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.
The passage mentions which of the following as a factor that can affect the accuracy of ethnologists’ transcriptions of life stories?
选项 A、The informants ’ social standing within the culture.
B、The inclusiveness of the theory that provided the basis for the research.
C、The length of time the researchers spent in the culture under study.
D、The number of life stories collected by the researchers.
E、The verifiability of the information provided by the research informants.
答案C
解析 文中指出下面哪一个有可能影响人类文化学家对生活故事转述的真实性?A．“social standing”文中未提。B．“inclusiveness of the theory”无。C．正确。调查者用来研究的时间长短。见L30—34Radin对此研究法的批评。D．收集故事的数量。未提。E．“verifiability of the information”文中未提。
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