Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Fieldwork

Writing anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:16:29 +0000

Stockholm University

Initially published 26 Feb 2021

Abstract:

Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes a long way back, it was not until the 1970s that writing began to be collectively acknowledged as a craft to be cultivated in the discipline. This led to a boom of experimental ethnographic writing from the 1980s, as part of the ‘writing culture’ debate. The idea behind experimental narratives was that they might convey social life more accurately than conventional academic writing. Today, literary production and culture continue to be a source of inspiration for anthropologists, as well as a topic of study. Anthropological writing ranges from creative nonfiction to memoirs, journalism, and travel writing. Writing in such non-academic genres can be a way to make anthropological approaches and findings more widely known, and can inspire academic writing to become more accessible. Recent developments in anthropological writings include collaborative text production with interlocutors and artists. However, the tendency for experimentation is also held in check, as publishing in academic publication formats and featuring in citation indices is crucial for anthropologists’ careers. Still, as our writing moves increasingly online, there is a growth of flexible formats for publishing, including online books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals.

Introduction

Writing is essential in anthropology. As a major way of communication, teaching, research, and outreach all draw on, or result in writing. But it was not until long after anthropology emerged in the late nineteenth century that writing was first recognised as a crucial craft that required careful training. This entry spans the changing politics of writing anthropology from the late nineteenth century, when Victorian natural science notions about texts as objective was the model for scholarship, to the 1970s, when a sensitivity to style was identified, developing into a movement in the 1980s around the idea of experimental ethnographic writing as initiated by the 'writing culture’ debate (Clifford & Marcus 1986). The protagonists of that debate argued in favour of more detailed accounts of research processes, including the role of the fieldworker in the composition of anthropological writing. Moving on to the twenty-first century, this entry suggests that the understanding that anthropologists are also writers has brought a new emphasis on writing in the discipline. It includes both writing accessible academic anthropology and writing in different genres, ranging from creative nonfiction to memoir, anthropological journalism, and travel writing. Anthropology has existed in a literary mode for quite some time, but as it underwent a ‘literary turn’ (Scholte 1987), literature has become an even stronger resource for the discipline: certainly as an influence to enhance writing styles, but also as a topic for research into literary production and culture. This is made obvious by increasing requests for writing workshops for students and young scholars. Yet, writing remains constrained insofar as publishing is a must when making an anthropological career. Here it is governed by academic publication formats, readership, and citation indices. This entry is organised chronologically, discussing the changing politics of writing academic anthropology over time in terms of styles, publishing, and careers, including the impact of the ‘literary turn’, which leads to a consideration of anthropological writing genres and more recent writings for digital channels.

Changing politics of writing anthropology

Classic anthropological monographs, written as the discipline was getting established, were influenced by lingering natural scientific notions of objectivity. These monographs generally left the anthropologist outside the text, at least when it came to personal experiences and feelings, such as revelations, which were assumed to inhibit their scientific value. This applies to the works by founding anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Malinowski’s academic work stands in particularly stark contrast to his controversial private diaries from fieldwork in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918 (Malinowski 1967). Published posthumously by his widow, the diaries revealed his personal prejudice against interlocutors as well as other problematic attitudes.

But it was the ideal of objectivity, with what would be regarded as its constrained style, that eventually provoked anthropologists to find freer forms of writing, hoping to provide more precise reflections of the richness and complexity of fieldwork. This entailed a shift to taking writing seriously, as identified in the introduction to the volume The anthropologist as writer (Wulff 2016: 1). Prefigured by the interest in narratives of Victor Turner and Edward Bruner in the 1950s and 1960s, a careful consideration of writing became a major feature of anthropology in the 1970s with Clifford Geertz’s work, especially The interpretation of cultures (1973). It was Geertz who developed the concept of ‘thick description’ for a detailed and engaging mode of writing that provides an understanding of human action in a wider context. Geertz’s seminal essay on this topic describes a cockfight in Bali and opens as follows: ‘Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study’. In this uneasy stage, as newcomers among people who did not acknowledge their presence, they learn after about ten days that ‘a large cockfight was held in the public square’. Geertz goes on to note that cockfights are mostly illegal in Bali:

In this case, however, perhaps because they were raising money for a school that the government was unable to give them, perhaps because raids had been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion, there was a notion that necessary bribes had been paid, they thought they could take a chance on the central square and draw a larger and more enthusiastic crowd without attracting the attention of the law. They were wrong...A truck full of policemen armed with machine guns roared up (Geertz 1973b: 412-15).

The policemen ‘began to swing their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going so far as to actually fire them’. People ran, and so did the Geertzes, who found themselves hiding from the police in a courtyard with a local couple, which was what made them accepted by the villagers. It is most likely the captivating style, built with suspense and surprise, that explains why this essay has become classic, and the way the Geertzes are included in the story as protagonists who are experiencing potential danger together with locals, but then are rescued by a local couple. This turned out to be an efficient way of conveying how an ethnographic event such as an illegal cockfight could be analysed as a kind of play that mirrored major power struggles in the village.

In the 1980s, a debate known as the ‘writing culture’ debate arose, which argued for more detailed accounts of the research process, including the role of the fieldworker, in anthropological writings than what had previously been the case (Clifford & Marcus 1986). There was an expectation that the fieldwork process should include great and intimate details, including the fieldworker’s feelings and relationships, as that promised to produce a more exact account of fieldwork. A critique levelled against ‘writing culture’ was that its proponents focused too much on the activities of fieldworkers rather than on the people the research is about. The legacy of that debate is a heightened awareness of the intellectual impact of writing style, the politics of representation, and the partial truth of any account. Connected to the ‘writing culture’ debate was the idea of anthropological writing as ‘cultural critique’. It suggested that anthropology should identify alternative ways of considering what is often taken for granted in society. Anthropological writing should be part of ‘a strategy for discovering diversity in what appears to be an ever more homogenous world’ and ‘making visible to others the critical perspectives and possibilities for alternatives that exist’ (Marcus & Fischer 1987: 133). Some of those alternatives concerned the role of women in social life – insisting, for instance, that women should be given opportunities for education and careers that had of course not always been regarded as a matter of importance. Supported by the second wave of feminism, the book Women writing culture (Behar & Gordon 1995) explored issues of identity and difference in relation to sexual politics, racial history, and moral predicaments of anthropology. But its mission was a direct critique of the claim by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), that feminist anthropologists had not written in interesting and experimental ways. The volume challenged the male dominance in the discipline at the time (see also Abu-Lughod 1993).

What proponents of experimental forms of writing share is that a sensitivity to style and an openness to other writing genres may produce more than just a pleasant turn of phrase. ‘Narrative and related writing genres may actually offer more accurate – hence, more scientific – means for us as scholars to convey the full range of the human experience’ (Gottlieb 2015: 742) than conventional academic writing. A defining feature of experimental writings today is their argument for accessibility, even though this was not necessarily a characteristic of all different stages of this movement. There is a growing understanding that even anthropological texts about complicated issues can preferably be phrased in a lucid way, as exemplified by Ulf Hannerz (1992) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2018), among many others. This goes against the traditional academic norm to write in a convoluted style which can still be regarded as a marker of prestige, more so than being straight-forward. While some very complicated issues do require a more complex writing style and specialised vocabulary, many academic topics do not. This insight is gaining ground, but it also leads to the need for (re)training academics to write in a more transparent manner. Clarity and captivating narratives are more useful both in teaching and research than the writing style of some traditional ethnographies that have been referred to as ‘boring’ and ‘virtually unreadable’ (MacClancy 1996: 237). The desire for being not only clear but also more engaging has opened up space for experimental writing, such as the early In sorcery’s shadow (1987), a memoir of an apprenticeship among the Songhay people who live in Niger and Mali in West Africa. Written by Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes as a literary essay informed by theory, it did not include explicit academic references: there is no bibliography. The memoir has been appreciated for its well-crafted narrative that also includes methodological points as Stoller learnt about and understood a way of life which was at first alien to him. The different stages of his training to become an apprentice sorcerer are carefully conveyed.

