Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 415
Continuous Monitoring in Anthropology
CM has a long and noble history in anthropology. When Eliot Chapple was
still a student at Harvard in the 1930s, he built a device he called the ‘‘interaction
chronograph’’ for recording on a rolling sheet of paper the minute features
(facial expressions, gestures) of human interaction. The interaction chronograph
is, as far as I can tell, the unheradled forerunner of the handheld computer
recording systems used for continuous monitoring in ethology, psychology,
and anthropology today (Chapple 1940; Chapple and Donald 1947).
In 1949, John Roberts and a Zuni interpreter took turns sitting in one of the
rooms of a Zuni house, simply dictating their observations into a tape
recorder. (That recorder, by the way, was the size of a suitcase and weighed
30 pounds.) This went on for 5 days and produced data for a 75,000-word
book, rich in detail about everyday Zuni life. Figure 15.1 shows some excerpts
from Roberts’s work.
People let Roberts park in their homes for 5 days because Roberts was a
participant observer of Zuni life and had gained his informants’ confidence.
Even earlier, in 1936–1937, Jules and Zunia Henry did fieldwork among the
Pilagá Indians of Argentina. Among the data they collected was a set of direct
observations of children. Table 15.1 shows the data from observations made
on four children for 10 kinds of behaviors associated with eating and food
sharing.
The data in table 15.1 were extracted from 843 observations of children’s
behavior. Here are two of those observations from the original data:
The three children of Diwa’i are feeding peacefully together. Deniki, the baby,
waves his hand for food and mother gives him a small piece of palm dipped in
fat. After eating a second piece he is given the breast.
Deniki, Naicho, and Soroi are together. Deniki is holding a dish with a very
small quantity of cooked fruit in it. Soroi says, ‘‘Share it with me,’’ and takes one
fruit out of the dish. Naicho immediately snatches another one away violently,
but not before Deniki has already taken one out, which he then offers to Naicho,
appearing not to comprehend her action. (Mensh and Henry 1953:467)
The Zapotec Children Study
Douglas Fry used CM to study aggressive play among Zapotec children.
From 1981 to 1983, Fry did 18 months of participant observation fieldwork in
La Paz and San Andrés, two small Zapotec-speaking villages just 4 miles
apart in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. During the last 5 months of his
research, Fry did direct, continuous monitoring of 24 children (3–8 years old)
in each village. Before that, he visited almost all the households in the villages