Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 371
pletely. But it’s not impossible to do at all. Priests, social workers, clinical
psychologists, and counselors suspend their own biases all the time, more or
less, in order to listen hard and give sensible advice to their clients.
Laurie Krieger, an American woman doing fieldwork in Cairo, studied
physical punishment against women. She learned that wife beatings were less
violent than she had imagined and that the act still sickened her. Her reaction
brought out a lot of information from women who were recent recipients of
their husbands’ wrath. ‘‘I found out,’’ she says, ‘‘that the biased outlook of an
American woman and a trained anthropologist was not always disadvantageous,
as long as I was aware of and able to control the expression of my
biases’’ (Kreiger 1986:120).
Colin Turnbull held objective knowledge as something to be pulled from
the thicket of subjective experience. Fieldwork, said Turnbull, involves a selfconscious
review of one’s own ideas and values—one’s self, for want of any
more descriptive term. During fieldwork you ‘‘reach inside,’’ he observed, and
give up the ‘‘old, narrow, limited self, discovering the new self that is right
and proper in the new context.’’ We use the field experience, he said, ‘‘to know
ourselves more deeply by conscious subjectivity.’’ In this way, he concluded,
‘‘the ultimate goal of objectivity is much more likely to be reached and our
understanding of other cultures that much more profound’’ (Turnbull
1986:27). When he was studying the Ik of Uganda, he saw parents goad small
children into touching fire and then laughing at the result. It took everything
he had, he once told me, to transcend his biases, but he managed (see Turnbull
1972).
Many phenomenologists see objective knowledge as the goal of participant
observation. Danny Jorgensen, for example, advocates complete immersion
and becoming the phenomenon you study. ‘‘Becoming the phenomenon,’’
Jorgensen says, ‘‘is a participant observational strategy for penetrating to and
gaining experience of a form of human life. It is an objective approach insofar
as it results in the accurate, detailed description of the insiders’ experience of
life’’ (Jorgensen 1989:63). In fact, many ethnographers have become cab drivers
or exotic dancers, jazz musicians, or members of satanic cults, in order to
do participant observation fieldwork.
If you use this strategy of full immersion, Jorgensen says, you must be able
to switch back and forth between the insiders’ view and that of an analyst.
To do that—to maintain your objective, analytic abilities—Jorgensen suggests
finding a colleague with whom you can talk things over regularly. That is,
give yourself an outlet for discussing the theoretical, methodological, and
emotional issues that inevitably come up in full participation field research.
It’s good advice.