Session7 "VOICE"
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Script
Professor Takumi Moriyama is a cultural anthropologist.
One of the most important ways in which he conducts research is through personal interaction with the people he is studying. So field work is in important part of the academic study.
From 1987 to 1990 professor Moriyama was involved in what's known as participant observation on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar is located off the coast of the African continent.
One of the most important ways in which he conducts research is through personal interaction with the people he is studying. So field work is in important part of the academic study.
From 1987 to 1990 professor Moriyama was involved in what's known as participant observation on the island of Madagascar. Madagascar is located off the coast of the African continent.
The key point about participant observation is that a researcher participates in the culture he or she is also observing. The researcher , in this case professor Moriyama, becomes immersed in the culture ,learns its languages and takes parts in its everyday routines, rituals and activities.
Professor Moriyama talked to us about the time he spent doing field work in Madagascar.
Professor Moriyama talked to us about the time he spent doing field work in Madagascar.
One of the reasons I decided to study culture and anthropology (was that I'd always be) interested in questioning things that seems natural in self-evidence.
I thought that encountering different cultures and different people would give me a chance to understand myself and my own culture common sense in relative terms. One thing led to another by an ended up focus in the culture and people in Madagascar.
I lived on the island for three years. Sometimes cultural difference manifested itself in really obvious ways, like the time when I crashed my motorcycle and broke a leg. The villagers who came to help me insisted that I should be taken straight to a traditional healer, who would work on my leg while praying to a various gods and ancestors.
It was very difficult to decline this offer and get myself to the nearest hospital instead.
Usually, though, my experience of "difference" in Madagascar was not dramatic at all, but really quite subtle, not unlike the difference or distance I feel from my friends and acquaintances in Japan.
What I learned through my fieldwork was that it was wrong to define the people of the island as "completely other" just because they live so far away from Japan.
At the same time, I also came to feel strongly that it was just as wrong to expect people who share my cultural background to act and think in the same manner that I do. Difference and distance are not the same thing.
I learned many things about Madagascar while doing my fieldwork, but in the end, perhaps most significant lesson I learned was not how to see myself relatively through my encounters with others but to reflect on the reasons why I want to see myself in relation to others.
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