Participant Observation & Field Notes - H. Russell Bernard

节选出处：H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (5th Edition, AltaMira Press, 2011), Chapter 12 & 13 (pp. 256-305).

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Participant Observation

Participant observation fieldwork is the foundation of cultural anthropology. It involves getting close to people and making them feel comfortable enough with your presence so that you can observe and record information about their lives. If this sounds a bit crass, I mean it to come out that way. Only by confronting the truth about participant observation—that it involves a deception and impression management—can we hope to conduct ourselves ethically in fieldwork. Much more about this later.

Participant observation is both a humanistic method and a scientific one. It produces the kind of experiential knowledge that lets you talk convincingly, from the gut, about what it feels like to plant a garden in the high Andes or dance all night in a street rave in Seattle.

It also produces effective, positivistic knowledge—the kind that can move the levers of the world if it gets into the right hands. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), for example, developed a nomothetic theory, based on participant observation, that accounts for the tragedy of very high infant mortality in northeast Brazil and the direct involvement of mothers in their infants’ deaths. Anyone who hopes to develop a program to lower the incidence of infant mortality in that part of the world will have to read Scheper-Hughes’s analysis (box 12.1).

Romancing the Methods

It used to be that the skills for doing fieldwork were mysterious and unteachable, something you just learned, out there in the field. In the 1930s, John Whiting and some of his fellow anthropology students at Yale University asked their professor, Leslie Spier, for a seminar on methods. ‘‘This was a subject to discuss casually at breakfast,’’ Whiting recalls Spier telling him, not something worthy of a seminar (Whiting 1982:156). Tell this story to seasoned anthropologists at a convention today, and it’s a good bet they’ll come back with a story of their own just like it.

It’s fine for anthropologists to romanticize fieldwork—vulcanologists and oceanographers do it, too, by the way—particularly about fieldwork in places that take several days to get to, where the local language has no literary tradition, and where the chances are nontrivial of coming down with a serious illness. Research really is harder to do in some places than in others. But anthropologists are more likely these days to study the impact of television in culture in Brazil (Kottak 2009), the meaning of hair styles among African American women (Dione Rosado 2007), the everyday culture of the English (Fox 2004), the formation of Croatian identity in Croatia and in Toronto (Winland 2007), how basic training in the U. S. Army transforms young people into soldiers (Bornmann 2009), consumer behavior (Sherry 1995), gay culture (Boellstorff 2007), or life on the mean

BOX 12.1

P A R T I C I P A N T O B S E R V A T I O N A N D A P P L I E D A N T H R O P O L O G Y

Participant observation has long been used in product applications research, where the object is to solve a human problem. One area of applied anthropology that’s getting a lot of attention is product development. Panasonic thought it had a winning idea in 1995 for an electric razor that women could use in the shower—but none of the women they observed using the shavers during home visits took it into the shower. The women (who were in bathing suits) all said that (1) they didn’t believe a razor could be waterproof and (2) they were afraid of dropping the razor in the shower and cracking the porcelain. The shiny, smooth material used in making the razor was interpreted in Japan as an indicator of quality but was interpreted by American women as an indicator of fragility. And thus the Panasonic Lady Shaver was rebuilt for the American market with a then-new kind of rubbery material that looked (and was) non-slip and waterproof (Rosenthal and Capper 2006:228).

streets of big cities (Bourgois 1995; Fleisher 1998) than they are to study isolated tribal or peasant peoples. It would take a real inventory to find out how much more likely, but in Hume and Mulcock’s (2004) collection of 17 self-reflective studies of anthropologists about their fieldwork, just three cases deal with work in isolated communities (Further Reading: street ethnography).

And although participant observation in small, isolated communities has some special characteristics, the techniques and skills that are required seem to me to be pretty much the same everywhere.

WHAT IS PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION?

Participant observation usually involves fieldwork, but not all fieldwork is participant observation. Gomes do Espirito Santo and Etheredge (2002) interviewed 1,083 male clients of female sex workers and collected saliva specimens (to test for HIV) during 38 nights of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal. The data collection involved a team of six fieldworkers, and the lead researcher was with the team throughout the 3.5 months that it took to collect the data. This was serious fieldwork, but hardly participant observation.

So much for what participant observation isn’t. Here’s what it is: Participant observation is one of those strategic methods I talked about in chapter 1—like experiments, surveys, or archival research. It puts you where the action is and lets you collect data . . . any kind of data you want, narratives or numbers. It has been used for generations by positivists and interpretivists alike.

A lot of the data collected by participant observers are qualitative: field notes taken about things you see and hear in natural settings; photographs of the content of people’s houses; audio recordings of people telling folk tales; video of people making canoes, getting married, having an argument; transcriptions of taped, open-ended interviews, and so on.

But lots of data collected by participant observers are quantitative and are based on methods like direct observation, questionnaires, and pile sorts. Whether you consider yourself an interpretivist or a positivist, participant observation gets you in the door so you can collect life histories, attend rituals, and talk to people about sensitive topics.

Participant observation involves going out and staying out, learning a new language (or a new dialect of a language you already know), and experiencing the lives of the people you are studying as much as you can. Participant observation is about stalking culture in the wild—establishing rapport and learning to act so that people go about their business as usual when you show up. If you are a successful participant observer, you will know when to laugh at what people think is funny, and when people laugh at what you say, it will be because you meant it to be a joke.

Participant observation involves immersing yourself in a culture and learning to remove yourself every day from that immersion so you can intellectualize what you’ve seen and heard, put it into perspective, and write about it convincingly. When it’s done right, participant observation turns fieldworkers into instruments of data collection and data analysis.

The implication is that better fieldworkers are better data collectors and better data analyzers. And the implication of that is that participant observation is not an attitude or an epistemological commitment or a way of life. It’s a craft. As with all crafts, becoming a skilled artisan at participant observation takes practice.

SOME BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) didn’t invent participant observation, but he is widely credited with developing it as a serious method of social research. A British social anthropologist (born in Poland), Malinowski went out to study the people of the Trobriand Islands, in the Indian Ocean, just before World War I. At the time, the Trobriand Islands were a German possession, so when the war broke out, Malinowski was interned and could not return to England for 3 years. He made the best of the situation, though. Here is Malinowski describing his methods:

Soon after I had established myself in Omarkana, Trobriand Islands, I began to take part, in a way, in the village life, to look forward to the important or festive events, to take personal interest in the gossip and the developments of the village occurrences; to wake up every morning to a new day, presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the natives. . . . As I went on my morning walk through the village, I could see intimate details of family life, of toilet, cooking, taking of meals; I could see the arrangements for the day’s work, people starting on their errands, or groups of men and women busy at some manufacturing tasks.

Quarrels, jokes, family scenes, events usually trivial, sometimes dramatic but always significant, form the atmosphere of my daily life, as well as of theirs. It must be remembered that the natives saw me constantly every day, they ceased to be interested or alarmed, or made self-conscious by my presence, and I ceased to be a disturbing element in the tribal life which I was to study, altering it by my very approach, as always happens with a newcomer to every savage community. In fact, as they knew that I would thrust my nose into everything, even where a well-mannered native would not dream of intruding, they finished by regarding me as a part and parcel of their life, a necessary evil or nuisance, mitigated by donations of tobacco. (1961 [1922]:7–8)

Ignore the patronizing rhetoric about the ‘‘savage community’’ and ‘‘donations of tobacco.’’ (I’ve learned to live with this part of our history in anthropology. Knowing that all of us, in every age, look quaint, politically incorrect, or just plain hopeless to those who come later has made it easier.) Focus instead on the amazing, progressive (for that time) method that Malinowski advocated: Spend lots and lots of time in studying a culture, learn the language, hang out, do all the everyday things that everyone else does, become inconspicuous by sheer tenaciousness, and stay aware of what’s really going on. Apart from the colonialist rhetoric, Malinowski’s discussion of participant observation is as resonant today as it was almost a century ago (box 12.2).

BOX 12.2

NO TE S A ND Q UE R I E S . . .

By the time Malinowski went to the Trobriands, Notes and Queries on Anthropology—the fieldwork manual produced by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland—was in its fourth edition. The first edition came out in 1874 and the last edition (the sixth) was reprinted five times until 1971.

Forty years later, that final edition of Notes and Queries is still must reading for anyone interested in learning about anthropological field methods. Once again, ignore the fragments of paternalistic colonialism—‘‘a sporting rifle and a shotgun are . . . of great assistance in many districts where the natives may welcome extra meat in the shape of game killed by their visitor’’ (Royal Anthropological Institute 1951:29)—and Notes and Queries is full of useful, late-model advice about how to conduct a census, how to take impressions of engraved objects, and what questions to ask about sexual orientation, infanticide, food production, warfare, art. . . . The book is just a treasure.

We make the most consistent use of participant observation in anthropology, but the method has very, very deep roots in sociology. Beatrice Webb was doing participant observation—complete with note taking and informant interviewing—in the 1880s and she wrote trenchantly about the method in her memoir (Webb 1926). Just about then, the long tradition in sociology of urban ethnography—the ‘‘Chicago School’’—began at the University of Chicago under the direction of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (see Park et al. 1925). One of Park’s students was his son-in-law, Robert Redfield, the anthropologist who pioneered community studies in Mexico.

Just back from lengthy fieldwork with Aborigine peoples in Australia, another young anthropologist, William Lloyd Warner, was also influenced by Park. Warner launched one of the most famous American community-study projects of all time, the Yankee City series (Warner 1963; Warner and Hunt 1941). (Yankee City was the pseudonym for Newburyport, Massachusetts.) In 1929, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published the first of many ethnographies about Middletown. (Middletown was the pseudonym for Muncie, Indiana.)

Some of the classic ethnographies that came out of the early Chicago School include Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929) and Clifford Shaw’s The Jack Roller (1930). In The Jack Roller, a 22-year-old named Stanley talks about what it was like to grow up as a delinquent in early 20th-century Chicago. It still makes great reading.

Becker et al.’s Boys in White (1961)—about the student culture of medical school in the 1950s—should be required reading, even today, for anyone trying to understand the culture of medicine in the United States. The ethnography tradition in sociology continues in the pages of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, which began in 1972 under the title Urban Life and Culture (Further Reading: Chicago School of ethnography).

Participant observation today is everywhere—in political science, management, education, nursing, criminology, social psychology—and one of the terrific results of all this is a growing body of literature about participant observation itself. There are highly focused studies, full of practical advice, and there are poignant discussions of the overall experience of fieldwork. For large doses of both, see Wolcott (1995), Agar (1996), and Handwerker (2001). There’s still plenty of mystery and romance in participant observation, but you don’t have to go out unprepared (Further Reading: participant observation fieldwork).

FIELDWORK ROLES

Fieldwork can involve three very different roles: (1) complete participant, (2) participant observer, and (3) complete observer. The first role involves deception—becoming a member of a group without letting on that you’re there to do research. The third role involves following people around and recording their behavior with little if any interaction. This is part of direct observation, which we’ll take up in chapter 14.

By far, most ethnographic research is based on the second role, that of the participant observer. Participant observers can be insiders who observe and record some aspects of life around them (in which case, they’re observing participants), or they can be outsiders who participate in some aspects of life around them and record what they can (in which case, they’re participating observers).

In 1965, I went to sea with a group of Greek sponge fishermen in the Mediterranean. I lived in close quarters with them, ate the same awful food as they did, and generally participated in their life—as an outsider. I didn’t dive for sponges, but I spent most of my waking hours studying the behavior and the conversation of the men who did. The divers were curious about what I was writing in my notebooks, but they went about their business and just let me take notes, time their dives, and shoot movies (Bernard 1987). I was a participating observer.

Similarly, when I went to sea in 1972 and 1973 with oceanographic research vessels, I was part of the scientific crew, there to watch how oceanographic scientists, technicians, and mariners interacted and how this interaction affected the process of gathering oceanographic data. There, too, I was a participating observer (Bernard and Killworth 1973).

Circumstances can sometimes overtake the role of mere participating observer. In 1979, El Salvador was in civil war. Thousands fled to Honduras where they were sheltered in refugee camps near the border. Phillipe Bourgois went to one of those camps to initiate what he hoped would be his doctoral research in anthropology. Some refugees there offered to show him their home villages and Bourgois crossed with them, illegally, into El Salvador for what he thought would be a 48-hour visit. Instead, Bourgois was trapped, along with about a thousand peasants, for 2 weeks, as the Salvadoran military bombed, shelled, and strafed a 40-square-kilometer area in search of rebels (Bourgois 1990). Perforce, Bourgois became an observing participant.

John Van Maanen played both of these roles, one after the other, in his dissertation research on how rookie cops in a California city become street-wise. There was nothing accidental about this, either. First, Van Maanen went through the 3-month training course at the police academy. Everyone at the academy knew why he was there, but he was a full participant in the training. He was an observing participant. Then, for 4 months, Van Maanen rode 8 to 10 hours a day in the back of a patrol car as an participant observer (Van Maanen 1973). His first role not only gave Van Maanen the credibility he needed for his second role to be successful; it also gave him a deep appreciation of what he was observing in his second role.

Researchers at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons asked Mark Fleisher (1989) to do an ethnographic study of job pressures on guards in a maximum-security federal penitentiary in California. It costs a lot to train a guard—a correctional officer, or CO in the jargon of the profession—and there was an unacceptably high rate of them leaving the job after a year or two. Could Fleisher look into the problem?

Fleisher said he’d be glad to do the research and asked when he could start ‘‘walking the mainline’’—that is, accompanying the COs on their rounds through the prison. He was told that he’d be given an office at the prison and that the guards would come to his office to be interviewed. Fleisher said he was sorry, but he was an anthropologist, he was doing participant observation, and he’d have to have the run of the prison. Sorry, they said back, only sworn correctional officers can walk the prison halls. So, swear me in, said Fleisher, and off he went to training camp for 6 weeks to become a sworn federal correctional officer. Then he began his year-long study of the United States Penitentiary at Lompoc, California. In other words, he became an observing participant in the culture he was studying. Like Van Maanen, Fleisher never hid what he was doing. When he went to USP-Lompoc, Fleisher told everyone that he was an anthropologist doing a study of prison life.

Barbara Marriott (1991) studied how the wives of U.S. Navy male officers contributed to their husbands’ careers. Marriott was herself the wife of a retired captain. She was able to bring the empathy of 30 years’ full participation to her study. She, too, took the role of observing participant and, like Fleisher, she told her informants exactly what she was doing.

Holly Williams (1995) spent 14 years as a nurse, ministering to the needs of children who had cancer. When Williams did her doctoral dissertation, on how the parents of those young patients coped with the trauma, she started as a credible insider, as someone whom the parents could trust with their worst fears and their hopes against all hope. Williams was a complete participant who became an observing participant by telling the people whom she was studying exactly what she was up to and enlisting their help with the research (box 12.3).

HOW MUCH TIME DOES IT TAKE?

Anthropological field research traditionally takes a year or more because it takes that long to get a feel for the full round of people’s lives. It can take that long just to settle in, learn a new language, gain rapport, and be in a position to ask good questions and get good answers.

A lot of participant observation studies, however, are done in a matter of weeks or a few months. Norman Conti (2009) was a participant observer during a 21-week course at a police academy, documenting how recruits develop their occupational culture. Gretchen Purser (2009) spent 5 months studying the hiring of illegal immigrant day laborers. She divided her time each week between a street corner that had become a shape-up venue and a not-for-profit agency about a mile away that brought day laborers and potential employers together.

At the extreme low end, it is possible to do useful participant observation in just a few days. Assuming that you’ve wasted as much time in Laundromats as I did when I was a student, you could conduct a reasonable participant observation study of one such place in a week. You’d begin by bringing in a load of wash and paying careful attention to what’s going on around you.

BOX 12.3

G O I N G N A T I V E

Some fieldworkers start out as participating observers and find that they are drawn completely into their informants’ lives. In 1975, Kenneth Good went to study the Yanomami in the Venezuelan Amazon. He planned on living with the Yanomami for 15 months, but he stayed on for nearly 13 years. ‘‘To my great surprise,’’ says Good, ‘‘I had found among them a way of life that, while dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, and a thousand daily lessons in communal harmony’’ (Good 1991:ix). Good learned the language and became a nomadic hunter and gatherer. He was adopted into a lineage and given a wife. (Good and his wife, Ya´rima, tried living in the United States, but after a few years, Ya´rima returned to the Yanomami.)

Marlene Dobkin de Rios did fieldwork in Peru and married the son of a Peruvian folk healer whose practice she studied (Dobkin de Rios 1981). And Jean Gearing (1995) is another anthropologist who married her closest informant on the island of St. Vincent.

