Part I A Brief History of Fieldwork
Why Fieldwork?
Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark research approach of sociocultural anthropology. Its centrality has not waned since its inception more than a century ago, yet the variety of questions that fieldwork answers has expanded greatly. For instance, anthropologist Olga Lidia Olivia Hernandez studies Aztec dance collectives in multiple sites in Baja California, Mexico; and California, USA. She conducts fieldwork to understand why Aztec dance emerged as a form of ethnicity on the US-Mexico border among non-indigenous participants, and how national, political, religious, and bodily processes are involved in the reappropriation of Aztec dancing (Olivas 2018). Taking a more multidisciplinary approach in her fieldwork among Orangutan care workers in Borneo, anthropologist Juno Salazar ParreƱas draws on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies. She explores the violence care workers and Orangutans experience. She asks if conservation biology can turn away from violent techniques to ensure Orangutan population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare (ParreƱas 2018). Anthony Kwame Harrison conducts fieldwork in San Francisco among the underground hip-hop scene. Harrison interviewed area hip-hop artists and also performed as the emcee āMad Squirrel.ā His immersion in the subculture allowed him a unique vantage point to examine the changing nature of race among young North Americans, as well as issues of ethnic and racial identification, and how different ethnic groups engage hip-hop in different ways as a means to claim racial and establish subcultural authenticity (Harrison 2009).
Fieldwork is an extraordinarily flexible and expansive methodology, allowing researchers to ask challenging questions and uncover deep, nuanced, and contextualized answers that are rarely self-evident. The purpose of this book is to guide you step by step as you learn ethnographic techniques. Ultimately, I hope you will use them to answer the types of questions you are most passionate about. However, in order to gain competence in ethnographic fieldwork techniques, it is important to understand what ethnographic fieldwork is, what makes it special, and how it evolved into the preeminent research approach in cultural anthropology
Armchair Anthropology
Before ethnographic fieldwork became the well-established and rigorous research tool it is today, it went through a number of significant changes. In the nineteenth century, a very few (primarily North American) anthropologists traveled away from the comforts of their hometowns to study āothers,ā while the majority of them preferred to stay at home and gather their data by consulting the records of travelers instead. By the start of the twentieth century, the balance had shifted, with the great majority venturing out from their homes. At that time (and later), the seemingly self-evident divide between sociology and anthropology was that sociologists studied āus,ā whereas anthropologists studied āthem.ā Otherwise, both disciplines were interested in how societies/cultures worked.
In the nineteenth century, influential anthropologists such as E.B. Tylor, and James George Frazer developed highly generalized analyses of cultures. They tended to view small scale societies as if they were isolated from one another and from the impact of global forces, such as colonialism, which most certainly had a major impact on their internal social structures and belief systems, yet were largely ignored. These anthropologists, who dominated the field in Europe, did not conduct fieldwork at all, but, instead, sought cross-cultural information from the seclusion of their library armchairs. They drew their grand conclusions about the evolution of culture around the world from diverse sources without any systematic concern for the reliability of the materials they used nor the context in which they were written. Their goal was to show that under the incredible diversity of cultural practices there was a bedrock unity.
A classic example of this approach is Frazerās multivolume Golden Bough (Frazer 1890), which was one of the towering centerpieces of anthropological theorizing in the nineteenth century, well into the twentieth. He took data from any and all available sources ā travelersā journals, newspaper articles, historical archives, etc. ā with no clear assessment of the truth or validity of the information, nor was he concerned with contextualizing the data culturally because overarching theorizing about religion worldwide was the ultimate goal. Thus, finding common patterns globally took precedence over the specialized analysis of fine-grained cultural details.
The weakness of Frazerās method is that without cultural context, cross-cultural comparison of specific symbols is meaningless. For example, take the image of a snake. What a snake means in different cultures varies tremendously, in no small part because snakes are themselves enormously varied, both within geographic regions and between them. Some snakes are small and harmless, some are large and terrifying, some are fatally poisonous, some have domestic uses, and so on. When snakes are a main component of tales globally they can take on myriad meanings. It is simply impossible to gather together all the tales and images of snakes worldwide and meld them into a unified theory of the meaning of snakes to humans. They are forces for good or for evil, protectors or destroyers, creators or demolishers, healers or killers, wise teachers or treacherous betrayers, etc. etc. But if you gather together a group of tales from around the world without paying attention to such cultural details, as Frazer did, you can weave fantastical theories concerning the meaning of the snake in human culture. Ethnographic fieldwork that paid attention to fine-grained details and cultural context put an end to that kind of theorizing.
At the turn of the twentieth century, scholars such as Ćmile Durkheim and Max Weber were interested in how modern European cultures functioned and evolved, but they did not limit themselves to that sphere alone. They wrote about Pacific Rim cultures at great length as well, including indigenous Australian and traditional Chinese and Indian religious beliefs and practices. Both assumed that, at some level, all humans operated according to certain fundamental, discoverable principles. In other words, they were searching for human universals, rather than exploring what made people diverse. Like anthropologists of the nineteenth century, their data were second-hand. They did no fieldwork for themselves. As social science matured in the early twentieth century the split between sociology and anthropology opened up, with anthropologists carving out intensive, long-term fieldwork projects with peoples well outside of Europe and North America as their domain ā in large part, supported by, and promoted by, colonialist governments for their own ends. In this context, getting out of their armchairs and getting to grips with the pragmatics of rigorous, āscientificā (that is, grounded and verifiable) fieldwork in foreign places was a major breakthrough in the development of anthropology as a discipline.
