Combining historical and ethnographic methods: Theoretical, methodological, and ethical implications
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This working paper discusses theoretical, methodological, and ethical questions researchers encounter when combining historical and ethnographic research approaches. In 2021, a group of historians and cultural and social anthropologists formed the interdisciplinary working group Entanglements of Historical and Ethnographic Research (Approaches). The group members share an interest in combining historical and anthropological research methods and approaches. This publication is a result of their discussions. The working paper contains contributions by Susanne Fehlings (Frobenius Institute/Goethe University Frankfurt), Oliver Tappe (University of Heidelberg), Lena Rüßing (Head Office of the German Science and Humanities Council), Ole Münch (German Historical Institute London), Sofie Steinberger (University of Cologne), and Gerda Kuiper (University of Cologne). Based on the fields of ethnohistory, historical anthropology as well as oral history and archival research within the field of historical research, the contributions show that anthropologists and historians face similar methodological challenges and encounter comparable questions and uncertainties during the research process. The papers address topics such as the use of the histoire croisée approach for anthropologists, ethnographic multi-sited archival fieldwork, various aspects of oral history research in terms of positionality, power structures, language use and secondary analysis of interviews, as well as remote data collection. Although the contributions focus on very individual subject matters related to the research topics of the group members and although the contributors have carried out research in different regions (the Caucasus, Laos, Canada, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Tanzania), they also share similar concerns and interests. Questions and concerns addressed throughout the working paper are the question how to give voice to marginalized people, the role of historiography in contested and exclusionary processes of nation-building (and the question how researchers can avoid contributing to such nationalist discourses through their historical research), and the opportunities and pitfalls of a researcher’s remoteness in time and space. We hope our discussions of such questions and concerns in this working paper are helpful for other researchers working on the interface of history and anthropology.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it