cultural interview

cultural interview The goal of the project is for the student to experience the value and challenge of conducting ethnographic fieldwork. If you were doing your PhD in cultural anthropology I would be sending you out to interview/observe perhaps dozens of people over the course of perhaps a year or more!! We will scale this down to a project you can accomplish with a single key informant and a couple of hours of interview time. Each student will find one willing key informant. This person can be a family member, friend, casual acquaintance, or complete stranger. Just make sure that they are a willing participant, and that they can set aside at least a couple of hours to be interviewed. There are a few basic requirements that I expect each student to accomplish in the project: Construct a kinship diagram for your key informant, showing all of ego’s (your informant!) relatives. This includes relatives whose names are known and unknown. From this kinship diagram, try to draw some conclusions about the relative importance of kin ties for ego. Use the guidelines in your textbook for help in making your diagram. Note that ego may have fictional kin (people who are not “blood relatives” but are nonetheless considered kin). It is up to you and your informant to decide if peoples’ names are to be included on the chart, but at a minimum identify each person on the chart with the etic symbols as used in the text book (i.e. F, B, S, Z, FB, MB, FZD, FFB, etc.) Identify the culture, sub-cultures, ethnic groups, or other social groups to which the informant belongs. Try to evaluate how strongly your informant is connected to each group. Explicitly identify the methods that you are using in the project. This should include your goal, how you met and interviewed your informant, how you took notes or otherwise recorded information, your overall perspective (emic or etic). Note any problems or areas of improvement for future work. How might your own biases or perspectives have affected your questions and/or interpretations? Your project should be described in a 5-7 page report, typed, double-spaced (12 pt Times New Roman font), and with standard 1 inch margins. Feel free to include photos, sketches, maps, notes, or any other information with the text (these do not count towards the text requirements, of course).