BSOE 144
READING ETHNOGRAPHIES
BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment Jan 2022 & July 2022
Assignment – I
Q1. What is Ethnography? Discuss in detail types of ethnographies.
Ans. Ethnography as a qualitative methodology lends itself to studying the beliefs, practices, social interactions, and behaviours of the people through participant observation and later interpreting the data collected(Denzin& Lincoln,2011; Berry, 2011). Thus,
Ethnography is the study of the people in naturally occurring settings of ‘fields’ by means of methods which capture their social meanings and ordinary activities, involving the researcher participating directly in the setting,
if not also the activities, to collect data in a systematic manner without the meaning being imposed on them externally’ (Brewer, 2000;10)
Types of ethnographies :
The philosophical approaches that inform ethnographic approaches can be Positivism, Functionalism, Interpretative, feminist and post-modernism.
(1. Positivist and functionalist ethnography: During the 19th century, a positivistic approach in anthropology and ethnography predominated.
This approach adheres to the empiricist notions of knowledge generation and advocates objectivity and distance from the object of inquiry.
Objectivity requires the researcher to maintain distance and remain detached from the object of inquiry and the results are focused on facts rather than the researcher’s own beliefs and values (Payne &Payne, 2004).BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
The primary focus is to seek generalizable laws that may be applied to human behaviour. The anthropologists like Malinowski,
(2. Interpretative approach to ethnography: With thick description’, Clifford Geertz professed on meanings and real emotions rather than just noting of facts in the field.
It was stated that it is essential to see humans as actors in the social world rather than simply reacting as objects in the natural world (O’Reilly;49).
It was emphasized that the actual context of the situation be noted to know the relation between the action and the environment in which the action is taking place and what participants have to say about it.
The focus shifted to creating more meaningful ethnographies with rich data and more qualitative depth.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
(3. Phenomenological approach Understanding Ethnography: Following Alfred Schutz (1972), much of the 1960s and 1970s qualitative research turned to phenomenological approach, i.e., obtaining the actor’s point of view.
Humans make sense of what we receive through our senseswe see, hear, smell, feel, and taste by splitting up the world around us into categories and sub-categories.
By emphasizing on the constituted meanings, phenomenology offers a vision of the social world where human subjects define themselves and what they value and a variety of ways they experience the world.
It becomes imperative for ethnographers to look how the lived world of the people under study is constituted.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
(4. Critical ethnography: Some ethnographies are strategically situated to shed light on larger social, political, symbolic or economic issues.
Moving from parochial vision, there has been a shift in ethnographies to larger issues like addressing the political economy or seeing from the perspective of the disadvantaged group in advanced capitalist societies.
These are example of critical realist tales embedded within the Marxist frame.
(5. Feminist ethnography: Women ethnographers have brought a new perspective to the way ethnographies are written and read.
During the 1970s when feminists began questioning the use of masculine pronouns and nouns, the female was essentially missing in the ethnographies.
Sally Slocum’s (1970) paper Woman the Gatherer: The Male Bias in Anthropology critiqued the popular conception of man-the hunter and challenged the androcentric academy.
Another volume by Peggy Golde Women in the field is an edited volume by women anthropologists, opened the debate of how being women affected the experiences of anthropologists conducting their research in diverse settings.
Q2. Critically examine the position of women in Mukkuvar society.
Ans. The women within the Mukkuvar community are restricted to the domestic domain largely. Even when out, they maintain their physical distance from the men.
This entire distancing and freedom is intricately planned as it differs with age and marital status of the women.
While the younger women who are unmarried face much stricter surveillance; the women over forty, widows enjoy much freedom of movement.
The space dominated by the women remains the domestic space as well as the areas around it like the wells etc.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
On the contrary, the male space is the sea, beaches etc. where the boats and professional work takes place.
In fact many men sleep on the beach under the open sky and do not return to their homes many times.
The men, moreover need no justification of their presence through their duties of work. Their ways of entertainment and lazying around are also quite apparent.
They can freely move and access the village square, toddy shop, shady groves and can also visit cinema houses or teashops that exist in the larger town of Colachel. In short, the public venues are all openly and easily accessible to them.
This is in sharp contrast to the women who rarely access the public spaces or loiter around. Their movement outside is marked only by work.
