Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 343
Romancing the Methods
It used to be that the skills for doing fieldwork were mysterious and
unteachable, something you just learned, out there in the field. In the 1930s,
John Whiting and some of his fellow anthropology students at Yale University
asked their professor, Leslie Spier, for a seminar on methods. ‘‘This was a
subject to discuss casually at breakfast,’’ Whiting recalls Spier telling him, not
something worthy of a seminar (Whiting 1982:156). Tell this story to seasoned
anthropologists at a convention, and it’s a good bet they’ll come back with a
story of their own just like it.
It’s fine for anthropologists to romanticize fieldwork—vulcanologists and
oceanographers do it, too, by the way—particularly about fieldwork in places
that take several days to get to, where the local language has no literary tradition,
and where the chances are nontrivial of coming down with a serious illness.
Research really is harder to do in some places than in others. But the
fact is, anthropologists are more likely these days to study drug use among
urban African Americans (Dei 2002), the daily life of the mentally retarded in
a common residence (Angrosino 1997), the life of police in Los Angeles
(Barker 1999), army platoons in Britain (Killworth 1997), consumer behavior
(Sherry 1995), gay culture (Herdt 1992; Murray 1992), or life on the mean
streets of big cities (Bourgois 1995; Fleisher 1998) than they are to study isolated
tribal or peasant peoples. It would take a real inventory to find out how
much more likely, but in a recent collection of 17 self-reflective studies of
anthropologists about their fieldwork (Hume and Mulcock 2004), just three
cases deal with work in isolated communities. (For more on street ethnography,
see Agar 1973, Weppner 1973, 1977, Fleisher 1995, Lambert et al. 1995,
Connolly and Ennew 1996, Gigengack 2000, and Kane 2001.)
And while participant observation in small, isolated communities has some
special characteristics, the techniques and skills that are required seem to me
to be pretty much the same everywhere.
What Is Participant Observation?
Participant observation usually involves fieldwork, but not all fieldwork is
participant observation. Goldberg et al. (1994) interviewed 206 prostitutes and
collected saliva specimens (to test for HIV and for drug use) during 53 nights
of fieldwork in Glasgow’s red light district. This was serious fieldwork, but
hardly participant observation.
So much for what participant observation isn’t. Here’s what it is: Participant
observation is one of those strategic methods I talked about in chapter