Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 365
hall what color tie their professor was wearing. Or observe a busy store clerk
for an hour and count the number of sales she rings up. Then ask her to estimate
the number of sales she handled during that hour.
You can build your skills at becoming explicitly aware of ordinary things.
Get a group of colleagues together and write separate, detailed descriptions of
the most mundane, ordinary things you can think of: making a bed, doing
laundry, building a sandwich, shaving (face, legs, underarms), picking out
produce at the supermarket, and the like. Then discuss one another’s descriptions
and see how many details others saw that you didn’t and vice versa. If
you work carefully at this exercise you’ll develop a lot of respect for how
complex, and how important, are the details of ordinary life. If you want to
see the level of detail you’re shooting for here, read Anthony F. C. Wallace’s
little classic ‘‘Driving to Work’’ (1965). Wallace had made the 17-mile drive
from his home to the University of Pennsylvania about 500 times when he
drew a map of it, wrote out the details, and extracted a set of rules for his
behavior. He was driving a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle in those days. It had 12
major mechanical controls (from the ignition switch to the windshield wiper—
yes, there was just one of them, and you had to pull a switch on the instrument
panel with your right hand to get it started), all of which had to be handled
correctly to get him from home to work safely every day.
Building Memory
Even when we are explicitly aware of things we see, there is no guarantee
that we’ll remember them long enough to write them down. Building your
ability to remember things you see and hear is crucial to successful participant
observation research.
Try this exercise: Walk past a store window at a normal pace. When you
get beyond it and can’t see it any longer, write down all the things that were
in the window. Go back and check. Do it again with another window. You’ll
notice an improvement in your ability to remember little things almost immediately.
You’ll start to create mnemonic devices for remembering more of
what you see. Keep up this exercise until you are satisfied that you can’t get
any better at it.
Here’s another one. Go to a church service, other than one you’re used to.
Take along two colleagues. When you leave, write up what you each think you
saw, in as much detail as you can muster and compare what you’ve written.
Go back to the church and keep doing this exercise until all of you are satisfied
that (1) you are all seeing and writing down the same things and (2) you have
reached the limits of your ability to recall complex behavioral scenes.
Try this same exercise by going to a church service with which you are