Who Studies Whom? The Observer as the Observed

You may find one “remote” culture exotic. But your own culture is just as exotic to those whom you consider “remote.”

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Participatory observation is one of the key methodologies used mostly in the social sciences such as anthropology and sociology and the like. It started from the criticism against what is called armchair researchers.

When those researchers in social sciences tried to understand and describe specific communities like tribes, cultures, societies, ethnicities, or any type of group, the approach that those “traditional researchers” used was just reading books and documents mainly written by those who visited the communities they wanted to study. The approach was, in short, more like reading what those who visited the field wrote instead of visiting and living in the targeted communities themselves.

In nineteenth-century ethnology, this was, in a way, inevitable because traveling to those remote areas itself was a challenging task. As such, in most cases, they had no choice but to rely on books and documents written by travelers, explorers, and the like. In this way, their approach was quite similar to that of historians. For historians, of course…