ABSTRACT
This paper is a survey and explication of a new approach in ethnography—of what one might well call “the New Ethnography” were it not for that label’s pejorative implications for practitioners of other kinds of ethnography. The method has no generally accepted name, although one is clearly required. “Ethnoscience” perhaps has the widest acceptance, in conversation if not in print, and has the advantage of freshness. However, some of this word’s undesirable implications should be disavowed: “The term ‘ethnoscience’ is unfortunate for two reasons—first, because it suggests that other kinds of ethnography are not science, and second because it suggests that folk classifications and folk taxonomies are science” (Spaulding 1963). Although the name may have been chosen partly because of the first of these implications, it would be impolitic if not impolite to insist on it; in any case, the method should stand or fall on its own merits. To dispose adequately of the second implication would require a discourse on the definition and philosophy of science. It is perhaps sufficient to remark that the most appropriate meaning to assign to the element “science” here (but not necessarily elsewhere) is, essentially, “classification.” This restricted implication has been well expressed by G. G. Simpson in a somewhat similar context:
The necessity for aggregating things (or what is operationally equivalent, the sensations received from them) into classes is a completely general characteristic of living things…. Such generalization, such classification in that sense, is an absolute, minimal requirement of adaptation, which in turn is an absolute and minimal requirement of being or staying alive…. We certainly order our perceptions of the external world more fully, more constantly, and more consciously than do any other organisms…. Such ordering is most conspicuous
From American Anthropologist, 66(2): 99-131, special issue on “Transcultural Studies in Cognition,” June, 1964. Copyright © 1964 by the American Anthropological Association. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. William C. Sturtevant is Curator of Ethnology, Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. in the two most exclusively human and in some sense highest of all our activities: the arts and sciences…. The whole aim of theoretical science is to carry to the highest possible and conscious degree the perceptual reduction of chaos…. the most basic postulate of science is that nature itself is orderly…. All theoretical science is ordering (Simpson 1961: 3-5).
