Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

466 Chapter 17
that one utilizes in his work should have been personally obtained’’ (Sapir’s
letter to Barbeau, February 1, 1915; quoted in Anderson and Halpin
2000:5–6.) This was the start of Beynon’s career as a professional informant.
By the time he died in 1958, Beynon had sent Barbeau 54 Canadian government–issue
notebooks of 50 pages each, filled with Tsimshian texts and with
observations of Tsimshian daily life and ceremonies (ibid.:7).
Beynon never published a monograph based on his ethnographic notebooks,
but four of his notebooks, detailing the ceremonies in 1945 surrounding the
raising of five totem poles, were rescued from the archives and published verbatim
(Anderson and Halpin 2000).
Another of Boas’s students, Paul Radin, however, took the method of native
ethnography further. Radin studied the language and culture of the Winnebago
Indians and, following his mentor’s lead, trained Sam Blowsnake to write in
Winnebago. Blowsnake started writing his autobiography. After one day, he
came to Radin, worried about what white people might think when they read
it (Blowsnake confesses in the narrative to murdering a Potowatami). Radin
reassured him, and Blowsnake polished off the manuscript in 2 days. Relying
on a bilingual Winnebago-English interpreter, Radin translated and published
the manuscript in 1920 as Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago
Indian (Radin 1983 [1920]).
Radin’s insistence that he ‘‘in no way influenced [Crashing Thunder], either
directly or indirectly in any way’’ seems disingenuous today. And including
that part about murdering a Potawatami was poor professional judgment, by
today’s standards. But Crashing Thunder is, in my view, a milestone in the
history of anthropology. Since then, the method of native ethnography has
been greatly extended.
Fadwa El Guindi, for example, worked in the 1960s and 1970s with Abel
Hernández Jiménez, on a native ethnography of the Zapotec people of Oaxaca.
One of El Guindi’s colleagues, Harvey Rosenbaum, taught Hernández linguistics
while El Guindi taught him anthropology (El Guindi 2004:141). El Guindi
used open-ended interviewing to get Hernández to discuss four rituals: a baptism,
a child’s funeral, a wedding, and an adult’s funeral. After each discussion
(which covered things like the ordering of events in each ritual, who participates,
and the meaning of ritual objects), Hernández wrote up his
description of one of the rituals, and El Guindi collected parallel data on her
own to compare with those of her colleague (El Guindi and Hernández Jiménez
1986:25).
El Guindi (2004:chap. 4) observes that some classic work in visual anthropology
should also be counted as native ethnography. From 1963 to 1965,
for example, Asen Balicki worked with Itimanguerk, a Netsilik Inuit hunter,
producing a monumental film record of indigenous Netsilik culture: nearly 50