Engaging with ethnography: areas of inquiry and real-world issues practice questions.

Evans-Pritchard reported that his Nuer hosts in the southern Sudan in the 1930s placed past events by reference to the movement of herds between camps and to the succession of age-sets, rather than by counting years from a fixed point. He took this to show that

• the people he worked with had no way of measuring an interval longer than a single season
• time was reckoned through social and ecological relations rather than on an abstract scale
• recollection of the past was unreliable, since no written record of events was kept
• seasonal movement had made a shared calendar unnecessary for settling debts

Answer: time was reckoned through social and ecological relations rather than on an abstract scale

He distinguished ecological time, marked by the seasons and the herds, from structural time, marked by distance between groups in the lineage system; both are ways of classifying duration and neither is a defective calendar.

Conklin reported in 1955 that the colour vocabulary he recorded on Mindoro in the Philippines sorted the visible world with four terms, and that the contrasts they marked included wet against dry and fresh against withered as well as light against dark. The anthropological point of the case is that

• colour categories divide a single continuum by criteria that differ from one language to the next
• the speakers he worked with were able to see fewer distinctions of hue than a European observer could see
• colour terms answer to nothing outside language and for that reason cannot be compared across societies at all
• the classification of the natural world is everywhere organised by the same underlying set of oppositions

Answer: colour categories divide a single continuum by criteria that differ from one language to the next

The lesson concerns where the cuts fall, not what the eye can see: the same continuum can be divided by moisture and freshness as readily as by hue. Treating another scheme as a shortage of terms mistakes a different classification for a defective one.

A national census asks every household to place itself in one of five official categories. Across three censuses the list is revised, and households that were counted in one category are counted in another, although nothing about the households has changed. Anthropologists studying such systems argue that

• the categories are simply inaccurate and should be replaced by measures taken from the biological sciences
• classification of this kind records divisions that exist prior to it and independently of the counting
• the households concerned do not know which of the five categories they belong to in reality
• administrative categories help to produce the very groups that they claim merely to be counting

Answer: administrative categories help to produce the very groups that they claim merely to be counting

Official categories allocate rights, resources and suspicion, and people learn to present themselves in the terms the form offers, so the classification feeds back into what it counts. This is why race is analysed as a social classification with real effects rather than as a natural division of humanity.

In a fishing settlement an ethnographer finds that the catch is sorted into named groups by where the fish were taken, how they behave in the net and how they are cooked, and that two fish a biologist would assign to one species fall into different groups. The most defensible conclusion is that

• the fishers have not yet arrived at any classification of the fish they handle every day of the working year
• the biologist's species are an emic category, while the groups the fishers use are the etic one imposed from outside the settlement
• the two schemes sort the same animals by different criteria, and each of them is usable for the purposes of the people who apply it
• the groups the fishers use are a rough approximation to the scheme that the biologist has been trained to apply

Answer: the two schemes sort the same animals by different criteria, and each of them is usable for the purposes of the people who apply it

Folk taxonomies are systematic schemes built on criteria that matter to their users - habitat, behaviour, use - rather than failed attempts at Linnaean classification. Note also which way round the pair runs: emic categories are the participants', etic categories the analyst's.

Evans-Pritchard recorded among the Azande of the southern Sudan in the late 1920s that when a granary collapsed on people resting in its shade, everyone agreed that termites had eaten through the supports. People nevertheless asked why it had fallen at the moment those particular people were sitting under it, just as they asked why sickness struck one household and not the one beside it. Witchcraft, in his account, answered

• the technical question of what had weakened the timbers holding up the granary floor
• the question of which oracle ought to have been consulted before the granary was built
• the practical question of how such collapses might be prevented in future seasons
• the question of why this misfortune fell on these people at this moment

Answer: the question of why this misfortune fell on these people at this moment

Azande explanation of misfortune ran alongside physical causation rather than replacing it: termites explained how the granary fell, witchcraft explained the coincidence of persons and moment, and the same reasoning was applied to who fell ill. Treating witchcraft as a substitute for causal reasoning is the standard misreading of his 1937 account.

Farmer reported from Haiti's Central Plateau, in work published in the early 1990s and drawn from fieldwork begun in the 1980s, that patients recorded as 'noncompliant' with tuberculosis treatment completed their course once the programme added food supplements, travel money and visits from community health workers. He drew the conclusion that

• the patients' beliefs about the causes of tuberculosis had been corrected by additional health education
• adherence cannot be assessed in settings that keep no continuous hospital records of their patients
• the obstacle lay in the distribution of poverty, not in what patients believed
• local beliefs about sorcery are the principal barrier to treatment in rural Haiti

Answer: the obstacle lay in the distribution of poverty, not in what patients believed

Farmer uses such results to argue that what is reported as a cultural barrier is frequently poverty misdescribed, and that who falls ill and who recovers follows the lines of structural violence. He does not deny that Haitians hold explanations of illness; he denies that those explanations account for the failure to complete treatment.