og12 语文分册，第38题

ainiAnnie

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
observing 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 acquiring 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 investi-
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
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 another
culture.

38. 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

这道题目刚开始做的时候，题目都没怎么看懂，现在看懂了怎么看都觉得挺好懂的，看不懂的时候不知道脑子是怎么构造的...大家在做这道题的时候题目看懂了么？万一遇到不怎么看的题目，大家怎么处理？？求好方法，求提高方法。

daisywinds

这道题倒还是挺好懂的我觉得。
主要还是理解文章本身结构和主旨吧。
这样就很快能确定选项的有无关啦~~~

ainiAnnie

这道题倒还是挺好懂的我觉得。
主要还是理解文章本身结构和主旨吧。
这样就很快能确定选项的有无关啦~~~

-- by 会员 daisywinds (2012/3/25 9:23:08)

额，好吧......
btw，头像挺有感觉哈~