Purposes: To delve into a culture and your own by gathering information from an informant about his or her culture or origin and his or her experience in our culture. To practice cultural relativism. To exercise some anthropological ideas. To make personal contact with someone from another culture to learn how someone from another culture looks at us, and to learn about our culture by using the comparative approach.
What you do: Find someone who immigrated to the United States from another country after the age of 15 and is willing to talk with you for at least an hour. Your informant may be a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, as long as he or she is not also being interviewed by someone else in the class. If your informant desires, may use a pseudonym (false name) for your informant, to reduce any possible embarrassment or concerns about privacy. If you have trouble finding an informant please come talk to me early in the semester.
Interview your informant for at least an hour. You may want to record the interview, so you can focus on the conversation without having to write extensive notes. If so, ask beforehand if your informant is comfortable with the recording, and comply with his or her wishes. Do not pressure anyone to be recorded. Offer to give your informant a copy of your final paper.
Write a 5-7 paged (double-spaced) paper based on the interview, covering themes indicated below.
Grading: The paper is worth 100 points towards your total course grade
Due date: May 17th
Subjects to cover in the interview: try to guide the conversation along interesting lines, without discouraging your informant from bringing up things that are important or interesting to him or her. Often the best information concerns things you would never have thought to ask. You do not need to cover all of the suggestions below; they are just ideas to get you started. Try to get enough material for your paper, but don’t force the conversation into a checklist of questions and answers. Often, asking follow-up questions like “how do you feel about that?” “ Why do you think it happened that way?” or “ would that have happened in your home country?” can bring up interesting responses.
The idea is to learn enough to briefly outline your interviewee’s story, and more importantly, his or her observations about life in the country he or she came from and here, as well as your interpretations, explanations, and reactions, using anthropological approaches you learn in this course.
First, get a little background.
Where did your informant grow up?
How old was your informant when he or she immigrated, and approximately what year was that?
Then find out a bit about your informant’s original culture. You might try very open-ended questions, like
What was your life like?
How was it different from here?
You could also try more specific questions.
What language did your informant speak?
How many people lived together in the immediate family, how were they related and how did they get along?
What did they do for a living?
How did they divide responsibilities? Who did what?
What was their home and neighborhood like- physically and socially?
What special events did they celebrate, how did they celebrate them, and why?
Did your informant experience any weddings, funerals, coming-of-age ceremonies, or other life-cycle events? If so, what were they like? How do they differ from what we do here? Any thoughts about what these differences might mean?
Were there multiple ethnic or racial groups? If so, how did they differ? How did race and or ethnicity affect life?
If she or he is willing to talk about it, what were their religious beliefs and practices?
Does he or she have any particularly good memories of home, or bad ones?
Does she or he have any interesting stories, or funny or sad ones, from home?
Next, ask your informant about immigrating to the United States
Why did he or she come to the United States? How?
What did he or she expect of the United States?
Did the United States match those expectations, or was it different? If so, how?
Finally, ask about your informant’s experiences and views of our culture as an immigrant here. For example:
How did your informant learn English (if he or she did)?
How does American culture differ from the culture that he or she came from?
Did your informant experience anything like culture shock on first arriving here? If so, what was it like?
Was there anything that seemed particularly strange, confusing, funny, or hard to get used to about Americans?
Has he or she had any particularly good, bad, or interesting experiences as an immigrant?
Is there anything that she or he particularly likes, or does not like, about Americans?
Does your informant still feel connected to his or her original culture?
If so, what does he or she do to maintain that connection or identity?
What are some things that she or he notices about American culture that Americans don’t seem to notice themselves?
How would he or she describe American people to a friend in his or her home country?
All along, try to get your informant to provide some explanations of events, behavior, etc. in his or her own home culture and in ours. Basically, ask why things happened, or why things are as they are.
There are many other subjects your could discuss, be creative, and follow up on things that the interviewee seems to find interesting and important
Subjects to cover in the paper:
Use a pseudonym rather than your informant’s real name.
Cover enough background about your informant’s personal history to orient the reader
Describe important or interesting aspects of your informant’s culture or origin
Explain why and how he or she immigrated.
Discuss some of her or his experiences here.
Describe some of your informant’s explanations of events or features of her or his home culture, or of the culture here. Which explanations are emic (in terms of your informant’s own culture), and which are etic (from and outsider’s or scientist’s point of view)?
Suggest your own etic explanations of the same and/or other subjects.
Throughout, emphasize aspects that seem interesting from an anthropological point of view.
Try to synthesize and interpret what you learn of both cultures. For example: suggest general themes or characteristics of either culture (“Filipinos tend to value such-and-such, which affects many aspects of their lives, such as…”)
Note repeating themes or parallels in different stories or aspects of the culture (“ A common thread in these stories is that…”)
Ask yourself “ Is this part of a larger pattern?” “Does this repeat some theme from another part of the interview?” “What does this imply about the culture?”
Ask yourself “Why did my informant react to X in this way?” “Why did he/she think it was interesting or informative to bring up Y subject?”
Suggest some general conclusions about both cultures (and course they will be tentative, but try!) These might be generalizations about what the culture is like, what they value, how they handle certain kinds of issues, etc. Show how you came to these interpretations and conclusions by using specific things your informant said, either as quotations (not too many) or summaries of his or her comments, and explaining how they support your conclusions.
To summarize the previous points: Do not just write a life history. Some life history is necessary background, but the focus here is on understanding a little about both cultures. So:
Try to make some generalizations about your informant’s home culture
Note recurring themes
Or ways in which different aspects of culture fit together into a coherent pattern
Try to do the same for your own US culture, in contrast to your informant’s
Consider why each culture is as it is. What function or purpose do features of each culture serve for members of that culture? What historical, or other factors help to explain the cultures? That is, offer some explanations of events and cultural traits.
Identify which of these explanations are emic, and which are etic (Note that the immigrant might give you either kind of explanation, or both, because he or she now may be able to take an outsider’s point of view or his or her original culture, and an insider’s view of her or his adopted US culture.)
It is OK not to cover everything that you discussed in the interview. It won’t fit in 7 pages. Select what seems most interesting, most telling about the cultures, and things for which you can suggest interesting interpretations or explanations.