Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://www.chriskaplonski.com/anthro/fieldwork.html
Simply asking a person what they think about a topic will get you an answer, but what it really gives you is an answer to your question. This is not necessarily the same thing as what people really think, or how they act. If you want to understand peoples views about corruption, for example, you can ask them. And they will probably tell you. But it is more enlightening if a lot more work to hang out with people and see how they talk about corruption as they go about their daily lives. You will also pay attention to what they actually do. People would probably tell you that corruption is wrong and should be stopped. And if you just did a survey that is what you would learn. But as you go about trying to be a member of a community and watching people, you will probably see that the people who told you corruption is wrong doing something that, to you, seems like corruption: offering a bottle of vodka in exchange for some help in hurrying paperwork along. What this should alert you to is the fact that you as the anthropologist and the people you are talking with, have different understandings of what corruption actually is. Anthropologists (or most of us, anyway) feel that it is this extra depth to our understanding that is important and interesting. Clifford Geertz once described it as being able to tell the difference between a wink and a blink. He notes (somewhere in the interpretation of cultures, I believe) that a wink and a blink are physically the same action. But they carry deeply different meanings. The goal of an anthropologist is to be able to understand a culture well enough to be able to tell the difference between the local equivalent of a wink and a blink. This means understanding the meanings that people attribute to things (at least in certain contexts) better than you can do by just reading about a place. Such a depth of knowledge clearly takes a long time. This is why anthropologists typically measure time spend in fieldwork in months rather than weeks or days (as Ive seen economists and political scientists do). We also spend lots of time in the field for other reasons. If the first is that learning a culture well takes time, another is that picking up information through conversation and observation is also slow. Yet, for the reasons mentioned in the example above, we think it is almost always better to learn something through it being offered or mentioned in passing rather than through explicit questioning. Also, our very presence as researchers affects the community we are living in. We anthropologists are, after all, outsiders. Our being there disrupts the very things we want to learn about. So we often spend weeks or months letting people get used to us hanging around and learning hopefully that we can be trusted before we start poking our noses into more sensitive areas, or before people feel comfortable enough to talk more freely about politics or whatever. Notes: When anthropologists do research, there are two basic types of notes we use. There are the onthe-spot (or immediately afterwards) notes. If you are doing an interview or observing a political rally, you can usually jot down a few notes to serve a memory aids. If you are chatting over dinner, it is usually considered bad form to pull out a notebook, so it has to wait. These notes are usually fairly short and semi-cryptic. I use a stenographers pad, as they give a fairly good balance between size and actually having enough space to write things down in. Even if you use a tape-recorder, you still tend to take notes, for a number of reasons. The first is the possibility of a tape-recorder malfunction, or other loss of data. The second is not everything shows up on a tape where was the interview, what does the person look like, what where his or her physical expressions, and so forth. And, last but not least, having a notepad in front of you is a good way to stall for time or to go back and check for things you might have missed. Its a good prop. Later in the day, or at some later time, the anthropologist will work up his or her rough notes into fuller ones. These days I use a computer and a database program, so I can search the notes much more easily.
(Besides, I can type faster than I can write neatly, so I tend to have fuller notes if I type.) But on my first research trip, I wrote out notes in bigger notebooks longhand. In these notes you expand on your rough notes. You put down fuller accounts of what happened, but you also reflect on things. My fieldnotes are full of observations and notes to myself to back and check out things. Other research methods: While participant-observation is the key method we anthropologists use, it isnt the only one. Depending on what you are studying, you will use a number of different sources of information. We do often use surveys and questionnaires to cover more ground quickly. If you live in an area that has newspapers, that is another source of information. If you do work that has a historical bent, you probably will end up in the archives at some point. Ive spent weeks sitting in the national historical archives in Mongolia reading old government resolutions and proclamations, as well as reports from the countryside to the Council of Ministers in an effort to understand better the socialist-era government and how people reacted to it. Basically, anything that gives you information or insight into a topic you are interested in is fair game as a source of information. Ethics and research: I could probably write for several more pages on various aspects of fieldwork, but I think for the time being Ill just add one more section. Probably the most important thing about anthropological research is the ethics aspect. To me, the most important thing about research is the people you work with. They should always come first. At one level, this is fairly basic and straightforward. Anthropologists are (or should be) clear about who they are and what they are doing. We are not investigative reporters. When I talk to people, I am clear that I am researcher and why I want to talk to them. In our publications, we do not use real names if at all possible. Since people are going to be telling us things or letting us see things that would have concrete ramifications if they were attached to a specific, identifiable person, we must do our best to mitigate these. What I mean is more than someone leaking us confidential government information. Simply writing about social interaction can be hazardous to the people who trust us if it gets back to the community that person A, whom everyone thinks is person Bs best friend, actually cant stand him or her. Lives might not be lost as a result, but damage will still be done. In an attempt to mitigate this, even my fieldnotes are coded. Today B-3 told me that When I write up, names are changed and descriptions left vague enough to try to cover up characteristic traits. (This isnt always successful, especially in a small community like Mongolian academics.) Although (at least in the US) anthropologists do not have the legal protections against naming sources of information that journalists are usually afforded, we should hold ourselves to those sorts of standards. At another level, ethics are much more of a judgment call. Especially if you return to the same research site multiple times, people whom you work with become friends. And conflicts between respect for friends and research are sure to arise. There are no simple or easy answers here you must draw your own line where you feel comfortable. In the end, I like to think that I have done the right thing and chosen friendship over research when the choice had to be made. But I am sure there are anthropologists who would choose otherwise, and feel that they made the right choice.