Volume 56, No. 4, Winter 1997
Trying the Impossible: Relatively "Rapid" Methods in a City-Wide Needs Assessment
Alexander M. Ervin
Key words: rapid assessment, research design, methodology, qualitative methods, needs assessment, urban anthropology, Canada.
This article discusses ingredients and processes in the design and conduct of applied social research. It underscores the usefulness of qualitative approaches for large-scale urban studies and the desirability of methodological flexibility. With very little money, a community needs assessment had to be done quickly for an urban United Way and as a basis for a major policy review. Overall, the approach taken was intermediate between rapid appraisal as a formal methodology and more traditional policy or academic investigation. The article explores how methods are selected and how the many details of logistics are organized in applied research. Such choices are normally dictated by the opportunities and constraints of working collaboratively with stakeholders. Here, there was a need to concurrently explore many domains of human service delivery while still attempting to preserve depth and context for each of them. Yet, because the study was expected to recommend priorities for a whole city, there were pressures to look for linkages among those sectors. The article emphasizes fluidity and rapidity in both designing and doing research. It also reinforces the necessity of pre-researching the policy context and to deal with organizational conflict before actually doing the study at hand.
That'll Teach You: Cognition and Practice in a Chicago Union Local
E. Paul Durrenberger
Key words: education, triads, unions, organized labor, consciousness, cognition, practice
I challenge the wisdom of the idea that education is efficacious in changing peoples' behavior. I show that in a Local union consciousness is not related to activism among stewards and that union consciousness among members is related to the structures of their workplaces and to history or recent events. I conclude that it is more effective to involve people in alternate actions than to "educate" them.
On-the-job Performance of Home Health Aides Performance: A Structural Interpretation
Eric Rossman
Key words: Home Health Aide, occupation, home care, work environment, supervising nurses, research literature, organizational role
This is a structural analysis of the causes of poor job performance in one of the fastest growing occupations in the Health Care Service sector. It is overwhelmingly dominated by Black and Hispanic women. Aides must negotiate two social organizations: their official job duties are regulated by administrators who have little knowledge of Aides' work environments. The other structure that they encounter involves the expectations of patients. Since many of the tasks performed by Aides fall into society's classification of woman's work, there is an expectation on the part of patients that Health Workers will fulfill the mother/maid role rather than the role of nursing paraprofessional laid out by the Home Care industry.
Transnational and Transformational: Mixtec Immigration and Health Beliefs
James I. Grieshop
Key words: immigration, transformation and change, health beliefs, Mixtec, Mexico, California
This study was designed to investigate the transforming impacts of transnational migration of the Mixtec (an indigenous community from the Mexican State of Oaxaca) on their personal health belief systems. Specific interest was focused on beliefs in omens (presagios) and health beliefs as measured by the Locus of Illness Control (LIC) instrument. Two convenience samples, a Mexican Mixtec (or National) sample in Mexico and a Transnational sample residing in rural California, were interviewed and responded to the Locus of Illness Control instrument. Analyses of results, including statistical procedures, revealed significant differences between the two samples in relation to the number and type of omen beliefs, and especially in relation to the dimensions of externality and internality and prevention and cure as measured by the LIC. The phenomenon of migration was clearly the primary factor associated with the change in the belief systems. Migrants to California revealed a much more pronounced external control profile, suggesting that Transnational respondents see the power for control and prevention of illness as lying more outside themselves than do the National group. Implications of this finding for health professionals and others are discussed.
Smoke Exposure of Women and Young Children in Highland Guatemala: Prediction and Recall Accuracy
Patrice L. Engle, Elena Hurtado and Marie Ruel
Key words: air pollution, child caregiving practices, indigenous women, recall accuracy, smoke exposure, Guatemala, Quetzaltenango
In order to measure accurately indigenous Guatemalan women and young children's exposure to smoke from cooking fires, three techniques were compared: 1) observation; 2) recall 24 hours later based on duration of activities; and 3) recall 24 hours later based on the time each activity started and stopped (elapsed time). To measure recall accuracy, 43 women and their children under two years were observed during meal preparation and consumption, and the next day were asked to recall these activities. Women were reasonably accurate when recalling durations, but recall was significantly less accurate using elapsed times. Recall accuracy increased when two days' measurements were averaged. Women spent more time in the kitchen if they had a husband, and spoke only the indigenous language. For children, mothers' patterns and child's age were associated with time in the kitchen. Children who could walk spent significantly less time in the kitchen than non-walkers. Implications for action to prevent indoor air pollution for women and children are discussed.
Folk Management among Belizean Lobster Fishermen: Success and Resilience or Decline and Depletion?
