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Method In Cultural Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

John Hast Weakland
John Hast Weakland*
Affiliation:
46 West 88th Street New York 24, N. Y.
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Extract

Those—other social scientists as well as laymen—who have read recent studies of national character and culture by anthropologists, while not having had experience in this field themselves, often seem to believe that the results which such anthropological investigators obtain are interesting, but that the methods used were intuitional, magical, or just invisible. The status of the work is cast in doubt, as falling short of an ideal that scientific description and analysis must be reproducible by any observer to whom a set of techniques of the discipline has been communicated. This paper attempts to show why and how such a belief is erroneous, and then to describe some of the fundamentals of method in current cultural anthropology as used in research and as related to the general structure of scientific method today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 1951 , pp. 55 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1951

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Footnotes

∗

In this paper, for reasonable convenience the simple terms “anthropology” and “anthropologist” are often used. Strictly speaking, reference is not to anthropologists in general, but only to those whose specialty is the field usually called “culture and personality” studies. There is yet no really convenient and accurate term for either this field or the workers in it, as distinct from the quite different other fields of anthropology, and to which this paper definitely does not refer.

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