Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Preface
xv
begin writing the second edition when I was a guest professor at the Museum
of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, from March to June 1991. My deep appreciation
to Kazuko Matsuzawa for that opportunity. A year at the University of
Cologne, in 1994–95, as a von Humboldt scholar, gave me the time to continue
reading about research methods, across the social and behavioral sciences.
Alas, my colleague and host for that year, Thomas Schweizer, died in
1999. The University of Florida granted me a sabbatical to bring out this
fourth edition.
In 1987, Pertti Pelto, Lee Sailer, and I taught the first National Science
Foundation Summer Institute on Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology—widely
known as ‘‘methods camp.’’ Stephen Borgatti joined the team in
1988 (when Sailer left), and the three of us taught together for 8 years, from
1988 to 1995. My intellectual debt to those two colleagues is profound. Pertti
Pelto, of course, wrote the pioneering methods text in cultural anthropology
(1970), and I’ve long been influenced by his sensible combination of ethnographic
and numerical data in field research.
Stephen Borgatti tutored me on the measurement of similarities and dissimilarities
and has greatly influenced my thinking about the formal study of emically
defined cultural domains. Readers will see many references in this book
to Borgatti’s suite of computer programs, called Anthropac. That package
made it possible for anthropologists to do multidimensional scaling, hierarchical
clustering, Likert scaling, Guttman scaling, and other computationally
intensive data analysis tasks in the field.
The original methods camp, which ended in 1995, was open only to those
who already had the Ph.D. In 1996, Jeffrey Johnson founded the NSF Summer
Institute for Research Design in Cultural Anthropology. That institute, which
continues to this day, is open only to graduate students who are designing their
doctoral research. I’ve been privileged to continue to teach at these summer
institutes and continue to benefit from collaborating with Johnson and with
Susan Weller in teaching young anthropologists the craft of research design.
Penn Handwerker has, for many years, been willing to spend hours on the
phone with me, discussing problems of data analysis. My closest colleague,
and the one to whom I am most intellectually indebted, is Peter Killworth,
with whom I have worked since 1972. Peter is a geophysicist at the University
of Southampton and is accustomed to working with data that have been collected
by deep-sea current meters, satellite weather scanners, and the like. But
he shares my vision of an effective science of humanity, and he has shown an
appreciation for the difficulties a naturalist like me encounters in collecting
real-life data, in the field, about human behavior and thought. Most importantly,
he has helped me see the possibilities for overcoming those difficulties
through the application of scientific research practices. The results are never