CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY-- Deductive and Inductive Methods-- ENEMIES ALL AROUND AND TAXES

24 September 2017--

Reality as Seen in the Movies--

   Following excerpts from various sources attempt to explain the difference between the the principal scientific methods for developing theories: Deductive and Inductive--

http://www.actforlibraries.org/explaining-the-inductive-approach-cultural-anthropology/

   This question was one that Franz Boas raised in the early twentieth century, and Boas was the one who proposed the inductive approach to ethnography as one of the methods to correct the problem. Back then, ethnographic fieldwork was approached with a theory in place which the ethnographer wished to test, much the same way that scientists perform experiments to support or disprove a hypothesis.
   According to Boas, however, starting fieldwork with a hypothesis in mind (known as a deductive approach) would narrow the researcher’s focus and emphasis their own cultural biases enough that important information would be glossed over or overlooked. An inductive approach to ethnographies, however, formulates theories from the ‘bottom-up’ rather than from the ‘top-down’. This means that the researcher starts by observing the community and for repeated patterns of behaviour. If certain themes continue to crop up, the researcher can develop a tentative hypothesis that can be verified and turned into a theory once more corroborating data is gathered from other communities within the same society.

   BLOG NOTES--There are so many different aspects and approaches to the exact process of understanding where to look and what to see, either doing an archaeological dig in the dusty library files, or out on some remote island, it is just not completely possible to decide which one is not just the best, but also the truth.

   There appears to be a genuine lack of, or disregard for, the truth in all of the language, hypotheses and myriads of research files available. Who is to say what is the answer to understanding a culture. How do we know that when moving in with the natives, they are hip to the game and will tell you anything just to get something out of you?

   As in the nearly every  encounter of  Dravot and Carnehan, in the Kipling film classic "The Man Who Would be King" (1975) , they found out that everyone had enemies all around them; even though that may have been furthest from the truth if the two British adventurers hadn't travelled into the high mountains above Afghanistan.

   By the same token, in the film "Shout at the Devil" (1976), every time  Sebastian Oldsmith (Roger Moore) went into a village to collect taxes, the villagers stashed all their worldly goods and the women sat out front of the huts in ragged clothes with crying babies on their laps.

   One might, from the examples in the two films above, draw the conclusion, either by deduction or induction, that there is no genuine approach to discovering the core values of a culture, in spite of library research or fieldwork. The natives might just be putting us on, seeing enemies behind every bush and feigning poverty at the sight of the taxman.

   There is one other  variable to consider. Many of these regions under study have barely come out of the historic barbaric stage, probably near the top of that category; only to find themselves a new "nation" by global standards. Somalia is a classic example. We hurry to nationalize a region full of diverse tribes and villages, with no more real common cultural similarities than the Native Americans had when the colonists arrived in the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. We take it for granted that all of the natives are the same, treat them the same and classify them as such. So when the warlords of Mogadishu revolt and we find ourselves in a "Black Hawk Down" environment, we blame them for not wanting to be a part of the emerging global community; even though it would be better if they weren't.

   No deductive or inductive approach will satisfy this dilemma, there is no sanitized classification in anthropology that will satisfy the problem of how to accept barely civilized communities into the global arena.

   They have enemies all around them and refuse to pay taxes.

JC LANGELLE (c) 2017--Eyeless On Campus Blog--