Using Visual Stimuli in Ethnography

GEORGE SPINDLER Stanford University In this article, the work of George and Louise Spindler is reviewed with visual stimuli ranging from the Rorschach technique and Thematic Apperception Technique to inventions of their own, the Cross-Cultural Sensitization Technique, the Instrumental Activities Inventory, and the Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reective Interview Technique. The sites of the various researches, the methods of application, and a brief analysis of the results are included. [interview techniques, culture and personality, ethnography and education] Biography George Spindler started practicing educational anthropology before WWII, and his rst publication in the emerging eld was in 1946, Anthropology May Be the Answer. For 50 years, he and his wife, Louise Spindler, developed a shared career in psychological and educational anthropology. Their involvement in education accelerated auspiciously in 1954 when they organized a four-day conference in Carmel Valley under the auspices of the Department of Anthropology and School of Education at Stanford University and the American Anthropological Association (Spindler 1955; with support from the Carnegie Foundation). Since then, he and Louise, and he alone after her death in 1997, have published widely in educational and psychological anthropology. Their major emphasis has been on comparative interpretations among Native American cultures and hinterland populations in Europe and the United States (collected in Spindler and Spindler 2000; summarized in Spindler 2000). His most recent contributions can be found in two books: one edited by Spindler and Hammond (2006), the other by Spindler and Stockard (2006). My aim as an ethnographer is dual: (1) to offer selective descriptions of human situations, and (2) to determine what psychological and cultural resources individuals use in their adaptations to these situations. I have pursued these aims in the company of my wife, Louise Spindler, among the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin; the Blood Indians of Alberta, Canada; the Mistassini Cree of Quebec; German villagers and their schools; California teachers and their schools; and rural Wisconsin teachers and their schools. It is my intention in this article to discuss the second of my aims as an ethnographer: to determine what psychological and cultural resources individuals use in their behavior in the situations selected for study; and to determine, within this general category, the perceptions they bring into their understanding of the situation. This is a narrative account, designed to trace in brief compass the evolution in the use of audio-visual stimuli from the Rorschach projective technique, through various other techniques, to the Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reective Interview Technique (CCRIT) in our research across 50 years. I take the opportunity afforded by this narrative to discuss certain advantages and disadvantages of the ethnographer as
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, Issue 2, pp.127140, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492. 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2008.00012.x.

127

128

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

expert versus ethnographer as collaborator, an issue that has developed as a part of this trip through time. This article is not contextualized in the expanding literature on the use of visual stimuli in anthropology. It is intended to be a personal narrative. As an introduction, I briey scan each of the research sites. The Menominee Indians, Wisconsin: This tribe of approximately 3,000 people in northeast central Wisconsin (when we worked with them) was attractive to us because of its active lumber industry employing several hundred Menominee and producing income that created several levels of socioeconomic and acculturative status. We documented a division of the tribal community into ve groups: the nativeoriented, the Peyote/Native American church, transitionals (in between traditional and acculturated), lower-status acculturated, and elite acculturated. The nativeoriented people were a small minority but the most interesting to us. They carried on traditional ceremonies, spoke Menominee at all ceremonial gatherings, and lived in the woods near Zoar, the center of the conservative element on the reservation, in the northwest corner of the reservation. The Peyotists were members of the Native American Church and frequently held meetings. They were also of great interest to us. The rest were vigorously studied but were somewhat less interesting because they were more similar to us. We administered Rorschach tests to a sample representing each of the groups and established a group case that included the Rorschach and a variety of observations and ethnographic data on each person in the case le. We worked with the Menominee every summer from 1948 through 1954, and visited them many times after that. Of all the peoples we have worked with, we felt closest to them and felt that we identied with them. Lorie Hammond (my partner) and I visited them during the seasonal rites of the Nemehetwin (Dream Dance) ceremony in 1998 and were rewarded by nding them using Dreamers with Power: The Menominee (1971, 1984) as a guide to the ceremony. Roger Harker, Beth Anne, and California Teachers and Schools: In 1950, I became a new member of a Stanford University research and consultation team headed by Professor Robert Nelson Bush. The team was devoted to studies of teachers and administrators in three communities within commuting distance of the university. I was the only ethnographer on the team; only my studies were conducted ethnographically, although the sociologist on the team had ethnographic leanings. Our objective was to improve the professional competence of the people who volunteered to participate in the study; most of the personnel in the schools we approached volunteered. Roger Harker and Beth Anne were two of my rst respondents. I worked for two years with the Stanford Consultation Service, but in the second year I began to teach courses at Stanford as an acting assistant professor, to be followed by an appointment as assistant professor of education and anthropology the following year. This work in the Bay Area and at Stanford was carried out while we were in the midst of our most intense period of work with the Menominee. Sometimes our identications got in the way of each other, but it all turned out well. The Blood Indians, Canada: Louise and I began eldwork with the Blood in the summer of 1959. We chose them because, like the Menominee, they had enough income (from ranching, hay cutting, and wheat) to have developed several levels of acculturation and socioeconomic status. Our idea was to administer Rorschachs and collect case data and run statistical and ethnographic comparisons as we had done with the Menominee. We worked intermittently from 1959 to 1973 with them, accu-

