Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

306 Chapter 11
down a list of 43 fish (tarpon, silver perch, Spanish mackerel, etc.), and pick
out the fish that fit each frame. Here are a few of the belief frames:
The meat from
is oily tasting.
It is hard to clean .
I prefer to catch .
That’s 43 62 2,666 judgments by each of 120 informants, but informants
were usually able to do the task in about half an hour (Johnson, personal
communication). The 62 frames, by the way, came straight out of ethnographic
interviews where informants were asked to list fish and to talk about
the characteristics of those fish.
Gillian Sankoff (1971) studied land tenure and kinship among the Buang, a
mountain people of northeastern New Guinea. The most important unit of
social organization among the Buang is the dgwa, a kind of descent group,
like a clan. Sankoff wanted to figure out the very complicated system by
which men in the village of Mambump identified with various dgwa and with
various named garden plots.
The Buang system was apparently too complex for bureaucrats to fathom,
so, to save administrators a lot of trouble, the men of Mambump had years
earlier devised a simplified system that they presented to outsiders. Instead of
claiming that they had ties with one or more of five different dgwa, they each
decided which of the two largest dgwa they would belong to, and that was as
much as the New Guinea administration knew.
To unravel the complex system of land tenure and descent, Sankoff made a
list of all 47 men in the village and all 140 yam plots that they had used over
the recent past. Sankoff asked each man to go through the list of men and
identify which dgwa each man belonged to. If a man belonged to more than
one, then Sankoff got that information, too. She also asked her informants to
identify which dgwa each of the 140 garden plots belonged to.
As you might imagine, there was considerable variability in the data. Only
a few men were uniformly placed into one of the five dgwa by their peers. But
by analyzing the matrices of dgwa membership and land use, Sankoff was
able to determine the core members and peripheral members of the various
dgwa.
She was also able to ask important questions about intracultural variability.
She looked at the variation in cognitive models among the Buang for how land
use and membership in descent groups were related. Sankoff’s analysis was
an important milestone in our understanding of the measurable differences
between individual culture vs. shared culture. It supported Goodenough’s