Practice question · True or false
Anthropologists study stock exchanges, hospitals and corporate offices with the same methods they bring to a village.
Hints
- Is the discipline defined by its subject or by its method?
- Ethnography travels.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. The defining commitment is method — sustained fieldwork, participant observation, taking the insider's categories seriously — not the exoticism of the subject. Studies of trading floors, laboratories and hospital wards are mainstream anthropology, and the 'anthropology of the West' turns the discipline's own distancing move back on the societies that invented it.
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More questions on What is Anthropology?
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