At the end of the nineteenth centum a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnologists to begin recording the life stories of Native Americans. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories:they were after linguistic or anthropological data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without. In addition many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native American manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever.
There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete information. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being of limited value, and useful chiefly for the study of the perversion of truth by memory,¨ while Paul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator's own emotional tone to be reliable.
Even more importantly, as these lire stories moved from the traditional oral mode to recorded written form, much was inevitably lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events that they thought significant were often deemed unimportant by their interviewers. Indeed, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures, as taboos had to be broken to speak the names of dead relatives crucial to their family stories.
Despite all of this, autobiography remains a useful tool for ethnological research:such personal reminiscences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, are likely to throw more light on the working of the mind and emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from another culture.
Which of the following best describe the organization of the passage?
The historical background of two currently used research methods are chronicled.
The validity of the date collected by using two different research methods is compared.
The usefulness of a research method is questioned and then a new method is propose.
The use of a research method is described and the limitations of the results obtained are discussed.
A research method is evaluated and the changes necessary for its adaptation to other subject areas are discussed.
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正确答案是 D. The use of a research method is described and the limitations of the results obtained are discussed。
理由:该文章首先介绍19世纪末人们对于原住民文化越来越浓厚的兴趣,以及为了了解原住民文化而将他们的故事以书面形式记录下来的原因。然后这种记录方式也遭到了批评,比如波艾司指出这种方式的有限价值,罗定则怀疑被观察者的情感会影响记录的准确性。随后文章介绍了自传式研究的有用性,以及这种方法可能带来的局限性,比如编辑会选择哪些元素是重要和可行的,以及原住民无法完整地用英语表达他们的生活。因此 D 项正确,即描述了一种研究方法并讨论了可能得出的局限结果。