Introduction to Cognitive Ethnography and Systematic Field Work

About G.M. Schoepfle

G. Mark Schoepfle has devoted his entire career to applied anthropology in federal and tribal government with an adjunct status in various academic institutions that have often helped support this research. He received a bachelors degree in anthropology from the University of California Berkeley in 1968.  Following his military service he received his Masters in 1972 and Doctorate in social anthropology 1977 from Northwestern University under the anthropological linguist Oswald Werner his dissertation chair.  His employment in anthropology began with the Navajo Tribal Division of Education.  Here under the supervision of Oswald Werner he helped train and supervise Navajo researchers and compile ethnographic reports of the Navajo Nations different school systems.  What began originally as involvement with a one-year training and research project evolved into a 14-year research and teaching career on the Navajo Nation.  It involved both research and training Navajos as active research participants and analysts co-publishers and findings presenters.  Beginning in 1974 he was involved with Oswald Werner in developing a researchers training manual that finally became the two-volume Systematic Fieldwork published in 1987.  From 1980 to 1984 he also served as Deputy Director of the Northwestern University Summer Field School in Ethnography. In 1988 he shifted his career interests to auditing and evaluation at the Government Accountability Office and later the Department of the Interior in Washington DC.  At the Department of the Interior he has served as cultural anthropologist for the National Park Services program in applied ethnography and at what is now the Office of Federal Acknowledgment.