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In this lecture on Anthropological Research Methods,
Dr. Michael Paolisso presents an overview of
the perspectives taken by researchers and the
approaches used to gather and interpret information.
He notes that holism and cultural relativism are
important starting points for anthropological
research and that research focuses on
people, structures, and social processes.
He describes the anthropological research
process as being empirical, multi-sided, and
grounded in fieldwork and ethnography.
He highlights the large toolkit of qualitative
and quantitative methods for data gathering
and analysis and the range of outcomes,
including case studies, comparisons, and
participatory and collaborative research.
He ends by emphasizing that anthropological research
methods are people-centered accounts of people
and their contexts, which are used to evaluate and
refine theoretical understandings of human societies.
A couple caveats and promises before
I get into some of these methods.
So, we have a wide range of methods depending
on our theoretical orientation and our problems
and we've already seen a bit of that.
These methods vary by our sub-field, and so
we've had discussion of our sub-fields, and we're
talking of, I think, mainly about socio-cultural
anthropology here, but a little beyond that.
I see these methods as multi-dimensional in
terms of their flexibility and that flexibility
depends on your epistemological or
your ontological leanings or orientations.
We stated as we can take these methods and we
can reuse them and repackage them to accomplish
multiple goals, and I think the methods are, provide
a fundamental platform from which to engage
in transdisciplinary and synthesis research.
So I'm not going to make the argument that it's
our methods that help us bridge out completely.
I mean, I don't want to leave our theories behind,
but I think they are very, very good, sort of bridging
mechanism for us as we reach out to other disciplines.
So I did a word cloud, or I had a graduate student
help me do the word cloud on anthropological research
methods and so you can see probably all of the
terms, many of the terms that we've talked about
already today are showing up in this word cloud.
And you can see some of the major ones: participant,
ethnography methods, research, observation, etc,
but you see a number of other terms.
So this is kind of a nice anthropological start
to a discussion of methods where I just
kind of throw them all out there for you.
We weren't able to get participant observation kind
of hyphenated, one of our main methods, so it's kind
of separated there, but it still comes out strong
and we could talk more about it, but let's not.
So another way to kind of get a handle at our
research methods is to go through a recent
handbook and cultural methods handbook in
cultural anthropology by Bernard and Gravlee,
and if you read down the topics, you know,
it goes by perspectives, acquiring data, and
then interpretation, etc. and if you look at it,
you see a wide range of, sort of orientations
or perspectives including discussions
of epistemology, etc, and meaning.
You see some standard methods down there of
interviewing, participant observation, behavioral
observations, structured interview, discourse,
visual, and then, interpreting anthropology and
we have kind of the statistical reasoning with
numbers to text analysis, cross-cultural research.
So this is another kind of way to throw out
all the possibilities out there of our methods
and this is a very useful book to have and
so another way to kind of break that down and
maybe go below that word cloud or table of
contents is to look at principles and practices, so
I came up with some that struck me as like what
makes our methods kind of unique to us, and I, the
ones I came up with were holism, cultural relativism,
fieldwork, ethnography, multi-sited, large toolkit,
people centered, culture, structure, and process.
Now as we get further down, we get a little
more specific, and I'm sure that if I redid this
I would come up with a few more, but if I
think of in preparing this presentation, they
seemed like things that made me recognize
the use of these methods as anthropological.
So let's go through these each.
Holism, we've already mentioned that, and I
think it's a fundamental principle in anthropology.
It's part of our DNA, if you will.
We don't discuss it that much.
We kind of live it, we don't question it that much,
but I think what's important is that meaning or
understanding and behavior are generated by
interconnections of a whole, whatever that whole is,
you know, we, that's, I think a fundamental base to
our methods that, you know, today we say we're
interdisciplinary and we're bringing all of that, but for
anthropologists from the very beginning, I believe
what separated us, what defined us compared to other
disciplines was we had this holistic perspective and
I've said to my students I think it's a very brave and
courageous and ambitious, perhaps foolish, approach,
but it's something that I think very few others do, and
more importantly, I think very few other disciplines kind
of recognize that that's implicit and tacit in your methods
and that the specific cannot be understood without
reference to that whole, or some subset of that whole,
so we recognize that we can't study it all, but we
constantly come back to kind of check where are
we vis-à-vis this broad or holistic understanding.