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

129

mulated all the necessary data, but never nished the study. We wrote a couple of articles and used the data in several more. Perhaps someday I will nish the study. Roseville, United States of America, and Schoenhausen, Germany: In the fall of 1959 we went to the Stanford campus in Germany to teach one quarter at the German campus and to travel the rest of the academic year. Little did we know then that studies in schools and communities in Das Remstal (the Rems Valley) would preoccupy us most of our remaining academic years. I did not even speak German, although Louise did. (She had been a teacher of German and English literature and drama in high schools for three years before we were married.) I learned German aus dem Mund des Volkes (out of the mouth of the folk), which may account for my Swabisch accent and my incorrect grammar. But I learned it well enough to conduct interviews with teachers and children and carry on reasonably well in interactions with the people with whom we mingled for nine sessions of study in Germany. The Stanford campus closed in 1975, but we continued our German eldwork through 1985. Schoenhausen (pseudonym) was the Remstal community that we concentrated on. It was a village of about 3,000 in the Remstal and was surrounded by other communities, bigger and smaller, that were becoming satellites of Stuttgart. It had undergone expansion from an ausgesprochene Weinort (outspoken, dedicated wine village) to a community twice its prewar size and housing about 1,500 migrants from the former east zone and areas of prewar Germany in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. We started out studying ethnographically the relations between newcomers and natives, but through the years shifted and turned as we adapted our studies to the local and regional developments to which the schools had to adjust as well. It was some time after 1959 when we rst chanced on the idea of comparing schooling in Schoenhausen, the German community, with that in Roseville, the U.S. community in Wisconsin only about seven miles from the northwestern border of the Menominee Reservation. We had become well acquainted with Roseville and knew it was comparable to Schoenhausen in size, rural setting, population, and predominant ethnicity. So we went there ostensibly to take videos of teachers and their classrooms to show to our German teachercolleagues. Of course, we started doing ethnography in Roseville and its elementary school and thereby embarked on a journey that took up the last few years of our trips to Germany: the comparison of the two schools and their communities. The Mistassini Cree, Canada: Interacting with the Mistassini Cree was more of an adventure than eld research. We went there to help a graduate student start on his doctoral research, to do work for McGill University, and to test out the possibility of preparing an Instrumental Activities Inventory (IAI) in a new society before we had started eldwork. All of these ends were accomplished in the month we spent there, and it was worth the trip to experience the extreme north at a Hudson Bay post where the Cree were living during the summer before the trapping season that started in September. We installed our camp on an island about a mile across the bay to the post, and proceeded to our administration of the IAI the next day out of a rented tent-cabin at the post. It went well, and we packed up 30 days later to negotiate the 18 miles of open water to return to Chibougima, the last outpost of modern Canada, where we had left our car before leaving for the Hudson Bay post. What we learned from the administration of the IAI to 22 teenage boys and girls was that Cree males at this outpost elected activities available on and through the posthunting, trapping, living in plastic tents on the trapline, shing, all traditional

