. The objective
is to try to understand how world views and life experience can vary among people. This
assignment is a structured interview that will investigate specific life experiences such as
subsistence and ideology. After conducting your interview, you will write a 5-page paper that
explains how another experiences and understands the same components of life we all participate
in. This assignment has a lot of freedom, but there are also very specific requirements, so to
make sure everyone meets these requirements, you will be expected to turn in a proposal that
identifies who you will interview and outlines the questions you will include in your interview.
This will allow the instructor and TA to provide constructive feedback before the project gets
started.
When conducting ethnographic research, it is important to focus your study on certain themes. It
is not possible to explain everything about a culture in just five pages of text. In fact, it is even
very difficult to do so in multiple volumes of books. Your strategy should either be to design a
suite of questions centered on a theme (or maybe two related themes; e.g., religion, gender roles,
education), or to identify themes that arise from answers to a variety of different questions.
Your interview paper should include:
1. A brief discussion of your interviewee, why you decided to interview this person, and the
information you were interested in learning about your interviewee and their culture
2. You should introduce the main theme of your investigation, why it is important to
investigate this/these theme(s) and what you hoped to gain/learn from your investigation.
3. Provide a description of the culture and experiences of your interviewee in an organized
and coherent manner that helps you (and your reader) understand these unique cultural
experiences.
4. As you summarize and make your conclusions, be sure to add some comparisons to your
own culture and experience. This will allow you to think critically about how culture and
human behavior is both similar and different cross culturally. In other words, this should
allow you to see how other people approach the same human experience in different ways
and how they understand similar experiences differently.
As you develop your questionnaire, conduct your interview and write your paper, please
remember the key elements of anthropological research that we have discussed time and again in
class. Please put into practice your new-found appreciation for cultural relativism, being
careful to avoid ethnocentrism. A paper that is filled with value judgments will result in a
failing grade.
There is no need for you to include the questions you asked to obtain the information you are
writing about, unless it will help clarify a point you are trying to make. Additionally, avoid
including direct quotes from your interviewee in your paper unless it is necessary to make or
clarify a point. Five pages is not a lot of space. A paper that is made up of mostly quotes will
not earn very many points.
