Brief Communications 1347

Transcription

1 Brief Communications 1347 ON FORMAL ETHNOGRAPHIC PROCEDURES The October issue of the ANTHROPOLOGIST presented some results of an ethnographic eliciting and descriptive procedure which is being developed by Duane Metzger and Gerald E. Williams (1963a). A variation of this procedure was employed in a recent research study in which I participated. I believe it might be useful to report the reactions of one student of this method, derived from the experience of testing its application and considering the principles of its rationale. (This study is more fully explicated in Black 1963, and Metzger 1963.) The eliciting method we used consisted in rigidly controlling the ethnographer-informant interaction situation to achieve minimum ambiguity in interpretation of results. It resembles programmed learning, except that it is the ethnographer who learns, systematically, precisely what questions are appropriately included in the program. He uses himself as a measuring device, as he attempts successively more correct verbal behavior and tests his knowledge of the cultural rules by his success in constraining informant responses. The results consist of sets of critical questions (frames) in the native language, along with their appropriate, and stable, answers-that is, the responses they consistently elicit from native informants. Meaning resides in the distribution of such responses and the relations between the frames. Such distributional meaning, or knowledge of environments, can be learned independently of the content (or translated) meaningfulness of each statement. Context and relationship do in fact constitute the essential information value of any utterance or segment thereof (or of any object, act, or event); it is its membership in form classes or contrast sets relative to the next highest level of events which conveys information absoiutely necessary for understanding the unit. Indeed, philosophers have contended that the meaning of a statement cannot be known without knowledge of the question it is intended to answer (Collingwood 1939, Ch. 5: The Logic of Question and Answer ). This is basic to communications theory. Applied to ethnography, it suggests that anthropologists should not go into the field armed with specific questions to which they intend to find the answers but with an open ear for responses to which they intend to find the questions-and, most urgently, with an operational technique for discovering them. Ideally, such an operation will, as it goes along, develop the descriptive categories appropriate to the observed phenomena. It seems to me that Metzger and Williams are formulating a tight and original application of these principles to a fundamental yet elusive problem of ethnography-that of obtaining scientifically respectable data. They are coming up with results which, though tentative and incomplete, are highly exciting because of the direction which they take. The following seem to me to be the major assets and limitations of this particular technique : Restricting and controlling one s manner of acquiring cultural knowledge from informants has here at least a two-fold goal: to produce a description that is 1) phenomenological, and 2) replicable. The first seems a particular problem of ethnography, the second a general scientific one.

2 1348 Americaii Anthropologist [65, Under the first, the aim is to elicit data which give native classifications of phenomena, how people perceive their environment, what they attend to when making discriminations between classes of things and events; to get descriptive categories which are psychologically real, significances and meanings based on informants inferences rather than investigators ; in short, a discovery procedure which discovers, not just observables from which to infer, but a meta-level of cultural communication-the inferential relations that members of a given society commonly share about the things they select to observe. (That this selection is often implicit, in the sense that the selectors are unaware of alternatives-together with the fact that it is a different selection from that of the investigator s culture-makes this kind of cultural knowledge the most tricky to get at and to substantiate. It strikes me that such knowledge is just what has been referred to in the past as covert culture, and that, far from not dealing with this aspect of culture, the general approach subscribed to by these ethnographers is a breakthrough toward discovering it more rigorously than has before been possible.) A limitation which seemed to adhere to the method as used in our study involved its strictly verbal nature. The authors acknowledge their reliance on verbal behavior; their intent is to exploit it fully. This is all very well, but the cultural grammar it produces will, I feel, reflect throughout a certain limitation of field resulting from the constraint to purely linguistic observation and manipulation. Granted it is the informants organization of cultural knowledge (sometimes termed cognitive structuring ) that is sought. (This in itself implies a certain definition of culture, not perhaps shared by all anthropologists.) Linguistic manipulation can reveal only those discriminations and relations which can be observed in or transmitted by talk. For linguists purposes, of course, this is sufficient. But while it is probable that talk transmits (explicitly or implicitly) a large portion of the cultural knowledge an individual must acquire (learn from his fellows somehow) in order to become a functioning member of his group, I do not believe this eliciting method can uncover all such cultural transmission. One can point, for example, to the proxemic behavior reported by Hall (1963) in the same recent issue of the ANTIIRO- POLOGIST. Metzger and Williams are aware of this point, and their statement elsewhere (1962a), It is our contention that any cultural domain may be examined through the various communication media in terms of which it is expressed, undoubtedly includes extra-linguistic expression. Thus this method, as so far developed, may be seen as one specialized way for discovering one particular level of cultural patterning: the verbalizable (or terminologizable) cognitive discriminations used by informants to identify and classify phenomena. This level, when put together with other, non-linguistic or paralinguistic, symbolic systems, probably constitutes the core of what many of us would choose to call culture, following the operational definitions of Goodenough (1957) and others. If methods for acquiring it by native actors can be matched by methods of learning it by ethnographers, some phenomeno-

