Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 375
Besides gender, we have learned that being a parent helps you talk to people
about certain areas of life and get more information than if you were not a
parent. My wife and I arrived on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, in 1964 with
a 2-month-old baby. As Joan Cassell says, children are a ‘‘guarantee of good
intentions’’ (1987:260), and wherever we went, the baby was the conversation
opener. But be warned: Taking children into the field can place them at risk.
(More on health risks below. And for more about the effects of fieldwork on
children who accompany researchers, see Butler and Turner [1987].)
Being divorced has its costs. Nancie González found that being a divorced
mother of two young sons in the Dominican Republic was just too much.
‘‘Had I to do it again,’’ she says, ‘‘I would invent widowhood with appropriate
rings and photographs’’ (1986:92).
Even height may make a difference: Alan Jacobs once told me he thought
he did better fieldwork with the Maasai because he’s 65 than he would have
if he’d been, say, an average-sized 510.
Personal characteristics make a difference in fieldwork. Being old or young
lets you into certain things and shuts you out of others. Being wealthy lets you
talk to certain people about certain subjects and makes others avoid you.
Being gregarious makes some people open up to you and makes others shy
away. There is no way to eliminate the ‘‘personal equation’’ in participant
observation fieldwork, or in any other scientific data-gathering exercise for
that matter, without sending robots out to do the work. Of course, the robots
would have their own problems. In all sciences, the personal equation (the
influence of the observer on the data) is a matter of serious concern and study
(Romney 1989).
Sex and Fieldwork
It is unreasonable to assume that single, adult fieldworkers are all celibate,
yet the literature on field methods was nearly silent on this topic for many
years. When Evans-Pritchard was a student, just about to head off for Central
Africa, he asked his major professor for advice. ‘‘Seligman told me to take ten
grains of quinine every night and keep off women’’ (Evans-Pritchard 1973:1).
As far as I know, that’s the last we heard from Evans-Pritchard on the subject.
Colin Turnbull (1986) tells us about his affair with a young Mbuti woman,
and Dona Davis (1986) discusses her relationship with an engineer who visited
the Newfoundland village where she was doing research on menopause.
In Turnbull’s case, he had graduated from being an asexual child in Mbuti
culture to being a youth and was expected to have sexual relations. In Davis’s
case, she was expected not to have sexual relations, but she also learned that