Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

484 Chapter 17
exchanged there’s no turning back, which means that parents can’t, or won’t
take back a daughter if she wants out of a marriage. Then, as Mathews
explains, the only way a woman can end her marriage is suicide (ibid.:150).
And that, Mathews, says, is why suicide is part of virtually all tellings of the
La Llorona tale. (There is an enormous literature on schema analysis. For the
history of this key concept in psychology, see Brewer [1999, 2000] and Nishida
[1999]. For more on the application of the schema method in anthropology,
see Holland and Quinn 1987, D’Andrade 1991, D’Andrade and Strauss
1992, D’Andrade 1995:chap. 6, and Strauss and Quinn 1997.)
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis involves the close study of naturally occurring interactions.
Scholars in this arena, like Brenda Farnell and Laura Graham
(1998:412), see discursive practices—all the little things that make our utterances
uniquely our own—as concrete manifestations both of the culture we
share with others and of our very selves. What we do in traditional ethnography,
according to Joel Sherzer and Greg Urban (1986:1), is distill discourse
into a description of a culture. What we ought to be observing—and describing—they
say, is ordinary discourse itself, since culture emerges from the constant
interaction and negotiation between people.
Here’s an example of how much of culture can be encapsulated in an ordinary
discourse event. I went to Japan for 4 months in 1991 to work at the
National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. I didn’t speak Japanese, so I was
limited to studying things that I could observe directly and about which I
could hold discussions, in English, with my colleagues at the museum. I
noticed that many Japanese bowed when they said good-bye to someone on
the telephone and I became interested in the cultural artifact of bowing.
I rode the bus to work every day. Most regular riders of the buses in Osaka
buy blocks of tickets in advance, at a discount. When people leave the bus,
they drop one of their fare tickets into a hopper next to the driver. As the bus
rolled to a stop one day, a boy of about 5 implored his mother to let him drop
off her ticket as they left the bus. The mother gave him the ticket, left the
bus, and watched from the sidewalk as the toddler dropped off the ticket and
scampered, grinning, down the bus’s stairs to her.
The mother gave the child a stern look and said something that I couldn’t
hear. The child scampered back up the stairs, faced the driver, and bowed
deeply from the waist. ‘‘Arigato gozaimashitá,’’ said the boy to the driver,
with heavy emphasis on the final syllable. The driver bowed slightly and