Construction of an ethnographical database of groups of immigrants and their descendats in the province of Buenoas Aires

Abstract

In Argentina, research about immigration has traditionally been made fundamentally upon two majorities: Spanish and Italian. There were few specific anthropological studies concerning small and medium groups of immigrations (Cape Verdeans, Polish, Greek, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, etc.). As a result of our experience in the field of anthropology, working with some of these goups and their descendants, we became aware of the need of a tool which allows, in a flexible way, to recognize the profile which characterizes the studied communities and those which will be studied in the future. Our ultimate goal was to establish in advance, sufficiently representative comparisons to describe similarities and differences between distinctive groups. Without such a tool, it would be difficult to characterize the modifications which where produced and still take place as a consequence of the cultural change and the intercultural contact.At this stage of the research, diverse specialist in statistics were consulted, who agreed that a database is the best tool for this purpose, since it allows flexible and more efficient storage and management of the information. Thus, we considered two steps: 1. Definition and development of the data base structure, 2. Elaboration of an interface for actualization and modification of the collected data.