Ethnography of West Africa

Catalog description

The course deals with the subject of fieldwork defined recently as "a form of enquiry in which one immerses oneself personally in the ongoing social activities of some individual or group for the purposes of research" (Wolcott, 1995:12). It also examines the techniques, theories, and concepts relevant to sound cross cultural ethnographic work. It will attempt to study the traditional notions of the specialized area of doing fieldwork such as the "emic" and the "etic" approaches, "participant observation interactive and non-interactive methods" as well as the various levels of interpretative analysis. Prerequisite: SOC 1001