2. 外语
  3. At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native

At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Native

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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.
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?
选项 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B
解析 19世纪，人类文化学研究印第安人有何特点?A．调查者熟悉其研究的文化。正好说反，文中多次指出不熟悉。B．正确。使用一种和提供信息人不同的语言。从L41—43推出，印第安人用土语陈述，调查者用英语记录。C．primary在文中推不出。D．彻底转述提供者对部落信仰的陈述。无。E．“preservation of cultural data”无。
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