Constructing the Field

Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World

Vered Amit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415198295
• eBook ISBN: 9781134640676
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnographic fieldwork is traditionally seen as what distinguishes social and cultural anthropology from the other social sciences. This collection responds to the inte nsifying scrutiny of fieldwork in recent years. It challenges the idea of the necessity for the total immersion of the ethnographer in the field, and for the clear separation of professional and personal areas of activity. The very existence of 'the field' as an entity separate from everyday life is questioned. Fresh perspectives on contemporary fieldwork are provided by diverse case-studies from across North America and Europe. These contributions give a thorough appraisal of what fieldwork is and should be, and an extra dimension is added through fascinating accounts of the personal experiences of anthropologists in the field.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Constructing the field

Vered Amit

In the joint anthropology and sociology department where I teach, students have frequently asked me somewhat hesitantly, assuming they ought to already know the answer, ‘What, after all, is the difference between sociology and anthropology?’ I usually tend to talk vaguely about general orientations versus absolute disciplinary boundaries but, if a flurry of recent publications are correct, in answering the same question most anthropologists would be likely to invoke ethnographic field-work as the quintessential hallmark of social and cultural anthropology. According to Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997:1):

the single most significant factor determining whether a piece of research will be accepted as (that magical word) ‘anthropological’ is the extent to which it depends on experience ‘in the field.’

So what is ‘experience in the field’? Much as fieldwork is the most commonly cited defining criteria of anthropology, intensive participant observation in turn is frequently treated as defining anthropological fieldwork (see Clifford, 1992). You have to actually be physically present in the field, assert Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik (1994a:3). Long-distance methods of communication will not do. Ethnographic field-work must be experienced as performed rather than just communicated in dialogue (ibid.). Duration is also critical, according to Judith Okely (1992). The bounded periods of sociological versions of ethnography, she argues, bear no comparison to the long-term and thorough immersion of anthropological fieldwork, ‘a total experience, demanding all of the anthropologist’s resources, intellectual, physical, emotional, political and intuitive’ (ibid.: 8). But of course, this is fundamentally a social rather than a solitary experience mediated by and constituted through the fieldworker’s relationships with others (ibid.: 2). The scope of activities which an ethnog-rapher can observe and in which s/he can participate, his/her vantage point and premise of involvement are contingent on the nature of the relationships s/he is able to form with those engaged in these situations. Finally, fieldwork has generally incorporated an expectation of travel away from the researcher’s ordinary place of residence and work or ‘home’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997).

Thus in this composite but familiar portrait, ‘fieldwork’ involves travel away, preferably to a distant locale where the ethnographer will immerse him/herself in personal face-to-face relationships with a variety of natives over an extended period of time. While this is a familiar representation, as the chapters in this volume illustrate, it is a rendering of ethnographic ‘fieldwork’ that in one respect or another no longer suffices even as a serviceable fiction for many contemporary ethnographers. The contributors to this volume are hardly alone in their discomfiture with the gap between the experience and archetype (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997) of fieldwork, as the latter is subjected to increasing critical scrutiny by anthropologists (ibid.; Flinn et al., 1998; Hastrup and Hervik, 1994b; Okely, 1996; Okely and Callaway, 1992; Robbins and Bamford, 1997). In this introductory chapter I want to examine some of the paradoxes embedded in the anthropological tradition of fieldwork. While these dilemmas reflect epistemological variabilities that are not amenable to overly generalized solutions, how we respond to them has the possibility of either opening up or alternatively limiting the scope of anthropological enquiry. It is to the former orientation that this book is dedicated.

