recognize the key role of consumption. Appadurai ( 1986 ) called for a renewed focus on the circulation of commodities in social life. He suggested that while the traditional focus in anthropology has been on the type of exchange, focusing on the object of the exchange allows for a new understanding of human behavior. Anthropologists working in consumer behavior and marketing have helped to rekindle the discipline’s focus on the importance of material culture (see Figure 3 ). As Grant McCracken ( 1988 ) proposes, consumption, from the viewpoint of an anthropologist, is the process at work when consumer goods are created, bought, and used, and understanding consumption is important to understanding culture.

Figure 3: Example of marketing for cross-cultural appeal. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Briody.

Important to this field of anthropological study is consumer culture theory (CCT). While this field involves several disciplines, anthropology has been at the forefront since the beginning. In 2005 , Arnould and Thompson outlined four thematic domains of research: consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, the sociohistoric patterning of consumption, and mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies. In an overview of the CCT work, Joy and Li ( 2012 ), suggest that the domains of research have grown and fractured since the inception of CCT. For example, they credit business anthropologists Moeran ( 2006 ) and Sunderland and Denny ( 2007 ) with extending CCT research into organizations by studying how employees, managers, consumers and others in corporations collaboratively create market cultures.

Studies in consumer behavior cover a variety of topics. Examples of the breadth of the work include: negotiated identity : Chin’s ( 1999 ) study of alterations that African-American ten-year olds make to Barbie dolls; resistance through consumption : Kates and Belk ( 2001 ) on consumption at a Gay Pride Day in Toronto; experiential consumption : Creighton ( 1997 ) on Japanese tourism selling the “village experience” to urban Japanese; localization in globalization : Miller’s ( 1998 ) study of coke and rum recognized as a national drink in Trinidad; and branding : Garth and Powell ( 2017 ) on the rebranding of a convenience store as a market for healthy foods, and Tse ( 2016 ) on the tension between creativity and money in composing text and pictures for a Hong Kong fashion magazine.

Anthropological work in marketing and consumer behavior is rich and deep. The field is a growth area for anthropologists wishing to practice outside academia. Work by Malefyt and Morais ( 2012 ) and Sunderland and Denny ( 2007 ), anthropologists who have worked in the field for decades, provide in-depth guidance into the anthropological approach. Steve Barnett, an anthropologist who has been conducting consumer research as a consultant since 1978 , demonstrates through a series of case studies the unique value of anthropological qualitative pattern-recognition techniques. They satisfy his guiding principle: “what kinds of research will get us as close as possible to the client’s concerns in ways that do not duplicate the kinds of research the client’s competitors are doing” (Barnett, 2016 , p. 62).

Design Anthropology

Work for anthropologists in the design field continue to increase. Ethnographic techniques have become popular in the design field because they fill a void. At one time, designers depended primarily on human factors research, which developed out of cognitive psychology and marketing. Human factors research considers human cognitive abilities and the attributes that make a product easy for humans to use; for example, if the hardware on a door is flat with a bar across the middle, it becomes obvious to the user that to open the door she must push, not pull Wasson, 2000 ). Human factors research is useful but not sufficient for understanding the best way to design some products. Rob Van Veggel, in an unpublished manuscript “Where Two Sides of Ethnography Collide,” persuasively argues that it is too abstract and removed from everyday reality since it is often conducted in controlled, laboratory environments. In addition, this type of research focuses on what goes on in individuals’ heads and does not consider group interaction and social and cultural contexts. Thus, there is no opportunity to observe and learn from the rich interaction of social beings in and with their environment. Anthropologists are the social scientists uniquely situated by training to analyze that rich social milieu and that group-patterned interaction.

Ethnographic techniques are not the only valuable tools anthropologists offer, however. After all, anyone can videotape consumers in the act of using a product (although not just anyone can analyze that videotape). Anthropologists offer a theoretical grounding and an understanding of the interrelationships of the variables that are essential to providing valuable and useful analysis of the data. As Wasson puts it, “a videotape alone cannot answer questions about how, for instance, particular user–product interactions are situated in consumers’ family dynamics, work pressures, and cultural beliefs” (Wasson, 2002 ).

Design anthropologists work on new product development, redesign of existing products and existing product evaluation, sometimes taking a cue from do-it-yourself products (see Figure 4 ). An example of product redesign is Von Baeyer’s ( 2017 ) study of Syrian refugees in Jordan. The aim was to aid a client in designing educational programs. An ethnographic study of refugee families in their homes and communities helped the client think “outside the camp” and move beyond the refugee camp model of assistance. Von Baeyer’s reporting on social networks and cell phone usage among refugees led the client to consider mobile technologies and social networks in developing educational solutions. An example of both product evaluation and redesign, Peinado and colleagues worked with three banks and two insurance companies to develop a new methodology for designing bank and insurance products for customers in France. They began with an evaluation of the existing bank products and interviewed individuals about banking. The knowledge gained resulted in the designing of an interactive based interface that allowed “clients to personalize their bank and insurance information, assess their overall financial situation, simulate future actions, and dialogue directly with their banks and insurances”(Peinado, Jarvin, & Damoisel, p. 271).

