Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

468 Chapter 17
professional anthropologist of this team, I had laid academic hands on Jesús’s
work and that the result was much better for it. (Bernard and Salinas Pedraza
1989:24)
I was soon disabused of these illusions. Jesús Salinas wrote his 232,000-
word ethnography of the Ñähñu with very little active coaching from me.
Wolcott’s Critique of Native Ethnography
Very little active coaching, but still. . . . Harry Wolcott (1999) offers two
incisive critiques of the Ñähñu native ethnography project: (1) that I had more
influence on Jesús Salinas’s writing of the Ñähñu ethnography than I imagined
in 1989, and (2) that the Ñähñu ethnography is not really an ethnography
because Jesús Salinas is not really an ethnographer.
Wolcott is right about the first point. As he points out (ibid.:151), early on
in the Ñähñu ethnography project, I presented Salinas with a Spanish-language
version of the Outline of Cultural Materials, the detailed codebook
developed by George Peter Murdock to categorize ethnographic materials on
cultures of the world (Murdock 1971). This reflected my own training, and
was hardly a totally hands-off approach to the content of Jesús’s work.
In fact, my influence extended far beyond just advocating that Salinas pay
attention to the categories of the OCM. By the time we completed the translation
of the Ñähñu native ethnography in 1988, Jesús and I had known one
another for 26 years. I had asked him countless questions about Ñähñu culture
before we ever got started on the project and countless more as we sat, elbow
to elbow, translating the ethnography from Ñähñu into English (we worked
through Spanish as an intermediary language). I forced him to think out loud
about things that he might otherwise never have contemplated consciously. In
the end, the content of the Ñähñu native ethnography was the result of constant
negotiation, constant interaction between Jesús Salinas and me.
On the other hand, Jesús was not chained to the OCM and he went far
beyond simply addressing my questions. He wrote about things that I could
not have asked about, simply because of my ignorance of Ñähñu culture. I
made plain that I was interested in the uses of plants, but he wrote about plants
that I didn’t know existed.
I asked him to begin the Ñähñu ethnography with a chapter on the setting
and explained that this was about the geography, the climate, the flora and
fauna, and so on. Again, this was straight out of my own training, and Jesús
followed my instructions, but the result was nothing like anything I would
have written, because it was nothing I could have written. As the ethnography
begins, Jesús walks the reader through the Mezquital Valley, naming the