Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

464 Chapter 17
sets available for time series analysis. But longitudinal qualitative data are also
plentiful. For a window on American popular culture, for example, take a look
at the themes dealt with in country music and in Superman comics over the
years. Or look at sitcoms from the 1950s and those made today.
In the 1950s, for example, Lucille Ball created a furor when she got pregnant
and dared to continue making episodes of the I Love Lucy show. Now
think about any episode of Will and Grace or Sex and the City. Or scan some
of the recent episodes of popular soap operas and compare them to episodes
from 30 years ago. Today’s sitcoms and soaps contain many more sexual innuendos.
How many more? If you really wanted to measure that, you could code two
representative samples of sitcoms and soaps, one from the 1950s and another
from the last 10 years, and compare the codes statistically. That’s content
analysis.
Interpretivists, on the other hand, might be more interested in understanding
the meaning across time of concepts like ‘‘flirtation,’’ ‘‘deceit,’’ ‘‘betrayal,’’
‘‘sensuality,’’ and ‘‘love,’’ or the narrative mechanisms by which any of these
concepts is displayed or responded to by various characters.
Text analysis is for positivists and interpretivists alike. Both kinds of text
analysis are easier to do today, with inexpensive, easy-to-use software for
managing, coding, and retrieving texts.
The Great Anthropology Text Tradition
We’ll get to text analysis later, but first I want to tell you about the great
tradition of text collection in anthropology. Anthropologists have been big
producers and collectors of texts, right from the beginning of the discipline.
In 1881, Adolph Bastian argued that, with indigenous cultures of the world
disappearing fast, ‘‘our guiding principle . . . in anthropology, prehistory, or
ethnology should be to collect everything’’ (Bastian 1881:217; cited in Bunzl
1996:48).
For Franz Boas, Bastian’s young colleague at the Berlin Museum, that
meant collecting texts, and more texts, about the indigenous cultures of the
world, in the native languages of those cultures. Boas trained his students
(Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, etc.) to collect verbatim text in as many indigenous
American languages as they could reach.
This was really tough to do before voice recorders were invented, but that
first generation of American anthropologists persevered and made use of every
new technology they could to produce texts and more texts. In 1936, Margaret
Mead and Gregory Bateson hauled heavy movie cameras to Bali and, with