Locating the Field

Space, Place and Context in Anthropology

Simon Coleman, Peter Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845204020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Are reports of the death of conventional fieldwork in anthropology greatly exaggerated? This book takes a critical look at the latest developments and key issues in fieldwork. The nature of 'locality' itself is problematic for both research subjects and fieldworkers, on the grounds that it must now be maintained and represented in relation to widening (and fragmenting) social frames and networks. Such developments have raised questions concerning the nature of ethnographic presence and scales of comparison. From the social space of a cybercafe to cities in India, the UK and South Africa among others, this book features a wide range of ethnographic studies that provide new ways of looking at the concepts of 'locality' and 'site'. It shows that rather than taking key fieldwork processes such as globalization and mobility for granted, anthropologists are well-placed to examine and critique the totalizing assumptions behind these notions.

1
Studying Down, Up, Sideways, Through, Backwards, Forwards, Away and at Home: Reflections on the Field Worries of an Expansive Discipline

Ulf Hannerz

We seem to worry about ‘the field’ these days. Perhaps anthropologists always did, in a more private way, even in the past when elders tended to be secretive or at least vague about the field experience, and when first fieldwork was thus indeed like a rite of passage into professional maturity. But that field was probably a rather fixed entity to worry about, a ‘tribe’, a village, some place you could get to know by covering it on foot and engaging with its people face to face. And it used to be self-evidently a matter of ‘being there’ – away, rather than ‘here’. Now we do not seem to know what the field is, or where it should be, if it is real or perhaps virtual, and even if there has to be one at all.

Yet there may still be limits, or at any rate proclaimed limits. When some colleague, not least a young one, or a youngish one beginning to stake a claim to seniority, now comes up with what he or she sees as a new kind of field, or a new way of approaching a field, the elders might curtly say, ‘It’s already been done’, but they could also snap, ‘That’s not anthropology’. And that would mean that it would not serve as a rite of passage.

I will try here to look at some understandings of fields and fieldwork as they have developed in the last few decades, in the post-classical period of social anthropology. This will be in large part my own story, partly perhaps to show my credentials, partly because I am reaching the stage where one’s point of view becomes increasingly retrospective and where one is quick to grasp occasions for nostalgia – but mostly, I hope, because my field experiences, basically four of them, can illustrate reasonably instructively some of our shifting notions of, and arguments about, proper locations.

It seems that most of the time that I have been in anthropology, there have been key terms of direction, mostly of expansion, suggesting important ways in which the discipline has continuously reinvented itself. Classic anthropology was a matter of ‘being there’, away, an expatriate anthropology; thus calls for an ‘anthropology at home’, fieldwork without malaria pills, already signalled an expansive innovation. As on reflection it was soon understood that much of that anthropology ‘at home’ had become a matter of ‘studying down’, it was proposed that we should do more ‘studying up’. But then as some anthropologists focused their ethno-graphic curiosity on people with practices not so unlike their own, this could readily enough be labelled as ‘studying sideways’. And when it was understood that the construction of fields could involve tracing webs of relations between actors, institutions and discourses, a notion of ‘studying through’ was close at hand.¹ Recently, moreover, the field has sometimes been ‘here and there’, in many sites, ‘trans-’ or ‘multi-’ something or other. If we bring time in as well, to complicate things yet more, the classics may have tended towards the construct of an ‘ethnographic present’, but even when Radcliffe-Brownean strictures on conjectural history were still a reigning orthodoxy, there were those who quietly went on with their ethnographic excavations of the past. Later on historical anthropology indeed became a growth area, but it was also understood to include a ‘history of the present’. And if anthropologists have tended to be mostly sceptical about predictions, one can spot here and there an interest in the future, and in people’s ideas about the future: in terms of hope or despair, or in terms of scenarios.² So anthropologists now study not only here or there, and up, down, through or sideways, but also backwards and forward.

Assuming, as I do, that the overall agenda of anthropology involves the mapping of a continuously changing human diversity, that is all fine. It is an agenda where most of us can fit in somewhere, with all the particularities of our interests, temperaments and situations. Our paths through this expanded terrain of anthropology may be very personal, revealing themselves only cumulatively, depending on practical circumstances and experiences as well as on debates within the discipline. At that level we may mostly take a few steps at a time, dealing with problems pragmatically as we encounter them, less concerned with what these individual moves in their aggregate mean to anthropology. In large part that is the kind of story I will tell.

