Nature of Anthropology and Research Methods
What this domain tests
This section examines anthropology as a four-field discipline - biological, archaeological, linguistic, and cultural - plus applied anthropology. Expect questions on holism, the comparative method, long-term fieldwork, ethnography, emic/etic perspectives, sampling, and research ethics. You should be able to design or critique a small study.
Core rules and concepts
- Holism: no single dimension (economy, kinship, belief) is studied in isolation.
- Ethnocentrism judges another culture by your own standards; cultural relativism suspends that judgment to understand a culture in its own terms. Relativism is a method, not a claim that all practices are morally equal.
- Ethnography relies on participant observation, language learning, key informants, fieldnotes, and long residence. A survey administered in one afternoon is not ethnography.
- Emic = insider's categories; etic = analyst's comparative categories. Both are necessary.
- Triangulation combines methods (observation, interviews, documents, quantitative coding) to strengthen claims.
- Sampling choices matter: random, stratified, snowball, and convenience samples answer different questions.
Worked example
A student studies dispute settlement in a farming village. She lives there 14 months, learns the language, and records 40 disputes. Villagers call the process making the heart cool; she codes it analytically as mediation with third-party witnesses. Her claim - that disputes are usually settled before formal councils meet - is supported by both observation and the coded cases. Reasoning: the emic phrase captures meaning; the etic code permits comparison; triangulation reduces the chance that one informant's view is mistaken for the village's.
Traps that cost marks
Treating cultural relativism as moral relativism; calling any interview study ethnographic; assuming one informant speaks for everyone; presenting etic categories as if they were local ones; ignoring the researcher's effect on the setting (reflexivity).