Thomas D. King
Key words: fisheries management, folk management, local management, fishing cooperatives, tourism, Belize
Fishermen from Caye Caulker, Belize use a local management system based on traditional "areas," or territories, which limits access to the fishing areas around the caye. Data from Northern Fishermen Cooperative Society annual reports suggest that fishermen members of the cooperative have produced lobster tails at a stable rate for over thirty years. Other data from observations and interviews suggest that this seemingly effective local management system may be beginning to teeter. Many factors are shifting the nature of tenure and access to fishing areas in the lobster fishery around Caye Caulker. Other factors are increasing pressure on the lobster population. Here I will discuss changing tenure patterns, fishermen's children's emigration from the caye, and tourism development at the caye. Though these factors are defining characteristics of success among villagers at Caye Caulker, they are in other ways threatening the resilience of this folk management system.
Organic Agriculture and Globalization: A Maya Associative Corporation in Chiapas, Mexico
Ronald Nigh
Key words: cooperatives, organic agriculture, coffee, globalization, Mam, Chiapas
Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla (ISMAM), the world's foremost producer of organic gourmet coffee, is a prominent example of an associative corporation, an organizational form combining aspects of traditional Indian social organization and modern capitalist enterprises. The development of ISMAM's organic strategy is analyzed as achieving multiple goals, including improving soils and improving marketing conditions by permitting greater value-added to growers through direct access to high-value markets. The role of external brokers and the impact of organic marketing on organizational structure are analyzed. Though not typical, ISMAM is an encouraging example of a viable small-farmer strategy for meeting the economic and political challenge of globalization.
Bananas, Are They the Quintessential Health Food? A Global/Local Perspective
Susan L. Andreatta
Key words: bananas, political ecology, pesticides, transnational corporations, St. Vincent
Banana cultivation serves to demonstrate that we as consumers must expand our conceptualization of "healthy food" to include the production practices of growers and the political and economic milieu in which production and distribution are sustained, as well as their impact on human health and the physical environment. Political ecology is used to examine the agro-food sector to understand more clearly the relationship that food producers, local governments, transnational corporations, international policy-makers, regional and extra-regional markets have with each other vis-a-vis the linkages they maintain in the banana industry. This article examines banana production in the Caribbean and its connections with the European Union. Specific attention is given to Windward Island banana production, and especially to St. Vincent. This article illustrates that the increased acreage under banana cultivation and its associated loss of vegetative cover is creating a downward spiral of environmental degradation. The process has contributed to soil and water pollution from biocides used in production, soil erosion and decline in soil fertility. However, not only has the natural environment suffered, local human and animal populations have paid the price physically and economically.
From Vegetable Gardens to Flower Gardens: The Symbolic Construction of Social Mobility in a Development Project
Carmen A. Ferradas
Key words: development anthropology, practice of anthropologists, resettlement, Argentina
The Argentine and Paraguayan agency in charge of the construction of the Yacyret‡ hydroelectric dam created a relocation division to deal with resettlement issues. This article examines the practice of anthropologists and other social scientists in the relocation process. Although programs and plans of social action claim to pursue structural transformations, they generally do not achieve those goals, and only operate at a symbolic level which represents the professional, class, and regional ideologies of the development practitioners.
Effectiveness of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects: Case Study from Madagascar
Lisa Gezon
Key words: conservation and development projects, institutions, ecology, environment, monitoring and evaluation, Madagascar.
The success of conservation efforts does not depend just on having a good project design. The national and international resource management infrastructure plays an important role in enabling projects to meet their goals or in presenting barriers to effective implementation. A study of the institutional infrastructure for resource management in Madagascar has revealed that certain factors-with regards to communication between institutional levels, the integration of national-level players at all phases of project design, and appropriate institutional development, for example-may encourage positive institutional interactions and as a consequence, effective integrated conservation and development projects (ICDP). This article considers the interlinked levels of political analysis, examining the relationship between institutional structure and effectiveness in meeting conservation objectives. It advocates the full participation of nationals in conservation initiatives and that individual projects be given the flexibility to develop innovative schemes and confront unintended circumstances at the local level.
Informant Networks and Their Anthropologists
Michael A. Ashkenazi
Key words: Fieldwork, informants, methodology, Japan, Israel
The major methodological enterprise of anthropology - fieldwork - is the result of cooperation between anthropologists and native informants in a process of participant observation and questioning. Informants convey information ("data") to anthropologists in a variety of forms. I would claim that such transfers of information are managed by informants in ways that they perceive as to their benefit. Here I compare the ways in which informants in two cultures, Japanese townspeople and Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, manage their relations with an anthropologist and manage the sorts of information he receives as well. Control of information is maintained through selective approaches to the ethnographer, monitoring his activities via social networks in which he is peripherally embedded, prevarication, procrastination, and rewards for perceived "proper" behaviors. I suggest that both the anthropologist and his informants operate with a dearth of information about one another, and that the sorts of information that are passed are expressive in the different cultures. The results of the fieldwork enterprise must be viewed therefore as a composite between the two information sets.
Commentary: Ethical Issues for Social Anthropologists: A North American Perspective on Long-Term Research in Mexico
Robert V. Kemper and Anya P. Royce
Commentary: The Influences of Government Policies and Academic Theories on the Practice of Applied Anthropology in the United States: Some Personal Observations
J. Anthony Paredes
Commentary: Professional Responsibility to the Communities in Which They Work and Live
Harold Cox
