Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

216 Chapter 9
Letting the Informant or Respondent Lead
If you can carry on ‘‘unthreatening, self-controlled, supportive, polite, and
cordial interaction in everyday life,’’ then interviewing will come easy to you,
and informants will feel comfortable responding to your questions (Lofland
1976:90). But no matter how supportive you are as a person, an interview is
never really like a casual, unthreatening conversation in everyday life. In
casual conversations, people take more or less balanced turns (Spradley 1979),
and there is no feeling that somehow the discussion has to stay on track or
follow some theme (see also Merton et al. 1956; Hyman and Cobb 1975). In
unstructured interviewing, you keep the conversation focused on a topic,
while giving the respondent room to define the content of the discussion.
The rule is: Get people on to a topic of interest and get out of the way. Let
the informant provide information that he or she thinks is important.
During my research on the Kalymnian sponge fishermen in Greece, I spent
a lot of time at Procopis Kambouris’s taverna. (A Greek taverna is a particular
kind of restaurant.) Procopis’s was a favorite of the sponge fishermen. Procopis
was a superb cook, he made his own wine every year from grapes that
he selected himself, and he was as good a teller of sea stories as he was a
listener to those of his clientele. At Procopis’s taverna, I was able to collect
the work histories of sponge fishermen—when they’d begun their careers, the
training they’d gotten, the jobs they’d held, and so on. The atmosphere was
relaxed (plenty of retsina wine and good things to eat), and conversation was
easy.
As a participant observer, I developed a sense of camaraderie with the regulars,
and we exchanged sea stories with a lot of flourish. Still, no one at Procopis’s
ever made the mistake of thinking that I was there just for the camaraderie.
They knew that I was writing about their lives and that I had lots of
questions to ask. They also knew immediately when I switched from the role
of participant observer to that of ethnographic interviewer.
One night, I slipped into just such an interview/conversation with Savas
Ergas. He was 64 years old at the time and was planning to make one last 6-
month voyage as a sponge diver during the coming season in 1965. I began to
interview Savas on his work history at about 7:30 in the evening, and we
closed Procopis’s place at about 3 in the morning. During the course of the
evening, several other men joined and left the group at various times, as they
would on any night of conversation at Procopis’s. Savas had lots of stories to
tell (he was a living legend and he played well to a crowd), and we had to
continue the interview a few days later, over several more liters of retsina.
At one point on that second night, Savas told me (almost offhandedly) that
he had spent more than a year of his life walking the bottom of the Mediterra-