Reductionism and parsimony are
suspect unless holistically contextualized.
So we are reductionistic, and we do
reduce things down, and we do focus,
and we do become very parsimonious.
And some of us do, some of us don't, but we
constantly, in one way or another, come back
and kind of check where does that fit within
this broader holism perspective, so I think
fundamental to our methods is holism.
Cultural Relativism, now this is the notion that,
well you can see the cartoon up there of it.
I was wondering if this, hopefully, this is
appropriate, that resistance to universal
assumptions about socio-cultural processes.
We do believe in, we have evolutionary
anthropology and there are universals and there
are changes over time and we've heard already
Paige's presentation too also accounts for that.
But we're, we first, before we're willing to accept that,
we want to check it to see about cultural relativism,
that other groups and cultures are different, etc.
The focus on cross-cultural or group patterns and
also exceptions and alternatives to these patterns.
So we're not just looking at the normative,
what's the broad pattern, but we want to
explain those patterns and variations in
those patterns, or variations around the norm.
We want to give a possible voice and articulate
value to socio-cultural phenomena in marginalized,
under-served, and under-represented populations,
so another thing, I think, implicit in our methods is
that we often try to give voice to populations and
people that have not been heard and value that voice.
And we do want to focus on the intercultural or
group patterns of agreement and disagreement.
Fieldwork, this has come up already, and here
are some pictures of fieldwork early in the
1930s, 1920s and 30s, etc, and then fieldwork
today, and these are just two examples
from the Pacific and the Trobriand Islanders.
So fieldwork, for us, is very, very important and
this, it's the real world places for engaging people.
And to me, again, I've mentioned already, my
focus is on engaging, the real-world place.
It doesn't have to be on a distant island in
an exotic place where you get those tropical
diseases, etc, but it is a real world place.
We, the socio-cultural anthropologists,
we don't do our fieldwork so much in a lab.
There are some exceptions to that though.
It's still fundamental to our discipline, both real
and imaginary, so doing fieldwork, whether it's
in an urban environment close to your University
or whether it's in a distant location that requires
learning a new language, learning new behaviors,
practices, etc., being far away from things that you're
comfortable, that still is a very, very important process.
It's also part of an imagined world for
us that it's kind of our rite of passage.
You know, years ago, in graduate school, you
could not get your PHD if you did not go and
do fieldwork in a distant, exotic, you know,
faraway place and if you were in graduate
school at that time, you would see graduate
students coming and returning from the field
and etc. and some people didn't come back.
They came back, but not to
the anthropology department.
They kind of left or etc., but It was kind of,
a very much a rite of passage for us, so
it's an opportunity for grounding and
validating our theories, methods, and goals.
Again, I think this going to the field, as we
say, whether, again, it be to Starbucks, is
really about testing our theories and methods.
We're a very empirical based discipline
significantly, and so fieldwork is that place
where we can do that and is professionally
and personally challenging, this rite of passage.
So we have lots of stories of anthropologists
in the field; it's part of our lore and history.
Paige has already told you about her scars.
You know and we, you know, we got off on that.
There's something, it's a trial and very much a ritual.
And so it's part of what kind of bonds us together.
So again, you know, back to those principles and practices
that I talked about, another one is Ethnography.
So this is the empirical grounding of our research
during fieldwork, so anthropologists, we do ethnography.
We take our theories and our toolkit and our goals
and objectives and take them to a physical place
and ground them through interactions with people
looking at institutions, structures, processes.
It's very, very much engaged.
It's inductive.
It's reflective.
We go to great lengths to try to minimize
our assumptions before we enter the field,
so we are very, very inductive.
That does not mean that we haven't written
an NSF proposal that had all the hypotheses
laid out, etc., but when we go to the field,
you know, we still go with those, but
we're open that those may change.
And so, and it's also a great, a time for
reflection and processing during ethnography.
It's focused, but it's flexible.
So ethnography is not just hanging out or
doing whatever comes to you or writing down
whatever comes to you, whether again you're
in the field or you're in a meeting like this.
It is focused and, but it's also flexible that
you can adjust your insights and pursuits.
Certainly, it's a triangulation of practices and
tools, so we most anthropologists don't go to
do, practice ethnography during fieldwork
or otherwise with only one type of tool.
And we like to take those tools and compare and
contrast and see what overall picture they produce.
And today, I would say increasingly,
maybe becomes a dominant model.
It's participatory and collaborative.
So we had a nice discussion at lunch about what
we call people informants or subjects and all of
that, you know, and so I was saying, you know,
it's more, you know, participants now and sort
of a collaborative research effort that we're
undertaking cause we're also learning from them
and sharing; they're sharing and learning from us.
We recognize that we're not doing ethnography
fieldwork in small isolated communities like
Roy Rappaport did when he wrote the book
Pigs for the Ancestors and it wasn't isolated then,
but it was a lot more isolated than it is today.
So our fieldwork spans more than one
geography, community, or institution site.
So it's not only a geographical site,
but it's also what is a community?
A community doesn't have to be a
local community, spatially situated.
It can be a network of individuals across space
at different levels of organization and institutions
and it can be within an outside of institutions itself.
Our examination of the linkages among sites at
different scales and at, and temporal scales, spatial
and temporal scales, so we look at these connections
across sites now, both spatially and temporally, and
focus on the inter-sight flows of knowledge, values,
power, materials, and their human and environmental
consequences such as justice, decisions, or policies,
so we are interested in flows and consequences
and they can be in a wide range of phenomena.
So getting even more specific, so with these
kind of orientations, goals that we have for our
research methods, what do we have in our toolkit?
Some of the major ones here that I just pull, I focus
on is participant observation, interviews and surveys,
qualitative to quantitative analysis, and modeling.
So participant observation, I say it's a
defining method for anthropology.
So anthropologists, as a fundamental way
of collecting knowledge, understanding,
is we participate and then, and we observe
simultaneously, we emphasize one or the other.
We've had people that have done
more participation, less observation.
We've had observation participation.
We've teased these apart, but we actually
go out and participate and observe in human
activities, in often very unstructured ways,
meaning we will participate and observe with,
what comes up that we don't know about.
And so what makes this interesting
is that the anthropologist is kind
of the instrument, or interlocutor.
We are actually filtering and processing and
putting a frame or a lens on the information
that we're collecting and using ourselves as
an instrument and I think that's a very, very
powerful sort of observation that I don't know
of any other social science discipline that in fact
uses the individual as the instrument for data
collection, the researcher as an instrument.
Most science has tried to keep the
researcher as objective as possible.
Now, the data or information is subject to very,
very different types of analyses from sort of
post-modernists, sort of what Paige was alluding
to earlier, sort of writing culture sort of analyses,
scientific and humanistic, so the participant
observation data that we collect is amenable to
many, many different interpretations and analyses.
We have manuals and guidance, if you took a
qualitative methods class in Anthropology, you would
actually practice doing participant observation,
you would practice writing up your field notes.
We've, have very good methods and critiques
of what it means to write up your field notes.
It's not just that that's some objective sort of process, but
that you actually are contributing to some of the analysis.
And this participant observation can be
standalone or it can complement other methods.
So we do this participant observation,
but we also do interviews and surveys.
So we use informal interviews to identify relevant issues
and topics to complement participant observation.
So we go out and we talk to people.
We have some questions and that's come out of
our participant observation or wherever, and we
will actually go, sit down, and interview people.
In the informal interview, and there's lots of
variations on it, we can start off with a set of
questions, but we can add more, we can come
back and circle back to others, and then the next
informal interview we may add other questions
that weren't in the first interview, etc.
It's an informal interview.
It's about, with key informants
or collaborators or participants.
These are very, very open-ended questions.
It's about kind of learning the lay of the land, getting,
checking some of your assumptions, making, building
rapport with people that you're studying, etc.
So typically, anthropologists do that at the
beginning of their research, the method they use.
We then use semi-structured interviews to simulate
natural discourse and I think this is one of our most
powerful methods, so semi-structured interviews
are interviews where we have a small number of
questions, but that we apply them to each individual
that we interview, but it allows for follow-up
questioning in between, probing, etc.
The goal of a semi-structured interview is to
try to generate something as close to natural
discourse on a topic as you can come to.
So, if you're interested in environmental
sustainability, then your questions in a
semi-structured interview are orientated to trying
to get people to talk in and around, on top,
over, the topic of environmental sustainability.
So it's a very, very effective process.
It's a challenging process to implement because
you're probing and following, trying to, you
know, just actually get somebody to start
talking about it without overly controlling it.
You do have a set of questions as
guides, set of open questions.
It produces sort of non-qualitative, but
data that's amenable to sort of text analysis.
Too often, people think you can tabulate things
from semi-structured or informal interviews.
How many times this topic came up
and how many times that topic came up.
I would say that's not the best use
of these interviews, but rather it's to
generate rich, rich discussion on a topic.
We now have lots of skill and technology
for audio recording and text analysis
of that and guidance, so it produces
a very, very rich, rich, rich database.
And then, finally, you know, sort of
structured questionnaires or surveys.
For, in anthropology, we 9.9 times out of 10 I would
say, we develop these surveys, questionnaires,
after we've done the qualitative, more qualitative
interviewing participant observation, okay.
We can also do them, we can do interviews and
qualitative stuff after the survey as well, and we
typically do that, so I think what's unique, not unique,
but a strong characteristic of anthropological methods
is that we generate the surveys out of the qualitative
data that we collect with the people that we interview.
And it's used to translate from a, so we collected
a lot of rich knowledge in these interviews, well
how do we find out to what degree that knowledge
is shared, or that information or these practices are
common to a larger population, so this is about
extending the analysis to a larger population than your
key informant sample of interviewees or participants.
And the results are validated and interpreted using
qualitative interview and participant observation data.
So some years ago, I worked with
some economists, econometricians and
we built a complex regression model of
what were the factors driving women to
start work in agricultural fields in Nepal.
And we used some time allocation data that we
had, that I'd collected and we built this model
and we had a lot of qualitative data leading
into the model, and then what I realized,
and then we ran the model, and the model
predicted a couple of things that were the
drivers of accounting for women, whether
they entered into working in agriculture or not.
And I remember another rich, a rich moment
again in anthropology was after I got, we got
the model results, I wanted to interpret it and
my economist friend said, "No, we're done. This,
you know, we built the model and we've tested
the model and we don't need to go back and then
bring it to, you know, qualitatively interpret it."
So in our use of surveys, we start with qualitative data.
We can do a range of statistical modeling analyses
on it, but we always bring it, I think, back again
to enrich our understanding of that complex sort
of holistic, area - topic as well as specific questions.
And so that was a rich moment for me in terms of
better understanding what our, how our methods,
even though that wasn't our regression model that
we used, it was a standard model and techniques.
It was different than my economist's friends and colleagues.
So we do anthropological modeling
and I'm going to talk about a couple here.
And so in those that are kind of shaded
with light, light brown yellow, text models,
cultural models, cultural consensus.
Those are things that are, I think, a type of
modeling, are more specific to anthropology,
while the others which anthropologists do:
social network analysis, complex adaptive systems,
agent-based modeling, participatory GIS or just GIS.
These are very, very sort of
cross-disciplinary sort of approaches.
On the, in the picture here is a text model of a
harmful algal bloom, it is, you know, or common
motivators among stakeholders and this is from
a study we did on the Eastern Shore where
we tried to, with semi-structured interviews,
we were able to identify what were the drivers
that were, people willing to kind of address
the issue of a harmful algal bloom on a lake.
And then, take text around, and then find, you know,
that there were health issues, there were lake issues,
there were environmental issues, and we kind of
could build a text-based model of the different
themes or issues that people said as opportunities
or health risks or save the lake or a liability.
These were kind of underlying, we built this model
to pick up sort of these underlying model drivers,
and then applied sort of text analysis over it,
so I'll talk tomorrow about cultural modeling,
cultural consensus, so I'm going to skip those.
So anthropologists do do modeling, and some
that is unique to us and also some that is, we
share with other disciplines, but that we apply
kind of following some of these other principles.
So what are some of the outcomes of
our, these methods, these goals of our
methods, the principles and practices?
So, one thing is that we're very good at
doing ethnography and doing case studies,
so it's a big part of our research methods,
but we also do comparative research
and Monique mentioned that earlier.
We're not just interested in a specific ethnography
or a specific case study, rich and detailed
as that might be, but also in comparative
research and looking for patterns, similarities,
differences across groups, institutions, regions, etc.
I think these methods allow us to do
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.
And certainly, by interdisciplinary, we're often asked
to come and, I think Monique was saying earlier,
"explain this", or "how do you account for this?"
or "we had some problem when we were
doing this, and we, you know, we heard that
you know these people and, you know, you
know the region, so could you come like
kind of sort it out and tell us how we could
get them to do what we need them to do."
"Leave those buckets alone," someone earlier said.
So that's been, I think we've had some success
at that, but it, you know, it's different than the
transdisciplinary where some of these disciplinary
boundaries break down and we're actually
elevating our research methods up to match with
the methods and approaches of other disciplines.
So again, I think methodologically, that's maybe
the first way that we can do our transdisciplinary
rather than perhaps putting too much emphasis
on our theories, whether they're cultural ecology
or environmental anthropology or political ecology,
they will be there and certainly will be expressed
in our methods, but I don't mean to trivialize
them at all, but I think the methodologies that
we use is a way to promote transdisciplinary.
Our methods are very, very participatory and collaborative.
And they can be, you know, by their very
nature, we're asking people and we should
honestly be interested and engaged in what
people know and think and believe and do.
The problems they see, the solutions they see.
And we, that first step already gets us halfway
to participation, and then engaging them in our
research and embracing their, you know, their
research ideas, their experiential local knowledge,
global knowledge, etc., is something that I think
naturally comes out of our research methodologies.
I think our research methods also value and
give value and agency to knowledge, values
and practices within and between groups.
In anthropology, we've been critical of culture, of
the culture concept, and with good reason and to
a large degree, but knowledge and people's values
and their practices and what generates them within
a group and causes them to be similar or different
between groups is a powerful, powerful research
approach that has lots of benefits and payoffs.
And too often, somehow it's seen as
not perhaps as useful as a deductive,
top-down model to explain something.
I was here last week, and after I gave a presentation
that highlighted what farmers know about land
conservation, their knowledge about land conservation,
a colleague and friend said, "Ah, but that can't tell
you anything about the environment" and we've
had this discussion before, and so the point he
was making was that our models for explaining
land degradation are much, are explaining a
system that local knowledge cannot understand
and I think that there may be some truth to that,
but not exhaustively and that local knowledge, or
experiential knowledge, whether that be indigenous
people or whether that be government officials,
whether that be the researchers in this room, is
very, very critical to put into our kind of, our model
building and our research, and but it's not all about
just knowledge, values, and practices within and
between groups; there are structures out there.
There are processes that have covered centuries
of time that Paige has referred to and there are
processes that individuals, that capture and
have effects on individuals, and so our methods
can also get at some of that and my colleagues
here have shared some of that research as well.
So these methods, again, tell us a lot about anthropology.
As I, you know, I've give, I've taught methods,
both qualitative and quantitative for a number of
years, but I found preparing this PowerPoint was
quite challenging, when I said okay let's talk about
our research methods in a broad sense, but it
told, it reminded me a lot of, about anthropology.
We produce ethnographies,
and again, people-centered accounts.
I hope you don't, I don't beat that theme to death
over the next few days, but I hadn't, you know
I, that's kind of was implicit in my understanding
of anthropology, but I think it's even more and
more important as I participate in this workshop
and also think about what our methods accomplish.
Our methods organize our goal to talk
and understand people and their concerns.
Without these methods, I don't think we'd be able
to do what we've kind of charged our self to do.
They produce data that are valid ethnographically,
you know, our methods are, again, are a way
that kind of in the end bring us back to this
ethnographic pursuit that we have to kind of
triangulate and ground our research approaches.
And I can't imagine us making advances in our
theories without using our methods to collect
empirical data and that doesn't mean that it
has to be just at one moment in time; it can
be over time, and it can be at multi-levels, but
without these methods, I don't think we can
keep advancing our theoretical assumptions.
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