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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

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

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

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

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.

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

Even what I thought was basic was actually more complex

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.

Learning how to ask

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.

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