Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 471
Is an N of 1 Really Science?
Of course, Salinas’s native ethnography is one person’s report of selected
aspects of Ñähnu culture. What if other Ñähñu don’t agree with Salinas on
key issues? What if other Ñähñu think that Salinas focused too much on the
flora and fauna of the Mezquital Valley and ignored other elements of the culture?
Well, all ethnographies are written by someone. Why shouldn’t other
Ñähñu disagree with Salinas about his take on key issues? ‘‘Why not,’’ Jesús
once asked me, ‘‘invite a group of Ñähñu to read the Ñähñu version of the
ethnography, and offer new interpretations?’’ I can hardly wait.
Other Kinds of Native Ethnography
The term ‘‘native ethnography’’ covers a lot of ground. At one end of the
spectrum are the works of George Hunt, Jesús Salinas, Crashing Thunder,
Abel Hernández Jiménez, and Ignacio Bizarro Ujpán, written entirely in the
nonliterary, indigenous language of the native ethnographer.
At the other end are the works of indigenous people who have become professional
anthropologists and who write about their own culture in one of the
major literary languages of the world, like English, Japanese, French, Spanish,
etc. Included here are the works of scholars like Jomo Kenyatta (1938) and
Victor Uchendu (1965), who wrote ethnographies of the Gikuyu (in Kenya)
and Igbo (in Nigeria), respectively. Both were bilingual speakers of English
and their tribal language; both were trained as anthropologists; and both wrote
in English. Kenyatta studied with Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School
of Economics in the 1930s. Uchendu’s ethnography of the Igbo was written
as his M.A. thesis in anthropology when he was a student at Northwestern
University (Uchendu 1965).
Another genre comprises autobiographies by speakers of nonliterary languages
who were not trained as ethnographers but who wrote in a major literary
language. Between 1964 and 1968, Refugio Savala, a Yaqui poet, wrote
his richly detailed autobiography in English (Savala 1980). In his narrative,
Savala tries to describe Yaqui culture in general by showing his family’s participation
in it (Sands 1980).
Other examples of this genre for North American Indians include The Middle
Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe by Francis La Flesche (1963
[1900]) about life at a boarding school; Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the
White Man’s Road, by John Joseph Mathews (1968 [1932]) about life under a
particular Indian agent on the Osage Reservation in the late 1800s; and The
Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday (1969), in which Momaday,
who holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford, tells of his attempt to seek his