life history, or personal narrative of one’s life, is an important research method in anthropology for learning about how culture is experienced and created by individuals. It involves collecting and recording individuals’ experiences, and can be done either by the individual writing down their own life story or by using semi-structured or unstructured interviewing, often tape-recorded, which the researcher then writes up.
Life histories are a rich source of insight both into a person’s individual experiences, presented from their own point of view, and into the wider social forces that affect their lives. For example, they can provide an insight into how war affects those who live through it. This approach, like other kinds of ethnography, places most importance on the person’s own interpretations and explanations of their experiences.
However, life histories obtained through interviews require the researcher to be able to empathize with the subject and to have good listening skills. Such interviews are also very time-consuming and labour-intensive. They rely upon the interviewee’s memory recall, which can sometimes be distorted, unclear or lacking altogether, and they are also unrepresentative of the population as a whole. So, even though they may give us an insight into one person’s experience, that might not be representative of other people’s experiences at that time.
ACTIVITY
Conduct a life history project in which you have to carry out an extended series of interviews with a chosen informant in order to ascertain what effects globalization has had on his or her life. Transcribe the interviews and write a report that includes themes such as childhood, education, career and family.
You should choose an older person who has experienced changes throughout his or her life.
Reflexivity in anthropology
In ethnography, reflexivity has come to mean thinking carefully about who has undertaken the research, under what conditions, how it was written up and what impact these questions might have on the value of the ethnography produced. In anthropology, reflexivity has come to have two distinct meanings, one that refers to the researcher’s awareness of an analytic focus on his or her relationship to the field of study, and the other that attends to the ways that cultural practices involve consciousness and commentary on themselves. In the following case study, Mwenda Ntarangwi reflects on his experience of being an African anthropologist in American culture.
reflexivity The process of reflection on the research process
An African ethnography of American anthropology (Mwenda Ntarangwi)
Anthropologists are not only good at studying other cultures and communities in depth, they also frequently turn their analytical eye on themselves and their practices. They look at how their gender, race, social class, ethnic identity and other identity markers shape their ethnographic studies and the analyses they undertake of the data collected. This analytical look on themselves is the approach I have taken in my book Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (2010). I present a side of Western anthropology that is not commonly accessed by many who read anthropological literature, even including that which is found in accounts of field experiences that culminate in reflexive ethnographies and memoirs that have now become standard contributions. My focus is anthropologists’ identities as they ‘practice’ anthropology within academic departments, professional meetings, classrooms and lecture halls, and through ethnographic writing, all of which constitute the ‘other side’ of anthropological practice that is often absent in scholarly papers, ethnographies and memoirs. To do this, I ask a number of questions, including the following:
1 How different are anthropologists’ lives at home in their own institutional and cultural contexts from their lives abroad while conducting the research that they subsequently share in their memoirs and ethnographies?
2 What part of the anthropologist’s identity revealed in ethnographies is shaped by their own culture and how can it provide a window to an understanding of the general work that anthropologists do?
3 How do students of anthropology navigate the challenges of ethnography while undergoing training in their own institutions before going ‘out’ into the ‘field’ to undertake their major ethnographic projects, and how might these projects inform each other?
4 Are mini-ethnographies, conducted at home to fulfil research methods course requirements, some kind of symbolic representation of dissertation fieldwork carried out in any field far away from the departments and institutions?
5 How do anthropologists interact at annual professional meetings and what does it say about anthropology as a discipline within the larger field of academic practice? Is the annual meeting a ritual similar to the cultural rituals analysed by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz or Victor Turner? [See Chapter 9.] And to what extent do those rituals in professional meetings represent windows into understanding American anthropological culture?
My work does not present the undiluted culture of America and of anthropologists, but rather my understanding and interpretation of the ways and thoughts of individuals with whom I have interacted and of events that I have attended. This is not unlike many similar practices engaged in by anthropologists throughout their ethnographic research. My work is an account of how Americans and anthropologists with whom I have interacted have constructed what I consider to be a relatively consistent and shared set of actions, thoughts and beliefs that constitute a cultural logic that made sense to me. But, as anthropologists, we encounter other cultures against a backdrop of our own cultures and this in itself cannot be ignored in understanding the questions we ask, the conclusions we come up with or the topics and issues we seek to pursue. That is why I conclude that my book is as much about American anthropology as it is about my own cultural background; it is a conversation between two cultures and an analysis of key elements in the composition of that conversation within an anthropological frame.
Interview with Brian Morris (2015)
DESCRIBE YOUR ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH.
I have carried out four major pieces of fieldwork. The first was for my PhD, studying the Hill Pandaram people, who are hunters and gatherers in South India. I also carried out my research in Malawi on the relationship people have with their environment. I later returned to Malawi to study people’s relationship with animals, small mammals.
HOW DID YOU GAIN ACCESS TO THE GROUP YOU STUDIED?
I never actually had a problem gaining access in Malawi, as I lived and worked there for seven years on a tea plantation before I began my fieldwork. Very few people spoke English there at that time, so I had to learn the local language, Chichewa. So, when I began my research, I already knew the context and language well.
WHAT RESEARCH METHOD(S) HAVE YOU USED IN YOUR FIELDWORK? The main research method I use is to participate and join in activities and to observe. The best way to join in is by chatting with people. If you ask me what my research method is, it is chatting! In Malawi the word they use for chatting is ‘kucheza’. It is very important in Malawi culture. To chat or discuss means to be sociable, so it is seen as important to chat to people. I would also go with local Malawi people to do what they were doing, and I constantly asked questions. When I studied mammals in Malawi I joined in rituals, which allowed me to be part of the group. I would often just listen to people’s conversations. I learnt a lot about Malawi culture this way.
WHAT