With the growth of global connections came the insight that interlocutors might, and indeed should, be able to read anthropological work about themselves without the risk of being harmed personally or politically. Such ethical issues are considered in When they read what we write (Brettell 1993), which mainly focuses on how this can impact the anthropologist and the writings. There is, for instance, the devastating experience of having one’s published work contested by those it is about. Such experiences can be unexpected, which makes them even more painful. In addition, they might impact negatively the possibility for future research in the community for other colleagues, who might have had nothing to do with this work. Newspaper accounts of anthropological writings add complexity to this problem, especially when they misrepresent findings and if interlocutors read the newspapers but not the actual text. Highly politicised contexts such as conflicts over national language and between ethnic groups may feed into resulting dilemmas. While awareness of the difficulty of doing justice to divided communities is important, the necessity of including the studied people as a potential audience, and not only academics, remains a primary concern in contemporary anthropological writing. Existing concerns are fuelled by the rise of digital online journals and e-books, which can reach a vast and worldwide audience in an instant, particularly when they are Open Access.

All of this raises questions regarding publication outlets in relation to making an academic career, and negotiations over whether a monograph or journal article ranks the most highly (Wulff 2019; Boyer 2016). This has been a concern since the natural sciences, where journal articles are the prime publication format, became the model for citation indices and research assessments. As part of ‘new public management’ of European universities since the 1980s (Shore & Wright 2017), ranking systems have been in place for publishers, their books, and journals. They attempt to emulate private sector management models and business-like approaches to improve research efficiency and results. At some universities, publishing with highly ranked publishers can thus impact positively a department’s funding, as well as the anthropologist’s salary. It certainly impacts hiring practices. Rankings have also reinforced the notion of ‘publish or perish’, meaning that, even in order to keep a job, academics sometimes have to publish a certain number of high-ranking publications per year, for if not, their careers may be in jeopardy. In spite of these measures, the politics of academic publishing remain elusive as criteria keep changing, not least because what one cohort of anthropologists was trained for is bound to be different once they are exposed to assessment. There is a debate over the extent to which the quality of academic writing is and should be tailored to research assessments and evaluation formats, and what the intellectual consequences of this might be (Strathern 2000).

Anthropological writing is increasingly influenced by these managerial trends. In our discipline, journal articles continue to be important, but there is an enduring notion that long-term fieldwork can best be justified in the space of a full-length monograph. While a number of substantial journal articles might work almost as well, it may be more cumbersome to find those articles rather than reading a book where the material and analysis are all in one place. As books, edited volumes, and book chapters are less prominent in the natural sciences and thus on the ranking lists, they become less prestigious on the citation indices where anthropology is included. Moreover, the amount of work it takes to write a monograph is not rewarded, as it is often treated as just another ‘item’. What is more, appreciative references are not distinguished in the citation indices from negative ones.^[1] Anthropology, in so far as it is a critical science, can also not be captured by numerical metrics (Stein 2018). The logic of such ranking lists is not in accordance either with how certain edited volumes or at least notable introductions to volumes that were published before citation indices were set up keep having a major influence on anthropology. This aspect is obviously not indicated in citation indices or as impact factors, as they only take account of recent work that is available online. Fredrik Barth’s introduction to his edited Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969) is a case in point as it keeps being a standard reference in anthropology (see also Appadurai 1986) but was published too early to be included in indices. As to the fate of books, printed or electronic, fiction or nonfiction, John Thompson, in his sociological research of the publishing business, predicts that as long as it is attractive enough to readers, the book will ‘continue to play an important role as a means of expression and communication in our cultural and public life for the foreseeable future’ (2011: 399-400).

Writing anthropology in relation to literature

Though anthropology’s literary mode is nothing new, the ‘writing culture’ debate intensified the presence of literature in anthropology, which has been identified in terms of a ‘literary turn’ because of literature’s impact on anthropological writing (Scholte 1987). This was in line with the growing awareness of the writing process. As a part of the move away from the detached textual style, as well as when it came to narrative structure, anthropologists took inspiration from fiction. Geertz (1988) even identified the ‘anthropologist as author’.^[2] An anthropology of writing and writers emerged. Local literary work from a field was read as ethnography and might be included in anthropological accounts. With his background as a student of literature at University College London, Victor Turner later connected African ritual and Western literature as ‘mutually elucidating’ (1976: 77-8). Jane Austen was identified by Richard Handler and Daniel Segal (1990) as an ethnographer of marriage, kinship, and class in early eighteenth century England. In the 1990s, Nigel Rapport (1994) organised his fieldwork in the village of Wanet in England in relation to the writer E.M. Forster as an imagined fellow fieldworker. Rapport’s technique was to ‘zigzag’ between the work of Forster and his own field experience. A similar way of combining anthropology and literature, of writing anthropology together with a literary companion, is Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the writing (2012). Narayan juxtaposes her experience of ethnographic writing with that of Anton Chekhov, the renowned playwright and short story writer, as he researched and wrote about Sakhalin Island, the Russian penal colony. Recognising Chekhov as her ethnographic muse releases Narayan’s writing creativity. Inspired by Chekhov’s letter about his journey to Sakhalin, his reflections on his research, and writing process, Narayan feels an affinity with him as she finds topics and texts to include in her book. Incidentally, Chekhov’s work on Sakhalin is nonfiction, and as Naryan gets to know his literary oeuvre, she learns that he is a literary writer with an ethnographic sensibility.^[3]Included in Alive in the writing, at the end of the chapters, are writing exercises, and the book concludes with a postscript with advice for different stages of the writing process, ranging from getting started and moving forward to moving past writer’s block, and revising and finishing. In response to the upsurge of non-academic writing workshops and university programs in creative writing in Euro-America during the last decades, there is a plethora of writing manuals, also by fiction writers (cf. Wulff 2017). The daughter of Alfred Kroeber, and his writer-wife Theodora, Ursula Le Guin (2015: ix, xiii, xii) was not an anthropologist herself, but there are anthropological aspects in her fiction, referred to as science fiction or fantasy. Anthropologists appear in her writings, and the ‘other worlds’ she imagined resonate with an anthropological endeavour to study very different ways of living. Le Guin also wrote a ‘handbook for storytellers – writers of narrative prose’ to go with the writing workshops she taught. Her declaration that her ‘book is not for beginners’ attests to an awareness that writing is a skill that is never fully learnt, but ideally one to keep developing. Observing that some people have a gift for writing, she points out that writing is a skill to be learnt and mastered even for those who are gifted (cf. Wulff 2018). Le Guin emphasises that reading one’s own work also requires training. This would be what Brian Moeran refers to as ‘self-editing’, the process of making choices about style, grammar, organization, and of what to include and exclude (2016: 60-5). ‘Editing’, Moeran goes on, ‘is not writing but rewriting’ and this entails being ‘tough with yourself’ (2016: 60-5). Before submitting a text to an editor at a publishing house, Moeran’s advice is to get a sympathetic colleague’s stern comments on it.

