SE300 - Ethnographic Comparison

Extracting Meanings from Ethnographic Data

The Role of Comparison

Lecture Slides Visit Hraf at http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/ehrafe/

The Ethnographic Enterprise

Ethnographic research is predicated on comparison

Long-held focus on the behaviour of social units as emergent from individual level phenomena - holism

A resistance to deterministic explanations

Reliance on tension between conformity and innovation

Why Comparison?

Ethnography is about describing cultures

To draw conclusions we must compare cultures

Comparison highlights the similarity and differences

Comparison

Comparing like to like

Standardising features

Three-way comparison

We can compare simple things - tools, clothing or activities. This gives us a basis to discuss both abstract similarities and differences

Human Relations Area Files: HRAF

To do comparison in anthropology we need a source of information

We use ethnographies

In the 1930's George Peter Murdock set out to create the first ethnographic database

These eventually became the HRAF

Over the past 20 years the HRAF as begun to go online as e-HRAF - eHRAF World Cultures - login required

Page 1 - last modified by Michael Fischer on 08/12/2009 at 09:29 SE300 - Ethnographic Comparison

Using E-Hraf

You search a large number of ethnographies in E-HRAF

Locate sections that relate to a single issue or concept

From this you build up a comparative picture of the societies relative to the issue

The Ethnographic Atlas and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

George Murdock and Douglas White produced the Standard Cross-cultural Sample based on Murdock's earlier work on the Ethnographic Atlas

The purpose was to create a sample of world cultures from which valid generalisations could be made

*We have a copy* at Kent - see Lecture Slides for more information

George P. Murdock and Douglas R. White 1969 *Standard Cross-Cultural Sample* , Ethnology, 8:4, 329-369

Page 2 - last modified by Michael Fischer on 08/12/2009 at 09:29