Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

314 Chapter 11
terms of ‘‘those that are similar.’’ Some fieldworkers have used photographs
of objects as stimuli for a pile sort.
Borgatti (1999:133) points out that physical stimuli, like images or objects,
make people focus on form rather than function. In fact, when asked to sort
drawings of fish, fishermen in North Carolina sorted on shape—the long thin
ones, the ones with a big dorsal fin, the small roundish ones (Boster and Johnson
1989). ‘‘In contrast,’’ says Borgatti (1999:133), ‘‘sorting names of fish
allows hidden attributes to affect the sorting’’—things like taste or how much
of a struggle fish put up. ‘‘If you are after shared cultural beliefs,’’ says Borgatti,
‘‘I recommend keeping the stimulus as abstract as possible’’ (1992b:6).
Pile Sorts and Taxonomic Trees
Pile sorting is an efficient method for generating taxonomic trees (Werner
and Fenton 1973). Simply hand informants the familiar pack of cards, each of
which contains some term in a cultural domain. Informants sort the cards into
piles, according to whatever criterion makes sense to them. After the first sorting,
informants are handed each pile and asked to go through the exercise
again. They keep doing this until they say that they cannot subdivide piles any
further. At each sorting level, informants are asked if there is a word or phrase
that describes each pile.
Perchonock and Werner (1969) used this technique in their study of Navajo
animal categories. After an informant finished doing a pile sort of animal
terms, Perchonock and Werner built a branching tree diagram (such as that
shown in figure 11.1) from the data. They would ask the informant to make
up sentences or phrases that expressed some relation between the nodes. They
found that informants intuitively grasped the idea of tree representations for
taxonomies. (For more about folk taxonomies, see chapter 18.)
Pile Sorts and Networks
I’ve used pile sorts to study the social structure of institutions such as prisons,
ships at sea, and bureaucracies, and also to map the cognitively defined
social organization of small communities. I simply hand people a deck of
cards, each of which contains the name of one of the people in the group, and
ask informants to sort the cards into piles, according to their own criteria.
The results tell me how people in the various components of an organization
(managers, production workers, advertising people; or guards, counselors,
prisoners; or seamen, deck officers, engine room personnel; or men and
women in a small Greek village) think about the social structure of the group.
Instead of ‘‘what goes with what,’’ I learn ‘‘who goes with whom.’’ Then I ask