Compartmentalizing fieldwork

One of the peculiarities of participant observation as ethnographic field-work is the way in which the researcher and his/her personal relationships serve as primary vehicles for eliciting findings and insight. There is surely no other form of scholarly enquiry in which relationships of intimacy and familiarity between researcher and subject are envisioned as a fundamental medium of investigation rather than as an extraneous by-product or even an impediment. This onus towards comradeship, however incompletely and sporadically achieved, provides a vantage point imbued at once with significant analytical advantages as well as poignant dilemmas of ethics and social location. On the one hand, it encourages ethnographers to see people as rounded individuals, as multifaceted social beings with involvements, experiences and stories reaching far beyond the limited purview of any research project. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, for fieldworkers to regard the people with whom they are conducting research merely as one-dimensional research subjects. Hence the discomfiture many anthropologists have with using terms such as informant, respondent or research subject as textual references for people they have known as friends, neighbours, advisers, etc. Nonetheless, opting instead for the latter terms of reference may not resolve the problem that however sincere and nuanced the attachment they express, ethnographic fieldworkers are still also exploiting this intimacy as an investigative tool. Participant observation is therefore often uneasily perched on the precipice between the inherent instrumentalism of this as of any research enterprise and the more complex and rounded social associations afforded by this particular method.

The tension between the personal and the professional aspects of fieldwork has, however, extended both ways, equally raising concern about the integrity of anthropologists’ claims of professionalism. Judith Okely is undoubtedly correct that anthropologists have tried to respond to pressures for scientific detachment (1992:8) as a marker of professionalism. But the effort to separate work and home or the professional and the personal is responsive to a much more pervasive structural bias in capitalist, industrial societies extending well beyond the university gates. Anthropologists whose principal methodology has rested on a maverick if sometimes uneasy melding of these domains have nonetheless attempted to uphold their overall separation by compartmentalizing fieldwork spatially, temporally and textually. The result has been a set of epistemological conventions which have both reproduced and camouflaged key contradictions in anthropological practices. There is now a copious literature attesting to the distortions and contradictions involved in one of these efforts: the absence of the ethnographer as an active and embodied participant in the social relationships and situations described in published texts. Drawing on Johannes Fabian’s analysis of the disjunction between fieldwork and text contrived by textual conventions, Helen Callaway notes that ‘ethnographic research involves prolonged interaction with others, yet anthropological discourse conveys the understanding gained in terms of distance, both spatial and temporal’ (1992:30).

Another device for establishing distance has been more literal, involving a convention for choosing fieldwork sites that are ‘away’, preferably far away from the ethnographer’s usual place of residence and work. Gupta and Ferguson argue that this convention has resulted in a ‘hierarchy of purity of field sites’ (1997:13).

After all, if ‘the field’ is most appropriately a place that is ‘not home’, then some places will necessarily be more ‘not home’ than others, and hence more appropriate, more ‘fieldlike’.

Ironically, however, anthropology has also traditionally been dedicated to the cause of contextualizing the exotic and unfamiliar so effectively that it is rendered explicable and unexceptional. Fieldwork has focused on the ordinary, the everyday and mundane lives of people and often relegated more exceptional and unique circumstances to the province of sensation-seeking journalists (Malkki, 1997). Thus anthropological conventions regarding the selection of fieldwork sites have first insisted on cultural, social and spatial distance as a gauge of ethnographic authenticity but then measured the craft of anthropology through the capacity of its practitioners to render the distant familiar. The nearby is assumed not to require this alchemy and is thus treated as ethnographically unproblematic. As Virginia Caputo’s chapter in this volume illustrates, in spite of a post-Said decade replete with anthropological atonement for the sins of orientalism, the disciplinary bias towards the distantly exotic as more valid sites for fieldwork continues to shape training and hiring practices at the very least in North American and British anthropology departments. In designing her doctoral study of children’s songs and narratives in Toronto, the city in which she resided, Caputo had assumed that a concept of fieldwork as defined by a journey to distant and specific places no longer held sway in anthropology. And yet the notion of journey and geography subtly recurred in the assumption that doctoral students would adopt a regional specialization, an assumption that appeared in record-keeping practices and comprehensive examinations. In applying for academic positions, Caputo also found that ‘geographic area’ continued to be a crucial criterion for judging candidates and that her own specific choices of ‘field’ and ‘fieldwork’ had become limiting factors.

