Anthropological Practice

Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method

Judith Okely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845206024
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Anthropologists are increasingly pressurised to formulate field methods for teaching. Unlike many hypothesis-driven ethnographic texts, this book is designed with the specific needs of the anthropology student and field researcher in mind, with particular emphasis on the core anthropological method: long term participant observation. Anthropological Practice explores fieldwork experiences unique to anthropology, and provides the context by which to explain and develop practice-based and open-ended methodology. It draws on dialogues with over twenty established and younger anthropologists, whose fieldwork spans the late 1960s to the present day, taking place in locations as diverse as Europe, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, North and South America.Revealing first-hand and hitherto unrecorded aspects of fieldwork, Anthropological Practice provides critical, systematic ways to enhance anthropological and alternative knowledge. It is an essential text for anthropology students and researchers, and for all disciplines concerned with ethnography.Interviewees include: Paul Clough, Roy Gigengack, Louise de la Gorgendière, Suzette Heald, Michael Herzfeld, Signe Howell, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Ignacy Marek Kaminski, Margaret Kenna, Raquel Alonso Lopez, Malcolm Mcleod, Brian Morris, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Akira Okazaki, Joanna Overing, Jonathan Parry, Carol Silverman, Mohammad Talib, Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper, Sue Wright, Helena Wulff, Joseba Zulaika.

1
Theoretical and Historical Overview

Anthropological fieldwork is the subject in practice. It cannot be reduced to the implementation of techniques. No one can rote learn what to do and how to be when moving among people whose daily lives and total context, unfamiliar or seemingly familiar to the researcher, are to be studied over an extended passage of time.

When anthropology applicants are asked to outline their research proposals and methods, would they dare reveal the following? That they will learn to shin up tree trunks, as Morris (see chapter 6) kept attempting in Tropical forest India; or pound manioc hour upon hour like Christine Hugh-Jones (1979); ride horses on migration in Afghanistan, as Lindisfarne (see chapter 6); take peyote on a sacred journey, as Myerhoff (1974); hunt monkeys for dinner with poison darts, like Stephen Hugh-Jones (1977); dance as did Smith-Bowen (1954) and Powdermaker (1967); learn to gut fish day long in Iceland (Johnson 1984); or walk Greek mountain paths barefoot on a pilgrimage, then write about the smell of incense like Kenna (2005). Should the monitoring committee know that anthropologists also make friends rather than interrogate ‘informants’?

Will research proposals suggest the anthropologist will clean lavatories in a hospice (Hockey 1990), weep with the bereaved, play children’s games the day long (Hardman 1973), or drink the water of the Ganges, as Parry (see chapter 6), when it contains the remnants of a burning ghat? I did not know that I would have to drive a 1,500-weight van for scrap collection, hand-milk cows and join twelve-hour Normandy banquets. I was to appear as character witness at the central London criminal court for a Traveller charged with kidnap, possessing a firearm and attempted murder. Rewarded as intellectuals, anthropologists use their bodies. Long out of the armchair, they have moved down from the verandah. They are at the mercy of their hosts’ acceptance and then set on unpredictable paths. They can hardly mimic bureaucratic research designs and pursue a preordained project, increasingly set by a top-down managerial culture. Grounded theory may have recognized the back and forth of knowledge through process (Glaser and Strauss 1967), but not grounded in the whole being and the researcher’s body. Such theory is interview-privileged and rooted in text and word, divorced from hand, heart, movement and the senses. By contrast, as chapter 6 will explore with vivid examples, the anthropologist puts his or her body on the line, at the disposal of the subjects. Knowledge comes through the skin and all the senses (Stoller 1989; Howes 2003; Okely 2006c) There is a relationship with the people(s) through continuing, not one-off, shared experiences. We are forever changed in mysterious, unpredictable ways (Young and Goulet 1994; Coffey 1999; Borneman and Hammoudi 2009).

This book is about the possibilities and creative potential in ethnographic field-work. Although primarily addressed to anthropologists, there are lessons for other social scientists and beyond. Social anthropological fieldwork provides unique insights into long-term cross-cultural encounters. Few anthropology academic textbooks explicitly analyze fieldwork as what is done in practice. Courses have privileged sociological definitions of ethnography with positivist remnants. I explore the contrasts between pre-fieldwork assumptions with what anthropologists actually did. I had initially hoped to find the lived examples in the introductions, or even footnotes of anthropological monographs. These were elusive. I was thus drawn to tape-record informal dialogues, many up to four hours. The anthropologists were willing to divulge hitherto unrecorded accounts as superb narrative.