Writing about connections between anthropology, ethnographic writing, and literature, Caroline Brettell observes that:

The experiments with forms of ethnographic writing that might enliven the ethnographic text represent just one dimension of the way in which anthropology has engaged with literature…Some anthropologists have drawn directly on works of literature as inspiration; others have subjected these literary works to an anthropological analytical and theoretical lens (2015: 73).

Yet others, she goes on to say, ‘have found the ethnographer or the autoethnographer in the novelist’. Anthropological interest in literary production certainly exists, such as in the ethnographic study of writing as craft and career in Ireland. Taking the question ‘How come the Irish are such great writers?’ as a point of departure, I have argued that this goes back to the oral storytelling tradition in Ireland, and a culture that cultivates this practice at social gatherings, also by teaching it to younger generations. Then, there is extensive training in creative writing at schools, as well as writing competitions, and an abundance of writing workshops for adults at literary festivals and other literary events. All this fosters a habit and an urge to write (Wulff 2017: ix). Ethnographies of writing are not limited to textual analysis. They can be based on live literature events and public readings of fiction at literary festivals. Drawing on a study of one of the major literary festivals in the UK called the Hay Festival and the small Polari Salon, an LGBT literary festival at the South Bank Centre in London, Ellen Wiles conveys the value of experiential literary ethnography not only to the academic world, but also to arts practitioners, curators, and producers (2021). It was through participant observation at literary festivals that Wiles learnt that, even in our digitalising world, such live events draw big audiences, not least because they provide appreciated opportunities for face-to-face connections between authors and readers.

Another take on how literature can relate to ethnography is the conceptualisation of fiction as a written text along with songs, poetry, essays, drama, and even newspapers and letters that are produced in a society under study (Archetti 1994a). This can reveal, on one level, interpersonal relationships and, on another level, cultural and social contexts such as history and the nation. It has been suggested that there are three types of fiction: ‘The realistic historical novel that attempts to ”reconstruct” a given period in a given society; the totally imagined story set in a historical period; and the essays devoted to an interpretation of a nation, its characteristics and creed’. In addition, ‘some kind of historical and sociological knowledge is important in fiction’, which makes it similar to writing anthropology. In line with much anthropology, in this volume fiction is treated as ‘ethnographic raw material, not . . . authoritative statements about, or interpretations of, a particular society’ (Archetti 1994b: 16-17).

Many anthropologists have expressed a sense of being confined by the rigidity of the academic style, which has led them to seek refuge in fiction writing. This has been a way to complement what has been found to be unsatisfactory with producing dissertations or other academic writing (Stankiewicz 2012). Reflecting on fiction versus anthropology, there is a common notion that ‘anthropology is unique in its specification of dimensions for comparison and its standards for ethnographic descriptions. Are such dimensions and standards straitjackets? If one thinks so, one might turn to fiction for consolation’ (Eriksen 1994: 192; see also Narayan 1999). This advice seems to be both about reading fiction, also from one’s field, and writing fiction by drawing on fieldwork, such as In an antique land (Ghosh 1992). It turns out that ethnographic novels abound. They were (and are) written by authors who were trained in anthropology, and in some cases pursued an academic career while others went into writing fiction full time. An early ethnographic novel is The delight makers (Bandelier 1890), making use of many years of fieldwork with Pueblo Indians. Their eyes were watching God (Hurston 1937) also has an anthropological perspective. In 1954, the bestseller Return to laughter was published by Laura Bohannan under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen. This is a fictionalised story about Bohannan’s fieldwork in Africa, including aspects of tribal life such as the impact of witchcraft. The novel has been widely read not only by students and scholars, but also by a general audience. It is a testimony to the efficacy of conveying anthropological insights through fiction. It is common that social scientists and anthropologists, including those who drive their disciplines, appreciate fiction writers’ ‘capacity to depict the real and unveil truths’ (Fassin 2014: 52). It is even the case that ‘distinguished anthropologists and sociologists have admitted that they find, in the works of these authors, more compelling, more accurate, and more profound accounts of the social worlds they explore than in those proposed by the scholars who study them’ (Fassin 2014: 52; see also McLean 2017). In this spirit, a new brand of ethnographic writing has emerged, one that experiments with various literary styles, not just as embellishment, but also as a way of writing anthropology through creative writing and thereby conveying otherwise unconveyable truths. The volume Crumpled paper boat (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2), for example, is composed of ethnographic writing in the form of poetry, fiction, memoir, and scriptwriting, among others. The title is a line from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and refers in the volume to ethnographic writing as a journey, ‘a transformative passage’ indicated by ‘a little lost boat’ and ‘the frustrations that lead writers to crumple and scrap the slips of paper on which they work’ until their texts will ‘float… to unforeseeable destinations’ (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2). Here, writing is about transformations of the author and saying the unsayable, rather merely conveying what social life is like.

Anthropological writing genres

It is obvious that academic scholarly writing is the major genre for anthropologists, and that it is supported by the art of writing field notes (Sanjek 1990, 2015; Andersen et al. 2020). Still, anthropologists do much writing in other genres, not only literary fiction, as discussed above, but also poetry (Rosaldo 2013, among many others). An anthropological career inevitably includes writing academic administrative texts such as a variety of reports and evaluations, but also writing grant proposals, yet another genre (Brenneis 2009; Finnström 2016). Contrary to many fiction writers, anthropologists tend to learn a certain writing style marked by academic strictness and cues such as aim, argument, engagement with debates and/or earlier research, theory, ethnography, method, conclusions, and bibliography. Anthropologists then tend to keep that style, rather than developing in new directions. Some of them, though, see an opportunity for changing track and tone as they move on to new research topics. Others switch between different genres, bringing back stylistic features from creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, journalism, and even fiction, poetry, and crime novel writing to their academic writing (Wulff 2016; Barton & Papen 2010).

Creative nonfiction, which tells stories about real events with fiction techniques, has been especially popular among anthropologists in the United States. This genre can be understood as ‘making the reading experience vivid, emotionally compelling, and enjoyable while sticking to the facts’ (Cheney 2001: 2). Originating in the 1960s New Journalism, this writing genre is often connected with the highly successful In cold blood (Capote 1965), a true crime story about the murder of a family on a farm in Kansas in the United States. The book builds on interviews with local people and police investigators, newspaper articles, and observation of the court case. Creative nonfiction has, since it was formulated, ‘gained momentum in subsequent years to inform assorted kinds of writing’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). The movement has come to include a variety of genres and is now established through ‘courses, grants, writing degree tracks, and journals’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). So what can ethnographers learn from creative nonfiction? One point is to strike a balance of writing about social life in an absorbing way without making things up. Another is to think of how to include and deal with situation, story, character, scenes, summaries, and so called ‘expository lumps’ (i.e. dense and heavy background information) when writing up their work (Narayan 2007a: 136-139). The advice to deal with the latter is to ‘break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation’ (Le Guin 1998: 114).

Following up on writing anthropology in relation to literature, and in different genres, finding publishing outlets for work that is not strictly academic may be an issue. Yet some specialised journals for this exist, such as Anthropology & Humanism, the journal of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, which publishes traditional academic articles as well as other anthropological writing genres: poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction essays in every issue.^[4] These essays often take ethnographic or personal experiences as points of departure and move into more or less imagined realms. The vulnerable observer (Behar 1996), for example, is the story of how a Cuban-American anthropologist was away doing fieldwork on funeral practices in Spain, when her own grandfather died back in Miami. This experience made her argue for the emotional, subjective nature of fieldwork: the ethnographer cannot be detached, nor fully objective, in relation to their field. Spanning different genres, this book is also a kind of memoir, which has itself become a substantial genre in anthropology, primarily recalling events from the field but often going back to the personal life of the anthropologist (Jackson 2006; Narayan 2007b; Stoller 2008; Collins & Gallinat 2010). While memoirs can be expected to be written by older people who have lived long and eventful lives, it turns out that many anthropological memoirs are composed by writers who are still relatively young, or at least middle aged in their 40s or 50s, such as The power of the between (Stoller 2008: 4), triggered by the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis, which entailed a space ‘in-between’ life and death.

