Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

470 Chapter 17
swelling on the feet to burst by itself, then it hurts even more. 1167. Niguas lay
their eggs in the webbing between the toes. Of course, this happens to people
who don’t wear huaraches; niguas are an affliction of those who go barefoot.
Sometimes it causes just itching and other times it itches and hurts. (Bernard and
Salinas 1989:209)
And here is Salinas, the storyteller, talking about religion and playing, what
Wolcott says is ‘‘the docent, giving us a carefully arranged tour’’ (Wolcott
1999:154):
1136. Right next to San Clemente is another small village called El Nogal. This
community belongs to Orizabita and only has 17 full citizens. All together,
among the men, women, and children, there are 55 people there. There is no
church of either of the two religions. The people of San Clemente tried to impose
Protestantism on the people of El Nogal, but the people of El Nogal did not like
that religion. Because of that, and because of other things that they did to them,
the people of El Nogal abandoned Protestantism, became even stronger believers
in Catholicism, and opted to follow their pueblo, which is Orizabita. (Bernard
and Salinas 1989:533)
There were, to be sure, complaints over the years that Boas’s work was
nothing more than a mountain of raw facts. Leslie White complained that
Boas’s Kwakiutl texts were not intelligible because they were without commentary
(White 1963:55), and George Peter Murdock mocked Boas’s ‘‘fivefoot
shelf’’ of monographs about the Kwakiutl as contributing little to understanding
the social structure of the Kwakiutl (Murdock 1949:xiv, n. 5).
From my perspective, ethnography has not outlived the positivist, descriptive
function it had for Boas and his students and the goal of native ethnography
is the same today as it was in Boas’s time: Get it down and get it right, in
the natives’ own languages. ‘‘Getting it right’’ is a goal, not a given, so we
keep trying to improve the method. One thing we can do is to provide training
(even more than I offered Jesús Salinas) in what scholars of culture are interested
in knowing. Another is to provide extensive commentary and explanations
of the native-language materials (as I did in the Ñähñu native ethnography
[Bernard and Salinas Pedraza 1989]).
More important than commentary or explanation, however, is the ineluctable
presence of those 232,000 words of Ñähñu that Salinas produced about
Ñähñu culture. Many of the languages in which Boas’s students collected ethnographic
texts are no longer spoken, or will soon die out. The texts collected
by the Boasians for 50 years are a precious resource for all scholars interested
in the diversity of human culture. Debates about -isms—structuralism, materialism,
postmodernism—come and go, but texts are forever.