Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis II: Models and Matrices 539
of dessert—just takes plain hard work. Unless you’re a child, in which case
all this discovery is just plain fun.
A common way to display folk taxonomies is with a branching tree diagram.
Figure 18.6 shows a tree diagram for part of a folk taxonomy of passenger
cars. I elicited this taxonomy in Morgantown, West Virginia, from Jack in
1976.
Things to Look for in Folk Taxonomies
There are four important points to make about the taxonomy shown in figure
18.6:
1. Interinformant variation is common in folk taxonomies. That is, different people
may use different words to refer to the same category of things. Sometimes,
in fact, terms can be almost idiosyncratic. Jack distinguished among what he
called ‘‘regular cars,’’ ‘‘station wagons,’’ and ‘‘vans.’’ The term ‘‘regular cars’’ is
not one you normally see in automobile ads, or hear from a salesperson on a car
lot.
2. Category labels do not necessarily have to be simple lexical items, but may be
complex phrases. The category labeled ‘‘4-wheel drive’’ vehicles in figure 18.6
was sometimes called ‘‘off-road vehicles’’ in 1976, or even ‘‘vehicles you can go
camping in or tow a horse trailer with.’’ Jack said that Jeep station wagons were
both wagons and 4-wheel-drive cars you can go camping in. Remember, I elicited
this taxonomy in 1976, long before the advertising industry came up with
the concept of a ‘‘sport utility vehicle.’’ In 1998, I asked some people to list
‘‘types of cars.’’ The term ‘‘utes’’ showed up and I flat didn’t understand it. Of
course, after expressing my ignorance, I learned that ‘‘utes’’ is short for ‘‘sport
utility vehicles,’’ better known as SUVs.
3. There are those covert categories I mentioned—categories for which people have
no label at all, or at least not one they find easily accessible. Some people insist
that Corvettes, Camaros, Maseratis, and MGs are part of a single category, which
they find difficult to name (one informant suggested ‘‘sporty cars’’ as a label).
Others, like Jack, separate ‘‘performance cars’’ from ‘‘sports cars’’ and even subdivide
sports cars into ‘‘true sports cars’’ and ‘‘rally cars.’’ Be on the lookout for
unlabeled categories (that is, unlabeled nodes in a branching tree diagram) in any
folk taxonomy.
4. Even when there are consistent labels for categories, the categories may represent
multiple dimensions, each of which has its own levels of contrast. For example,
many native speakers of American English recognize a category of ‘‘foreign
cars’’ that cuts across the taxonomy in figure 18.6. There are foreign sports cars,
foreign luxury cars, and foreign regular cars.
Folk taxonomies can be very, very complex. One way to get at the complexity
is through a technique known as componential analysis. (Another is multidimensional
scaling, which we’ll get to in chapter 21.)