The Extended-case Method and Situational Analysis

Abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork is guided by the anthropologist's theoretical approach. The reader of ethnographic monographs as a rule can never be certain what kind of material the anthropologist has recorded in his notebooks, but there is evidence to suggest that anthropologists with contrasting theoretical frameworks collect different kinds of material and use different methods to gather it. The chapter provides an overview on the extended-case method and situational analysis. This refers to the collection by the ethnographer of detailed data of a particular kind. But it also implies the particular use to which such data are put in analysis, above all the attempt to incorporate conflict as a normal rather than abnormal part of social progress. Firth's emphasis on choice in his concept of social organization is an important mark of the trend in recent anthropology away from a preoccupation with social structure as such. Related to this trend is the growing interest in social processes, including the study of regularities in the variety of actual individual behavior within the social structure. Situational analysis have been proved useful in dealing with this process of optation, that is, selection by the individual in any one situation from a variety of possible relationships.