![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseAdding Simon Fraser University to my list of universities to be researched, purely because and article in their student newspaper turned up in my current random-obsessive research hobby. Vancouver is a good place.
On that note... For all that I love research, and adore the random avenues it leads me down, there are times when I'd give anything for just a plain old flat answer to something. This is why I like books. But anthropologists are fickle bastards, and something only holds their interest for about a ten year span, in which twenty or so books are published, followed quickly by a sucking vacuum in which, if one didn't know better, one would think the group in question fell off the face of the earth as soon as they were no longer being observed by a bunch of hippy grad students, except for some anecdotal evidence that everything the ethnologists said couldn't possibly have been accurate to begin with. Frigging hell.
Rule of ethnography: by the time the anthropologist gets their study published, the ethnography will be out of date, the people involved completely changed, and the readers totally confused about reality. Gods help the reader who picks up the book twenty years later in a desperate attempt to do some damned research.
Not like I'm bitter or anything. Not in the slightest.
Back to the Google mines.
Edit: Don't mind me - I'm just tired. The seminar went well today, but it was long and a lot of sitting in one very boring room, and a lot of brainstorming through past experiences, and other things that aren't particularly energizing. And I have a sinus thing, which is somehow making my neck hurt. Don't ask, I don't know. So... I'm kind of in a Mood at the moment, and my attempts to do a little fact-checking have so far been completely foiled by both basic library work (hence the bitching about old ethnographies) and internet work. Edit2: I swear, bitching on LJ is a magic formula for success. XD Son of Edit: I hate being compulsive about historical/sociological accuracy in my writing. Especially when the writer of the fandom I'm writing fic for has no such compulsions. It makes things so... complex.
On that note... For all that I love research, and adore the random avenues it leads me down, there are times when I'd give anything for just a plain old flat answer to something. This is why I like books. But anthropologists are fickle bastards, and something only holds their interest for about a ten year span, in which twenty or so books are published, followed quickly by a sucking vacuum in which, if one didn't know better, one would think the group in question fell off the face of the earth as soon as they were no longer being observed by a bunch of hippy grad students, except for some anecdotal evidence that everything the ethnologists said couldn't possibly have been accurate to begin with. Frigging hell.
Rule of ethnography: by the time the anthropologist gets their study published, the ethnography will be out of date, the people involved completely changed, and the readers totally confused about reality. Gods help the reader who picks up the book twenty years later in a desperate attempt to do some damned research.
Not like I'm bitter or anything. Not in the slightest.
Back to the Google mines.
Edit: Don't mind me - I'm just tired. The seminar went well today, but it was long and a lot of sitting in one very boring room, and a lot of brainstorming through past experiences, and other things that aren't particularly energizing. And I have a sinus thing, which is somehow making my neck hurt. Don't ask, I don't know. So... I'm kind of in a Mood at the moment, and my attempts to do a little fact-checking have so far been completely foiled by both basic library work (hence the bitching about old ethnographies) and internet work. Edit2: I swear, bitching on LJ is a magic formula for success. XD Son of Edit: I hate being compulsive about historical/sociological accuracy in my writing. Especially when the writer of the fandom I'm writing fic for has no such compulsions. It makes things so... complex.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 05:01 am (UTC)Anyway. She was telling us about the culture in Japan, listing well-known sayings, that kind of thing. We also had a student in our class who was from Japan. I'm not sure how long he'd been here, but not long.
He had no idea what she was talking about. Her culture and his culture were completely different, though they were from the same tiny island.
So, really, there's no good way to study such things. You can get snapshots, but that's about it.
http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html
Have you read that? I love it. My high school teacher showed it to us and I believe I was the only one who actually figured it out. Everyone else was talking about how they wouldn't want to live there. I was appalled.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 05:20 am (UTC)And on the language thing... yeah, that's even worse than anthro. At least culture is reasonably slow to change, when compared with slang, which changes about every five minutes in the youth segment of any given culture.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-01 04:08 pm (UTC)She was talking culture, not linguistics, when they had their funny conversation in front of us about him not knowing. Japanese culture is funny because it still has very ancient traditions combining with very new ones. It's fun to see who knows which.