Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 449
Cultural Processes
Archival resources can be particularly useful in studying cultural processes
through time. June Helm (1980) found that between 1829 and 1891, traders at
the Hudson’s Bay Company posts of the upper Mackenzie Delta had surveyed
the Indians who traded at their stores. On the basis of those data, Helm concluded
that, before 1850, the Indians of the area had practiced female infanticide.
After 1850, missionaries were successful in stopping infanticide. Nancy
Howell (1981), a demographer, subjected Helm’s data to a sophisticated statistical
analysis and corroborated Helm’s conclusion.
Daniel Swan and Gregory Campbell (1989) studied the population records
of 1877 to 1907 for the Osage reserve. They were able to show that from 1877
to 1887 the full bloods declined at 6.4% a year, while the mixed bloods
increased at 7.3% a year. This had great consequences for the Osage because
the full bloods and mixed bloods had formed voting blocs on economic issues.
In particular, the full bloods resisted turning the reserve land into private property.
Whites who married into the tribe fraudulently claimed tribal mixedblood
status. The mixed bloods were in favor of the private property measures.
Using fashion magazines going back to 1844, Alfred Kroeber made eight
separate measurements of women’s clothing in the United States and France
(Kroeber 1919). He measured things like the diameter of the skirt at the hem,
the diameter of the waist, the depth of decolletage (measured from the mouth
to the middle of the corsage edge in front), and so on. After analyzing the
data, Kroeber claimed to have found ‘‘an underlying pulsation in the width of
civilized women’s skirts, which is symmetrical and extends in its up and down
beat over a full century; and an analogous rhythm in skirt length, but with a
period of only about a third the duration’’ (ibid.:257). Kroeber offered his
finding as evidence for long-cycle behavior in civilization.
Allport and Hartman (1931) criticized Kroeber for having been insufficiently
critical of his sources. They found, for example, that the range in width
of skirts for one year, 1886, was greater than the range Kroeber reported for
1859–1864 and that some years had very few cases on which to base measurements.
If the data are suspect, Allport and Hartman concluded, then so are the
regularities Kroeber claimed to have found (ibid.:342–343).
Richardson scoured the archives of fashion and extended the database from
1605–1936 (Richardson and Kroeber 1940). Before making measurements for
all the new years included in the study, Richardson redid Kroeber’s measurements
for 1844–1846 and for 1919 and assured herself that she was coding
each plate the same way Kroeber had done in 1919 (ibid.).
Lowe and Lowe (1982) reanalyzed the Richardson-Kroeber data for the 150
years from 1787–1936, using all the firepower of modern statistics and com-