My father’s wars (Waterston 2014) is a daughter’s account about her father’s fate as told to her mainly by him, but also by her mother. This was a life course that was driven by dramatic historical events: Alisse Waterston's father had to flee the Holocaust in Poland with his family to Cuba. Eventually he joins the US Army, meets and marries an American woman, and finds himself commuting between Havana and New York, until Castro’s revolution forces the family to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico. This memoir exemplifies how an eventful personal story defined by dangers can convey major political events. Another kind of memoir is My life as a spy (Verdery 2018). When the secret police files in Eastern Europe became available after 1989, Katherine Verdery, an American anthropologist who had spent frequent long research stints studying political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism in communist Romania, discovered in her file that she had been surveilled by the secret police, the Securitate, and accused of being a spy. In this case, the memoir was a way to correct and contextualise a faulty local image of an anthropologist. At the same time, it is an important piece of information about how Romania operated during communism.

Travel writing is yet another form of memoir, as heralded in the classic Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1992 [1955]) which documents travels and fieldwork in Brazil. Its proximity to travel writing was later problematised, when travel accounts about the colonies were critiqued for conveying a Western imperial perspective (Pratt 1992). Even though early travel writing relied too much on exoticisation, this is now changing (Nyqvist 2018). Yet travel writing continues to be a way to explore the world on behalf of people ‘at home’, to tell them about places elsewhere, often far away, thereby mediating the world. In addition to describing places and people, as well as the travel itself, travel writing also tends to address the conditions of travel.

Related to anthropological memoir as a genre is the notion of ‘autoethnography’, defined as ‘referring either to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest’ – indeed, the two types can be related (Reed-Danahay 1997: 2). An autoethnography of borders is ‘Illegal’ traveller, which combines fieldwork on undocumented immigrants with descriptions of the personal experience of having to flee Iran during dangerous circumstances. The preface, dated 1987, begins:

One cold night in late February, in a barren land surrounded by huge rugged mountains, I stood on a gravel road, like any other road in this rural area. Midnight passed; the whole landscape was wrapped in silence. The road separated Iran from Afghanistan. It was the border. Shrouded in a deadly stillness was the road, one of the most sanguinary roads in the world laid in wait for its next prey. It was a moonless night. “Good! The darkness shelters us,” said my smuggler… “If I take this step, I will be an ‘illegal’ person and the world will never be the same again.” That night I took that step and my odyssey of “illegality” began (Khosravi 2010: ix).

There are, again, overlaps between memoirs and autoethnography, yet an anthropological autoethnography is usually distinguished by an explicit and systematic theoretical structure which is intended to explain how a personal story that acknowledges power and inequality has a general ethnographic interest. This has been referred to as critical autoethnography (Reed-Danahay 2019). The experiences in the quote above, and subsequent ones about what it is like to be a refugee in Stockholm, also go into opinion pieces for newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times (Khosravi 2020). Contrary to writing anthropology, writing journalism always requires an accessible style, short sentences, and a key point introduced early in the text. If anthropological ideas are used, they have to be explained to a general audience. More often than not, journalistic articles connect to an urgent event in the news. They tend to be much shorter and limited in scope than most academic ones. In addition, editors often decide on the headline, which is drastically different from what academics are used to. Again, the boundaries with anthropological writing are blurred, as some anthropologists who keep writing influential journalistic comments on current affairs become public intellectuals, thereby potentially enhancing their academic reputation. This is at times called public anthropology, considered by many to be crucial for an understanding of public life but requiring a refinement of the art of narrative as well as a relinquishing of dry analysis (Eriksen 2005). Moreover, anthropologists who write journalism can be seen to bring back stylistic traits such as lucidity to their anthropological writing. Journalism in anthropology is – as is so often the case – a twofold topic, comprising both anthropologists writing journalism, and the anthropological study of worlds of journalism and journalistic writing (Boyer 2005, 2013; Hannerz 2004; Boyer & Hannerz 2006). Writing future worlds (Hannerz 2016) investigates the new genre of speculative future scenarios, such as the idea of ‘the clash of civilizations’, having impact on global debate and understandings. As to ethnographies of journalism, there is, for instance, a study of former East German journalists and their attempts at explaining life in post-unification Germany which raises complicated issues about the nation and modernity (Boyer 2005). Still in Germany, another study focuses on news organizations, and how digital information and communication technologies have transformed how journalists work there (as elsewhere): they find themselves in a quickly changing landscape where social media is a major actor and contributes to the fact that their authority, expertise, and skills are challenged (Boyer 2013). More in line with travel writers, foreign correspondents, in a study conducted mainly in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, report from one part of the world to another. It turns out that unique story lines emerge in different correspondent ‘beats’, yet what they write is also shaped by their home country and personal interest. One insight of this study is that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents have a lot to learn from each other when it comes to illuminating the general public about events and peoples in faraway places (Hannerz 2004).

The frequent blurring of writing genres has attracted a lot of attention. In fact ‘there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in social science, as in intellectual life generally, and such blurring of kinds is continuing apace’ (Geertz 1980: 1659). One type of genre mixing is the monograph Lost in transition (Ghodsee 2011), on the downfall of communism in Bulgaria, where ethnographic chapters take turns with chapters written as ethnographic fiction. More often, genre mixing in anthropology takes the form of single texts, identified as combinations of ethnography and creative nonfiction, memoir and opinion pieces. Genre mixing has been pivotal for anthropology’s development both intellectually and methodologically. It fosters creativity, and suggests a language to approximate saying the unsayable as well as generating new approaches and ideas for research, even if that is often overlooked on academic ranking lists and citation indices.

Conclusions and looking ahead

As a discipline, anthropology builds on academic writing. Yet a focus on the craft of writing is relatively recent in the discipline’s history. Anthropologists continue to accentuate their identity as writers, drawing on literature, as well as different anthropological writing genres such as creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, and journalism. Our on-going sharpening of writing as a skill improves the knowledge that we are able to produce and convey, sometimes even providing more accurate accounts of social life than conventional academic work. Collaborative writing has increased both with the people we study, as an attempt to empower them and to draw on their expertise, and with colleagues from other disciplines, partly in response to requests from research funding agencies. There is also a growing interest in working with visual artists, especially graphic artists, as exemplified by Light in dark times (Waterston & Hollands 2020). Publication formats have equally become more flexible: featuring small books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals among many other types of outlets. The rise of digital publishing increases this flexibility, as anthropological discussions are now had on Twitter, and blogs such as AnthroDendum.^[5] There is an upswing in honest accounts of how anthropological texts are actually composed that describe the role of personal creativity, academic training, and biography in the way arguments are formulated, as well as the impact of writing routines. They combine writing with a personal touch in combination with a scholarly responsibility, while calling for accessible styles (Nielsen & Rapport 2018; McGranahan 2020). With more diversity in anthropological writing styles, formats, and outlets in the future, questions of how to assess quality will be even more accentuated and debated. Importantly, there is a quickly-expanding realization that writing can and should be a driving force in the process of decolonising anthropology (Pandian 2017; Ulysse 2020; Tapsell 2020), indicating that this is a defining moment for reconsidering writing styles.

