Volume 54, No. 1, Spring 1995
"It is Futile to Trust in Man": Methodological Difficulties in Studying Non-Mainstream Populations with Reference to Ethiopian Jews in Israel
Shalva Weil
Key words: Ethiopian Jews, insider vs. outsider research, methodology, Israel
There is an extensive literature on Ethiopian Jews, but it contains remarkably few references to methodological problems in studying this population. This article explores the nature of the encounter between the researcher and Ethiopian Jews in their new setting in Israel, where the Ethiopian and the Israeli personalities are characterized by different and sometimes opposing qualities. The intentional use of ambiguities in Ethiopian communication may produce an extreme situation in which the collection of data westerners consider "basic" may be impeded. Can the "outsider" collect valid information at all, or is "insider" research, employing the native as research assistant or translator, more effective? Finally, the article discusses the appropriate methodology for research, and argues that a holistic approach combining innovative theoretical and practical approaches should be pursued in order to reflect effectively the negotiated reality between the researcher and "the Other."
Filipino Self-Help and Peacemaking Strategies: A View from the Mindanao Hinterland
Timothy Austin
Key words: crime, Muslim/Christian conflict, peacemaking, social control, Philippines
Building upon field research, two predictably allied features of Philippine society are explored: the time-honored patterns of neighborhood or village cooperation (self-help) long associated with Filipino culture and character, and the continuing emergence of citizen volunteer security organizations. A variety of informal features of self-help are described along with variously formalized and official networks of social control. How these security and peacemaking activities fluctuate but persist in a turbulent sociopolitical setting is discussed.
Industry-University Cooperation at Japan's Protein Engineering Research Institute: A Study Based on Long-Term Fieldwork
Samuel Coleman
Key words: fieldwork, research consortia, science and technology; Japan
Japanese R&D consortia have scored successes in applied research with specific targets. More recent consortium approaches to basic research, however, must compensate for differences in the reward structures and career trajectories of researchers from industry and academia, while accommodating the goals of the supporting institutions. Japan's Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI), a flagship effort to organize industry, government, and academic resources for protein-related basic research, has assembled an impressive array of material and human resources to join international competition in protein engineering. Long-term fieldwork at PERI supported an analysis of the organizational features that hampered that institution's effectiveness. The combination of research approaches used suggests productive avenues for anthropologists in science, technology and society studies (STS).
Workplace Training, Workplace Learning: A Case Study
Charles N. Darrah
Key words: industrial ethnography, job skills, manufacturing, problem solving, workplace training, US
Workplace training may be viewed as an instrumental activity that can be evaluated as to its efficiency in conveying requisite skills and knowledge. This paper develops a broader analysis of training by analyzing a series of classes offered to the production workers of a computer manufacturer. The training curriculum failed in its instrumental function, and instead was used by trainees, support staff trainers, and production floor management to pursue diverse agendas. It also simplified organization "messes" by making them seemingly amenable to rational problem solving. On-the-job training, the formal training classes, and daily life on the production floor are analyzed as distinct "arenas for learning" that reflected organizational power as much as efficient pedagogy. The implications of this analysis for a world in which enhancing the skills of workers is widely deemed essential are also explored.
Basic Concepts and Techniques of Rapid Appraisal
James Beebe
Key words: rapid appraisal, rapid assessment (procedures)
Rapid appraisal is an approach for developing a preliminary, qualitative understanding of a situation. This paper identifies three basic concepts--(1) a system perspective, (2) triangulation of data collection, and (3) iterative data collection and analysis--and suggests that they provide a conceptual foundation for rapid appraisal and a rationale for the selection of specific research techniques. The basic concepts and their related research techniques provide a flexible but rigorous approach for data collection and analysis by a team of two or more individuals, usually with different academic discipline backgrounds. The paper reviews the history of rapid appraisal, provides a definition, discusses the three basic concepts and the illustrative research techniques associated with them, argues for flexibility, and suggests the use of a "Data Collection Checklist" to remind the team of important concepts and as a means by which the reader of a report can estimate the degree of confidence that can be placed in the results.
Brazilians and the 1990 United States Census: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and the Undercount
Maxine L. Margolis
Key words: Brazilian immigrants, ethnicity, US Census; US, New York City
Two issues involved in the conduct of the 1990 United States census and its problematic final tally are the ethnic categories that were utilized and the enumeration of undocumented immigrants. The experience of Brazilian immigrants in New York City highlights these issues. The census categories hampered the ability of Brazilians to declare their ethnicity, a failing that almost certainly led to an undercount of this segment of the immigrant population. A significant but unknown percentage of Brazilian immigrants are undocumented. Factors that make it difficult to enumerate undocumented populations, including disinterest in the entire census enterprise and fear of detection by immigration authorities, also were responsible for the non-participation of many Brazilians in the 1990 census and for their subsequent undercount.
