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  3. (46)At the end of the nineteenth century, a rising interest in Native American customs and an increasing desire to understand Na

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

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问题     (46)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. (47)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 bef0re the cultures disappeared forever.
    There were, however, arguments against this method as a way of acquiring accurate and complete information. (48)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. (49)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.
    (50)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.

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答案讲故事本身就足以促使印第安人叙事者扭曲自己的文化，因为他们必须打破禁忌，以便说出他们已经逝去的、与他们的家庭故事有关的亲戚的姓名。
解析 该句也是一个简单句，但理解程度上较难，注意调整语序，采用"分而治之"的办法，即"分译法"。"force…to"意思是：促使…做…。crucial：关键的。此外在 as引导的原因状语从句中出现了一个动词不定式的被动语态形式。
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考研英语一

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