Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

688 Chapter 21
each pair of items is for this set of informants. If we run the MDS on the
aggregate matrix we’d get a mental map for the group.
Susan Weller (1983) asked 20 Guatemalan women to list as many illnesses
as they could think of. Then she took the 27 most frequently named illnesses,
put each named illness on a card, and asked 24 other women (some urban,
some rural) to sort the cards into piles, according to similarity. Weller created
an aggregate proximity matrix from the 24 individual matrices and did a multidimensional
scaling to represent how her informants collectively perceived
the 27 illnesses. Figure 21.6 shows the MDS graph for Weller’s urban sample
RheumatismArthritis
Allergies
Rubella
Small pox
Measles Chicken pox
Mumps
Polio
Whooping
cough
Typhoid
Tonsilitis
Flu
Malaria
Tuberculosis
Kidney pain
Diarrhea Intestinal
infection
Gastritis
Ameobas Colic
Hepatitis
Diphtheria
Cancer
Diabetes
Tetanus
Appendicitis
Figure 21.6. MDS representation of 27 illnesses for urban Guatemalan women.
SOURCE: S. Weller, ‘‘New Data on Intracultural Variability: The Hot-Cold Concept of Medicine and Illness,’’
Human Organization, Vol. 42, pp. 249–257. 1983. Reprinted with permission of the Society for Applied
Anthropology.
of the pile-sort data. The MDS program converts similarities (percentages, in
this case) into distances. The illness terms that were judged to be similar are
closer together in figure 21.6, and the terms judged to be dissimilar by informants
are farther apart.
This is the fun part. Look at figure 21.6. Keep looking at it. Think about the
distribution of those items (the illness names). Do you see any pattern? We’re
looking for arrays, ordimensions of illnesses across the plot and clumps, or
clusters of illnesses scattered around the plot. Since the MDS program was
able to plot the items in two dimensions with acceptably low stress, we are
looking for two arrays. There can be any number of clumps. Interpretation
means figuring out what the dimensions and the clumps are.
Try naming the clusters in figure 21.6. There is a clump on the right that
might be called ‘‘gastrointestinal disorders.’’ On the left there is a clump of