130

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

activities. However, girls preferred activities available only in towns and cities, such as working as secretaries or nurses, going to shows, eating and living in apartment houses, and driving cars on city streetsall activities that demanded giving up traditional activities and adopting the white (European American) way. This is the same conclusion we drew from our administration of the IAI to the people of the Remstal and the Blood, and it played a role in the interpretation of male and female adaptations to the impact of modernization. The Rorschach: Louise and I began with the Rorschach, the inkblot projective technique. As we used it, the technique consisted of ten inkblots standardized in clinical usage, with a scoring and interpretive procedure developed by Bruno Klopfer. We were stimulated to its use by the work of A. Irving Hallowell and his associates with the Ojibwa of Canada and the related Chippewa of Wisconsin and Minnesota (1946, 1952, 1954; collected in Hallowell 1955; see also Hallowell 1976; and Mead 1978). If they had any opinion at all, most anthropologists would probably regard this work as at least misguided. The purpose of Hallowell and his associates was to determine the effect of modernization and radical culture change on the core personality of the Ojibwa at three different levels of acculturation (this term is problematic, but conveys the general meaning intended). Our research was similarly directed, but involved ve different levels of acculturation and complex ethnography at each of the levels (Spindler and Spindler 1992b). What the Rorschach did for us was identify a personality structure for the most traditional group that appeared to characterize most tribal groups in the far north of Native North America and to trace the outlines of this personality structure throughout the acculturative groups of the Menominee until it was lost in the most acculturated population, whose personality structure as revealed by the Rorschach was indistinguishable from the white male control group living on the reservation and married to Menominee women. To accept the ndings of both Hallowell and ourselves, one has to accept the Rorschach as an appropriate technique for the analysis of psychological process in non-Western cultures, in other words, to accept the Rorschach as something more than a culturally limited (and limiting) instrument. Most anthropologists do not so accept disbelief. My major professor at Wisconsin said, You can throw away all of your Rorschach analysis and present only your ethnography for your dissertation. However, my University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), major professor felt that my careful statistical analysis made it useful. My experience with the Rorschach was apparently different than that of many of our colleagues. I regard the years spent working with it as productive of some noteworthy insights and the raising of signicant and still unanswered questions. In our work with the Menominee, we found that Rorschach results correlated well with sociocultural measures and in their contradictions still raised important questions and shed light on the depth of psychological adaptations made by individuals in various sociocultural groups delineated in the Menominee community (Spindler 1955, 1962; Spindler and Spindler 1971, 1984, 1992b). We also found it to be a helpful justication for spending time with people, observing them, and interviewing them about much more than their responses to the Rorschach. At this last level of analysis, one does not have to believe in the powers of the Rorschach as much as in the ingenuity of all people to make the most of anything put in front of them. This work is mostly unknown to educators interested in contemporary ethnography, but we used the Rorschach in our research with teachers and others in California.

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

131

The signature case studies of Roger Harker and Beth Anne, as shown later, utilized the Rorschach to good effect (Spindler 1955, 1963, 1974a; Spindler and Spindler 1982, 2000). Whatever its merits, the Rorschach is a kind of abstraction from reality, and it produces responses that are a kind of abstraction from reality. It produces a prole of personality (translate as perceptual) structure that requires interpretation to make it useful, and this requires an analyst with special training. (Louise and I had that special training for two years with Bruno Klopfer, the dean of projective techniques at UCLA.) We turned to more reality-oriented research techniques, such as the Thematic Apperception Technique (TAT), and created a series of techniques that were more reality centered than the Rorschach. In response to perceived needs arising in our eld research, we generated: the Cross-Cultural Sensitization Technique (CCST); various forms of the IAI; and the CCRIT. I devote the rest of this article to a discussion of these techniques, all of them invented by us to meet the needs generated in the sites just described. I discuss rst the TAT as a step in the right direction. The TAT: Although anthropologists had used the TAT in their research on various non-Western peoples, few had used it in research with middle- and upper-middleclass Americans for anthropological purposes. The TAT consists of 30 pictures (somewhat ambiguous in respect to visual structure) of interactions in Western cultural settings: a mother gure and a son, a farming scene, a young boy seated and looking at a violin, a bare-breasted woman in bed with a man standing before her with his hand to his head, and so forth. The respondent was requested to tell what happened before the scene occurred, what is happening, and what will happen. From these stories the analyst infers attitudes and perceptions. We applied the TAT to a large sample of Stanford students to acquire data for classes in Social Foundations of Education and Psychological Foundations of Education. I used the data to discuss relevant attitudes toward sex, authority, gender, and other features of the students everyday life as they would affect their behavior as teachers. I actually dittographed (this was before Xerox copiers were invented) selected portions of their responses to share with students in the discussion. The discussions were quite amazing and really got down and dirty in a hurry. A number of students dropped the course, but those remaining (the majority) became uniformly enthusiastic about it. I started to write up the experiment, but gave it up in favor of more pressing demands for publications of a more recognizable anthropological type. We did not use the TAT in our research with the Menominee or with the Blood, for we felt that the TAT duplicated already established ndings, and besides, there was a question as to whether we could legitimately use the pictures included in the technique with a non-Western population. Anthropologists had experimented with TATs redone in native dress and accoutrements, but none of them seemed satisfactory to us. This was not an issue with the Rorschach, because the latter used inkblots without any specic cultural content. We did use the TAT in our case study research on California teachers and administrators and found it useful. Both Roger and Beth Anne gave complete responses that were quite revealing. Roger, for example, gave many responses that indicated a positive bias toward females, and he produced other responses that showed that his relations with his father were troubled. This correlated nicely with what our classroom observations showed and what his expressive autobiographic interview revealed (a technique developed by Louise in her study of Menominee women). The TAT

