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  23
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] It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the usefulness of life stories as a source of ethnographic information?
选项 A、They can be a source of information about how people in a culture view the world.
B、They are most useful as a source of linguistic information.
C、They require editing and interpretation before they can be useful.
D、They are most useful as a source of information about ancestry.
E、They provide incidental information rather than significant insights into a way of life.
答案 A
解析 作者会同意下面哪一个关于生活故事作为人类文化信息资源的有用性?A．正确。它们可以就一个文化系统内的人的世界观提供信息。即L57“the workingof the mind and emotions”。B．作为语言学信息最有用。文中未提。C．先应被编辑、解释，才能有用。对其进行加工，解释正是当年那些人类学家所做的事，作者认为是不妥的。D．关于祖先是最有用信息。未提。E．incidental information和作者最后一段的态度不符。
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