Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Structured Interviewing II: Cultural Domain Analysis 303
That is, if an informant mentioned goats 12th on her list, and bears 32nd,
then the distance between goats and bears, for that informant, was 32 12
20. Henley standardized these distances (that is, she divided each distance
by the length of an informant’s list and multiplied by 100) and calculated the
average distance, over all the informants, for each of the 66 pairs of animals.
The lowest mean distance was between sheep and goats (1.8). If you named
sheep, then the next thing you named was probably goats; and if you named
goats, then next thing you named was probably sheep. Most speakers of
English (and all other major Western languages, for that matter) have heard
the expression: ‘‘That’ll separate the sheep from the goats.’’
This part of Western culture was originally a metaphor for distinguishing
the righteous from the wicked and then became a metaphor for separating the
strong from the weak. The first meaning was mentioned in the Old Testament
(Ezekiel 34:17), and then again around 600 years later in the New Testament
(Matthew 25:31–33). Nowadays, you might hear someone say ‘‘Boy, that’ll
separate the sheep from the goats’’ on their way out of a calculus exam.
Henley’s respondents were neither shepherds nor students of Western scriptural
lore, but they all knew that sheep and goats somehow ‘‘go together.’’
Free lists tell you what goes with what, but you need to dig in order to understand
why. Cats and dogs were only 2 units apart in Henley’s free lists—no
surprise there, right?—while cats and deer were 56 units apart. Deer, in fact,
are related to all the other animals on the list by at least 40 units of distance,
except for rabbits, which are only 20 units away from deer.
Robert Trotter (1981) reports on 378 Mexican Americans who were asked
to name the remedios caseros, or home remedies, they knew, and what illnesses
each remedy was for. Informants listed a total of 510 remedies for treating
198 illnesses. However, the 25 most frequently mentioned remedies—
about 5% of the 510—made up about 41% of all the cases; and the 70 most
frequently mentioned illnesses—about 14%—made up 84% of the cases.
Trotter’s free-list data reveal a lot about Mexican American perceptions of
illness and home cures. He was able to count which ailments were reported
more frequently by men and which by women; which ailments were reported
more frequently by older people and which by younger people; which by those
born in Mexico and which by those born in the United States; and so on.
Free listing is often a prelude to cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling,
which we’ll get to in chapter 21. But consider what John Gatewood
(1983a) learned from just a set of free lists. He asked 40 adult Pennsylvanians
to name all the trees they could think of. Then he asked them to check the
trees on their list that they thought they could recognize in the wild. Thirtyseven
of them listed ‘‘oak,’’ 34 listed ‘‘pine,’’ 33 listed ‘‘maple,’’ and 31 listed
‘‘birch.’’ I suspect that the list of trees and what people say they could recog-