132

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

enriched our understanding of the psychological depth and texture of these attitudes on Rogers part. In Beth Annes case, this little girl, subjected to great pressure to be perfect from the adults in her life, showed in her responses to the TAT pictures complex evidence of the strain it was causing her and how her defenses were activated by this strain. The virtue of these data was that the responses were revealing without the respondents knowing that they were, and this is the virtue to be found in any projective response. All classes of projective techniques, and all the techniques discussed in this article may be considered projective techniques, share this virtue. The CCCRIT is the least projective, in the sense that it does not evoke emotional responses in the same degree the others do, because it is aimed at the perception of pedagogical issues. (I further discuss the CCCRIT below.) Because all projective techniques do share the virtue of revealing more than the respondents realize, there may be questions about the ethics of their use. Extreme caution must be exercised in their application. There are knotty questions involved that I cannot treat in this article. I must say that to be worth the effort, if the purposes of the ethnographer are similar to ours, ethnographic research must deal with more than the informant knows and can discuss. The ethnographer, to draw inferences about what the informant does not explicitly know and is not articulate about, must know himself or herself to avoid projective interpretations. One of my recently published papers explores the question of how to nd out what informants dont know (Spindler 2002) and another explores the relationship between certain psychocultural processes and the situated selves of the researchers (Spindler and Spindler 1992a). The CCST: The CCST is not, strictly speaking, a research technique, as we used it. Our purpose was to demonstrate to students in our classes how their cultures would affect their cross-cultural perceptions. To do this, we used 14 colored slides mostly of scenes in Germany, with two slides of the Kapauku Papuans. Student respondents were asked to write down what the slides seemed to be showing. No hints were given, but they were told that the slides were of German scenes, with the exception of the two of the Kapauku, a Papuan people studied by Leopold Pospisil, who furnished us with the pictures. We told them that these two were of a Stone Age people, which they were (Spindler 1974b, 2000). After the administration, the slides were gone over, one by one, giving the correct interpretation. For example, an ordinary BaurenHaus was shown. It was often interpreted as a large suburban house because of its large size (it contains animals and humans, hay, and farming implements). Or we showed an older woman pruning and espaliering grapevines in a stooped position and we asked respondents to tell what she was doing. We also asked them to tell how she would feel at the end of the day and what she would be thinking. Their response was usually that she would be very tired, her back would ache, and that she would be thinking about that. It was explained that to the contrary that she would feel good, that the aches would actually feel good because it was good, hard work that made her back ache, and given the deep work ethic of German workers of the grape (Weingartners), this is the way she would experience it. In the Kapauku case the image is of a group of men, naked but for penis sheaths, carrying bows and arrows, standing around one man who is cross-legged on the ground counting out shell money to pay off lineage debts and compound interest accumulated over a six-month period from another lineage. He calculates the interest

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

133

using a grid drawn in the sand. No one sees the grid, and no one interprets the scene as having anything to do with paying off debts. (Stone Age people dont have debts, or money, and certainly would not be paying off compound interest!) Every one of the pictures causes incorrect interpretations that clearly project percepts drawn from the cultural experience of the respondents. For those who are not Western, as among some Asian students, particularly Mien, Hmong, some East Indians, and so forth, the situation may be complicated by their cultural background, but by the time they get to college they have been so heavily exposed to Western, U.S. culture that they use this knowledge as a source of percepts, at least in a situation of this kind. We have used the CCST as part of the introduction to every class we have taught, because all of our courses involve understanding behaviors and ideas cross-culturally. The rst step in cross-cultural understanding is to be able to see how ones own culture affects perceptions of cross-cultural behavior or material circumstances. Various permutations of the technique are possible. The pictures may be drawn from any context. The CCST can be used for research purposes wherever cross-cultural interpretations are a part of the process. Under ideal circumstances, it is possible to use the CCST as a means of correcting what your respondents are telling you, by detecting the possible bias in their remarks stemming from their own cultural determinations. This does not, of course, deny the validity of their stories. In a special ethnographic sense, anything any informant says is true, even if intended as a falsehood. The IAI When we were well into the Blood Indian research, we tired of the ambiguity and abstraction of the Rorschach and desired something more concrete, less ambiguous, and more realistic. Except for Goldschmidt and Edgertons (1961) picture choice technique, there were no techniques that approached our needs in a satisfying manner, but neither the theory behind it nor the style of administration or interpretation of results was entirely appropriate for our purposes. It supplied a motivational push in the right direction. We started with the Blood but also applied the technique to the Mistassini Cree and used it in the German research. We used slides we had taken of the Blood as models for the drawings of the IAI applicable to the Blood, and likewise drawings for the Cree and the Remstal from our slides in these contexts. The IAI drawings vary, but the categories of process revealed by it remain the sametraditional activities: curing by a shaman, traditional dancing, and so forth for the Blood; the traditional grape harvest, drayage using oxen or large cows for the Remstal; activities within the reservation context or the local community, bronc busting, haying, or cattle handling for the Blood; modern methods of espaliering grape vines, using tractors for drayage for the Remstal; for modernization and urbanization, being a doctor, marrying a white person, driving a car in the city for the Blood; being a lawyer, or living in a modern single family dwelling or an apartment for the Remstal. We used drawings as stimuli, because we found that photographs stimulated responses related to details that were irrelevant to our purposes. For example, a photograph of some machinery lying neglected in a eld stimulated responses such as Oh, thats Joe Two Heads disk. He never takes care of anything, whereas a drawing

