Exercise 2: Participant Observation 81
3. Has the ethnographer adopted a scientific approach or a humanistic approach to the study of this community? Is there a contrast between the way the community was studied (perhaps using rigorous scientific methods) and the way it is reported (perhaps more humanistically)?
4. How does the ethnographer select where to conduct fieldwork and how is entrée gained?
5. How does the ethnographer present herself or himself to the studied community? What role or image does she or he have in the community?
6. At what point in the sojourn does the ethnographer appear to have acquired rapport?
7. What evidence is there of the ethnographer’s impact on the community being studied?
8. What does the ethnographer do about those impacts?
9. What evidence is there of the community’s impact on the ethnographer? Does the fieldworker appear at any point to be suffering culture shock?
10. Are there aspects of community life that the ethnographer does not have access to or chooses to ignore?
11. Did the ethnographer encounter ethical issues, or do you perceive ethical issues that should be addressed?
12. Are the strengths and weaknesses of fieldwork discussed or illustrated?
This exercise provides a relatively brief, safe, and inexpensive way to acquire a sense of what participant observation in ethnographic fieldwork is like, and to evaluate its strengths and limitations as a method.
Select an event or activity to observe and, ideally, to participate in at some level. The event or activity may be quite simple, common, small, or frequent—or it may be elaborate, unusual, and different from your own cultural tradition—but it must meet these criteria:
•
•
•
•
•
•
• You have a right to be there, or you have secured permission or an invitation to attend from persons in charge.
It is not familiar to you.
It has a clear beginning and end.
It is limited in time so you can observe the entire event.
It is legal and risks little harm.
You are curious about it.
You have a trusted acquaintance familiar with the event—your key informant—who will accompany you or host you at the event and answer your questions about it.

82 Chapter Two How Do I Learn about Culture?
To assist with your selection, here are examples of events on campus and in the village that meet all these criteria for me, personally:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Women’s rugby club practice (no scrums, thank you)
Set building for the drama production
Campus radio staff meeting
A session of student video or computer gaming
Sorority social event with outside guests
Demolition derby (no driving, thank you)
Seder celebration
Observe the event, taking a few notes on a small pad, if this can be done unobtrusively, to refresh your memory during debriefing soon after. Request to participate in some way: to throw the ball, wield a hammer, pour the punch, and so on.
During the event or the debriefing, ask your key informant to explain what you observed.
After the event, after consulting your field notes and your key informant, debrief yourself by composing a typed document of notes. Include in these notes:
•
•
•
•
• What happened at the activity. Include sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile memories.
How you felt during the activity.
How people responded to you.
What your key informant told you.
Evidence that your presence influenced the scene.
Make a line across your sheet after your notes, and then answer the following questions. Bring this sheet and your field notes to class for discussion.
1. What understanding was gained from participation compared to just observing?
2. What did having a key informant add to your understanding?
3. What was learned from participant observation at this event that a questionnaire or interview about it might miss?
4. For what purposes might a questionnaire or interview be better than participant observation?
In both versions of this exercise you’ll observe a patterned behavior under two conditions. You’ll compose an ethnography—that is, you’ll describe the pattern and infer the cultural rules. You’ll also comment on the effect of the two conditions of observation.

