Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 475
from summer to winter, Herzfeld concludes that there is symbolic danger
associated with these mediating months. He finds support for this analysis in
the fact that February is never referred to with an unequivocally good epithet.
This is hermeneutic analysis—the search for meanings and their interconnection
in the expression of culture. The method for doing this kind of analysis
requires deep involvement with the culture, including an intimate familiarity
with the language, so that the symbolic referents emerge during the study
of those expressions—as in the study of texts here. You can’t see the connections
among symbols if you don’t know what the symbols are and what they
are supposed to mean.
Narrative and Performance Analysis
In narrative analysis, the goal is to discover regularities in how people tell
stories or give speeches. This is achieved mostly through the analysis of written
text. Dell Hymes’s work is instructive. In 1977, Hymes reported that ‘‘the
narratives of the Chinookan peoples of Oregon and Washington can be shown
to be organized in terms of lines, verses, stanzas, scenes, and what many call
acts.’’ Hymes felt that this discovery might be relevant to many indigenous
languages of the Americas (1977:431).
Chinookan is a family of American Indian languages from the northwest
coast of North America. Shoalwater Chinook and Kathlamet Chinook are two
mutually unintelligible languages (related in the way French and Spanish are
both Romance languages), but Franz Boas had run into an informant who was
fluent in both Shoalwater and Kathlamet and had collected texts in both languages
between 1890 and 1894. Hymes examined those texts as well as texts
from Clackamas Chinook (collected in 1930 and 1931 by Melville Jacobs) and
in Wasco-Wishram Chinook (collected by Sapir in 1905, by Hymes in the
1950s, and by Michael Silverstein in the 1960s and 1970s).
What Hymes found was that features of Chinook that might have seemed
idiosyncratic to the speakers of those three Chinook languages—Shoalwater,
Kathlamet, and Clackamas Chinook—were actually ‘‘part of a common fabric
of performance style,’’ so that the three languages ‘‘share a common form of
poetic organization’’ (Hymes 1977:431).
This was a truly important discovery. It made clear once and for all that
Native American texts have something to contribute to a general theory of
poetics and literature. Hymes discovered the existence of verses, by recognizing
repetition within a block of text. ‘‘Covariation between form and meaning,’’
said Hymes, ‘‘between units with a recurrent Chinookan pattern of narrative
organization, is the key’’ (ibid.:438).