Oral blanc de préparation à l'épreuve de SES au bac européen
Classe de première ES


Preparation : 20 minutes
Oral exam : 10 minutes, 6-7 minutes to answer the question, and 3-4 minutes for discussion.

Using the document and your knowledge, make a structured answer to the following question, you must use examples studied in class.

Subject :

 

Are the difficulties the same in anthropology and in sociology?

Chapter 6
Once removed, my equipment was disposed among the roof beams . I set up a map of Poli I had acquired in the capital. This was a major wonder to Dowayos who never grasped its principles and would ask me to tell them where to find villages I had never visited. When I was able to, they would ask me to name the people who lived there and could never understand why I could accomplish the first but not the second. (…)
For the first three weeks the rain poured down with relentless fury. The very air was saturated. (…) Time was spent trying to learn the basis of the language. Africans are normally bi- or tri-lingual to some degree but have no experience, for the most part, of learning a language in anything but social encounters. The idea of recording a verb in all its forms, tenses, moods, to see the overall system is totally alien. They learn their languages as children and can switch effortlessly from one to another. (…)
Chapter 7
At last I had material to work on and began by elucidating the notes I had made at the festival. Each page of notes would keep me occupied for several days, checking what it was that I had seen, how it compared with the festival in my own village, what other cultural knowledge it implied. For example, the man who carried the skulls at the dance was not just anyone, he had to be in a duuse relationship with the dead man. To understand what this word implied, I had to sort out all the kinship terms. Trying to do this even roughly with French equivalents is quite impossible, but the mistakes Dowayos make when speaking French are very helpful.

The Innocent Anthropologist
Nigel Barley, Penguin, 1983