On the sliding scale of recent efforts to reform fieldwork practices over the last fifteen years, anthropologists have subjected the artifices of textual distantiation to the most sustained introspection and revision. They have sought atonement for representational exoticisms but continue to embed them in their locational strategies. Nonetheless, they appear to have been least inclined to relinquish some longstanding presumptions about what makes the experience of fieldwork truly anthropological. Tellingly, some of the critics who have been most concerned with reshaping ethnographic conventions have also been among the most insistent that anthropological fieldwork must continue to be exemplified by thorough immersion in the daily practices and face-to-face relationships of a particular set of people (Hastrup and Hervik, 1994a; Okely, 1992). Thus Judith Okely has been a long-standing critic of the exoticist bias in anthropological orthodoxies which artificially position ‘field’ versus ‘home’. She has argued strongly for the importance of an autobiographical reflexivity as an integral element of ethnographic fieldwork. Indeed, Okely has gone so far as to subject episodes of her own childhood experiences in an English boarding-school to a retrospective ethnographic analysis (1996). Yet she insists that the quintessence of what makes ethnographic fieldwork anthropological continues to be a commitment to a process of utter social immersion.

Kirsten Hastrup has argued that in the face of the mobility and displacement of peoples worldwide, anthropologists are being forced to relinquish the conflation of place with collective and cultural production (Hastrup and Olwig, 1997). Yet only a few years earlier, she and Peter Hervik were contending both that the anthropological tradition of fieldwork as participant observation is more relevant today than ever before, and that it requires the actual physical presence of the ethnographer as an absolute prerequisite (Hastrup and Hervik, 1994a:3). It is as if in order to do something different, anthropologists have to reassure themselves and each other that it is not too different. Even such thoughtful critics appear unwilling to relinquish a longstanding epistemological tautology: that anthropology is validated as a separate discipline through a particular methodology which, while valued for its open-endedness, is in turn legitimated through spatial and social encapsulation. When am I doing anthropological fieldwork? When I am ‘there’ and doing nothing else. Given the persistence of conceptions of immersion and presence as archetypes for anthropological fieldwork and the continuing status of fieldwork as a virtual charter for anthropology as a discipline, it seems appropriate to examine these presumptions a little closer.

Autobiography, immersion and constructing the field

The conception of fieldwork as comprehensive immersion presumes a singularity of focus and engagement which flies in the face of the actual practices of many anthropologists whether working near or far from their usual place of residence. Many ethnographers are accompanied by or continue to live with their families (Flinn, 1998), visit or are visited by long-standing friends and associates, and maintain professional and personal communications, all while initiating relationships with and observing the activities of still other sets of people. These practices are hardly new. Indeed, one could argue that transgressions of the solitary fieldworker model of ethnographic fieldwork are as much an anthropological tradition as the model itself. If this model was unsustainable even during less reflexive phases of anthropological production, the effort to retain a version of it, however reformed, to take account of fin-de-siècle sensitivities, is puzzling, given nearly two decades of effort to bring the anthropologist’s own positioning into focus. It is difficult to reconcile the contradiction between an emphasis on the importance of autobiography with the implicit insistence on an interregnum of the ethnographer’s usual relationships, routines, commitments and preoccupations so that s/he can be utterly encapsulated in fieldwork. The notion of immersion implies that the ‘field’ which ethnographers enter exists as an independently bounded set of relationships and activities which is autonomous of the fieldwork through which it is discovered. Yet in a world of infinite interconnections and overlapping contexts, the ethnographic field cannot simply exist, awaiting discovery. It has to be laboriously constructed, prised apart from all the other possibilities for contextualization to which its constituent relationships and connections could also be referred. This process of construction is inescapably shaped by the conceptual, professional, financial and relational opportunities and resources accessible to the ethnographer. Seen from this perspective, an idea of fieldwork in which the ethnographer is expected to break from his/her usual involvements in order to immerse him/herself in the ‘field’ of others’ involvements is an oxymoron. Instead, as the chapters in this volume illustrate, the construction of an ethnographic field involves efforts to accommodate and interweave sets of relationships and engagements developed in one context with those arising in another. Or perhaps to view ongoing relationships from altered perspectives as ethnographers ask different questions on ‘entering’ and ‘leaving’ the ‘field’. As Nigel Rapport argues (Chapter 5, this volume), anthropologists have used the outward signs of transit entailed in travel from one site to another as the validation of what is much more crucially an experiential and cognitive rather than a physical movement.