Exercise 4: Inferring Culture from Behavior 83
Observe door-opening behavior in a public place. Hang out with the smokers on the sidewalk, for example, while watching a popular entryway to a classroom building. For several minutes at a busy time and again at a slower time, pick out individuals (“Observed1”) and watch them pass through the doorway. Observe the etiquette during individual events of door behavior. That is, does Observed1 passing through the door hold the door for the next person (“Observed2”)? In what manner does Observed1 hold the door, for whom, how long is the door held, how far away from the door can Observed2 be and still motivate Observed1 to hold? Is there any visual or verbal communication between Observed1 and
Observed2 during the event? How often does Observed2 become a holder?
As a guide to what to watch for, an observation protocol sheet (jargon for
“form to write your notes on”) is printed in Table 2.1.
P
HASE
1: B
LENDING
I
N
This first time, take no notes in public, make no attempt to stand out. After observing for several minutes, pull over an acquaintance emerging from those doors and ask him or her the rules of door etiquette. Are door holders aware of what they’re doing? Can they describe the shared understanding? Did your watching make door users self-conscious? (In this phase, they probably didn’t even notice you.) Slip away to note down your observations and your conversation.
P
HASE
2: S
TANDING
O
UT
Repeat this observation with the protocol sheet, so that door users will notice that a person with a clipboard is observing them. Watch for evidence that your activity influences the door holding. Experiment with your location until you’re clearly being noticed by many door holders. Compare what you’re observing now with what you observed the first time. How does self-consciousness alter their behavior?
Here’s a smaller-scale version of the same type of exercise. Enter into an apparently casual conversation with a couple of friends on a topic of common practice such as phoning home or decorating your room. When things are going along nicely, produce a tape recorder or a clipboard and propose to conduct an “interview for class” on that same topic. Watch for changes in body language and verbal responses by your friends. Is there evidence that they are now more selfconscious? Is the information you’re getting now different from what it was before the tape recorder or clipboard appeared?
I have proposed that in its scientific mode, cultural anthropology seeks to generalize about humans, to build up a description of the understandings people share

84

Exercise 4: Inferring Culture from Behavior 85 by discovering patterns in their behavior. That pattern may be in what they tell you, or in what you observe. Sometimes, people don’t know what to tell you, and you have to puzzle it out entirely from observation. In this exercise you will look both at what the culture’s participants say and at the patterns of their behavior, to infer the cultural pattern.
Imagine how long it would take an anthropologist from a non-Christian country such as Morocco to figure out when Easter occurs in the United States. A brief inquiry will reveal that Easter doesn’t occur on the same calendar day each year, as do Christmas or Halloween. So the anthropologist turns to you, the informant, and asks, “What is the cultural rule for determining the date of
Easter?” You reply,
I haven’t a clue
I think it is . . . (fill in)
What proportion of students in the class don’t know?
___ %
How many students in the class think they know how the date is determined? ___ %
(Don’t explain it to us yet; we need to do some data analysis.)
It appears that the date of Easter is assigned by a cultural rule that most of us don’t know. We’re quite familiar with the Christian holy day, even if it’s not in our religion, but calculation of the date appears to be a cultural rule that we leave to our ritual experts to know.
So, if the ordinary member of society isn’t much help as informant, the
Moroccan anthropologist will have to infer a pattern from behavior—in this case, from the dates on which we have commemorated Easter. If the Moroccan were to make a list of the dates of Easter for a number of years, noting also events in the lunar calendar, eventually the pattern would emerge. It appears that the crucial variables are the day of the week, the phase of the moon, and the first day of spring (vernal equinox). Here are the Moroccan’s data:
Table 2.2
Calendar Dates of Easter
Year
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Month
April
March
April
April
March
Date
15
31
20
11
27
Day
Sunday
Sunday
Sunday
Sunday
Sunday
Moon Phase
7 days after full
3 days after full
4 days after full
6 days after full
2 days after full
Vernal Equinox
Mar 20
Mar 20
Mar 21
Mar 20
Mar 20
Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2001 (2001); U.S. Naval Observatory (2004); http://Scienceworld.wolfram.com (2005).
There is a formula; what is it? Your answer has to be precise enough that only one day a year qualifies.
Test your formula: when is (was) Easter this year?

86 Chapter Two How Do I Learn about Culture?
For those of you who thought you knew how Easter was calculated: were you right—should the Moroccan have believed you?
Even omitting highly sophisticated technology such as putting a robot on
Mars, there is much that we in the United States know and do—that is, there is much in our culture—that we can’t explain. For example, which side of a man’s shirt has the buttonholes? which side of a woman’s shirt? Why?
In what other areas of culture—areas much more important than buttonholes—do participants share experience or awareness but can’t explain it to the anthropologist?