For entertainment and other purposes they may sit at the porch of their homes or the sandy lanes outside the houses.
The distancing from the sea becomes a significant reason for lack of cultural capital among women.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Though the exclusion of women from fishing and their debarring from trade can be explained in economic terms; this would lead to banishing of the existence of social processes that are the reified structures creating such disparities.
According to popular beliefs here, women are also regarded as dangerous to men. The danger they may cause again depends on the age and social position that they have in society.
The supernatural frame relegates women as being a threat to men’s pursuit of their labour, mainly fishing activities.
It is considered that a woman crossing a man’s path going on work turns the sea as rough and crazy.
They must thus stay out of sight of men when the latter are moving out for work.
This was the reason that the researcher realised that the young girls avoided taking these sort route to the village as that lied in front of the beach.
Any wrongful or incorrect conduct by the women became the reason for any kind of turbulences faced by the men at the sear and especially for their safety and upkeep.
Such references can be found in popular novels like Chemmeen by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Here the man is entrusted with the girl rather than the other way round. The chastity of women and their prayers that bring men safe from the sea.
In the novel, the heroine’s mother tells her daughter that “Purity is the great thing, child Purity.BSOE 144 Free Solved Assignment
The strength and wealth of the fisherinan lie in the purity of his wife … My child, you must not be the cause of the ruin of the sea-front” (1962:5).
Assignment – II
Q3. Discuss the issues and challenges to ethnography from globalization.
Ans. An ethnographic approach to globalization requires the understanding of locally, socially, and culturally specific ways in which people understand the place of their locality in the global scheme of things, and the actions they take to shape that place.
These understandings and actions are deeply political, and the very definition of the ethnographer’s topic and site is shaped by the place-making projects within which any particular site is embedded.
Globalization involves the contesting of the boundaries of places and negotiations concerning which geographical scale is best suited for action. As a result, the choice of site also becomes political.
Thus, the challenge to ethnography from globalization lies in the concept of ‘field’, and the need to provide the ‘hard’ data that characterizes positivist research (Gille, 2001).
Some researchers have always questioned the concepts of field or homework, rural or urban, community or corporation, arguing that such dichotomies create boundaries that are in fact non-existent, and are products of discriminatory white western discourses, whereby no alternative way of looking at ‘other’ is presented.
Globalization, however, seems to have made such concepts redundant, since the whole notion of location appears to have lost its meaning. Gille (2001) argues that such challenges need to be put into the context of global social relations.
For Naidoo (2012), the epistemological basis of ethnography involves the study of people who are in or affected by certain situations, and sometimes locale is difficult to define, even with Marcus’ attempt to put this in the context of multi-sited ethnography, allowing for the fact that many localities are no longer isolated, but linked to the world in often complex ways.
Q4. Explain with suitable examples, the Characteristics of a strong leader.
Ans. A major difference that exists between a strong leader and a weak leader is that the strong leader commands while the weak leader asks for consent.
A strong and good leader also understands that in a contract group, the followers have to be always treated as individuals and not as a group.
Their requirements are different and therefore not everyone needs to be kept happy at the same time. The leader can have several ways of dividing up the earned dividends, in other words, the spoils.BSOE 144 Free Solved Assignment
These could be in the form of material goods; they could also be in the form of titles that can be handed over to the follower.
Both material resources as well as power positions are important in the game.
Good leadership, nevertheless, is not only about the material goods but is also dependent on the skills.
These include the understanding about the pragmatic rules and their applicability, the appropriate use of these rules to make the best use of the resources, which are sourced from other people and through these resources, make a successful following.
Additionally, a leader is the strongest when there are no intermediary leaders within the team, who while necessary to manage a very large team, also run the risk of becoming the leaders themselves.
One way to avoid this is to use the divide and rule’ strategy in order to keep an ambitious internediate leader in check.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Additionally, the leader can also introduce the notion of specialization, whereby each smaller team under an internediate leader is fulfilling only one function, while all report to the top leader.
Such a division will reduce the possibility of any one person overtaking and becoming a rival. BSOE 144 Free Solved Assignment
Moreover, in a moral team, the leader should further have control over the symbols which brings the team together.
Q5. What do you understand by interpretive research?
Ans. The nature of interpretive research gives it some unique advantages.
