Fieldwork Project

One of the greatest challenges of anthropology is fieldwork, and breaking through the language barrier. It is hard to get the whole picture, unless you understand the native language. Sometimes it is hard to get the whole picture even you can understand the native language, because certain ideas that exist in English don’t exist in other languages. In linguistics you can translate certain words between languages, but in most cases translation doesn’t capture the whole idea of the word, or it leaves out part of it. I think that you can’t simply translate words, you have to know and understand the meaning of that word in its native language.For instance, when making a kinship chart, in Hawaiian your “makuahine” are equivalent to all of your aunts and your mother in English. So in Hawaiian you can’t differentiate between aunts on either side of the family or your mother easily. I interviewed a friend of mine to prove the point. The first question that I asked was, who are your makuahine (mother and aunts)? Then I asked, who are your makuakane (father and uncles)? I listed all of the names on a sheet of paper, so that I had a list of the whole generation. From there I had to figure out who my friend’s parents were. I did this by asking who gave birth to him, because I couldn’t just say who is your mom, in this case my friend said that her name is Tess. Once I had the name, I plugged it in to the next question, who is the husband of Tess? Then I drew the anthropological symbol for marriage with their names under it. The next thing to do was to find out who was married to who, so all I had to do was plug-in all of the names of the makuahine, then I drew the same symbols as before with the names under them. Once I had all of the makuahine and makuakane paired as husband and wife, respectfully. I had to find out which ones where siblings of the parents and place them on the correct side of the kinship chart. I did that by asking, who are the Kaikunane (brothers and male cousins) of your mom? Then I asked, who are the Kaikuahine (sisters and female cousins) of your dad? From there I made a table, one column was my friend’s father, the other side was his mother, and I moved the correct husband and wife pair to the correct side of the table. By that point, there were only there was three people left and two of them were married, so I who were the mother’s kaikuahine (sisters and female cousins), my friend said that she had none. After asking that last question I could logically deduce that the only men left were brothers of his father, since the last woman wasn’t directly related to anyone in the family. You can understand the native view by speaking the language, but if you don’t think in that language you may miss the whole point, I would argue that there are some things (thoughts) that you can’t translate into English, therefore an anthropologist may not be able to make his own culture understand the native view, the view may be lost in translation, and in that sense [I think] anthropology has failed. But, is it fair (or even possible) to ask everyone to think (or even understand) in the native language? Perhaps most would say no, but I don’t agree.The main goal of anthropology is to understand the native view, and you simply can’t understand it if you don’t speak the language. Language is more than the spoken word, it is also your thoughts, which will affect the way you perceive things, and will create your paradigm (way of thinking). I enjoyed this project because I got to experience some of the real challenges an anthropologist may feel. I think that the most important part of understanding another culture, is understanding their language, and the next time I wonder why someone is acting a certain way, perhaps, I will try to understand their own paradigm.