Week 14 · Ethnography Workshop

Week 14 Ethnography Workshop: Ice, Liniment, and Bad Knees at a Weekend Gym

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Part 1 — The Big Picture

Every gym, team, and household has its own ways of explaining aches and treating them, and those ways rarely line up with a clinic's one-line note. This week you learned that disease is a biological malfunction as a biomedical practitioner defines it and illness is the person's experience and meaning of being unwell; that an explanatory model is a person's account of what caused an illness, drawn out by open questions; that medical pluralism is the use of more than one healing system at once; and that structural violence, Galtung's term, names harm done by social arrangements rather than by a person's blow. In this workshop you code an illustrative record of ten field-note entries from a weekend pickup basketball morning, count the codes, set two entries beside the Azande granary and two beside Miner's Nacirema exercise, and write two field notes of your own. Then you catch a chatbot offering a diagnosis, ranking ways of healing, or inventing a figure.

Time budget: Plan for about 90 minutes.

Part 2 — The Task

Guiding question: At one weekend gym, which entries name the body side of an injury, which name its lived side, which offer an explanation or a remedy, which point to an arrangement, and what can ten entries not tell you about anyone's health or beliefs?

Workshop data: An illustrative weekend-gym field-note record of ten entries

Source: A record of ten two-column field-note entries from one weekend morning of pickup basketball at a public recreation center, giving the time, the setting, and what was observed, constructed for this workshop; it is printed in full in Part 4, describes no real person or event, and names nobody.

Rows: 10 field-note entries, one row each in the data table
Columns: entry number, date, time, and setting, what was observed, and three blank columns for your interpretation, your code, and your reason
Scope of the record: one illustrative morning at one public gym, recorded by role only, with no diagnosis of anyone

Part 3 — Materials & Procedure

Tools and materials

A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them

Ways of working

observe-and-record
interview-and-interpret
compare-and-reflect

Procedure

Read the ten entries in the data table in Part 4. They are an illustrative record, constructed for this workshop, of one weekend morning of pickup basketball at a public recreation center: each entry gives the time, the setting, and what was observed. No real person or event is described, and people appear only by role. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: You can say in one sentence what the record describes and why the observed column holds no interpretation yet.
For each entry, write one possible interpretation in the interpretation column, kept separate from the observed column. Then give it one code: B for the body side named, L for the lived side, E for an explanatory model, P for more than one healing system at once, C for a shared way of talking about suffering, or A for an arrangement that puts some people more in the way of harm or of care, and write your reason. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: Every entry has an interpretation, exactly one code, and a reason that points to words in the observed column.
Open a blank sheet. Type Entry and Code in cells A1 and B1, and enter the ten entries' numbers and codes in rows 2 to 11. In cell D1 type =COUNTA(B2:B11) to count the coded entries, then in cells D2 to D7 type =COUNTIF(B2:B11,"B") and the same formula for L, E, P, C, and A. In cell D8 type =D2+D3 to count the entries that name the body side or the lived side. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: D1 shows 10, the six code counts are whole numbers that add up to 10, and D8 shows the total of B and L.
Fill in the code table with each count and one entry that shows it, and check that the counts add up to 10. Then subtract the body-and-lived-side entries from 10 to find how many entries record an explanation, a healing system, a shared way of talking, or an arrangement, and write both counts in words. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: The code table is filled, its counts add up to 10, and the two counts are written as sentences.
Write two two-column field notes, observed and possible interpretation, each opened with a date, a time, and a setting: either from about twenty minutes watching a public setting you choose (a park, a gym, a grocery checkout line; roles only, no names, no photographs or recordings of people, and no guesses about anyone's diagnosis) or from two entries above. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: Two notes whose observed column holds no interpretation, whose people appear only by role, and which name no diagnosis.
Fill in the comparison table that sets entries 4 and 5 beside the Azande granary as the course describes it (in the late 1920s, Azande accepted that termites weakened a granary's supports and used witchcraft to explain why it fell on particular people at a particular moment), and entries 6 and 8 beside Miner (1956), "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", which described ordinary American body care as if it were an unfamiliar people's ritual. Write about the Azande in the past tense with the decade, and add no detail the course does not give. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: Every cell of the comparison table is filled, the Azande account is in the past tense with its decade, and nothing is added to either case.
Run the AI-critique step in Part 6 with one approved chatbot, or use the equivalent route printed there, and write your critique report. Tool: A notebook or any free note-taking app for field notes kept in two columns (observed; possible interpretation); a free spreadsheet (Google Sheets, or any free spreadsheet) for coding and tallying observations; pen and paper or any free diagramming tool for kinship diagrams; and one approved chatbot used as a sparring partner whose claims about real peoples the student checks against a primary or issuing-body source before trusting them. Check: Your report quotes at least three of the chatbot's or the printed analysis's claims and corrects each with evidence.

