|
At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native American culture prompted ethnolo- gists to begin recording the life stories of Native Amer- (5) ican. Ethnologists had a distinct reason for wanting to hear the stories: they were after linguistic or anthropo- logical data that would supplement their own field observations, and they believed that the personal stories, even of a single individual, could increase their (10) understanding of the cultures that they had been observing from without. In addition many ethnologists at the turn of the century believed that Native Amer- ican manners and customs were rapidly disappearing, and that it was important to preserve for posterity as (15) much information as could be adequately recorded before the cultures disappeared forever. There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete informa- tion. Franz Boas, for example, described autobiogra- (20) phies 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 investi- (25) gator’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 (30) 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 (35) 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 reminis- (40) cences 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 another culture. 66. 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 为什么选B我知道,其他答案都不太准确. 可是B也很牵强嘛!! 为什么不用同样语言就是特点啊!! 这算什么特点啊,这不过是一个事实而已嘛!! | 
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2004-7-28 21:56:00
楼主
