Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

538 Chapter 18
by Frake (1964), Metzger and Williams (1966), and D’Andrade et al. (1972).
Start with the frame:
What kinds of
are there?
where the blank is ‘‘cars,’’ ‘‘trees,’’ ‘‘saddles,’’ ‘‘snow,’’ ‘‘soldiers’’—whatever
you’re interested in understanding. This frame is used again and again, until
an informant says that the question is silly.
For example, suppose you asked a native speaker of American English
‘‘What kinds of foods are there?’’ You might get a list like: pasta, meat, fish,
fruits, vegetables, snacks. . . .’’ (You’ll probably get a slightly different set of
labels if you ask a native speaker of British English this same question.)
Next, you ask: ‘‘What kinds of pasta [meats] [fish] [etc.] are there?’’ The
answer for meats might be: beef, lamb, chicken, pork, venison. . . .
So you extend the search: ‘‘What kinds of beef [lamb] [chicken] [etc.] are
there?’’ For some people, at least, you’ll find that beef is divided into steak,
chops, hamburger, and so on, and that chicken is divided into dark meat and
white meat. But if you ask ‘‘What kinds of steaks are there?’’ you might be
told: ‘‘There are no kinds; they just are what they are.’’ Of course, if you’re
dealing with a real steak lover, you might be told about Porterhouse, T-bone,
rib eye, Delmonico, filet mignon, and so on.
Once you have a list of lexical items in a domain, and once you’ve got the
basic divisions down, the next step is to find out about overlaps. Some foods,
like peanuts, get classified as snacks and as protein sources by different people—or
even by the same person at different times.
The point is, while the Food and Drug Administration may have codified
foods in the United States, there is no codified set of folk rules for a taxonomy
of foods in American culture. The only way to map this is to construct folk
taxonomies from information provided by a number of people and to get an
idea of the range of variation and areas of consistency in how people think
about this domain. You can learn about the possible overlaps in folk categories
by using the substitution frames:
Is a kind of ?
Is a part of ?
Once you have a list of terms in a domain, and a list of categories, you can
use this substitution frame for all possible combinations. Are marshmallows a
kind of meat? A kind of fish? A kind of snack? This can get really tedious,
but discovering levels of contrast—that magenta is a kind of red, that
cashews are a kind of nut, that alto is a kind of sax, or that ice cream is a kind