Russ Bernard

Biography

H. Russell Bernard (b. 1940), known professionally as Russ Bernard, is an American cultural anthropologist and the discipline's most widely read authority on research methods. He took his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1968 and spent most of his career at the University of Florida, where he is professor emeritus; he is now a research professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and has directed ASU's Institute for Social Science Research.

His research covers technology and social change, language death, social network analysis, and the training of native speakers to write ethnography of their own cultures. He has conducted fieldwork in Greece, Mexico and the United States and has taught in Greece, Japan and Germany.

Editorial Work

Bernard has edited three of the discipline's significant journals: Human Organization (the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology), American Anthropologist (the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association), and Field Methods, which he founded as Cultural Anthropology Methods in 1989 and continues to edit. Since 1987 he has co-run the annual National Science Foundation summer institute on research methods in cultural anthropology, through which a large share of the field's methodologists have passed.

Key Works

• Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. The standard graduate textbook, first published in 1988 and now in its sixth edition. It is unusual in treating qualitative and quantitative approaches as a single toolkit rather than as opposed camps, and it is written with an insistence that method is a craft learned by doing.
• Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (2000; 2nd ed. 2013), the same argument extended beyond anthropology.
• Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches, with Gery W. Ryan (2010).
• Native Ethnography: A Mexican Indian Describes His Culture, with Jesús Salinas Pedraza (1989) — an ethnography of the Ñähñu written in Ñähñu by a native speaker, and a practical argument about who is entitled to describe a culture.

Honours

Recipient of the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association in 2003, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 — a rare distinction for a cultural anthropologist.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Cyborg anthropology inherits its obligations from anthropology proper, and Bernard is where those obligations are stated most plainly: sampling, informed consent, systematic coding, the difference between an anecdote and a finding. His work on social network analysis and on the reliability of informant recall is directly relevant to any study of mediated sociality, where the traces a platform records and what participants report about them routinely diverge.

Related Reading

• Traditional Anthropology
• Digital Anthropology
• Cultural Resource Management
• Social dialect