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The enduring Jim Spradley
A charismatic teacher, he died young,
but he left 20 books and many grateful students
Like a lot of anthropology majors at the time, Kimberley
Brown '74 called herself "a Spradley major,"
after Professor James P. Spradley. "Literally,
I took every course he offered," she says.
Jim Spradley taught at Macalester from 1969 until
1982, when he died of leukemia at the age of 48. Despite
his all-too-short career, he had an enduring impact
on many students.
"He pushed me early on to write well and to think
well," says Brown, a professor of applied linguistics
and international studies at Portland State University.
"In my senior year I was trying to do too much
and he recognized that. He made a lot of observations
about me as an individual that were really powerful.
I was so amazed that a faculty member would take the
time to do that. He said, 'You spend a lot of time doing
good work, but each time I see you in competition with
someone else, you have stopped doing your best work,
maybe because of fear of competition.'
| 'He pushed me early on to write
well and to think well.' |
"That's a very powerful insight to share with
a 20-year-old, and he did that kind of thing routinely,"
Brown recalls.
Doug Harper '70 was so inspired by Spradley that in
a nod to his mentor's first book--You Owe Yourself
a Drunk, a study of skid row tramps in Seattle--he
wrote his doctoral thesis on railroad tramps, for which
he rode freight trains for 25,000 miles.
"I'm still a Spradley student," says Harper,
chair of the sociology department at Duquesne University.
"My current project is on Italian food. I've been
going to Italy and trying to get Italians to define
food. That's what Jim always got us to do--to think
about the mundane, daily world in some new way, to become
conscious of it and engage in it, to see its structure.
He just bubbled over with excitement about learning
the simplest things about people's lives. He taught
us to have that same kind of interest and enthusiasm."
No one was more strongly affected by Spradley than
the man who hired him, Professor David McCurdy. The
two had met earlier at anthropologists' conferences.
"I was just blown away by the great questions he
asked me about what I was doing," McCurdy recalls.
When Spradley taught a course at Mac on "ethnosemantics"--a
precursor of what became the ethnography course--McCurdy
sat in on his classes. "I said, 'I've got to learn
how to do this,' so I took field notes of every class."
The two became close friends and colleagues. Their reader,
Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology,
was first published in 1971. Now in its 12th edition,
it has sold a half-million copies.
Spradley grew up in Los Angeles in a poor, deeply
religious family; his father was a part-time Pentecostal
minister. Jim memorized many Bible verses and was taught
to summarize Bible chapters--a skill that came in handy
when reading students' papers. "He was very supportive
of students and quite demanding in his own way,"
McCurdy says.
A driven, charismatic man who became an authority
on skid row tramps, occupational stress and deafness,
Spradley wrote or edited 20 books in 12 years. Seven
of them--including Deaf Like Me, written with
his brother Thomas, whose daughter was deaf--are still
in print today.
"I learned a lot about writing from him,"
McCurdy says. "I'm an editor basically by nature.
He used to say, 'If you work on this chapter two more
weeks, will it sell 20 more books?' He was very good
for me. He wrote so fast that sometimes things would
be disjointed, but the more he wrote the better he got.
We went to lunch every day. We looked at each other's
stuff, we talked over what to do about problems, we
invented titles. We just had a lot of fun."
Spradley and his wife, Barbara, had three daughters,
Sheryl Spradley Grassie '79, Deborah Spradley Mattingly
'82 and Laura Spradley Harris.
--Jon Halvorsen
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Every semester Macalester students fan out from campus to
do anthropological field work in an area rich with microcultures:
the Twin Cities. They conduct exhaustive interviews with a
vast range of "cultural informants": police detectives
and midwives, tattoo artists and Jesuit priests, legal secretaries
and nightclub bouncers.
They learn anthropology in the most direct way: by doing
anthropology.
In the past 35 years, more than 6,000 Macalester students
have done research projects in anthropology using an approach
pioneered by Professors James Spradley and David McCurdy;
more than 1,000 students have taken the Anthropology Department's
methods course, "Ethnographic Interviewing."
Until the 1970s, it was assumed that anthropology students
would begin their field work in graduate school. McCurdy,
who joined the faculty in 1966 as Macalester's first anthropologist,
and Spradley, who arrived in 1969, made it possible for undergrads
to do high-quality anthropological research in a single semester.
Their textbook on how undergraduate research should be taught,
The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society,
was published in 1972.
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'One of the things students learn in
this course is just to see things from other people's
points of view.'
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Now, 33 years later, the second edition has just been published,
featuring ethnographic studies by a new generation of Mac
students and recent grads.
"For anthropologists," McCurdy says, "there's
a rite of passage where you learn to think in every situation:
'What are the rules here? What am I supposed to do in this
situation? How do I play this game?' Sometimes you can't figure
out where people are coming from but there are always rules.
One of the things students learn in this course--and the more
they do it, the better they get at it--is just to see things
from other people's points of view. In a complex world, it's
really useful to be able to do that."
