Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

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Participant Observation
Participant observation fieldwork is the foundation of cultural anthropology.
It involves getting close to people and making them feel comfortable
enough with your presence so that you can observe and record information
about their lives. If this sounds a bit crass, I mean it to come out that way.
Only by confronting the truth about participant observation—that it involves
deception and impression management—can we hope to conduct ourselves
ethically in fieldwork. Much more about this later.
Participant observation is both a humanistic method and a scientific one. It
produces the kind of experiential knowledge that lets you talk convincingly,
from the gut, about what it feels like to plant a garden in the high Andes or
dance all night in a street rave in Seattle.
It also produces effective, positivistic knowledge—the kind that can move
the levers of the world if it gets into the right hands. Nancy Scheper-Hughes
(1992), for example, developed a nomothetic theory, based on participant
observation, that accounts for the tragedy of very high infant mortality in
northeast Brazil and the direct involvement of mothers in their infants’ deaths.
Anyone who hopes to develop a program to lower the incidence of infant mortality
in that part of the world will certainly have to read Scheper-Hughes’s
analysis.
And participant observation is used in product development and other direct
applications research—that is, where the object from the start is to solve a
human problem. Brigitte Jordan and her team of ethnographers at Xerox corporation
determined the information flow and the hierarchy of interactions in
the operations room of a major airline at a metropolitan airport (Jordan
1992b). And when credit-card readers were first installed on gasoline pumps
in the early 1990s, consumers avoided using the technology. John Lowe and a
team of participant observers figured out why (Solomon 1993).
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