Harvey Russell "Russ" Bernard (born 1940) is an American anthropologist and social scientist,known for his research on social network analysis,for his use of computers to preserve the cultural history of vanishing languages,and for his work on training young anthropologists. Bernard,who is director of ASU's Institute for Social Science Research,[2] is also a professor emeritus of anthropology of the University of Florida.[3]
H. Russell Bernard,born in New York City on June 12,1940,[4] majored in anthropology and sociology at New York's Queens College,earning a BA in 1961.[5]
He earned an MA in linguistic anthropology from University of Illinois in 1963,doing work that he later said shaped much of his career.[1][5]
He then continued at the University of Illinois,doing graduate work in the area of quantitative data analysis with his thesis adviser Edward Bruner,getting his Ph.D. in 1968.[1][5]
Bernard's anthropology career after leaving the University of Illinois included work at Washington State University and at West Virginia University. The University of Florida anthropology department recruited him as a full professor and department chair in 1979.[3][6] In 2015,ASU hired Bernard to direct its Institute for Social Science Research.[7]
Social network analysis
Small world theory model
Bernard (together with oceanographerPeter Killworth whom he met in 1972 while both were working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography)[8] designed the "reverse small world" experiment (1978). This took an approach different from Stanley Milgram's "small-world" research,which had been done in the 1960's. Where Milgram had studied the network-distance between two random people (Six degrees of separation),Bernard and Killworth instead asked people to name a person whom they would first approach if they were starting to reach out to contact an unknown person.[9]
Bernard and Killworth also developed the "network scale-up method" (NSUM),a new and inexpensive way to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations.[8] Its original use was to estimate the number of people who had been killed by a recent earthquake. By asking each respondent a number of questions in the form "How many X's do you know?",they were able to use data from populations whose size they knew (doctors,people over 80,etc.) to scale-up from the number of earthquake victims known to each respondent to the probable number of earthquake victims in a population.[10][11]
Their NSUM mathematical model has also been used to improve calculation of the size of a person's social network.[12] The 1990's Dunbar's number theorem had estimated people's average social network size was about 150. The Bernard-Killworth number was about 290.[13] A survey paper "Thirty Years of The Network Scale-up Method" published in 2021 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association reported that network scale-up methods still needed more improvement but,having "been used in a large number of real-world studies..have offered promising results in the field of size estimation."[10]
Language preservation
While studying tone-patterns of the Otomi language in 1962,Bernard started collaborating with Otomi-speaker Jesús Salinas Pedraza. In 1971,they began collaboration on an ethnography that would be written by Pedraza in his native language and translated by Bernard.[14] Using an Apple II computer with Gutenberg word-processing software,Bernard was able to create custom fonts with special characters matching the orthography of Otomi language.[15] This collaboration produced four volumes written in Otomi with translations into English and Spanish.[14]
Since the 1980s,Bernard has worked to preserve vanishing languages by helping native speakers use computers to create books in those languages.[1][16] By using computers to create WYSIWYG text in scripts used for vanishing languages,Bernard's goal was to create camera-ready text and reduce the cost of creating books in those languages.[17] According to Bernard,desktop publishing can play a vital role in helping indigenous-language authors share their work.[18][19]
Writing in The Washington Post in 2008,Joel Garreau called Bernard "a grand old man of endangered-language research."[20]
Methodology work
Research is a craft. I’m not talking analogy here. Research isn’t like a craft. It is a craft. If you know what people have to go through to become skilled carpenters or makers of clothes, you have some idea of what it takes to learn the skills for doing research. It takes practice, practice, and more practice.
Bernard's work on practical aspects of anthropology has been influential, not least his widely-quoted mantra that "research is a craft."[22][23][24]
In the 1980s, Bernard, together with Pertti J. Pelto and Stephen Borgatti, started the three-times-yearly Cultural Anthropology Methods Newsletter (sometimes called the CAM Newsletter), which in 1989 became the Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal.[25] Bernard was its first editor, continuing in that role when in 1995 the journal changed its name to Field Methods.[26][27]
Bernard is the author of Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (6th edition)[21] which has been described as "the most revered book of cultural anthropological research methods" (E. N. Anderson)[28] and "without doubt the best book in this field" (Daniel Bates).[29] His other books on methodology include Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches[30] and Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches (2nd edition, coauthored with Gery W. Ryan and Amber Wutich).[31]
The "methods camp" summer training program in cultural anthropology was started, with NSF support, by Bernard and Pertti Pelto in 1987.[32][33] The NSF-funded Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP) at ASU, which Bernard co-leads with his former student Amber Wutich,[34] is a continuation of this program.[2] In 2024, the Cultural Anthropology Methods Program started "CAMP-International," inviting anthropologists around the world to a virtual online version of the program, including a listserv and YouTube curriculum, where lectures in English are available with subtitles "in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Bangla, and Guarani."[35]
Recognition
Bernard was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.[36] He has received from The American Anthropological Association both their Franz Boas Award (2003)[37][38] and their Conrad M. Arensberg Award (2024).[39][40] The Society for Anthropological Sciences, which "promotes empirical research and social science in anthropology," has since 2016 awarded the "H. Russell Bernard Graduate Student Paper Prize" for a student paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.[41][42]
References
1 2 3 4 Borofsky, Robert, ed. (1994). "Intellectual Roots of Key Anthropologists". Assessing Cultural Anthropology(PDF). New York: McGraw Hill. Retrieved February 23, 2025. In the summer of 1959, as a junior at Queens College, I went to Mexico to study Spanish and came back knowing that I wanted to be an anthropologist.
