A number of years ago a comparative literature graduate student came to Debraâs office in Cornell University to inquire about possibilities for funding fieldwork she hoped to pursue in Mexico. When asked what specifically she wanted to do there, she said, âHonestly, what I really need to do is to breathe the air and eat the food.â Debra told her she needed a more compelling academic justification in order to satisfy the evaluators.
Years later, looking back on this incident, we might well ask if the student had a point, under-theorized but implicit in the blunt statement of her underlying need for something that soundsâon the face of itâall too distant from the objective, academic work we are traditionally taught to aspire to. Perhaps she was reaching for something she could not yet nameâsomething like Renato Rosaldoâs invocation of the value of âdeep hanging out,â 1 or Rebecca Solnitâs account of walking in a place as a valuable kind of âreading with oneâs feet,â 2 or Michel de Certeauâs discussion of the importance of walking in the city, 3 or Stuart Hallâs metaphorical direction of cultural studies toward the âdirty crossroadsâ 4 where popular culture and the high arts meet. All point to the gains of emplaced and embodied cultural encounter, in James Cliffordâs words: âembodied activities pursued in historically and politically defined placesâ 5 ; or in Anand Pandianâs eloquent phrasing: âan enchantment with the unknown promise of worldly circumstance.â 6 Such phrases are starting points for our exploration of fieldwork in this volume.
For there is no institutional consensus in literary studies specifically or in the humanities in general on the value of such work; still less is there institutionalized opportunity for it. In fact, recurrent motifs in the experience of scholars who want to undertake such research have been skepticism, caution, discouragement, deferral (until after the dissertation, after tenure, afterâŠ), and an intense sense of constraint. Sometimes the discouragement stems not from skepticism but from a desire to protect fellow scholars from institutional consequences; it recognizes, in other words, that notwithstanding routinized invocations of interdisciplinarity, our disciplines rarely reward such work or make allowances for the time it takes.
Nonetheless, those of us who have found ways to undertake fieldwork have found it an indispensable tool, one that has transformed the practice, goals, and conclusions of our scholarship. In fact, other recurrent motifs in our experience of fieldwork have been gratitude for the richness of ongoing relationships forged in the field, the possibility of collaborative work, invigoration by the felt connection of academia with the world outside it, a sense of our writing as one part of a larger shared project, and intense pleasure at the conjunction of sensory and intellectual cognition.
Doing fieldwork in the humanities thus often involves strangely dissonant experiences of intellectual exhilaration and intersubjective connection on the one hand and disciplinary isolation and professional incomprehension on the other. We are enriched by the knowledge that we gain through place-based research; yet, this knowledge is often largely incompatible with the conventions of scholarship in which we are professionalized. This volume is both for those who are deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and for those of us who would like to be so, such as the graduate student who said to Shalini after hearing a talk she gave at a conference in Essex: âI didnât know you could use material like that as evidence. I went back and rewrote my talk after hearing yours.â We hope she will find in this volume an emerging community of scholars with whom to think. For, indeed, when we find others attempting fieldwork in the humanities, it is like finding family one didnât know one had.
In our experience, it is quite typical that the methods that humanities-based fieldwork emerges from and forges, the decision points along the way, remain largely invisible or backstage or appear only in brief allusions onstage. Many of our field-based conversations do not show up explicitly in our writing yet nonetheless infuse and transform the entire project. One goal of this volume is thus simply to launch a public conversation among scholars doing fieldwork in the humanities, to make such methods more widely visible without seeking to standardize them.
Our claim, then, is not that there are no scholars in the humanities doing fieldwork. On the contrary, there are a number of inspiring examples of fieldwork-based humanities study, often located at the fringes of disciplines, or dispersed across the muddled undisciplines that may be highly praised but are somewhat institutionally homeless. What we want to do is to articulate, share, and refine our practices; to compare our varying understandings of fieldwork in our different disciplines, most of which have no public discourse on fieldwork and offer no training in how to conduct it.
