Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 67
effects of infirmity brought on by years of deep diving, hence their productivity
was lowered, along with their risk of death or injury from bends.
The real question was: What caused the young Kalymnian divers to engage
in acts that placed them at greater risk?
My first attempt at explaining all this was pretty lame. I noticed that the
men who took the most chances with their lives had a certain rhetoric and
swagger. They were called levédhis (Greek for a brave young man) by other
divers and by their captains. I concluded that somehow these men had more
levedhiá (the quality of being brave and young) and that this made them higher
risk takers. In fact, this is what many of my informants told me. Young men,
they said, feel the need to show their manhood, and that’s why they take risks
by staying down too long and coming up too fast.
The problem with this cultural explanation was that it just didn’t explain
anything. Yes, the high risk takers swaggered and exhibited something we
could label machismo or levedhiá. But what good did it do to say that lots of
machismo caused people to dive deep and come up quickly? Where did young
men get this feeling, I asked? ‘‘That’s just how young men are,’’ my informants
told me. I reckoned that there might be something to this testosteronepoisoning
theory, but it didn’t seem adequate.
Eventually, I saw that the swaggering behavior and the values voiced about
manliness were cultural ways to ratify, not explain, the high-risk diving behavior.
Both the diving behavior and the ratifying behavior were the product of a
third factor, an economic distribution system called plátika.
Divers traditionally took their entire season’s expected earnings in advance,
before shipping out in April for the 6-month sponge fishing expedition to
North Africa. By taking their money (plátika) in advance, they placed themselves
in debt to the boat captains. Just before they shipped out, the divers
would pay off the debts that their families had accumulated during the preceding
year. By the time they went to sea, the divers were nearly broke and their
families started going into debt again for food and other necessities.
In the late 1950s, synthetic sponges began to take over the world markets,
and young men on Kalymnos left for overseas jobs rather than go into sponge
fishing. As divers left the island, the remaining divers demanded higher and
higher plátika. They said that it was to compensate them for increases in the
cost of living, but their demand for more money was a pure response by the
divers to the increasing scarcity of their labor. The price of sponges, however,
was dropping over the long term, due to competition with synthetics, so the
higher plátika for the divers meant that the boat captains were losing profits.
The captains put more and more pressure on the divers to produce more
sponges, to stay down longer, and to take greater risks. This resulted in more
accidents on the job (Bernard 1967, 1987).