114 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
E X E R C I S E S t
Even if the ethnography that you are currently reading does not focus on economics, it cannot help but provide clues about how essential goods and services of the culture of the group are produced, distributed, and consumed. This is so because these economic activities are linked systematically to social, political, religious, and other spheres of group life—or even embedded in them, if the society is not fully industrialized and market oriented. In this exercise you will collect evidence for those links or embeddedness. Identify the best examples of linkage in the current ethnography, and note them in Table 3.1. To assist you in taking this holistic perspective, consider these questions as you search:
1. What social groups labor together, or produce or consume goods together? Parents and children may garden together, for example. Vegetable production is thus linked to family.
2. What social relationships are involved in the exchange of goods and services? A man may be expected to give much of his wool harvest to a particular kinsman, or the temple priests, or his landlord. Kinship or debt relations thus channel the exchange of goods.
3. How is the economic activity linked to the exercise of power or differences in status among participants? Collecting the resources for village feasts might be the sole responsibility of one leader, for example, and a successful feast increases that person’s power. Distribution can thus influence political power.
Table 3.1
Holistic Connections of Economic Activity
Page Economic activity
Production of goods and services
Linkages
Distribution of goods and services
Consumption of goods and services

Exercise 3: Holistic Approaches to Jokes 115
4. How are religious beliefs and activities linked to economic activities? A religious ceremony may require extra production of dress cloth, for example, or exchanges of livestock, and so forth. Or, only persons with certain religious credentials are allowed to make or trade beaded belts.
In this exercise you will act as cultural informants for a test of Marshall Sahlins’s analysis of the linkage between acts of reciprocity and social relationships
(1972a). To review, a group can distribute goods and services among the members by the market, by redistribution or pooling, and by reciprocity, an exchange between two individuals or groups. This exercise focuses on acts of reciprocity.
In small groups, draw from your own recent experiences an example of reciprocity that fits each of the terms in column 1 of Table 3.2. Fill out the rest of the columns as suggested by the two examples.
Before turning to Sahlins’s published analysis, on a sheet of paper answer this question:
1. What is the pattern in these data? How do variations in economic reciprocity follow or make certain kinds of social relationships?
Your instructor will now introduce Sahlins’s analysis of the linkage between reciprocity, morality, and social relations. Discuss these questions with your group and report the answers on the sheet you started above:
2. How well do your cases sort into his types?
3. In what ways don’t some of your cases fit Sahlins’s model? Why don’t they?
4. Select one of the cases for consideration here: How might altering the terms of the transaction be considered a social blunder or a proposal to change the social relationship? How might that alteration strain our tolerance of what is moral in that transaction?
A joke is extremely culture specific, requiring listeners to be familiar with so much context but alluding to all that context with just the barest of clues. A joke requires such artistry and subtlety in its design and delivery that when it is dissected, it disappears.
In this exercise you will select a cartoon and provide the holistic context, the cultural information that its audience must know to understand it. You will compare your study to others’ to identify the importance of context.
Why do all cultures have humor and jokes? What makes a particular joke funny, and why do we laugh? These are appropriate questions for anthropologists, along with other social scientists, to tackle. Anthropologist Mary Douglas developed a cultural explanation from Freud’s psychological theory of humor
(1968). Jokes are basically subversive, she proposes; they challenge control and

116 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
Table 3.2
Analysis of Cases of Reciprocity
Transaction type
A sale (example)
Who (EGO)
Me
With whom (ALTER)—
Transacts what good or service?
what relationship?
Bought motorbike A guy my roommate knew
A gift (example) My roommate Gave box of chocolates His girlfriend
A loan
Haggle/barter*
A gift
A sale/purchase†
Help
A deal
A trade/exchange
A con/dupe‡
Hospitality
KEY:
“EGO” refers to the informant.
“ALTER” refers to the other person in the reciprocal transaction.
* In haggle/barter, the terms of the exchange are negotiated with one’s self-interest in mind.
† This refers to a sale or purchase other than a conventional transaction in a commercial establishment.
‡ In con/dupe, one party fools the other party into giving more than it gets.
formality. They reveal that what we accept or take for granted is not inevitable or necessary. We find such a revelation exciting—we “break out” in laughter. Applying Douglas’s explanation to a specific joke in a specific culture, the anthropologist’s next question is What is the control—the structure—the “system” that is being subverted?
In this exercise you will explore how embedded in the culture a joke may be, how a single joke relies upon much cultural context in order to challenge that context. Although its message may contain themes common throughout the

