Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

366 Chapter 13
familiar and take along several colleagues who are not. Again, compare your
notes with theirs, and keep going back and taking notes until you and they are
seeing and noting the same things. You can do this with any repeated scene
that’s familiar to you: a bowling alley, a fast-food restaurant, etc. Remember,
training your ability to see things reliably does not guarantee that you’ll see
thing accurately. But reliability is a necessary but insufficient condition for
accuracy. Unless you become at least a reliable instrument of data gathering,
you don’t stand much of a chance of making valid observations.
Bogdan (1972:41) offers some practical suggestions for remembering
details in participant observation. If, for some reason, you can’t take notes
during an interview or at some event, and you are trying to remember what
was said, don’t talk to anyone before you get your thoughts down on paper.
Talking to people reinforces some things you heard and saw at the expense of
other things.
Also, when you sit down to write, try to remember things in historical
sequence, as they occurred throughout the day. As you write up your notes
you will invariably remember some particularly important detail that just pops
into memory out of sequence. When that happens, jot it down on a separate
piece of paper (or tuck it away in a separate little note file on your word processor)
and come back to it later, when your notes reach that point in the
sequence of the day.
Another useful device is to draw a map—even a rough sketch will do—of
the physical space where you spent time observing and talking to people that
day. As you move around the map, you will dredge up details of events and
conversations. In essence, let yourself walk through your experience. You can
practice all these memory-building skills now and be much better prepared if
you decide to do long-term fieldwork later.
Maintaining Naiveté
Try also to develop your skill at being a novice—at being someone who
genuinely wants to learn a new culture. This may mean working hard at suspending
judgment about some things. David Fetterman made a trip across the
Sinai Desert with a group of Bedouins. One of the Bedouins, says Fetterman,
shared his jacket with me to protect me from the heat. I thanked him, of course,
because I appreciated the gesture and did not want to insult him. But I smelled
like a camel for the rest of the day in the dry desert heat. I thought I didn’t need
the jacket. . . . I later learned that without his jacket I would have suffered from
sunstroke. . . . An inexperienced traveler does not always notice when the temperature
climbs above 130 degrees Fahrenheit. By slowing down the evaporation
rate, the jacket helped me retain water. (1989:33)