But then to the extent that the discipline is also some sort of community, perhaps as some of these particular moves are added up, and as they combine with more general conjunctures, they may lead towards more collective worries. And then the practical and technical issues may turn out to have become mixed with moral matters having to do with the coherence of the community. I will suggest that we have seen this happening recently, with ‘the field’ serving as a symbol of tensions which also have other dimensions. And I will end by pointing to some circumstances affecting our relationships to ‘the field’ that we perhaps need to think more about.

From Ghetto to Global

I have always been an expatriate ethnographer, in the routine sense of not being in the field, in any organized way, in my own country. I went into anthropology because of an early engagement with Africa, at about the time Harold Macmillan, British prime minister, was proclaiming that a ‘wind of change’ was blowing through the continent; a wind of independence. We might describe it as a period of Afro-optimism. I had already done a little travelling in West Africa before, but by the time I was ready for serious fieldwork, in the mid-1960s, the country I had in mind, Nigeria, descended into civil war, and it seemed wisest to think of something else. I was offered a position as staff anthropologist in an applied socio-linguistic project concerned with Afro-American dialect in Washington, DC, and so I spent two years in the latter half of the 1960s hanging out in a black neighbourhood in that city; a ghetto neighbourhood, as one would say (Hannerz 1969).

At that point in time, the location may have been rather unconventional for an anthropologist, but the fieldwork was mostly according to the rules. The social and political climate was not such that I wanted to have a high profile as a researcher, doing more or less formal interviews or even surveys. Instead this was participant observation in a quite strict sense, mostly within one city block and its immediate surroundings. Above all, in the eyes of neighbourhood people, I was a young white foreigner, and a student of some sort; no doubt noticeable enough, although I tried to be unobtrusive. Since then, as anthropologists have become more self-conscious about their ways of being in the field, the notion of the observer as a ‘fly on the wall’ has come in for much ridicule. Indeed we could seldom be so inconspicuous, and it would have been entirely unnatural to be somehow present but not engaged in human interactions. None the less, in the field in my Washington neighbourhood, I preferred to let people walk their walk and talk their talk, to have everyday events as far as possible take the course I believed they would have taken without me; in that sense surrendering to the field. This seemed least risky in terms of my personal acceptability, and, moreover, since it was a central purpose of the study to understand how the modes of thought and action of black ghetto-dwellers differed from those of mainstream America, indeed whether they differed, more active interference on my part would have seemed quite counterproductive. In summary, then, my Washington experience seems to me to have been a case of fieldwork by immersion, of the classical type or even in certain ways a somewhat extreme version of it.

If anything worried me about my Washington field, then, it was hardly the general nature of my endeavour. I was aware of questions of personal safety, but less because I was a conspicuous outsider than because people in the neighbourhood were themselves a bit preoccupied with the threat of violence – the management of danger indeed became one research topic (cf. Hannerz 1981). Moreover, I occasionally felt some dismay, especially early in fieldwork, about the hours I seemed to be wasting in semi-darkness, watching bad TV programmes with neighbourhood friends. Standard ethnographic practice in the 1960s was not yet about media use.

Two developments in the growing self-consciousness and intensifying debate among anthropologists about their fields occurred about the time of my work in Washington, or soon after. One was the emergence of that notion of ‘anthropology at home’ – there had perhaps always been some, but now it became increasingly recognized as a tendency, and professionally legitimized. But what was ‘at home’? I was rather amused when I received an invitation to an ASA conference on that topic on the basis of my Washington experience – I had hardly thought of my Afro-American ghetto neighbourhood in that way. But since I did not attend the conference, I did not get to voice my doubts. The underlying assumption may still have been that any fieldwork in an urban Western setting was not quite ‘away’, at least unless you were a non-Occidental anthropologist yourself – other ethnographers, other Bongo Bongos.

The second development could be readily identified with one particular anthropologist, and one particular chapter in a book criticizing established anthropology. In her contribution to Reinventing Anthropology, Laura Nader (1972) argued that it was time for anthropologists to ‘study up’ – for various reasons they had been ‘studying down’, observing people rather less powerful and privileged than themselves; but to understand how powerlessness and poverty were shaped, one must scrutinize the activities of the people at the top. And so, in these terms, what I had done in Washington was merely one more case of studying down.