Does going native mean loss of objectivity? Perhaps, but not necessarily. In the industrialized countries of the West, we expect immigrants to go native. We expect them to become fluent in the local language, to make sure that their children become fully acculturated, to participate in the economy and politics of the nation, and so on. If some of them become anthropologists, no one questions whether their immigrant background produces a lack of objectivity. Since total objectivity is, by definition, a myth, I’d worry more about producing credible data and strong analysis and less about whether going native is good or bad.

After two or three nights of observation, you’d be ready to tell other patrons that you were conducting research and that you’d appreciate their letting you interview them. The reason you could do this is because you already speak the native language and have already picked up the nuances of etiquette from previous experience. Participant observation would help you intellectualize what you already know.

In general, though, participant observation is not for the impatient. Gerald Berreman studied life in Sirkanda, a Pahari-speaking village in north India. Berreman’s interpreterassistant, Sharma, was a Hindu Brahmin who neither ate meat nor drank alcohol. As a result, villagers did neither around Berreman or his assistant. Three months into the research, Sharma fell ill and Berreman hired Mohammed, a young Muslim schoolteacher to fill in.

When the villagers found out that Mohammed ate meat and drank alcohol, things broke wide open and Berreman found out that there were frequent intercaste meat and liquor parties. When villagers found out that the occasional drink of locally made liquor was served at Berreman’s house, ‘‘access to information of many kinds increased proportionately’’ (Berreman 1962:10). Even then, it still took Berreman 6 months in Sirkanda before people felt comfortable performing animal sacrifices when he was around (Berreman 1962:20).

And don’t think that long term is only for foreign fieldwork. It took Daniel Wolf 3 years just to get into the Rebels, a brotherhood of outlaw bikers, and another couple of years riding with them before he had the data for his doctoral dissertation (Wolf 1991).

The amount of time you spend in the field can make a big difference in what you learn. Raoul Naroll (1962) found that anthropologists who stayed in the field for at least a year were more likely to report on sensitive issues like witchcraft, sexuality, political feuds, etc. Back in chapter 3, I mentioned David Price’s study of water theft among farmers in Egypt’s Fayoum Oasis. You might have wondered then how in the world he was able to do that study. Each farmer had a water allotment—a certain day each week and a certain amount of time during which water could flow to his fields. Price lived with these farmers for 8 months before they began telling him privately that they occasionally diverted water to their own fields from those of others (1995:106). Ethnographers who have done very long-term participant observation—that is, a series of studies over decades—find that they eventually get data about social change that is simply not possible to get in any other way (Kemper and Royce 2002).

My wife Carole and I spent May 2000 on Kalymnos, the Greek island where I did my doctoral fieldwork in 1964–65. We’d been visiting that island steadily for 40 years, but something qualitatively different happened in 2000. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but by the end of the month I realized that people were talking to me about grandchildren. The ones who had grandchildren were chiding me—very good-naturedly, but chiding nonetheless—for not having any grandchildren yet. The ones who didn’t have grandchildren were in commiseration mode. They wanted someone with whom to share their annoyance that ‘‘Kids these days are in no hurry to make families’’ and that ‘‘All kids want today . . . especially girls . . . is to have careers.’’

This launched lengthy conversations about how ‘‘everything had changed’’ since we had been our children’s ages and about how life in Greece was getting to be more and more like Europe (which is what many Greeks call Germany, France, and the rest of the fully industrialized nations of the European Union), and even like the United States. I suppose there were other ways I could have gotten people into give-and-take conversations—about culture change, gender roles, globalization, modernization, and other big topics—but the grandchildren deficit was a terrific opener in 2000. It wasn’t just age. These conversations were the result of the rapport that comes with having common history with people.

Here’s history. In 1964, Carole and I brought our then 2-month-old daughter with us. Some of the same people who joked with me in 2000 about not having grandchildren had said to me in 1964: ‘‘Don’t worry, next time you’ll have a son.’’ I recall having been really, really annoyed at the time, but writing it down as data. A couple of years later, I sent friends on Kalymnos the announcement of our second child—another girl. I got back kidding remarks like ‘‘Congratulations! Keep on trying. . . . Still plenty of time to have a boy!’’ Those were data, too. And when I told people that Carole and I had decided to stop at two, some of them offered mock condolences: ‘‘Oh, now you’re really in for it! You’ll have to get dowries for two girls without any sons to help.’’ Now those are data!

Skip to 2004, when our daughter, son-in-law, and new granddaughter Zoe¨ came to Kalymnos for Zoe¨’s first birthday. There is a saying in Greek that ‘‘the child of your child is twice your child.’’ You can imagine all the conversations, late into the night, about that. More data. By 2009, the grandchildren deficit had been resolved for many of my cohort, but not for all. By this time, people in their late 60s and early 70s were talking openly about things that could not have been imagined 40 years earlier, like: Who will take care of old people if there are no granddaughters?

Bottom line: You can do highly focused participant observation research in your own language, to answer specific questions about your own culture, in a short time. How do middle-class, second-generation Mexican American women make decisions on which of several brands of pinto beans to select when they go grocery shopping? If you are a middle-class Mexican American woman, you can probably find the answer to that question, using participant observation, in a few weeks, because you have a wealth of personal experience to draw on.

But if you’re starting out fresh, and not as a member of the culture you’re studying, count on taking 3 months or more, under the best conditions, to be accepted as a participant observer—that is, as someone who has learned enough to learn. And count on taking a lifetime to learn some things.

Rapid Assessment

Applied researchers don’t always have the luxury of doing long-term participant observation fieldwork. In fact, applied work—like needs assessment in nutrition, education, and agricultural development—often has to be done in a few weeks. This doesn’t leave much time for building rapport, and applied anthropologists have developed rapid ethnographic assessment procedures, including participatory rapid assessment. These methods are now used by anthropologists in long-term fieldwork.

In participatory mapping, for example, people draw maps of their villages and locate key places on the maps. Robert Chambers, a pioneer in PRA, spent 2 full days in 1974 trying to map the wells in an Indian village. Fifteen years later, he tells us, in 1989, one of his colleagues asked people in another Indian village to map their wells. The job was done in 25 minutes and the villagers noted which wells had water and which were dry (Chambers 2006). In participatory transects, a technique that Chambers borrowed from wildlife biology, you walk through an area systematically, with key informants, observing and asking for explanations of everything you see along the transect. Chambers also engages people in group discussions of key events in a village’s history and asks them to identify clusters of households according to wealth. In other words, as an applied anthropologist, Chambers is called on to do rapid assessment of rural village needs, and he takes the people fully into his confidence as research partners. This method is just as effective in organizations as in small villages.

Applied medical anthropologists also use rapid assessment methods. The focused ethnographic study method, or FES, was developed by Sandy Gove (a physician) and Gretel Pelto (an anthropologist) for the World Health Organization to study acute respiratory illness (ARI) in children. The FES manual gives detailed instructions to fieldworkers for running a rapid ethnographic study of ARI in a community (Gove and Pelto 1994; WHO 1993).

Many ARI episodes turn out to be what physicians call pneumonia, but that is not necessarily what mothers call the illness. Researchers ask mothers to talk about recent ARI events in their households. Mothers also free list the symptoms, causes, and cures for ARI and do pile sorts of illnesses to reveal the folk taxonomy of illness and where ARI fits into that taxonomy. There is also a matching exercise, in which mothers pair locally defined symptoms (fever, sore throat, headache . . .) with locally defined causes (bad water, evil eye, germs . . .), cures (give rice water, rub the belly, take child to the doctor . . .), and illnesses.

The FES method also uses vignettes, or scenarios, much like those developed by Peter Rossi for the factorial survey (see chapter 9). Mothers are presented with cases in which variables are changed systematically (‘‘Your child wakes up with [mild] [strong] fever. He complains that he has [a headache] [stomach ache],’’ and so on) and are asked to talk about how they would handle the case.

All this evidence—the free narratives, the pile sorts, the vignettes, etc.—is used in understanding the emic part of ARI, the local explanatory model for the illness.

Researchers also identify etic factors that make it easy or hard for mothers to get medical care for children who have pneumonia. These are things like the distance to a clinic, availability of transportation, number of young children at home, availability to mothers of people with whom they can leave their children for a while, and so on.

The key to high-quality, quick ethnography, according to Handwerker (2001), is to go into a study with a clear question and to limit your study to five focus variables. If the research is exploratory, you just have to make a reasonable guess as to what variables might be important and hope for the best. Most rapid assessment studies, however, are applied research, which usually means that you can take advantage of earlier, long-term studies to narrow your focus.

For example, Edwins Laban Moogi Gwako (1997) spent over a year testing the effects of eight independent variables on Maragoli women’s agricultural productivity in western Kenya. At the end of his doctoral research, he found that just two variables—women’s land tenure security and the total value of their household wealth—accounted for 46% of the variance in productivity of plots worked by women. None of the other variables— household size, a woman’s age, whether a woman’s husband lived at home, and so on— had any effect on the dependent variable.

If you were doing a rapid assessment of women’s agricultural productivity elsewhere in east Africa, you would take advantage of Laban Moogi Gwako’s work and limit the variables you tested to perhaps four or five—the two that he found were important and perhaps two or three others. You can study this same problem for a lifetime, and the more time you spend, the more you’ll understand the subtleties and complexities of the problem. But the point here is that if you have a clear question and a few, clearly defined variables, you can produce quality work in a lot less time than you might imagine (Further Reading: rapid ethnographic assessment).

VALIDITY—AGAIN

There are at least five reasons for insisting on participant observation in the conduct of scientific research about cultural groups.

1. Participant observation opens thing up and makes it possible to collect all kinds of data. Participant observation fieldworkers have witnessed births, interviewed violent men in maximum-security prisons, stood in fields noting the behavior of farmers, trekked with hunters through the Amazon forest in search of game, and pored over records of marriages, births, and deaths in village churches and mosques around the world.

It is impossible to imagine a complete stranger walking into a birthing room and being welcomed to watch and record the event or being allowed to examine any community’s vital records at whim. It is impossible, in fact, to imagine a stranger doing any of the things I just mentioned or the thousands of other intrusive acts of data collection that fieldworkers engage in all the time. What makes it all possible is participant observation.

2. Participant observation reduces the problem of reactivity—of people changing their behavior when they know that they are being studied. As you become less and less of a curiosity, people take less and less interest in your comings and goings. They go about their business and let you do such bizarre things as conduct interviews, administer questionnaires, and even walk around with a stopwatch, clipboard, and camera.

Phillipe Bourgois (1995) spent 4 years living in El Barrio (the local name for Spanish Harlem) in New York City. It took him a while, but eventually he was able to keep his tape recorder running for interviews about dealing crack cocaine and even when groups of men bragged about their involvement in gang rapes.

Margaret Graham (2003) weighed every gram of every food prepared for 75 people eating over 600 meals in 15 households in the Peruvian Andes. This was completely alien to her informants, but after 5 months of intimate participant observation, those 15 families allowed her to visit them several times, with an assistant and a food scale.

In other words: Presence builds trust. Trust lowers reactivity. Lower reactivity means higher validity of data. Nothing is guaranteed in fieldwork, though. Graham’s informants gave her permission to come weigh their food, but the act of doing so turned out to be more alienating than either she or her informants had anticipated. By local rules of hospitality, people had to invite Graham to eat with them during the three visits she made to their homes—but Graham couldn’t accept any food, lest doing so bias her study of the nutritional intake of her informants. Graham discussed the awkward situation openly with her informants, and made spot checks of some families a few days after each weighing episode to make sure that people were eating the same kinds and portions of food as Graham had witnessed (Graham 2003:154).

And when Margaret LeCompte told children at a school that she was writing a book about them, they started acting out in ‘‘ways they felt would make good copy’’ by mimicking characters on popular TV programs (LeCompte et al. 1993).

3. Participant observation helps you ask sensible questions, in the native language. Have you ever gotten a questionnaire in the mail and said to yourself: ‘‘What a dumb set of questions’’? If a social scientist who is a member of your own culture can make up what you consider to be ‘‘dumb’’ questions, imagine the risk you take in making up a questionnaire in a culture very different from your own! Remember, it’s just as important to ask sensible questions in a face-to-face interview as it is on a survey instrument.

4. Participant observation gives you an intuitive understanding of what’s going on in a culture and allows you to speak with confidence about the meaning of data. Participant observation lets you make strong statements about cultural facts that you’ve collected. It extends both the internal and the external validity of what you learn from interviewing and watching people. In short, participant observation helps you understand the meaning of your observations (box 12.4).

5. Many research problems simply cannot be addressed adequately by anything except participant observation. If you want to understand how a local court works, you can’t very well disguise yourself and sit in the courtroom unnoticed. The judge would soon spot you as a stranger, and after a few days you would have to explain yourself. It is better to explain yourself at the beginning and get permission to act as a participant observer. In this case, your participation consists of acting like any other local person who might sit in on the court’s proceedings. After a few days, or weeks, you would have a pretty good idea of how the court worked: what kinds of crimes are adjudicated, what kinds of penalties are meted out, and so forth. You might develop some specific hypotheses from your qualitative notes—hypotheses regarding covariations between

BOX 12.4

T H E M E A N I N G O F D A T A

In 1957, N. K. Sarkar and S. J. Tambiah published a classic study, based on questionnaire data, about economic and social disintegration in a Sri Lankan village. They concluded that about two-thirds of the villagers were landless. The British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, did not accept that finding (Leach 1967). He had done participant observation fieldwork in the area and knew that the villagers practiced patrilocal residence after marriage. By local custom, a young man might receive use of some of his father’s land even though legal ownership might not pass to the son until the father’s death.

In assessing land ownership, Sarkar and Tambiah asked whether a ‘‘household’’ had any land, and if so, how much. They defined an independent household as a unit that cooked rice in its own pot. Unfortunately, all married women in the village had their own rice pots. So Sarkar and Tambiah wound up estimating the number of independent households as very high and the number of those households that owned land as very low. Based on these data, they concluded that there was gross inequality in land ownership and that this characterized a ‘‘disintegrating village’’ (the title of their book).

Don’t conclude from Leach’s critique that questionnaires are ‘‘bad,’’ while participant observation is ‘‘good.’’ I can’t say often enough that participant observation makes it possible to collect quantitative survey data or qualitative interview data from some sample of a population. Qualitative and quantitative data inform each other and produce insight and understanding in a way that cannot be duplicated by either approach alone. Whatever data collection methods you choose, participant observation maximizes your chances for making valid statements.

severity of punishment and independent variables other than severity of crime. Then you could test those hypotheses on a sample of courts.

Think this is unrealistic? Try going down to your local traffic court and see whether defendants’ dress or manner of speech predict variations in fines for the same infraction. The point is, getting a general understanding of how any social institution or organization works—the local justice system, a hospital, a ship, or an entire community—is best achieved through participant observation.

ENTERING THE FIELD

Perhaps the most difficult part of actually doing participant observation fieldwork is making an entry. There are five rules to follow.

1. There is no reason to select a site that is difficult to enter when equally good sites are available that are easy to enter (see chapter 3). In many cases, you will have a choice— among equally good villages in a region, or among school districts, hospitals, or cell blocks. When you have a choice, take the field site that promises to provide easiest access to data.

2. Go into the field with plenty of written documentation about yourself and your project. You’ll need formal letters of introduction—at a minimum, from your university, or from your client if you are doing applied work on a contract. Letters from universities should spell out your affiliation, who is funding you, and how long you will be at the field site.

Be sure that those letters are in the language spoken where you will be working, and that they are signed by the highest academic authorities possible.

Letters of introduction should not go into detail about your research. Keep a separate document handy in which you describe your proposed work and present it to gatekeepers who ask for it, along with your letters of introduction.

Of course, if you study an outlaw biker gang, like Daniel Wolf did, forget about letters of introduction (Wolf 1991). On the other hand, Johnny Moore was president of an outlaw biker gang in Mississippi before he teamed up with sociologist Columbus Hopper to study biker gangs (Hopper and Moore 1983). Moore had ‘‘courtesy cards’’ from biker gangs across the country that served as letters of introduction (Hopper and Moore 1990:385).

3. Don’t try to wing it, unless you absolutely have to. There is nothing to be said for ‘‘getting in on your own.’’ Use personal contacts to help you make your entry into a field site.

When I went to Kalymnos, Greece, in 1964, I carried with me a list of people to look up. I collected the list from people in the Greek American community of Tarpon Springs, Florida, who had relatives on Kalymnos. When I went to Washington, DC, to study how decision-makers in the bureaucracy used (or didn’t use) scientific information, I had letters of introduction from colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (where I was working at the time).

If you are studying any hierarchically organized community (hospitals, police departments, universities, school systems, etc.), it is usually best to start at the top and work down. Find out the names of the people who are the gatekeepers and see them first. Assure them that you will maintain strict confidentiality and that no one in your study will be personally identifiable.

In some cases, though, starting at the top can backfire. If there are warring factions in a community or organization, and if you gain entry to the group at the top of one of those factions, you will be asked to side with that faction.

