Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

426 Chapter 15
times people are seen doing things (working, playing, resting, eating) as a
proxy for the percentage of time they spend in those activities.
Charles Erasmus used spot sampling in his study of a Mayo Indian community
in northern Mexico (1955). As Erasmus and his wife went about the village,
investigating ‘‘various topics of ethnographic interest,’’ they took notes
of what people were doing at the moment they encountered them. They did
not use a representative sampling strategy but they were very systematic in
their recording of data.
Individual charts were made for each man, woman, and child in the village, and
on those charts were noted the page numbers from the field log where the activity
descriptions were to be found. These page numbers were recorded on the charts
according to the hours of the day when the observations were made. Thus, the
individual charts served as indexes to the field log as well as a means of making
sure that equal attention was being given to all families at all hours of the day.
Periodic examination of the charts showed which households and which hours of
the day were being neglected, so that visits about the community could be
planned to compensate for these discrepancies. (Erasmus 1955:325)
It’s difficult to top this research for sheer elegance of design and the power
of the data it produced. In the 3 months from July to September 1948, the
Erasmuses made about 5,000 observations on 2,500 active adults, 2,000 children,
and 500 elders in the community. From those observations, Erasmus
demonstrated that men in the village he studied spent about the same time at
work each day as did semiskilled workers in Washington, D.C. At the time,
Melville Herskovits was trying to combat the racist notion that primitive and
peasant peoples are lazy and unwilling to exert themselves. Herskovits’s
assertion was vindicated by Erasmus’s TA research.
Reactivity in TA Research
In CM, getting around the reactivity problem involves staying with the program
long enough to get people accustomed to your being around. Eventually,
people just get plain tired of trying to manage your impression and they act
naturally.
In TA research, the trick is to catch a glimpse of people in their natural
activities before they see you coming on the scene—before they have a chance
to modify their behavior.
Richard Scaglion (1986) did a TA survey of the residents of Upper Neligum,
a Samakundi Abelam village in the Prince Alexander Mountains of East
Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea. ‘‘It is not easy,’’ he says, ‘‘for an
anthropologist in the field to come upon an Abelam unawares. Since I did not