134

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

of the same kind would elicit a response, Thats somebodys machinery lying out where it will rust. When he wants to use it there will be problems. Gerald Tailfeathers, a noted Blood Indian artist, drew 37 pictures, using our slides as models, depicting situations in which the activities occurring were expressive of traditional culture, reservation culture, and mainstream Canadian culture. We administered these pictures to 48 males and 34 females between 18 and 87 years of age and representing the major sociocultural categories our research up to that time indicated as present in the Blood population. Of these 72 respondents, 50 were already cases in our les. The results exceeded our expectations. From them, we were able to deduce several major categories of perception:
Autonomy: No one has the right to tell anyone else what to do. One is answerable only for his or her own actions. Activity and Health: An active, vigorous, outdoor life is good. It keeps one young and healthy. Pride in Physical Appearance: The body should be kept intact and unmarred. Appearance as well as function is important. Low Tendency Toward Stereotypic Thinking: Each situation is to be judged on its own merits. Avoid sweeping generalizations. Immediacy and Practicality: It is good to have skills because they can be used on the spot to keep things running well, and not for distant goal-oriented achievements. Literality: What is, is. What will be no one knows. Choices are limited by reality. Conditional thinking is out. Practicality for the Elite: It is the characteristic of the socioeconomic elite. The difference is that the elite put their practicality in a long-range perspective, but it is still practical.

The question arises, did the Blood know what they were saying? The answer is not as clear as I would like it to be. They knew what they knew, and they knew, for example, that Blood males liked vigorous, risky activity. They did not know that this was most characteristic of the more tradition-oriented respondents or that this perception t into a complex of interrelated perceptions produced by their experience in a social environment heavily inuenced by the traditional culture. These understandings are created by the researchers and do not in any way contradict what natives know. The technique enabled us to collate and categorize their responses in ways germane to our research purposes from a relatively large number of respondents selected for representation of major sociocultural categories. This is not the same issue raised by the case study of Beth Anne being selected the most adjusted child in the school by the faculty. She turned out to have a personality under siege; she was troubled by high expectations and demands from teachers and her parents. They had projected their own values in her selection as best adjusted. Their illusion proved to be false. For the Blood, the technique enabled us to advance our knowledge of the relationship between perceptions and the utilization of psychological resources in adaptations to changing conditions as determined by sociocultural experience and therefore contributed to our closure in this particular research. We also made major use of the IAI in our German research. We collected a sample in 1968 of all the children in the Schoenhausener Grundschule (elementary school), their teachers, the Rektor (principal), and those parents attending a PTA meeting in 1968. We collected another sample from the same sources in 1977. The samples were particularly revealing in their comparison.