Another danger is that top administrators of institutions may try to enlist you as a kind of spy. They may offer to facilitate your work if you will report back to them on what you find out about specific individuals. This is absolutely off limits in research. If that’s the price of doing a study, you’re better off choosing another institution. In the 2 years I spent doing research on communication structures in federal prisons, no one ever asked me to report on the activities of specific inmates. But other researchers have reported experiencing this kind of pressure, so it’s worth keeping in mind (Further Reading: gatekeepers).

4. Think through in advance what you will say when ordinary people (not just gatekeepers) ask you: What are you doing here? Who sent you? Who’s funding you? What good is your research and who will it benefit? Why do you want to learn about people here?

How long will you be here? How do I know you aren’t a spy for ? (where the blank is filled in by whoever people are afraid of).

The rules for presentation of self are simple: Be honest, be brief, and be absolutely consistent. In participant observation, if you try to play any role other than yourself, you’ll just get worn out (D. J. Jones 1973).

But understand that not everyone will be thrilled about your role as a researcher. Terry Williams studied cocaine use in after-hours clubs in New York. It was ‘‘gay night’’ in one bar he went to. Williams started a conversation with a man whose sleeves were fully rolled, exposing tattoos on both arms. The man offered to buy William a drink. Was this Williams’s first time at the bar? Williams said he’d been there before, that he was a researcher, and that he just wanted to talk. The man turned to his friends and exploded: ‘‘Hey, get a load of this one. He wants to do research on us. You scum bag! What do we look like, pal? Fucking guinea pigs?’’ (T. Williams 1996:30).

After that experience, Williams became, as he said, ‘‘more selective’’ in whom he told about his real purpose in those after-hours clubs.

5. Spend time getting to know the physical and social layout of your field site. It doesn’t matter if you’re working in a rural village, an urban enclave, or a hospital. Walk it and write notes about how it feels to you. Is it crowded? Do the buildings or furniture seem old or poorly kept? Are there any distinctive odors?

You’d be surprised how much information comes from asking people about little things like these. I can still smell the distinctive blend of diesel fuel and taco sauce that’s characteristic of so many bus depots in rural Mexico. Asking people about those smells opened up long conversations about what it’s like for poor people, who don’t own cars, to travel in Mexico and all the family and business reasons they have for traveling. If something in your environment makes a strong sensory impression, write it down.

A really good early activity in any participant observation project is to make maps and charts—kinship charts of families, chain-of-command charts in organizations, maps of offices or villages or whatever physical space you’re studying, charts of who sits where at meetings, and so on.

For making maps, take a GPS (global positioning system) device to the field with you. GPS devices that are accurate to within 3 meters or less are available for under $200 (see appendix E for more). What a GPS does is track your path via satellite, so that if you can walk the perimeter of an area, you can map it and mark its longitude and latitude accurately. Eri Sugita (2006) studied the relation between the washing of hands by the mothers of young children and the rate of diarrheal disease among those children in Bugobero, Uganda. Sugita used a GPS device to map the position of every well and every spring in Bugobero. Then she walked to each of the water sources from each of the 51 households in her study and, wearing a pedometer, measured the travel distance to the nearest source of clean water.

Another good thing to do is to take a census of the group you’re studying as soon as you can. When she began her fieldwork on the demography and fertility in a Mexican village, Julia Pauli (2000) did a complete census of 165 households. She recorded the names of all the people who were considered to be members of the household, whether they were living there or not (a lot of folks were away, working as migrant laborer). She recorded their sex, age, religion, level of education, marital status, occupation, place of birth, and where each person was living right then. Then, for each of the 225 women who had given birth at least once, she recorded the name, sex, birth date, education, current occupation, marital status, and current residence of each child.

Pauli gave each person in a household their own, unique identification number and she gave each child of each woman in a household an I.D. number—whether the child was living at home, away working, or married and living in a separate household in the village. In the course of her census, she would eventually run into those married children living in other households. But because each person kept his or her unique I.D. number, Pauli was able to link all those born in the village to their natal homes. In other words, Pauli used the data from her straightforward demographic survey to build a kinship network of the village.

A census of a village or a hospital gives you the opportunity to walk around a community and to talk with most of its members at least once. It lets you be seen by others and it gives you an opportunity to answer questions, as well as to ask them. It allows you to get information that official censuses don’t retrieve. And it can be a way to gain rapport in a community. But it can also backfire if people are afraid you might be a spy. Michael Agar reports that he was branded as a Pakistani spy when he went to India, so his village census was useless (1980b).

THE SKILLS OF A PARTICIPANT OBSERVER

To a certain extent, participant observation must be learned in the field. The strength of participant observation is that you, as a researcher, become the instrument for data collection and analysis through your own experience. Consequently, you have to experience participant observation to get good at it. Nevertheless, there are a number of skills that you can develop before you go into the field.

Learning the Language

Unless you are a full participant in the culture you’re studying, being a participant observer makes you a freak. Here’s how anthropologists looked to Vine Deloria (1969:78), a Sioux writer:

Anthropologists can readily be identified on the reservations. Go into any crowd of people. Pick out a tall gaunt white man wearing Bermuda shorts, a World War II Army Air Force flying jacket, an Australian bush hat, tennis shoes, and packing a large knapsack incorrectly strapped on his back. He will invariably have a thin, sexy wife with stringy hair, an I. Q. of 191, and a vocabulary in which even the prepositions have eleven syllables. . . . This creature is an anthropologist.

Now, four decades later, it’s more likely to be the anthropologist’s husband who jabbers in 11-syllable words, but the point is still the same. The most important thing you can do to stop being a freak is to speak the language of the people you’re studying—and speak it well. Franz Boas was adamant about this. ‘‘Nobody,’’ he said, ‘‘would expect authoritative accounts of the civilization of China or Japan from a man who does not speak the languages readily, and who has not mastered their literatures’’ (1911:56). And yet, ‘‘the best kept secret of anthropology,’’ says Robbins Burling, ‘‘is the linguistic incompetence of ethnological fieldworkers’’ (2000 [1984]:v).

That secret is actually not so much well kept as ignored. In 1933, Paul Radin, one of Franz Boas’s students, complained that Margaret Mead’s work on Samoa was superficial because she wasn’t fluent in Samoan (Radin 1966 [1933]:179). Sixty-six years later, Derek Freeman (1999) showed that Mead was probably duped by at least some of her adolescent informants about the extent of their sexual experience because she didn’t know the local language.

In fact, Mead talked quite explicitly about her use of interpreters. It was not necessary, said Mead, for fieldworkers to become what she called virtuosos in a native language. It was enough simply to use a native language, as she put it, without actually speaking it fluently:

If one knows how to exclaim ‘‘how beautiful!’’ of an offering, ‘‘how fat!’’ of a baby, ‘‘how big!’’ of a just shot pig; if one can say ‘‘my foot’s asleep’’ or ‘‘my back itches’’ as one sits in a closely pack native group with whom one is as yet unable to hold a sustained conversation; if one can ask the simple questions: ‘‘Is that your child?’’ ‘‘Is your father living?’’ ‘‘Are the mosquitoes biting you?’’ or even utter culturally appropriate squeals and monosyllables which accompany fright at a scorpion, or startle at a loud noise, it is easy to establish rapport with people who depend upon affective contact for reassurance. (Mead 1939:198)

Robert Lowie would have none of it. A people’s ethos, he said, is never directly observed. ‘‘It can be inferred only from their self-revelations,’’ and this, indeed, requires the dreaded virtuosity that Mead had dismissed (Lowie 1940:84–87). The ‘‘horse-andbuggy ethnographers,’’ said Lowie, in a direct response to Mead in the American Anthropologist, accepted virtuosity—that is, a thorough knowledge of the language in which one does fieldwork—on principle. ‘‘The new, stream-lined ethnographers,’’ he taunted, rejected this as superfluous (Lowie 1940:87). Lowie was careful to say that a thorough knowledge of a field language did not mean native proficiency. And, of course, Mead understood the benefits of being proficient in a field language. But she also understood that a lot of ethnography gets done through interpreters or through contact languages, like French, English, and pidgins . . . the not-so-well kept secret in anthropology (Further Reading: using interpreters).

Still . . . according to Brislin et al. (1973:70), Samoa is one of those cultures where ‘‘it is considered acceptable to deceive and to ‘put on’ outsiders. Interviewers are likely to hear ridiculous answers, not given in a spirit of hostility but rather sport.’’ Brislin et al. call this the sucker bias and warn fieldworkers to watch out for it. Presumably, knowing the local language fluently is one way to become alert to and avoid this problem.

And remember Raoul Naroll’s finding that anthropologists who spent at least a year in the field were more likely to report on witchcraft? He also found that anthropologists who spoke the local language were more likely to report data about witchcraft than were those who didn’t. Fluency in the local language doesn’t just improve your rapport, it increases the probability that people will tell you about sensitive things, like witchcraft and that even if people try to put one over on you, you’ll know about it (Naroll 1962:89–90).

When it comes to doing effective participant observation, learning a new jargon in your own language is just as important as learning a foreign language. Peggy Sullivan and Kirk Elifson studied the Free Holiness church, a rural group of Pentecostals whose rituals include the handling of poisonous snakes (rattles, cottonmouths, copperheads, and water moccasins). They had to learn an entirely new vocabulary:

Terms and expressions like ‘‘annointment,’’ ‘‘tongues,’’ ‘‘shouting,’’ and ‘‘carried away in the Lord’’ began having meaning for us. We learned informally and often contextually through conversation and by listening to sermons and testimonials. The development of our understanding of the new language was gradual and probably was at its greatest depth when we were most submerged in the church and its culture. . . . We simplified our language style and eliminated our use of profanity. We realized, for example, that one badly placed ‘‘damn’’ could destroy trust that we had built up over months of hard work. (Sullivan and Elifson 1996:36)

How to Learn a New Language

In my experience, the way to learn a new language is to learn a few words and to say them brilliantly. Yes, study the grammar and vocabulary, but the key to learning a new language—and to using it effectively in ethnography—is saying things right, even just a handful of things. This means capturing not just the pronunciation of words, but also the intonation, the use of your hands, and other nonverbal cues that show you are really, really serious about the language and are trying to look and sound as much like a native as possible. Michael Herzfeld (2009b) reports that when he did his first summer’s fieldwork in Bangkok, he couldn’t get ordinary people in the street to respond to him in Thai. People just stared at him. On his second trip, a Thai person asked him for directions on the street. What had changed? Despite his white Western face, a street vendor told him, he had Thai gestures and looked Thai (p. 141).

When you say the equivalent of ‘‘Hey, hiya doin’ ’’ instead of the equivalent of ‘‘Hello, how are you today?’’ with just the right intonation in any language—Zulu or French or Arabic—people will think you know more than you do. They’ll come right back at you with a flurry of words, and you’ll be lost. Fine. Tell them to slow down—again, in that great accent and body language you’re cultivating.

Consider the alternative: You announce to people, with the first, badly accented, stilted words out of your mouth, that you know next to nothing about the language and that they should therefore speak to you with that in mind. When you talk to someone who is not a native speaker of your language, you make an automatic assessment of how large their vocabulary is and how fluent they are. You adjust both the speed of your speech and your vocabulary to ensure comprehension. That’s what Zulu and Arabic speakers will do with you, too. The trick is to act in a way that gets people into pushing your limits of fluency and into teaching you cultural insider words and phrases.

The real key to learning a language is to acquire vocabulary. People will usually figure out what you want to say if you butcher the grammar a bit, but they need nouns and verbs to even begin the effort. This requires studying lists of words every day and using as many new words every day as you can engineer into a conversation. Try to stick at least one conspicuously idiomatic word or phrase into your conversation every day That will not only nail down some insider vocabulary, it will stimulate everyone around you to give you more of the same.

A good fraction of any culture is in the idioms and especially in the metaphors (more about metaphors in chapter 19). To understand how powerful this can be, imagine you are hired to tutor a student from Nepal who wants to learn English. You point to some clouds and say ‘‘clouds’’ and she responds by saying ‘‘clouds.’’ You say ‘‘very good’’ and she says ‘‘no brainer.’’ You can certainly pick up the learning pace after that kind of response.

As you articulate more and more insider phrases like a native, people will increase the rate at which they teach you by raising the level of their discourse with you. They may even compete to teach you the subtleties of their language and culture. When I was learning Greek in 1960 on a Greek merchant ship, the sailors took delight in seeing to it that my vocabulary of obscenities was up to their standards and that my usage of that vocabulary was suitably robust.

To prepare for my doctoral fieldwork in 1964–65, I studied Greek at the University of

Illinois. By the end of 1965, after a year on the island of Kalymnos, my accent, mannerisms, and vocabulary were more Kalymnian than Athenian. When I went to teach at the University of Athens in 1969, my colleagues there were delighted that I wanted to teach in Greek, but they were conflicted about my accent. How to reconcile the fact that an educated foreigner spoke reasonably fluent Greek with what they took to be a rural, working-class accent? It didn’t compute, but they were very forgiving. After all, I was a foreigner, and the fact that I was making an attempt to speak the local language counted for a lot.

So, if you are going off to do fieldwork in a foreign language, try to find an intensive summer course in the country where that language is spoken. Not only will you learn the language (and the local dialect of that language), you’ll make personal contacts, find out what the problems are in selecting a research site, and discover how to tie your study to the interests of local scholars. You can study French in France, but you can also study it in Montreal, Martinique, or Madagascar. You can study Spanish in Spain, but you can also study it in Mexico, Bolivia, or Paraguay.

You’d be amazed at the range of language courses available at universities these days: Ulithi, Aymara, Quechua, Nahuatl, Swahili, Turkish, Amharic, Basque, Eskimo, Navajo, Zulu, Hausa, Amoy. . . . If the language you need is not offered in a formal course, try to find an individual speaker of the language (the husband or wife of a foreign student) who would be willing to tutor you in a self-paced course. There are self-paced courses in hundreds of languages available today, with lots of auditory material on disks or online.

There are, of course, many languages for which there are no published materials, except perhaps for a dictionary or part of the Judeo-Christian Bible. For those languages, you need to learn how to reduce them to writing quickly so that you can get on with learning them and with fieldwork. To learn how to reduce any language to writing, see the tutorial by Oswald Werner (2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002a, 2002b) (Further Reading: language and fieldwork) (box 12.5).

BOX 12.5

W H E N N O T T O M I M I C

The key to understanding the culture of loggers, lawyers, bureaucrats, schoolteachers, or ethnic groups is to become intimately familiar with their vocabulary. Words are where the cultural action is. My rule about mimicking pronunciation changes, though, if you are studying an ethnic or occupational subculture in your own society and the people in that subculture speak a different dialect of your native language. In this situation, mimicking the local pronunciation will just make you look silly. Even worse, people may think you’re ridiculing them.

Building Explicit Awareness

Another important skill in participant observation is what Spradley (1980:55) called explicit awareness of the little details in life. Try this experiment: The next time you see someone look at their watch, go right up to them and ask them the time. Chances are they’ll look again because when they looked the first time they were not explicitly aware of what they saw. Tell them that you are a student conducting a study and ask them to chat with you for a few minutes about how they tell time.

Many people who wear analog watches look at the relative positions of the hands, and not at the numbers on the dial. They subtract the current time (the position of the hands now) from the time they have to be somewhere (the image of what the position of the hands will look like at some time in the future), and calculate whether the difference is anything to worry about. They never have to become explicitly aware of the fact that it is 3:10 p.m. People who wear digital watches may be handling the process somewhat differently. We could test that.

Kronenfeld et al. (1972) reported an experiment in which informants leaving several different restaurants were asked what the waiters and waitresses (as they were called in those gender-differentiated days) were wearing and what kind of music was playing. Informants agreed much more about what the waiters were wearing than about what the waitresses were wearing. The hitch: None of the restaurants had waiters, only waitresses.

Informants also provided more detail about the kind of music in restaurants that did not have music than they provided for restaurants that did have music. Kronenfeld et al. speculated that, in the absence of real memories about things they’d seen or heard, informants turned to cultural norms for what must have been there (i.e., ‘‘what goes with what’’) (D’Andrade 1973).

You can test this yourself. Pick out a large lecture hall where a male professor is not wearing a tie. Ask a group of students on their way out of a lecture hall what color tie their professor was wearing. Or observe a busy store clerk for an hour and count the number of sales she rings up. Then ask her to estimate the number of sales she handled during that hour.

