Blog #2

Fieldwork is crucial to obtaining information for a research project for Folklore anthropology. The methods used to obtain data take on very different approaches. For my research project/experiment, I could use all the approaches in the following ways: Questionnaires would work for asking Latino people their opinion of how they view comedy in popular culture in the United States. The draw back would be, like mentioned in the book, is the questionnaire is a bit impersonal and will not catch the essence of an interview. An interview I can ask more specific questions and also ask follow up questions to answers that I do not completely understand from the interviewee's response. Again, my project is to view and understand the folklore of Latino's use of humor, jokes and anything that is considered popular comedy in their culture. An approach I have thought of that is different from the methods above is to watch popular Latino shows since I understand Spanish. This way I can grasp what is comic to the Latino audience and then ask people questions about the shows. Also, a few of my interviewing questions would be to ask what types of humorous shows/movies their culture considers funny, what is not funny and why? For example, yo momma jokes are not funny in the Latino culture. Do the answers of the interviewee have anything to do with their greater culture such as strong sense of religion? The background on Latino's in the book's chapter mention that Latinos are dominiately Catholic, so maybe their religion has to so with the type of things they consider funny. The Spanish language does not evenly translate to English, so sometimes, jokes or statements cannot be taken in the same way, which would ultimately alter the joke or humorous part of the statement. For my type of research, I would need to do "thick" description because I would have to get into the Latino perspective to appreciate why their culture accepts some things as humorous and some things as offensive.