The book concentrates on aspects of the largely unique field practice of anthropology. Clifford (1988) and others argue that while the method of long-term immersion via participant observation is the hallmark of the discipline, few have explored its intellectual implications. Of the ethnographic method, Sanjek suggests ‘anthropologists have done a better job of using than articulating it’ (1991: 617). In Okely and Callaway (1992), progress was made in the discussion of the individual encounter and the need to explore further the means by which fieldwork is accomplished.

Autobiographical accounts have served as alternative approaches and subversions, defying any suggestion of universalistic rules of method. Through the personal, they undermine the notion of the neutral data gatherer. I argued for their integration into the mainstream rather than as marginalized narrative for entertainment (Okely 1992). Fortunately, numerous edited collections of personalized fieldwork accounts have emerged (Bell, Caplan and Karim 1993; Young and Goulet 1994; Kulick and Willson 1995; Amit 2000; Dresch, James and Parkin 2000; De Soto and Dudwick 2000; Hume and Mulcock 2004; James and Mills 2005). These necessarily, by their format of individualized articles, remain detached from linked monographs and indeed from each other.

By contrast, this book synthesizes through one author/analyst the commonalities and contrasts in multifaceted individual dialogues. I have therefore inserted extended extracts from the spoken (not written) voices of each anthropologist. Nevertheless, the selection, editing and commentaries are my responsibility alone. Ultimately, texts ‘are written from a particular author’s point of view’ (Hastrup 1992: 125).

These exchanges moved beyond any rigid interviewing formulae which the sociologist Anne Oakley (1981) so convincingly challenged long ago. They were dialogues between anthropologists where they could exchange parallel or contrasting experiences. Burgess rightly suggests that interviews can be conversations, but his example is of an adult researcher with school children, where there is a power imbalance with little or no reciprocity in the process (1984: 101–22). Similarly, while Dwyer attempts to avoid potential imbalance in Moroccan Dialogues (1982) to give the perspective of the Faqir, there is little reciprocity, thus restricting the full meaning of dialogue as exchange. At the time, it was considered innovative merely to record individual lives (Crapanzano 1980), as later creatively confirmed by Caplan (1997).

For my dialogues, I chose individuals I knew, ensuring a trusting exchange. The occasional recorded encounter with relative strangers failed. Unease inhibited free dialogue. The majority of my dialogues were recorded in either the anthropologists’ or my home space, with notable exceptions. That with Michael Herzfeld was recorded in a Copenhagen airport lobby. Malcolm McLeod, then Curator of the Huntingdon Museum, Glasgow, welcomed me to his office, while Helena Wulff and I sat in a Stockholm café. Her tape recorder malfunctioned, so I hand-wrote the answers. When she did not want personal confidences noted, she said: ‘Turn the tape recorder off!’ Indeed, many anthropologists trusted me to turn off the real machine at important, sometimes dramatic junctures. Louise de la Gorgendière, in her Edinburgh flat, insisted on ironing throughout the interview. Roy Gigengack and Raquel Alonso López brought their toddler son to my home. He, like Hélène Neveu’s crawling baby daughter, found plenty of objects to play with in an academic’s paper and book-heaped spaces. The anthropologists had the confidence to reveal hitherto hidden, unrecorded aspects of fieldwork. The extended, vivid quotations eventually pushed earlier chapter drafts to the edges.¹

In reproducing quotations in this text, some of my own interjections and comparisons have been largely deleted to avoid repetition across interviews or the recycling of published narratives (e.g. Okely 1994b, 1996b: chapter 1, 2005, 2008). With a very limited word length, I have been obliged to reserve some aspects for publication elsewhere. These included: acts of recording through field notes and memory, then analysis and writing up (cf. Okely 1994a).

Although the book is ultimately one author’s interpretation, nevertheless the text is dominated by multiple voices. The anthropologists proved to be brilliant narrators.² I challenge any high theorists’ triumphant put-down that ethnography is ‘just descriptive’. They are immune to the detail of human possibility. The minutiae in the anthropologists’ testimonies carry profound theoretical implications, if the reader will only surrender to the emergent flow of knowledge.

These anthropologists have lived fieldwork in Afghanistan, in India, whether the tropical forest, Banaras, an iron and steel complex or a stone quarry south of Delhi. Others have lived fieldwork in Iran, tropical forest Malaysia, Indonesia, the Amazon region of Venezuela or Mexico City. Many have researched in Africa, in Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Sudan, Kenya or Nigeria (Okely 2010a). Others have done fieldwork in Europe, both before and after the collapse of communism, in Poland, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Slovakia. There are fieldwork testimonies from Western and Northern Europe, namely Sweden, Germany, Norway, the Basque country, England, Ireland, several Greek islands and New York. The continents are Africa, Asia, South America, North America, and Europe, north, south or central. Fieldwork collectively spans the late 1960s to the present. The anthropologists have done fieldwork both in so-called remote localities (Ardener 1987) and in or near the Western metropolises.