You can build your skills at becoming explicitly aware of ordinary things. Get a group of colleagues together and write separate, detailed descriptions of the most mundane, ordinary things you can think of: making a bed, doing laundry, building a sandwich, shaving (face, legs, underarms), picking out produce at the supermarket, and the like. Then discuss one another’s descriptions and see how many details others saw that you didn’t and vice versa. If you work carefully at this exercise, you’ll develop a lot of respect for how complex, and how important, the details of ordinary life are. If you want to see the level of detail you’re shooting for here, read Anthony F. C. Wallace’s little classic ‘‘Driving to Work’’ (1965). Wallace had made the 17-mile drive from his home to the University of Pennsylvania about 500 times when he drew a map of it, wrote out the details, and extracted a set of rules for his behavior. He was driving a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle in those days. It had 12 major mechanical controls (from the ignition switch to the windshield wiper—yes, there was just one of them, and you had to pull a switch on the instrument panel with your right hand to get it started), all of which had to be handled correctly to get him from home to work safely every day.

Building Memory

Even when we are explicitly aware of things we see, there is no guarantee that we’ll remember them long enough to write them down. Building your ability to remember things you see and hear is crucial to successful participant observation research.

Try this exercise: Walk past a store window at a normal pace. When you get beyond it and can’t see it any longer, write down all the things that were in the window. Go back and check. Do it again with another window. You’ll notice an improvement in your ability to remember little things almost immediately. You’ll start to create mnemonic devices for remembering more of what you see. Keep up this exercise until you are satisfied that you can’t get any better at it.

Here’s another one. Go to a church service other than one you’re used to. Take along two colleagues. When you leave, write up what you each think you saw, in as much detail as you can muster and compare what you’ve written. Go back to the church and keep doing this exercise until all of you are satisfied that (1) you are all seeing and writing down the same things and (2) you have reached the limits of your ability to recall complex behavioral scenes.

Try this same exercise by going to a church service with which you are familiar and take along several colleagues who are not. Again, compare your notes with theirs, and keep going back and taking notes until you and they are seeing and noting the same things. You can do this with any repeated scene that’s familiar to you: a bowling alley, a fast-food restaurant, etc. Remember, training your ability to see things reliably does not guarantee that you’ll see thing accurately. But reliability is a necessary but insufficient condition for accuracy. Unless you become at least a reliable instrument of data gathering, you don’t stand much of a chance of making valid observations.

Bogdan (1972:41) offers some practical suggestions for remembering details in participant observation. If, for some reason, you can’t take notes during an interview or at some event, and you are trying to remember what was said, don’t talk to anyone before you get your thoughts down on paper. Talking to people reinforces some things you heard and saw at the expense of other things.

Also, when you sit down to write, try to remember things in historical sequence, as they occurred throughout the day. As you write up your notes you will invariably remember some particularly important detail that just pops into memory out of sequence. When that happens, jot it down on a separate piece of paper (or tuck it away in a separate little note file on your word processor) and come back to it later, when your notes reach that point in the sequence of the day.

Another useful device is to draw a map—even a rough sketch will do—of the physical space where you spent time observing and talking to people that day. As you move around the map, you will dredge up details of events and conversations. In essence, let yourself walk through your experience. You can practice all these memory-building skills now and be much better prepared if you decide to do long-term fieldwork later.

Maintaining Naı¨vete´

Try also to develop your skill at being a novice—at being someone who genuinely wants to learn a new culture. This may mean working hard at suspending judgment about some things. David Fetterman made a trip across the Sinai Desert with a group of Bedouins. One of the Bedouins, says Fetterman,

shared his jacket with me to protect me from the heat. I thanked him, of course, because I appreciated the gesture and did not want to insult him. But I smelled like a camel for the rest of the day in the dry desert heat. I thought I didn’t need the jacket. . . . I later learned that without his jacket I would have suffered from sunstroke. . . . An inexperienced traveler does not always notice when the temperature climbs above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. By slowing down the evaporation rate, the jacket helped me retain water. (1989:33)

Maintaining your naı¨vete´ will come naturally in a culture that’s unfamiliar to you, but it’s a bit harder to do in your own culture. Most of what you do ‘‘naturally’’ is so automatic that you don’t know how to intellectualize it.

If you are like many middle-class Americans, your eating habits can be characterized by the word ‘‘grazing’’—that is, eating small amounts of food at many, irregular times during the course of a typical day, rather than sitting down for meals at fixed times. Would you have used that kind of word to describe your own eating behavior? Other members of your own culture are often better informants than you are about that culture, and if you really let people teach you, they will.

If you look carefully, though, you’ll be surprised at how heterogeneous your culture is and how many parts of it you really know nothing about. Find some part of your own culture that you don’t control—an occupational culture, like long-haul trucking, or a hobby culture, like amateur radio—and try to learn it. That’s what you did as a child. This time, try to intellectualize the experience. Take notes on what you learn about how to learn, on what it’s like being a novice, and how you think you can best take advantage of the learner’s role. Your imagination will suggest a lot of other nooks and crannies of our culture that you can explore as a thoroughly untutored novice.

When Not to Be Naive

The role of naive novice is not always the best one to play. Humility is inappropriate when you are dealing with a culture whose members stand a lot to lose by your incompetence. Michael Agar (1973, 1980a) did field research on the life of heroine addicts in New York City. His informants made it plain that Agar’s ignorance of their lives wasn’t cute or interesting to them.

Even with the best of intentions, Agar could have given his informants away to the police by just by being stupid. Under such circumstances, you shouldn’t expect your informants to take you under their wing and teach you how to appreciate their customs. Agar had to learn a lot, and very quickly, to gain credibility with his informants.

There are situations where your expertise is just what’s required to build rapport with people. Anthropologists have typed documents for illiterate people in the field and have used other skills (from coaching basketball to dispensing antibiotics) to help people and to gain their confidence and respect. If you are studying highly educated people, you may have to prove that you know a fair amount about research methods before they will deal with you. Agar (1980b:58) once studied an alternative lifestyle commune and was asked by a biochemist who was living there: ‘‘Who are you going to use as a control group?’’ In my study of ocean scientists (Bernard 1974), several informants asked me what computer programs I was going to use to do a factor analysis of my data.

Building Writing Skills

The ability to write comfortably, clearly, and often is one of the most important skills you can develop as a participant observer. Ethnographers who are not comfortable as writers produce few field notes and little published work. If you have any doubts about your ability to pound out thousands of words, day in and day out, then try to build that skill now, before you go into the field for an extended period.

The way to build that skill is to team up with one or more colleagues who are also trying to build their expository writing ability. Set concrete and regular writing tasks for yourselves and criticize one another’s work on matters of clarity and style. There is nothing trivial about this kind of exercise. If you think you need it, do it.

Good writing skills will carry you through participant observation fieldwork, writing a dissertation and, finally, writing for publication. Don’t be afraid to write clearly and compellingly. The worst that can happen is that someone will criticize you for ‘‘popularizing’’ your material. I think ethnographers should be criticized if they take the exciting material of real people’s lives and turn it into deadly dull reading.

Hanging Out, Gaining Rapport

It may sound silly, but just hanging out is a skill, and until you learn it you can’t do your best work as a participant observer. Remember what I said at the beginning of this chapter: Participant observation is a strategic method that lets you learn what you want to learn and apply all the data collection methods that you may want to apply.

When you enter a new field situation, the temptation is to ask a lot of questions to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. There are many things that people can’t or won’t tell you in answer to questions. If you ask people too quickly about the sources of their wealth, you are likely to get incomplete data. If you ask too quickly about sexual liaisons, you may get thoroughly unreliable responses.

Hanging out builds trust, or rapport, and trust results in ordinary conversation and ordinary behavior in your presence. Once you know, from hanging out, exactly what you want to know more about, and once people trust you not to betray their confidence, you’ll be surprised at the direct questions you can ask.

In his study of Cornerville (Boston’s heavily Italian American neighborhood called North End), William Foote Whyte wondered whether ‘‘just hanging on the street corner was an active enough process to be dignified by the term ‘research.’ Perhaps I should ask these men questions,’’ he thought. He soon realized that ‘‘one has to learn when to question and when not to question as well as what questions to ask’’ (1989:78).

Philip Kilbride studied child abuse in Kenya. He did a survey and focused ethnographic interviews, but ‘‘by far the most significant event in my research happened as a byproduct of participatory ‘hanging out,’ being always in search of case material.’’ While visiting informants one day, Kilbride and his wife saw a crowd gathering at a local secondary school. It turned out that a young mother had thrown her baby into a pit latrine at the school. The Kilbrides offered financial assistance to the young mother and her family in exchange for ‘‘involving ourselves in their . . . misfortune.’’ The event that the Kilbrides had witnessed became the focus for a lot of their research activities in the succeeding months (Kilbride 1992:190).

The Ethical Dilemma of Rapport

Face it: ‘‘Gaining rapport’’ is a euphemism for impression management, one of the ‘‘darker arts’’ of fieldwork, in Harry Wolcott’s apt phrase (2005:chap. 6). E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the great British anthropologist, made clear in 1937 how manipulative the craft of ethnography really is. He was doing fieldwork with the Azande of Sudan and wanted to study their rich tradition of witchcraft. Even with his long-term fieldwork and command of the Azande language, Evans-Pritchard couldn’t get people to open up about witchcraft, so he decided to ‘‘win the good will of one or two practitioners and to persuade them to divulge their secrets in strict confidence’’ (1958 [1937]:151). Strict confidence? He was planning on writing a book about all this.

Progress was slow, and although he felt that he could have ‘‘eventually wormed out all their secrets’’ he hit on another idea: His personal servant, Kamanga, was initiated into the local group of practitioners and ‘‘became a practising witch-doctor’’ under the tutelage of a man named Badobo (Evans-Pritchard 1958 [1937]:151). With Badobo’s full knowledge, Kamanga reported every step of his training to his employer. In turn, Evans-Pritchard used the information ‘‘to draw out of their shells rival practitioners by playing on their jealousy and vanity.’’

Badobo knew that anything he told Kamanga would be tested with rival witch doctors. Badobo couldn’t lie to Kamanga, but he could certainly withhold the most secret material. Evans-Pritchard analyzed the situation carefully and pressed on. Once an ethnographer is ‘‘armed with preliminary knowledge,’’ he said, ‘‘nothing can prevent him from driving deeper and deeper the wedge if he is interested and persistent’’ (Evans-Pritchard 1958 [1937]:152).

Still, Kamanga’s training was so slow that Evans-Pritchard nearly abandoned his inquiry into witchcraft. Providence intervened. A celebrated witch doctor, named Bo¨gwo¨zu, showed up from another district and Evans-Pritchard offered him a very high wage if he’d take over Kamanga’s training. Evans-Pritchard explained to Bo¨gwo¨zu that he was ‘‘tired of Badobo’s wiliness and extortion,’’ and that he expected his generosity to result in Kamanga learning all the tricks of the witch doctor’s trade (Evans-Pritchard 1958 [1937]:152).

But the really cunning part of Evans-Pritchard’s scheme was that he continued to pay Badobo to tutor Kamanga. He knew that Badobo would be jealous of Bo¨gwo¨zu and would strive harder to teach Kamanga more about witch-doctoring. Here is Evans-Pritchard going on about his deceit and the benefits of this tactic for ethnographers:

The rivalry between these two practitioners grew into bitter and ill-concealed hostility. Bo¨gwo¨zu gave me information about medicines and magical rites to prove that his rival was ignorant of the one or incapable in the performance of the other. Badobo became alert and showed himself no less eager to demonstrate his knowledge of magic to both Kamanga and to myself. They vied with each other to gain ascendancy among the local practitioners. Kamanga and I reaped a full harvest in this quarrel, not only from the protagonists themselves but also from other witch-doctors in the neighborhood, and even from interested laymen. (Evans-Pritchard 1958 [1937]:153)

Objectivity

Finally, objectivity is a skill, like language fluency, and you can build it if you work at it. Some people build more of it, others less. More is better.

If an objective measurement is one made by a robot—that is, a machine that is not prone to the kind of measurement error that comes from having opinions and memories—then no human being can ever be completely objective. We can’t rid ourselves of our experiences, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it would be a good idea even to try.

We can, however, become aware of our experiences, our opinions, our values. We can hold our field observations up to a cold light and ask whether we’ve seen what we wanted to see, or what is really out there. The goal is not for us, as humans, to become objective machines; it is for us to achieve objective—that is, accurate—knowledge by transcending our biases. No fair pointing out that this is impossible. It is impossible to do completely, but it’s not impossible to do at all. Priests, social workers, clinical psychologists, and counselors suspend their own biases all the time, more or less, in order to listen hard and give sensible advice to their clients.

Colin Turnbull held objective knowledge as something to be pulled from the thicket of subjective experience. Fieldwork, said Turnbull, involves a self-conscious review of one’s own ideas and values—one’s self, for want of any more descriptive term. During fieldwork you ‘‘reach inside,’’ he observed, and give up the ‘‘old, narrow, limited self, discovering the new self that is right and proper in the new context.’’ We use the field experience, he said, ‘‘to know ourselves more deeply by conscious subjectivity.’’ In this way, he concluded, ‘‘the ultimate goal of objectivity is much more likely to be reached and our understanding of other cultures that much more profound’’ (Turnbull 1986:27). When he was studying the Ik of Uganda, he saw parents goad small children into touching fire and then laughing at the result. It took everything he had, he once told me, to transcend his biases, but he managed (see Turnbull 1972).

Many phenomenologists see objective knowledge as the goal of participant observation. Danny Jorgensen, for example, advocates complete immersion and becoming the phenomenon you study. ‘‘Becoming the phenomenon,’’ Jorgensen says, ‘‘is a participant observational strategy for penetrating to and gaining experience of a form of human life. It is an objective approach insofar as it results in the accurate, detailed description of the insiders’ experience of life’’ (Jorgensen 1989:63). In fact, many ethnographers have become cab drivers, exotic dancers, jazz musicians, or members of satanic cults, to do participant observation fieldwork.

If you use this strategy of full immersion, Jorgensen says, you must be able to switch back and forth between the insiders’ view and that of an analyst. To do that—to maintain your objective, analytic abilities—Jorgensen suggests finding a colleague with whom you can talk things over regularly. That is, give yourself an outlet for discussing the theoretical, methodological, and emotional issues that inevitably come up in full participation field research. It’s good advice.

Objectivity and Neutrality

Objectivity does not mean (and has never meant) value neutrality. No one asks Cultural Survival, Inc. to be neutral in documenting the violent obscenities against indigenous peoples of the world. No one asks Amnesty International to be neutral in its effort to document state-sanctioned torture. We recognize that the power of the documentation is in its objectivity, in its chilling irrefutability, not in its neutrality.

Claire Sterk, an ethnographer from the Netherlands, has studied prostitutes and intravenous drug users in mostly African American communities in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Sterk was a trusted friend and counselor to many of the women with whom she worked. In one 2-month period in the late 1980s, she attended the funeral of seven women she knew who had died of AIDS. She felt that ‘‘every researcher is affected by the work he or she does. One cannot remain neutral and uninvolved; even as an outsider, the researcher is part of the community’’ (Sterk 1989:99, 1999).

Laurie Krieger, an American woman doing fieldwork in Cairo, studied physical punishment against women. She learned that wife beatings were less violent than she had imagined and that the act still sickened her. Her reaction brought out a lot of information from women who were recent recipients of their husbands’ wrath. ‘‘I found out,’’ she says, ‘‘that the biased outlook of an American woman and a trained anthropologist was not always disadvantageous, as long as I was aware of and able to control the expression of my biases’’ (Krieger 1986:120).

At the end of his second year of research on street life in El Barrio, Phillipe Bourgois’s friends and informants began telling him about their experiences as gang rapists. Bourgois’s informants were in their mid- to late 20s then, and the stories they told were of things they’d done as very young adolescents, more than a decade earlier. Still, Bourgois says, he felt betrayed by people whom he had come to like and respect. Their ‘‘childhood stories of violently forced sex,’’ he says, ‘‘spun me into a personal depression and a research crisis’’ (1995:205).

In any long-term field study, be prepared for some serious tests of your ability to remain a dispassionate observer. Hortense Powdermaker (1966) was once confronted with the problem of knowing that a lynch mob was preparing to go after a particular black man. She was powerless to stop the mob and fearful for her own safety.

I have never grown accustomed to seeing people ridicule the handicapped, though I see it every time I’m in rural Mexico and Greece, and I recall with horror the death of a young man on one of the sponge diving boats I sailed with in Greece. I knew the rules of safe diving that could have prevented that death; so did all the divers and the captains of the vessels. They ignored those rules at terrible cost. I wanted desperately to do something, but there was nothing anyone could do. My lecturing them at sea about their unsafe diving practices would not have changed their behavior. That behavior was driven, as I explained in chapter 2, by structural forces and the technology—the boats, the diving equipment—of their occupation. By suspending active judgment of their behavior, I was able to record it. ‘‘Suspending active judgment’’ does not mean that I eliminated my bias or that my feelings about their behavior changed. It meant only that I kept the bias to myself while I was recording their dives (box 12.6).

