Question

Ethnography and Culture
JAMES P. SPRADLEY
Summary In this introductory chapter from his book Participant Observation, Spradley defines and emphasizes the importance of ethnographic fieldwork and the concept of culture. Ethnography is the work of describing a culture. It requires the discovery of the native or insider's point of view.
Cultural behavior consists of the actions generated by cultural knowledge. Cultural artifacts, based on cultural behavior and cultural knowledge, are the things people make or shape from natural resources. Culture, itself, is the socially acquired knowledge that people use to generate behavior and interpret experience. Different cross-cultural interpretations of the same event easily cause misunderstandings.
Culture may also be explicit (part of our conscious awareness) or tacit (outside awareness). The meaning of things for members of a group is at the heart of the culture concept, a point related to Blumer's notion of symbolic interactionism. The concept of culture as acquired knowledge has much in common with symbolic interactionism, a theory that seeks to explain human behavior in terms of meanings. Blumer's theory rests on three premises. The first is that "human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them." The second is that the "meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows." The third is that "meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person dealing with the things he encounters." Spradley concludes by characterizing culture as a map, a guide to action and interpretation.
Spradley argues that culture is more like a map, guiding human action, rather than a strict set of rules requiring specific behavior.

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