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——— 2017. Rhythms of writing: an anthropology of Irish literature. London: Bloomsbury.

——— 2018. Diversifying from within: diaspora writings in Sweden. In The composition of anthropology: how anthropological texts are written (eds) M. Nielsen & N. Rapport, 122-36. London: Routledge.

——— 2019. Rhythms of writing: craft, career, and context. Pro Futura Lecture. Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University.

Note on Contributor

Helena Wulff is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her current research engages with migrant writing in Sweden. She is editor of The anthropologist as writer: genres and contexts in the twenty-first century (2016, Berghahn) and author of Rhythms of writing: an anthropology of Irish Literature (2017, Bloomsbury).

Professor Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. helena.wulff@socant.su.se

[1] Tichenor, M. 2020. Metrics. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (available on-line: http://doi.org/10.29164/20metrics).

[2] Clifford Geertz (1988) considered especially Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Claude Lévi-Strauss as authors.

[3] A number of volumes combine anthropology with literature such as Dennis & Aycock 1989, Benson 1993, Daniel & Peck 1996, De Angelis 2002, and Cohen 2013.

[4] The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is a section of the American Anthropological Association. See also the online magazine, Otherwise (https://www.otherwisemag.com/).

[5] https://anthrodendum.org/

Ethnography

Felix Stein — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:05:31 +0000

Signe Howell

University of Oslo

Initially published 18 Feb 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18ethno

Abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the method directs the anthropologist to study that which is of significance to the community studied rather than test a number of hypotheses formulated in advance of the fieldwork. Anthropology is a comparative discipline, seeking to unravel the complexity and variety of human understanding and human social and cultural life. For this reason, anthropologists have sought out societies that seemed to be very different from their own and, during the first half of the twentieth century, most went to undertake their fieldwork in small - often minority - communities in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. While this is still the case to a large extent, today many anthropologists have directed their ethnographic gaze toward communities closer to home. Thus the method of participant-observation is found to be useful by those who, for example, study life in a large bank, or the gay community in an American urban setting, as much as in a settlement in the Malaysian rain forest. The method is based on the paradoxical activity of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing it from a distance. To base one’s study on the ‘native’s point of view’, and to disentangle what really goes on rather than what people say goes on, is one central advantage of the method. This forces the researcher to allow herself to be open to the unexpected event or utterance. The ethnographer always engages with contemporary anthropological theory in her interpretations. Ethnographic fieldwork is thus performed in active relationship with anthropological theory.

Introduction: ethnography and anthropology

Ethnographic fieldwork is the method that defines social anthropology. The key word here is fieldwork. Anthropology is an academic discipline that constructs its intellectual imaginings upon empirical-based knowledge about human worlds. Ethnography is the practice developed in order to bring about that knowledge according to certain methodological principles, the most important of which is participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. Current understandings of both anthropology and ethnography are the result of years of debate and practice. While anthropologists are endlessly debating the premises for their understanding of different societies, they mostly agree that anthropology has nothing to offer the world without ethnographic fieldwork. At the same time, ethnography is just an empty practice without a concern for the disciplinary debates in anthropology departments and publications. It is therefore wrong to separate them; they are part and parcel of each other. Anthropology and ethnography are so intertwined that together they have become a basic premise for the anthropological epistemology.^[1] This is how anthropologists understand the world. This is the premise for how they perform their fieldwork – wherever that may be – and this is the basis for their writings.

The following is a useful definition of ethnography: ‘the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson & Coleman 2017). Having said that, the empirical focus for ethnographic research is in flux. For example, in recent years, some anthropologists have moved away from face-to-face participant observation to studying alternative constructions of cultural life, such as emergent online virtual worlds (e.g. Boellstorff 2012). Ethnography is today used for both the actual fieldwork during which the anthropologist collects material, and the subsequent text – an ethnography. Here, ethnography will be used in the former sense, and this entry will seek to unravel the complexities that are hidden in the seemingly simple definition.

Participant-observation

The ethnographic method is called participant-observation. It is undertaken as open-ended inductive long-term living with and among the people to be studied, the sole purpose of which is to achieve an understanding of local knowledge, values, and practices ‘from the “native’s point of view”’.^[2] The task of the ethnographer is to contextualise insight of local values and practices within wider local significations, and to render them probable; to show how theirs is a meaningful alternative as a way of life. That is the be-all and end-all of anthropology and, as such, central to disciplinary identity.

Regardless of where the fieldwork is undertaken, the ethnographer must first have obtained a thorough grounding in the basic principles of the discipline of anthropology. The main overarching issues to keep in mind are: what are the persistent questions – the essential perplexities (Needham 1978) – about human life to be investigated and how are these handled in each case? Which are the central theoretical concepts to be addressed? What are the ‘gate-post’ issues from a particular region – those that previous ethnographers have identified as significant there and that need to be addressed? Through addressing these issues, the anthropologist hopes to contribute to fundamental intellectual quandaries about the nature of social institutions and social life.

The choice of where to go is often dictated by two considerations: a place that the anthropologist thinks would be congenial to her taste, perhaps a place she has heard of or read about and which appealed to her imagination and sense of adventure; and a place that she thinks might help her to answer some theoretical issues that, through readings and lectures, have aroused her intellectual curiosity. Together these two concerns add up to a general desire to explore the unknown^[3]: whether geographically, socially, culturally, or intellectually. Through rigorous and persistent study of the various institutions, ideas, and practices that are encountered, an anthropologist seeks to provide an ethnographic study of the community that is informed and anthropologically relevant. However, increasingly anthropologists are eager to investigate places or people closer to their own experience. The so-called ‘anthropology at home’ trend has shown that a place for investigation may nevertheless be as unfamiliar as life in distant places. A pioneering work, and subsequent classic, was the study of young Italian men in a poor part of Boston carried out by the Harvard academic W.F. Whyte (1943). This has been followed by studies on a wide variety of local institutions and social groups in the anthropologist’s own country (see endnote v). It is particularly common for anthropologists from the Global South to undertake their ethnographic research in their own country.

Anthropologists insist that what they do, and that which distinguishes their research from that of other academic disciplines, is participant–observation. At first glance that seems straightforward. The anthropologist goes to the selected group of people that she wants to study and settles down in their midst. She seeks to participate in daily and ceremonial life, preferably as a contributor as she becomes affiliated to a household or some other local group, and all the while she will observe, ask questions, and take notes. She may also use a number of other methods, such as formal and informal interviews, focus groups, and use audio/visual recordings. However, while such methods are shared by other disciplines, anthropologists argue that they gain a different and more holistic and profound understanding when they engage in a participant-observation regime. An ethnographic study seeks to come to grips with the complex socio-cultural institutions and practices that are more or less taken for granted by the people themselves. Through a holistic investigation in which patterns of behavior, utterances, and actions are contextualised and placed in relation to each other, a world view^[4] may be detected: ideas about human nature, gender, family, economy, politics and religion become discernible.

What those who undertake some form of ‘qualitative research’ often fail to appreciate, is that what people say they do is often very different from what they actually do. Such paradoxes become apparent only through long-term fieldwork. The anthropologist’s antennas must be at work all the time in order to pick up the unstated and the taken-for-granted, as well as tensions and conflicts, all of which must be brought to bear on the analysis of the bigger whole.

