Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

364 Chapter 13
When Not to Mimic
The key to understanding the culture of loggers, lawyers, bureaucrats,
schoolteachers, or ethnic groups is to become intimately familiar with their
vocabulary. Words are where the cultural action is. My rule about mimicking
pronunciation changes, though, if you are studying an ethnic or occupational
subculture in your own society and the people in that subculture speak a different
dialect of your native language. In this situation, mimicking the local
pronunciation will just make you look silly. Even worse, people may think
you’re ridiculing them.
Building Explicit Awareness
Another important skill in participant observation is what Spradley
(1980:55) called explicit awareness of the little details in life. Try this experiment:
The next time you see someone look at their watch, go right up to them
and ask them the time. Chances are they’ll look again because when they
looked the first time they were not explicitly aware of what they saw. Tell
them that you are a student conducting a study and ask them to chat with you
for a few minutes about how they tell time.
Many people who wear analog watches look at the relative positions of the
hands, and not at the numbers on the dial. They subtract the current time (the
position of the hands now) from the time they have to be somewhere (the
image of what the position of the hands will look like at some time in the
future), and calculate whether the difference is anything to worry about. They
never have to become explicitly aware of the fact that it is 3:10 p.m. People
who wear digital watches may be handling the process somewhat differently.
We could test that.
Kronenfeld et al. (1972) report an experiment in which informants leaving
several different restaurants were asked what the waiters and waitresses (as
they were called in those gender-differentiated days) were wearing, and what
kind of music was playing. Informants agreed much more about what the waiters
were wearing than about what the waitresses were wearing. The hitch:
None of the restaurants had waiters, only waitresses.
Informants also provided more detail about the kind of music in restaurants
that did not have music than they provided for restaurants that did have music.
Kronenfeld et al. speculated that, in the absence of real memories about things
they’d seen or heard, informants turned to cultural norms for what must have
been there (i.e., ‘‘what goes with what’’) (D’Andrade 1973).
You can test this yourself. Pick out a large lecture hall where a male professor
is not wearing a tie. Ask a group of students on their way out of a lecture