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.


The primary purpose of the passage as a whole is to


question an explanation

correct a misconception

critique a methodology

discredit an idea

clarify an ambiguity

考题讲解

此讲解的内容由AI生成,还未经人工审阅,仅供参考。

答案是 C. critique a methodology。

本文主要介绍了 19 世纪正值印第安人文化的兴起时,民族学家要求印第安人讲述他们的生活故事,并探讨使用这种方法作为获取准确有效信息的优势以及不足之处。文章从印第安人角度提出反对意见,指出编辑筛选出来的故事部分可能丢失了真实的文化内涵,以及在经历这样的转化时,可能会剥夺部分印第安人需要保持秘密和隐私的文化习俗。本文目的是批判和评估这一方法,因此答案是 C. critique a methodology。

展开显示

登录注册 后可以参加讨论

快来第一个发言吧
OG2015V-RC