2. 职称英语
  3. At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American c

At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American c

游客2024-01-13  27
问题     At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnologists to begin recording the life stories of Native American. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: they were after linguistic or anthropological data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had been observ- ing from without. In addition many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native American manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever.
    There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquir- ing accurate and complete information. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiographies as being "of limited value, and useful chiefly for the study of the perversion of truth by memory," while Paul Radin contended that investigators rarely spent enough time with the tribes they were observing, and inevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator’s own emotional tone to be reliable.  Even more importantly, as these life stories moved from the traditional oral mode to recorded written form, much was inevitably lost. Editors often decided what elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English and that events that they thought significant were often deemed unimportant by their interviewers. Indeed, the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures, as taboos had to be broken to speak the names of dead relatives crucial to their family stories.
    Despite all of this, autobiography remains a useful tool for ethnological research: such personal reminiscences and impressions, incomplete as they may be, are likely to throw more light on the working of the mind and emotions than any amount of speculation from an ethnologist or ethnological theorist from an- other culture. [br] Information in the passage suggests that which of the following may be a possible way to eliminate bias in the editing of life stories?
选项 A、Basing all inferences made about the culture on an ethnological theory.
B、Eliminating all of the emotion-laden information reported by the informant.
C、Translating the informant’ s words into the researcher’s language.
D、Reducing the number of questions and carefully specifying the content of the questions that the investigator can ask the informant.
E、Reporting all of the information that the informant provides regardless of the investigator’ s personal opinion about its intrinsic value.
答案 E
解析 文章暗示，以下哪个方式可以消除编辑故事时的偏见?原文第3段写明了偏见易产生的原因(L38—40)，取非即得消除的途径。∴E正确，不管记录者对提供的信息价值个人意见如何，都将所有信息记录下来。A、B原文未提。C．将提供信息人的话翻译成调查者语言。现已这样做了，见L41—43。D“reducing the number of questions”原文并未说问题数目过多。
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