Figure 4: Design anthropology includes the study of repurposed objects. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Briody.

Just as in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior, anthropologists’ ability to get close to the consumer, to let the consumer formulate the questions, and to see the rich, contextual issues surrounding product use, are contributions to design research. Miller ( 2018 ), Gunn and Donovan ( 2012 ) and Gunn, Otto and Smith ( 2013 ) provide useful discussions of how design and anthropology intertwine. While ethnography as a method has become decoupled from anthropology in the design field by those who have no anthropological training and in has, in some instances, become co-opted under the umbrella of User Experience (UX) research, the anthropological approach to ethnography and theory and the anthropological understanding of context and holism have much to offer product design and research (Amirebraahimi, 2016 ). A synergy results from the evolving relationship between anthropology and design. Design anthropologists no longer limit their research to work on products, they design processes, work spaces, and solve other design issues.

There is substantial literature in the field of business anthropology on ethics. Examples include Beeman ( 2017 ); Cefkin ( 2017 ); Gallenga, Sampson, and Soldani ( 2016 ); Kitner ( 2014 ); Malefyt and Morais ( 2017 ); and Urban ( 2017 ). Malefyt and Morais state that in comparison to those for academic and non-practicing anthropologists, ethics for business anthropologists include a host of distinct and complex issues, many of these due to the capitalist environment. They explain that “business anthropologists work in an interactive field of consumer–producer co-creation in continual change that presents a substantial ethical challenge. Not only are issues of causality, power, and agency less clearly assigned, but also anthropologists in business are, themselves, agents of change.” (Malefyt & Morais, 2017 , p. 9)

In the 1980s the anthropology community was deeply involved in a debate over ethics. Many anthropologists felt there was a dangerous possibility that the rights of the individuals who were the subjects of their studies were in jeopardy when anthropologists were being hired by clients to use their expertise to find out information on the subjects of study for use by these clients. Suppose corporate executives hired an anthropologist to learn how to control employees. Could the information gleaned from this research be damaging to the employees being studied? Or, suppose corporate executives hire an anthropologist to devise a marketing plan for a new product. Will this research assist the corporation in convincing people to buy a product that they don’t need, or is harmful, thereby increasing corporate profit at the expense of the consumer? What if this research is to be kept secret (a common requirement when one is hired to do research by a corporation)? Is it ethical for the anthropologist to engage in secret research? These are questions anthropologists consider highly important to the ethics of the profession. The anthropological community strongly defends the rights of research subjects and the responsibility of the researcher to prevent her subjects from being harmed by the research.

Today professional anthropologists operate under several codes of ethics. Those most important in North America are the codes of the American Anthropological Association (AAA, 2012 ), the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA, n.d. ), and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA, 2018 ). Taken together, these codes establish a valuable set of criteria for the consultant to follow. They cannot possibly, however, address all potential ethical conflicts an anthropologist may experience. Many business anthropologists find the AAA code inadequate in creating guidelines for their work. Briody and Pester ( 2017 ) wonder why the AAA code of “do no harm” cannot be supplemented with one of “do some good?” Doing some good is an ethical guide that most applied anthropologists consider to be at the core of their work.

Value of Anthropology to Business and Other Organizations

Anthropologists have a skill set and knowledge base that are valuable to business (Desjeux, 2017 ; Morais & Briody, 2018 ; Sieck & McNamara, 2016 ; Tett, 2014 ). Some of those skills are:

Culture Construct: Discussed in Section 2, this is a cornerstone of the anthropological perspective.

Holism: A holistic perspective, the ability to see the integrated picture, to pull back from the specific problem, event, or situation under study and put it in a larger context, is one of anthropology’s most important contributions to business. Just as we understand that culture is an integrated system, we understand how issues are frequently integrated with other issues so that to understand museum attendance, for example, one must look at use of space, types of visitors, and placement of objects, not just museum attendance. Sieck and McNamara ( 2016 ) discuss how the anthropologist reframes and expands the conversation. For example, police violence could be reframed by viewing officer training as ritual or a police department as kin networks. Tett refers to this as “joining up the dots between different parts of peoples’ lives” ( 2015 , p. 133).