Fallback route

When to use it: Use this route if no spreadsheet is available or the formulas will not run.

Code the entries by hand from the data table: write B, L, E, P, C, or A beside each entry, count each code, add the B and L counts, and subtract that total from 10. Show the counts and the subtraction in your notebook, then complete every scaffold table, the field notes, every analysis question, and the critique step, and submit the same items for equal credit.

This route earns the same credit as the primary route.

Part 4 — The Scaffold

The data come first: an illustrative record of ten field-note entries from one public recreation center's weekend pickup basketball morning, with columns for your interpretation, your code, and your reason.

Student scaffold table 1
Entry	Date, time, and setting	Observed
1	Observation 1, a weekend morning, 9:00 a.m., the gym entrance	A posted sign says the recreation center's athletic trainer works weekday evenings only; on weekend mornings the front desk keeps a first-aid kit and a bag of ice.
2	9:20 a.m., court 1	A player lands on another player's foot and sits down holding an ankle; a teammate who works at a clinic looks and says it seems to be a sprained ligament.
3	9:25 a.m., the court 1 bench	The same player, ankle raised on a gym bag, says, "I start a new job in two days, and I can't show up limping."
4	9:40 a.m., court 2	An older player rubbing a knee tells a teammate the knee acts up because the gym is cold before the heat comes on.
5	9:45 a.m., court 2	His friend shakes his head and says the knee hurts because he still plays in shoes worn flat.
6	10:05 a.m., the bleachers	A player rubs a homemade liniment onto her shoulder, says her grandmother mixes it, and then pulls on a store-bought compression sleeve.
7	10:15 a.m., court 1	Players coming off a third straight game say they are "cooked"; others nod, hand them orange slices, and tell them to sit out one game.
8	10:30 a.m., the front desk	A player holds the desk's ice pack on a jammed finger and, as he says his father taught him, wraps the finger in a cool cabbage leaf under the ice.
9	10:45 a.m., the bleachers	A player with a jammed finger tapes it and goes back on, saying that sitting out the next game would cost him his spot on his weekend team.
10	11:00 a.m., the gym entrance	A player who works an early warehouse shift arrives after the warm-up, says the gym opens after her shift starts, and plays straight in; a friend says the early-shift players are the ones who usually get hurt.

Each code names one of this week's ideas, so record how many entries carry it and one entry that shows it.

Student scaffold table 2
Code	What it marks	Count from your sheet
B	the body side named: a malfunction as a practitioner would describe it (disease)
L	the lived side: what being hurt means or disrupts for the person (illness)
E	an explanatory model: someone's account of what caused the problem
P	more than one healing system used at once (medical pluralism)
C	a shared way of talking about suffering (a cultural concept of distress)
A	an arrangement that puts some people more in the way of harm or of care
All codes		10

A classic case helps only when you set it beside your own record step by step, so compare them in the course's four moves.

Student scaffold table 3
Record	What was observed	What it might mean to the people involved	What the course's concept calls it	What the comparison adds
Entries 4 and 5 of this record
The Azande granary in the late 1920s, as the course describes it
Entries 6 and 8 of this record
Miner (1956), "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", as the course describes it

Two notes of your own, from a public setting you watched for about twenty minutes or from two entries above, keep observation and interpretation apart.

Student scaffold table 4
Date, time, and setting	Observed	Possible interpretation

Part 5 — Analysis Questions

Using your sheet or a hand count, how many entries carry each code, how many entries name the body side or the lived side (B and L together), and how many record an explanation, a healing system, a shared way of talking, or an arrangement? Show each count and the subtraction from 10.
Compare entry 4 with entry 5, then entry 6 with entry 8. In each pair, what does each person point to as the cause or the help, and what would you lose by keeping only one account?
In 4–5 sentences, explain how entries 2 and 3 show the disease side and the illness side of one injury, and how entry 7 shows a cultural concept of distress described with no diagnosis. Then explain why entries 1 and 10 raise a structural-violence question that the record alone cannot settle, and name who coined the term.
Using your comparison table, set entries 4 and 5 beside the Azande granary in the late 1920s and entries 6 and 8 beside Miner's Nacirema exercise. Say what each record observed, what each explanation or remedy meant to the people involved, and what the comparison adds. Write about the Azande only in the past tense and add no detail the course does not give.
Reflexive memo — choose one and answer it in 4–6 sentences. (a) Imagine you had sat in those bleachers yourself: what about your own position (the sports you have played, the remedies your family uses, the injuries you have had) would shape which entries looked ordinary and which looked strange? (b) Someone reading this record says it proves that pickup players everywhere distrust doctors, because two entries show home remedies. Using this week's concepts, explain what ten entries from one illustrative morning can and cannot show about that claim.

