Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 473
tape. Then, using the Winnebago tapes as a guide, and a second tape recorder,
Mountain Wolf Woman told her story again, in English (Lurie 1961).
Lurie and Mountain Wolf Woman translated the Winnebago tape together,
and Mountain Wolf Woman’s grand-niece, Frances Thundercloud Wentz,
helped Lurie produce the final, detailed translation. Lurie is critically aware of
her influence on the final product: ‘‘The final preparation of an acceptable
English narrative from a literary and scholarly point of view required decisions
for which I must take full responsibility.’’ These decisions, said Lurie,
include ‘‘choice of tenses, equivalents of idiomatic expressions, insertion of
words necessary for clarification, and the like’’ (ibid.:95).
Lurie also recorded comments that Mountain Wolf Woman made during the
5-week stay and inserted some of these comments into the final published narrative.
She had them set in italics to show where she had added text from
materials other than the original tapes.
All of these different kinds of native ethnographies offer glimpses—some
more descriptive, some more interpretive—into the lived experience of people
in other cultures. But all of them depend first on the collection of mountains
of texts.
Some Traditions of Text Analysis
Analyzing texts is another matter. There is no single method for doing it.
Some of the major traditions of text analysis include hermeneutics (interpretive
analysis), narrative and performance analysis, schema analysis, discourse
analysis, grounded theory, and content analysis.
Hermeneutics/Interpretive Analysis
Modern hermeneutics derives from biblical hermeneutics, also called biblical
exegesis. (Recall from chapter 1 that the word ‘‘hermeneutics’’ comes from
Hermes—he of the winged hat—Greek messenger of the gods, whose job it
was to interpret the will of the gods to humans.) In the Western tradition of
exegesis, the Old and New Testaments are assumed to contain eternal truths,
put there by an omnipotent creator through some emissaries—prophets, writers
of the Gospels, and the like. The idea is to continually interpret the words
of those texts in order to understand their original meaning and their directives
for living in the present.
Formal rules for biblical exegesis were developed by the early Talmudic
scholars, about a hundred years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. For exam-