Cultural studies was an early practitioner of fieldwork when it emerged as an interdiscipline in the 1960s, breaking away from literature in response to massive social upheavals around race and empire, self-consciously an irritant that hoped to produce a pearl in the oyster shell of academic life, as Stuart Hall put it. 7 Cultural studies at that time turned to sociology and a range of ethnographic practices to realize its promise. But even a cursory sampling of recent cultural studies readers reveals that the center of gravity of its canonized versions has long since shifted away from fieldwork. 8 Some of the energy, sense of political urgency, and turn toward fieldwork as a method that characterized early incarnations of cultural studies now also animates the newer field of public humanities (including the work of Brooks, Cooper, Harney and Moten, Jay and Graff, Nussbaum, Sommer, Woodward, and the Critical University Studies series published by Johns Hopkins University Press, to name a few). 9 Unlike cultural studies, however, the public humanities have gained institutional currency and legitimation in a technocratic environment where it has become necessary to justify the usefulness of the humanities and where interdisciplinarity is often a form of resource consolidation.
Fieldwork-based projects have also been important in contemporary art history and architecture. Likewise, a handful of historians led the way in making oral histories a recognized and legitimate archive for their discipline; Bourdieu describes his research as âfieldwork in philosophyâ; and feminist cultural geography, music and ethnomusicology, scholarship on popular culture and everyday life have all turned to fieldwork. So too have scholars in emergent disciplines and interdisciplines such as sound studies; the movement outward from literary studies to music studies; performance studies at the intersection with literature and theater studies or with ethnography, testimonio studies, and subaltern studies. 10
There is also an emerging group of scholars who explicitly define their projects in the context of literary fieldworkâalbeit often by way of references that are as tantalizing as they are brief. We might include Muniza Ahmad (Indian Muslim literature), Lara Maconi (Tibetan oral literature), Emily Lethbridge (Icelandic sagas), Tim Frye (Panama), BĂ©quer SeguĂn (Cuba), Catalina Neculai (New York). Sean Heuston in his book Modern Poetry and Ethnography offers an extended meditation on poetic fieldwork; Renato Rosaldo describes his study of grief in The Day of Shellyâs Death as ethnographic poetry; and Saidiya Hartman describes her 2008 Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route as an exercise in literary fieldwork. 11
In his brief article, SeguĂn acknowledges that fieldwork is âa strange taskâ for a literary scholar. 12 Ahmad issues a clear call to action: âThe role and methodologies of fieldwork in the literary sphere are far less clearly defined than in other disciplines, such as anthropology or history. Yet with the gradual expansion of literary studies in Europe and North America towards the literatures of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, together with the growing emphasis on interdisciplinary perspectives, this aspect of our research would surely benefit from collective discussion.â 13
Joan (Colin) Dayanâs remarkable study Haiti, History and the Gods offers a relatively early example in this brief genealogy. Dayan uses the term âliterary fieldworkâ to describe the novelistic achievement of Marie Chauvetâs Fonds des nĂšgres: âusing a literary text as data that can test, confirm, or enhance facts from other sources.â 14 Dayan argues that Chauvetâs novel offers historical insights that are lost in empiricist and nationalist records, and provides an opportunity for questioning generic divisions between fact and fiction. The term âliterary fieldworkâ could well be applied also to Dayanâs own work and to name what is at the heart of the richness of that work. In a 2013 interview, Dayan acknowledges the pivotal role of her time in Haiti: âI traveled to Haiti for the first time as I worked on the book, met Aubelin Jolicoeur in the lobby of the Oloffson, discovered vodou and nothing was ever the same again.â 15 Dayan also credits anthropologist Michele-Rolph Trouillotâs question â[t]o what extent do âlocal initiative and local responseâ account for motion in the system?â as guiding her own work. Paying tribute to the significance of his work, she observes: âThis insistence on the local ⊠set the bar for everything I wrote, not only my writing about Haitian historiography and literature, but also my engagement with the practical quandaries of the rapprochement of anthropology and literary criticism, what I later called âliterary fieldwork.â What he referred to as a â methodology for the study of particulars as sources of change in their own right,â was for him an enduring bulwark against over...