Exercise 3: Holistic Approaches to Jokes 117
When, where— Return time the context?
(never, immediate, delayed)
Return type
(identical, similar, unrelated)
Return quantity
(equal, more, less) at college Immediate Unrelated (cash) at home,
Valentine’s Day
Delayed (next evening) Similar (home-cooked dinner)
I returned less (seller wanted to be rid of it) equal world (the foolishness of pride, or the tension between the genders, for example), to explain a joke to someone from another culture or subculture is not going to produce laughter because the outsider lacks the context. A joke might depend upon familiarity with a newspaper comic strip, or on recognition of symbols or images associated with a particular occupation. The jokester usually assumes that listeners are familiar with the latest fashions and current events. The jokester usually provides clues that listeners will associate with a certain socioeconomic class, gender, or occupation.

118 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
The man is balding, not young, and bearded, indicating that he’s probably not working at a high-paying job.
The setting is the kitchen, indicating that the man on the left is not just a guest.
He’s helping himself after a simple meal.
This appears to be an ordinary suburban middle class house or condo: there is an upstairs and a kitchen large enough to have a breakfast table.
The couple is dressed in dark clothes, a conservative older couple.
We assume that the couple would be happy to have the son home yet he would be eager to become independent. Instead, the parents are trying to nudge the “family cycle” along: he should move out, so they can attend to their own needs.
This man is one of 3.8 million unmarried “white” adults over
25 years still living with parents.
Such an arrangement is not considered proper unless it is short-term.
Figure 3.12
An American cartoon from 1995. ( The New Yorker , December 4. Used by permission. Annotations by John Omohundro)
In literate cultures, cartoons are a form of visual and verbal joke. Figure 3.12 is a cartoon that many Americans will understand. I have annotated it in a way that certainly doesn’t make it funnier but does provide a holistic view of it, connecting the scene, the characters, and their remarks to the wider culture, which might help the anthropologist to “get” the joke and identify what Douglas calls its subversive message.
1. Describe the aspects of American culture that this cartoon pokes fun at.

Exercise 3: Holistic Approaches to Jokes 119
2. Which Americans will probably laugh at this cartoon and which, because of their cultural background, won’t?
3. What context will you have to explain to a reader from the Trobriand
Islands, for example, or from the society whose ethnography you are reading?
Figure 3.13 is a cartoon from a popular series of books published in Japan in the
1950s and 1960s. It too is about sons and parents, and we Americans “get” that
Older brother, married and living with his mother, takes younger brother to dinner in a restaurant. Older brother, a “salaryman,” dresses conservatively.
Younger brother, a poor writer, dresses outlandishly.
Older brother: “This is just about cooked. . . . It’s been a while since we had a drink together.”
Younger brother: “You may not think so, but we writers are busy all the time.”
He must often justify his unconventional and poorlypaying work.
Younger brother: “Might I have one of your scroll paintings, Older Brother?”
Poor artists can’t afford art, and older brothers are expected to take care of younger.
Older brother: “Of course.
Since we renovated our living room, I’ll also send you a suite of furniture as well!”
The delivery truck arrives and younger brother and wife look forward to wealthy older brother’s good painting and furniture.
Old Mother is in the van also.
As with the furniture, she is the “gift” which cannot be returned, an important concept in Japanese culture.
Younger brother: “There is nothing more costly than receiving a favor.”
Respecting and caring for
Mother is expected of children, but no one wants to do it. So
Granny is a hot potato.
Figure 3.13
A Japanese cartoon from the early 1950s. (Hasegawa 1952, 4. Used by permission. Annotations by John Omohundro)