This kind of research is useful for exploring hidden reasons behind complex, interrelated, or multifaceted social processes,
such as institutional politics or violence against women, where quantitative evidence may be biased,inaccurate, or otherwise difficult to obtain.
Second, they are often helpful for theory construction in areas with no or insufficient a priori theory.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Thirdly, they are also appropriate for studying contextspecific, unique, or idiosyncratic events or processes.
Fourth, interpretive research can also help uncover interesting and relevant research questions and issues for follow-up research.
That is in addition to finding answers it can also help in raising questions which need to be addressed by future research.
Interpretive ethnography also offers a certain flexibility to the researcher as it allows the researcher to change the original research question.
If the researcher realizes that her original research questions are unlikely to generate new or useful insights, they can modify the questions to a certain extent.
This is a valuable but often understated benefit of interpretive research, and is not available in positivist research.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Interpretive ethnography has its own set of challenges. It has been criticized by the positivists on method, truth and verification.
They argue that interpretive ethnography does not use on agreed on methods of verification, including random samples, representative texts, and so-called unbiased methods of interpretation.
According to positivists, this kind of research tends to be more time and resource intensive than positivist research in data collection and analytic efforts.
Assignment – III
Q6. What is Online Ethnography?
Ans. An online or virtual medium used to study internet communities in various forms is a new way of doing ethnography.
This research method explores how humans live and interact online through a wide range of different research strategies.
Hine argues that ethnographic researchers start from the perspective of questioning what is taken for granted and seeking to analyse and contextualize the way things are (Hine 2000: 8). BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
In relation to the internet this means that researchers challenge the notion that the internet is the product of the features of its technology, and explore how it is constructed by the way in which people inhabit, utilize and actively make it.
Q7. Name the different phases in which the growth of anthropology in India is divided.
Ans. The Formative phase (1774-1919): For Majumdar, this phase ended in 1911, but for Vidyarthi, this phase extended to 1920. This phase saw the ethnographic studies on tribes and other communities.
The monographs produced were on customs and beliefs, traditions and caste communities and social life. A lot of work on tribes was published during this period.
The Constructive phase (1920-1949): A full-fledged Department of Anthropology was established at Calcutta University in 1920. L.K. Anantha Krishan Iyer, who joined the University, published BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
The current evaluative phase, i.e., 1990 onwards, has led to the development of Indian anthropology with emerging new sub-fields like Medical Anthropology, Business Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Gender Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology and Tourism anthropology.
Q8. What do you understand by virtual ethnography?
Ans. Another suggested approach to global ethnography is virtual ethnography based on the Internet and online communities.
Since the internet is one of the primary means by which local people maintain social relations and communities across National borders.
However, ethnographers should be cautious about regressing to a contemporary digital warm chair anthropology” based on secondary sources and interactions captured in cyber-communities.
A rich ethnographic account of online communities would ideally explore the relationship between people’s online activities and their actual offline social lives through firsthand fieldwork. BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Q 9 Which are the prominent castes that the Coorgs interact with?
Ans. The most prominent castes that the Coorgs interact with are the Brahmin or the priest,
the Kaniyas who are astrologers, Banna or the caste which usually performs the rites prescribed by the Kaniya; the blacksmith, carpenter, goldsmith, washernan and barber and the Meda and Poleyas.
The Meda and Poleyas are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. The castes and professional categories mentioned here are blanket terms and consist of a number of sub-castes.
Vertical solidarity is maintained with these castes beyond the mere interdependency of economic needs, through ritual roles in both mourning as well as household and village festivals.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
Q10. Why do ethnographers develop a rapport and establish relationships with the people under study?
Ans. Ethnographers always encourage and support inductive based research as well as research which is based on new discovery.
They place much emphasis on how respondents (or subjects) attach meaning to their actions and to their lives broadly. They rely much on how people interpret their living patterns.
When ethnographers, who have certain predefined concepts, theories and propositions, attempt to study a community, they generally do not succeed in discovering the distinctive nature of what is being studied.BSOE 144 Solved Free Assignment 2022
It is for this reason only that ethnographers generally begin their study, not with preconceived concepts and theories but because of their interest to understand a particular community, a particular section of population, any type of activity or problem.
Many a times, ethnographers refine their problems and modify it as they advance in the research study.
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