人类学家实际在都在做什么?(2)

在每一个例子中，我都是别人生活方式的学习者。

我现在能够理解并解释为什么斗牛迷们不认为斗牛表演是残酷的事情，以及为什么在斗牛场杀死公牛是一种爱的表现。

我可以解释为什么一些球迷会饮酒过量，为什么大都市的火车司机不愿意报告他们工作的疲劳程度，以及为什么一些宠物主人会冲进火灾现场救他们的猫，而此时却让孩子独立留在车里。

我也许会赞同或反对这些行为和信仰，但是我能够解释文化的内在逻辑，这些逻辑能够让文化信仰和行为变得更加重要、有意义，更自然也更持久。

如果你只是倾听而不批判，那么你可以用其他方式去看世界。如果你这样看待世界，即你的观点可能并不唯一，甚至你的观点可能并不正确，那么你可能比以往任何时候都要更批判性的看待自己的文化信仰和行为。

如果你能使用这种见解向其他人解释文化差异(以他们能够理解方式，但他们不见得赞同这种文化)，那么你就已经开始用人类学家的方式在思考问题了。

英文原文:

What does an anthropologist actually do?

Ask any anthropologist what they do and they will find it hard to give you a direct answer.

If you've seen the television series Bones, you probably think an anthropologist is someone who studies the remains of dead people to help solve crimes. Well, technically that's a biological or forensic anthropologist.

Ask me what we do and I say anthropologists study living people. But don't all social sciences study people? The answer is yes, but anthropologists do it via culture.

The other social sciences, such as psychology, engineering and ergonomics, specialise in singular aspects of people's lives, making culture a kind of variable on the side.

This kind of reduction is academic and problematic. It is far removed from the everyday experience of being a human who creates, and is created by, a complex sociocultural, political and historical world. And that's why we need anthropologists.

Colonial past

In its colonial heyday, the main aim of anthropology was to map a trajectory of man in which white, civilised peoples were considered the most recent advancement on an evolutionary scale. Their historical past was considered visible in the veritable living museum of coloured, primitive, natives.

That was an awkward moment in anthropology's history, but one that was symptomatic of the world at that time. The anthropologist would don his pith helmet and safari suit in search of an exotic location to study. as a complete outsider (possibly an uninvited guest), \"natives\", to map the noble history of man.

They would feel the same culture shock that you might feel when you travel to another country. But their aim was to triumph over it by learning firsthand what it is like to be a native; to walk a mile in their shoes, as the saying goes.

The methodological approaches developed to suit those ends are largely the ones that still distinguish anthropology: namely, ethnography.

On the 'inside'

Anthropologists use ethnographic methods designed to facilitate their competency in another culture to understand what people do, think, feel and say that might seem strange to an outsider but are completely familiar to an insider.

The golden standard of ethnographic research is participant-observation, where an anthropologist lives within a culture, as one of the natives, until they are competent or proficient in being one of them.

Aminimum of one year is seen as necessary to understand annual ebbs and flows of seasonal variation and annual rituals.

This is exactly what happened to Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who, in the early 20th century, travelled from London to Papua New Guinea to study native patterns of exchange.

When the First World War broke out, he was unable to return to England but the Australian government gave him permission to study in the Trobriand Islanders, off the east coast of New Guinea.

For many, Malinowski is the grandaddy of modern anthropology. He removed the white lab coat of experimental science by clearly acknowledging his role in the production of scientific knowledge. He was there, he gathered and interpreted the data and so he included his voice in his ethnographic writing.

Malinowski's personal diaries (which were never intended for publication), show a man struggling between \"us and them\", between the old regime of a racism legitimating colonialism and asserting difference, and a new regime emphasising sameness and questioning the superiority that any one culture has over another.

But Malinowski paved the way for future anthropologists to look at cultural difference for difference's sake, without making arrogant, ethnocentric judgements.

However much an anthropologist seeks an insider perspective, they are required to maintain an objective, scientific view of what is happening around them, lest they go \"native\" as depicted in the 1999 movie In a Savage Land, set in Papua New Guinea.

文章来源：《人类学学报》 网址: http://www.rlxxb.cn/zonghexinwen/2020/1111/421.html