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studying. Most of the earlier stalwarts in the subject chose their field among such
communities. For example,
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• Malinowski worked among the Trobriand Islanders inhabiting Papua
New Guinea,
• Evans Pritchard worked among the Nuer community of Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan,
• Radcliffe Brown worked among the Andaman Islanders,
• Margaret Mead worked among the Samoans
The fieldworker will not only stay with the people that they want to study but also
learn their language and ways of life. They will be expected to participate in the
daily activities of the people and at the same time observe how people and their
various institutions function. This method is known as ‘Participant Observation’.
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Employing this method, a fieldworker participates in the social life of the
community she is studying and observes how people negotiate their cultural and
social lives.

Q3. What is the main objective of anthropology?
Ans. Objectives of a discipline can be defined at two levels:
a) At the student’slevel where they learn the objectiveof studying the discipline.
b) At the level of different stakeholders, that how theknowledge created by research
in a particular discipline is beingarrangeby people at large or what purpose does
it serve for differentpeople such as administrators, thinkers, and researchers.
At the first level, the objective of anthropology is to make students awareof and
appreciatehuman and cultural variations. This, in turn, leads to amuch-nuanced
approach to various lifesituations. It is the only disciplinethat takes into account the bio-
social existence of the humanpopulation.Most of the path-breaking researches in
anthropology have been conductedamongthe tribal and peasant groups and therefore it
brings a largelymarginalized section of humanpopulation into dominant public and
intellectual discourse through knowledge sharing and dissemination.
a) Cultural relativism: The Cross-Cultural Relationship is the idea that people
from different cultures can have relationships that acknowledge, respect and
begin to understand each other’s diverse lives. People with different backgrounds
can help each other see possibilities that they never thought were there because
of limitations, or cultural proscriptions, posed by their own traditions.
Traditional practices in certain cultures can restrict opportunity because they are
“wrong” according to one specific culture. Becoming aware of these new
possibilities will ultimately change the people that are exposed to the new ideas.
This cross-cultural relationship provides hope that new opportunities will be
discovered but at the same time it is threatening. The threat is that once the
relationship occurs, one can no longer claim that any single culture is the
absolute truth.

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