Emic View: Anthropologists are trained to be able to understand the “emic” perspective: the point of view of the participants in our research, not just the view others hold of them. In organizations, we interview and observe at all levels of an organization to get many points of view in addition to those of the organization leaders; in studying consumers, we interact with the consumers, not just product designers, in our quest to see patterned group behavior. For example, Sobo and collegues studied a VHA health care organization; their detailed research revealed the competing agendas of the implementation scientists and those impacted by their research. Their goal was to understand the view of all stakeholders (Sobo, Bowman & Gifford, 2008 ). Squires’ ( 2002 ) research on breakfast foods for children took her into homes at breakfast time to observe morning rituals and talk with parents and kids to learn what each wanted in a breakfast food. This is the kind of fine-grained analysis that quantitative data cannot provide. We are trained to analyze not only talk but silence and not only what people say they do but what they actually do.

Ethnocentrism: One barrier to our ability as humans to understand the cultures of others is our tendency to mistake our own cultural behavior for natural, panhuman behavior. Corporations that have interests in many countries recognize the importance of understanding foreign cultures but frequently insist on running their international branches under the influence of their home cultural bias. Anthropologists have the skills to understand this all-too-human behavior and explain how it leads to management mistakes and product failures (for example, Wan and Ip on the Chinese practice of guanxi ). Also, within an organization, the construct of ethnocentrism can be used to understand how distinct employee groups may have differing “ethnocentric” views of the organization. For example, Krause-Jensen (120) learned of the divide between leaders’ and employees’ views of the organization’s culture at Bang & Olufsen.

Ethnographic Methods: Our qualitative methods continue to gain popularity in business and beyond for their ability to provide real insights into consumer and employee actions and interests. They are the calling cards that get many anthropologists in the door of business. Examples of this importance are found in Butler ( 2015 ); Garsten and Nyqvist ( 2013 ); Hasbrouck ( 2018 ); LeCompte and Schensul ( 2010 ); and McCabe ( 2017 ).

Comparative Analysis: An additional important insight is the understanding of how cultural groupings interface. One of the tasks of the anthropologist is to act as a culture broker and negotiate among multiple stakeholders, for example, between a Norwegian CEO and his local manager in Brazil (Giskeødegård, 2016 ). In an example of sociocultural brand research, a team studying the American Girl brand strove to view it from the points of view of numerous stakeholders (girls, adult women, marketers, etc.) in order to compare and analyze their viewpoints (Diamond et al., 2009 ). Anthropologists are ambassadors of cultural difference whether that difference be between employees in the sales department and those in the marketing department, between technology specialists who design the company website and the less tech savvy customers who use it, or between company employees in Germany and those in Kenya.

Analysis of Power Structures: anthropologists are trained to see informal and formal power structures. Tett ( 2014 ) states that CEOs avoid the mention of power as almost a taboo. Processes of social control include clearly stated controls but also controls transmitted in more subtle, silent ways.

Tett, an anthropologist and Assistant Editor of The Financial Times , states: “the real beauty of anthropology is that it encourages people to ask the question: why? Why is the world arranged in this way? Why do we talk about some topics – but not others? Why do groups coalesce in this manner, attach so much importance to particular objects, or think in a certain manner?” (Tett, 2014 , p. 134).

Future of Business Anthropology

The number of practicing anthropologist working in the fields of business anthropology continues to grow. There is work for anthropologists wishing to pursue this avenue. Anthropologists Morais (35 years of experience in advertising and marketing with customers including Procter and Gamble, WD-40, Coca-Cola, Safeway, and Swissotel) and Briody (24 years at General Motors Research and in consulting work in health care, consumer products, aerospace, petrochemicals, and aging) proclaim that “business anthropology is booming”. Anthropologists can be found at Google, Intel, American Eagle, Nissan, ADP, and IBM and at advertising agencies, design companies and marketing research firms. Corporations for which they have conducted research include Procter & Gamble, Campbell’s Soup, Revlon, IDEO and Mars. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts growth in business and consulting for anthropologists (Morais & Briody, 2018 ).

Examples of the need for business anthropology are found in the popular press. In an article for businessinsider.com, Baer ( 2014 ) stated that companies were desperate to hire anthropologists for the new perspective they could bring. While company executives are great at understanding the numbers, they do not know how to figure out what is important to people in their daily lives, Baer explained. Forbes published an article by anthropologist and consultant Andrea Simon in 2016 describing four ways anthropology can help women drive change in corporations. Lidow ( 2017 ) explained that while there is ample panel survey data, there is an urgent need for ethnographic study of business creation and entrepreneurship and Moore ( 2011 , 506) suggests international business needs more ethnography to understand “ambivalent phenomena.” Anna Cucurull (a business anthropologist, managing partner of A Piece of the Pie in Barcelona, and whose clients include Intel, Mondalez, Volkswagen Group and Vodafone) says her consultancy is growing due to the uncertainty and complexity in business. Traditional thinking just does not solve the problems (Bowman 2016 ).