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

135

Most startling was the difference in the female part of the sample. In 1968, the girls chose instrumental activities available in the urban mainstream more frequently than they chose activities that were available in the traditional community. This was in sharp contrast to the male sample, which chose more frequently the traditional activities. This was the same relationship we had found among the Blood and the Cree, so we thought we had a generalization emerging. But the 1977 sample upset our generalization. The girls reversed their choices, choosing more frequently the traditional activities. In some instances, for example, choosing between a quiet evening meal at home versus a meal in a loud, boisterous tavern, they completely reversed their choices. In 1968, they had overwhelmingly chosen the boisterous tavern. In 1977, they all chose the quiet evening at home. To be sure, one reversal does not unseat an apparently secure generalization in which the tendency for females to choose from the urban mainstream choices was present in all choices. What we concluded was that it depended on the stage of adaptation to the emerging urbanization and modernization of the area (Spindler and Spindler 1990). When the girls felt that their secure futures in the traditional frame of reference were being threatened by increasing urbanization they began to choose the traditional activities more frequently. This resistance to losing the traditional culture is expressed in nativistic movements in traditional societies around the world when modernization threatens the existing culture. It is expressed in modern contexts when political developments threaten established values, as in the 1990s in the United States (Spindler and Spindler 1998). What does all of this have to do with education? Louise and I tended to work on what most educators would regard as background factors and not the relationships in classrooms and schools. But can what goes on in schools be understood without understanding the background processes? We think not. Some of the implications of this research do have a direct bearing on what goes on in the school. Of course, our work with individual cases, as with Roger Harker and Beth Anne, is directly from the school, although we brought in life-history factors and the ethnicity and socioeconomic status of the children and the teachers for explanations of behavior that took place in the classroom. Further aeld than that, the understandings that the techniques used in the Blood and Menominee research produced are less directly relevant. If teachers are informed about the psychological depth of the attitudes and perceptions that native children bring into the classroom, they can adapt their teaching styles and techniques to them much more knowledgeably. In the German case, all of the research was done in conjunction with work in the classroom and the school and with all related personnel. Our core work was to do thorough ethnographies of the classroom. Everything else was supplementary. The IAI showed us that the teachers and children were conicted about traditional values and percepts in relation to the new demands made by an urbanizing and modernizing environment. This was not new information to us but the IAI showed specically how the conicts worked out and in what degree in different populations (students, teachers, administrators, and parents). When we administered the second IAI sample in 1977 in Germany, the Bundesregierung (federal government) had just nished an intensive decade of educational reform. New, young teachers had been hired, textbooks had been completely revamped and the curriculum reorganized, class schedules restructured, and reading material completely reconstituted. What the comparison of the IAI results for 1968 and 1977 showed us was that both students and teachers resisted this reform. Reforms appeared to be implemented but

136

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

essentially were not. The changes actually made were substitute changes. For example, reading books that dealt with Heimat (homeland) issues and themes were discarded, and children read stories about faraway places like China, but the themes were the same. Truly transformative change was neither initiated nor accepted. Perhaps this is the way it always is with schools, but it was extremely useful to have this demonstrated with the IAI data in the German study. What we strove for in all of our research was to have several sources of data converging on a single relationship. In the German study we had ethnographic observations, interviews, and IAI data telling us what was happening in the school. When they agreed, all was well. When the different approaches produced similar results, did not agree, we knew we had more work to do. In any event, the IAI increased the depth of the analysis and broadened its scope. The CCRIT: This technique is the most complex of those described here because it involves showing videos of teachers in action as teachers in their classrooms. U.S. and German teachers saw videos of their own classrooms and those of the other teachers. The videos were also shown to the children and administrators. The idea was borne out of the interaction of German teachers with videos that we had taken, at their request, of teachers in classrooms of comparable grades and subject matter in the United States. They had already seen videos of their own classrooms, and their response at seeing themselves was virtually volcanic. The school in Wisconsin was similar to the German one we were working in. It was semirural, preparing students for an urbanizing and modernizing world, but with one foot in the traditional rural society. It was largely attended by children of German ethnicity. The response of the German teachers, children, and administrators to the U.S. videos was overwhelming. The German children were uncontainable and whooped and hollered throughout, in sharp contrast to the highly disciplined, rather quiet and subdued responses of the U.S. children. We could anticipate this difference because we had seen it many other times in many other contexts, and thereby hangs a complex difference between an aspect of contemporary German and U.S. cultures that I have no intention of voicing, because it is problematic and would distract us from our purposes in this article. We found that although there were differences in the perceptions of both ones own and the other, there were underlying perceptions among children, teachers, and administrators that were much the same among both the Germans and the Americans. This is the way social systems work, differences and commonalities function to keep the system operating. The orchestration of differences is as important to the functioning of the system as the agreement on common themes. The comments of two teachers, one German and the other American, seemed to tell the whole story. The interviews took a form we came to call Conversational, in that experiences and opinions were shared between the interviewer and interviewee. Both Frau Wanzer and Ms. Schiller had seen the videos from their own classes and from the other school, German or American. A more complete accounting of the interviews with teachers, children, and the administrator may be found in Spindler and Spindler (1993). One of the by-products of our explorations in cross-cultural perceptions was the development of a procedure we termed cultural therapy in 1955 (Spindler 1963). Cultural therapy is the subject of a book that we did in 1994, and our version of it is explained in our chapter (Spindler and Spindler 1994). It involves feeding back the

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

137

data collected in research to persons involved in the research, discussing it at length, and thereby gaining self-knowledge of ones cultural participation. This began with the sessions with Roger Harker in which I gave him a thorough rundown on what I had discovered about him as a teacher. My methods were a little too direct, and his ight from the confrontation showed how he felt. Luckily he did return, and we were able to nish the exposure.

