MODULE 1

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Ethnography, Ethnology, and Ethnohistory
Native American Languages in the Southwest
Connections and History of the Southwest

ETHNOGRAPHY, ETHNOLOGY, AND ETHNOHISTORY

Anthropology is the study of humankind. It differs from other social sciences because anthropology examines all societies, ancient and modern, from those with relatively simple political and social systems to those with more complex systems. While other social sciences, such as sociology, tend to focus on industrial nations such as the United States or Canada, anthropology studies both industrial and less technologically developed nations as well. Anthropology also offers a unique cross-cultural perspective, constantly comparing the customs of one society against those of others.

Anthropology is holistic in studying all aspects of human experience. This holism is represented by the four fields of American anthropology. Biological or physical anthropology investigates the biological characteristics of humankind. Linguists study language, the uniquely human capacity to process information quickly and to transmit ideas, observations, questions, and commands as well as stories to others with words. Language is intimately related to the transmission of culture, which is why, as we will see, the loss of a language through extinction means that much of the culture it transmits is also lost. Archaeologists study material culture or artifacts and technology and their relation to what people think and do; it reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains.

To become a cultural anthropologist, one usually does ethnography which is the firsthand, personal study of a culture. Ethnographic fieldwork generally entails spending a year or more in another society, living with the people and learning about their customs. While culture includes the traditions and customs that are transmitted through learning, a society refers to the group of people who practice a given culture. Ethnology refers to the comparison of cultures in time and space, while an ethnography is the account of a single culture.

Ethnohistory uses documents and texts to understand past behavior and events. In the Southwest, prehistory, the traditional domain of archaeology, refers to pre-contact, or before A.D. 1540, when the Spaniards arrived in the Southwest. The prehistory of the Southwest is treated in Anthropology 205, while this course, Anthropology 206 deals with Southwestern cultures and societies after Spanish contact.

Cultural anthropologists study cultures in their entirety instead of concentrating exclusively on social systems or other isolated cultural components. They take a synergistic-the whole is greater than the sum of its parts-view of culture, so that, even when studying one component of a cultural system, anthropologists relate this part to other parts of the system. In this course, we will consider the following aspects of each group's culture: their prehistory, history, territory, linguistic affiliation, and their Creation/Emergence story. Then their subsistence pattern, which includes behaviors associated with food getting and technology such as irrigation patterns. Material culture refers to the material objects they made such as houses, clothing, pottery, and other items they made and used.

Social organization includes how they structured social relations and how they made social decisions, such as postmarital residence or where a couple lives after marriage. Kinship, whether through the male line (patrilineality), the female line (matrilineality), or through both (bilaterality) affects who inherits land and other property. Political organization includes how the society is structured-was there a strong, centralized government, dispersed authority, or flexible leadership headed by a man who had no coercive power to back up his decisions.