Whether working for non-profit or for-profit organizations or government agencies, anthropologists bring every voice to the table by including the low-level employee and the isolated consumer, promote intercultural knowledge by understanding the value in diverse groups, and bring underrepresented groups into the discussion. To be a business anthropologist does not in itself represent a stance for or against business, but it does represent a willingness to engage in the dialogue about business that illuminates solutions to new problems and new ways of seeing old realities; this is fast becoming the defining dialogue of our times. Anthropologists have a responsibility to contribute their knowledge to this worldwide conversation. We champion consumers, foster human-centered organizations, and promote cultural diversity. If the goal of anthropology is to study human behavior, we cannot exclude business.

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1. Examples of definitions are Baba ( 2012 , p. 25), Denny and Sunderland ( 2014 , p. 16), and Peluso ( 2017 , p. 11).

2. Sedgwick ( 2017 ) and Cefkin ( 2017 ) discuss the issues involved in distinguishing anthropology of/for business.

3. Podjed et al. define business anthropology differently than I do here and break up the field into several areas. I add together all his numbers for fields I call business anthropology to arrive at this conclusion. This difference is again an example of the many and differing definitions of the field.

4. Adapted from Hiebert ( 1976 , p. 25).

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17.3 Theories and Methods

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following:

• Discuss the importance of cross-cultural comparison and cultural relativism in study of human health.
• Explain why both objectivity and subjectivity are needed in the study of health.
• Discuss ethnographic research methods and their specific applications to the study of human health.
• Summarize the theoretical frameworks that guide medical anthropologists.

The Importance of Cultural Context

Culture is at the center of all human perspectives and shapes all that humans do. Cultural relativism is crucial to medical anthropology. There is a great degree of variety in the symptoms and conditions that cultures note as significant indicators of diminished health. How the sick are treated varies between cultures as well, including the types of treatments prescribed for a particular sickness. Cultural context matters, and health outcomes determined by culture are informed by that culture’s many parts. The United States, for example, relies heavily on biomedicine, treating symptoms of mental and physical illness with medication. This prevalence is not merely an economic, social, or scientific consideration, but all three. A cultural group’s political-economic context and its cultural beliefs, traditions, and values all create the broader context in which a health system exists and all impact individuals on a psychosocial level. Behaviors such as dietary choices and preferences, substance use, and activity level—frequently labeled as lifestyle risk factors—are all heavily influenced by culture and political-economic forces.

While Western cultures rely upon biomedicine, others favor ethnopharmacology and/or ritual healing. Medical anthropologists must attempt to observe and evaluate ethnomedical systems without a bias toward biomedicine. Medical anthropologists must be cautious of tendencies toward ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism in medical anthropology takes the form of using the health system of one’s own culture as a point of comparison, giving it preference when analyzing and evaluating other systems. An American anthropologist who studies ethnomedicine in the Amazon River basin must be careful to limit their bias toward a biomedical approach as much as they can. That is not to say that subjective experience and opinion need be discarded entirely, merely that bias should be acknowledged and where necessary limited. Admitting bias is the first step in combating it. Being aware of one’s own ethnocentrism allows an anthropologist to analyze culture and medicine more truthfully.

Methods of Medical Anthropology

Medical anthropology is a highly intersectional subfield of anthropology. The field addresses both the biological and social dimensions of maladies and their treatments. Medical anthropologists must thus become comfortable with a wide-ranging tool kit, as diverse as health itself. Like all anthropologists, medical anthropologists rely on qualitative methods, such as ethnographic fieldwork, but they also must be able to appropriately use quantitative methods such as biometrics (including blood pressure, glucose levels, nutritional deficiencies, hormone levels, etc.) and medical statistics (such as rates of comorbidities, birth rates, mortality rates, and hospital readmission rates). Medical anthropologists can be found working in a myriad of endeavors: aiding public health initiatives, working in clinical settings, influencing health care policy, tracking the spread of a disease, or working for companies that develop medical technologies. The theories and methods of medical anthropology are invaluable to such endeavors.

Qualitative Methods

Within medical anthropology, a number of qualitative research methods are invaluable tools. Qualitative methods are hands-on, first-person approaches to research. An anthropologist in the room or on the ground writing down field notes based on what they see and recording events as they happen creates valuable data for themselves and for others.

