L48 Anthro 150A Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Noble Savage, Trobriand Islands, Unilineal Evolution
23 Oct 2018
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2.3 Notes
• Fieldwork
o Distinguishes anthropology from other disciplines who study societies from a
distance—sending surveys out, bringing people into lab
• Fieldwork and the empirical tradition
o Contrasting views of primitive man
▪ Originally as an animal then as a gentle person or “noble savage”
• Both very stereotypic
• Colonialism gave a real incentive to learn something about the
people so they were doing real research (still with an agenda)
o Scholarly shift
▪ Historians and philosophers as anthropologists to natural scientists as
anthropologists caused this change
o Previous methods
▪ Armchair scholars→ had agenda, didn’t do much real research
o The origins of fieldwork
▪ Key developments→ anthro is becoming a profession, people are
specializing in it
▪ Weaknesses…
o Early fieldwork→ interviewing from veranda—still not living with the society,
having people come to where they were to talk to them
• Bronislaw Malinowski
o Trobriand Islands→ “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”
▪ Found that Australian aborigines did live in families—they just looked
different than how we knew them
• Challenged unilineal evolution
▪ Made fieldwork essential—the Ethnographer’s magic, Malinowski’s new
standard
• Must live among subjects of study—rejecting interviewing from
the veranda
o Objective
▪ Wanted to prove everyone who said they were savage, with no laws,
families, etc. wrong
▪ Found shells and necklaces that were circulated among traders→
ceremonial gift exchange network—many items showed you had a vast
exchange network
o Malinowski’s impact
▪ Shifted methodology
▪ Impacted next generation of anthropologists
• Evans-Pritchard
o Sudanese government wanted Pritchard to learn about the Nuer
o Research obstacles