As things turned out, in my next field, after a fashion, I did study up. After completing my Ph.D. I spent the next year doing Swedish military service, and just after I got out of that, I had an invitation to a conference at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Since I was not due back in Stockholm until the next academic year, I had time to spare, and decided to stay on in the Caribbean for that period. Where I went was in large part a matter of accident. When I had made a brief excursion from Washington to Jamaica a few years earlier, the airline booking agent had regretted that I could not get on a non-stop flight from Jamaica back to the USA, but had to have a brief stop on the Cayman Islands. That way, at least, I became aware of their existence, in the late 1960s, when this small lingering outpost of the Empire had not yet earned a reputation for either tourism or more or less shady offshore banking. I found that little anthropological work had been done there. So to the Cayman Islands I returned, in 1970, for a slightly longer stay (Hannerz 1974).

I had a very modest research grant which at least allowed me to rent a bicycle, although after having found that one stretch of road was inhabited by some mean dogs, I began to rent a car for selected excursions instead. At any rate, the grant had not required very precisely identified research goals, so when just about a week after my arrival a local political crisis erupted, I could quickly focus my attention on that. The British colonial administration had announced plans for regulating land sales and construction more strictly than in the past. The growth of tourism, the rise of new hotels on the sea front, and the perceived interest in plots for foreigner-owned second homes appeared to require such planning. Various local entrepreneurs, however, probably with expatriate interests in the background, much preferred to continue their less constrained style of business, and they mobilized local opinion. There was heated agitation, and a protest march unique in the history of the islands. Then one morning a British gunboat was seen anchored off the small harbour, and rumours were flying that soldiers were hiding in the bushes inland. Eventually there was a dramatic all-day meeting of the Legislative Assembly, some kind of compromise was hammered out, and the Islands could return to their ordinary tranquillity.

While the crisis lasted, I had had a close-up view of local-level politics and of the styles of populist leadership exhibited by some of the prominent agents of protest. During the remainder of my stay in the Cayman Islands, much of my time was taken up by trying to grasp the character of recent political history in the territory, after an administrative link to Jamaica had been cut as that larger island moved towards its own independence, through a short-lived attempt at party politics, to the current state of personalized flux. After a period of intense observation followed a phase where I did extensive interviews with the politicians involved, with people in the administration, and with various other observer-commentators. Some of the politicians had had their egos or their reputations bruised and were eager to talk. Apart from these encounters, I sought out various written materials – what little there had been of a Caymanian press, official documents, old manifestoes, and the like, which some politicians could retrieve from half-forgotten personal collections. Working my way from the present into the past, then, I was studying backwards. But to repeat, I was also studying up, insofar as I was dealing in large part with the Caymanian political élite. Yet such things are relative. These leaders were mostly petty entrepreneurs in a small-scale society, struggling to rise a little above the level where one merely makes ends meet. One could insert here that much anthropology from the classic early or mid-twentieth-century period is indeed ambiguously placed in terms of studying up or down. Certainly it was often about kingship, chieftaincy and rule, thus ‘up’. Yet entangled in the power relationships of colonialism, anthropologists may have found themselves almost inevitably studying ‘down’.

For my next field engagement, beginning in the mid-1970s, I was back in West Africa, where I had intended to start my career as an ethnographer, in a Nigerian town which had grown around a new railway junction in the colonial era. But by now my plans had been influenced not least by my Washington field experience. If the latter, like much urban ethnography, had involved a smaller unit within a city, in this case a neighbourhood, in Nigeria I wanted to try to deal with an entire urban community, even if not a particularly large one. (In this case, if I took a couple of hours, I could in fact walk around all of it.) While ethnicity and occupational structure were the main dimensions of my study, in a way I tried to maximize ethno-graphic diversity. I should add that it was also in a period when I was strongly influenced by the work of the ‘Manchester School’ in Central Africa, and while my Nigerian town was of a different kind than the urban communities which the Mancunians had dealt with on the Copperbelt, I found thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: ‘Being … Where?’ Performing Fields on Shifting Grounds
• 1 Studying Down, Up, Sideways, Through, Backwards, Forwards, Away and at Home: Reflections on the Field Worries of an Expansive Discipline
• 2 Beyond the Verandah: Fieldwork, Locality and the Production of Knowledge in a South African City
• 3 Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing
• 4 Rendering and Gendering Mobile Subjects in a Globalized World of Mountaineering: Between Localizing Ethnography and Global Spaces
• 5 Post-Diasporic Indian Communities: A New Generation
• 6 The Internet, Cybercafés and the New Social Spaces of Bangalorean Youth
• 7 Out of Proportion? Anthropological Description of Power, Regeneration and Scale on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea
• 8 Far from the Trobriands? Biography as Field
• 9 Diaspora, Cosmopolis, Global Refuge: Three Voices of the Supranational City
• Index