Participant observation is a methodology in which the anthropologist makes first-person observations while participating in a culture. In medical anthropology, participant observation can take many forms. Anthropologists observe and participate in clinical interactions, shamanic rituals, public health initiatives, and faith healing. A form of participant observation, clinical observations allow the anthropologist to see a culture’s healing practices at work. Whether a doctor is treating COVID-19 or a shaman is treating a case of soul loss, the anthropologist observes the dynamics of the treatment and in some cases actually participates as a patient or healer’s apprentice. This extremely hands-on method gives the anthropologist in-depth firsthand experience with a culture’s health system but also poses a risk of inviting personal bias.

Anthropologists observe a myriad of topics, from clinical interactions to shamanic rituals, public health initiatives to faith healing. They carry these firsthand observations with them into their interviews, where they inform the questions they ask. In medical anthropology, interviews can take many forms, from informal chats to highly structured conversations. An example of a highly structured interview is an illness narrative interview. Illness narrative interviews are discussions of a person’s illness that are recorded by anthropologists. These interviews can be remarkably diverse: they can involve formal interviews or informal questioning and can be recorded, written down, or take place electronically via telephone or video conference call. The social construction of sickness and its impact on an individual’s illness experience is deeply personal. Illness narratives almost always focus on the person who is ill but can at times involve their caregivers, family, and immediate network as well.

Another method commonly used in medical anthropology, health decision-making analysis , looks at the choices and considerations that go into deciding how to treat health issues. The anthropologist interviews the decision makers and creates a treatment decision tree, allowing for analysis of the decisions that determine what actions to take. These decisions can come from both the patient and the person providing the treatment. What religious or spiritual choices might make a person opt out of a procedure? What economic issues might they face at different parts of their illness or sickness? Health decision-making analysis is a useful tool for looking at how cultures treat sickness and health, and it highlights a culture’s economic hierarchies, spiritual beliefs, material realities, and social considerations such as caste and gender.

Quantitative Methods

Quantitative methods produce numeric data that can be counted, correlated, and evaluated for statistical significance. Anthropologists utilize census data, medical research data, and social statistics. They conduct quantitative surveys, social network analysis that quantifies social relationships, and analysis of biomarkers. Analysis of census data is an easy way for medical anthropologists to understand the demographics of the population they are studying, including birth and death rates. Census data can be broken down to analyze culturally specific demographics, such as ethnicity, religion, and other qualifiers as recorded by the census takers. At times, an anthropologist may have to record this data themselves if the available data is absent or insufficient. This type of analysis is often done as a kind of background research on the group being studying, creating a broader context for more specific analysis to follow.

Also important to medical anthropologists are analyses of medical statistics . The study of medical records helps researchers understand who is getting treated for what sickness, determine the efficacy of specific treatments, and observe complications that arise with statistical significance, among other considerations. Analysis of census data combined with medical statistics allows doctors and other health providers, as well as medical anthropologists, to study a population and apply that data toward policy solutions. Famous examples include the World Health Organization’s work on health crises such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19.

Questionnaires are more personal to the anthropologist, allowing them to ask pointed questions pertinent to their particular research. Surveys make it possible for anthropologists to gather a large quantity of data that can then be used to inform the questions they ask using qualitative methods. Distribution methods for surveys vary and including means such as personally asking the questions, releasing the survey through a health care provider, or offering online surveys that participants choose to answer.

These are the most common methods used by medical anthropologists. Different theories are influential in determining which of the methods a particular research might favor. These theories inform how an anthropologist might interpret their data, how they might compose a study from beginning to end, and how they interact with the people they study. Combined with more general anthropological theory, each anthropologist must craft a composite of theory and method to create their own personalized study of the world of human health.

Theoretical Approaches to Medical Anthropology

Social health.

Biomedicine, the science-based ethnomedical system practiced in the United States, recognizes the impact physical health and mental health have on one another: when one falters, the other does as well. There is an increasing awareness in biomedicine of a third type of health, social health , which has long been recognized by many ethnomedical systems around the world. Each of the theoretical approaches to medical anthropology demonstrates that to develop a holistic understanding of human well-being, it is necessary to include mental, physical, and social health. Social health is driven by a complex set of sociocultural factors that impact an individual or community’s wellness. At a macro level, it includes the cultural and political-economic forces shaping the health of individuals and communities. An individual’s social health also includes the support a person receives from their extended social network, as well as the social pressures or stigma a person may face and the meaning that they ascribe to their experiences. Just as mental and physical health strongly influence one another, when a person’s social health falters, their physical and/or mental health declines as well.

