Anthropology 2222F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Margaret Mead Award, Trobriand Islands, Kula Ring
1 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Ethnographic research often enables us to ask better questions. Brownislaw malinowski (1884-1942) - father of eldwork. Not just collecting data - participant observation - he engaged in social relationships with others. The reader will grasp the native"s point of view through the readings of ethnographer"s books, accounting for years of eldwork by the ethnographers. They will arrive to the same conclusions (the power of ethnography) For malinowski, this was akin to science. He argued that trobriand islanders have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure: The ethnographer has to conduct the picture of the big institution, very much as the physicist constructs his theory from the experimental data, which always have been within reach of everybody, but needed a consistent interpretation . The big institution that malinowski describes in this book is the kula ring - a complex system of exchange through which men traded prestige goods and interacted with one another.