The Evolution Century
In many ways we can think of the nineteenth century as the āevolution century.ā The notion that things evolve according to scientifically discoverable principles became the mantra across the board in academia. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, famous for their folktale collections, were significant linguists who documented in detail how languages evolved, Charles Lyell suggested that rocks and the physical landscape evolved according to discoverable scientific principles, Mary Anning found fossil evidence of change in lifeforms over time, and Charles Darwin (as well as Alfred Russel Wallace) argued that species evolve via the process of natural selection. Evolution seemed like the perfect paradigm to cover all branches of inquiry, and the study of human cultures looked as if it could easily fit under the umbrella of evolution along with the others. E. B. Tylor in Britain (Tylor 1871) and Lewis Henry Morgan (Morgan 1877) in North America developed complementary paradigms of universal sociocultural evolution that became normative in anthropology until the early twentieth century. Both Tylor and Morgan argued that the movement through various stages ā which Morgan labeled savagery, barbarism, and civilization ā was controlled by discoverable scientific principles akin to the three-age system which is still in use (in considerably modified form) in many branches of Old World archeology.
The three-age system, or the movement from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age, was once seen as an obvious and inevitable sequential progression. There is a simple, although flawed, logic which governs the three-stage progression, as follows. The first humans used rocks to make their tools for cutting, mashing, scraping, and killing because rocks and muscle power were all they had at the outset. They would have used wood, bones, and vines also, of course, but stone tools are what remain in the archeological record, so the era was dubbed the Stone Age. This era saw numerous innovations, including the domestication of plants and animals. Thus, it was eventually divided into the Old Stone Age (or Paleolithic), the period before domestication, and the New Stone Age (or Neolithic), the period after domestication. Domestication of plants led to sedentism because people had to stay in one place to cultivate their crops. Sedentary peoples could build permanent structures which migratory or nomadic foragers could not. These included ovens for baking that could also be used for firing pottery. Subsequently, these peoples could control heat sufficiently to smelt metals. Copper and tin were smelted first because they have low melting points. Thus, they could produce bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) to make tools which are superior to stone tools ā¦ and so it goes.
Archeologists now see that the three-age system is neither applicable to all cultures worldwide nor as logical a series of steps as once appeared obvious. Some cultures never developed metallurgy indigenously, yet they managed to evolve in complex ways sociopolitically. Some cultures had a distinct copper-using era (the Chalcolithic) in between their Stone and Bronze Ages. Some cultures skipped over the Bronze Age entirely and moved directly from stone tools to iron ones. The possibilities are seemingly endless, and what was once presumed to be a series of inevitable advancements taken in logical steps is now seen to be a much more fluid and malleable process, influenced by a variety of variables including geography and contact with other cultures. In the nineteenth century, however, such nuances were less well known because both archeological methods and ethnographic fieldwork were in their infancy. Reliable data were scarce.
While the 1870s were productive in North America in some spheres of ethnographic fieldwork, such as Morganās extensive collection of kinship data, first from the Iroquois (Morgan 1851), and later from the Winnebago, Crow, Yankton, Kaw, Blackfeet, Omaha, and others (Morgan 1871), there were two significant problems with the research. First, Morgan relied almost exclusively on interviews, which meant that the information which he collected had no cultural context with which to frame it and, hence, make sense of it, and, second, because there was a physical and intellectual separation between museum departments, which were engaged in field expeditions, and university teaching departments of anthropology, which might have been bastions of ethnographic theory but were virtually nonexistent. Consequently, field data did not translate into theory within a university environment. Morgan never held an academic position but, almost by default (there being no rivals in academia), his paradigm of universal cultural evolution held center stage, and was heavily relied upon by all manner of theorists, from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, to buttress their own theories of social development.
The three-age system of archeology, and hence cultural evolution, has the concept of progress built into it. Evolution in other academic spheres does not imply that the processes under study which are evolving are also progressing. For example, Modern English is not better than Middle English or Old English in any absolute sense. Each form of the language suits the needs of the people using them in their respective eras. Likewise, marble is not better than limestone even though it is the metamorphosed form of limestone. Both rocks serve their purposes. The verbs āevolveā and āchangeā in these contexts are almost exact synonyms, and the scholars in biology, geology, and linguistics understood this idea. Unfortunately, the three-age system of Old World archeology, when transformed into a full-blown theory of cultural evolution, can carry with it the notion that cultures advance or improve as they move through the stages. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century the idea of āprogressā in both archeology and sociocultural anthropology was equated with technological advancements, as befits a world that was rapidly changing (āadvancingā in their terms) under the powerful thrust of the Industrial Revolution,...
