Doing Field Projects. John Forrest
that fieldwork data are akin to experimental data in physical science in that in both cases the observer gathers the welter of observations together and is able to abstract overarching principles from all the myriad details. This is a point of view that we must ponder very carefully. Is it the goal of ethnographer as social scientist to take a mass of field observations and reduce them down to social laws in the way that Isaac Newton took a mass of experimental observations and reduced them to the laws of motion, or is there a different goal in anthropology? This debate has swung back and forth for some time with no clear answers, although at present the overwhelming majority of cultural anthropologists reject the scientific model (see Part II).
Post-Colonial Anthropology
The step from hotel verandah to village hut was a major leap forward for ethnographic fieldwork, but it contained some baggage that was rarely acknowledged. No matter how much Malinowski wanted to be a “participant” in local activities, he was always going to be perceived as an outsider, and, as importantly, he was going to be categorized as a member of the colonial elite. This status cannot avoid coloring the relationship between ethnographer and people being recorded. Whether in interviews, participant-observation, or both, there always exists a power dynamic informed by the status of the parties involved.
It is not an accident that all prewar ethnographic fieldwork conducted by British social anthropologists took place among peoples who had been colonized and become part of the British empire. Nor is it a coincidence that many of their works, such as African Political Systems, edited by Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), and Political Systems of Highland Burma by Edmund Leach (1954), spoke directly to the political organization of subject populations. Colonial offices in Britain funded such research because they wanted to devise strategies for controlling local people by using their own power structures rather than simply imposing British law arbitrarily. Whether consciously or unconsciously, such a situation inevitably leads to a skewed power dynamic between ethnographer and people being analyzed.
During the mid-twentieth century, many European colonies, particularly those controlled by Britain and France, pushed for independence. When that independence was achieved, European anthropologists no longer had easy access to what many previously saw as their “natural laboratories” – especially in Africa and Asia. Once the colonial powers gave way to indigenously controlled governments, the continued role of anthropology came under scrutiny both in the former colonies and at home in anthropology departments. This time period is now conventionally thought of within anthropology as “post-colonialist” with a mindset which seeks to redress the long-standing imbalance of power and authority between the person conducting fieldwork and the people being analyzed. Post-colonial anthropology also seeks to change the very framework of investigation, including the continuing assessment of the relative value of various lines of inquiry both for the inquirer and for the community in the spotlight. It also includes the restructuring of inquiry so that the people under analysis are able to conduct the analysis themselves.
The process of transforming ethnography from an outsider enterprise to an insider one meant that both methods and theory came under deep examination and were forced to change because of it. On the one hand, if a member of a group of people whose cultural history lies well outside of mainstream Euro-American practices takes on the job of ethnographic inquiry, the intellectual norms of Euro-American anthropology get imported into that inquiry (including its goals as well as its procedures). Thus, the insider may (perhaps unwittingly) take on the role of an outsider. On the other hand, an indigenous ethnographer may have the desire, and ability, to change the methods and analysis of anthropology to suit local needs and expectations, although such changes bring their own problems (see, for example, Hannoum 2011; Hurston 1935; Mingming 2002).
The underlying colonialist sympathies of anthropologists such as Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard are now reasonably well understood, although their implications are still being explored and debated. In Malinowski’s case, his private diaries confirm his many ethnic and gender biases explicitly. It is just as easy to identify inherent prejudices in the fieldwork of the earliest practitioners, even in the absence of confidential personal data. We should also acknowledge attempts by anthropologists, from the mid-twentieth century on, to reflect on the nature of their own fieldwork and its inherent limitations (e.g. Briggs 1970; Dumont 1978; Marriott 1953; Powdermaker 1967, Rabinow 1977 (& 2007). In light of this complicated history of the development of anthropological fieldwork, today, it is ever more important for fieldworkers to be hyper-vigilant concerning the power dynamics that exist between the ethnographer and the people providing ethnographic information (e.g. Ayi et al. 2007; Bester et al. 2003; Cerwonka and Malkki 2007; Gardner 2006; Siegel 2011); I will discuss this issue in more detail throughout this book, beginning with Self-Study (Chapter 5).
Another change in anthropology during the post-colonial era is an increasing emphasis on the need for fieldwork to do something beyond the collecting and analysis of field data for pure research purposes only. This had led to the development of the specialty of applied anthropology, including medical anthropology (see in particular Kedia and Van Willigen 2005). Applied anthropology required that anthropologists become more directly engaged with the people under investigation (see e.g. Albro et al. 2011; Armbruster and Laerke 2008; Price 2004; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006), such that activism and engaged anthropology became field methodologies in their own right and are now mainstream within the discipline (see Chapter 10). Today, applied anthropologists work in a myriad of areas, including in business, IT, healthcare, environmental science, archaeology, and other fields. There are numerous benefits, as well as drawbacks, involved in applied and activist anthropology, including ethical concerns created by the deliberate intervention with communities. These issues are directly addressed in relevant chapters.
In the process of coming of age, qualitative fieldwork went through a great deal of methodological and philosophical soul searching concerning the nature of the data being collected and the ways they were analyzed and presented, as anthropologists became more and more skeptical about the validity of the ethnographies of the past. Could field data ever be considered objective, and, even if such a goal was possible, was it desirable? Should fieldwork follow the basic models of hypothesis testing that dominate the physical sciences? How do we ensure that qualitative methods are legitimately rigorous? These, and many other, questions were posed repeatedly, beginning in the postwar years and they continue to this day. Therefore, before beginning actual projects we need to take a step back and review some key methodological issues to bear in mind when embarking on fieldwork.
Part II Analytic Strategies
Fieldwork Vs Ethnography (or Ethnology)
Analytically, there is a difference between doing fieldwork and writing ethnography (or “doing” sociocultural anthropology), although the edges between the two are fuzzy. Rather loosely, we can think of fieldwork as the process of data collection, and ethnography as the next step: writing up field notes into finished form that analyzes the field data. But things are not that simple. There is a necessary synergy between data collection and its analysis. Etymologically, “ethnography” is a blend of two Greek roots (ethnos = a people + graphein = to write). The older, more generic, term for the study of cultures was “ethnology” where the suffix logos (= knowledge) was preferred – akin to biology (life knowledge), geology (earth knowledge), theology (god knowledge), and anthropology (humankind knowledge). Today, “ethnology” is considered a somewhat dated term, although it is still used, and the notion that we are writing about a culture seems to sit better philosophically with anthropologists than the thought that we definitively know something about them. After all, writing about cultures always entails analysis even if only implicitly. There is no such thing as a simple description of a culture without some kind of analysis. The bias of the observer is inevitable.
Terminology aside, curiosity about “other” cultures has a long history (see e.g. Malefijt 1974; Honigmann 1976). Not only did ancient and medieval scholars, such as Plutarch