Working in the Field

Anthropological Experiences across the World

P. Stewart, A. Strathern

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137430977
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428967
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How are ethnographic knowledge and anthropological theory created out of field experiences? Spanning Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, and Scotland, and Ireland, Stewart and Strathern show how fieldwork in apparently different areas can lead to unexpected comparisons and discoveries of similarities in human cross-cultural patterns of behavior.

1

Prologue

Abstract: Early impressions of a field area and the emplacement of the anthropologist within it are significant. Analyses emerge out of this experience in dialogue with contemporary theoretical paradigms and fashions. We adduce examples from Papua New Guinea and Scotland. Emplacement is also important for people in general. We provide three case histories by other authors that illuminate how senses of emplacement are connected to the formation of identities, among diaspora Tokelau Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, and among indigenous communities in Australia and elsewhere.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew J. Strathern. Working in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137428967.0004.

Introduction

Much of our narrative is written in ways that we have designed to help students who are embarking on field research or contemplating it to think about what field experience entails and why it is so important for anthropological analysis and theory.

We have already stressed the importance of senses of emplacement. Entry into a field area is important in this regard. The earliest field experiences tend to remain impressed upon memory because of the drama and intensity of new events. Such experience amounts to an immediate sense of place, even if, or perhaps because, so much about the new place cannot immediately be understood and ‘placed’ in context. Keeping a diary in which every bit of experience that seems striking or puzzling on first or early acquaintance gets recorded is therefore a vital part of the overall field project. Other, more systematic, ways of collecting information of course have to be put into effect, but the diary can and should be used to put into it what the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called the ‘imponderabilia’ of life: the daily events laden with meanings and ambiguities that are in effect ‘the stuff of life’ for both the fieldworker and the people studied themselves.

Another benefit of keeping a regular record of this kind is that it can become a register of how one’s ideas and interpretations change over time with deepening experience in an area. Memories themselves find their place in a flow of records, and these memories are also a touchstone for the validity of interpretations we make. In presenting some of our own memories in our narrative here we are reconstructing these in order to highlight what has been salient in our experience and therefore feeds into our analyses. Memory is a topic that anthropologists and psychologists have paid much attention to, with distinctions between public and private memories forming one axis of interest, and the importance of cognition as a process running across the public-private domains forming a cross-cutting axis. Early work by Paul Connerton (1989) laid down some outlines of discussion on the public sphere of creating and maintaining memories, and societies differ greatly in terms of the ways that such public memories are sustained, in material or other ways. In terms of the works of the anthropologist, these experiences become a part of the public world they enter into as well as having a separate, if connected, personal or private dimension. One thing we always further say to students is that they should realize that the people are studying them (the fieldworker) just as much as they are studying the people, and what we call reflexivity in fieldwork, which is self-awareness, entails being aware of this reciprocal process of studying that goes on in fieldwork.

Writing up fieldwork results is itself an act of discovery and creativity, like the fieldwork itself. Gradually, in the course of many daily and some extraordinary or culminative experiences, patterns begin to emerge into consciousness of what it is that drives and motivates social life. The pattern may be one that was expected, or one that was not, as with any scientific enquiry, and the mind has to be kept open and flexible in relation to such patterns. What you come out with will not necessarily fit the current paradigms in theory or what the recent most authoritative pronouncements have been. You may have to challenge existing stereotypes of analysis. For example, in the earliest work that one of us (Andrew J Strathern) carried out in Papua New Guinea the problem of how to define local structures in terms of either descent-based identities or alliance- and intermarriage-based identities was highly contested. The controversies could be resolved only by according parallel significance to both descent and alliance in order to account for the dynamics of social life (A J Strathern 1968). Many years later, we developed another concept that again ran across existing analytical stereotypes, in this case to do with gender relations. These relations were said by some writers to be antagonistic, marked by violence, and male domination. While there was some truth in this characterization, it failed to take into account countervailing patterns of co-operative activities between female and male agents. The locus of most debates had to do with relations between wives and husbands. The earlier analysis, pointing up the importance of alliances between groups through intermarriage, led directly on to the later development of our new concept of ‘the collaborative model’ in which ties of co-operation between spouses and between in-laws linked by marriage were perceived as the vital life-lines constraining conflict and encouraging dispute-settlement (Stewart and Strathern 2010 [first published in 1999]). In this regard, and in many others, we formed our analysis directly from remarks, observation, and practices of the people rather than from a preconceived theoretical model. When we write of our field experiences here, we want our readers to realize that these are the kinds of experiences that have led us, directly, or indirectly, to important insights into the social contexts we have studied.