1 2 "NSF-funded workshop aims to better train future cultural anthropologists". ASU News. November 8, 2023. Retrieved February 21, 2025. ...the CAMP workshop builds on the previous iterations of this work — which started with field schools before morphing into "camp" settings in the 1980s, led by Bernard for decades.
1 2 3 "UF professor emeritus elected to National Academy of Sciences". University of Florida. April 30, 2010. Retrieved February 21, 2025. Bernard has held the editorship of the American Anthropologist and the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Human Organization. He was a founder of Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, which became the journal Field Methods.
↑ "Bernard steps aside as chair"(PDF). Anthropology at Florida Newsletter. University of Florida. 1989. Retrieved February 21, 2025. Bernard was recruited as Professor and Chair from West Virginia University in 1979.
1 2 "Are you average and know 290 people?". Post Gazette. March 24, 2002. Retrieved February 23, 2025. Bernard and Killworth believe that the mathematical model they've developed may one day provide government agencies and other organizations with an easy, inexpensive way to estimate hard-to-count populations, such as the homeless, abused children, rape victims, heroin users and people with HIV.
1 2 "Thirty Years of The Network Scale-up Method". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 116 (535): 1548–1559. July 21, 2021. Retrieved February 23, 2025. The NSUM uses questions from "How many X's do you know?" surveys to estimate both average network size and subpopulation sizes.
↑ "Generalizing the Network Scale-Up Method: A New Estimator for the Size of Hidden Populations". Sociological Methodology. 46 (1): 153–186. 2016. Retrieved February 27, 2025. The core insight behind the network scale-up method is that ordinary people have embedded within their personal networks information that can be used to estimate the size of hidden populations, if that information can be properly collected, aggregated, and adjusted (Bernard et al., 1989, 2010).
↑ John Noble Wilford (December 31, 1991). "In a Publishing Coup, Books in 'Unwritten' Languages". The New York Times. Retrieved February 21, 2025. In an effort to preserve language diversity in Mexico, Dr. Bernard and Mr. Salinas decided in 1987 on a plan to teach the Indian people to read and write their own languages using microcomputers.
↑ H. Russell Bernard (1992). "Preserving Language Diversity". Human Organization. 51 (1): 82–89. Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing houses produce authors.
↑ "Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary". The Washington Post. October 1, 2008. Retrieved February 21, 2025. H. Russell Bernard is a grand old man of endangered-language research, having devoted four decades to it.
↑ Pelto, P.J. (2005). "What Is So New About Mixed Methods?". Qualitative Health Research. 25 (6): 734–735. We started with a newsletter, Cultural Anthropology Methods, sometimes referred to as the CAM Newsletter. Most of the editorial work and logistics for the CAM was managed by Russ Bernard and his team of colleagues and graduate students at the University of Florida. Quite soon, the CAM newsletter transformed into a full-scale journal, beginning in 1989.
↑ "Field Methods (Formerly Cultural Anthropology Methods)". Sage Publishing. Retrieved February 25, 2025. Field Methods (formerly Cultural Anthropology Methods) publishes articles about methods used by field investigators from the social and behavioral sciences in the collection, management, analysis and presentation of data about human thought and/or human behavior in the natural world.
↑ Eugene N. Anderson (April 18, 2023). "A Method in Our Madness: Experiences With Seeking Local Knowledge". Journal of Ethnobiology. 43 (1). Retrieved February 23, 2025. The most revered book of cultural anthropological research methods is Russell Bernard's Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (2006), which must be in the library of every ethnographer and serious ethnobiologist
↑ Bates, D.G. "Research methods in cultural anthropology". University of Chicago Library. Retrieved February 23, 2025. This is without doubt the best book in this field and its publication fills a real need.
↑ "Commentary: The History and Purpose of Methods Camp". Practicing Anthropology. NSF's Short Courses in Research Methods (SCRM) program ... is part of a larger, long-term project (popularly known in the discipline as "methods camp") to help cultural anthropologists develop skills in research design, data collection, and data analysis.
↑ "H. Russell Bernard". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 21, 2025. I have worked with indigenous people in Mexico to develop ways to publish works in previously nonwritten languages. I also do research in social network analysis, particularly on the problem of estimating the size of uncountable populations.
↑ "H. Russell Bernard". American Antropological Association. Retrieved February 21, 2025.
↑ "Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology". American Antropological Association. Retrieved February 23, 2025. The Franz Boas Award recognizes Association members who have made exceptional contributions to anthropology with respect to the increase and dissemination of humanistic and scientific knowledge and/or service to the profession.
↑ "Conrad M. Arensberg Award". American Antropological Association. the Conrad Arensberg Award .. honors individuals who have furthered anthropology as a natural science.
↑ "Society for Anthropological Sciences". Society for Anthropological Sciences. Retrieved February 22, 2025. H. Russell Bernard Graduate Student Paper Prize $500.00
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