Only through familiarity with local values and practices will the magic of serendipity come into play. Serendipity, in contrast to what many believe, is not just a chance event. It is the ability to make discoveries, by accidents and wisdom, of things which one was not in quest of.^[5] Wisdom required for serendipitous discoveries is obtained through the day-to-day participant observation that develops a particular way of being and seeing – a way that springs out of anthropological concerns.

Participant-observation is far from a straightforward or generally agreed upon project. But every anthropologist, whether a graduate student or professor, writes in their research proposal that participant-observation will be the major method to be pursued. Participant-observation is not a clearly defined practice. It is better regarded as a methodological ‘onion,’ with no firm centre. The method is based on the paradox of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing them from a distance. Nevertheless, it is the method that identifies the discipline. Full participation may be a fantasy. Nevertheless, most anthropologists would agree that it is an ambition which is central to the future identity of the discipline. Regardless of whether the fieldwork is in an Indonesian village or a large company in a European city, that is what anthropologists strive to achieve. According to the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, participant-observation can never become more than a fiction, or an illusion (1968: 154). However close one gets to the people one studies, the anthropologist and the people know that she is not a real member of the group and that she will leave after one or two years; that her world is very different from theirs. But it is an illusion that is necessary in order to achieve the insights that are sought. It is only through this that ‘thick description’ becomes possible. That is why language is important; anthropologists try not to work with interpreters.

One often hears that ‘the alien gaze’ is a necessary component of ethnographic fieldwork because it is difficult to identify the significance of one’s own practices. It is noticing the unfamiliar and the unexpected, however mundane, that sharpens the attention and renders everything to be of potential interest. This is one reason for undertaking fieldwork outside one’s own socio-cultural domain. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that participant-observations presuppose a central premise, namely that any ethnographic experience must be preceded by an examination of ones’ own ‘pre-understanding’ – to be reflexive about the understanding that is brought from home. To cultivate a reflexive alien gaze is particularly important when undertaking one’s ethnographic research close to ‘home’. Many will argue that such research is best carried out after having had the experience of fieldwork elsewhere – this was my experience^[6] – while others claim that a conceptual boundary between home and away is artificial.

A brief history of ethnographic research in anthropology

Although anthropology can be said to have started as a distinct academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, ethnographic fieldwork was not a necessary part of it. Rather, in Britain a group of men subsequently termed ‘armchair anthropologists’ laid the groundwork for the comparative study of human society and culture. That was a time when intellectual life was heavily influenced by the theories of evolution developed by Charles Darwin (1970 [1859]). Herbert Spencer, Sir Edward B. Tylor, and Sir James Frazer were the most prominent contributors to the debate. Their research was undertaken in their offices in British universities - not out in the bush - where they developed their theories of the evolution of culture. They based their analyses upon the many texts that were available on life in ‘primitive, uncivilized and undeveloped’ parts of the world, from material collected by missionaries, traders, scientists, and travelers. Although in many cases these provided well-observed details about local practices and ideas, they were, nevertheless, randomly collected from a biased western, Christian position without a theoretical model beyond the evolutionary one. The evolutionary school of thought maintained that humans had gone through a number of stages in order to achieve the assumed pinnacle of their own time. Religion, kinship, and marriage practices as well as technology were the chief criteria for allocating a particular social group a place on the evolutionary ladder. Both Tylor’s Primitive culture (1871) and Frazer’s The golden bough (1890) became bestsellers and were printed in many editions. It was not until the arrival on the British anthropological scene of the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski (see below) at the end of World War I, whose path-breaking studies of the Trobriand Islanders were based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, that participant-observation became integral to the discipline of social anthropology.

A similar situation pertained in France where the sociologist Émile Durkheim established his influential group of armchair anthropologist-philosophers called the Année Sociologique. Again, ‘savage and exotic’ beliefs and practices were the focus for their studies, but they were analyzed in sociological terms, unlike the British and Americans (see below) who tended to look to the individual actor. The British and the French armchair anthropologists were extremely well-read about ‘primitive’ customs and beliefs, but they had never visited, let alone lived in, one of the ‘exotic’ social groups that they claimed to study. The situation in the United States developed in a somewhat different fashion. The lawyer-ethnographer L.H. Morgan took a serious interest in the Iroquois people who lived close to him in Rochester, New York. He visited them over a long period of time – from the 1850s until his death in 1881 – and learned to speak their language. Morgan undertook a systematic study of their kinship system. His discovery, that patterns of kinship terminology in other, even unrelated, American Indian cultures were very similar to those of the Iroquois, launched a systematic survey of kinship nomenclature that provided a template for modern studies of kinship in anthropology. His major work, Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family (1871) was widely read and highly influential; amongst its readers were Marx and also Engels, whose work, The origins of the family, private property and the state (1902 [1884]) drew directly upon Morgan’s work. However, American anthropology got a powerful kick in a new direction – a direction in which ethnographic fieldwork became an essential part – when the German anthropologist Franz Boas established an anthropology department at Columbia University in New York in 1899. Boas argued that in-depth long-term field research was essential for an understanding of alien cultures and went to study the Kwakiutl society on the Pacific Northwest coast (1966) over a period of more than twenty years during the first part of the twentieth century. Boas trained a number of talented students, all of whom undertook their own field studies – mainly of various American Indian groups. Perhaps the most famous of his students was Margaret Mead, whose ethnography based on participant-observation study of teenage girls on Samoa (1928) created a lot of attention and debate in America.

Boas and his students were firm cultural relativists. That is, they argued that each culture should be studied according to its own beliefs and values, that there is nothing essentially human that transcends culture. This gave rise to the so-called nature or nurture debate that, in some form or other, is still with us today. Today, however, the extreme form of cultural relativism is contested, not least through the experience of ethnographic fieldwork that refutes the notion of many humanities. Anthropologists argue for a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind. The job of the anthropologist is to demonstrate the many ways that humans imaginatively create socio-cultural worlds.

Malinowski and the birth of British social anthropology

In Britain, anthropology developed in a somewhat different direction following the groundbreaking ethnographic studies written by the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski, who went to the Trobriand Island off Papua New Guinea in 1918. Malinowski subsequently became a professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics where he inspired a number of students, many of whom became central figures in the anthropology departments in British universities. Malinowski argued strongly for fieldwork and he did so from a clearly-argued theoretical position.

His chapter on methods in the book The Argonauts of Western Pacific became the ‘bible’ for British ethnographers/anthropologists of his own and subsequent generations:

The field ethnographer has seriously and soberly to cover the full extent of the phenomena in each aspect of tribal culture studied, making no difference between what is commonplace, or drab, or ordinary and what strikes him as astonishing and out-of-the way (1922: 11).

And, according to Malinowski, the final goal is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realise his vision of his world’ (1922: 25, original emphasis). The principles that Malinowski identified apply today as much as then. They apply not just to those undertaking ‘exotic’ fieldwork in small communities far away, but equally to those studying groups or institutions in their own country. As noted above, in order to perform good ethnographic fieldwork in ‘modern’ settings, it can be an advantage to have undertaken fieldwork in an alien small-scale society first (see endnote v). Either way, fieldwork is informed throughout by anthropological concerns. Ethnographic fieldwork used to be more open-ended than it is today, when increasingly anthropologists go to the field with a particular research question in mind. This may be due to difficulties in obtaining funding and high university fees, as well as a trend towards more policy-oriented research, often as part of a multi-disciplinary research group. However, the ideals of the participant-observation method guide all interaction in the field, and ethnographic field research continues to be inductive.

