Frederick Damon's Study on Anthropology---An Interview with Anthropologist, Professor Frederick Damon

Dr.Bian Simei conducted an inter-view with Professor Frederick Damon of the Univer-sity of Virginia in 2012.Their discussions focused on Professor Damon's anthropological fieldwork ex-periences on the islands that make up the Kula Ring, and his new fieldwork spot-Fujian, China. Professor Damon started to do his ethnographic re-search on an island in the South Pacific based on the presumption that people understood the island as a body , and later he shifted to the study of trees.This is because he came to know that trees were very important for the Muyuw people .In July 1996, Professor Damon started to combine his re-search of trees with the research of boats .This was because he came to understand that the most impor-tant trees for the most import boats came from the relationship between people's gardens and forests . The trees were personified by the local people , and the Muyuw people had their own way to distinguish the trees as female or male .The Muyuw people al-so have their own classificatory system , and there are always analogies between sets of things that are related.In order to acquire more knowledge about trees, Professor Damon also interacted with scien-tists during his process of doing research , including geochemists .Although one of the things Professor Damon was involved with during the 1980 s post-modernism and the critique of western science , what he wanted to try to do with his research was to engage himself with natural scientists in order to expand his field as much as possible .Sometimes, when Professor Damon shared his knowledge on for-est systems learned from the natives , it would a-maze the scientists that “savages” could have that kind of knowledge .From his experience , Professor Damon found that cooperative work with natural scientists was very helpful for his research , and this kind of mutual -learning is necessary .Professor Damon also was critical that some of the anthropol-ogists or scientists were not good at understanding things in relationship to each other .This was be-cause they just buried themselves in their desks , and never looked up . Professor Damon thinks that Levi -Strauss's saying “the meaning begins with differences” is the elementary principle of structuralism , and very im-portant.For example, the Muyuw people's distinc-tion between bitter and sweet is also one of the ways they understand the differences between trees.Concerning Professor Damon's research on boats, he thinks that The Savage Mind was ve