Doing Field Projects. John Forrest
as a fieldwork method can be surprisingly deceptive in that the material being produced may contain multiple layers of meaning that are not evident at the time that the interview is being conducted. One benefit of recording interviews is that you can return to them repeatedly and continually reassess what you have recorded, as in the example above. In fact, this kind of reassessment can begin almost immediately as you are transcribing, and can continue for years. Recorded interviews, by their very nature, are artificial events in the life of a community you are studying, but another significant benefit is that they are one method of entering into the subjective reality of the people you are working with. In this book there are numerous projects that employ interviews in part or as the whole exercise. Keep in mind that different methods of investigation produce different kinds of data. Not only is interviewing only one method of data collecting, the way that you approach recorded interviews determines the kind of data you receive. Most anthropologists today prefer to record interviews in partnership with the person being interviewed as opposed to seeing the interviewee as an object to be studied. Indeed, this approach is useful in multiple methods; not just interviews.
While the objective/subjective distinction can still serve a purpose in a generalized, heuristic manner, the best we can accomplish is what we can call “objectifiable” information, that is, collecting certain kinds of information in ways that allow them to be measured in standardized or quantized ways (see Thapan 1998). Certain objectifiable facts are always going to have their uses. When dealing with issues such as economics or nutrition or medicine, one might, of necessity, need to gather objectifiable data, such as the calorific value of foods commonly eaten or the analgesic properties of locally made teas. But even such objectifiable data are only usable within a context which will inevitably be subjective. What the facts are, is objectifiable; why they matter (and which ones are important), is always subjective.
Idiographic Vs Nomothetic Approaches
Right from the start of the twentieth century, the status of anthropology as a science (even when qualified as a “social” science) was a topic of debate. Both Boas and Malinowski had pursued advanced degrees in the physical sciences before becoming anthropologists and undertaking ethnographic fieldwork and, therefore, brought an element of scientific inquiry to their fieldwork. Meanwhile, Boas’ student, Alfred Kroeber, characterized anthropology as “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities,” which was his way of softening the sense that ethnographic inquiry was a scientific endeavor akin to physics or chemistry, yet it was still a science.
We commonly call the methods of physical scientists, such as Galileo and Newton, “reductionist” because they take the complexity of observable reality and reduce all the details to simple principles that ultimately govern the seemingly endless details. The observer stands outside of what is being observed in order to uncover its mysteries. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) called this approach “nomothetic” and contrasted it with the “idiographic” approach of the humanities. The humanistic approach is the diametric opposite of reductionism because it is interested in exploring the rich contexts and diversity of cultural phenomena, rather than stripping them away in order to hypothesize simple, unifying principles.
For example, if you like romantic comedies, you will not be stopped from watching a new Netflix release by a friend telling you that the main characters in the movie fall in love near the beginning, face a difficulty that pulls them apart, but then find a way, by some twist of fate or other plot device, to be together in the end. You know this structure: you like it. You take this structure as a given, and you go to the movie because you want to see the specifics: the exact character of the principles, the jokes, the absurd misunderstandings, and so forth. It is the particulars that attract you, not the generalities (which you assume). We call the focus on the particulars of a situation, over the desire to reduce its specifics to general rules, an idiographic approach, and it is the hallmark of interpretive analysis in ethnography. This book takes the position that ethnographic analysis sits somewhere between the nomothetic and the idiographic. Through the projects in this book you will have ample opportunity to explore both approaches.
Undergraduate Fieldwork
One of the prime motivations in producing this text is to teach fieldwork methods to undergraduates (as well as other novice researchers). Yet undergraduate research has not always been encouraged. Since Malinowski pioneered the gathering of data through participant observation in the Trobriand Islands, fieldwork has been entrenched within the discipline and viewed as a “sacred” activity (see Sluka and Robben 2012). Indeed, nearly all PhD programs in cultural anthropology today require a student to produce a dissertation based on intensive fieldwork (of a year or more). There are outliers who have managed to graduate without doing fieldwork, but they are rare indeed. Fieldwork is considered the quintessential rite of passage for entering the profession.
Allowing undergraduates into the sacred rites of the profession was at one time viewed with extreme caution, yet increasingly it is seen as an important, if not essential, experience for students (see Ingold 1991; Sharma 1989; Sharma and Wright 1989; Thorn and Wright 1990; Watson 1995). Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, many social and cultural anthropology programs in Britain and the United States embraced undergraduate fieldwork as a core curricular component, but this trend met with loud resistance in some quarters. The chief objections to undergraduate fieldwork are that the positive benefits are limited and do not outweigh the harm that can be caused by inexperienced researchers both to themselves and to those they are working with. Without getting knee deep in this debate I would simply say that adequate advanced preparation and constant supervision by trained faculty mitigate the potential dangers that can arise, and that, in my experience, the value of undergraduate projects has been immense. If it were not, I would not be writing this text. Now, field methods requirements for undergraduates are relatively common, and quite popular because of the enduring effects it has on the students. Fieldwork is like that. It changes you.
While not getting bogged down in the intense quarrels within the discipline concerning the validity of our field research, you should familiarize yourself at some point with the continued re-evaluation of the overarching legitimacy of our methods. I recommend dipping into some of the following:
Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method by J. Okely
(Berg Publishers, 2006)
Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader Edited by C.G. Antonius, M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sulka
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)
Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology (Anthropology, Culture and Society) by C. W. Watson,
(Pluto Press, 1999)
Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus eds.,
(Cornell UP 2009)
Ethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research by Anthony Kwame Harrison.,
(Oxford University Press, 2009)
You might also want to look at how fieldwork on communities that interest you is conducted by anthropologists who have a particular/personal slant on their data, and how this work gets translated into ethnography. Instead of pretending to be presenting “objective” data about individuals and communities, or to being “objective” about their research findings, ethnographers now routinely embrace their own cultural identities, as well as their sympathies with marginalized and oppressed peoples, and use those identities to encourage nuanced or multifaceted ways of writing ethnography. The following is a small example of the types of ethnography that explore marginalized identities. You should review at least one such ethnography to get a sense of ways in which you can move away from traditional, objectified writing. Your instructor can help you find more.
The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled by Robert F. Murphy (Holt 1987)
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