"Ethnographic Interviewing" requires students to
study a microculture--a culture associated with a particular
group--and discover through a series of interviews the particular
cultural knowledge that the members of the group use to interpret
their experience and relate to others. Students tape-record
and transcribe at least seven, hour-long, face-to-face interviews,
analyze their research and write a 30-page paper. (The American
Anthropological Association's code of ethics also calls on
them not to harm their cultural informants in any way and
to protect their privacy; dangerous or illegal microcultures
are off limits to Mac students.)
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'The Spradley and McCurdy method taught
to Macalester students is widely recognized among anthropologists
as valuable.'
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"With a lot of other research projects in the social
sciences, you have a hypothesis," says Professor Arjun
Guneratne, chair of the department. "You don't have any
hypothesis you want to test in this methods course. You are
in the position of a student; your [cultural] informant is
in the position of the teacher. What you want to do is to
learn from your informant what it is like to operate in that
setting--what are the rules, the inside knowledge of this
cultural setting."
A demanding, time-intensive course, "Ethnographic Interviewing"
is usually oversubscribed. Cole Akeson '05, who interviewed
a police detective for his study about the art of the police
interview, believes the course is popular for several reasons:
because it's so challenging, "because it's one of those
courses where you learn a real, marketable skill...[and] because
it leaves students with a real sense of accomplishment...the
opportunity to pursue a semester-long research project resulting
in a substantial and original work."
In 2002, three outside reviewers from Carleton, Brandeis and
Union College wrote: "The Spradley and McCurdy method
taught to Macalester students is widely recognized among anthropologists
as valuable. What is so distinctive at Macalester is that
undergraduates are being taught ethnographic research methodology
so seriously. The experience is intense, intellectually and
socially, and creates a remarkable esprit among the [anthropology]
majors....As outsiders, we were extremely impressed with the
success of this unusual course."
Dianna Shandy joined the Anthropology Department in 1999.
A sociocultural anthropologist, Shandy says she feels "more
like a facilitator or a coach than 'the expert instructor'
imparting knowledge" when she teaches the course, which
is required of anthropology majors.
"Students learn by doing," she said in an e-mail
from Dublin, Ireland, where she was doing field work to learn
more about the new African-Irish diaspora. "I think this
course engages them differently than a lecture course might.
They are pushed to take intellectual risks in a structured
and supported environment. Ethnographic research demands a
sort of intellectual freefall and students have to become
comfortable moving forward with their projects without necessarily
having a clear sense of where they will end up. I think these
attributes are why the course is so effective in giving students
a grounding for the research they undertake during study abroad."
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'The course has been a major springboard
into my professional career in several ways.'
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Shandy was 5 years old when the first edition of The Cultural
Experience was published. A co-author of the new edition,
she was an undergraduate at Georgetown University when one
of her anthropology professors introduced her to Spradley
and McCurdy's work.
"However," she says, "what really sold me on
the attributes of this particular way of teaching students
were the 'testimonials' I received from Mac alumni who had
taken this course in the 1970s and '80s. Now physicians, public
health professionals, real estate agents, anthropologists,
these Mac grads I encountered socially described the impact
this course made on their intellectual development and continues
to make on the work they do now."
Howard Sinker '78 became a journalist. A longtime reporter
and editor with the Minneapolis Star Tribune --he
also teaches a journalism course at Mac--Sinker uses an interviewing
style that he learned in the ethnography course from McCurdy.
"I found that it put interview subjects at ease and let
them think they were directing the conversation. For me, there's
no better way to ask open-ended questions, a key staple of
the journalist's tool kit, than by using an ethnographic approach,"
Sinker says.
More recent grads share Sinker's appreciation of the ethnography
course. "It's a unique course," says John Hoch '94,
who works with kids who have behavior disorders as part of
his Ph.D. studies in special education at the University of
Minnesota. "You can use this way of learning about people's
daily lives and apply it to anything."
Anne Hohol Becker '99, who is working in HIV prevention and
education as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, says the
skills she learned have been a great help in understanding
her new community in Trujillo. "By simply asking my neighbor
or the owner of my local corner store an open-ended question
such as 'Can you describe a typical day?', I can discover
all sorts of things about their families, where they shop,
how they make money, or if they go to church. Normally these
types of questions are used when studying a microculture,
but open-ended questions can help you learn a lot about people
in general. And because the questions are simple and non-specific,
I don't have to worry about asking a question that may offend
someone."
Byron Thayer '02 says "the course has been a major
springboard into my professional career in several ways."
After an internship with IBM that drew heavily on the McCurdy-Spradley
method for a marketing experiment, Thayer now works for a
phone headset manufacturer in Berkeley, Calif., helping designers
make headsets more user-friendly. "My toolbox has expanded
since college to include ergonomics, but I still use the skills
of participant-observation and ethnosemantic structured interviewing
that I learned from that course in my work. If nothing else,
the ethnosemantic skills have given me an unusual edge in
the job market," Thayer says.
Jon Halvorsen is the managing editor
of Macalester Today.
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