each phoneme. Morphology and syntax

each phoneme. Morphology and syntax involved the ordering of phonemes into
meaningful forms and of combinations of forms into words and words into phrases,
clauses, and sentences. To describe all of this was to make what in current jargon
would be called an emic description of a language.
This set me to thinking about social behavior. In every human society people
must learn how to conduct themselves in ways that are acceptable to their fellows.
People articulate what must be learned as rules of conduct and lists of “dos and
don’ts.” But much of what they learn remains subjective. They cannot explain to
someone else the working principles for which they come to have a feel any more
than they can explain to others the working principles of their language’s grammar.
They can apply their subjective knowledge to correct people in specific situations,
but they cannot explain the underlying understanding by which they make their
immediate judgments.
Learning how to behave, it seemed to me, must be much like learning how
to speak. For culturally appropriate behavior to be readily learnable, its content
had to be reducible to organizational principles analogous to those of a language’s
grammar. I presumed, therefore, that the methodological strategy of descriptive
linguistics should be applicable to getting at those underlying principles. So I
proposed as my doctoral dissertation project an exploration into the possibility of
formulating a “grammar of social behavior” while doing ethnographic fieldwork.
While at Yale, I had the opportunity to study under Bronislaw Malinowski in
1940–1941 and, on my return to Yale after World War II, under Ralph Linton in
1946–1947. I took courses also from G.P. Murdock, Clellan Ford, John Dollard,
and Cornelius Osgood and archaeology courses from Irving Rouse and Wendell
Bennett. From November 1941 to December 1945, I served in the Army, where I
had the good fortune to work for three years doing attitude and opinion research
in the Research Branch of the Army’s Information and Education Division, un-
der the sociologists Samuel Stouffer and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. There I learned
about sampling and questionnaire survey methods, and, most importantly for me,
I learned Guttman scaling, which led to my first publication (Goodenough 1944).
My dissertation fieldwork was done in 1947 in Chuuk (formerly Truk) in
Micronesia. I was part of a team that went there under the National Research
Council program called the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropol-
ogy (CIMA), funded by the Office of Naval Research. Our team, led by Murdock,
also included Isidore Dyen, as linguist, and fellow graduate students Thomas
Gladwin and Frank LeBar. Under our division of labor, LeBar (1964) worked on
the traditional material culture, Gladwin on the life cycle, life histories, and person-
ality and culture (Gladwin & Sarason 1953), while I was assigned social behavior
and religion. Murdock took on social organization, but he had me working with
him because he was having trouble with the Chuukese language and I was making
good progress in it. I learned a great deal about fieldwork from him in the process.
After he left, I continued working on social organization as well as my other topics
(Goodenough 1951).
In accordance with my linguistic (emic) methodological approach, I found that
study of the traditional property system required learning what one needed to know
to do a search of title in the system. This required knowing the different kinds of
entitlements individuals and corporate groups could have, the transactions that
could occur with these entitlements, and the new entitlements that could result
from the different possible transactions. It also required knowing what were the
rights and duties associated with each of these entitlements. As far as I know,
the resulting ethnography stands almost alone as an account of how a property
system is culturally constructed and actually works (Goodenough 1951). My emic
approach led me also to try to learn what were the choices that the Chuukese saw
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GOODENOUGH
available to them in making decisions about marital residence. These choices could
be mapped into the standard anthropological (etic) categories, but these categories
did not describe their choices. Similar experience in fieldwork in Kiribati and New
Britain led me to formulate the need for emic description in doing ethnography
and at the same time attend to how the emic formulations could be mapped into
the etic concepts needed for comparative, cross-cultural research (Goodenough
1956a). Some years later these considerations led me to examine anthropology’s
etic concepts in relation to marriage, family, kin groups, and kinship terminology
with the object of refining them for comparative purposes (Goodenough 1970a).
Writing my ethnographic account of Chuuk’s social organization, I encountered
a problem involving the order in which things were to be described. To describe kin
groups seemed to require describing property first, but describing property seemed
to require describing kin groups first. The problem resolved itself when I saw that
both entitlements and kin groups depended on property transactions. Describing
transaction first made it possible to treat entitlements and kin groups as emergent
forms resulting from previous transactions. An orderly, linear rather than circular
account of social organization thus became possible. From this I learned that
customs and institutions were not only largely interconnected and to be understood
in terms of one another, as Malinowski (1922) demonstrated long ago, but also that
the understanding of some was dependent on the understanding of others. Finding
the logical starting points for orderly description of interconnected cultural systems
was something requiring attention for an emic ethnographic account (Goodenough
1951).
With an eye to my premise about underlying principles specific to a partic-
ular culture’s ordering of social relationships, I was able to come up with two
empirically based examples from my fieldwork in Truk in 1947. One of these ex-
amples involved the application of contrastive analysis to the sets of genealogical
relationships that were designated by the same kinship terms to arrive at a set of
cross-cutting criteria that allowed me to use every kinship term correctly by in-
formants’ standards in every relationship to which the term denotatively applied.
Having the genealogical connections among all the community’s members already
recorded, I went through the roster of the community’s members and listed for one