Discussion Today, anthropologists of education are exhorted to work as interactive, collaborative ethnographers: to encourage respondents to come to their own understanding of themselves and their contexts, to share the process of discovery with them, and to act as equals. Little of the data collection I did early in my career could be regarded as interactive and collaborationist, although elements of this orientation occasionally appeared. The underlying assumption of the Stanford research team was that we would share the results of our research with our subjects to improve their professional competence. There are places in the interaction between Roger and me in which the give and take resembles a collaborative interaction. The notion of cultural therapy grew out of this process and was itself interactive and collaborative. But essentially, we acted as experts who would work closely with our assigned cases, keeping them informed as to what was going on, what we would ask them to do and to some extent why, but never in full disclosure. There are certain advantages to this research orientation. I would never have been able to perceive Roger Harkers characteristics as a teacher as I did if I had worked with him in an egalitarian, collaborative relationship. I could see him with a certain detachment I regarded as essential to the kind of understanding I wanted to obtain. The classroom observations, interviews with him, the children in his fth-grade classroom, the superintendent, school psychologist, principal and vice principal and others, the Rorschach and TAT, the survey of the community surrounding the school, and the documentary evidence all formed a pattern that showed he was teaching only the white, mainstream children in his class. I was free to draw conclusions and create interpretations, which I eventually shared with him, and almost lost him in the process. He would never have come to the conclusions and interpretations I did. He was too well defended, and his defense was well founded, for the personnel of the entire school system shared the same illusion he did about his teaching and the purpose of the school. They shared his illusion and he shared theirs. He was regarded as one of the most promising young teachers in the system. To work with him and convey the results of my study of him to the broader educational community, I had to take what would be regarded today as an essentially autocratic position, speaking as an expert. As any experienced anthropological eld-worker can tell you, no modernist anthropologist enters into a relationship with his or her informants as an expert. One enters the eld relationship as a student: I am here to learn about your way of life. I am ignorant and must be educated, or words to that effect. And one stays in that relationship for as long as one is in the eld, and for the duration of any follow-up trips one takes to the eld site. It is only when one comes home that one becomes an expert. The task becomes one of translating the exotic, the strange, into the familiar,

138

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

so that readers back home can understand and appreciate the way of life you have learned. There is less of this task today. Globalization and the general melee of cultures have reduced the task of making the familiar strange, but have also increased the complexity of analysis and interpretation. The other is no longer out there, because there is no out there in the traditional sense. The task of the anthropologist has become more complicated. We came to understand what the strange becoming familiar can do to a research project. After some years working and living in the Remstal, the school and its community had become home. There were no surprises. When we started work in a school in Roseville, Wisconsin, the Remstal suddenly became strange again. The familiarity of structure and system in human communities worldwide can be deceptive. Nothing is at it seems, an anthropological adage of long standing, is well to keep in mind. Things happen that seem the same, but for quite different reasons. It is assumed that now with literate persons, even anthropologistsincreasingly available from among heretofore subjects of anthropological scrutinythere is no need for this essentially outsider expertise. This is a moot assumption, for often the native student of his or her own society has blind spots rarely lled in interpretations, and he or she will bring native conceptions of reality to the ethnographic process. Of course, the outsider student also has blind spots. A thorough run-through cultural therapy might help both. Be that as it may, the CCRIT was more interactive than anything else we had done using visual techniques to stimulate responses relevant to our research objectives. We supplied videos of German classrooms comparable in grade and subject matter to U.S. teachers and vice versa, so both U.S. and German teachers saw their own classrooms and behavior in the light of the other classrooms and perceived behaviors. How they interpreted what they saw and the inuence of this on their own behavior was entirely of their own making. We left them to their own devices, so to speak. We were more recorders than managers. Of course, our roles and behaviors were not entirely one kind or another, but on the whole we were more interactive and collaborationist, and less managerial than we had been in our previous research. The results were impressive, to us at least. Our interpretations go beyond the results, as the teachers furnished them, as interpretations usually do. We relate the teachers interpretation of what they were doing to what we think are enduring German and enduring U.S. features of school practice and conceptions of the purpose of education, and, at the same time, to universal teacherstudent school behavior. None of our interpretations challenge conventional belief and knowledge in the measure of our earlier research. Whether this is because the more recent research is cast more collaboratively is by no means entirely clear, although my bias is in that direction. In any event, it might be well to assume a position that does not ascribe all good to collaborative research or to research with the ethnographer as expert. Good research, it seems, will be conducted by whatever means work best in the context in which the research is being done and in conjunction with its purposes. Only one thing further needs to be said. The collaborationist approach does not have quite the same objectives as the expert approach. The latter requires the ethnographer to produce as little change as possible in the act of data collection. The collaborationist approach has as its purpose change, mutually and cooperatively promoted. We had the same purpose in our early work, in that we counseled our cases

Spindler

Visual Stimuli

139

to improve their professional competence, but we did not assume parity in our relationships.