BOX 12.6

O B J E C T I V I T Y A N D I N D I G E N O U S R E S E A R C H

Objectivity gets its biggest test in indigenous research—that is, when you study your own culture. Barbara Meyerhoff worked in Mexico when she was a graduate student. Later, in the early 1970s, when she became interested in ethnicity and aging, she decided to study elderly Chicanos. The people she approached kept putting her off, asking her ‘‘Why work with us? Why don’t you study your own kind?’’ Meyerhoff was Jewish. She had never thought about studying her own kind, but she launched a study of poor, elderly Jews who were on public assistance. She agonized about what she was doing and, as she tells it, never resolved whether it was anthropology or a personal quest.

Many of the people she studied were survivors of the Holocaust. ‘‘How, then, could anyone look at them dispassionately? How could I feel anything but awe and appreciation for their mere presence? . . . Since neutrality was impossible and idealization undesirable, I decided on striving for balance’’ (Meyerhoff 1989:90).

There is no final answer on whether it’s good or bad to study your own culture. Plenty of people have done it, and plenty of people have written about what it’s like to do it. On the plus side, you’ll know the language and you’ll be less likely to suffer from culture shock. On the minus side, it’s harder to recognize cultural patterns that you live every day and you’re likely to take a lot of things for granted that an outsider would pick up right away.

If you are going to study your own culture, start by reading the experiences of others who have done it so you’ll know what you’re facing in the field (Further Reading: studying your own culture).

GENDER, PARENTING, AND OTHER PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

By the 1930s, Margaret Mead had already made clear the importance of gender as a variable in data collection (see Mead 1986). Gender has at least two consequences: (1) it limits your access to certain information, and (2) it influences how you perceive others.

In all cultures, you can’t ask people certain questions because you’re a [woman] [man]. You can’t go into certain areas and situations because you’re a [woman] [man]. You can’t watch this or report on that because you’re a [woman] [man]. Even the culture of social scientists is affected: Your credibility is diminished or enhanced with your colleagues when you talk about a certain subject because you’re a [woman] [man] (Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Golde 1986; Scheper-Hughes 1983; Warren 1988; Whitehead and Conaway 1986).

Sara Quandt, Beverly Morris, and Kathleen DeWalt spent months investigating the nutritional strategies of the elderly in two rural Kentucky counties (Quandt et al. 1997). According to DeWalt, the three women researchers spent months, interviewing key informants, and never turned up a word about the use of alcohol. ‘‘One day,’’ says DeWalt:

the research team traveled to Central County with Jorge Uquillas, an Ecuadorian sociologist who had expressed an interest in visiting the Kentucky field sites. One of the informants they visited was Mr. B, a natural storyteller who had spoken at length about life of the poor during the past 60 years. Although he had been a great source of information about use of wild foods and recipes for cooking game he had never spoken of drinking or moonshine production.

Within a few minutes of entering his home on this day, he looked at Jorge Uquillas, and said ‘‘Are you a drinking man?’’ (Beverly whipped out the tape recorder and switched it on.) Over the next hour or so, Mr. B talked about community values concerning alcohol use, the problems of drunks and how they were dealt with in the community, and provided a number of stories about moonshine in Central County. The presence of another man gave Mr. B the opportunity to talk about issues he found interesting, but felt would have been inappropriate to discuss with women. (DeWalt et al. 1998:280)

On the other hand, feminist scholars have made it clear that gender is a negotiated idea. What you can and can’t do if you are a man or a woman is more fixed in some cultures than in others, and in all cultures there is lots of individual variation in gender roles. Although men or women may be ‘‘expected’’ to be this way or that way in any given place, the variation in male and female attitudes and behaviors within a culture can be tremendous.

All participant observers confront their personal limitations and the limitations imposed on them by the culture they study. When she worked at the Thule relocation camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Rosalie Wax did not join any of the women’s groups or organizations. Looking back after more than 40 years, Wax concluded that this was just poor judgment.

I was a university student and a researcher. I was not yet ready to accept myself as a total person, and this limited my perspective and my understanding. Those of us who instruct future field workers should encourage them to understand and value their full range of being, because only then can they cope intelligently with the range of experience they will encounter in the field. (Wax 1986:148)

Besides gender, we have learned that being a parent helps you talk to people about certain areas of life and get more information than if you were not a parent. My wife and I arrived on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, in 1964 with a 2-month-old baby. As Joan Cassell says, children are a ‘‘guarantee of good intentions’’ (1987:260), and wherever we went, the baby was the conversation opener. But be warned: Taking children into the field can place them at risk. (More on health risks below. And for more about the effects of fieldwork on children who accompany researchers, see Butler and Turner 1987.)

Being divorced has its costs. Nancie Gonza´lez found that being a divorced mother of two young sons in the Dominican Republic was just too much. ‘‘Had I to do it again,’’ she says, ‘‘I would invent widowhood with appropriate rings and photographs’’ (1986:92).

Even height may make a difference: Alan Jacobs once told me he thought he did better fieldwork with the Maasai because he’s $6 ^ { \prime } 5 ^ { \prime \prime }$ than he would have if he’d been, say, an average-sized $5 ^ { \prime } 1 0 ^ { \prime \prime } .$

Personal characteristics make a difference in fieldwork. Being old or young lets you into certain things and shuts you out of others. Being wealthy lets you talk to certain people about certain subjects and makes others avoid you. Being gregarious makes some people open up to you and makes others shy away. There is no way to eliminate the ‘personal equation’’ in participant observation fieldwork, or in any other scientific datagathering exercise for that matter, without sending robots out to do the work. Even then, the robots would have their own problems. In all sciences, the personal equation (the influence of the observer on the data) is a matter of serious concern and study (Romney 1989).

SEX AND FIELDWORK

It is unreasonable to assume that single, adult fieldworkers are all celibate, yet the literature on field methods was nearly silent on this topic for many years. When Evans-Pritchard was a student, just about to head off for Central Africa, he asked his major professor for advice. ‘‘Seligman told me to take ten grains of quinine every night and keep off women’’ (Evans-Pritchard 1973:1). As far as I know, that’s the last we heard from Evans-Pritchard on the subject.

Colin Turnbull (1986) tells us about his affair with a young Mbuti woman, and Dona Davis (1986) discusses her relationship with an engineer who visited the Newfoundland village where she was doing research on menopause. In Turnbull’s case, he had graduated from being an asexual child in Mbuti culture to being a youth and was expected to have sexual relations. In Davis’s case, she was expected not to have sexual relations, but she also learned that she was not bound by the expectation. In fact, Davis says that ‘‘being paired off’’ made women more comfortable with her because she was ‘‘simply breaking a rule everyone else broke’’ (1986:254).

Proscriptions against sex in fieldwork are silly, because they don’t work. But understand that this is one area that people everywhere take very seriously. The rule on sexual behavior in the field is this: Do nothing that you can’t live with, both professionally and personally. This means that you have to be even more conscious of any fallout, for you and for your partner, than you would in your own community. Eventually, you will be going home. How will that affect your partner’s status? (Further Reading: sex and fieldwork).

SURVIVING FIELDWORK

The title of this section is the title of an important book by Nancy Howell (1990). Even 20 years on, anyone who does fieldwork in developing nations should read this book. Howell surveyed 204 anthropologists about illnesses and accidents in the field, and the results are sobering. The maxim that ‘‘anthropologists are otherwise sensible people who don’t believe in the germ theory of disease’’ (Rappaport 1990) is apparently correct.

Through the 1980s, 100% of anthropologists who did fieldwork in south Asia reported being exposed to malaria, and 41% reported contracting the disease. Eighty-seven percent of anthropologists who worked in Africa reported exposure, and 31% reported having had malaria. Seventy percent of anthropologists who work in south Asia reported having had some liver disease.

Among all anthropologists, 13% reported having had hepatitis A. I was hospitalized for 6 weeks for hepatitis A in 1968 and spent most of another year recovering. Glynn Isaac died of hepatitis B at age 47 in 1985 after a long career of archeological fieldwork in Africa. Typhoid fever is also common among anthropologists, as are amoebic dysentery, giardia, ascariasis, hookworm, and other infectious diseases.

Accidents have injured or killed many fieldworkers. Fei Xiaotong, a student of Malinowski’s, was caught in a tiger trap in China in 1935. The injury left him an invalid for 6 months. His wife died in her attempt to go for help. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo was killed in a fall in the Philippines in 1981. Thomas Zwickler, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, was killed by a bus on a rural road in India in 1985. He was riding a bicycle when he was struck. Kim Hill was accidentally hit by an arrow while out with an Ache hunting party in Paraguay in 1982 (Howell 1990).

Five members of a Russian-American team of researchers on social change in the Arctic died in 1995 when their umiak (a traditional, walrus-hided Eskimo boat) was overturned by a whale (see Broadbent 1995). The researchers included three Americans (two anthropologists—Steven McNabb and Richard Condon—and a psychiatrist—William Richards), two Russians (one anthropologist—Alexander Pika—and the chief Eskimo ethnographic consultant to the project—Boris Mumikhpykak). Nine Eskimo villagers also perished in that accident. I’ve had my own unpleasant brushes with fate and I know many others who have had very, very close calls.

What can you do about the risks? Get every inoculation you need before you leave, not just the ones that are required by the country you are entering. Check your county health office for the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control about illnesses prevalent in the area you’re going to. If you go into an area that is known to be malarial, take a full supply of antimalarial drugs with you so you don’t run out while you’re out in the field.

When people pass around a gourd full of chicha (beer made from corn) or pulque (beer made from cactus sap) or palm wine, decline politely and explain yourself if you have to. You’ll probably insult a few people, and your protests won’t always get you off the hook, but even if you only lower the number of times you are exposed to disease, you lower your risk of contracting disease.

After being very sick in the field in Mexico, I learned to carry a supply of bottled beer with me when I was visiting a house where I was sure to be given a gourd full of local brew. The gift of bottled beer was appreciated and it headed off the embarrassment of having to turn down a drink I’d rather not have. It also made clear that I’m not a teetotaler. If you are a teetotaler, you’ve got a ready-made get-out.

If you do fieldwork in a remote area, consult with physicians at your university hospital for information on the latest blood-substitute technology. If you are in an accident in a remote area and need blood, a nonperishable blood substitute can buy you time until you can get to a clean blood supply. Some fieldworkers carry a supply of sealed hypodermic needles with them in case they need an injection. Don’t go anywhere without medical insurance and don’t go to developing countries without evacuation insurance. It costs $60,000 or more to evacuate a person by jet from central Africa to Paris or Frankfurt. It costs about $60 a month for insurance to cover it.

Fieldwork in remote areas isn’t for everyone, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it as safely as possible. Candice Bradley is a Type-I diabetic who did long-term fieldwork in western Kenya. She took her insulin, glucagon, blood-testing equipment, and needles with her. She arranged her schedule around the predictable, daily fluctuations in her blood-sugar level. She trained people on how to cook for her and she laid in large stocks of diet drinks so that she could function in the relentless heat without raising her blood sugars (Bradley 1997:4–7).

With all this, Bradley still had close calls—near blackouts from hypoglycemia—but her close calls are no more frequent than those experienced by other field researchers who work in similarly remote areas. The rewards of foreign fieldwork can be very great, but so are the risks, even under the best conditions (Further Reading: dangerous fieldwork).

THE STAGES OF PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

In what follows, I will draw on three sources of data: (1) a review of the literature on field research; (2) conversations with colleagues during the last 40 years, specifically about their experiences in the field; and (3) 5 years of work, with the late Michael Kenny, directing National Science Foundation field schools in cultural anthropology and linguistics.

During our work with the field schools (1967–1971), Kenny and I developed an outline of researcher response in participant observation fieldwork. Those field schools were 10 weeks long and were held each summer in central Mexico, except for one that we held in the interior of the Pacific Northwest. In Mexico, students were assigned to N^˜ a¨hn˜u-speaking communities in the vicinity of Ixmiquilpan, Mexico. In the Northwest field school, students were assigned to small logging and mining communities in the Idaho panhandle. In Mexico, a few students did urban ethnography in the regional capital of Pachuca; in the Northwest field school, a few students did urban ethnography in Spokane, Washington.

What Kenny and I found so striking was that the stages we identified in the 10-week field experiences of our students were the same across all these places. Even more interesting—to us, anyway—was that the experiences our students had during those 10-week stints as participant observers apparently had exact analogs in our own experiences with year-long fieldwork.

1. Initial Contact

During the initial contact period, many long-term fieldworkers report experiencing a kind of euphoria as they begin to move about in a new culture. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that people who are attracted to the idea of living in a new culture are delighted when they begin to do so.

But not always. Here is Napoleon Chagnon’s recollection of his first encounter with the Yanomami: ‘‘I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! . . . had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my fieldwork then and there’’ (Chagnon 1983:10–11).

The desire to bolt and run is more common than we have admitted in the past. Charles Wagley, who would become one of our discipline’s most accomplished ethnographers, made his first field trip in 1937. A local political chief in Totonicapa´n, Guatemala, invited Wagley to tea in a parlor overlooking the town square. The chief’s wife and two daughters joined them. While they were having their tea, two of the chief’s aides came in and hustled everyone off to another room. The chief explained the hurried move to Wagley:

He had forgotten that an execution by firing squad of two Indians, ‘‘nothing but vagrants who had robbed in the market,’’ was to take place at five p.m. just below the parlor. He knew that I would understand the feelings of ladies and the grave problem of trying to keep order among brutes. I returned to my ugly pensio´ n in shock and spent a night without sleep. I would have liked to have returned as fast as possible to New York. (Wagley 1983:6)

Finally, listen to Rosalie Wax describe her encounter with the Arizona Japanese internment camp that she studied during World War II. When she arrived in Phoenix it was 110. Later that day, after a bus ride and a 20-mile ride in a GI truck, across a dusty landscape that ‘‘looked like the skin of some cosmic reptile,’’ with a Japanese American who wouldn’t talk to her, Wax arrived at the Gila camp. By then it was 120. She was driven to staff quarters, which was an army barracks divided into tiny cells, and abandoned to find her cell by a process of elimination.

It contained four dingy and dilapidated articles of furniture: an iron double bedstead, a dirty mattress (which took up half the room), a chest of drawers, and a tiny writing table—and it was hotter than the hinges of Hades. . . . I sat down on the hot mattress, took a deep breath, and cried. . . . Like some lost two-year-old, I only knew that I was miserable. After a while, I found the room at the end of the barrack that contained two toilets and a couple of wash basins. I washed my face and told myself I would feel better the next day. I was wrong. (Wax 1971:67)

2. Culture Shock

Even among fieldworkers who have a pleasant experience during their initial contact period (and many do), almost all report experiencing some form of depression and shock soon thereafter—usually within a few weeks. (The term ‘‘culture shock,’’ by the way, was introduced in 1960 by an anthropologist, Kalervo Oberg.) One kind of shock comes as the novelty of the field site wears off and there is this nasty feeling that research has to get done. Some researchers (especially those on their first field trip) may also experience feelings of anxiety about their ability to collect good data.

A good response at this stage is to do highly task-oriented work: making maps, taking censuses, doing household inventories, collecting genealogies, and so on. Another useful response is to make clinical, methodological field notes about your feelings and responses in doing participant observation fieldwork.

Another kind of shock is to the culture itself. Culture shock is an uncomfortable stress response and must be taken very seriously. In extreme cases of culture shock, nothing seems right. You may find yourself very upset at a lack of clean toilet facilities, or people’s eating habits, or their child-rearing practices. The prospect of having to put up with the local food for a year or more may become frightening. You find yourself focusing on little annoyances—something as simple as the fact that light switches go side to side rather than up and down may upset you.

This last example is not fanciful, by the way. It happened to a colleague of mine. When I first went to work with the N^˜ a¨hn˜u in 1962, men would greet me by sticking out their right hand. When I tried to grab their hand and shake it, they deftly slid their hand to my right so that the back of their right hand touched the back of my right hand. I became infuriated that men didn’t shake hands the way ‘‘they’re supposed to.’’ You may find yourself blaming everyone in the culture, or the culture itself, for the fact that your informants don’t keep appointments for interviews or don’t keep them ‘‘on time.’

Culture shock commonly involves a feeling that people really don’t want you around (which may, in fact, be the case). You feel lonely and wish you could find someone with whom to speak your native language. Even with a spouse in the field, the strain of using another language day after day and concentrating hard so that you can collect data in that language can be emotionally wearing.

A common personal problem in field research is not being able to get any privacy. Many people across the world find the Anglo-Saxon notion of privacy grotesque. When we first went out to the island of Kalymnos in Greece in 1964, Carole and I rented quarters with a family. The idea was that we’d be better able to learn about family dynamics that way. Women of the household were annoyed and hurt when my wife asked for a little time to be alone. When I came home at the end of each day’s work, I could never just go to my family’s room, shut the door, and talk to Carole about my day, or hers, or our new baby’s. If I didn’t share everything with the family we lived with during waking hours, they felt rejected.

