Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

374 Chapter 13
[woman] [man]. Even the culture of social scientists is affected: Your credibility
is diminished or enhanced with your colleagues when you talk about a
certain subject because you’re a [woman] [man] (Scheper-Hughes 1983;
Golde 1986; Whitehead and Conaway 1986; Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Warren
1988).
Sara Quandt, Beverly Morris, and Kathleen DeWalt spent months investigating
the nutritional strategies of the elderly in two rural Kentucky counties
(Quandt et al. 1997). According to DeWalt, the three women researchers spent
months, interviewing key informants, and never turned up a word about the
use of alcohol. ‘‘One day,’’ says DeWalt,
the research team traveled to Central County with Jorge Uquillas, an Ecuadorian
sociologist who had expressed an interest in visiting the Kentucky field sites. One
of the informants they visited was Mr. B, a natural storyteller who had spoken at
length about life of the poor during the past sixty years. Although he had been a
great source of information about use of wild foods and recipes for cooking game
he had never spoken of drinking or moonshine production.
Within a few minutes of entering his home on this day, he looked at Jorge
Uquillas, and said ‘‘Are you a drinking man?’’ (Beverly whipped out the tape
recorder and switched it on.) Over the next hour or so, Mr. B talked about community
values concerning alcohol use, the problems of drunks and how they were
dealt with in the community, and provided a number of stories about moonshine
in Central County. The presence of another man gave Mr. B the opportunity to
talk about issues he found interesting, but felt would have been inappropriate to
discuss with women. (DeWalt et al. 1998:280)
On the other hand, feminist scholars have made it clear that gender is a
negotiated idea. What you can and can’t do if you are a man or a woman is
more fixed in some cultures than in others, and in all cultures there is lots of
individual variation in gender roles. While men or women may be expected to
be this way or that way in any given place, the variation in male and female
attitudes and behaviors within a culture can be tremendous.
All participant observers confront their personal limitations and the limitations
imposed on them by the culture they study. When she worked at the
Thule relocation camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Rosalie
Wax did not join any of the women’s groups or organizations. Looking back
after more than 40 years, Wax concluded that this was just poor judgment.
I was a university student and a researcher. I was not yet ready to accept myself
as a total person, and this limited my perspective and my understanding. Those
of us who instruct future field workers should encourage them to understand and
value their full range of being, because only then can they cope intelligently with
the range of experience they will encounter in the field. (Wax 1986:148)