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--- 1001:2021:12 [2021/05/15 20:58] – Ryan Schram (admin)
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 Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2021/12
+===== Family trees =====
+What is a //susu//? It has something to do with the groups of relatives that people live with, so I thought I would ask people who they were related to and how.
+When I asked for people’s genealogical relatives, they say they “did not want to trick me.”
+To learn about someone’s susu, you have to ask for their tetela.
+  * A **tetela** is the oral history of a susu from the first woman. It describes her children, and her descendants through women, and their migrations from an origin to other places.
+  * A **susu** is a group of people who are all related to each other through common descent through women, or a matrilineage.
+    * Auhelawa susu are, moreover, links a chain of places connected through ancestral migrations.
 ===== Learning how to ask =====
-Ethnographic fieldworkers need to “learn how to ask,” that is, learn the genres of interaction that are appropriate to the topics they want to learn about.
+  * A culture shapes how people use language to communicate
+    * Cultures impose symbolic categories ([[:emic and etic|emic categories]]) on different ways of speaking: some words are obscene, some topics are impolite to discuss with strangers.
+    * Cultures also identify forms of conversation, and these forms imply roles and relationships for the participants.
+      * interrogation
+      * job interview
+      * coffee
+      * //[[:tetela|tetela]]//
+  * Fieldworkers want to do interviews, but may not get the kinds of information they want if they don’t know people’s cultural norms for communication.
+    * If an interview reminds people of an interrogation, then the interviewees will treat the interviewer like a cop.
+    * If people’s experiences with interviews comes through their culture’s emic category of //job interview//, then they will relate to the fieldworker like an employer.
+      * Fieldworkers first need to be socialized to converse in the same way that people of the community also “learn how to ask” questions and participate in different kinds of conversation (Briggs 1984).
-Language is a part of a culture as a system, and cultural values determine the ways people learn to use language in social interaction.
+===== How to ask in Auhelawa =====
 People of Auhelawa have specific kinds of talk with specific roles associated with them:
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 The Malinowskian model of fieldwork makes the ethnographic fieldworker sound like an explorer who leaves home and crosses the threshold between one cultural world and another.
-But all fieldworkers rely on partners who facilitate their work. It is common for fieldworkers and other people with the same experience of culture shock to find each other, because they both have learned to see their own societies in relative terms.
+But all fieldworkers rely on [[:key informants|partners]] who facilitate their work. It is common for fieldworkers and other people with the same experience of culture shock to find each other, because they both have learned to see their own societies in relative terms.
   * Example: Mari, a friend of John Layard, who had recently returned from plantation work.
+===== The fieldworker is a double being =====
+Lots of people collect qualitative observations and use interviews as methods, but anthropologists are different because their position is always dual.
+* An ethnographic researcher is a fieldworker who observes and an "adopted" member of a community.
+* Ethnographic fieldworkers have a research question they seek to answer, but they also give up a certain degree of control over what they do and how they do it when they immerse themselves in a community as a field.
+* Ethnographic fieldworkers are observers of people but they are also students, and social and intellectual inferiors, of those same people they observe.
 ===== The ethics of research on human subjects =====
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 ===== The ethics of anthropology is always in conflict with the ethics of bureacratic organizations =====
-  * Anthropology’s job is, as Ruth Benedict says, “to make the world safe for human difference.” We cannot recognize each person’s full humanity if we do not also recognize the diversity of humanity.
+  * Anthropology’s job is, as Ruth Benedict says, “to make the world safe for human difference” (Wheeler 2017). We cannot recognize each person’s full humanity if we do not also recognize the diversity of humanity.
-  * Bureacratic organizations says that we must treat everyone as the same.
+  * Bureaucratic organizations say that we must treat everyone the same.
 ===== Auhelawa ethics and anthropological ethics =====
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   * I should live with a family, and act like a member of the family. I was not allowed to live alone, or to detach myself from relationships with people in the community.
-  * When I wrote about people in Auhelawa, I should make clear that Auhelawa people are Christians, and that my audience’s stereotypes about people in PNG were wrong.
+  * When I write about people in Auhelawa, I should make clear that Auhelawa people are Christians, and that my audience’s stereotypes about people in PNG were wrong.
 From my institution’s point of view, I was giving up my independence.
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 This is the limit of a code of ethics, according to Bell (2014). Applying a single code of conduct grants authority to the researcher to dictate terms to the subject. Ethnographic research is based on giving up one’s authority and control, and granting authority and control to the people whom one studies.
-===== The injustices that research ethics cannot solve =====
+===== The injustices that research ethics cannot fix =====
   * No society exists in isolation.
     * Auhelawa people live //on// an island, but they are connected to everyone else in the world, although on unequal terms.
     * Someone can hold themselves to the highest possible standard of ethical behavior toward research subjects, but none of their conduct would do anything to remedy or ameliorate their unequal position with respect to the people they study.
-  * According to Pels (1999), when we talk about the fieldwork situation in terms of ethical obligations is to erase the deeper asymmetries and inequalities in the situation which can only be addressed through politics. Ethical codes make the researcher into a saint and savior.
+  * According to Pels (1999), when we talk about the fieldwork situation in terms of ethical obligations we erase the deeper asymmetries and inequalities in the situation. These can only be addressed through politics. Ethical codes make the researcher into a saint and savior.
   * Rather than talk about what we shouldn’t do in research, let’s talk about ethical value of learning about each other’s differences.
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 Bell, Kirsten. 2014. “Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12122.
+Briggs, Charles L. 1984. “Learning How to Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers.” Language in Society 13 (1): 1–28.
 Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932 (1922). Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. http://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp.