There is a troubled relationship between the representation of anthropological fieldwork and the actuality of any particular fieldwork. In sober fact, fieldwork can take as many forms as there are anthropologists, projects, and circumstances. tJean Briggs (1970) spent 17 months with a family group of Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, 150 miles from anyone else. It is difficult to conceive of a more intense, total, and perhaps ill-advised abandonment to the ethnographic project. No-one spoke English. She was dependent on her hosts for shelter, for much of her food and clothing, and in an immediate and frightening sense for her very survival. Only once did she briefly leave the field, for a tiny and hardly less austere outpost of civilization. Malcolm Young (1991), on the other hand, did his fieldwork on the police of Newcastle while being a Newcastle policeman, and so never left home — or perhaps never left the field. My own fieldwork with Sri Lankan forest monks was different again (Carrithers 1983). I lived in Sri Lanka for nearly three years, but only occasionally among the monks: after all, they live in the woods to get away from people.
The representation of fieldwork is another matter. In the 1920s Malinowski published a series of works representing the Trobrianders and — even more momentous for subsequent anthropologists — the character of his fieldwork in the Trobriands. ^George Stocking called these works ‘mythopoeic’ (Stocking 1983: 110) because they set out a grandly heroic and vivid image of fieldwork against which later anthropologists measured themselves. To become immersed in local life, the intrepid fieldworker must be isolated completely from the consolation of his or her fellows: ‘imagine yourself set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village while the launch … which has brought you sails away’ (Malinowski 1922: 4). The fieldworker spends months or years in task, learns the language and thoroughly documents every aspect of local society. It is hard to imagine a more thorough devotion to science, and indeed the Mal-inowskian ethnographer is a paid-up member of the scientific guild, possessing special methods of collecting, manipulating, and fixing evidence (1922: 6), thus making an experimental contribution (1922: 2) on the analogy of chemistry or physics. Malinowski captured this composite picture brilliantly in the phrase participant observation, which evokes what was then considered the scientific method par excellence, observation, and adds a twist of first-hand knowledge from the person on the spot.
It is now easy to find this image quaint, and certainly Malinowski’s practice was not so monumental as his precept, but it is important to retrieve the tremendous impact the ideal of the heroic ethnographer has had on the practice of anthropology. It set out an aspiration which enabled later anthropologists, not only in Britain but elsewhere, to work in extraordinarily difficult circumstances under the fortifying assumption that if it had been done once it could be done again. Moreover, the quality and quantity of Malinowski’s information seemed fully to justify the role he claimed for himself as founder of modern anthropological fieldwork. On the other hand, there were significant silences in his work, and in that of those who followed him. Methods were frequently invoked, but in print little of use was said. The actual process of fieldwork, the sense of it being a day-to-day experience and a deeply problematical one at that, was largely missing. And participation was understood largely to be a superior form of observation, for anything more might seem unscientific.
The Malinowskian image held unchallenged for more than forty years (for discussions of fieldwork in that period see the bibliography to Powdermaker 1966). But in 1959 Joseph Casa-grande edited In the Company of Man, a collection in which a long list of anthropologists, including several elder statesmen, each discussed a key informant met during fieldwork. This topic signalled a more human-sized and less scientistic view of the research enterprise. Casagrande wrote that ‘we wish to share with the reader the personal experience of field work, and to communicate the essentially humane quality of our discipline in a way that is at once aesthetically, emotionally, and scientifically satisfying’. He stressed that the capacity for imaginatively entering into the life of another people becomes a primary qualification for the ethnographer (Casagrande 1960: xii). This is no doubt true of most fieldwork, indeed of Malinowski’s, but it had not so far figured as a part of anthropology’s official self-image. In 1965 Kenneth Read’s The High Valley was the first serious ethnography to use a largely autobiographical style, revealing his own feelings and failings in the service of scholarship. And in 1966 Hortense Powdermaker, a one-time student of Malinowski, wrote quite explicitly of anthropology as a humanistic discipline in a monograph-length personal-cum-scholarly retrospective of her professional life (Powdermaker 1966). To bolster her rejection of a purely scientistic anthropology, she chose an image that was intentionally subversive, that of the anthropologist as a ‘human instrument’ studying other human beings (1966: 19). She probably meant scientific instrument, but the direction of her argument suggests that she could as well have meant sensitive musical instrument.
There followed an explosion of writing about fieldwork, ranging from handbooks for gathering information, through personal reminiscences, to new styles of ethnography using personal experience and feelings, and this broadening stream carries on right to the present. Some of the Malinowskian mystique still hovers over fieldwork, and some of the fieldwork manuals make it out to be at least as orderly and scientific as Malinowski ever did: but for the most part we now understand the ethnographer as a more complex, flawed, human-sized figure whose efforts and exposure to the unfamiliar bring forth a less absolutely certain, but also a richer and more nuanced account. Jean Briggs’s Never in Anger (1970) became one of the most widely quoted ethnographies. She showed how an outburst of anger, unremarkable among Yankees but unacceptable among Inuit, led to their ostracizing her, but also to a more profound understanding on her part, and so ours, of Inuit social relations. The use of personal experience in this way is now an acceptable scholarly and writerly device for anthropologists, and can sometimes be extremely revealing (see, for example, Favret-Saada 1980).
This shift in the representation of fieldwork is tied to a larger change in the character of anthropology in general (see Carrithers 1992 for a fuller treatment). The natural scientific image of anthropological research regarded culture and society chiefly as collectible or countable, whereas now we regard culture and society as matters to be learned. On this view, there are two kinds of knowledge involved in fieldwork. One kind is the practical, everyday knowledge that the people studied use to get around in their lives. The anthropologist must engage with this, both to survive and work in local circumstances and to discover local reasons, motives and standards. The anthropologist may never totally command the local language or local styles of relating, but she does achieve a good passive knowledge of them. She then rehearses and reflects upon what she has learned — and also upon what she has counted and collected – and transforms this first knowledge into a second knowledge, no longer a personal knowledge of how to handle persons, but a critical knowledge of how to compare one society and culture with others, particularly her own. It would be more faithful to the anthropological enterprise if we called this process engaged learning.
In this light, the present understanding of fieldwork might be something like this. Field-work encompasses much more than the time you spend in the field. You must prepare by reading and talk, and by cultivating knowledge of your own ignorance and an attitude of intense and pure curiosity, rather like the feeling you have just before you utter a question to which you deeply want to know the answer. Then, in the field, you must be able to tap this sense and turn it upon anything you meet. For you will find that your experience there is mostly a brash, awkward, hit-and-run encounter of one sensibility with others, as Kumar (1992: 1) so aptly remarked, and only curiosity and hope – with a measure of self-organization — will get you through. Whatever preparations you made, you will still have to make it up as you go along. You will struggle to produce that second knowledge, the knowledge reworked for scholarly purposes, even while you are struggling to achieve the first knowledge, how to live with people. You will gain a measure of peace from successfully counting and collecting things, but only towards the end of your stay might you expect the reward Kumar discovered toward the end of her fieldwork in Banaras:
I felt part of my surroundings; I was like a finely tuned instrument from which a complex sound could emerge and all the resonant strings vibrate in analogy with the sitar when the correct note was plucked. Reports confirmed one another, facts were buttressed by more facts, interpretations rallied to one another’s defense … I was interacting with only a few informants on one level but on many other levels I was interacting with other components of the city. I felt beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was interacting with the city itself.
But it doesn’t end there. Back home at your desk you will continue to be engaged laboriously with the people you study, through imagination, recollection and reconstruction. It is easy to forget that writing is as much a part of fieldwork as any choice passage of travel or startling encounter.
