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.
According to the passage, collecting life stories can be a useful methodology because
选项 A、life stories provide deeper insights into a culture than the hypothesizing of academics who are not members of that culture.
B、life stories can be collected easily and they are not subject to invalid interpretations.
C、ethnologists have a limited number of research methods from which to choose.
D、life stories make it easy to distinguish between the important and unimportant features of a culture.
E、the collection of life stories does not require a culturally knowledgeable investigator.
答案A
解析 收集生活故事为什么是一种有用的方法?A．正确。生活故事提供了一种比并不属于一文化之成员的学者所做推测要深入的认识。见原文最后L56—60.B．“collected easily”原文未提。C．“limited number of research methods”无。D．使人容易区分一文化中重要与非重要的特征。无。E．收集故事不需要对此文化理解的调查者。这种情况确实存在(第10题所叙述正是)，但作者在第三段指出，这正是使此方法有很大局限性的原因所在，是作者主张避免的。
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