120 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
the younger brother has been tricked, but why would a Japanese person think this is so funny? The joke subverts a number of principles that Japanese culture has long valued: Older brother must care for younger brother. Successful brother must care for less affluent brother. Grown children must respect their aged parents, want to be with them, and care for them. Brothers dine together without their wives. They are not supposed to fool one another. Gifts should be pure. People with low status occupations (younger brother’s humor writing) shouldn’t seek to emulate real businessmen’s lifestyle. In the postwar Japanese economy of the 1950s, as the nation struggled to revive its economy and standard of living, some of the old Japanese values—such as taking care of one’s elderly parents— were neglected in practice, although they continued to be heralded as the Japanese way. The cartoon reminds the reader that “in these modern times” when everyone pursues his self-interest, cultural rules can easily be bent or broken.
4. Contrast the cultural ideas and practices being twitted in this cartoon and the American cartoon.
5. How does the Japanese cartoonist provide contextual clues for the reader?
Select a single-frame cartoon from a U.S. mass market publication such as
Reader’s Digest or the New Yorker (see also www.cartoonbank.com). Funny Times is an entire tabloid devoted to cartoons. The comic sections of newspapers also usually contain single-frame cartoons. Some political cartoons on the op-ed pages of newspapers will also serve for this exercise, because readers are challenged by the cartoonist to supply the context in order to grasp the editorial message.
Mount your selection in the center of a letter-size sheet of paper. Annotate the cartoon, as I have, with arrows and text in the space around the cartoon. Items in the cartoon requiring explanation may include the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Elements that indicate setting, timing, region
Clothing
Other objects
Word choice, idioms, puns or plays on words, dialect, other language clues
Activities taking place or recently having taken place
Relationships among the characters
Fanciful elements (a talking zebra, a man with no head, for example)
Exchange annotated cartoons in small groups and read each other’s. Compare your cartoons for their contexts.
6. Are some of these cartoons more likely than others to be understood by someone from a very different cultural background, perhaps a Thai or
Russian? Why?
7. Which aspects of your cartoon require the longest explanation? Why?

Exercise 4: Sociobiography: A Life in Cultural Context 121
8. Can you see a way to make the cartoon funnier? Or easier to understand?
What does that alteration borrow from the context? Does that alteration change the context?
The ethnographies we read are answering the holistic question, What’s the context and how is everything connected? but often they must dissect to show the links and the operation of the parts. As one anthropology professor, Philip Carl
Salzman, admits, “Not to put too fine a point on it, ethnographies, by and large, tend to be bloodless” (2002, 74). That’s less true today than when Salzman and I were students. Still, the more an ethnographic case study tries to generalize or theorize, the more lifeless it becomes. An excellent way to restore the life is the biography, which casts light on a culture as it is manifested in one participant’s life.
Biographies of persons in other cultures have been published and celebrated in anthropological circles and placed on the reading lists of many anthropology courses. I suggest a few in the Recommended Reading. The biography humanizes the culture’s participants, but it also reveals the culture’s integration in the only place it can occur: in people’s lives. No individual experiences the whole culture or recognizes all the linkages that the anthropologist might pursue, but every life is a rich source of cultural clues, so the fieldworker will invest significant time in a society to collect those clues. My understanding of the Philippine Chinese community depended heavily on the ninety-six autobiographies I painstakingly collected in the heat and noise of fabric bazaars and iron foundries.
As an alternative to taking our classes into the field or bringing our field informants into class, Professor Salzman recommends writing sociobiographies, or fictional portraits of individuals participating in specific cultures. In this exercise you will invent an individual of specific age, gender, and other characteristics relevant to a culture you have read about recently. Describe that person’s life as a participant of that culture. Consider answering these questions:
1. What is daily life like?
2. What are this person’s abilities, beliefs, and attitudes?
3. How does this person relate to other individuals and groups?
4. What major events may occur in this person’s life, and how might those reveal what provides meaning and shapes behavior by such a person?
To anchor your imagination in ethnographic reality, frequently cite pages from the ethnography you’re reading. More detailed guidelines for writing the sociobiography and two samples of student work are published in Salzman
(2002, 74–77).
Read each other’s essays, not to rate or criticize them, but to fuel the following discussion:
• Has your ethnographic source provided a cultural description sufficiently holistic to permit you to imagine a life in it?

