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====== Anthropologists are professional strangers—The method of “fieldwork” ======

===== Anthropologists are professional strangers—The method of “fieldwork” =====

ANTH 1001: Introduction to anthropology

Ryan Schram

Week of May 17, 2021 (Week 11)

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1001/2021/11  

===== What makes anthropology different? =====

At this point in your first anthropology class, you probably have your own ideas about **what makes anthropology different** from other social sciences, like sociology? What do you think?

===== Anthropologists at work =====

Anthropologists study many of the same things as other social sciences, but they believe that one must go to the people that one wants to understand, talk to them, and learn to see things the way they see them.

Anthropologists don’t work in the lab, or the library, but in “the field”—the real world where people live. An anthropologist’s work is “fieldwork.”

Anthropological “fieldwork” is:

  * **Participatory**. The researcher immerses herself in the situation and among the people that she wants to understand.
  * **Long-term**. The anthropologist assumes that it takes time, perhaps a year or more of continuous residence in a place, for one to truly understand its patterns and rhythms.
  * **Empirical**. To understand the human condition, anthropologists examine facts that they can see, hear, or perceive. They are interested in people’s real lives, in real conditions and concrete situations, as opposed to ideals or opinions or abstractions.
  * **Qualitative**. Anthropologists don’t usually count or measure (quantify) what they observe. They want to describe a single instance of something in detail, and see it as part of a larger context.

Another term for the colloquial name “fieldwork” is **“participant observation.”**

===== Anthropologists write ethnographies =====

Another great contribution of anthropology to the social sciences is //ethnography//.

Ethnography is, at least ideally, a comprehensive and synthetic description of a single community of people in a specific place and time.

===== The story of “fieldwork”: Malinowski in the Trobriands =====

  * W. H. R. Rivers and expeditionary methods
    * Survey questionnaires and diffusionist hypotheses
    * Salvage ethnography
  * Bronislaw Malinowski and the Cambridge expedition of 1914
    * Immersion in one place
    * First-hand observation of actual happenings
    * Imponderabilia of everyday life and typical pattern of behavior
    * Key words, technical terms, verbatim quotations

===== Another story of fieldwork: Layard on Atchin =====

* Rivers and John W. Layard on Atchin (Tsan) island in the New Hebrides islands (today in Malakula, Vanuatu)

   - Abandoned by Rivers, who got frustrated
   - “Paper [an untitled man] makes another fire and uses a different teapot than us [Rivers and Layard]. The fact that we have eaten with women prevents him from eating with us” (Layard’s field notes, ca. Sept.–Oct. 1914).

* After Rivers left, Layard

  - Was left alone to make friends
  - Experienced culture shock
  - Adopted by another outsider: Mari
  - Participated in a big collective project: The revival of the Maki


===== Yet another story of fieldwork: Gomberg-Muñoz and The Lions =====

  * Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz wanted to understand the ways in which undocumented immigrants from Mexico made a living in Chicago
  * Met with her fellow workers separately and in social occasions outside of work
  * Worked in a restaurant, as a waitress, not a busboy
  * At work, she used “head notes” and expanded on them after hours
    * Work in the restaurant is “The Busboy Show”
  * Her informants (that is, research subjects), their restaurant, and the collective name for them are all pseudonyms

===== My fieldwork story =====

I conducted fieldwork in a society known as Auhelawa, on the south coast of Duau (Normanby Island, Milne Bay Province) in Papua New Guinea.

===== What I learned from my fieldwork story =====

My entree into Auhelawa as a “field” of research has taught me what makes anthropological fieldwork different

  * immersion
  * learning a new language
  * developing common ground with people

But there’s more to it. When you “go to the field,” you also have to give up control over your own research.

  * You meet people and develop relationships with them as equals
  * You have to depend on your hosts for practically everything
  * You must trust people, and they must trust you

Only then is there a possibility of discovery, of finding things that you did not even think you would be looking for.

/* 
===== Gardens and funerals =====

In my original plan for my research in Milne Bay Province, I wanted to study two things I already knew were very important to societies of this region.

  * Yam gardens and the food gardening system
  * Funerals and the feasts held after death

I assumed that one would be easy and simple, and one would require me to develop a strong relationship with my hosts.

Things did not turn out as I thought they would.

===== Survey questions =====

I did ultimately conduct a household survey about people’s gardens, food, and income.

I thought my questions were quite simple. I wanted to ask

  * Who were members of the household?
  * What kinds of food did people grow?
  * What did they do to earn money?

Even what I thought was basic was actually more complex

  * Garden: //oya//, or //yaheyahe// (or, //yaʻwayaʻwala//)?
  * Family and/or household: //susu// (but this concept also refers to a matrilineage).

===== Family trees =====

What is a //susu//? It has something to do with the groups of relatives that people live with, so I thought I would ask people who they were related to and how.

When I asked for people’s genealogical relatives, they say they “did not want to trick me.”

To learn about someone’s susu, you have to ask for their tetela.

  * A **tetela** is the oral history of a susu from the first woman. It describes her children, and her descendants through women, and their migrations from an origin to other places.
  * A **susu** is a group of people who are all related to each other through common descent through women, or a matrilineage.
    * Auhelawa susu are, moreover, links a chain of places connected through ancestral migrations.

===== Learning how to ask =====

  * A culture shapes how people use language to communicate
    * Cultures impose symbolic categories on different ways of speaking: some words are obscene, some topics are impolite to discuss with strangers.
    * Cultures also identify forms of conversation, and these forms imply roles and relationships for the participants.
      * interrogation
      * job interview
      * coffee
      * //[[:tetela|tetela]]//
  * Fieldworkers want to do interviews, but may not get the kinds of information they want if they don’t know people’s cultural norms for communication.
    * If an interview reminds people of an interrogation, then the interviewees will treat the interviewer like a cop.
    * If people’s experiences with interviews comes through their culture’s emic category of //job interview//, then they will relate to the fieldworker like an employer.
      * Fieldworkers first need to be socialized to converse in the same way that people of the community also “learn how to ask” questions and participate in different kinds of conversation (Briggs 1984).

*/

===== References =====

/* Briggs, Charles L. 1984. “Learning How to Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers.” //Language in Society// 13 (1): 1–28. */

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Fieldwork and Ethnography.” In //Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology//, 32–51. London: Pluto Press.

Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth. 2010. “Willing to Work: Agency and Vulnerability in an Undocumented Immigrant Network.” //American Anthropologist// 112 (2):295–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01227.x.

———. 2011. //Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network//. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://books.google.com?id=9tb0SAAACAAJ.

Layard, John W. 1942. //Stone Men of Malekula//. London: Chatto and Windus. http://books.google.com?id=Z6etvQEACAAJ.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1922) 1932. //Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea//. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. http://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp.

Rivers, W. H. R. 1914. //The History of Melanesian Society//. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.