Assignment 5: Ethnography Readings

In this assignment, we were given links to a page on the americanethnography.com website, and two wikipedia articles.  The first link basically contained definitions for ethnography.  The second is an encyclopedic article about ethnographies.  It better explained the concept of the ethnography, and really gave more information than I probably needed on the subject.  The final article is an example of a very famous ethnographic article written by Margaret Mead, and the fallout caused by it.

Upon clicking the link for the first page, I thought "wow, this is just a few sentences, this assignment will be no problem at all.  So I blasted through that one and started the page on ethnographies.  That was the one with all the substance in it.  Frankly, this article was particularly hard for me to focus on, because I have taken an anthropology class where I had to conduct several ethnographies.  As a result, I felt like everything here was review, so I didn't focus too terribly hard on it.  I realized while taking the quiz in class that anything that is ever presented in an enumerated format must be memorized because we WILL be quizzed on it.  The third article contained new material to me, and it wasn't as dry as the previous one, so I was actually able to pay attention to the events it described.  This is the only article that I found any bit entertaining, possibly because of how scandalous it was considered during the 20s' and beyond.

My favorite character was Derek Freeman, just because he spent the majority of his career being a giant conservative asshole in the anthropological community.  I can't believe he spent all that time bashing Mead, especially AFTER she died, and couldn't refute any of his claims.  He waited until then to publish his own study of the Samoan people, 60 years later.  This Samoa and its people were under completely different circumstances from the 20s when he came to them.  I don't know why he didn't just publish his book, noting how Samoa had change since being converted to Christianity instead of insisting that that was how Samoa had been the entire 20th century.  In the end, the American Anthropological Association met without inviting Freeman, and denounced everything he said.

Way to make the other Freemans look bad.

Pictured above: more likable Freemans