Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 537
ing, while other nuts—cashews and peanuts, for example—may be shelved
somewhere else, like with the snacks. Lychee nuts (a Chinese dessert food)
and matzohs (unleavened bread boards eaten primarily by Jews) are sometimes
shelved in American supermarkets together under ‘‘ethnic foods,’’ but
may be shelved in separate ‘‘Oriental foods’’ and ‘‘Jewish foods’’ sections if
local populations of those groups are sufficiently large.
Spradley (1979) reported that he once called the St. Paul, Minnesota, police
department and said he needed to find the case number of a robbery that had
been committed at his house. Two bicycles had been stolen from his garage in
the middle of the night, while he was asleep. The police had investigated, but
Spradley’s insurance company needed the case number to process the claim.
When Spradley told the police that he needed the case number for a ‘‘robbery,’’
they quite naturally transferred his call to the robbery unit. But the
people there couldn’t help him because, according to their rules, robberies
involve a face-to-face encounter between the criminal and the victim and the
criminal uses a gun.
Spradley was transferred to burglary, but they couldn’t help him either
because, they said, theft of bicycles is handled by the juvenile division in St.
Paul. Eventually, Spradley got his case number, but, he said, if he had understood
the police culture, he ‘‘would have begun with a simple question: What
part of the police department has records of bicycles stolen from a garage
when no one is present?’’ (1979:142). In other words, if he’d known the taxonomy
for the cultural domain of crimes, he’d have asked the right question and
gotten taken care of right away.
Cultural domains are everywhere. Ask people to free list any set of things
you can name—emotions, names of ethnic groups, junk foods, hand tools. If
lots of people can respond easily, you’ve gotten hold of a cultural domain.
Some domains (like animals and plants) are huge; others (like the names of
carpenters’ tools) are small but require specialized knowledge.
Some domains are highly consensual. All native speakers of Spanish know
the list of names of family members (madre, padre, hijo, hija, etc.). There are
some specialized uses of terms that vary from one Spanish-speaking country
to another, but no student of any Spanish-speaking culture could avoid learning
that domain. (See Borgatti [1993/1994] for a seminal discussion of cultural
domain analysis. For classic work on folk taxonomies, see the many contributions
in Frake 1961, Tyler 1969, and Werner and Schoepfle 1987.)
How to Make a Taxonomy: Lists and Frames
In building a folk taxonomy, many researchers combine the free-list technique
I described in chapter 11 and the frame elicitation technique developed