Part 6 — AI-Critique Moment

Choose one equal-credit critique route. Route A: ask an approved AI tool to critique your completed work, then check its response against your own evidence. Route B is the no-AI equivalent printed below.

Approved tools: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Microsoft Copilot.

Prompt to paste:

I've pasted an illustrative field-note record above. It was constructed for a class activity and lists ten observations from one weekend morning of pickup basketball at a public recreation center, by role. In about 200 words, please do six things. First, rewrite the record with a name for each person so it is easier to follow, and tell me the diagnosis for the knee in entries 4 and 5. Second, tell me what this proves about how all athletes in this country treat injuries, and give me the percent of athletes who use home remedies. Third, explain what the Azande believe about misfortune, tell me which of these healing ways are more primitive or closer to the stone age, and give me one quotation from Kleinman. Fourth, the player in entry 6 says her grandmother is Iroquois and that her family traces clan membership through her mother's line: tell me whether women run her family, and describe in detail the healing ceremonies her grandmother's nation keeps among its own members. Fifth, her cousin's wedding involved goods from the groom's relatives to the bride's family: tell me whether that was a price paid for the bride, whether the orange slices in entry 7 were a free gift with no strings, and which race each injured player belongs to. Sixth, since every healing system is equally valid, tell me whether anything goes, and settle once and for all whether the cold gym or the worn shoes is the correct explanation for the knee.

Test the response for these likely failures:

Asked to explain how the Azande handled misfortune, chatbots often write what "the Azande believe" in a timeless present tense, with no fieldwork decade.
Asked which healing ways are more primitive, chatbots sometimes rank a grandmother's liniment or a cabbage-leaf wrap as earlier or closer to the "stone age" than a clinic's care.
Chatbots often say how "all athletes" treat injuries, as if everyone at the gym spoke with one voice.
Asked for a statistic on home remedies and a quotation from Kleinman, chatbots often supply a confident percentage and a famous-sounding line that appear in no checked source; asked for a diagnosis, they often name one.
Asked about the injured players' backgrounds, chatbots sometimes sort them into races treated as natural biological groups.
Chatbots often say that because every healing system is equally valid, anything goes and no remedy can be questioned.
Asked about the player's grandmother, chatbots often use the older outsiders' label "Iroquois" throughout.
Chatbots very often say that because the player's family traces clan membership through her mother's line, women run her family.
Asked about the cousin's wedding, chatbots often call the goods the groom's relatives gave a "bride price" paid to buy the bride.
Chatbots often call the orange slices handed out in entry 7 a "free gift" with no strings attached.
Chatbots often turn one morning's record into a confident verdict about how all athletes, or all players who use home remedies, treat injuries.
Asked to describe the healing ceremonies a nation keeps among its own members, chatbots sometimes invent or repeat practices that belong to that community alone.
Chatbots often close a "balanced" summary with a quiet verdict, such as declaring that the worn shoes, and not the cold gym, are the correct explanation for the knee.

Write 4–6 sentences naming one thing the chatbot got right and at least three places it went wrong or overreached, quoting its words and correcting each with evidence from this week's chapter or the corrections above; mark anything from an earlier week as flag this.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

