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Show The best chance for achieving such an inside perspective is- through direct observation--through ethnography. Ethnographers describe culture with the intent, as Roger Abrahams has recently suggested, of showing how "such behavior is endowed with meaning and value. 1138 "Ethnographic description," Abrahams continues, "takes into account organic relationships between the inception and outcome of action, relationships that underline the purposes of the activity. Therefore, we assume that a system and a set of regularities underlie the actions. 1139 Historians do oot have the anthropologist's advantage of seeing firsthand the experience which they are studying, but they can nevertheless sift the evidence that remains of that experience for traces of human action--action patterned by culture. Historians concerned with understanding past behavior must look for signs, again following Rhys Issac, of "people doing things, 11 for "the searching out of the meanings that such actions contained and conveyed for the participant lies at the heart of the enterprise of ethnographic history. 1140 One of the main things people of the past did was to build houses. Definitions Many of the terms encountered in this work--particularly those connected with buildings and the building process--will not be familiar to the uninitiated reader. I have included most of the relevant definitions within the text, but several key concepts need short, formal i ntroductions. I have used the term 11 Mormon 11 here to denote both the institution 18 |
