Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 349
great surprise,’’ says Good, ‘‘I had found among them a way of life that, while
dangerous and harsh, was also filled with camaraderie, compassion, and a
thousand daily lessons in communal harmony’’ (Good 1991:ix). Good learned
the language and became a nomadic hunter and gatherer. He was adopted into
a lineage and given a wife. (Good and his wife, Yárima, tried living in the
United States, but after a few years, Yárima returned to the Yanomami.)
Marlene Dobkin de Rios did fieldwork in Peru and married the son of a
Peruvian folk healer, whose practice she studied (Dobkin de Rios 1981). And
Jean Gearing (1995) is another anthropologist who married her closest informant
on the island of St. Vincent.
Does going native mean loss of objectivity? Perhaps, but not necessarily. In
the industrialized countries of the West—the United States, Canada, Germany,
Australia, Germany, England, France, etc.—we expect immigrants to go
native. We expect them to become fluent in the local language, to make sure
that their children become fully acculturated, to participate in the economy
and politics of the nation, and so on.
Some fully assimilated immigrants to those countries become anthropologists
and no one questions whether their immigrant background produces a
lack of objectivity. Since total objectivity is, by definition, a myth, I’d worry
more about producing credible data and strong analysis and less about whether
going native is good or bad.
How Much Time Does It Take?
Anthropological field research traditionally takes a year or more because it
takes that long to get a feel for the full round of people’s lives. It can take that
long just to settle in, learn a new language, gain rapport, and be in a position
to ask good questions and to get good answers.
A lot of participant observation studies, however, are done in a matter of
weeks or a few months. Yu (1995) spent 4 months as a participant observer in
a family-run Chinese restaurant, looking at differences in the conceptions that
Chinese and non-Chinese employees had about things like good service, adequate
compensation, and the role of management.
At the extreme low end, it is possible to do useful participant observation
in just a few days. Assuming that you’ve wasted as much time in laundromats
as I did when I was a student, you could conduct a reasonable participant
observation study of one such place in a week. You’d begin by bringing in a
load of wash and paying careful attention to what’s going on around you.
After two or three nights of observation, you’d be ready to tell other patrons
that you were conducting research and that you’d appreciate their letting you