By: Rithika Kilari
Today, anthropologists develop general insights into the nature of society and human existence. To do this, they primarily use the method of ethnography; which is doing direct long-term studies by personally participating in a specific culture on-site. This requires much observation and detail from the anthropologist. However, anthropologists have not always based their research on ethnographic methods. Instead, in the 19th century, they used armchair anthropology, which was notorious for resulting in the spreading of false and discriminatory information.
Armchair research, according to Benjamin Felson, is “research that uses instructive case material as a basis for creative writing.” Anthropology, is the study of humans. Thus, armchair anthropology refers to the study of humans based on received data. In the late 19th century, scholars conducted anthropological research by writing papers solely based on indirect sources such as secondhand reports or written opinions of others. More often than not, anthropologists would study second-hand research regarding a specific region using biased information from European and western colonizers, who traveled to the region themselves.
A particular paper, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, shows the effects of armchair anthropology using the Nacirema as an example. The paper states:
“The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures” (Miner 504).
In this ironic fictional piece, the author, Horace Miner, writes about the average American brushing their teeth (Nacirema is ‘American’ spelled backwards). Similar distortive descriptions in legitimate anthropological papers were used to narrate the actions of people from other cultures, which greatly warped others’ perspectives of the native population.
In the early 20th century, the era of armchair anthropology ended when Bronislaw Malinowski, considered the founding father of social anthropology, used ethnographic methods to study the Trobriand Islanders. He popularized the idea of using ethnography as the main method of anthropology. In particular, Malinowski spread the method of participant observation, where anthropologists visit a region themselves and personally participate in the culture for a long period of time to create an accurate analysis of a person, group of people, or an area itself. Thus, a reign of anthropological misinformation as a consequence of armchair anthropology had come to an end.
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