Physical environments—whether they are natural, constructed, or modified environments—shape cultural adaptations and behaviors. People living on islands and people living in deserts inhabit very different environments that inform their cultures and affect their biology. On the other hand, culture often affects how humans interact with their environments. People who work in offices in Los Angeles and hunter-gatherers in the Amazon River basin interact with their environments differently, relying upon very different subsistence patterns and sets of material culture. Culture also informs human biology. Eating a lot of spicy foods changes a person’s biophysiology and health outcomes, as do dietary taboos such as refusing to eat pork. These dietary choices inform biology over generations as well as within a single lifetime.

The Biocultural Approach

The biocultural approach to anthropology acknowledges the links between culture and biology. Biology has informed human development and evolution, including the adaptations that have made culture, language, and social living possible. Culture, in turn, informs choices that can affect our biology. The biocultural approach analyzes the interaction between culture, biology, and health. It focuses on how the environment affects us, and the connections between biological adaptations and sociocultural ones. The biocultural approach draws on biometric and ethnographic data to understand how culture impacts health. The effects of environment on biology and culture are apparent in the treatment of survivors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that occurred in 2011 in Japan. Studies regarding the genetic health of survivors focus on the combination of environmental damage and social stigma in Japan due to their potential exposure to radiation.

Symbolic Approach

Other theoretical approaches ask different types of questions. What does it mean to be a patient? What are the social expectations for the behaviors of a person diagnosed as suffering from a particular sickness? Why is it symbolically meaningful for a treatment to be prescribed by a medical doctor? These are questions typically asked by those utilizing a symbolic approach to medical anthropology. The symbolic approach focuses on the symbolic thinking and beliefs of a culture and how those beliefs affect social and especially health outcomes.

A person’s beliefs affect how they perceive treatments and how they experience illness. The most obvious example of the symbolic approach at work is the placebo effect . If a person believes that a treatment will be effective, this belief will affect their health outcome. Often in medical trials, people who believe they are receiving a treatment but are in fact receiving a placebo, such as a sugar pill, will demonstrate physiological responses similar to those receiving an active substance. Accounting for the placebo effect is an important consideration for all medical studies. The opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, occurs when a person believes they are not receiving an effective medicine or that a treatment is harmful. Common to both phenomena is the importance of meaning-centered responses to health outcomes. One of the most potent examples of this is voodoo death , when psychosomatic effects—that is, physical effects created by social, cultural, and behavioral factors—such as fear brought on by culture and environment cause sudden death. Related to the symbolic approach of medical anthropology is the symbolic interaction approach to health utilized by medical sociologists. Both approaches recognize that health and illness are socially constructed concepts. The symbolic interaction approach to health focuses on the roles of the patient, caregiver, and health care provider and the interactions that take place between people occupying these roles.

Medical Ecology

Another major medical anthropology theory is medical ecology . Pioneered by Paul Baker and based on his work in the Andes and American Samoa in the 1960s and 1970s, medical ecology is a multidisciplinary approach that studies the effects of environment on health outcomes. Examples of these environmental influences include food sources, environmental disasters and damage, and how environmentally informed lifestyles affect health. Whereas the biocultural approach looks at the intersection of biology and culture, medical ecology focuses instead on how environment informs both health and the culture surrounding it.

A popular example of these connections can be observed in what are termed Blue Zones , certain locations around the world where a significant number of people regularly live exceptionally long lives, many over a century. These communities can be found in the United States, Japan, Columbia, Italy, and Greece. Common links between people who live in these places include a high-vegetable, low-animal-product diet (eggs and fish are the exception), a lively social life and regular activity, and a strong sense of cultural identity.

A negative example of the links between environment and health can be viewed in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. In this case, pollution of the city water system negatively affected health outcomes due to high exposure to lead and Legionnaires’ disease. Studies, including a long-term study by the National Institutes of Health, confirm that the water, central to the larger environment of Flint, negatively affected citizens of all ages, with particular harm caused to children and the elderly.

Cultural Systems Model

Culture is a chief consideration in another theory, the cultural systems model . Cross-cultural comparison is a core methodology for anthropology at large, and the cultural systems model is ideal for cross-cultural comparison of health systems and health outcomes. Cultures are made of various systems, which are informed by sociocultural, political-economic, and historical considerations. These systems can include health care systems, religious institutions and spiritual entities, economic organizations, and political and cultural groupings, among many others. Different cultures prioritize different systems and place greater or less value on different aspects of their culture and society. The cultural systems model analyzes the ways in which different cultures give preference to certain types of medical knowledge over others. And, using the cultural systems model, different cultures can be compared to one another.

An example of the cultural systems model at work is Tsipy Ivry ’s Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (2009), which examines pregnancy and birth in Israel and Japan. A particular focus is how state-controlled regulation of pregnancy and cultural attitudes about pregnancy affect women differently in each society. Despite both societies having socialized medicine, each prioritizes the treatment of pregnant women and the infant differently.

