Week 3 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 3 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 96–109 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (18–21 min total)

• Anthropology in practice — Discover Anthropology
• Understanding Emic and Etic Perspectives: Outlander Ethnography 2 — Armchair Academics

① Joining in, and staying long enough to learn

Chapter 3, Section “Join in and record: participant observation” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Participant observation” · Remember: participant observation means taking part in daily life over a long stay while you record what you see.

• Anthropology in practice — Discover Anthropology — an outreach page from a professional body for anthropologists that explains ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews in plain terms; read the sections on participant observation and on interviews, and compare its word for close community teachers with the chapter's term, key consultants. (reading, 6–9 min)
• Strangers Abroad 4: Bronislaw Malinowski Preview — Royal Anthropological Institute — a short preview of a documentary from the 1980s about the early fieldworkers who stopped studying other people from an armchair, so expect some older wording. This builds on Week 1's work with the anthropological perspective: notice what the preview says changed when researchers went to live among the people they studied. (video, 3 min) (captions: automatic)
• How do you build rapport with your participants in ethnographic research? — AnthroDorphins — working anthropologists talk about entering a community, building trust, culture shock, and long relationships in the field; as you watch, ask what a long stay makes possible that a single visit cannot. Use it while working through the Week-3 module overview. (video, 15 min) (captions: creator)

② Insider words, outsider words, and the observer's own position

Chapter 3, Section “Read two points of view: emic, etic, thick description, and reflexivity” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Emic and etic, thick description, and reflexivity” · Remember: emic is the insiders' view, etic is the analyst's view, and neither one is wrong.

• Understanding Emic and Etic Perspectives: Outlander Ethnography 2 — Armchair Academics — a video essay that uses scenes from a historical television drama to show how a fieldworker moves between insiders' categories and an outside analyst's categories; it is a drama, so treat its scenes as teaching examples, not as an account of a real people. (video, 12 min) (captions: automatic)
• Fieldnotes from the Kitchen Counter — Anthropology News — a short, playful piece written as the field notes of a smart speaker living with a family; read it for the passage where the narrator asks whether it notices things because they matter or because of its own background, which is reflexivity at work. (reading, 4–6 min)

③ Asking first: interviews, consent, and doing no harm

Chapter 3, Section “Do no harm: fieldwork ethics and consent” · Session 2, Segment 5, “Fieldwork ethics” · Remember: ask before you interview, record roles instead of names, and treat consent as an ongoing agreement.

• Data, Interviews, and Notes in Anthropological Fieldwork — Anthropology Matters — a short talk on the range of interviews, from highly structured to informal, and on how note-taking changes with each; match its range to the chapter's open-ended and structured interviews. (video, 10 min) (captions: automatic)
• For Participants in Oral History Interviews — Oral History Association — a professional association's guide written for the person being interviewed; read the parts on deciding to take part and on the interview itself, and notice every point where the person may decline, pause, or withdraw. This course is stricter than the guide: you make no recordings at all. (reading, 8–12 min)
• Informed Consent for Research: What to Expect — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — a government explainer, made for people thinking about joining a research study, on what informed consent should tell them; as you watch, check whether it treats consent as a one-time signature or an ongoing agreement. (video, 8 min) (captions: creator)
• Ethics in Social Science Research: Three Case Studies, Outlander Ethnography 3 — Armchair Academics — a video essay that treats a fictional character in a television drama as if she were a field researcher and weighs her choices one case at a time; compare each choice with the first principle the chapter names, do no harm. (video, 22 min) (captions: automatic)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• Emic and etic — Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology — an encyclopedia entry on where the two terms came from and how anthropologists have argued about them; read the Abstract and the Introduction. Stop here before the section on the terms' roots in the study of speech sounds; next week takes up language. (reading, 8–12 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

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