Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

360 Chapter 13
sequently, you have to experience participant observation to get good at it.
Nevertheless, there are a number of skills that you can develop before you go
into the field.
Learning the Language
Unless you are a full participant in the culture you’re studying, being a participant
observer makes you a freak. Here’s how anthropologists looked to
Vine Deloria (1969:78), a Sioux writer:
Anthropologists can readily be identified on the reservations. Go into any crowd
of people. Pick out a tall gaunt white man wearing Bermuda shorts, a World War
II Army Air Force flying jacket, an Australian bush hat, tennis shoes, and packing
a large knapsack incorrectly strapped on his back. He will invariably have a thin,
sexy wife with stringy hair, an I.Q. of 191, and a vocabulary in which even the
prepositions have eleven syllables. . . . This creature is an anthropologist.
Now, nearly four decades later, it’s more likely to be the anthropologist’s
husband who jabbers in 11-syllable words, but the point is still the same. The
most important thing you can do to stop being a freak is to speak the language
of the people you’re studying—and speak it well. Franz Boas was adamant
about this. ‘‘Nobody,’’ he said, ‘‘would expect authoritative accounts of the
civilization of China or Japan from a man who does not speak the languages
readily, and who has not mastered their literatures’’ (1911:56). And yet, ‘‘the
best kept secret of anthropology,’’ says Robbins Burling, ‘‘is the linguistic
incompetence of ethnological fieldworkers’’ (2000 [1984]:v; and see Owusu
[1978]; Werner [1994]; Borchgrevink [2003]).
That secret is actually not so well kept. In 1933, Paul Radin, one of Franz
Boas’s students, complained that Margaret Mead’s work on Samoa was superficial
because she wasn’t fluent in Samoan (Radin 1966 [1933]:179). Sixty-six
years later, Derek Freeman (1999) showed that Mead was probably duped by
at least some of her adolescent informants about the extent of their sexual
experience because she didn’t know the local language.
In fact, Mead talked quite explicitly about her use of interpreters. It was not
necessary, said Mead, for fieldworkers to become what she called ‘‘virtuosos’’
in a native language. It was enough to ‘‘use’’ a native language, as she put it,
without actually speaking it fluently:
If one knows how to exclaim ‘‘how beautiful!’’ of an offering, ‘‘how fat!’’ of a
baby, ‘‘how big!’’ of a just shot pig; if one can say ‘‘my foot’s asleep’’ or ‘‘my
back itches’’ as one sits in a closely packed native group with whom one is as yet
unable to hold a sustained conversation; if one can ask the simple questions: ‘‘Is