Extract
[...] Mead conducted her first field season in Oceania in 1925. It was there that she gathered material for her book, Coming of Age in Samoa (Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a best-seller and a characteristic example of her qualitative rather than quantitative methods. This approach is distinguished by its inductive character. It is not a matter of confirming or refuting existing hypotheses, but of developing questions and answers in contact with a context. The interpretations are derived from the field, not following pre-fabricated models to explain. [...]
[...] Field research allows anthropologists not to fall into the pitfalls of the discipline, such as the essentialization of cultures. Thus, Bronis?aw Malinowski, a pioneer of modern fieldwork, introduces participant observation as the central object of his method. He emphasizes the importance for the ethnographer to live within the studied community, to observe and actively participate in order to understand the structures and dynamics, going beyond the simple collection of data. Such a practice allows him to avoid considering his objects of study as such, to integrate and not to conserve an external, colonialist or simply exogenous point of view, which can harm his results. [...]
[...] For example, Edward Tylor, an American anthropologist, in Primitive Civilization, applies a scientific approach to culture: Tylor defends the idea that human culture can be defined scientifically, just like natural phenomena. He travels from 1852 to 1904 in Europe, northern and central America, and North Africa. During these expeditions, he practices direct observation of his objects of investigation: for example, he visits the Ojibwa Indians of Lake Huron in 1872. Field research was then in its infancy. The 'fields' developed under the influence of Franz Boas, specialized in the study of human culture in Canada and the United States, a dominant figure in early 20th-century anthropology. [...]
[...] He conducted 14 months of field research in South Africa among the Zulus of Natal. Then, appointed as a research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, he was sent to do a field study on the African continent, to which he remained deeply attached. In 1941, he became the second director of the Institute, which he contributed to making an important center of social research on Africa. A critique of the Western gaze and the contestation of the field Gluckman favors empiricism and engagement with real social and political contexts in his work. [...]
[...] Bibliography: Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa, New York, William Morrow and co, 1928. Gluckman, Max, "An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand", 1940. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques, coll. Terre humaine, Plon, Paris, 1955. [...]
