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 tohear the stories： they were after linguistic or anthropo-logical data that would supplement their own fieldobservations， and they believed that the personalstories， even of a single individual， could increase their understanding of the cultures that they had beenobserving from without. In addition many ethnologistsat the turn of the century believed that Native Amer-can manners and customs were rapidly disappearing，and that it was important to preserve for posterity as much information as could be adequately recordedbefore the cultures disappeared forever. There were， however， arguments against this methodas a way of acquiring accurate and complete informa-tion. Franz Boas， for example， described autobiographies as being “of limited value， and useful chiefly forthe study of the perversion of truth by memory，” whilePaul Radin contended that investigators rarely spentenough time with the tribes they were observing， andinevitably derived results too tinged by the investigator‘s own emotional tone to be reliable. Even more importantly， as these life stories movedfrom the traditional oral mode to recorded writtenform， much was inevitably lost. Editors often decidedwhat elements were significant to the field research on a given tribe. Native Americans recognized that theessence of their lives could not be communicated inEnglish and that events that they thought significantwere often deemed unimportant by their interviewers.Indeed， the very act of telling their stories could force Native American narrators to distort their cultures， astaboos had to be broken to speak the names of deadrelatives crucial to their family stories. Despite all of this， autobiography remains a usefultool for ethnological research： such personal reminiscences and impressions， incomplete as they may be， arelikely to throw more light on the working of the mindand emotions than any amount of speculation from anethnologist or ethnological theorist from anotherculture.
6. It can be inferred from the passage that a characteristic?of the ethnological research on Native Americans?conducted during the nineteenth century was the use?of which of the following？ （A） Investigators familiar with the culture under study （B） A language other than the informant‘s for recording life stories （C） Life stories as the ethnologist‘s primary source of information （D） Complete transcriptions of informants‘ descriptions of tribal beliefs （E） Stringent guidelines for the preservation of cultural data 答案是B，我选了C。自己反思了一下还是想不明白，觉得C和B都对。请教为什么选B？
The third paragraph tells us that much was inevitably lost (line 31) when investigators wrote the oral stories down. Native Americans recognized that the essence of their lives could not be communicated in English (lines 33-35). From these two statements, it is reasonable to infer that the stories were written down in a language different from that of the storyteller.
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发表于 2010-3-16 12:55:20
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