Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 469
mountains and describing the villages in great detail: which villages produce
lime for tortillas, which produce charcoal, and so on. He asked me if he could
include information on the weather and the seasons and the winds and what
effect they all had on people, plants, and animals. I could not even have formulated
the questions in Ñähñu to retrieve that kind of information.
Others may choose to pursue the method of native ethnography differently,
but I would do it the same way again. I would provide a framework and a long
list of topics (the OCM, for example). I wouldn’t tell the native ethnographer
what content to provide, but, as I did with Jesús, I would ask plenty of questions,
based on my own knowledge of the local culture—and on the holes I
recognize in that knowledge. I believe strongly that we need more, much
more, of this kind of work in anthropology.
Wolcott’s second critique—that the Ñähñu ethnography is not really an ethnography
because Jesús Salinas is not really an ethnographer—raises a really
interesting question: Who gets to be called an ethnographer? One school of
thought is captured in Paul Bohannan’s aphorism that ‘‘without an ethnographer
there is no ethnography’’ (Bohannan 1995:157). Wolcott quotes this
maxim to lead off his penetrating discussion of insider and outsider ethnography
(Wolcott 1999:131). In this perspective, Jesús Salinas’s work is ‘‘the stuff
out of which ethnography is made,’’ but it is not ethnography (ibid.:153). Just
as it is the rare ethnographer who can master the details of a culture the way
Salinas masters his, says Wolcott, ‘‘it would be an even rarer ‘native’ who
would have an intuitive grasp of ethnography’’ (ibid.:155).
In my view, this makes far too much of interpretation and not nearly enough
of description. Here is Salinas, the ethnographer, presenting a description of
one insect—illustrating what Wolcott (ibid.:154) identifies, correctly, as
crushing detail:
1163. The nigua. These are the same size and have the same characteristics as
squirrel and cat fleas. The nigua also jumps and turns up everwhere. One can see
them in the feet of pigs. The feet are cut open by the fleas which deposit their
eggs between the toes. The eggs are in a large, white ball in the pig’s flesh. 1164.
This is cured by putting on criolina so that the foot of the animal suppurates and
the flea egg-balls run out. This flea also affects people’s feet; they go between
the toes. At first, they just itch; though one knows it itches, one may think it’s
just any old flea. 1165. But after three days, the itching gets worse, and it begins
to suppurate and it grows worse and worse. When it gets like this it is opened up
with a needle and a ball comes out, filled with eggs. 1166. A hole remains where
the ball is taken out, as if a piece of flesh were removed. One must burn the ball
so that the fleas won’t be born. It is said that if it thrown on the ground, the heat
from the earth will hatch the eggs. 1167. So that they won’t hatch, the balls are
removed from people’s feet and thrown into the fire to burn up. If one allows the