American cultural anthropology focused on identifying cultural values and ethos embedded in individual actors, and their field-research revealed much about religious understandings, mythology, and notions of personhood. British, French, and Scandinavian social anthropology was preoccupied with social structure and institutions. Ethnographers from these countries sought to map this primarily through the study of kinship systems. While American anthropologists were largely studying American Indians in their own country and in Central America, European anthropologists went to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The British and French tended to undertake their field research in their own colonies, and continued to go to the same countries after they became independent. Ethnographic fieldwork demonstrated beyond doubt that there was no basis for maintaining the evolutionary model of human mentality. Formally speaking, a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind was accepted and the scientific interest lay in exploring the variations of socio-cultural modes that human imagination gave rise to.

Representation and the Writing culture debates

Fieldwork has been debated over and over. Anthropologists have always engaged in soul-searching regarding their disciplinary practices. Debates about methods, the status of findings, and the profoundly personal and idiosyncratic nature of fieldwork have all been hotly discussed – in and out of print – since the famous London School of Economics seminars under Malinowski. However, in this anthropologists may be their own worst enemies. Indeed, they could be in danger of debating away ethnographic fieldwork as they did culture through the ‘writing culture’ debate at the end of the twentieth century, leaving the ground open for other disciplines to claim it for their own. The effect of the Writing culture critics (Marcus & Fisher 1986) rendered fieldwork, especially in ‘exotic’ places in the South, politically incorrect in many university departments. The thrust of this postmodernist critique was directed at the kind of texts that had resulted from ethnographic fieldwork. These were, it was argued, pretending to provide an objective picture of the communities studied, on par with scientific research, whereas fieldwork is highly personal and idiosyncratic and findings are coloured by the training and personality of the anthropologist. Furthermore, anthropology was claimed to be an extension of colonial practice. Not only was there a concern that comparison simply extends the colonial gaze, but also it became politically problematic and morally unacceptable to study supposedly powerless small communities in former colonial domains, to make them, the argument went, into the reified ‘Other’ (e.g. Dresch 1992). As a result of these two aspects of the critique, many chose instead to do historical archival studies or studies ‘at home’ or so-called ‘dialogical studies’ (Borneman & Hammoudi 2009). However, many were critical of Writing culture’s assertions. Questioning who had replaced the ‘other’ as a result of this critique, Robbins suggested that the ‘suffering other’ at home had become the legitimate subject for anthropological ethnographic investigation (Robbins 2013). He further considers ‘how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses (Robbins 2013: 447). Many would agree and argue that for this to be achieved, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be cherished.

Two more points are worth making in regard to the postmodern critique of ethnographic practice in the South. First, most who have carried out fieldwork in rural areas of Asia, Africa, or Latin America do not agree that they ‘study down’ in any post-colonial sense. As they settle in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable circumstances, the relationship may be an unequal power relationship, but not in the sense the critics argued. More often anthropologists are at the mercy of the communities they study, struggling to gain acceptance, coping with unfamiliar language and trying to understand what goes on around them. They are rarely in a position to influence anything, even should they wish to do so. At the same time, as the people studied become literate and highly educated, they increasingly become active partners in the anthropological enterprise, thereby enhancing the understanding and knowledge of the field-worker and, simultaneously, giving themselves a new window through which they can view their own society in a changing world.

To many inside and outside anthropology, policy-oriented research may today seem more ideologically correct, more useful and relevant in a rapidly changing world, than simply setting off for the Highlands of New Guinea. However, it is worth bearing in mind that much innovative theoretical insight of general import was gained from the early studies of small-scale societies in the Pacific, Amazonia, and Africa, and that these have shaped the anthropology of development and applied anthropology as much as they have academic anthropology. In recent years, equally high-quality ethnographic fieldwork continues to be undertaken in New Guinea and Oceania, not least inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern (1989), as well as in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which has impacted contemporary theory. Gender studies have been revitalised, a new-found interest in indigenous ontologies and concepts of personhood has inspired much exciting theorising, and novel interpretations of exchange and classification owe their sources to both old and new ethnographic fieldwork from these places.

Not everybody goes to the jungles of South America or Southeast Asia, the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, India or the Middle East, the islands of the Pacific or far-flung Arctic settlements. Some go to urban areas on the same continents, others find places or topics in the Global North. However, regardless of where or what, most would argue that they perform a micro-study of some kind and that the same methodological criteria are adhered to. Many are part of a large, multidisciplinary team where the anthropological contribution is highly valued, while others carve out their own micro-field in a globalised world.

While the cutting edge in the discipline may be the most recent theoretical concepts, they often soon lose their attraction, whereas the old anthropological texts based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork rarely lose their salience. Ethnographic texts from two or three generations ago do not become outdated in the same way as fanciful theoretical treatises. While many may disagree with the early interpretations, they value and draw on the empirical observations of what may no longer be observed. Anthropologists return to them in seeking to enhance the understanding of their own material. Malinowski’s studies from the Trobriand Islands is a prime example. Among the many others, one finds Schapera’s work on the Khoisan people of South Africa (1935), Audrey Richards illuminating study on Bemba (Zambia) girls’ initiation rites (1956), and Boas’ work on the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast (1966). These, like all good ethnographies, are scrupulous in their attention to detail.

Multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork

In recent years two new approaches have appeared in anthropological methodology: multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork. Both are advocated as a means towards a fuller and more complex understanding. Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is a method of data collection where the ethnographer, rather than staying in the same community over time, follows a group, a material object, a particular topic, or social issue through different field sites geographically and/or socially. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork arose as a response to new topics for anthropological investigation, such as the study of reproduction and reproductive technologies, new modes of electronic communication such as internet and mobile telephones, transnational adoption, and local mobility and migration.

Multi-temporal fieldwork (Howell & Talle 2012) involves a continued relationship with the site of one’s original fieldwork. The anthropologist returns again and again at relatively frequent intervals, thus deepening the relationship with the people and widening the scope of anthropological practice in subtle ways. The British anthropologist Raymond Firth, famous for his studies of the Polynesian Tikopia community, made the point that there are two kinds of re-study: the dual-synchronic – a comparison of then and now after number of years, and the diachronic study – a continuous study of people and events over time (Firth 1959). Today, the latter is the more common, due largely to the ease of modern means of travel. Multi-temporal fieldwork enables the ethnographer to follow the community through times of change, and to record their reactions to outside influences – economic, technological, and social – that challenge old values and practices.

With the rapid spread of mobile telephones and internet, communication may be maintained with many field sites after the ethnographer has returned home. This renders ethnographic research more dynamic than was previously possible.

Ethnography and fieldwork in other disciplines

It is first and foremost the fieldwork method of participant-observation and the kinds of anthropological questions, debates, and analyses that spring out of it as these are embedded in an holistic analysis – questions about social production, and the cultural meaning of, for example: kinship, sociality, labour, money, exchange, social stratification, conflict, authority, gender etc. – that gives anthropology its special identity and that which distinguishes it from the other social sciences.

Due to a decrease in funding and pressure on publishing, PhD students as well as academic staff are having to change their research practice. A shorter period of fieldwork is becoming common and more topic-focused research questions are increasingly demanded. This raises the question of what insights anthropologists can provide that a clever investigative journalist cannot, or someone from Cultural Studies armed with an exciting theoretical concept (Howell 1997). Anthropologists will still claim that only the very nature of their ethnographic method of long-term participant observation can provide a unique contribution to knowledge about other life-worlds.