To sum up in this section, to the extent that our accounts are meant to be pointers for research workers just entering a field area and for their ongoing work, three key ideas are embedded in our text. The first is the importance of early experiences and of keeping a diary in general. The second is that what we are always observing is a process of emplacement, including our own. This holds, incidentally, whether the fieldwork is conducted in one place or in many; and emplacement here further means how the people themselves define places in relation to social identities. Third, we note that with longer-term acquaintance an apprehension of social patterns emerges, and this apprehension may entail the replacement of stereotypes or existing analytical models. That apprehension has then to be turned creatively into a narrative that engages with such models, either confirming or disconfirming them, always with the field experience in mind. Finally, and not simply as an aside, we noted that the people study the anthropologist just as much as the anthropologist studies the people. This may lead them to tell us what they think we want to hear. More crucially this process may mean that they are sizing us up as humans with our own particular ways and are trying to determine where to place us in the roster of humanity. The Melpa people of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, with whom we have collectively worked for over 50 years, express all this in a number of apparently self-contradictory ways. Using their concept of mind (noman) as an idiom, they say that you cannot look into another person’s noman and see what is there. They also, however, say that sometimes people’s minds are very different (when they disagree and enter into conflict) or that, at another level, everyone’s noman is the same (when they agree or exhibit similar peaceful characteristics) (Stewart and Strathern 2001a).

We add here a few passages from a field notebook that we wrote in Scotland in June 2013, after arriving there from County Donegal in Ireland. The notes contain observations, reflections, and an account of the serendipitous way that we have sometimes met people in field areas who have then taught us so much about their own areas and their, in every way, embodied emplacement in these.

A field episode

‘On a given day in a place we discover important insights into emplacement, merely by the fact that we ourselves are there, and have been there before many times, so that today’s observations always belong in a wider interpretative field of experiences. Today we noticed throughout the morning and early afternoon a stream of visitors to the flat of a downstairs neighbor of ours, who is 96 years old and has had a mini-stroke recently but is working hard to recover. Friends, relations, and his informal care-giver gather around him and they do so as an act of watching over him, in a sense waiting for the moment of his death. They want to recognize his life because he is inevitably near to its end. He himself encourages this process. As we watched visitors come and go today we realized that this is what sustains his life, that watching out for his death actually keeps him alive longer, and this is the function of visiting. We are reminded then of the argument in the book by Frances Norwood (Norwood 2009), that people in the Netherlands who are ill and engage in discussions about voluntarily ending their lives are actually sustained in life by the discussions and consultations they enter into. Our neighbor is consciously prolonging his life by encouraging people to come and see him on the grounds that they may not see him again—thus making it more likely that they will. Perhaps that is how he has reached the age of ninety-six.

‘Today also we went for a walk out of Catrine [a small Scottish village] along a part of the River Ayr walk. We walked far out, under the Howford road bridge on the A76 and on round up towards an old site where there are cup and ring prehistoric markings to the side of the path. We were not aware of this location at the time, and we turned back and retraced our steps toward Catrine. We were close to the river again when we met a weather-beaten man and his dog and greeted him. He opened by making a remark about the day’s weather. “No sich a bad day”, he said and we agreed. AJ had picked a pretty little blue flower and put it in his vest pocket. “Cranesbill”, the man said, “see the shape the pods make when the flower is finished”. We looked and saw this was true. Then, beside these flowers another: “meadowsweet”, he said, “If ye pick these and infuse them boiled up as a drink it can quench your thirst”: He cited a book “Food for Free” that explains about all kinds of natural foods. We said where we’d been along the river. He said he’d recently seen a pair of otters near to the Ayr College and just down from them a pair of kingfishers feeding their young. He went on to talk about the cup and ring site, telling us that he happened to be at it on the winter solstice, it was sunny and the sun hit exactly on the rings there. He had sat there on a ledge and felt a great calm coming over himself. “What was the meaning of the place?” He mused that there would be parts of it underground through the building up of ground over time. In any case he had his own experience of it. He added: “Some people try to win the lottery. I’ve won it—by being a part of nature here”. He told us he was brought up in Ochiltree [a small Scottish village] “another old place”, had spent time in Mauchline [a small Scottish town], and now lived in Catrine where within two minutes east or west he could be out in nature—that was his emplacement sensibility. He also told us that he had seen two men heads down racing by, intent on getting from A to B, but what would they see by running on like that? He spoke also of seeing numbers of great tit birds and then a buzzard circling for prey. No doubt he is a storehouse of such observations, all of them feeding into his own senses of identity. [On a later day we saw another local naturalist standing out on the main road that leads south from Catrine down to Cumnock (a small Scottish town) and beyond, the A76 highway. With several miles still to go, he looked like he was enjoying every step in the open air, untroubled by the vehicles whizzing past him]’ (Stewart / Strathern field notes, Scotland, 2013).

Identities

Encounters in places such as we have just sketched from a day in Scotland are also encounters with, and between identities. We have used the concept of identities in a publication on the analysis of life histories from persons in a number of different Pacific Island societies (Stewart and Strathern 2000a). Interest in identities as a theme has increased since then, and in particular the theme has been taken up as important by people themselves, especially in contexts we can think about as ‘indigenous’. Despite conceptual difficulties with this term, it indexes a rise in self-consciousness on the part of people who mostly find themselves in marginalized circumstances of power within wider arenas that have historically grown up around them. We cite here just three works that cogently illustrate this development within anthropology.

