
Boas quickly established himself as a leader in the field of anthropology and eventually took an associate role at the federal Bureau of American Ethnology.įigure 2.9 Franz Boas is credited with establishing the standards of field research that became the foundation of contemporary anthropological practices. Boas insisted that scholars obtain ethnographical information directly from the peoples they aimed to write about, rather than collecting information from other published sources. Many of these researchers were influenced by Columbia University professor Franz Boas, a German scientist who was originally trained as a physicist but became most famous as an anthropologist. In the later 19th century, numerous anthropologists and other scholars undertook research projects with hundreds of tribes throughout the Americas, many of them by then living solely on federal reservations. Morgan did meet with Native peoples at various times in his career, but he did not conduct ethnographic research among the Iroquois before writing League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois.

The content of his most famous publication, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), was gathered primarily from other books he read. Lewis Henry Morgan is a well-known practitioner of this type of research. In the 19th century, a form of ethnography developed that was called armchair anthropology, in which theories about human societies and human behaviors were proposed solely based on secondhand information. Ethnographers gather and utilize information from many sources, such as fieldwork, museum collections, government records, and archaeological data. The Development of Ethnography and EthnologyĪs discussed in What is Anthropology? ethnography is a method used by cultural anthropologists to create a description of a culture or society. Define feminist anthropology and describe its aims.Describe efforts to achieve multiple perspectives in anthropological research.

Define ethnology and provide examples of how it is used in anthropology.Identify early anthropological practices pertaining to ethnography.By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
