Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 361
that your child?’’ ‘‘Is your father living?’’ ‘‘Are the mosquitoes biting you?’’ or
even utter culturally appropriate squeals and monosyllables which accompany
fright at a scorpion, or startle at a loud noise, it is easy to establish rapport with
people who depend upon affective contact for reassurance. (Mead 1939:198)
Robert Lowie would have none of it. A people’s ethos, he said, is never
directly observed. ‘‘It can be inferred only from their self-revelations,’’ and
this, indeed, requires the dreaded virtuosity that Mead had dismissed (Lowie
1940:84ff). The ‘‘horse-and-buggy ethnographers,’’ said Lowie, in a direct
response to Mead in the American Anthropologist, accepted virtuosity—that
is, a thorough knowledge of the language in which one does fieldwork—on
principle. ‘‘The new, stream-lined ethnographers,’’ he taunted, rejected this as
superfluous (ibid.:87). Lowie was careful to say that a thorough knowledge of
a field language did not mean native proficiency. And, of course, Mead understood
the benefits of being proficient in a field language. But she also understood
that a lot of ethnography gets done through interpreters or through contact
languages, like French, English, and pidgins . . . the not-so-well kept
secret in anthropology.
Still . . . according to Brislin et al. (1973:70), Samoa is one of those cultures
where ‘‘it is considered acceptable to deceive and to ‘put on’ outsiders. Interviewers
are likely to hear ridiculous answers, not given in a spirit of hostility
but rather sport.’’ Brislin et al. call this the sucker bias, and warn fieldworkers
to watch out for it. Presumably, knowing the local language fluently is one
way to become alert to and avoid this problem.
And remember Raoul Naroll’s finding that anthropologists who spent at
least a year in the field were more likely to report on witchcraft? Well, he also
found that anthropologists who spoke the local language were more likely to
report data about witchcraft than were those who didn’t. Fluency in the local
language doesn’t just improve your rapport; it increases the probability that
people will tell you about sensitive things, like witchcraft, and that even if
people try to put one over on you, you’ll know about it (Naroll 1962:89–90).
When it comes to doing effective participant observation, learning a new
jargon in your own language is just as important as learning a foreign language.
Peggy Sullivan and Kirk Elifson studied the Free Holiness church, a
rural group of Pentecostals whose rituals include the handling of poisonous
snakes (rattles, cottonmouths, copperheads, and water moccasins). They had
to learn an entirely new vocabulary:
Terms and expressions like ‘‘annointment,’’ ‘‘tongues,’’ ‘‘shouting,’’ and ‘‘carried
away in the Lord’’ began having meaning for us. We learned informally and often
contextually through conversation and by listening to sermons and testimonials.
The development of our understanding of the new language was gradual and