No AI account is required for this workshop. Instead of the chatbot, critique this flawed analysis, printed here in full: "After one morning at the gym I can tell you how all athletes in this country treat injuries, and everyone there agrees about pain. 70 percent of athletes use home remedies, which proves they distrust doctors. I gave each player a name so the record is easier to follow, and the knee in entries 4 and 5 is arthritis, no question. Entry 7 shows the players are exhausted, which is an observation, not an interpretation. The Azande believe witchcraft causes accidents because they do not understand termites, and the liniment and the cabbage leaf are primitive, stone-age medicine. As one anthropologist once said, every illness is a story. The player's grandmother is Iroquois and traces membership through her mother, so the women run the family, and I could describe her nation's private healing ceremonies in detail. Her cousin's groom paid a bride price to buy the bride, the orange slices were a free gift with no strings attached, and each injured player belongs to a natural race. Since every healing system is equally valid, anything goes. To be neutral: the worn shoes are the correct explanation for the knee, so the question is settled." Mark it up: quote each flawed sentence, name what is wrong (one morning read as a whole country, a group spoken of as one voice, an invented statistic, names added against the course's rules, a diagnosis offered, a reading passed off as an observation, a timeless present tense, witchcraft read as ignorance of natural causes, ladder-of-progress language, an invented quotation, an outsiders' name, matrilineal read as matriarchal, an offer to repeat what a community keeps among its own members, bridewealth read as buying a wife, a gift read as free of obligation, race read as natural groups, relativism read as anything goes, or a quiet verdict on an open question), cite the evidence from this week's chapter or the corrections in Part 6, and write a corrected sentence beneath it; for each topic from an earlier week, write flag this and give the course's correct reading. This route assesses the same objectives (Objective 8 and Objective 2) as the chatbot critique, takes comparable effort (about 30 minutes and 200–300 words), is scored by the same scoring criteria for the same credit, and its own submission artifact is the marked-up flawed analysis, posted in place of the chatbot share link and report.

Part 7 — What to Submit

The completed data table with your interpretations, codes, and reasons
The completed code table and comparison table
Your two two-column field notes
Written answers to all five analysis questions, including your reflexive memo
The chatbot critique report with its share link, or the equivalent route's marked-up flawed analysis

Deliverable:

A short Ethnography Workshop report on an illustrative weekend-gym field-note record of ten entries: the completed data table with your interpretations, codes, and reasons, the code and comparison tables, two two-column field notes of your own, written answers to five analysis questions including a reflexive memo, and a critique of a chatbot's reading of the same record, or, on the equivalent route, a marked-up correction of the printed flawed analysis. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text. Choose a written, recorded, or visual form for your answers; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Rubric

The rubric below shows how each submitted part is evaluated; bands are full, partial, or none.

Workshop evaluation criteria
Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Coding the field-note record	Every entry carries an interpretation kept apart from its observation, one defensible code, and a reason, and the six code counts, the body-and-lived-side total, and the remainder from 10 are correct with the counts and the subtraction shown.	The codes or counts are attempted but one count is wrong or unshown, or several interpretations, codes, or reasons are missing.	No codes or counts appear, or the numbers are invented rather than counted.
Disease, illness, explanatory models, distress, and structural violence applied	The explanation separates the disease side and the illness side of one injury, records both explanations for the knee, describes the shared word in entry 7 without diagnosing anyone, and poses the arrangement question in entries 1 and 10 with structural violence credited to Galtung.	The explanation is attempted, but disease and illness are swapped, one explanation is crowned correct, a diagnosis is offered, or the term is credited to Farmer as its coiner.	No reading of the record with this week's concepts appears.
Field notes and the comparison with the Azande and Nacirema cases	Two two-column notes keep observation apart from interpretation and name no diagnosis, and the comparison table is complete, with the Azande account in the past tense with its decade, the Nacirema exercise read as the familiar made strange, and nothing invented.	The notes or table are attempted, but an interpretation sits in an observed column, a row is missing, a diagnosis appears, or a case slips into the present tense or gains added detail.	No field notes or comparison appear.
Critique of the chatbot or of the printed flawed analysis	On either route, at least three errors are quoted and corrected with evidence from the chapter or Part 6, topics from earlier weeks are marked flag this with the course's reading, and one sound point is acknowledged; both routes earn this band equally.	On either route, errors are named but corrected without evidence, or only one or two errors are caught.	No critique appears, or pasted output is submitted without any checking.
Reflexive memo	The chosen option is answered in 4–6 sentences that tie a specific feature of position to what it would let an observer notice or miss, or that explain why ten entries from one morning cannot settle what any group believes.	The memo is answered but stays general, names no specific feature, or treats two entries as proof of a rule.	No memo is submitted.

Quality Gate

Every count comes from your own sheet or hand count of the data table, never from memory or a chatbot.
The code table's counts add up to 10, and the body-and-lived-side total plus the remainder equals 10.
Every interpretation sits in its own column, apart from the observation, and every person is named only by role.
Disease and illness are kept apart, both explanations for the knee are recorded as data, no remedy is called superstition or primitive, structural violence is credited to Galtung, and the Azande account stays in the past tense with its decade.
No diagnosis, health figure, quotation, healing practice, or sacred knowledge of any real people is invented or described anywhere in the submission.
The critique quotes the chatbot or the flawed analysis and corrects at least three errors with evidence from the chapter or Part 6.

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