In the Israeli cultural model for pregnancy, life begins at a child’s first breath, which is when a woman becomes a mother. Ivry describes a cultural model that is deeply impacted by anxiety regarding fetal medical conditions that are deemed outside the mother’s and doctor’s control. As every pregnancy is treated as high risk, personhood and attachment are delayed until birth. The state of Israel is concerned with creating a safe and healthy gene pool and seeks to eliminate genes that may be harmful to offspring; thus, the national health care system pressures women to undergo extensive diagnostic testing and terminate pregnancies that pass on genes that are linked to disorders like Tay-Sachs disease.

Japan, facing decreasing birthrates, pressures women to maximize health outcomes and forgo their own desires for the sake of the national birth rate. The cultural model for pregnancy in Japan emphasizes the importance of the mother’s body as a fetal environment. From conception, it is a mother’s responsibility to create a perfect environment for her child to grow. Mothers closely monitor their bodies, food intake, weight gain, and stressful interactions. In Japan, working during pregnancy is strongly discouraged. Ivry noted that many women even quit work in preparation for becoming pregnant, whereas in Israel mothers work right up to delivery.

The cultural systems model also allows medical anthropologists to study how medical systems evolve when they come into contact with different cultures. An examination of the treatment of mental illness is a good way of highlighting this. While in the United States mental illness is treated with clinical therapy and pharmaceutical drugs, other countries treat mental illness differently. In Thailand, schizophrenia and gender dysmorphia are understood in the framework of culture. Instead of stigmatizing these conditions as illnesses, they are understood as gifts that serve much-needed roles in society. Conversely, in Japan, where psychological diagnoses have become mainstream in the last few decades and pharmaceutical treatment is more prominent than it once was, psychological treatment is stigmatized. Junko Kitanaka ’s work on depression in Japan highlights how people with depression are expected to suffer privately and in silence. She links this socially enforced silence to Japan’s high stress rates and high suicide rates (2015). The cultural systems model offers an effective way to evaluate these three approaches toward mental illness, giving a basis of comparison between the United States, Thailand, and Japan. Assigning ethnomedicine the same value as biomedicine rather than giving one primacy over the other, this important comparative model is central to the theoretical outlook of many medical anthropologists.

The cultural systems model encompasses a myriad of cross-disciplinary techniques and theories. In many cultures, certain phrases, actions, or displays, such as clothing or amulets, are recognized as communicating a level of distress to the larger community. Examples include the practices of hanging “the evil eye” in Greece and tying a yellow ribbon around an oak tree during World War II in the United States. These practices are termed idioms of distress , indirect ways of expressing distress within a certain cultural context. A more psychologically driven consideration is the cause of people’s behaviors, known as causal attributions . Causal attributions focus on both personal and situational causes of unexpected behaviors. A causal attribution for unusual behavior such as wandering the streets haplessly could be spirit possession within the context of Haitian Vodou, while in the United States behaviors such as sneezing and blowing one’s nose might be attributed to someone not taking care of themselves.

Causal attributions can be important to one’s own illness. Anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman has concluded that if doctors and caregivers were to ask their patients what they think is wrong with them, these explanations might provide valuable information on treatment decisions. One patient might think that their epilepsy is caused by a spirit possession. Another might suggest that their developing diabetes in inevitable because of their culture and diet. These beliefs and explanations can guide a doctor to develop effective and appropriate treatments. The approach recommended by Kleinman is known as the explanatory model. The explanatory model encourages health care providers to ask probing questions of the patient to better understand their culture, their worldview, and their understanding of their own health.

Political Economic Medical Anthropology

Another medical anthropology approach is critical medical anthropology (CMA) , which is sometimes referred to as political economic medical anthropology (PEMA) . Critical medical anthropology has a specific interest in the inequalities of health outcomes caused by political and economic hierarchies. Critical medical anthropology advocates for community involvement and health care advocacy as ethical obligations. Defining biomedicine as capitalist medicine, this approach is critical of the social conditions that cause disease and health inequalities and of biomedicine’s role in perpetuating these systemic inequalities. CMA is also interested in the medicalization of social distress, a process that has led to a wide range of social problems and life circumstances being treated as medical problems under the purview of biomedicine.

Systemic racism and structural violence create many negative health outcomes. Structural violence refers to the way in which social institutions, intentionally or otherwise, harm members of some groups within the larger society. Structural violence can affect things such as life expectancy, disability, or pregnancy outcomes and can lead to distrust of medical systems. The Tuskegee syphilis study, a decades-long “experiment” that studied the long-term effects of syphilis in Black men under the guise of medical treatment, is a prime example of structural violence at work within the United States medical system. Black men involved in the study were not told they had syphilis and were denied medical treatment for decades, with most dying of the disease. The government’s internal mechanisms for halting unethical studies failed to stop this experiment. It was only when public awareness of what was happening resulted in an outcry against the study that the experiments were stopped.