122 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
•
•
•
What features of the culture were missing from the case study that you needed to invent?
How much does changing the person who is the subject of the biography, from one in the royal family to one in the peasantry, for example, result in a different cultural experience?
Can you see some social and cultural linkages in these subjects’ lives that perhaps the subjects themselves can’t see or articulate very well?
A genealogical chart from the United States will be the data for this exercise. Like many features of culture, kin terms appear at first to be a narrow topic, but when we adopt the holistic perspective, we find that they are linked to the wider context of family life, social structure, gender relations, ethical systems, and other cultural arenas. This exercise illustrates how value systems and social relationships are embedded in the kin terms that people use to distinguish their relatives from each other.
Figure 3.14 is a portion of the genealogical chart of an imaginary U.S. citizen, aged 20, named Typ Ickle. His family background is mostly European American, and his native language is English. It is conventional to distinguish Typ by a solid symbol and to label him “EGO,” because he is our informant and the kin terms we add to this chart are all from his point of view.
Now that you can read Typ’s chart, you be the informant. Fill in beneath their names the kin terms of reference that you would use if you were Typ to refer to each of the kinfolk on this chart. The kin term of reference defines the person’s kin relationship to EGO. During data collection, we learn this term by asking
Typ, “That person is your . . . ?” or, “How is that person related to you?” The kin term of reference, for example, might be “father-in-law” or “second cousin.” Kin terms of reference are not to be confused with the kin terms of address, which are the terms Typ uses when addressing, or speaking to, relatives. So, the kin term of address might be “Granny,” “Billy,” or “Unca Donald.” To get you started, I’ve included three kin terms of reference on Typ’s chart.
Now look for patterns in the kin terms of reference you’ve written on the chart.
Holistically, we may expect these terms to be linked to the values and social relationships for families in Typ’s culture. When a child learns the kin terms for family members, he or she learns the social relationships that the terms represent.
The following questions are meant to lead you to discover the structure and values of English-speaking American families as revealed in the kin terms.

123

124 Chapter Three What Is the Context for This Practice or Idea?
1. To label Mick (3C) and Angel (3E), Typ uses two kin terms. What distinguishes those two terms? Can you imagine three terms? What would the third one be?
2. To label those in his own generation besides his siblings, Typ uses how many terms? Why are there fewer terms than there are for siblings?
3. Can someone in the class provide the French or Spanish kin terms for those in Typ’s own generation besides his siblings? Why do those languages have two terms while there is only one term in English?
4. Does Typ use any of the same terms for his generation and for relatives in his parents’ generation? Are any of the terms from the parents’ generation used for the grandparents’ generation? Why/why not?
5. There are linguistic similarities between the terms that Typ uses for the grandparents’ and parents’ generation. What’s the meaning of the prefix to the terms in the grandparents’ generation?
6. Why are more different kin terms used in Typ’s parents’ generation than are used in his own generation?
7. Madonna (2I) and Shania (2H) do not appear to have the same kin relation to Typ. Why does he refer to them by the same term?
8. Is there a difference between terms on the left side of the chart (the father’s) and the terms on the right side of chart (the mother’s)?
Why/why not?
From a holistic perspective, the kin terms that EGO (Typ or other Americans like him) uses may be clues to important social relationships in American families.
Two persons with different terms probably have different social relationships to
EGO. Two persons with the same term probably have the same relationship to
EGO. Answer these questions based on Typ’s chart.
9. How well is gender distinguished by kin term?
10. How well is generation distinguished?
11. How well is a relative by marriage distinguished from a relative by birth?
12. How well is birth order among siblings distinguished?
13. How is respect for seniority represented in the terms?
14. How is the paternal side of the family distinguished from the maternal side?
Compared to its European origins, Typ’s kin term system reflects American values of individualism, equality, informality, and probably other values. Identify some examples.
If analyzing Typ’s kin chart leads to reflection about your own kin chart, that’s as intended! Exercise 3, Chapter 7 provides an opportunity to construct your own genealogical chart.