For the younger researchers included here, fieldwork only commenced from 2001 and is continuing. My own fieldwork has been in Europe, namely Ireland, the United Kingdom and France, mainly from the late 1970s and through the 1990s. The work of these ethnographers around the world thus extends across space and time. While anthropologists have experienced the wonders and sometimes dangers of participation in alternative cultures, they have also confronted aspects of their own cultures which were taken for granted or controversial, indeed dangerous.

The anthropologists were of sixteen nationalities, including individuals of Japanese, Indian, Senegalese and Mexican descent. While the majority were of European and North American descent, the anthropologists included Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Basque, French, Maltese, English, Scottish, Franco-Canadian and US citizens. Their religious and ethnic identities also varied.

The narratives refute the critique that anthropologists have done interesting things but produced boring texts (Pratt 1986). The analysis of the material reveals an extraordinary set of both commonalities and some pertinent contrasts; all open to systematic theorizing. The consistent findings are indeed of generalized scientific value in the broader meaning of science (Okely1996a). What emerges, indeed cascades, from the accounts are the tumultuous and unexpected experiences across the multiplicity of cultures. Anthropologists have quietly challenged the straight-jacket of Euro-American prescribed scientized methods which are now finally being questioned beyond anthropology (Law 2004). While methods ‘training’ had been persistently institutionalized through the 1990s in the United Kingdom, little or no interest was shown in earlier textbooks towards those approaches which did not fit a positivist, ultimately ethnocentric agenda.

Informally, it has been taken for granted that anthropologists should be open to what confronts them in the field. Indeed these anthropologists responded to the people’s own interests and the specific context, avoiding pre-formed questions dictated by the anthropologists’ academic cultural contexts. Thus anthropologists have in practice experimented for decades with alternatives. Yet these ingenuities and differences have not been formally and creatively expounded to challenge dominant models in social science.

Anthropological methodological silence has not been restricted to the United Kingdom. In 1997, it was claimed that ‘most leading departments of anthropology in the United States provide no formal (and very little informal) training in field-work methods’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997b: 2). When lecturing at conferences and at Smith College in the United States, exposing the anthropologists’ flexible practices, I was surprised by the relieved responses from US postgraduates, for example at the annual conference of the Ethnological Society (Okely 2003c).

There was likewise an absence of detailed discussion of anthropological practice. Postgraduates were puzzled as to why they had not been told what actually happens in fieldwork. They were reassured to learn that established anthropologists had encountered experiences similar to their own. They had believed that changing research perspectives and making mistakes were proof of personal failure. Many methods textbooks circulated for anthropologists in North America and on book display, for example at the 2003 American Ethnological Conference, reveal similar positivist, pre-meditated intent. Fortunately, some informative wider-ranging methods books are emerging, for example that by Aull Davies (1999), although without the range of direct examples offered here.³

Without knowing in advance the outcome of my dialogues, I discovered many commonalities in the anthropologists’ experiences and responses. All the anthropologists found very different concerns and conditions than anticipated, either on first arrival or after the initial period of participant observation. Everyone changed focus to a large or lesser extent. They delved into their own resources. Any prior reading, cross-cultural knowledge and indeed a range of disciplines and earlier life experiences, became a rich resource for comparative comprehension. When the verb ‘to conduct’ is used in relation to fieldwork, this implies that fieldwork is managed and pre-directed. The more satisfactory verb is ‘to experience’. This is consistent with Borneman’s concern with what ‘anthropology does or can do in and through experience-based fieldwork’ (2009: 6). Regrettably, a managerial modus operandi has increasingly been imposed on university research (Okely 2006a).

Fieldwork, in the tradition explored in this volume, is embarked upon and completed by the anthropologist, often alone. This is not as part of a multi-disciplined research team, as implicitly critiqued by Shostak (1981). The anthropologist is the embodied participant observer, researcher, scribe, analyst then author. The anthropologist can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Theoretical and Historical Overview
• 2 Unit, Region and Locality
• 3 Choice or Change of Topic
• 4 Participant Observation: Theoretical Overview
• 5 Participant Observation Examples
• 6 Fieldwork Embodied
• 7 Specificities and Reciprocity
• Appendix: Questions for the Anthropologist
• Notes on Anthropologists and Interviewees
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Index