Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Participant Observation 379
But not always. Here is Napoleon Chagnon’s recollection of his first
encounter with the Yanomami: ‘‘I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen
burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn
arrows! . . . had there been a diplomatic way out, I would have ended my
fieldwork then and there’’ (Chagnon 1983:10–11).
The desire to bolt and run is more common than we have admitted in the
past. Charles Wagley, who would become one of our discipline’s most accomplished
ethnographers, made his first field trip in 1937. A local political chief
in Totonicapán, Guatemala, invited Wagley to tea in a parlor overlooking the
town square. The chief’s wife and two daughters joined them. While they were
having their tea, two of the chief’s aides came in and hustled everyone off to
another room. The chief explained the hurried move to Wagley:
He had forgotten that an execution by firing squad of two Indians, ‘‘nothing but
vagrants who had robbed in the market,’’ was to take place at five p.m. just below
the parlor. He knew that I would understand the feelings of ladies and the grave
problem of trying to keep order among brutes. I returned to my ugly pensión in
shock and spent a night without sleep. I would have liked to have returned as fast
as possible to New York. (Wagley 1983:6)
Finally, listen to Rosalie Wax describe her encounter with the Arizona Japanese
internment camp that she studied during World War II. When she arrived
in Phoenix it was 110. Later that day, after a bus ride and a 20-mile ride in a
GI truck, across a dusty landscape that ‘‘looked like the skin of some cosmic
reptile,’’ with a Japanese American who wouldn’t talk to her, Wax arrived at
the Gila camp. By then it was 120. She was driven to staff quarters, which
was an army barracks divided into tiny cells, and abandoned to find her cell
by a process of elimination.
It contained four dingy and dilapidated articles of furniture: an iron double bedstead,
a dirty mattress (which took up half the room), a chest of drawers, and a
tiny writing table—and it was hotter than the hinges of Hades. . . . I sat down on
the hot mattress, took a deep breath, and cried. . . . Like some lost two-year-old,
I only knew that I was miserable. After a while, I found the room at the end of
the barrack that contained two toilets and a couple of wash basins. I washed my
face and told myself I would feel better the next day. I was wrong. (Wax 1971:67)
2. Culture Shock
Even among those fieldworkers who have a pleasant experience during their
initial contact period (and many do), almost all report experiencing some form
of depression and shock soon thereafter—usually within a few weeks. (The