Blastoff.
September 16, 2007My first full week in SCUA started off slow but really mounted to a pleasing bit of discovery on Wednesday. Monday I spent over five hours reading documents of family interviews, observations on behavior and census information. The Obrebski papers encapsulate the very methodical process he used as an ethnographer – it is by starting to understand this process that I am finding a way to tell the story of the two Jamaican communities studied in 1947-48. In my research methods course this semester we are using a “Guide to Writing About Psychology”, at the begining of each section is a helpful quote on the topic, for instance:
“Discussion sections of published articles exhibit science at work”
(Norman H. Anderson, 2001)
Obrebski’s discussion of his Jamaican survey was never fully published, and in this sense a large part of the scientific story is missing. It is here that I can attempt to tell the remainder of the story with the pieces that we have intact. By using the Jamaican papers as a dialog to communicate with other researchers and interested neophytes we will experience science at work. In one of the boxes I was examining on Wednesday the family interview documents were categorized by “Poor”, “Average”, and “Prosperous”. I attempted to get a grasp of characteristics defining the class structures, thinking that I would need to state parameters for a piece of anthropological science, however at almost the back of the folder was a handwritten document labeled “Definitions”. Obrebski had left a juicy piece if science, sharing what he determined to be the necessary characteristics for economic classification in the study. My hope is that this will enable me to go one step further in the story of Obrebski in Jamaica.
