John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

One of the additional problems with Spanish is that many words have genders. The suffix “-o” is typically masculine, and the suffix -a is feminine When you have an unidentified group of people who could be male or female or both, the traditional linguistic convention has been to use the masculine plural. This usage is now changing. For example, “Latino/a” where gender is unclear or generic, or, more commonly nowadays, “Latinx” where the “x” indicates an undefined gender. In English, similar problems have been addressed in an analogous manner. At one time, the correct usage would have been to default to the masculine for pronouns, as in the sentence, “When a doctor is unsure of a diagnosis, he will …” Nowadays there are two choices to replace “he” in that sentence: one being the composite “s/he” (or he/she) and the other being to use the plural “they” – which is becoming more common usage. Gendered terms for occupations, such as “actress,” “poetess,” and “sculptress,” have all but disappeared from contemporary discourse.

There are numerous adjectives and nouns in common use in English that can be classified as dead metaphors (that is, words that carry metaphorical meanings either etymologically or historically, but no longer do so in contemporary speech) which can be culturally offensive even though their historic meanings have long since passed away. Anthropologists try to err on the side of caution in this regard. Take, for example, the old British slang word “clodhopper” (sometimes shortened to “clod”) meaning someone who is either physically or mentally clumsy. A “clod” refers to a lump of dirt such as you would find on a farm or in rural areas, so a clodhopper, that is, someone who has to hop over clods of dirt, is a farmer or rural person in general, implying that a clumsy person is like a (stupid) farmer. The word “clown” has exactly the same history. In the sixteenth century it was a term for a rustic or peasant, shifting in meaning over time to mean anyone whose actions were foolish. Where can we draw the line? Is it acceptable to call an argument “myopic” when the term refers specifically to a visual impairment? Probably not, even though the word is in common usage. Caution is always needed.

Terms such as “philistine,” which are derived from ethnic slurs, raise the issue of how to refer to ethnic and geographic designations. It is impossible to refer neutrally to the region of the world that was once the homeland of a group of Semitic peoples that became known Biblically as the Israelites, because any term you use for the region as a whole – Palestine, Israel, Canaan, Levant, et al. – will offend someone. Political designations have shifted over time, but whichever one you choose, it is a hegemoniclabel and, therefore, problematic. By that same token, “American” as an adjective for people and things that originate in the United States is offensive to me as it is to many people from Argentina, and much of South and Central America as a whole. Aren’t we Americans? In Spanish we use the term “estadounidense” (person or thing from the United States) or, more generally, “norteamericano” (North American) as adjectives in place of “americano” (American) which is too broad. But if you were born and raised in the United States you probably use “American” as a self-designation without thinking. The American Anthropological Association does. It can be challenging, but eye-opening, to examine your language usage critically.

Even terms that were at one time in common usage in anthropology, such as “tribe,” have come under suspicion even though they may have insider approval (as in parts of the first nations of the United States). Such terms tend to get lumped into the category of colonialist terminology, and are, indeed, vague when applied indiscriminately. But sometimes the alternate choices are either confusing or unhelpful. Take, for example, the adjective “indigenous.” It comes from Latin and its original meaning was “born in (a place),” but this meaning has been supplanted by a meaning of “original peoples” (synonymous with “aborigine” – that is, “ab origine” meaning “from the beginning”). In contemporary usage, however, “indigenous” is generally used to mean “the people who were living in a place when European colonists arrived.” You cannot legitimately refer to the Lenape as the original inhabitants of New York or the Inca as the original inhabitants of Peru. Peoples came and went continuously before Europeans arrived. But, the arrival of European colonists in a region put a timestamp on who was there when they arrived. Thus, even “indigenous” is a colonial term (meaning “descendants of people who were here at the time that the first colonists arrived”). There is no clear solution, but it is common in ethnographic writing nowadays to designate a group using the term for them that they use in their local language for themselves. Thus, for example, “Navajo” was the name given by Spanish missionaries to a group of people living in North America. They refer to themselves as Diné (“the people”), which is how anthropologists typically refer to them now.

At one time, anthropologists were in the habit of using the term “informant” to describe a person giving information to the ethnographer .The term has a rather dark undertone, as in “police informant,” but its more general usage in anthropology has habitually been less sinister: an informant “informs’’ the fieldworker, but thereby implies a certain kind of distance between speaker and listener. Because of the negative connotations of the term, contemporary anthropologists are more inclined to work with either more neutral or more indicative (and inclusive) terms such as “participant,” “interlocutor,” “partner,” or “interviewee.” Sometimes, however, using “informant” is the generic choice that fits best. Not all fieldwork situations are partnerships or symmetrical relationships by any means, and it can be misleading to represent them with vocabulary suggesting that they are.

Likewise, I am mindful that even the “field” and “fieldwork” can be loaded terms. When you interview someone in his/her home, are you “in the field”? Yes and no. The “field,” once conceived of as an “other” place where the “other” were studied, is now no longer a viable term, and certainly not when it comes to the projects in this book which are likely going to be conducted in situations with which you are reasonably familiar (even though some components will necessarily be new to you). The term “fieldwork” is somewhat less troublesome. Fieldwork is the process of gathering ethnographic data. Doing fieldwork has more to do with a certain mindset rather than with the people or places involved. That mindset has different facets, but it is always more than simply looking on or even “being there” as fieldwork is sometimes described (Watson 1999; Bradburd 1998).

Even if you go to live in a country that is alien to you, for a year or more, so that you are forced to learn a new language, meet new people, engage in forms of daily life that are foreign to you, and participate in strange customs, you are not necessarily doing fieldwork – even though some of the behaviors overlap. If you move to a strange location, your primary interest in learning about the place is likely to be pragmatic – where to live, how to get food, where to work, and so forth. Fieldworkers have to learn these things also, but they are not primary. Fieldwork has an ethnographic purpose as its focus, and, therefore, you must always maintain an ethnographic mindset, even if that mindset is not always front and center.

The purpose of fieldwork is to gather data to write ethnography. Therefore, you are “in the field” whenever you are gathering ethnographic data. The “field” is not a place, it is an attitude (or group of attitudes), or what we can call a mindset. The best way to establish this point is to think of a variety of people who are gathering data and what their purposes are: detective, tourist, journalist, and fieldworker. They are all concerned with useful data, but what can be considered “useful” is determined by the purposes for which the data are gathered, and how they will be used subsequently.