After about 2 months of this, we had to move out and find a house of our own. My access to data about intimate family dynamics was curtailed. But it was worth it because I felt that I’d have had to abort the whole trip if I had to continue living in what my wife and I felt was a glass bowl all the time. As it turns out, there is no word for the concept of privacy in Greek. The closest gloss translates as ‘‘being alone,’’ and connotes loneliness.

I suspect that this problem is common to all English-speaking researchers who work in developing countries. Here’s what M. N. Srinivas, himself from India, wrote about his work in the rural village of Ramapura, near Mysore:

I was never left alone. I had to fight hard even to get two or three hours absolutely to myself in a week or two. My favorite recreation was walking to the nearby village of Kere where I had some old friends, or to Hogur which had a weekly market. But my friends in Ramapura wanted to accompany me on my walks. They were puzzled by my liking for solitary walks. Why should one walk when one could catch a bus, or ride on bicycles with friends. I had to plan and plot to give them the slip to go out by myself. On my return, however, I was certain to be asked why I had not taken them with me. They would have put off their work and joined me. (They meant it.) I suffered from social claustrophobia as long as I was in the village and sometimes the feeling became so intense that I just had to get out. (1979:23)

Culture shock subsides as researchers settle in to the business of gathering data on a daily basis, but it doesn’t go away because the sources of annoyance don’t go away.

Unless you are one of the very rare people who truly go native in another culture, you will cope with culture shock, not eliminate it. You will remain conscious of things annoying you, but you won’t feel like they are crippling your ability to work. Like Srinivas, when things get too intense, you’ll have the good sense to leave the field site for a bit rather than try to stick it out (Further Reading: culture shock).

3. Discovering the Obvious

In the next phase of participant observation, researchers settle into collecting data on a more or less systematic basis (see Kirk and Miller 1986). This is sometimes accompanied by an interesting personal response—a sense of discovery, where you feel as if informants are finally letting you in on the ‘‘good stuff’’ about their culture. Much of this ‘‘good stuff’’ will later turn out to be commonplace. You may ‘‘discover,’’ for example, that women have more power in the community than meets the eye or that there are two systems for dispute settlement—one embodied in formal law and one that works through informal mechanisms.

Sometimes, a concomitant to this feeling of discovery is a feeling of being in control of dangerous information and a sense of urgency about protecting informants’ identities. You may find yourself going back over your field notes, looking for places that you might have lapsed and identified an informant, and making appropriate changes. You may worry about those copies of field notes you have already sent home and even become a little worried about how well you can trust your major professor to maintain the privacy of those notes.

This is the stage of fieldwork when you hear anthropologists start talking about ‘‘their’ village, and how people are, at last, ‘‘letting them in’’ to the secrets of the culture. The feeling has its counterpart among all long-term participant observers. It often spurs researchers to collect more and more data; to accept every invitation, by every informant, to every event; to fill the days with observation and to fill the nights with writing up field notes. Days off become unthinkable, and the sense of discovery becomes more and more intense.

This is the time to take a real break.

4. The Break

The mid-fieldwork break, which usually comes after 3 or 4 months, is a crucial part of the overall participant observation experience for long-term researchers. It’s an opportunity to get some distance, both physical and emotional, from the field site. It gives you a chance to put things into perspective, think about what you’ve got so far, and what you need to get in the time remaining. Use this time to collect data from regional or national statistical services; to visit with colleagues at the local university and discuss your findings; to visit other communities in other parts of the country. And be sure to leave some time to just take a vacation, without thinking about research at all.

Your informants also need a break from you. ‘‘Anthropologists are uncomfortable intruders no matter how close their rapport,’’ wrote Charles Wagley. ‘‘A short respite is mutually beneficial. One returns with objectivity and human warmth restored. The anthropologist returns as an old friend’’ who has gone away and returned, and has thereby demonstrated his or her genuine interest in a community (Wagley 1983:13). Everyone needs a break.

5. Focusing

After the break, you will have a better idea of exactly what kinds of data you are lacking, and your sense of problem will also come more sharply into focus. The reason to have a formally prepared design statement before you go to the field is to tell you what you should be looking for. Nevertheless, even the most focused research design will have to be modified in the field. In some cases, you may find yourself making radical changes in your design, based on what you find when you get to the field and spend several months actually collecting data.

There is nothing wrong or unusual about this, but new researchers sometimes experience anxiety over making any major changes. The important thing at this stage is to focus the research and use your time effectively rather than agonizing over how to save components of your original design, if that design turns out to be truly unworkable.

6. Exhaustion, the Second Break, and Frantic Activity

After 7 or 8 months, some participant observers start to think that they have exhausted their informants, both literally and figuratively. That is, they may become embarrassed about continuing to ask informants for more information. Or they may make the supreme mistake of believing that their informants have no more to tell them. The reason this is such a mistake, of course, is that the store of cultural knowledge in any culturally competent person is enormous—far more than anyone could hope to extract in a year or two.

At this point, another break is usually a good idea. You’ll get another opportunity to take stock, order your priorities for the time remaining, and see both how much you’ve done and how little. The realization that, in fact, informants have a great deal more to teach them, and that they have precious little time left in the field, sends many investigators into a frenetic burst of activity during this stage.

7. Leaving the Field

The last stage of participant observation is leaving the field. Don’t neglect this part of the process. Let people know that you are leaving and tell them how much you appreciate their help. The ritual of leaving a place in a culturally appropriate way will make it possible for you to go back and even to send others.

Participant observation is an intensely intimate and personal experience. People who began as your informants may become your friends as well. In the best of cases, you come to trust that they will not deceive you about their culture, and they come to trust you not to betray them—that is, not to use your intimate knowledge of their lives to hurt them. (You can imagine the worst of cases.) There is often a legitimate expectation on both sides that the relationship may be permanent, not just a 1-year fling.

For many long-term participant observation researchers, there is no final leaving of ‘‘the field.’’ I’ve been working with some people, on and off, for 45 years. Like many anthropologists who work in Latin America, I’m godparent to a child of my closest research collaborator. From time to time, people from Mexico or from Greece will call my house on the phone, just to say ‘‘hi’’ and to keep the relationship going.

Or their children, who happen to be doing graduate work at a university in the United States, will call and send their parents’ regards. They’ll remind you of some little event they remember when they were 7 or 8 and you came to their parents’ house to do some interviewing and you spilled your coffee all over yourself as you fumbled with your tape recorder. People remember the darndest things. You’d better be ready when it happens.

THE FRONT-EDGE: COMBINING METHODS

More and more researchers these days, across the social sciences, have learned what a powerful method powerful participant observation is at all stages of the research process. The method stands on its own, but it is also increasingly part of a mixed-method strategy, as researchers combine qualitative and quantitative data to answer questions of interest.

Laura Miller (1997) used a mix of ethnographic and survey methods to study gender harassment in the U.S. Army. Keeping women out of jobs that have been traditionally reserved for men is gender harassment; asking women for sex in return for a shot at one of those jobs is sexual harassment. (Gender harassment need not involve sexual harassment, or vice versa.)

Miller spent nearly 2 years collecting data at eight army posts and at two training centers in the United States where war games are played out on simulated battlefields. She lived in Somalia with U.S. Army personnel for 10 days, in Macedonia for a week, and in Haiti for 6 days during active military operations in those countries. Within the context of participant observation, she did unstructured interviewing, in-depth interviewing, and group interviewing. Her group interviews were spontaneous: over dinner with a group of high-ranking officers; sitting on her bunk at night, talking to her roommates; in vehicles, bouncing between research sites, with the driver, guide, protocol officer, translator, and guard (Miller, personal communication).

It turns out that ‘‘forms of gender harsassment’’ in the U.S. Army is one of those cultural domains that people recognize and think about, but for which people have no ready list in their heads. You can’t just ask people: ‘‘List the kinds of gender harassment.’ From her ethnographic interviews, though, Miller was able to derive what she felt was just such a list, including:

1. resistance to authority (hostile enlisted men ignore orders from women officers);

2. constant scrutiny (men pick up on every mistake that women make and use those mistakes to criticize the abilities of women in general);

3. gossip and rumors (women who date many men are labeled ‘‘sluts,’’ women who don’t date at all are labeled ‘‘dykes,’’ and any woman can easily be unjustly accused of ‘‘sleeping her way to the top’’);

4. outright sabotage of women’s tools and equipment on work details; and

5. indirect threats against women’s safety (talking about how women would be vulnerable to rape if they were to go into combat).

This list emerges from qualitative research—hanging out, talking to people and gaining their trust, and generally letting people know that you’re in for the long haul with them. If you are trying to develop programs to correct things that are wrong with a program, then this list, derived entirely from participant observation, is enough. An education program to counter gender harassment against women in the U.S. Army must include something about each of the problems that Miller identified.

Although ethnographic methods are enough to identify the problems and processes— the what and the how of culture—ethnography can’t tell you how much each problem and process counts. Yes, enlisted army men can and do sabotage army women’s tools and equipment on occasion. How often? Ethnography can’t help with that one. Yes, men do sometimes resist the authority of women officers. How often? Ethnography can’t help there, either.

Fortunately, Miller also collected questionnaire data—from a quota sample of 4,100 men and women, Whites and Blacks, officers and enlisted personnel. In those data, 19% of enlisted men and 18% of male noncommissioned officers (like sergeants) said that women should be treated exactly like men and should serve in the combat units just like men, but just 6% of enlisted women and 4% of female noncommissioned officers agreed with this sentiment. You might conclude, Miller says, that men are more supportive than women are of equality for women in combat roles. Some men with whom Miller spoke, however, said that women should be given the right to serve in combat so that, once and for all, everyone will see that women can’t cut it.

Are men really what Miller called ‘‘hostile proponents’’ of equality for women? Could that be why the statistics show so many more men in favor of women serving in combat units? Miller went back to her questionnaire data: About 20% of men in her survey said that women should be assigned to combat units just like men were—but almost to a man they also said that putting women into combat units would reduce the military’s effectiveness.

In other words, the numerical analysis showed that Miller’s concept of ‘‘hostile proponent of equality’’ was correct. This subtle concept advances our understanding considerably of how gender harassment against women works in the U.S. Army.

Did you notice the constant feedback between ethnographic and survey data here?

The ethnography produced ideas for policy recommendations and for the content for a questionnaire. The questionnaire data illuminated and validated many of the things that the ethnographer learned during participant observation. Those same survey data produced anomalies—things that didn’t quite fit with the ethnographer’s intuition. More ethnography turned up an explanation for the anomalies. And so on. Ethnographic and survey data combined produce more insight than either does alone.

FURTHER READING

Street ethnography: Agar (1973); Connolly and Ennew (1996); Fleisher (1995); Gigengack (2000); Kane and Mason (2001); Lambert et al. (1995); Weppner (1977).

Chicago School ofethnography: Abbot (1997); Bulmer (1984); Lofland (1983).

Participant observation fieldwork: A. Anderson (2003); Atkinson et al. (2001); Behar (1996); Bogdan (1972); Burawoy (1991); DeWalt and DeWalt (2002); Fenno (1990); Fine and Sandstrom (1988); Gummerson (2000); Kirk and Miller (1986); Lofland (1976); Schatz (2009); C. D. Smith and Kornblum (1996); Spradley (1980); Stocking (1983); Woods (1986).

Rapid ethnographic assessment: Baker (1996a, 1996b); Beebe (2001); Bentley et al. (1988); D’Antona et al. (2008). For more on the focused ethnographic study method, see Hudelson (1994); G. H. Pelto (1992); P. J. Pelto (1994); Scrimshaw and Gleason (1992); Scrimshaw and Hurtado (1987); Trotter et al. (2001).

Gatekeepers: Harrington (2003); Kawulich (in press); Maginn (2007); Rashid (2007); Sanghera and Thapar-Bjo¨rkert (2008); Wanat (2008).

Using interpreters: Borchgrevink (2003); Hsieh (2008); Jentsch (1998).

Language and fieldwork: Herzfeld (1983, 2009a); Owusu (1978); Werner (1994); Winchatz (2006).

Studying your own culture; indigenous research: Altorki and El-Sohl (1988); Fahim (1982); Messerschmidt (1981); Stephenson and Greer (1981); Zaman (2008).

Sex and fieldwork: Kulick and Willson (1995); Lewin and Leap (1996); Markowitz and Ashkenazi (1999).

Dangerous fieldwork: Belousov et al. (2007); Lee (1995); Lee-Treweek and Linkogle (2000); Nordstrom and Robben (1995); Sampson and Thomas (2003).

Culture shock: Bochner (2000); Furnham and Bochner (1986); Mumford (1998).

Field Notes and Database Management

Those who want to use qualitative methods because they seem easier than statistics are in for a rude awakening.

—Taylor and Bogdan 1984:53

Anthropologists collect many kinds of data. Some collect survey data; others collect audio and video recordings or networks or caches of personal letters. . . . But all anthropologists take field notes. In this chapter, I focus on how to write field notes and how to handle other kinds of material—like newspaper clippings and photos—that we accumulate during fieldwork. The lessons about coding and analyzing field notes apply just as well to transcripts of interviews and to other textual data, which we’ll take up in chapter 19.

ABOUT FIELD NOTES

Plan to spend 2–3 hours every working day of a participant observation study writing up field notes, working on your diary, and coding interviews and notes. Ralph Bolton asked 34 anthropologists about their field note practices; they reported spending anywhere from 1.5 hours to 7 hours a day on write-up (1984:132).

Remember that it takes twice as long to write up notes about a recorded interview as it does to conduct an interview in the first place. You have to listen to a recorded interview at least once before you can write up the essential notes from it, and then it takes as long again to get the notes down. If you need full transcriptions of interviews, plan to spend around 6 hours for each hour of interview, assuming that the recording is clear, the interview is in your own language, and you have a transcribing machine with a foot pedal. You can cut transcription time in half by using voice recognition software (more about this back in chapter 8, and see appendix E).

Every colleague with whom I’ve ever discussed this agrees that it’s best to set aside a time each day for working on your notes. And don’t sleep on your notes. It’s easy to forget material that you want in your notes if you don’t write them up in the afternoon or evening each day. The same goes for your own thoughts and impressions of events. If you don’t write them up every day, while they are fresh, you’ll forget them.

This means that you shouldn’t get embroiled in a lot of activities that prevent you from writing up field notes. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Here’s one. You are studying how families create culture by telling and retelling certain stories. You sit down to write up the day’s field notes and you get a call from a key informant who tells you to come right on over to meet her father who is leaving on a trip in the morning and wants to tell you himself the story she had told you earlier about his experience as a refugee during World War II. You couldn’t possibly turn that one down. But remember, it’s easy to let doing anything except writing notes become the norm rather than the exception.

Create many small notes rather than one long, running commentary. Make many separate note files, rather than adding to the same humongous file day after day. You can have one file for each day, or you can have files for each interview or each event you attend.

There are two radically different styles when it comes to writing field notes. Some people like to immerse themselves completely in the local culture and concentrate on the experience. They write up field notes when and as they find the time. Most ethnographers advocate writing up field notes every day, while you are still capable of retrieving detail about the day’s events and interactions. I’ve done both and, like Miles and Huberman (1994), I’m convinced that obsessiveness about writing field notes is the way to go.

HOW TO WRITE FIELD NOTES

The method I present here for making and coding field notes was developed and tested by the late Michael Kenny and me, between 1967 and 1971, when we ran those NSFsupported field schools in cultural anthropology that I described in chapter 12. Kenny and I relied initially on our own experience with field notes, and we borrowed freely from the experience of many colleagues. The method we developed—involving jottings, a diary, a daily log, and three kinds of formal notes—was used by 40 field-school participants in the United States and in Mexico and by others since then.

Two things can be said about the method I’m going to lay out here: (1) It works; and (2) It’s not the only way to do things. If you do field research, you’ll develop your own style of writing notes and you’ll add your own little tricks as you go along. Still, the method described here will help you work systematically at taking field notes and it will allow you to search through them quickly and easily to look for relations in your data. I wish I had used this method when I was doing my own M.A. and Ph.D. fieldwork—and I wish that computers and database management systems had been available then, too.

FOUR TYPES OF FIELD NOTES

You’ll write four kinds of notes in fieldwork: jottings, a diary, a log, and field notes proper.

Jottings

Field jottings—what Roger Sanjek calls scratch notes (1990:96)—are what get you through the day. Human memory is a very poor recording device, especially for the kind of details that make the difference between good and so-so ethnographic research. Keep a note pad with you at all times and make field jottings on the spot. This applies to both formal and informal interviews in bars and cafe´s, in homes and on the street.

It also applies to things that just strike you as you are walking along. Jottings wil provide you with the trigger you need to recall a lot of details that you don’t have time to write down while you’re observing events or listening to an informant. Even a few key words will jog your memory later. Remember: Ifyou don’t write it down, it’s gone.

