1 Introduction to Ethnographic Research Methods
1. For an overview of this basic argument see Fife 1992a. For some of the publications that I have written using this and closely related material, see Fife 1992b; 1994; 1995a; 1995b;
1995c; 1996; 1997; 1998; 2001; 2002.
2. For good examples of studies that insist upon this more contextual approach, see Singleton 1967; Roberts and Akinsanya 1976; Gearing and Sangree 1979; Haig-Brown 1988; McLaren 1989; Weis 1990; Lofty 1992; Thapan 1989; Pomponio 1992; Stromquist 1992; King 1999; Spindler and Spindler 2000.
2 Using Historical Sources for Ethnographic Research
1. For a small sample of secondary sources on the history of education in Papua New Guinea available around the time of my research, see Bray and Smith 1985;
Griffin 1976; Meek 1982; Dept. of Education 1985; Pomponio and Lancy 1986; Smith 1985, 1987.
2. For examples of secondary sources regarding the more general history of the political economy of the country available during the late 1980s, see, Amarshi, Good, and Mortimer 1979; Delbos 1985; Good 1986; Griffin, Nelson, and Firth 1979; Lacey 1983;
Levine and Levine 1979; Nelson 1976; Willis 1974.
3. Papua New Guinea is made up of half of the large island of New Guinea (the other half belonging to Irian Jaya, a colony of Indonesia) and a number of smaller islands (such as New Britain, which contains the provinces of East New Britain and West New Britain).
Historically, the large island was most commonly referred to as New Guinea, and I follow this convention here when referring to the whole island, including of course that portion of the island that later became the largest part of the country known as Papua New Guinea.
4. I have written extensively about the “Polynesian teachers” elsewhere (e.g., Fife 1991, 1992). The term “Polynesian teacher” was normally used for the first few waves of indigenous Pacific Island evangelists who came from London Missionary Society mission stations established on islands to the east of New Guinea. Not all of them were actually from “Polynesian” societies, although LMS missionaries at that time believed them to be so. In contrast, the term “native teacher” was normally reserved in the Papua New Guinea mission for indigenous evangelists who were native to the New Guinea mainland or to the immediately surrounding islands. However, the L.M.S. directors back in London, England often used the two terms interchangeably. I follow the New Guinea in-mission usage of these two separate terms in this book.
4 Newspapers and Government Documents: Popular and Official Sources of Information
1. Any scholar who has ever been interviewed by a newspaper reporter and has had his or her words “quoted” in a newspaper article will tell you that reporters clearly do not oper-ate under the same canons of accuracy that guide the work of professional researchers.
2. Readers who are not anthropologists may not be familiar with these kinship terms. A lin-eage is a descent group that traces its members though either the mother’s line or the father’s line backward to a known ancestor. A clan, on the other hand, is a descent group that traces its membership back through either the mother’s or the father’s line to a real or mythical ancestor. The main difference is that the case of a clan the actual genealogical linkages are not known.
3. Tok Pisin is the name for the pidgin language that is spoken by roughly half of the people in Papua New Guinea and it is one of the official languages of the state. It began as a trade language and remains important in a country in which the usual estimate is that there are over 800 separate languages (not dialects, languages). Tok Pisin combines mainly modified English words with a Melanesian-style grammatical system. So, for example, the English sentence “That’s all; there is no more” comes out as “No gat moa;
em tasol” (e.g., Mihalic 1971). A small literature has developed in Tok Pisin, including the national newspaper Wantok. All translations from that newspaper in this text are my own.
4. Schools that encompass grades one to six are referred to as community schools in Papua New Guinea. I use the term interchangeably with the more universal term of primary school. Some community schools, especially those in more remote rural areas, may offer less than the full six grades.
5. I should note as well that the British sociologist who was already in West New Britain studying the high schools and whose work necessitated a change in my research plans also turned out to be both a friend and an invaluable colleague. Graham Vulliamy whole-heartedly welcomed me to the field upon my arrival on his “turf ” in West New Britain and offered both excellent advice about specific local situations and played a key role in my securing a very hard to find habitation in Kimbe town itself. Later, he and Michael Crossley invited me to contribute a chapter about the use of ethnographic research methods for their extremely useful book Qualitative Educational Research in Developing Countries: Current Perspectives (1997), which initiated my interest in methodological issues. I am indebted to both of them for trusting what was then a largely unproven scholar to participate in their important book project.
5 Participant-Observation as a Research Method
1. I have purposefully written about “participant-observation” here in such a way as to make it useful for a wide variety of projects. I trust that the readers of this work will have their own opinions about what we might call the politics of participant-observation. Many contemporary scholars (e.g., Paine 1985; Fetterman 1993), including but not limited to feminist (e.g., Shenk 1995; Gailey 1998) and Marxist (e.g., Wolf 1999, 2001; Sider 2003) researchers, would suggest a more “committed,” “partisan,” or “advocacy,” style of partici-pant-observation than most of the people I cite in the main body of this text. I am certainly in sympathy with the idea of a more partisan ethnography, as this book as a whole should make very apparent, but wish to present the basic method of participant-observation and
leave it up to potential researchers to decide for themselves the extent to which they will become committed to a particular point of view in their research projects.
2. I use the masculine pronoun here because at the time of my field research all such officer holders were males. This was not always true, though it was a rare occasion when a woman was able to win an election for public office at either the provincial or federal levels of government.
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