ESSAY: A Theory of Culture for Demography

In the Shweder piece for today's class, he spends some time bringing evaluative discourse and praxis into focus as an object of ethnographic accounting and representation. He is building upon Eugene Hammel's essay (1990) entitled "A Theory of Culture for Demography". In that piece Hammel presents a range of definitions for culture before settling in on how to do ethnography. He makes a nice methodological point about the importance of finely grained case studies for the purposes of understanding the details of human social processes (and hence development and learning, for our purposes):

How information is gathered will depend, as always, on the exigencies of fieldwork. A guiding principle in ethnographic fieldwork is that more information can be gathered by intensive exploration of a few cases than by superficial examination of many. It is important that the few cases be representative.

Shweder uses this platform to bring the evaluative discourse to the fore in terms of developing an ethnographic accounting of specific moral communities:

By means of evaluative discourse members of most moral communities comment on their preferences and constraints, socialize and sanction their members, and seek to maintain their honor, prestige, and well-being.