Clearly, there are times when you just can’t take notes. Morris Freilich did research in the 1950s with the Mohawks in Brooklyn, New York, and on the Caughnanaga Reservation, 10 miles south of Montreal. He did a lot of participant observation in a bar and, as Freilich tells it, every time he pulled out a notebook his audience became hostile. So,

Freilich kept a small notebook in his hip pocket and would periodically duck into the men’s room at the bar to scribble a few jottings (Freilich 1977:159).

William Sturtevant used stubby little pencils to take furtive notes; he found the technique so useful, he published a note about it in the American Anthropologist (1959). When Hortense Powdermaker did her research on race relations in Mississippi in 1932, she took surreptitious notes on sermons at African American churches. ‘‘My pocketbook was large,’’ she said, ‘‘and the notebook in it was small’’ (1966:175).

Every fieldworker runs into situations where it’s impossible to take notes. It is always appropriate to be sensitive to people’s feelings, and it is sometimes a good idea to just listen attentively and leave your notebook in your pocket. You’d be surprised, though, how few of these situations there are. Don’t talk yourself into not jotting down a few notes on the incorrect assumption that people won’t like it if you do.

The key is to take up the role of researcher immediately when you arrive at your field site, whether that site is a peasant village in a developing nation or a corporate office in Chicago. Let people know from the first day you arrive that you are there to study their way of life. Don’t try to become an inconspicuous participant rather than what you really are: an observer who wants to participate as much as possible. Participant observation means that you try to experience the life of your informants to the extent possible; it doesn’t mean that you try to melt into the background and become a fully accepted member of a culture other than your own.

It’s usually impossible to do that anyway. After decades of coming and going in Indian villages in Mexico, I still stick out like a sore thumb and never became the slightest bit inconspicuous. Be honest with people and keep your note pad out as much of the time as possible. Ask your informants for their permission to take notes while you are talking with them. If people don’t want you to take notes, they’ll tell you.

Or they may tell you to take notes when you don’t want to. Paul Killworth studied the social organization of the British Army. Because notebooks are, as he says, ‘‘part of Army uniform,’’ he was able to go anywhere with his notebook in hand and take notes freely. But if he put his notebook aside for more than a few minutes, soldiers would ask him if he was getting lazy. ‘‘More than one relaxing moment,’’ he says, ‘‘was stopped by someone demanding that I write something down’’ (1997:5).

Or they may ask to see your notes. A student researcher in one of our field schools worked in a logging camp in Idaho. He would write up his notes at night from the jottings he took all day. Each morning at 6:00 a.m. he nailed the day’s sheaf of notes (along with a pen on a string) to a tree for everyone to look at. Some of the men took the time to scribble helpful (or amusing or rude) comments on the notes. If you use this technique, watch out for the CNN effect. That’s when people tell you things they want to tell everyone because they know you’re going to broadcast whatever they say. This is a disaster if you’re trying to make everybody around you feel confident that you’re not going to blab about them.

Even when people get accustomed to your constant jottings, you can overdo it. Emerson et al. (1995:23) cite the following field note from an ethnographer who was studying divorce negotiations:

On one occasion when finishing up a debriefing . . . [the mediator] began to apply some eye make-up while I was finishing writing down some observations. She flashed me a mock disgusted look and said, ‘‘Are you writing this down too!’’ indicating the activity with her eye pencil.

The Diary

Notes are based on observations that will form the basis of your publications. A diary, on the other hand, is personal. It’s a place where you can run and hide when things get tough. You absolutely need a diary in any ethnography project. It will help you deal with loneliness, fear, and other emotions that make fieldwork difficult.

A diary chronicles how you feel and how you perceive your relations with others around you. If you are really angry at someone, you should write about it—in your diary. Jot down emotional highs and lows while they’re happening, if you can, and write them up in your diary at the end of the day. During data analysis, your diary will become an important professional document. It will give you information that will help you interpret your field notes and will make you aware of your personal biases.

Dennis McGilvray (1989) did fieldwork in Akkaraipattu, Sri Lanka in 1969–71. Here is an excerpt from his diary:

January 7, 1970. Akkaraipattu. A miserable night indeed. Slight fever, humidity, and mosquitoes. Abuthahir doesn’t come at 5:00 a.m. as he promised. But at 6:00 a.m., just as I was finally getting to sleep, he came to slaughter the cow to inaugurate the house. The whole spectacle was quite bloody and aroused deep sympathy from me for the poor cow. A mob of 75 children plus various old adults assemble to watch the butchering and to watch me. Mainly me. What little appetite I had soon vanished, and I basically felt sick, but nonetheless I had to endure endless questions and invasions of my morning bathing and shaving ritual. It seems that word of my camera, typewriter, and tape recorder has spread for miles around. And everyone also knows I am getting a jeep, and they all want reservations for rides. In a more healthy state, I would be able to tolerate the speechless scrutiny of my every action, but this morning I came close to blowing my lid.

February 18, 1970. Akkaraipattu. For the first time, really, since being in Akk, I would love to have a drink. Just a nice highball with ice, nothing too powerful. I am weary. It was another of those days when people grab me by the tongue and won’t let go. It’s what I need to learn Tamil, I know, but it is often mindwracking and definitely like brainwashing. Right now, after everyone has finally gone and I am alone at last, I wish I could take a hot bath and crawl into a soft cool bed (dry, too) with clean sheets. But I can’t: everything, my sleeping bag included, is slightly damp from the rain. The mosquitoes and sundry bugs are waiting for me, and the bed still has no mattress so I sleep on planks. What a drag. I still feel as if I am not well-enough coordinated in studying Tamil: it is all just bits and pieces. ‘‘The Tamil Chef,’’ latest installment. Samitamby, my Barber neighbor, hailed me to the back fence again for another culinary delicacy. This time it was tortoise eggs and a bunch of green leaves. ‘Vitamin A and calcium!’ he exhorted, brandishing the clump of leaves. Palani (my Tamil cook), under strong pressure from Samitamby, laced every item for lunch with these damn leaves, which have zero taste whatsoever. As for the eggs, I tried the omelet but couldn’t take the boiled eggs: they are still soft when cooked and look like rancid cheese fon[due] inside . . . .

Franz Boas got engaged to Marie Krackowizer in May 1883, just 3 weeks before beginning his first field trip. It was a grueling 15 months on Baffin Island and at sea. Boas missed German society terribly and, although he couldn’t mail the letters, he wrote about 500 pages to his fiance´e. Here is an excerpt from his diary:

December 16, north of Pangnirtung. My dear sweetheart. . . . Do you know how I pass these long evenings? I have a copy of Kant with me, which I am studying, so that I shall not be so completely uneducated when I return. Life here really makes one dull and stupid. . . . I have to blush when I remember that during our meal tonight I thought how good a pudding with plum sauce would taste. But you have no idea what an effect privations and hunger, real hunger, have on a person. Maybe Mr. Kant is a good antidote! The contrast is almost unbelievable when I remember that a year ago I was in society and observed all the rules of good taste, and tonight I sit in this snow hut with Wilhelm and an Eskimo eating a piece of raw, frozen seal meat which had first to be hacked up with an axe, and greedily gulping my coffee. Is that not as great a contradiction as one can think of? (Cole 1983:29)

When Malinowski was trapped in the Trobriand Islands during World War I, he too, missed his fiance´e and European society and occasionally lashed out at the Trobrianders in his diary (Malinowski 1967:253–54). Fieldwork in another culture is an intense experience, but don’t think that you have to be stranded in Sri Lanka or the Arctic or Melanesia for things to get intense.

Your diary will give you an outlet for writing things that you don’t want to become part of a public record. Publication of Malinowski’s and Boas’s diaries have helped make all fieldworkers aware that they are not alone in their frailties and self-doubts.

The Log

A log is a running account of how you plan to spend your time, how you actually spend your time, and how much money you spent. A good log is the key to doing systematic fieldwork and to collecting both qualitative and quantitative data on a systematic basis.

A field log should be kept in bound books of blank, lined pages. Some of my students have been able to use PDAs with schedule-planning apps for their logs, but there’s something to be said for a big, clunky logbook, at least $6 ^ { \prime \prime } \times 8 ^ { \prime \prime }$ in size so that you can see at a glance what your agenda is as you have that first cup of coffee in the morning.

Each day of fieldwork, whether you’re out for a year or a week, should be represented by a double page of the log. The pages on the left should list what you plan to do on any given day. The facing pages will recount what you actually do each day.

Begin your log on pages 2 and 3. Put the date on the top of the even-numbered page to the left. Then, go through the entire notebook and put the successive dates on the evennumbered pages. By doing this in advance, even the days on which you ‘‘do nothing,’’ or are away from your field site, will have double log pages devoted to them.

The first day or two that you make a log you will use only the right-hand pages where you keep track of where you go, who you see, and what you spend. Some people like to carry their logs around with them. Others prefer to jot down the names of the people they run into or interview, and enter the information into their logs when they write up their notes in the evening. Keep a file of 25-word profiles on as many people you meet as you can.

You can start by jotting profiles on index cards (one for each person you meet) and then moving the profile to your computer when you write your field notes. Before you go into any second or third interview, look up the key biographical information you have about the person (PDAs are perfect for this sort of thing). During the first couple of minutes of the interview, work in a comment that shows you remember some of those key bio-facts. You’ll be surprised how far that’ll take you.

Jot down the times that you eat and what you eat, and write down who you eat with and how much you spend on all meals away from your house. You’d be surprised at how much you learn from this, too.

After a day or two, you will begin to use the left-hand sheets of the log. As you go through any given day, you will think of many things that you want to know but can’t resolve on the spot. Write those things down in your jot book or in your log. When you write up your field notes, think about who you need to interview, or what you need to observe, regarding each of the things you wondered about that day.

Right then and there, open your log and commit yourself to finding each thing out at a particular time on a particular day. If finding something out requires that you talk to a particular person, then put that person’s name in the log, too. If you don’t know the person to talk to, then put down the name of someone whom you think can steer you to the right person.

Suppose you’re studying a school system. It’s April 5 and you are talking to MJR, a fifth-grade teacher. She tells you that since the military government took over, children have to study politics for 2 hours every day and she doesn’t like it. Write a note to yourself in your log to ask mothers of some of the children about this issue and to interview the school principal.

Later on, when you are writing up your notes, you may decide not to interview the principal until after you have accumulated more data about how mothers in the community feel about the new curriculum. On the left-hand page for April 23 you note: ‘‘target date for interview with school principal.’’ On the left-hand page of April 10 you note: ‘‘make appointment for interview on 23rd with school principal.’’ For April 6 you note: ‘‘need interviews with mothers about new curriculum.’’

As soon as it comes to you that you need to know how many kilowatt hours of electricity were burned in a village, or the difference in price between fish sold off a boat and the same fish sold in the local market, commit yourself in your log to a specific time when you will try to get answers to your questions. Whether the question you think of requires a formal appointment, or a direct, personal observation, or an informal interview in a bar, write the question down in one of the left-hand pages of your log.

Don’t worry if the planned activity log you create for yourself winds up looking nothing like the activities you actually engage in from day to day. Frankly, you’ll be lucky to do half the things you think of to do, much less do them when you want to. The important thing is to fill those left-hand pages, as far out into the future as you can, with specific information that you need and specific tasks you need to perform to get that information.

This is not just because you want to use your time effectively, but because the process of building a log forces you to think hard about the questions you really want to answer in your research and the data you really need. You will start any field research project knowing some of the questions you are interested in. But those questions may change; you may add some and drop others—or your entire emphasis may shift.

The right-hand pages of the log are for recording what you actually accomplish each day. As I said, you’ll be appalled at first at how little resemblance the left-hand and the right-hand pages have to one another. You’ll get over it. Just keep reminding yourself that good fieldwork does not depend on the punctuality of informants or on your ability to do all the things you want to do. It depends on your systematic work over a period of time. If some informants do not show up for appointments (and often they won’t), you can evaluate whether or not you really need the data you thought you were going to get from them. If you do need the data, put a note on the left-hand page for that same day, or for the next day, to contact the informant and reschedule the appointment.

If you still have no luck, you may have to decide whether it’s worth more of your time to track down a particular person or a particular piece of information. Your log will tell you how much time you’ve spent on it already and will make the decision easier. There’s plenty of time for everything when you think you’ve got months stretching ahead of you.

But you only have a finite amount of time in any fieldwork project to get useful data, and the time goes very quickly.

FIELD NOTES

And now, about field notes. . . . Let’s face it: After a hard day trekking all over [town] [the village] [the jungle] [the desert] interviewing people, hanging out, and recording behavior, it’s hard to sit down and write up field notes. Sometimes, it’s downright intimidating. We know this much about field notes for sure: The faster you write up your observations, the more detail you can get down. More is better. Much more is much better (except, of course, when data are systematically biased, in which case more is decidedly worse) (box 13.1).

BOX 13.1

S O L A R C H A R G I N G F I E L D C O M P U T E R S

If you’re doing fieldwork in an area without electricity, the choices are: Take notes by hand or use solar chargers for your computer. Laptops, and even notebook computers, require a lot of power, which makes solar charging tough. Batteries for PDAs can be charged from portable solar cells. With wireless keyboards and lots of apps, PDAs are becoming more useful as replacements for laptops in fieldwork.

You can’t be too paranoid about backing up your notes. E-mail copies of them to a couple of trusted friends or colleagues (encrypt the notes if you need to), or send them CDs if you don’t have any access to the Internet. Ask them to print a copy of your notes for you, so you’ve got a hard copy somewhere in case your computer is stolen and all your backup disks are destroyed in a fire at the same time. Think this can’t happen? Think again. Trees are a renewable resource. Make paper backups. And upload your notes to an Internet server for good measure.

There are three kinds of field notes: methodological notes, descriptive notes, and analytic notes.

Methodological Notes

Methodological notes deal with technique in collecting data. If you work out a better way to keep a log than I’ve described here, don’t just use your new technique; write it up in your field notes and publish a paper about your technique so others can benefit from your experience. (See appendix E for a list of professional journals that publish articles on research methods in the social and behavioral sciences.) If you find yourself spending too much time with marginal people in the culture, make a note of it, and discuss how that came to be. You’ll discover little tricks of the trade, like the ‘‘uh-huh’’ technique discussed in chapter 8. (Remember that one? It’s where you learn how and when to grunt encouragingly to keep an interview going.) Write up notes about your discoveries. Mark all these notes with a big ‘‘M’’ at the top—M for ‘‘method.’’

Methodological notes are also about your own growth as an instrument of data collection. Collecting data is always awkward when you begin a field project, but it gets easier as you become more comfortable in a new culture. During this critical period of adjustment, you should intellectualize what you’re learning about doing fieldwork by taking methodological notes.

When I first arrived in Greece in 1960, I was invited to dinner at ‘‘around 7 p.m.’’ When I arrived at around 7:15 (what I thought was a polite 15 minutes late), I was embarrassed to find that my host was still taking a bath. I should have known that he really meant ‘‘around 8 p.m.’’ when he said ‘‘around 7.’’ My methodological note for the occasion simply stated that I should not show up for dinner before 8 p.m. in the future.

Some weeks later, I figured out the general rules for timing of evening activities, including cocktails, dinner, and late-night desserts in the open squares of Athens. Robert Levine has studied the psychology of time by asking people around the world things like ‘‘How long would you wait for someone who was late for a lunch appointment?’’ On average, Brazilians say they’d wait 62 minutes. On average, says Levine, ‘‘Americans would need to be back at their office two minutes before’’ the late Brazilian lunch was just getting underway (Levine 1997:136).

When I began fieldwork with the N^˜ a¨hn˜u people of central Mexico in 1962, I was offered pulque everywhere I went. I tried to refuse politely; I couldn’t stand the stuff. But people were very insistent and seemed offended if I didn’t accept the drink. Things were particularly awkward when I showed up at someone’s house and there were other guests there. Everyone enjoyed pulque but me, and most of the time people were too poor to have beer around to offer me.

At that time, I wrote a note that people ‘‘felt obliged by custom to offer pulque to guests.’’ I was dead wrong. As I eventually learned, people were testing me to see if I was affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical missionary group (and nondrinkers of alcohol) that had its regional headquarters in the area where I was working.

The SIL is comprised of many excellent linguists who produce books and articles on the grammar of the nonwritten languages of the world and translations of the Bible into those languages. There was serious friction between the Indians who had converted to Protestantism and those who remained Catholic. It was important for me to disassociate myself from the SIL, so my methodological note discussed the importance of conspicuously consuming alcohol and tobacco to identify myself as an anthropologist and not as a missionary.

Nine years later, in 1971, I still couldn’t stand pulque—and I was sure that drinking out of those common gourds that were passed around was what sent me to the hospital in 1968. I started carrying a couple of six packs of beer in the car and offering it to people who offered me pulque. This worked and the methods lesson was clear: Beer kept my reputation of independence from the SIL intact and was universally accepted because beer was costly, and prestigious, compared to pulque.

