The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

Cultural and Archaeological ANTH 2301 The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology According to What Is Anthropology? Cultural anthropologists utilise ethnography as a technique to describe a culture or society. Information is gathered and used by ethnographers from a variety of sources, including fieldwork, government documents, museum collections, and archaeological data. During the 1800s, a type of ethnography known as "armchair anthropology" emerged, when hypotheses concerning human societies and behaviours were put up only on the basis of secondary data. One well-known practitioner of this kind of study is Lewis Henry Morgan. The majority of the information in his best-known work, League of the Ho-déno-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), came from previous publications he had studied. Throughout his career, Morgan had meetings with Native Americans; nevertheless, before to authoring League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, he had not conducted anthropological study among the Iroquois. Many anthropologists and other academics conducted studies with hundreds of American Indian tribes in the later 19th century; by that time, many of them were exclusively residing on federal reservations. Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University, a German scientist who was schooled as a physicist but rose to prominence as an anthropological, had a significant effect on many of these researchers. Boas stressed that instead of gathering data from other published sources, academics should get ethnographical material directly from the peoples they intended to write about. Boas became well-known in the anthropology community very fast, and he later accepted an associate position at the government Bureau of American Ethnology. Boas posed several important problems in his work, supported, and published in all four of the anthropological areas. Boas outlined two fundamental concerns for anthropologists in his 1907 article "Anthropology": "Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?" (1974; Boas, 1982, 269). Boas was in charge of employing academics and deploying them to gather data about different Indigenous peoples in the field. His criteria for doing fieldwork served as the cornerstone for modern anthropology. Early anthropologists were interested in the parallels and discrepancies across different Indigenous communities. This fascination in comparison gave rise to the field of ethnology, a subfield of anthropology that compares various populations across cultures. Understanding the relationships between different Indigenous communities was the primary goal of early ethnology. This covered the relationships between dialects of the language, attire, and physical characteristics, as well as the extent and direction of migration of different tribes from one place to another. The aim of the inquiries conducted by the early anthropologists was to monitor the evolution of tribal cultures. The early migration of Native Americans to the Americas was another major source of concern. The methods of ethnology have been employed by anthropologists to build connections and discover aspects of common culture that shed light on the patterns of migration of peoples from the "old" to the "new" globe. In linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology, ethnology is still widely used. Archaeological analysis and methodologies are used with ethnology in some other applications. In the field of ethnoarchaeology, archaeologists use ethnographic data about contemporary or extant human societies to make inferences about human civilizations in the archaeological past. These approaches were primarily developed by American archaeologist Lewis Binford. Binford made analogies between the evidence found in Nunamiut trash sites and the methods used by modern Indigenous peoples to dispose of animal remains in his 1978 work Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. These parallels contribute to the development of a model that sheds light on possible previous disposal practices for the remains of Indigenous peoples. Even if these models are not ideal, many Indigenous communities have managed to preserve certain elements of their traditions into the modern day.