Another area of interest to medical anthropologists working with a CMA approach is how medical systems might be inherently biased toward or against certain segments of society. The research of anthropologist Leith Mullings demonstrated a lifelong focus on structures of inequality and resistance. Her work in Ghana examined traditional medicine and religious practice through a postcolonial lens, which was critical of the colonial legacy of structural inequality she observed. Her work in the United States also focused on health inequalities, with a special interest in the intersection of race, class, and gender for Black women in urban areas. It has been documented that some doctors in the United States regularly ignore the pain of women, and this is especially true in cases where the doctor displays racial bias. This tendency has been cited in several studies, including a study in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that women are more likely to be misdiagnosed for coronary heart disease based on the symptoms they give and pain levels reported (Nubel 2000). Another study in the Journal of Pain found that women on average reported pain 20 percent more of the time than men and at a higher intensity (Ruau et al. 2012). Another example of research that takes a CMA approach is Khiara Bridges ’s 2011 Reproducing Race , which brings a critical lens to pregnancy as a site of racialization through her ethnography of a large New York City hospital. This medical racism contributes to the higher rates of African American infant and maternal mortality.

Merrill Singer has done work on the role of social inequalities in drug addiction and in cycles of violence. This work has led to his development of the concept of syndemics , the social intersection of health comorbidities , or two health conditions that often occur together. For example, Japan’s hibakusha , or atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do not live as long as Japan’s normally long-lived population and are more likely to develop multiple types of cancer and other diseases tied to their exposure to nuclear radiation. In addition to these health risks, they face heavy discrimination from the larger Japanese population due to misinformation regarding nuclear radiation and radiation contamination. This discrimination carries over to the descendants of hibakusha , who have a higher rate of cancer than the average Japanese population despite having no detectable genetic damage from the atomic bombings. Studies are ongoing as to the cultural, economic, and genetic causes of this cancer. Syndemics is highlighted in the near-century-long struggle for numerous conditions caused by the atomic bombings to be recognized as related to the atomic bombings and thus treated by the Japanese government.

Critical theories of health are an applied method, analyzing medical systems and applying critical theory, often with the goal of improving the system or improving policy. Recommendations for improvements often come out of research but may also be the starting point of a research project, as part of a data-finding mission to highlight disparity in health outcomes. Whether it is systemic racism in biomedical treatment or power discrepancies in ethnomedical rituals, critical theories of health are a key part of exploring medicine in action and understanding real medical consequences. From birth to the grave, social inequalities shape health outcomes, life expectancy, and unnecessary human suffering. Critical medical anthropology scholarship demonstrates the social forces shaping disease and health, from drug addiction to the impacts of climate change. This work becomes a self-evident call of action. It is medical anthropology in action.

Profiles in Anthropology

Angela garcia 1971-.

Personal History: Angela Garcia comes from a small town along the Mexican border with New Mexico. She credits her background and upbringing with inspiring much of her later work in anthropology. Her early experiences have led her to focus on places where political and cultural spheres combine, resulting in inequality and violence. Within this framework, she has focused on medicine, postcolonial theory, and feminism. She first attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then earned a PhD from Harvard University in 2007, shortly thereafter publishing her first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande .

Area of Anthropology: medical anthropology, feminist anthropology

Accomplishments in the Field: The Pastoral Clinic analyzes heroin addiction among Hispanic populations in New Mexico’s Rio Grande region. Garcia’s work focuses on the political and social realities that contribute to addiction and treatment, with dispossession as a central theme. The degradation of the surrounding environment and the economic decline of the Great Recession have been important factors in determining people’s life choices. Also influential has been a political reality that denies many participation or power. Garcia describes addiction as a recurring reality in the lives of many, leading them in and out of rehab in an endless cycle. Garcia also describes the damaging effects of addiction on relationships within families and communities.

Garcia joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 2016. Her work has shifted to Mexico City, where she studies coercive rehabilitation centers run by the poor. She is particularly interested in political and criminal violence and in how informal centers like these exemplify the political and social climate within the larger Mexican nation. As much as these centers embody these realities, they also try to shift power away from pathways that lead to and encourage violence. In addition to this work, Garcia has also started examining addiction and mental illness in both Mexico and the United States Latinx (Latina/o) population.

Importance of Their Work: Garcia publishes and presents frequently in preparation for books she is currently writing. Her work is crucial to understanding dispossession and power dynamics within the United States and Mexico, including how immigration and migration affect access to health care and shape identity.

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