From: Terri Senft <tsenft@gmail.com> To: Ellis Godard <egodard@csun.edu>, "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Three Questions (was qual/quant and all that) Message-ID: <CAMsrFiFto+tHkBNtMOe3ar-XzKQ8mSQE-PLz4dGMH2dASRPzkw@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

3. Does anyone have an actual reason to use the term, "armchair theorizing?"

Dear Terri I'll skip the hard questions and go for the easy one. "Armchair theorizing" was the term used in introductory anthropology courses for the standard 19th Century form of ethnography/ethnology, which involved collecting information on the customs of "primitive" social formations by sending letters to various government officials, missionaries, and traders requesting such information, and then assembling the answers into a general account. Sir James Frasier's _The Golden Bough_ was the usual example. This approach was critiqued, ultimately and most famously, by Malinowski in his _Argonauts of the Western Pacific_ (being republished now by Routledge) who argued for actual fieldwork among the peoples of interest. This is often referred to as the "revolution" in anthropological methods. David Hakken Information Ethnographer Professor of Social Informatics School of Informatics and Computing 901 E. 10th Street, #318 Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47408 dhakken@indiana.edu 812-856-1869 office; 812-391-2966 cell; 812-856-1995 fax Faculty Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Trento, Italy http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/research/profiles/dhakken.asp Trento office hours (May-mid-July) by appointment