Doing Field Projects. John Forrest

1 Introduction

      Part I A Brief History of Fieldwork

      Why Fieldwork?

      Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark research approach of sociocultural anthropology. Its centrality has not waned since its inception more than a century ago, yet the variety of questions that fieldwork answers has expanded greatly. For instance, anthropologist Olga Lidia Olivia Hernandez studies Aztec dance collectives in multiple sites in Baja California, Mexico; and California, USA. She conducts fieldwork to understand why Aztec dance emerged as a form of ethnicity on the US-Mexico border among non-indigenous participants, and how national, political, religious, and bodily processes are involved in the reappropriation of Aztec dancing (Olivas 2018). Taking a more multidisciplinary approach in her fieldwork among Orangutan care workers in Borneo, anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas draws on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies. She explores the violence care workers and Orangutans experience. She asks if conservation biology can turn away from violent techniques to ensure Orangutan population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare (Parreñas 2018). Anthony Kwame Harrison conducts fieldwork in San Francisco among the underground hip-hop scene. Harrison interviewed area hip-hop artists and also performed as the emcee “Mad Squirrel.” His immersion in the subculture allowed him a unique vantage point to examine the changing nature of race among young North Americans, as well as issues of ethnic and racial identification, and how different ethnic groups engage hip-hop in different ways as a means to claim racial and establish subcultural authenticity (Harrison 2009).

Fieldwork is an extraordinarily flexible and expansive methodology, allowing researchers to ask challenging questions and uncover deep, nuanced, and contextualized answers that are rarely self-evident. The purpose of this book is to guide you step by step as you learn ethnographic techniques. Ultimately, I hope you will use them to answer the types of questions you are most passionate about. However, in order to gain competence in ethnographic fieldwork techniques, it is important to understand what ethnographic fieldwork is, what makes it special, and how it evolved into the preeminent research approach in cultural anthropology

      Armchair Anthropology

      Before ethnographic fieldwork became the well-established and rigorous research tool it is today, it went through a number of significant changes. In the nineteenth century, a very few (primarily North American) anthropologists traveled away from the comforts of their hometowns to study “others,” while the majority of them preferred to stay at home and gather their data by consulting the records of travelers instead. By the start of the twentieth century, the balance had shifted, with the great majority venturing out from their homes. At that time (and later), the seemingly self-evident divide between sociology and anthropology was that sociologists studied “us,” whereas anthropologists studied “them.” Otherwise, both disciplines were interested in how societies/cultures worked.

      In the nineteenth century, influential anthropologists such as E.B. Tylor, and James George Frazer developed highly generalized analyses of cultures. They tended to view small scale societies as if they were isolated from one another and from the impact of global forces, such as colonialism, which most certainly had a major impact on their internal social structures and belief systems, yet were largely ignored. These anthropologists, who dominated the field in Europe, did not conduct fieldwork at all, but, instead, sought cross-cultural information from the seclusion of their library armchairs. They drew their grand conclusions about the evolution of culture around the world from diverse sources without any systematic concern for the reliability of the materials they used nor the context in which they were written. Their goal was to show that under the incredible diversity of cultural practices there was a bedrock unity.

      A classic example of this approach is Frazer’s multivolume Golden Bough (Frazer 1890), which was one of the towering centerpieces of anthropological theorizing in the nineteenth century, well into the twentieth. He took data from any and all available sources – travelers’ journals, newspaper articles, historical archives, etc. – with no clear assessment of the truth or validity of the information, nor was he concerned with contextualizing the data culturally because overarching theorizing about religion worldwide was the ultimate goal. Thus, finding common patterns globally took precedence over the specialized analysis of fine-grained cultural details.

The weakness of Frazer’s method is that without cultural context, cross-cultural comparison of specific symbols is meaningless. For example, take the image of a snake. What a snake means in different cultures varies tremendously, in no small part because snakes are themselves enormously varied, both within geographic regions and between them. Some snakes are small and harmless, some are large and terrifying, some are fatally poisonous, some have domestic uses, and so on. When snakes are a main component of tales globally they can take on myriad meanings. It is simply impossible to gather together all the tales and images of snakes worldwide and meld them into a unified theory of the meaning of snakes to humans. They are forces for good or for evil, protectors or destroyers, creators or demolishers, healers or killers, wise teachers or treacherous betrayers, etc. etc. But if you gather together a group of tales from around the world without paying attention to such cultural details, as Frazer did, you can weave fantastical theories concerning the meaning of the snake in human culture. Ethnographic fieldwork that paid attention to fine-grained details and cultural context put an end to that kind of theorizing.

      At the turn of the twentieth century, scholars such as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber were interested in how modern European cultures functioned and evolved, but they did not limit themselves to that sphere alone. They wrote about Pacific Rim cultures at great length as well, including indigenous Australian and traditional Chinese and Indian religious beliefs and practices. Both assumed that, at some level, all humans operated according to certain fundamental, discoverable principles. In other words, they were searching for human universals,