Anthropologist may well be influenced in their choice of research topic by their theoretical position.
ACTIVITY
Your college or university is funding you to travel to South America and conduct anthropological fieldwork. You are going to visit people called the Yanomamö, who live in the rainforest of Venezuela. Their village has no electricity, no mobile phones and no modern technology. The nearest town with a hospital, shops and electricity is 200 miles away. The only way you can reach this community is by boat, and the journey takes five days from the nearest town. You are travelling on your own and you have to stay in the village for a period of three months and conduct a participant study that asks: ‘What is the Yanomamö relationship with nature?’
Plan your journey and explain the issues that you might encounter before, during and after your fieldwork. Consider these practical, ethical and theoretical issues:
Before the journey: What do I need to take with me? Food? Medicine? Money? How to get there? Planning the journey?
During the stay at this village: How do I communicate? How do I find relevant information? What if I make a mistake? How do I record the information?
After the journey: How do I leave the community? How do I write the report? What about my own views and beliefs? How do I represent this community?
Gangsters without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang (Ward 2012)
Thomas Ward spent eight and a half years of participant observation fieldwork in Los Angeles (see Chapter 11). His is one of the rare ethnographies to explore the issues of globalization and street gangs and how gang culture has spread from the streets of Los Angeles to El Salvador and other parts of Central America. Ward spent the better part of sixteen years inside what is considered to be one of the world’s largest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). He drank with gang members at parties, celebrated the birthdays of hard-core members, and met their children and parents. He visited them in hospitals after they had been shot or stabbed, and in prison after they were convicted. He also attended their funerals. During the course of his fieldwork, Ward became close to a dozen hard-core gangsters as he interviewed more than 150 gang members from eight different cliques – in Los Angeles, California state prisons, Salvadorean prisons, and the homes of retired members in El Salvador. He provides an insight into the world of street gangs and their spread throughout Central America and the USA.
According to Ward, his goal was to understand the motives behind the Salvadorean immigrants’ behaviour and to document the complexity of gangsters’ lives. He began his research in 1993 by meeting with five active members of the gang in Los Angeles. Two of these subsequently died as a result of gang violence, one recovered from crack addiction, another is serving life in prison, and the last one is free and has survived to old age. Those first connections led Ward into the hard, fast life of gangsters. Over the years, he had many open conversations with gang members, from the time of their initiations until long after, when they were thinking about leaving the gang. He discovered that they were often allowed to retire after a few years of service with the gang and move on to a full-time job and family responsibilities. While Ward was invited to sell drugs, commit robberies, participate in drive-by shootings and even become an honorary member of the gang, he always declined to participate in illegal activities. Before immersing himself in the street gang subculture, he had spent fourteen years researching the Salvadorean immigrant community and homeless people living on skid row in downtown Los Angeles.
Ward first started working with the Salvadorean community in 1981 while volunteering with a social service agency that provided food, shelter and legal services for Central American refugees fleeing their war-ravaged country. The experience would prove valuable: he learnt about Salvadorean history and culture, including their slang, which helped him earn trust among the MS-13 members. But this background provided only minimal protection when Ward had a gun put to his head and a knife held against his throat, with the warning that he would be killed if he was an undercover policeman. The gang members did not take Ward’s word for it – they did a background investigation by calling his employer and checking out his references in Los Angeles. Despite the death threats, Ward saw a human side to these MS-13 members – people who had lived difficult lives and were searching for something better. In their own way, they were looking for family security, status and self-respect.
ACTIVITY
What are practical, ethical and theoretical issues that Thomas Ward might have experienced in his research.
Participant observation
Anthropologists have to think about and deal with many issues before, during and after the participant observation in their fieldwork.
Getting in
To do their study, anthropologists must first gain entry to the group in question. Some groups are easier to enter than others. A football crowd? No problem. A criminal gang? Not so easy. Observed populations may alter their behaviour around the researcher because they know that they are being studied, an effect that has been exhaustively documented and studied in psychological research. Thus, while this research method allows for a deeper immersion and understanding of the culture, it faces a very real set of challenges.
Making contact: This depends on a range of factors – e.g., the researcher’s personal skills, having the right connections and maybe even luck.
Acceptance: To gain entry to the group, it is necessary to win their trust and acceptance. Making friends with a key individual could help.
Observer’s role: It is essential to adopt a role within the group – one that doesn’t disrupt their normal patterns but one that allows the researcher to make observations.
Staying in
Once a researcher has been accepted into the group, she or he needs to be able to stay in to complete their study. A problem arises if researchers become overinvolved. If they overidentify with the group, they become biased and cease to be objective observers. However, if they preserve their detachment to avoid bias, they risk not understanding the events they are observing.
Getting out
Getting out is less problematic than getting in or staying in – if the worst comes to the worst, researchers can just call a stop to their observations and leave. They may also find that loyalty to the group they have been studying makes it difficult to disclose everything they have learnt for fear of harming members of the group (e.g., exposure of the activities of criminal groups could lead to prosecution or reprisals against the researcher), even though such omissions will reduce the validity of the data.
The anthropologist Peggy Froerer with her research assistant, Shantilal, a young man from the Kolga village in the state of Chhattisgarh, central India. He assisted her in transcribing her field notes from Chetriboli or Kurukh into Hindi. (© Peggy Froerer)
An evaluation of participant observation (PO)
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Strengths
Validity: Observing people (rather than asking questions) results in qualitative data and a true picture of how they
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