John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

You might also want to look at how fieldwork on communities that interest you is conducted by anthropologists who have a particular/personal slant on their data, and how this work gets translated into ethnography. Instead of pretending to be presenting “objective” data about individuals and communities, or to being “objective” about their research findings, ethnographers now routinely embrace their own cultural identities, as well as their sympathies with marginalized and oppressed peoples, and use those identities to encourage nuanced or multifaceted ways of writing ethnography. The following is a small example of the types of ethnography that explore marginalized identities. You should review at least one such ethnography to get a sense of ways in which you can move away from traditional, objectified writing. Your instructor can help you find more.

The Body Silent : The Different World of the Disabled by Robert F. Murphy (Holt 1987)

A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia by Tom Boellstorff (Duke University Press, 2007)

Veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin society , by Lila Abu-Lughod. (University of California Press 1986).

High Tech and High Heels: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean by Carla Freeman. (Duke University Press, 2000).

Encounters with Aging: mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America . Margaret Lock. (University of California Press 1993)

Citizen Outsider Children of North African Immigrants in France by Jean Beaman (University of California Press 2017)

Burning at Europe’s Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco by Isabella Alexander-Nathani. (Oxford University Press 2021)

Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families by Heidi Catañeda. (Stanford University Press: 2019)

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation by Juno Salazar Parreñas (Duke University Press 2018)

Out of roughly 3,000 students I have taught fieldwork to (including some 400 anthropology majors), only 4 have pursued postgraduate training in anthropology. The rest are employed as social workers, activists, doctors, lawyers, and professionals of various stripes. But, nearly all retain a strong sense of the anthropological method, and look back to their fieldwork classes as turning points in their understanding of key concepts: how to listen well, how to attend to authentic voice, how to situate meaning in cultural context, and so forth.

Many of my former students mentioned their experience with the various skills learned in fieldwork in job applications and interviews, and some of them continue to use these skills in their work environment. Qualitative research methods are poorly understood by the general public, as well as by employers. Nonetheless, savvy employers can be convinced of the benefits of hiring someone with field methods skills. I won’t go so far as to say that having field methods skills will land you a job, but having them is another arrow in your quiver.

At minimum, training in anthropological field methods develops a way of observing and interacting with the world in general – all the time. Of course, it will be up to you to assimilate the lessons learned in field methods into your life as a whole. This process should not be difficult because intensive and analytic engagement with people is potentially life altering anyway. On the other side of the coin, it is important to bear in mind – always – that intense engagement with people carries a moral and ethical burden. I take up this issue in a subsequent chapter on ethics which is mandatory reading before you begin any of the projects ( Chapter 3).

Most of the projects in this book are self-contained, but a few rely on methods developed in others, and, where this is the case, I cross-reference the projects. I will be giving examples of projects that my students developed to give you ideas; you might find some of them worth emulating. But I also encourage you to be creative in your choice of field situations. When I taught a methods course I always had one class per project that was a practicum in which I walked my students through an example project, and usually involved them in some form of observation and documentation so that they had a little practical experience of the method before they embarked on their own projects. From time to time in the project instructions in this book I discuss salient practicums I used as additional aids in your learning process. Your instructors will undoubtedly have experiences of their own to share with you in a similar vein. You should use their knowledge as you proceed, and be guided by their preferences for the precise execution of projects and their presentation. The projects proposed here may be used as is, or they can be tailored to various instructional needs. Fieldwork is, by nature, a disciplined process that, while rigorous, allows for spontaneous flexibility.

Ethnographic writing is its own species of writing, and has come under critical scrutiny in recent decades for its capacity to mislead and misrepresent people. How you write about people is as important as what you say about them, and it is possible to offend the people you are writing about, or to give the wrong impression about them, by using inappropriate vocabulary or phrasing. This is a topic that you should discuss at length with your instructor; here I will simply point out a few cautions to bear in mind when presenting your data.

Anthropologists have been sensitive for some time to the fact that groups of people are commonly identified in multiple ways – the term(s) that outsiders use to name them, and the term(s) they use to name themselves. “Eskimo,” for example, is an outsider term, whereas “Inuit” (and variants) is an insider term. In reasonably straightforward cases, anthropologists opt for using the insider term. But things are not always straightforward. Take the case of people from predominantly Spanish-speaking countries in North, Central, and South America (and the Caribbean) living in the United States. What do you call them as a group? Are they a definable group? Do they have an insider term?

The problem with finding a term for Spanish-speaking peoples from the Americas living in the United States is that this is a multicultural demographic when viewed from the inside, but homogeneous when considered by outsiders. Any single term that identifies them as a group is going to entail treating them with some sense of unity as an “other” group (other than dominant, white, US culture). That is, the supposed unity of the group exists only in the minds of outsiders. It is common to hear Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States being called “Mexicans” regardless of their country of origin, and in this case “Mexican” is often used as a derogatory term. The desire for such people to adopt a collective term for themselves is an overt admission that they form a group in the eyes of an oppressing class and that they need a collective term to use in their struggle to fight back against oppression.

The problem with finding a collective term is that every one of them carries negative connotations for some or all of the people. “La Raza” had a currency for decades – originating in political struggles in Mexico in the 1920s. The problem is that “raza” is a loaded, potentially racial/racist, term that has, among other things, the implication not just of being non-white, but of being actively anti-white. In Argentina we have a specific classification, “rubio/a,” meaning something like the English term “white” and includes a substantial percentage of the population in urban areas. Rubios of Argentine origin (myself included) have major issues with being lumped into the general category of La Raza (which defaults in our minds to what we call “moreno/a” (brown) or “mestizo/a” (mixed) – also heavily loaded terms). In the 1960s, “Chicano” had widespread popularity among some groups but not with others. It had originally been a derogatory outsider term, but, as is quite common with such slurs, was picked up by insiders and used as a badge of honor. In turn, “Hispano/a,” “Latino/a,” etc. have all been adopted and discarded.