Participant Observation

Abstract

Indigenous social anthropologists investigating communities in their own country are not insulated from many of the difficulties their foreign counterparts face. This article is based on the experience of the author while carrying out, as a doctoral student, a year-long participant observation among the Orring, a little-known minority ethnic group in Nigeria's south-eastern districts. The researcher's ethnic group is not the same as that of his host community but both are Nigerian. Initially interactions with the culture-bearers went on without any trouble but the more the researcher became integrated in the host community, human-relations problems that are hard to ignore arose. But the author concludes that experiences such as the ones the article describes, inconvenient such as they certainly can be, may be the indication that an ethnographer has been integrated in their host community without which no claim of participant observation may be made. Low literacy rate and peculiarities of social structure of non-Western host communities both make the use of participant observation compelling in many cases despite current innovations in qualitative research.