Jeremy Price's Library tagged methods → View Popular

23 Sep 09

14 Aug 08

For people who see anthropology as a ‘science’, then ethnography is meant to provide data previously unavailable (to other anthropologists). This data then becomes evidence which can be used to confirm or deny what an anthropologist says about a place. Anthropologists present the data, make their argument, and let the reader judge whether the data supports their argument.
‘ethnography by example’. This is a situation where someone has done fieldwork, realized something—we might even say had a personal transformation—and is now conveying what they have learned to the reader.
1 more annotations...
- the ethnographier uses stories about the world as examples to drive the point home or to convince people that their diagnosis of the state of the world is correct.

08 Aug 08

It is a commonsense colloquialism: Statistics lie. But we also think of them as the best chance we have at some kind of hard-and-fast access to social truth.
As an anthropologist who respects the beauty and elegance of mathematics, I just wish our everyday privileging of its explanatory powers left a tad more room at the table for differently pitched methodological attempts at truth-telling.

14 Jul 08

SELF: I STUDY MY OWN CULTURE
OTHER: I STUDY OTHER CULTURES
2 more annotations...
- STUDYING SELF AND OTHER — THE SYNTHESIS
- Is this the double bind that will afflict any “science” that claims to study “difference”? Is the problem one of conceiving one’s research in terms of self and other, rather than in terms of specific social and political problems? Is the problem above the child of the culture concept and its flaws?

14 Jun 08

12 Apr 08

Human-centered science is marked by both what it is and what it is not. It is: problem centered, people oriented, and ethically engaged. In other words, it looks more like our everyday lives, an interdisciplinary mish-mash that makes sense most of the time. It is not: disciplinary specific, overly reductive, or based on cause-effect explanation.
Those explanations come from people, and they rely on context. Chipchase makes this argument through his use of “identity,” which is not set by personality, nor determined by culture.
2 more annotations...
- These emerging methods are based on two basic premises: good description and getting human feedback. Qualitative approaches based on these two premises can be as rigorous and scholarly as experiments and statistical science. And they connect to the real world a lot better, because that is where they are located.
- However, we still live in a world largely set by yes/no. Yes/no hypotheses. Yes/no votes. It gave us a powerful start, I know, over the past couple centuries. But damn, I wish our politicians today would approach problems the way Chipchase does. Not top-down, policy-driven, and ideologically-determined. Imagine the torrent of creativity that could create.