What is Fieldwork?

Fieldwork/Field Methods
  • Fieldwork is the foundation of creating ethnography in anthropology
  • The field is the site for doing research, and fieldworking is the process of doing it
    • although there are other methods, participant-observation is the principle method for collecting data when fieldworking
    • P-O studies people within the context of their (sub) culture
    • fieldworking requires an emic and etic perspective
      • emic: from the perspective (voice/worldview) of a member of the culture
      • etic: from the outsider (anthropologist/observer's) perspective
    • Everyday experience is the hallmark of good ethnography
      • fieldworking helps you to look at everyday experiences in new ways
      • good ethnography illustrates the importance of the everyday (mundane).
  • Anthropologists study others so that we can understand more about ourselves (and the human condition)
    • we are often unaware of our our culture and motivations
    • we tend to ignore the familiar
    • we fail to analyze our own lives, because they seem so obvious, natural and correct (ethnocentrism)
    • studying others allows us to see our own motivations and beliefs and appreciate the culture and worldview of others (cultural relativity).
    • Studying our own culture requires us to think like outsiders so that we do not miss the familiar. (strange things stand out)
  • Ethnography is the attempt by an anthropologist to describe a cultural reality so that one reading it might understand what it feels like to live within it. As such, anthropology is a powerful tool for developing empathy and understanding of complex realities. Anthropology accomplishes this in the following ways:

    1. Creative nonfiction
    2. giving powerful examples that are evocative
    3. using an informants own words and analysis (ethnographers are not in ethnography)
      • ethnography is "quote heavy"
      • good ethnography allows a culture to speak for themselves in their voice.
      • good ethnography leave out the first person voice of the ethnographer
    4. critically presenting a people, their values, beliefs, products and practices as logical systems with their own internal elegance and logic (cultural relativity).
CULTURE: The medium for human experience
  • Culture is difficult to define, and each definition is incomplete
    • Culture is local and man-made and hugely variable. It tends to be integrated. A culture, like an individual is more or a less consistent pattern of though and action. (Benedict).
    • A Society's culture is  whatever one needs to know or believe in order to operate in a manner that is acceptable to its members...it does not consist of things, people, behavior or emotions. It is rather, an organization of those things (Goodenough)
    • [C]ulture, that is,... the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives. (Sapir) 
    • An organization of conventional understandings manifest in act and artifact, which, persisting through tradition, characterizes a human group. (Redfield, quoted in Ogburn & Nimkoff) 
    • Culture is essentially a construct that describes the total body of belief, behavior, knowledge, sanctions, values, and goals that mark the way of life of any people. That is, though a culture may be treated by the student as capable of objective description, in the final analysis it comprises the things that people have, the things they do, and what they think. (Herskovits)
    • [Culture is] the various standards for perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing that... [a person] attributes to other persons as a result of his experience of their actions and admonitions.... Insofar as a person finds he must attribute different standards to different sets of others, he perceives these sets as having different cultures. (Ward Goodenough) 
    • A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members.... Culture Is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough)
    •  ... the sum of a given society’s folk classifications, all of that society’s ethnoscience, its particular ways of classifying its material and social universe. Thus, to take an extreme example, the ‘ethnopornography’ of the Queensland aborigines is what they consider pornographic—if indeed they have such a category—rather than what was considered pornography by the Victorian ethnologist [who studied them]. (Sturtevant) 
    • The culture concept... denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz) 
    • It is through culture patterns, ordered clusters of significant symbols, that man makes sense of the events through which he lives.The study of culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is thus the study of the machinery individuals and groups of individuals employ to orient themselves in a world otherwise opaque.... Peoples everywhere have developed symbolic structures in terms of 2 which persons are perceived not baldly as such, as mere unadorned member’s of the human race, but as representatives of certain distinct categories of persons, specific sorts of individuals.... The everyday world in which the members of any community move, their takenforgranted field of social action, is populated not by anybodies, faceless men without qualities, but by somebodies, concrete classes of determinate persons positively characterized and appropriately labelled. (Geertz) 
    • Culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters— as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions...—for the governing of behavior. (Geertz) 
    • Anthropological analysis reduces to the ability to ‘see things from the native’s point of view’.... To grasp concepts that, for another people, are experiencenear, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with experiencedistant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life, is clearly a task at least as delicate, if a bit less magical, as putting oneself into someone else’s skin. The trick is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to.... in the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the oneeyed is not king, he is spectator. (Geertz)
    • The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. (Geertz) 
    • Some of my work in this area has been guided by an image of a society as an organization for the production of social occasions, or ‘scenes,’ as I have called them, and of a culture as a script for planning, staging, and performing scenes.... [Culture is] a set of principles for creating dramas, for writing scripts, and, of course, for recruiting players and audiences. Culture provides principles for framing experience as eventful in particular ways, but it does not provide one with a neat set of eventtypes to map onto the world. Culture is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, more or less accurately, and then learn to read. People are cast out into the imperfectly charted, continually shifting seas of everyday life. Mapping them out is a constant process resulting not in an individual cognitive map, but in a whole chart case of rough, improvised, continually revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map-making and navigation. Different cultures are like different schools of navigation designed to cope with different terrains and seas. (Frake) 
    • Culture is, by definition here, a system of symbols and meanings. Culture contrasts with norms in that norms are oriented to patterns for action, whereas culture constitutes a body of definitions, premises, statements, postulates, presumptions, propositions, and perceptions about the nature of 3 the universe and man’s place in it. Where norms tell the actor how to play a scene, culture tells the actor how the scene is set and what it all means. Where norms tell the actor how to behave in the presence of ghosts, gods, and human beings, culture tells the actors what ghosts, gods, and human beings are and what they are all about.... The world at large, nature, the facts of life, whatever they may be, are always part of man’s perception of them as that perception is formulated through his culture. The world at large is not, indeed it cannot be, independent of the way in which his culture formulates his vision of what he is seeing.... Reality is itself constructed by the beliefs, understandings, and comprehensions entailed in cultural meanings. (Schneider) 
    • Culture... [is] defined not simply as experiences functioning within the context of historical structures and social formations, but as ‘lived antagonistic relations’ situated within a complex of sociopolitical institutions and social forms that limit as well as enable human action.... It is a complex realm of antagonistic experiences mediated by power and struggle and rooted in the structural opposition of labor and capital, as one instance, and, in another instance, as the transformative ability of human beings to shape their lives while only being partially constrained by the social, political, and economic determinants that place interventions on their practice.... To rethink the concept of culture is thus to attempt to articulate not only the experiences and practices that are distinctive to a specific group or class, but also to link those experiences to the power exercised by the dominant class and the structural field over which the latter exercises control. (Giroux) 
    • Culture is constituted by the relations between different classes and groups bounded by structural forces and material conditions and informed by a range of experiences mediated, in part, by the power exercised by a dominant society.... [C]ulture is constituted as a dialectical instance of power and conflict, rooted in the struggle over both material conditions and the form and content of practical activity. (Giroux)
Characteristics of Culture
  • We can see from these definitions above, that the way someone chooses to study and/or analyze culture might be greatly impacted by the definition to which one ascribes. What we do know about culture is the following:
    • learned
    • shared
    • integrated
    • symbolic
  • Cultures always change, and at the same time strive for equilibrium. This is known as the dynamics of culture.
  • Cultures may be understood from two main perspectives (or a combination of both):
    • Ideological: a set of beliefs, cognitive principles which guide thought and behavior
    • Adaptive: a system of adaptation in response to the "environment"
  • Cultures have internal variation
    • individuals who are members of a culture differ
    • the degree of internal variation depends on the scale of the society. Larger societies tend to be more heterogeneous and show higher levels of internal variation
    • individuals make up cultures, they vary around the "core principles" and "model personalities" (Benedict). 
  • A culture is composed of subcultures: this includes any group which is distinguished socially from another (this in addition to individual variation). 
    • These social distinctions will be accompanied by differences in values, beliefs, ideals and behaviors. 
    • The job of an anthropologist is to describe these to elucidate the complexity of culture and its integrative powers. 
    • Being a member of a subculture does not remove you from membership in the common culture, nor do subcultures threaten the existence of a culture.
      • common interest group
      • age cohort
      • ethnic group
      • occupational group
      • gender
      • class
      • neighborhood
      • school
      • sexuality
This semester we will be studying a subculture based on geography. Our geography will be limited to a "block" of public space which is inhabited by members of this subculture.

Anthropology is NOT Journalism:

  • insider's perspective
  • looking for multiple sources rather than facts
  • deep, lengthy data collection and analysis
  • use "principle informants" to guide research and check information
  • do no harm (ethically) as a guideline for research and writing

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