3 Brief Communications 1349 logically real ethnographic data should result. This approach has in fact already led to substantive ethnographic statements, such as those of Metzger and Williams (1962a,b, 1963a,b) and those of, for example, Frake and Conklin (for methodological statements and bibliographies see Frake 1962, 1963, and Conklin 1962). These are characterized by both a high degree of phenomenological validity, and the second of the goals mentioned earlier, replicability. Replicability refers to the descriptive format of the ethnography. The requirement is to produce a statement which specifies the operations of the observer, in his interactions with his subject matter; to report the questions to which the observed behavior is a response; to make a formal statement of relations between specified units such that another investigator can easily check out and build on these results, rather than begin again from scratch. This has for some time been possible with phonological descriptions by linguists; the procedure and analysis outlined above are in fact derived from structural linguistics, and any further effort by anthropologists toward trying out linguists ways of producing replicable reports certainly is all to the good. Metzger and Williams particular innovation, as I see it, is the transfer to ethnography of the linguist-informant rules of interaction, whereby the one is presented with crucial choices of performance, the other trying out his hypotheses of sameness and difference and learning to control responses. My question is, how much of this methodology can really be transferred to the description of patterns other than language unless the context is somehow enlarged? The method here described employs only linguistic context. Surely an essential part of the cultural code is the situations in which things happen. This level of context cannot be included in an interview except secondhand. The question may be raised, whether the talk, separated from the natural situation, may not distort rather than clarify. (It is noted that the authors resorted to simulated action -see Note 3, Metzger & Williams 1963a.) Anthropologists who consider that human events as they naturally occur are the proper subject matter for ethnography, and that artificial settings are hardly the place to observe how things happen in an alien milieu, will no doubt object to the experimental, laboratory techniques of this and similar current procedures. They may approve of the breaking up of behavioral regularities into however small analytic units, but they want to see these working in the system. (They may also agree that knowing a few things for sure is a legitimate goal for a scientific ethnography, but still tend to question whether the big things can be known this way, and they must take as an article of faith that the big things are after all only an accumulation and patterning of little things and that these will eventually fit together into a meaningful and non-trivial whole.) They may ask: How formal, how experimental, can ethnographic discovery procedure be, without either obscuring or destroying the natural history to be described? While I have observed that the authors of this procedure have fairly stable responses to this question of artificiality, I believe they will submit that observation of naturally occurring events must ut

4 1350 American Anthropologist [65, some point supplement their interview technique. Patterning at successive levels of inclusion and contrast will have to make up the whole. It seems to me what their results can help to provide is a valuableand essential-tool for the ethnographer: a grid for decoding more correctly the information to be received from other observational contexts. MARY B. BLACK Stanford University NOTE 1 I anticipate the argument that culture is just the grid itself (the knowledge of rules, or acquired cognitive-psychological apparatus necessary for appropriate interaction), and its counterargument that a culture (the object of the ethnographer s description-at least the American ethnographer s), cannot be limited to the symbolic system but must include as well the specific and observable products resulting from such knowledge. While recognizing the ultimate relevance of a resolution of these positions, the present communication can only leave them open for further discussion, noting that the argument has been going on for some time. I do think the Metzger- Williams method can be seen as an attempt to get at the rules independently of (or at least prior to) observation of behavioral regularities and inference therefrom-an attempt to avoid the circularity inherent in the inference from observation method and the eternal conundrum that the patterning perceived and described by ethnographers may be more in the observer s eye than in the culture observed. REFERENCES CITED BLACK, MARY Establishing units in the ethnography of American law. Paper presented at meetings of the Southwestern Anthropological Association in Riverside, California, April 12, 1963, in Symposium on Ethnographic Procedures and Descriptive Format. CONKLIN, H. C Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies. In Problems in lexicography, ed. by F. W. Householder and Sol Saporta. International Journal of American Linguistics 28, No. 2, Part IV. COLLINGWOOD, R. G An autobiography. London, Oxford University Press. FRAKE, C The ethnographic study of cognitive systems. In Anthropology and human behavior, ed. by Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D. C.: The Anthropological Society of Washington Notes on queries in ethnography. Paper for SSRC Conference on Transcultural Studies of Cognitive Systems, Merida, Yucatan, April 17-19,1963. GOODENOUGH, W. H Cultural anthropology and linguistics. Georgetown University Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, No. 9. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press. HALL, EDWARD T A system for the notation of proxemic behavior. American Anthropologist 65: METZGEX, DUANE 1963 Asking questions and questioning answers in ethnography. Paper presented at meetings of the Southwestern Anthropological Association in Riverside, California, April 12,1963, in Symposium on Ethnographic Procedures and Descriptive Format.

5 Brief Commzmications 1351 METZGER, DUANE and G. E. WILLIAMS 1962a Patterns of primary personal reference in a Tzeltal community. Anthropology Research Project 10. Stanford: Anthropology Research. 1962b Procedures and results in the study of native categories: Tzeltal firewood. Anthropology Research Project 12. Stan ord: Anthropology Research. 1963a A formal ethnographic analysis of Tenejapa Ladino weddings. American Anthropologist 65: b Tenejapa Medicine I: the curer. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19: