MORE COMPREHENSIVE FIELD METHODS 1

Abstract

THE history of ethnographic field work has been also the history of widening definition of which departments of human life are to be re-garded as culture, which are to be classified, and which ignored, under the heading of "psychology" or "private life." In the traditional monograph it is still regarded as adequate to dismiss "family relations" with a para-graph and "child training" with a page. Accidents of early choice have also determined which questions all good ethnographers ask; for example, a monograph would be condemned which betrayed the fact that the ethnog-rapher has failed to find out whether there was circumcision or what dis-position was made of the umbilical cord. But a complete ignorance of the way in which a child is weaned or the position in which a child is held while being suckled, although just as culturally standardized and possibly far more significant in the life of the child, may be omitted with a clear ethno-graphic conscience. Emphases such as these are purely accidental, having no essential relevance to the line drawn between those fields which are essentially the province of the ethnographer and those which are not. It is, however, advisable to scrutinize critically such fashions in field work and point out how inconsistent and disjointed present standards of inquiry are. One turns, however, from these merely fortuitous omissions which any traditional ethnographer will admit as nevertheless appropriate for study, to a more elaborate problem, the problem of how unformalized aspects of culture are to be studied. Traditionally, puberty has been studied from the standpoint of ceremonial. If there are periods of segregation, mutilations, instructions, taboos, rituals surrounding puberty, the ethnologist sets them down with conscientious regard for detail. If, however, the particular cul-1 This paper is based upon the combined field experience of Mr. Fortune and myself; on Mr. Fortune's experience in Dobu and Basima, my experience in Samoa, our joint experi-ence in Manus of the Admiralties, and among a North American Indian tribe. 1 This content downloaded from 148.214.221.13 on Thu, 24 Sep 2015 14:42:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 35, 1933 ture under consideration makes no formal point of puberty, stresses it by no ceremonial, no taboo, the ethnologist has in the past simply ignored the subject, counting his duty well done if he sets down: "These people have no puberty ceremonials." Yet a serious consideration of the problem will show that though the absence of a type of behavior inquired about because characteristic of other primitive societies is of historical interest, the mere recording of its absence is hardly an adequate statement about the society in question. The young people of Dobu and Samoa have to grow up just as certainly as do the young people of Manus or of the Orokaiva. Their own attitudes towards the increasing responsibilities of maturity, their behavior towards each other, towards their parents, towards members of the opposite sex, is just as much a fact of culture as if it were rendered explicit and con-spicuous by ceremonial and taboo. What can be said of puberty can be said with equal justice of childbirth, which is dismissed with a sentence if there are no religious or social rites, or immediately observable and striking customs; of marriage, to which pages' are given only if the particular culture has happened to seize upon marriage for obvious elaboration. The field ethnographer in the past has too often been prone to describe culture only in terms of the conspicuous, the conventional, and the bizarre. It is at his door that many of the most characteristic errors of the arm-chair theorizer must be laid; there is small wonder that Levy-Bruhl sees the native as pre-logical, or Crawley as ob-sessed by ideas of sex, when only the cultural elaborations of the unusual are presented for their consideration. In addition to this tendency to neglect whole aspects of culture, there has also been a failure, very often, to distinguish methodologically between the forms under which various aspects of culture appear in different soci-eties. The religion of a people like the Zuni, with their fixed calendrical ceremonial lends itself to a different type of analysis than does the religion of the Western Plains. In one case, the ground-plan of the culture is laid down and individuals pass through it, their experience is subsidiary, at least for a general understanding of the culture, to the plan itself. In the other there is no such ground-plan; only from the records of individual vi-sions, from a running record of the lives of individuals, can an adequate picture of the structure of religion be gained. This contrast can be drawn equally well between any other calendrical and non-calendrical people: in Hawaii the chief religious festivals occurred at stated seasons each year; the gods marched through the districts and each district presented tribute; among the Maori, on the contrary, it was an occasion, like the building of a great house or of a war canoe which called for important religious