Recently, a number of other disciplines have taken to use ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ in the methods section of their books, papers, and research applications. Most anthropologists would be very skeptical of the kind of methodology that is proposed under that rubric. ‘Qualitative research’ is not the same as ethnography. Open-ended interviews and focus groups do not replace the insights obtained from twenty-four hour / twenty months of informed ‘hanging around’. This challenges anthropologists to make clear what they mean by ethnographic fieldwork and what is so special about it. It is important to clarify this for the future of the discipline; otherwise, ‘…our protest will be of no avail unless we can explain what we mean by ethnography in terms of what is cogent and intellectually defensible’ (Ingold 2016). If anyone may ‘do’ anthropology, or ethnography, then what is so special about our contribution? Marilyn Strathern is reported to have said that anthropologists study social relationships by making social relationships. Perhaps that is the answer?

In his response to criticisms from the Writing culture debate, Spencer wrote, ‘Anthropologists…[do not just write, they] wade into paddy fields, get sick and read bad novels rather than confront another day of mounting misapprehensions; they also take photographs, make films and tape recordings […] the fact that they mainly do it by themselves in strange places is another oddity…’(Spencer 1989: 160). The main point is that not only do anthropologists undertake long-term deep immersion fieldwork regardless of the geographical location of their ‘field’, but they insist that ethnography and anthropology are two sides of the same coin. Others seem not to appreciate the epistemological consequences from such a unity. In his epilogue, ‘Notes on the future of anthropology’, to the volume of the same title edited by Ahmed and Shore (1995), the sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that anthropology has nothing unique to offer, that with the ‘disappearance of the exotic’ and the fall of colonialism, the distinctiveness of anthropology is under threat. He goes on to state that:

[a] discipline which deals with an evaporating subject matter, staking claim to a method which it shares with the rest of the social sciences anyway, and deficient in theoretical traditions […] does not exactly add up to defensible identity of anthropology today (Giddens 1995: 274).

The continued practice of participant-observation ethnography and the resulting theoretical development of the discipline of anthropology since that time clearly refute Giddens’ claim. Further, to assert as Giddens did, that there are no more ‘exotic’ places to study, is equally uninformed. Anyone who has travelled in Central or Southeast Asia, Melanesia, or the African continent knows that there is no shortage of potentially interesting localities in which to settle in order to conduct in-depth anthropological fieldwork. They may not be isolated empty blobs on the map, but people live in an ever-changing world and they cope with new ideas and practices in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the notion of ‘exotic’ is being challenged as anthropologists study a range of urban communities in the Global North as well as in the Global South. Religious, gay, youth, poor, immigrant, bankers, hospital wards, and many more communities in the vicinity may be as ‘remote’ from their previous experience and as ‘exotic’ as any community in the Global South. Anthropology as a discipline without participant-observation fieldwork would have very little to offer the academic world, or the general public. The aim of ethnography is to continuously expand our knowledge about the richness of human imagination and the ways that humans organise their lives. In order to achieve that, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be maintained. A substantial proportion of new recruits must continue to undertake long-term fieldwork in places far-away from their home: places where they have to learn to communicate in a previously-unknown language. This is the key to render alternative solutions to the organization of social and cultural life meaningful and understandable to the outsiders. When all is said and done, some form of cultural relativism remains the discipline’s trade mark. This is how anthropology differs from the other social sciences. There may simply be no future for the armchair (or even desktop) anthropologist.

In conclusion

Social anthropology developed from Malinowski and Boas through Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Mead, Leach, Douglas, Needham, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Geertz, Sahlins, Strathern, and many, many others. Despite their important theoretical differences, they had one thing in common: a commitment, through ethnographic fieldwork, to explore social, cultural, cognitive, and moral forms of life in places far from home – geographically and culturally. The aim was, and is, to use that knowledge to address overarching theoretical questions concerning the variety and similarity of human life as this is manifested through kinship, religion, classification, economic, and political life.

Anthropology is a discipline of amazement; knowledge of other peoples’ lives obtained during ethnographic fieldwork never ceases to astonish, even stupefy the ethnographer. Studies that throw light upon alien practices and values often lead to self-examination. They make one acknowledge that so much of what is taken for granted, what is considered to be ‘natural’ and right, is very far from the case. At the same time, the ethnographer discovers that so much is also common across space and lived culture. This results in an appreciation of both difference and sameness. These ethnographic experiences render invalid claims of radical alterity or of human incommensurability.

References

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Note on contributor

Signe Howell is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Her D.Phil was obtained at the University of Oxford and was based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Chewong – a hunter-gatherer community in the Malaysian rainforest. She has subsequently undertaken fieldwork in eastern Indonesia and she has performed a major study on values and practices of transnational adoption in Norway. She has published widely based on her three fieldworks.

Prof. Signe Howell, Postboks 1091, Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway. s.l.howell@sai.uio.no

[1] This potential confusion of the two terms is most commonly found in Anglo-Saxon anthropology. In France one talks of ethnologie or anthropologie sociale and in Germany it used to be Völkerkunde.

[2] The expression ‘the native’s point of view’ is as applicable to the study of middle-class managers in a German town as it is to a South Sea island community. It is a methodological term independent of place.

[3] The desire to untangle the ‘unknown’ is not always the driving force behind an ethnographic venture. Some may be more interested in untangling the underlying sociality of their own world (see, e.g., Okely & Callaway 1996, Lewin & Leap 1996).

[4] The expression ‘world view’ is theoretically contentious in anthropology. However, rather than entering the debate, here I use the term in its simple form as expressed by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world’.

[5] Definition adapted from 'Serendipity' (Little, Fowler & Coulson 1964: 1946).

[6] Having undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in two societies that correspond to the traditional perception of small-scale communities far away from my own home (the hunting and gathering community in the Malaysian rainforest [Chewong], and an agricultural community in the highlands of an island in Eastern Indonesia [Lio]), I turned my anthropological gaze homewards. I undertook a study of the practice of transnational adoption in Norway. Not only did I live in Norway at the time, but I had also adopted a daughter from Nepal. This made the research challenging in several ways and raised ethical questions on how far to delve into people’s most private and personal lives. The practical business of doing participant-observation fieldwork here was very different from the previous two. It was also methodologically more challenging. As there was no community to settle in, I had to find alternative methods to come to grips with the kinds of ideas, values, and practices that constituted the diffuse world of transnational adoption. I interviewed a range of social workers and bureaucrats handling adoption applications, politicians who formed legislation, the NGOs that actually provided the supply of children, prospective parents and parents with adopted children, and adoptees themselves. I read historical documents that dealt with adoption and I became interested in changes in adoption laws in Norway, other Western countries, and in the countries that sent children abroad in adoption; I studied international treaties and conventions on children and childrens’ rights and on the control of international adoption. The project took on global perspectives. In addition, I joined a group of adoptive families with children from Korea on a two-week ‘return – or motherland – visit’ to Korea, and a group of prospective parents on their mind-blowing journey to collect their children in Ethiopia. I supervised students doing fieldwork in Colombia and Brazil and in orphanages in China and in India. Through all these activities, and several more, I hoped to build up a holistic understanding of the complex picture of the practice of transnational adoption from the point of view of the many actors involved (Howell 2006). I am convinced that had I not had the experience of doing fieldwork twice previously, I would not have been able to complete my research on transnational adoption in Norway. I was less anxious about intruding into people’ lives. My eyes had been trained to look in seemingly irrelevant places, my mind was open to notice the seemingly insignificant moments and make use of the unexpected.