Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 467
miles of film, including nine finished films totaling nearly 11 hours (Balicki
1989; El Guindi 2004:129–34). And in 1966, Sol Worth and John Adair gave
16-mm movie cameras to seven Navajo men and women to learn about Navajo
life ‘‘through Navajo eyes,’’ the title of the book describing this famous project
(Worth and Adair 1970, 1972; El Guindi 2004:140–146).
Ignacio Bizarro Ujpán has been the long-term informant and friend of
anthropologist James Sexton. Between 1972 and 1974, at Sexton’s urging,
Bizarro wrote an autobiography in Spanish. He also began a diary in 1972,
which he kept for 5 years. Sexton edited the diary, removing repetitious events
and what he felt was trivial material detailing ‘‘the kinds of meals he [Bizarro]
ate each day, the saying of his nightly prayers, his daily work routine, how
well he slept, and common illnesses like colds and headaches’’ (Sexton
1981:4).
Sexton supplemented the diary with taped interviews. In his method, he
inserts his questions in italics into Bizarro’s narrative, to show ‘‘what kind of
information Ignacio volunteered and how much of it is material I solicited
from my own perspective’’ (ibid.; see also Bizarro Ujpán [1985, 1992, and
Sexton and Bizarro Ujpán 2001] for the continuation of the Bizarro diaries).
The Ñähñu Native Ethnography
My own contribution to this tradition of native ethnography has been in
collaboration with Jesús Salinas Pedraza, a Ñähñu teacher from the Mezquital
Valley in central Mexico. Jesús and I met in 1962 when I went to the Mezquital
to study Ñähñu for my M.A. In 1971, I told him that I was thinking of
writing an ethnography of the Ñähñu. He said that he might like to write one
himself, and so for the next 16 years, he wrote, and I translated and annotated,
a four-volume, 232,000-word book on Ñähñu culture in Ñähñu (Salinas
Pedraza and Bernard 1978; Salinas Pedraza 1984; Bernard and Salinas
Pedraza 1989).
Just as I had developed a writing system for Ñähñu and had taught Jesús to
intellectualize about the phonology of his language, I supposed that I would
teach him to take field notes about ceremonies and to write about all the details
of everyday life. As I said in 1989, in the introduction to the Ñähñu ethnography:
I saw him writing up a bunch of raw facts and me guiding him in the analysis of
those facts, as we teased out the underlying meaning of the texts produced by his
unschooled efforts. I saw myself guiding Jesús, monitoring and supervising his
work, and seeing to it that the ethnography he would produce would meet the
high standards of modern anthropology. I wanted to be able to say that, as the