While I studied the activities of a network of ethnic lobbyists in Montreal (Amit-Talai, 1996), I looked after my young son and also lectured and attended departmental meetings as I was required to do to earn my living. But my interest in this ‘field’, indeed my awareness that such an institutionalized round of minority representation even existed, arose from my previous involvement on this circuit as the paid employee of a community and lobbying organization. In this earlier role, I had spent most of my days immersed in the activities of the circuit. While this immersion contributed greatly to my knowledge and understanding of this set of activities and relationships, I was engaged in it as a participating lobbyist rather than as an ethnographer per se. Later, as a researcher, juggling other inescapable professional and personal commitments, I could not devote the same amount of time to the activities of the circuit yet I did feel that I was now seeing the circuit as an ethnographer rather than as a participant.

The melding of personal and professional roles in ethnographic fieldwork makes for a ‘messy, qualitative experience’ (Marcus and Fischer, 1986:22) which cannot readily or usefully be compartmentalized from other experiences and periods in our lives. For a number of years, Noel Dyck was actively involved as a parent, coach and technical official in the sports programmes which occupy so many children in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This involvement had come to feature as his ‘time out’ from his professional roles. This welcome separation between domestic and professional activities unravelled, however, when Dyck started to recognize the rhetorical and ideological components of what had passed until that point as ‘small talk’. Gradually, his analysis become more systematic, a shift finally formalized in an application for funding to study community sport. Yet the roles Dyck had previously performed as a less self-conscious participant, the relationships entailed in these roles and the knowledge they bequeathed did not end when he realized and formally acted upon the ethnographic potential of this field, nor did they end when this phase of fieldwork came to a close.

Helena Wulff’s access to the backstage of the Royal Swedish Ballet Company, her ability to contextualize some of the dancers’ biographical narratives, her understanding of the non-verbal bodily work entailed in ballet were made possible by experiences and relationships which she had shared as a dancer herself long before her re-entry into the ‘field’ of ballet as an ethnographer. Wulff argues that the stark dichotomy between native and anthropologist posited by Kirsten Hastrup has to give way to the more nuanced shifting multiple subjectivity experienced by many anthropologists. Wulff’s perspective and relationships as an ex-ballet dancer and the new forms of nativeness she acquired in the course of her ‘fieldwork’ crucially informed but were not erased by the ethnographic lens she now trained on the ballet world.

It is important, however, to be clear that this interfusion of contexts, involvements, roles and perspectives is not peculiar to the circumstances affecting ethnographers working in close geographic proximity to their place of residence. After all, in studying professional ballet companies, given her previous experiences as a dancer, Wulff was in a sense coming ‘home’, but ‘home’ in this context was a transnational occupational field and her study of it involved multilocale fieldwork in a number of different countries.

The boundary between anthropological field and home which has so often been demarcated by the metaphor of travel has incorporated a presumption that ‘home’ is stationary while the field is a journey away. It is a presumption which is undone as much by the cognitive and emotional journeys which fieldworkers make in looking at familiar practices and sites with new ethnographic lenses as by the transnational organization of many academics’ lives. Frequent migrants and travellers themselves, for many aca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9