Solidarity and Agency: Rethinking Community Development
Jnanabrata Bhattacharyya
Key words: community development, self-help, solidarity
Despite its four decade-long history, community development is still insufficiently conceptualized. Its name is buried under various euphemisms, although its ideology has become the legitimizing cachet for social interventions of all sorts. This paper presents a reformulation of the classic idea of community development as the pursuit of solidarity and agency. Such a formulation aligns community development with the central intellectual concerns of today. While community development pursues the same goals as many other endeavors, its distinctiveness lies in the manner in which it pursues them, namely, by adhering to the principles of self-help, felt needs, and participation.
Mexican-American Perceptions of Severe Mental Illness
María Luisa Urdaneta, Delia Hurón Saldana, and Anne Winkler
Key words: acculturation, Hispanics, Mexican-Americans, mental illness, schizophrenia, USA, South Texas
In south Texas, Mexican-Americans make up a large part of the patient population in public psychiatric facilities. Changing demographic trends that increase the proportion of Hispanics across the United Stated suggested the relevance of a comprehensive assessment of the perceptions of mental illness and hospital treatment among families of Mexican-American psychiatric patients. Results indicate low levels of formal education and acculturation in respondents, accompanied by minimal knowledge about severe mental illness despite having lived with a relative who had been hospitalized several times. The study shows a great need for educational and preventive outreach programs presented in simple idiomatic Spanish to reach this population. Further, pervasive barriers due to rurality and low socio-economic status imply that cultural influences on perceptions of illness should not be over-interpreted.
Focus Groups and Ethnography
Michael Agar and James MacDonald
Key words: conversational analysis, drug use, ethnographic method, focus group, US
Focus groups continue to grow in popularity as a method of applied social research. The two authors, anthropologically trained ethnographers, show how a particular focus group with former LSD-using adolescents dovetailed with other ethnographic data. By looking at a focus group transcript using a simplified version of techniques in conversational analysis, and by interpreting the utterances as indices of more comprehensive "folk models" derived from other data, focus groups yield richer understandings than a simple stand-alone use can provide.
Tourism and Cultural Change in Small-Scale Societies
Mark C. Mansperger
Key words: land utilization and tenure, small-scale societies, tourism
As tourism increases in small unindustrialized societies, it is increasingly important to understand its impacts and the primary process by which it produces cultural change. Gaining insight into how tourism leads to major cultural changes (which are often deleterious) will assist applied anthropologists, indigenous governmental departments, and perhaps even tourism agencies themselves in minimizing the damage that touristic activities create. Fieldwork on Yap Island and case study reviews indicate that tourism can increase indigenous jobs, foreign exchange reserves, cultural preservation, and education. Deleterious touristic impacts involve human displacement, subsistence disruptions, social conflict, loss of autonomy, dependency, crime, and other disturbances of the host culture. Analysis suggests that the impacts of tourism are magnified when tourists alter their hosts' economic base, particularly the indigenous land utilization and tenure relationships. Therefore, negative touristic impacts can be moderated in small scale societies by keeping the activities and influences of tourists out of the domain of indigenous land relationships.
The Social Acceptability of Clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest
Richard Hansis
Key words: clearcutting, forests, participation, social acceptability, US, Pacific Northwest
The fate of the public forests of the Pacific Northwest draws attention to the different values that various constituencies use to make decisions about the acceptability of forest practices. Clearcutting is perhaps the most visible such decision, and it is the one that many people fasten onto when public participation, which is mandated for federal forest lands, becomes part of the planning process. Acceptability becomes an issue for those who make forest decisions. Values can at least be rank ordered for individuals, but knowing the order does not allow prediction of what is acceptable: the context in which the values are called on is important. Through the use of a mailed questionnaire and of in-depth interviews, several populations in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington were sampled to determine the acceptability of clearcutting. Both methods were used to ensure both population-wide validity and in-depth meanings of the practice of clearcutting. In all samples the majority or, in the case of a rural sample, the plurality was opposed to clearcutting as it has been practiced in the Pacific Northwest. Urban residents, women, the more highly educated, and those persons with a liberal ideology were more likely to oppose clearcutting, but interviews showed that people's responses to the questionnaire were more nuanced than a questionnaire could probe.
