John Forrest - Doing Field Projects

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Most of the projects in this book were originally designed for undergraduate majors in anthropology, and they have been thoroughly tested over more than 20 years of teaching them. However, they may also be useful to anyone with an interest in qualitative methods, including postgraduate students in anthropology as well as researchers in related fields. Prior to the 1980s, there was precious little interest in teaching fieldwork methods to undergraduates, especially in the United States. There were some individual instructors who took it upon themselves to teach and supervise fieldwork projects, but no overall institutional expectation that undergraduates need be trained as fieldworkers, and, in fact, there was a significant contingent within the discipline that was actively hostile to the idea of undergraduates conducting fieldwork. There was not even a uniform interest in teaching field methods to doctoral candidates in those days. Eventually seminars and field schools, such as the one created by H. Russell Bernard, set about ensuring that professional fieldworkers had a solid methodological grounding before embarking on sustained fieldwork. Such seminars produced invaluable written resources for the novice fieldworker, and they continue to proliferate. These resources are, however, geared to a level of professionalism that is unnecessary for many undergraduate projects.

Undergraduate student needs are highly varied, but, no matter what their personal and professional goals in life are, they can all benefit from having some grounding in anthropological methods. While it is typical for a biology or chemistry course to have a lab component, it is less common for cultural anthropology courses to have a methods course. This is true for a number of reasons. First, anthropological fieldwork does not happen in a self-contained laboratory. Therefore, it is not easy to supervise. Second, fieldwork can take considerable amounts of time (with much of it unproductive). Third, there are numerous ethical concerns about dealing with human subjects that have to be monitored carefully. Fourth, setting up the kind of fieldwork projects that undergraduates can productively engage in is a challenge. The last issue is the reason for this book. Undergraduate fieldwork is similar to graduate work in some ways, but not identical by any means, and should really be handled differently. Hence the projects in this volume.

This book is the product both of my own intensive professional experience as a fieldworker over a period of 40 years in the swamps of the Tidewater of North Carolina, the pueblos and Hispano villages of New Mexico, Buenos Aires and surrounds (my birthplace), and urban Cambodia (where I currently live), as well as smaller projects in England, Ukraine, Mari-El in the Russian Federation, and northern Italy, and of my experience designing and teaching a fieldwork methods course for undergraduates, which ran annually for over 20 years. I also introduced fieldwork methods into my Introduction to Anthropology course, not as a full-blown lab section akin to bio or chem lab, but as a paper requirement in the second half of the semester, where students could pick one assignment to pursue. Many examples in this book can be used in this way.

This book is designed to be a self-contained text for undergraduate instruction, but, if you are an instructor considering using these projects for your classes, either as individual exercises, or strung together as a full-blown course, you should realize that, despite the personal details and the specificity, there is a great deal of flexibility built into each exercise, and you should feel free to add and modify as you see fit. In certain spheres, such as the development of research design, it is expected that you will have your own needs and ideas, and you should treat the suggestions here as a rough template only. Most of the projects can be used on their own, although some of the later ones build on skills acquired in earlier ones, and several require the kind of planning that is, perhaps, impractical for a stand-alone exercise in a course for which a field project is only an adjunct.

Although this text is designed for use in undergraduate courses in anthropology, it is not limited to that audience. Postgraduate students may also use it to gain insight into qualitative fieldwork as a method, particularly at the beginning of their studies. Trainees in a variety of disciplines from sociology and social psychology to market research and hotel management can also use relevant projects to apply qualitative methods of investigation to their own specialties. These days, there is a common popular belief that if social data under investigation are quantified, the resultant “study” is somehow more rigorous (that is, more “scientific”) than a qualitative one. This perception may sometimes be reasonable, but it does not have to be. Qualitative investigations can be designed in a thoroughly rigorous manner, and may yield results that are more nuanced and insightful (and, therefore, more “useful”), than a strictly quantitative one. In that regard, the methods outlined in this text can be used by anyone interested in facets of social research, so that the projects can be tailored for use by people in human resources, public relations, political campaigns, workplace efficiency, and the like, where a deeper understanding of various components of the social landscape can be beneficial.