Eight years later, in 1979, I read that William Partridge had a similar predicament during his work in Colombia (Kimball and Partridge 1979:55). Everywhere Partridge went, it seems, people offered him beer, even at 7:00 a.m. He needed an acceptable excuse, he said, to avoid spending all his waking hours getting drunk.

After a few months in the field, Partridge found that telling people ‘‘Estoy tomando una pastilla’’ (‘‘I’m taking a pill’’) did the trick. Locally, the pill referred to in this phrase was used in treating venereal disease. Everyone knew that you didn’t drink alcohol while you were taking this pill, and the excuse was perfect for adding a little virility boost to

Partridge’s reputation. Partridge used his knowledge of local culture to get out of a tough situation.

Methodological notes, then, have to do with the conduct of field inquiry itself. You will want to make methodological notes especially when you do something silly that breaks a cultural norm. If you are feeling particularly sheepish, you might want to write those feelings into your diary where no one else will see what you’ve written, but you don’t want to waste the opportunity to make a straightforward methodological note on such occasions, as well.

Descriptive Notes

Descriptive notes are the meat and potatoes of fieldwork. Most notes are descriptive and are from two sources: watching and listening. Interviews with informants produce acres of notes, especially if you use a recorder and later write down large chunks of what people say or even transcribe the interviews completely. Observations of processes, like feeding children, building a house, making beer, and so on, also produce a lot of notes. Descriptive field notes may contain birth records that you’ve copied out of a local church registry; or they may consist of summary descriptions of a village plaza, or an urban shopping mall, or any environmental features that you think are important.

The best way to learn to write descriptive field notes is to practice doing it with others who are also trying to learn. Get together with one or more partners and observe a process that’s unfamiliar to all of you. It could be a church service other than one you’ve seen before, or it could be an occupational process that you’ve not witnessed. (I remember the first time I saw plasterers hang ceilings: They do it on stilts.)

Whatever you observe, try to capture in field notes the details of the behavior and the environment. Try to get down ‘‘what’s going on.’’ Then ask informants who are watching the ceremony or process to explain what’s going on and try to get notes down on their explanation. Later, get together with your research partner(s) and discuss your notes with one another. You’ll find that two or three people see much more than just one sees. You might also find that you and your partners saw the same things but wrote down different subsets of the same information.

Analytic Notes

You will write up fewer analytic notes than any other kind. This is where you lay out your ideas about how you think the culture you are studying is organized. Analytic notes can be about relatively minor things. When I finally figured out the rules for showing up on time for evening functions in Greece, that was worth an analytic note. And when I understood the rules that governed the naming of children, that was worth an analytic note, too.

As I said in chapter 2, in the section on theory, it took me almost a year to figure out why the casualty rate among Kalymnian sponge divers was going up, while the worldwide demand for natural sponges was going down. When it finally made sense, I sat down and wrote a long, long analytic field note about it. After thinking about the problem for many years, I finally understood why bilingual education in Mexico does not result in the preservation of Indian languages (it’s a long story; see Bernard 1992). As the ideas developed, I wrote them up in a series of notes.

Analytic notes are the product of a lot of time and effort and may go on for several pages. They are often the basis for published papers or for chapters in dissertations and books. They will be the product of your understanding and that will come about through your organizing and working with descriptive and methodological notes over a period of time. Don’t expect to write a great many analytic notes, but write them all your life, even (especially) after you are out of the field.

CODING FIELD NOTES

Gene Shelley (1992) studied people who suffer from end-stage kidney disease. Most patients are on hemodialysis. Some are on peritoneal dialysis. The ‘‘hemo’’ patients go to a dialysis center, several times a week, while the ‘‘pero’’ patients perform a dialysis (called continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis, or CAPD) on themselves several times a day.

Figure 13.1 shows three descriptive notes from Shelley’s research. First, there’s a delimiter (she used the dollar sign) that marks the beginning of each note. This lets you pack all the notes together in one big file so a word processor or text analysis program knows where notes begin and end. Next is a unique number that identifies the note in a continuing sequence, starting with 0001. Next is the date.

Then come some numbers that refer to theme codes. In note 3, this is preceded by a location indicator. Finally, at the end of the codes at the top of each field note, there’s a cryptic indicator of the person to whom Shelley attributes the information—except for note 3, which was based on observation (box 13.2).

Theme Codes: The OCM

Shelley used a modified version of the Outline of Cultural Materials, or OCM, to code her field notes. The OCM was developed originally by G. P. Murdock in 1950 as a way to index and organize ethnographic materials in the Human Relations Area Files (more about HRAF and the OCM in the section on content analysis in chapter 19). The OCM has gone through several editions over the years, and the latest edition is available online at http://www.yale.edu/hraf/outline.htm (Murdock et al. 2004 [1961]).

There are 91 big cultural domains in the OCM, in blocks of 10, from 10 to 91. Block 58, for example, covers marriage with codes for nuptials (585), divorce (586), and so on. Other major domains are things like kinship, entertainment, social stratification, war, health, sex, and religious practices. Every project is unique, so you’ll need codes that aren’t in the OCM, but you can add decimals (or words) and extend the codes forever. Table 13.1 shows Shelley’s adaptation of the OCM code 757 (medical therapy):

Don’t be put off by the lengthiness of the OCM coding list. That is its strength. Lots of anthropologists have used the OCM over the years to code their field notes and other materials. George Foster coded his 50 years of notes on the Mexican community of Tzintzuntza´n using the OCM, and Robert V. Kemper uses it to code the data that he’s collecting on the same community (George Foster, personal communication; Kemper 2002:289). John Honigman used it in his fieldwork on Canadian Indians; the 37 field researchers in Clyde Kluckhohn’s Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures Project all used the OCM to code their notes, as did the fieldworkers on the Cornell University team project studying a village in India (Sanjek 1990:108, 232, 331). You’ll only use a fraction of the codes on any given project, but once you start using it in the field, you’ll quickly find yourself building supplemental coding schemes to fit your particular needs.

Figure 13.2 shows how Gordon Gibson (of the Smithsonian) used the OCM to code a series of ethnographic films on the Himba, a cattle-herding society in Namibia (in Kreiss and Stockton 1980:287). The film coded in figure 13.2 is about a wedding, so each piece is coded 585, the OCM code for nuptials. Where the hut is seen, the code for dwellings (342) is inserted. Where the film shows people eating meat, the codes 262 (diet) and 264

$ 615 8-16-89: 757.3; Dr. H

Dr. H explains that in peritoneal dialysis you exchange 2 liters of fluid several times a day (based on body size). Women do it about 3 times and men about 4 times because of larger body size. People mostly do a “dwell” for about 8 hours overnight while they sleep (fluid is inflowed into peritoneal cavity and allowed to sit there overnight). Then they do peritoneal dialysis when they wake up and another time or two during the day. Peritoneal dialysis patients are pretty close to being healthy. They have to take medication but you cannot tell them from healthy people, he says.

$ 742 8-30-89: 57.3, 757.5; Nurse Ralph B.

CAPD training takes about a week to 10 days. During this time, the patient comes in every day and receives training. Ralph thinks that when the whole family comes in for the training, the patients do better. They have about 20 CAPD patients right now. Ralph said there are 3 types of CAPD patients: (1) those patients who are already on hemo and in pretty good shape, usually well-motivated. (2) those who are late getting started and are in trouble (medically) and are hurriedly trying to learn the procedure. (It takes 2 weeks to get a catheter inserted and then have it heal. Since this surgery is viewed as “elective surgery,” it can be bumped and rescheduled.) Only after surgery and healing can the training take place. (3) those who have lost a kidney which was transplanted. They are just waiting for another kidney and they view CAPD as temporary and are not that motivated to learn it because they think they won't be on it long.

$ 876 12-6-89: Waiting Room 571; 580; 580.7; 580.1; 264; 12;

While waiting to talk to Dr. H, I sat in the hemodialysis waiting room. I watched and listed to patients (and waiting family) who were waiting to get on the dialysis machines. They were talking about how sometimes the staff is rough with them when putting the needles in to get the vein access. One guy said the needle went once “right into his bone.” Another guy said “the girl had to try 7 times” to get his blood and he was about to hit her. (The nurse said at the time, “I know this hurts.”) Another woman threatened physical harm to technicians who draw blood roughly. One patient mentioned that sometimes they have to get different vein access sites (i.e., the groin or the top of the foot). They were all talking, not always to anyone in particular (but sometimes they were). They were talking in a way so that everyone in the room could be in the conversation if they wanted to.

FIGURE 13.1.

Field notes from Gene Shelley’s study of kidney disease patients (1992). Reproduced by permission.

(eating) are inserted. In the frame at 11:45:10, the code for visiting (574) appears, and in the two earlier frames, the code for childhood activities (857) is inserted. When Gibson did this work in the 1970s, the database was held on a mainframe. Today, you would just watch an ethnographic film on your computer and enter codes as you go.

Many people find the use of number codes distracting. Matthew Miles and Michael Huberman (1994), authors of a wonderful book on qualitative data analysis, advocated

BOX 13.2

C O D I N G V E R S U S I N D E X I N G

I want to make clear the three different uses of the word ‘‘code.’’ When I say: ‘‘Use codes for places and informant names,’’ the word ‘‘code’’ means an encryption device. The object is to hide information, not dispense it. When William Partridge interviewed cannabis growers in Colombia, he identified the texts by a letter code and kept the only copy of his notes in a locked trunk (Kimball and Partridge 1979:174). You don’t have to be interviewing cannabis growers to be paranoid about keeping your informants’ identity secret. You never know what seemingly innocuous information might embarrass or hurt someone if your data fall into the wrong hands.

When I say: ‘‘Code your notes for the themes you develop in your analysis,’’ the word ‘‘code’’ means an indexing device. Suppose you do 100 interviews with women about their birthing experience. If you stick the code PAIN into the text whenever a woman mentions anything about pain or about feeling hurt, you’d be using the code PAIN as an indexing device—that is, as a way to find your way back to all the places in the text where anything about pain is mentioned. It’s just like an index to a book. It says that ‘‘sampling’’ is on page 237 and sure enough, when you go to page 237, you find you’re reading about sampling.

The third meaning of the word ‘‘code’’ is a measurement device. Suppose you make judgments about the amount of pain—by counting words like ‘‘agony’’ as indicating more pain than words like ‘‘distress’’ or by looking at the content and meaning of the text and counting ‘‘It was painful, but I got through it’’ as indicating less pain than ‘‘I prayed I would die.’’ You might use codes like LO-PAIN, MID-PAIN, or HI-PAIN and in this case, you’d be using codes for more than nominal measurement.

the use of words or mnemonics that look like the original concept. Like many researchers, they find that mnemonic codes (like ECO for economics, DIV for divorce, and so on) are easier to remember than numbers. Figure 13.3 shows an example of how to do this.

Another value of using your own codes is that they develop naturally from your study and you’ll find it easy to remember them as you code your notes each day. Strauss and

Table 13.1 Shelley’s (1992) Adaptation of the OCM Code 757 on Medical Therapy txt 757.1 Transplantation 757.2 Hemodialysis 757.3 CAPD (peritoneal dialysis) 757.4 Home dialysis 757.5 Adjustment to dialysis 757.6 Compliance with medical regime 757.7 Machinery involved in dialysis 757.8 Medicines 757.9 Medical test results 757.91 HIV test results

FIGURE 13.2. Gibson’s coding of the Himba films. SOURCE: L. Kreiss and E. Stockton, ‘‘Using the Outline of Cultural Materials as a Basis for Indexing the Content of Ethnographic Films,’’ Behavior Science Research, Vol. 15, pp. 281–93, 1980.

Corbin (1990:68) recommend in vivo codes as names for things. In vivo codes are catchy phrases or words used by informants. In his study of Alaskan fishermen, Jeffrey Johnson heard people talking about a ‘‘clown.’’ The word turned out to be a terrific label for a type of person found in many organizations. The term emerged in vivo from the mouths of Johnson’s informants. (More on in vivo coding in chapter 19).

If you use your own coding scheme, or if you modify an existing scheme (like the OCM), be sure to write up a verbose codebook in case you forget what ‘‘A5’’ or ‘‘EMP’’ or whatever-cute-abbreviations-you-dreamed-up-at-the-time-you-did-th e-coding mean.

And don’t get too picky when you make up your own codes. Coding is supposed to be data reduction, not data proliferation. Mathew Miles was involved in a big ethnographic project to evaluate six schools. All the researchers developed their own codes and the code list quickly grew to 202 categories of actors, processes, organizational forms, and

412 MA XOR 101210 MIG WOM ECO

This is note number 412. It’s about an informant named MA in these notes, and she is from a village you label XOR. The date is October 12, 2010, and the note is about migration from her village in search of work. The note is coded using abbreviations for themes as being about migration (MIG), about women (WOM), and about economics (ECO).

efforts. Each of the six researchers insisted that his or her field site was unique and that the highly specialized codes were all necessary. It became impossible for anyone to use the unwieldy system, and they just stopped coding altogether (Miles 1983:123).

The important thing is not which coding scheme you use, it’s that you code your notes and do it consistently. In most projects, the coding scheme takes shape as the notes are written. The scheme is revised a lot before it becomes stable. Some anthropologists, even those who use the OCM, wait a month or more, to see how their field notes are shaping up, before they think about how to code the notes.

ANALYZING FIELD NOTES

Until about 1980, field notes were all written on cards or sheets of paper and then handmarked with codes indicating themes. Some people still like to write field notes on paper, but most fieldworkers type up their notes on a computer or PDA and then use a text analysis program to code those notes. Text analysis programs don’t analyze anything, but they do take a lot of the drudgery out of coding and they make it easier to analyze your notes (box 13.3).

BOX 13.3

U S I N G A W O R D P R O C E S S O R T O C O D E A N D R E T R I E V E F I E L D N O T E S

If all you want to do is find and retrieve notes about particular topics whenever you want, then a word processor is all you need. Just create a symbol that will never be used for anything except codes—perhaps the ampersand followed by a backslash, &\ Then use that symbol to tag material in your notes. For example, you might tuck the phrase ‘‘&\marriage’’ into your notes as an indicator that you’re talking about marriage ‘‘about here.’’ Then, when you want to look for chunks of text that deal with marriage, you just look for the code &\marriage.

Tucking tags like this into your notes lets you mark text that is about marriage, even though the word ‘‘marriage’’ might not be mentioned (as might be the case, say, in a description of a wedding ceremony).

You can also use the font features (bold, italics, color) of a word processor to code your notes. You’d be surprised at what you can do with a simple word processor. For more, see Ryan (2004) and La Pelle (2004). Lots more about finding and coding themes in texts in chapter 19.

I think it’s best to start analyzing with the ocular scan method, or eyeballing. In this low-tech method, you go through your notes, reading them, one at a time. You live with them, read them over and over again, and eventually get a feel for what’s in them. This is followed by the interocular percussion test, in which patterns jump out and hit you between the eyes. For some, nothing is more fun or efficient at this early stage of analysis than pawing through a sheaf of printed notes, moving them around on the floor, putting them into piles, and thinking about them. For others, printing notes is a waste of time and trees. They like to read through their notes on a screen and code on the fly. There is no single best way to analyze field notes. Figure out what you like and stay with it.

For me, a text analysis program is the way to go. You can ask questions like: ‘‘Find every note in which I used the word woman but only if I also used the word migration within three lines of the word woman.’’ If you code your notes with themes, you can look for any combination of those, too. The mechanics are simple. The important thing is to decide what the themes are then to use those themes in coding your notes. We’ll get the problem of finding themes in chapter 19.

DATABASE MANAGEMENT

What do you do if you have physical things, like photos or news clippings, rather than notes? Local newspapers are a great source of data about communities, but once you start clipping all the interesting stories, you quickly wind up with hundreds of pieces. And the same goes for photos. They are full of information, but—especially with digital photos— it’s easy to accumulate a huge number of them.

Database management is the way to handle these kinds of data. Number your clippings or photos, starting with 00001, and set up a database using any of the popular programs, like Microsoft Access^ or FileMaker Pro^. The records of the database will be the numbered items, from 1 to n. The fields of the database will include things like the name of the informant associated with each item, the place where you collected it, the date, and the topics associated with it, and so on. Some items may get one or two topical codes; others may need 10, so build at least 10 code spaces into the database.

When you ask the database ‘‘Which clippings are about palm oil?’’ or ‘‘Which photos are about old men in the plaza?’’ or ‘‘Which are about market sellers and about meat and about servants making purchases for others?’’ you’ll get back answers like: ‘‘The information you want is on records 113, 334, 376, 819, 820, and 1,168.’’

Once you get accustomed to setting up databases, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them.