Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology. Having covered the main subject matter and unifying concepts of cultural anthropology, we must now turn to the more specific issues of how anthropologists record and represent cultural data and use them to address theoretical issues. Anthropology is a science and, as such, must deal with both the objective collection and recording of empirical data and the treatment of their findings in terms of an explanatory system. Ethnography is the process of recording and describing a culture of a specific people, such as the Dani, and its traits, patterns, and principles of coherent integration. Anthropologists produce ethnography on the basis of firsthand field observation of the people who are being studied.
Ethnology covers the theoretical aspect of anthropology.
Ethnologists ascertain how cultures differ or exhibit similarities through comparison and generalization, suggest reasons for cross cultural regularities observed, and use these explana tory inferences to formulate new research hypotheses. Ethnography and ethnology are interrelated in a complex fashion. Deductive scientific method dictates that research must be organized to address a theoretical hypothesis that is derived from prior reasoning. They have resulted in fairly general ethnographic descriptions. Problem oriented approaches are ty pical of current anthropological research and tend to focus on specialized subject matter, such as subsistence techniques, economic transactions, or religious rituals.