Week 2 - Guidelines for Census and Maps

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WEEK 2 - GUIDELINES FOR CENSUS AND MAPS

This week you will be doing a village map and beginning a census. These are good ways to begin to meet people and to get a rough sense of the social divisions in your village. Note: It is important to get started early on these tasks, particularly the census. Doing the census probably will require making appointments with people in advance. You will also have to allow time to reschedule some of these appointments as people get caught up in unexpected events (e.g. funerals...) and may end up being busy when they thought they would be free.
Sketch Map of the Village

Houses ready for censusing in the village of Vitawa

Getting oriented visually is also an important first step. Mapping the village is a task that goes hand-in-hand with censusing. What you need to do is have a good visual record of all the houses in the village. That way you can number them and use the map as a reference for your censusing. Walk around the village with someone and make a sketch of all the structures there. Be sure to ask that person what the purpose of each structure is. You want to include houses, stores, church, community hall, etc.--every building. It's less important to include outdoor bathrooms, showers, kitchens, but including these could also be a good visual reference for anyone back home who is looking at the map. You should also ask your informant to indicate the significant social divisions in the village. In most villages, houses will be grouped by lineage (Fijian: mataqali) and, if the lineages are very large, the houses will be grouped into sub-lineages (usually a group of adult brothers and their children; Fijian tokatoka). So it is a good idea to ask your informant what the mataqali's are in the village and where (in general) the houses of each mataqali are. In a few cases (e.g. Erinn's village Drana) the village may be so small that only one mataqali lives there.

If you have access to a compass (we're assuming most of you don't) it may help to orient your sketch map to the actual coordinates (up is north), and, as you're walking around, to periodically reorient yourself to the compass. The easiest way to do that is to note the directions (and maybe pace out distances) of the paths or roads first, and then sketch in your houses around those.

Sketch Map for Visual Layout of your House

Also make a sketch map of the house you are living in. Include where all the major items are (sinks, refrigerator, etc.) and also make clear who sleeps in what room. We have an interest in ideas about how modern house layouts might map onto traditional house structure, so you could try asking about that (after reading Ravuvu on this). To really get a sense of how people think about different sections of the house, you need to observe their actual behavior. Do children use different doors from adults? Do women use different doors from men? Etc.

The Census

The census is an opportunity to gather some systematic and solid information from a wide number of people. In this way, the census information is more like what you'd expect to get from sociologists. You'll be able to make some reliable estimates about size of families, size of villages, proportion in this or that religion, etc. In addition, the census provides you with some extremely valuable information on kinship relations in the village. As you have already seen, how people are related to each other is crucially important for defining who they are in the village. The more you can learn about how people are related to each other the better. The census helps with this.

In Fiji, people are divided up into three levels of groups:

• the tokatoka = the immediate family or extended family
• the mataqali = the patrilineal lineage (made up of a few tokatokas)
• the yavusa = the larger clan or as people sometimes say here, the "village."
The yavusa has a few mataqalis in it.

Your actual village may or may not have more than one yavusa in it. One of the things you'll be wanting to sort out is how each family you census fits in to this overall structure. You'll be wanting to count the numbers of people in each mataqali, the number of mataqalis in a yavusa, etc.

Another important thing you'll be getting in your census gathering is some basic kinship information. For each household you talk to, you'll want to record the parents of the father, and if the mother is from somewhere around here (or from the village) you'll want to get the parents of her as wellÑbest to just figure you'll get her parents and where they are from. You'll also want to get full sibling lists, certainly for the children of the household, but if time permits you can ask the father about his siblings as well.

In addition, collect general information about schooling, church affiliation, jobs, etc. Here's a list of the things you'll want to ask.

Name of head of household and wife.
Name of house location.
Original village of wife.
Name of husband's mataqali, tokatoka, and yavusa.
Full info on husband: parents' names, parents' original villages, extent of schooling, church affiliation, jobs or work, previous marriages (divorced or widowed)
Full info on wife (same as above)
Full info on eldest child (same as above, if married collect name and original village of wife or husband)
Full info on next child.
Etc.
Full info on anyone else who sleeps in this house.
Reiterate that you need to know which of the above actually sleeps in this house. Verify the number of people who sleep in this house.
Add in any particular questions you yourself are interested in, perhaps anticipating your future project. Be sure that your questions are of the type that are relatively easy to answer in a straightforward way.

Record as well any stories people volunteer, either about their relatives, or about their kin ties, or whatever. Chances are that if they choose to volunteer this information they consider it important. Overall, you need to be able to do the whole census interview in a relatively short period of time (say an hour).

Find a systematic way to record this information in your books. A good way to do this is to give each house a number on your village map and then record that number in your books.

Type in your census information in a systematic way that will be easy for you to read later. Maybe title each category in all capitals and then record the information next to it. Try to do this with a minimum of formatting--new line for each bit of info, etc. Indent with tabs if you like. Try to make the whole thing readable and useful for you. Put each household on a separate page. Make the household number prominently visible, along with the mataqali and head of household name.

Turn in to us the following on Saturday morning next week:

• field notes for the week
• typed version of census info on five households
(we can add page breaks when printing so these will come out on different pages)
• map of village
• map of your household

Prepare for our seminar:

• read Chapters 3 and 4 in Ravuvu's The Fijian Way of Life
• read Chapters 3 and 4 in Nest in the Wind

Our current plan is to arrange to take you up to Suva next weekend. You'll be away two nights. We'll pick you up early Friday morning, starting with Megan in Naivuvuni and working our way back, picking up Emily and Andy on our way out of town.

Enjoy your first week in the village!

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