The first is Ingjerd Hoëm’s work on the people of Tokelau Island in the Pacific. Hoëm’s beautifully crafted discussion shows how these islanders have combined life in their native place with a diaspora life in New Zealand, and how they have created theater groups that travel between and relate Tokelau identities to the diaspora life in New Zealand in ways that bring to the surface tensions and problems while reaffirming a love for the homeland. Hoëm’s study is particularly valuable for its portrayal of emplacement, as shown in her chapter 3, ‘Learning a Sense of Place’ and chapter 4, ‘A Sense of Place in Narrative’ (Hoëm 2004).

The second book has to do with issues of repatriation of items of material culture that are important for identities. This is the study edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickery (2010) in The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation. The chapters here are strongly infused with the opinions of contemporary members of indigenous communities with activist demands for the return of cultural property to their areas of origin. Human remains are often seen as iconic here because they bridge a kind of nature/culture divide and represent an elemental kind of fused property and identity. Issues to do with them tap into deep cross-cultural ideas of where people should be buried and the need to respect the dead, to regard them as ‘ancestors, not specimens’ and therefore having a right to retain the emplacement they had while living. It is emplacement and identity that are therefore in focus here again. Interestingly, one study in the book is an outlier. Kim Ackerman describes in it how one local group from the Pilbara area in Western Australia actually did not want old religious and cultural objects to be returned to them because their seniors in the 1940s and 1950s had embraced Christianity and had forbidden the use of such ritual paraphernalia within their territory. Elders of other groups had respected this decision by transporting the objects and their ritual use into other areas, avoiding the places where this use had been forbidden. (See also Sjoerd Jaarsma’s 2002 book, Handle with Care: Ownership and Control of Ethnographic Materials.)

The third study also deals with the indigenous peoples of Australia, and is focused on landscapes and the environment (Altman and Kerins eds. 2012). Landscapes in the broad sense are enormously important to Australian Aboriginal groups both as a source of ancestral identity and because historically they have been vital for a hunting and foraging mode of subsistence. Many of the contributors to this volume are of indigenous descent and they write from that perspective. Caring for and commitment to ‘country’ (i.e., Aboriginal territory) are prominent values explored in their writings. The authors are educated in cosmopolitan contexts and disciplines, but they bend their thought towards their native lands and their senses of identity and emplacement with regard to that land. One of the editors, Jon Altman, thoughtfully considers in a final chapter how all this sense of caring could lead to scenarios for ‘alternative development’ in ‘country’ and for ‘indigenous futures’. So emplacement has to do with past, present, and future also.

With these prolegomena we plunge now in medias res with some of our own narratives of time and space travel, urging our readers to bear in mind that emplacement embraces, rather than denying, change; and change entails re-emplacement in new places.

2

Papua New Guinea

Abstract: We begin with the country’s capital city, Port Moresby, as it appears on arrival and subsequently both to the anthropologist and to indigenous migrants from rural Highlands areas. We move to the importance of the field house and its emplacement, mentioning classic accounts by Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard. We discuss two field locations, at Mbukl and Kuk, among the Kawelka people of Mount Hagen and their noted leader, Ongka-Kaepa, indicating also how concepts of time have been influenced by government and mission practices. Among Duna speakers of Lake Kopiago we enter the area by a day’s walk from the airstrip or by helicopter. On one arrival our friends told us about fears of witchcraft attacks, based on jealousy of wealth, an important theme among the Duna.

Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew J. Strathern. Working in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137428967.0005.

Port Moresby

To the traveler coming up from Australia by an Air Niugini flight, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea (PNG) immediately feels different. It is not just the heat, because Australia too can be hot. The whole layout of the city is different, reflecting its layers of history, first as a colonial outpost with a few government buildings, then its accretion of small commercial enterprises and transport services strung out in the direction of the place Boroko, the creation of the University of Papua New Guinea at the place called Waigani, and finally the more recent expansion of large corporate offices and hotels in the old downtown area. Dust, noise, betel-nut stands, Chinese stores, and a mix of people from different parts of the country all going around—one’s senses are rapidly filled to bursting point. So it was when we both first flew to Port Moresby, knowing too that for us this was a way-station on a longer pilgrimage up to the Central Highlands, starting at Mount Hagen.

Port Moresby was a place where we gathered supplies and prepared ourselves for the next move, and met officials and colleagues who might help us on our way. There were deeper memories, too, going back earlier, which we will discuss later, and Port Moresby was also a place where migrants from the Highlands of PNG lived in enclaves, so that a familiar face that was known might at any time emerge from a crowd of passers-by. These migrants, for example those from Mount Hagen, often stay for a long time, planting gardens around their houses, gathering for communal cookings of food in improvised traditional-style earth ovens in their small yards, and accepting flows of kinsfolk from their home areas with varying degrees of reluctance or welcome. In the enclaves, everyone speaks their own local language, but as soon as they venture out they use the Tok Pisin national lingua franca that has its roots far back in colonial history, or t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Prologue
• 2  Papua New Guinea
• 3  Taiwan
• 4  Memory
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index