A Novice Anthropologist

3 Pages 744 Words

A Novice Anthropologist

When I was younger, my family and I were able to take a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee in order to visit my Aunt Becky, Uncle Jim, and my two cousins, Sarah and Amy. While visiting, I realized the many differences that my family in Tennessee lived with, unlike the routine I went through from day to day. Now that I have an idea of what kind of jobs anthropologists perform while conducting field work, I am able to realize that some of the activities I performed while in Chattanooga, were also typical of an anthropologist.
The first thing needed for an anthropologist to conduct field work is permission from the people to have a place to stay. Luckily, my Aunt allowed me to stay in this “alien” land for two weeks, which is actually a very short period in comparison to the two years that a regular anthropologist would stay while conducting their field research. Next, I needed monetary funds to conduct my research on these foreign people. After being rejected for a grant from my father, I gained a one time employment opportunity from my Uncle for cutting his grass, an activity that seemed more native to me than to either one of my female cousins. Now that I had everything needed to begin my field research, I was ready to begin.
One of the first things I noticed about these people from the south, was their bizarre pronunciation of the English language. At first, I stuck out from everyone else by the way I spoke, but as time went by, I began do simple things in order to hide my accent. For example, I would combine the words you and all into one word, “y’all,” a common practice for their dialect. Also, while in Chattanooga, I hardly ever heard anyone curse, whether or not if it was at a sports game, or yelling at another person.
I then studied what the people of Chattanooga did in their free time. In the household I was staying in, video games were not ever played and were looked at as a ...