George Spindler is a professor emeritus of anthropology and education at Stanford University. Along with Louise Spindler, Solon Kimball, and Elizabeth Eddy, he founded the eld of educational anthropology in the 1950s.

References Cited
Goldschmidt, Walter, and Robert Edgerton 1961 A Picture Technique in the Study of Values. American Anthropologist 63(1):2647. Hallowell, A. Irving 1946 Some Psychological Characteristics of the Northeastern Indians. In Man in Northeastern North America. Frederick Johnson, ed. Papers of the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archeology 3:195225. 1952 Ojibwa Personality and Acculturation. In Acculturation in the Americas. Proceedings and Papers of the Twenty-Ninth International Congress of the Americanists. Sol Tax, ed. Pp. 105112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1954 The Ojibwa Self and its Behavioral Environment. In Culture and Experience. Pp. 172183. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. 1955 Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. 1976 Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. Raymond Fogelson, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, Margaret 1978 The Evocation of Psychologically Relevant Responses in Ethnological Field Work. In The Making of Psychological Anthropology. G. D. Spindler, eds. Pp. 89139. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spindler, George D. 1946 Anthropology May Be the Answer. Journal of Education 129:130131. 1955 Sociocultural and Psychological Processes in Menomini Acculturation. University of California Publications in Culture and Society, vol. 5. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1963 The Transmission of American Culture. In Education and Culture: Anthropological Approaches. G. D. Spindler, eds. Pp. 148172. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1974a Beth AnneA Case Study of Culturally Dened Adjustment and Teacher Perceptions. In Education and Cultural Processes: Toward an Anthropology of Education. G. D. Spindler, ed. Pp. 230244. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1974b Transcultural Sensitization. In Education and Cultural Processes: Toward an Anthropology of Education. G. D. Spindler, ed. Pp. 467480. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 2000 The Four Careers of George and Louise Spindler. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:xvxxxvii. 2002 The Collusion of Illusions: How to Get People to Tell You What They Dont Know. In Ethnography and Schools: Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education. Y. Zou and H. Trueba, eds. Pp. 1325. New York: Rowman and Littleeld. Spindler, George D., ed. 1955 Anthropology and Education. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Spindler, George D., and Lori Hammond, eds. 2006 Innovations in Educational Ethnography. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Spindler, George D., and Louise Spindler 1971 Dreamers with Power: The Menominee. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1982 From Familiar to Strange and Back Again: Roger Harker and Schoenhausen. In Doing the Ethnography of Schooling: Educational Anthropology in Action. G. D. Spindler, eds. Pp. 2046. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

140

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Volume 39, 2008

1984 Dreamers with Power: The Menominee Indians. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. 1990 Male and Female in Four Changing Cultures. In Personality and the Cultural Construction of Society: A Festschrift for Melford Spiro. D. Jordan and M. Swartz, eds. Pp. 182200. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1992a The Enduring, Situated and Endangered Self in Fieldwork: A Personal Account. In The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 17: Essays in Honor of George and Louise Spindler. B. Boyer and R. Boyer, eds. Pp. 2328. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. 1992b Rorschaching in North America in the Shadow of Hallowell. In The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 16: Essays in Honor of A. Irving Hallowell. B. Boyer and R. Boyer, eds. Pp. 155182. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. 1993 Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reective Interviewing in Schoenhausen and Roseville. In Qualitative Voices in Educational Research. M. Schratz, eds. Pp. 106124. Hillsdale, NJ: Academic Press. 1998 Cultural Politics of the White Ethniclass in the Mid-Nineties. In Ethnic Identity and Power. Y. Zou and H. Trueba, eds. Pp. 2741. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2000 Fifty Years of Anthropology and Education, 19502000. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Spindler, George D., and Louise Spindler, eds. 1994 Pathways to Cultural Awareness: Cultural Therapy with Teachers and Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Spindler, George D., and Janice Stockard, eds. 2006 Globalization and Change in Fifteen Cultures: Born in One World, Living in Another. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Spindler, Louise 1962 Menomini Women and Culture Change. Memoir, 91. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.