Abstract
Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be is an edited collection comprising three parts; ‘Reflections on First Fieldwork and After’, ‘On the Ethics of Being an Anthropologist (Now)’ and ‘Teaching Fieldwork That is Not What it Used to Be’. This book covers a broad spectrum of topics and field-sites with a coherence afforded by the disciplinary and institutional affiliations of the contributors, all of whom are alumni or have held staff positions at Rice University, and it is a true testament to the critical tradition of the Rice department of anthropology that this book exists. The foreword, by Michael J Fischer, provides a concise contextualization of the environment of anthropological commentary from which the text was born, outlining previous contributions from Rice University by himself, the books’ editors, and James Clifford.
While in some ways consistent with the existing canon, this book unsurprisingly departs from the classic ‘tales from the field’ genre. The six chapters of the first section, rather than containing the testimonials of veteran anthropologists telling tales of malaria, eating obscure parts of rare creatures, or the comic miscommunications of a neophyte, instead comprises contributions by six former postgraduate students of Rice University, which are illustrative of the changing nature of ethnographic enquiry and a departure from the Malinowskian paradigm. These chapters are more synchronous to the contemporary bureaucratic nature of undertaking fieldwork in which research questions must be posed, literature reviews produced and ethical approval granted before fieldwork might be undertaken than to the romantic image of the anthropologist as explorer.
Rather than entering the field tabula rasa, the first two chapters tell of predetermined and well-defined interests in capital flight (Peterson, Chapter 1) and venture capital (Chung, Chapter 2) prior to commencement of fieldwork. Chapter 3 describes a more conventional neo-Malinowskian scenario, a ‘“go there” and “just do it” ethnography’ (p. 75), but focuses upon the mound of unusable data collected during the authors’ fieldwork in postcolonial Vancouver, illustrating (while denying such an intention) the means by which the ‘phoenix’ might arise from the ‘ashes’ of an ostensibly failed ethnographic encounter. Furthermore, this chapter elegantly demonstrates the transition from doctoral to postdoctoral work, and the threads that may weave apparently disparate projects together. Chapter 4 is concerned primarily with Reddy’s second rather than first fieldwork encounter, and her collaborative stance, both in terms of her disciplinary collaboration between the biological and the human sciences, and her collaborative position with the ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Issues) team. Given the declining view of the ‘lonely anthropologist’, and the increase in anthropological collaboration, the inclusion of this chapter is invaluable. Chapter 5 is Naficy’s personal narrative account of the challenges of the ‘native researcher’, and is both pleasantly literary and thought-provoking. The first section is concluded by Breglia’s discussion of her apprenticeship fieldwork working with archaeologists in Mexico, and the pragmatics of ethnographic labour now. This chapter is implicitly concerned with the ethics of fieldwork, and neatly paves the way for the next section.
The second part of this book, On the Ethics of Being an Anthropologist (Now), comprises but one chapter written by James Faubion, combining an epistemological concern with an ethical one, and neatly bridging the gap between ‘tales from the field’ and the final section on teaching anthropology. Kim Fortun begins this section with a ‘how-to’ guide to teaching ethnography, which is nonetheless highly engaging and embedded in her personal career narrative – researching emergent identities after the Bhopal disaster – allowing it coherence with the more philosophical and epistemologically concerned contributions that surround it. The final chapter, by Christopher Kelty with various others, deals with the engagement of anthropological expertise in the highly specialized realm of computer security, although in a manner that highlights the greater relevance of the authors’ comments to the discipline as a whole, and adds further empirical reinforcement to Fortun’s prescriptions for pedagogy.
Interdisciplinarity is an emergent context for this book, which highlights the use of ethnography in research concerned with archaeology (Breglia), economics (Peterson and Chung), law (Hamilton and Reddy), and politics (most explicitly in Naficy’s chapter), with a consistent recourse to science and technology and the ethics underpinning the method. Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be is a welcome addition to the already extensive literature concerned with anthropological method, cleverly combining interdisciplinary topics from a tightly defined institutional origin with a logical progression from fieldwork narratives, to ethical and epistemological concerns, to a pragmatic yet still philosophizing pedagogical discussion. It cannot be denied that fieldwork is indeed, ‘not what it used to be’; however, methodological training for neophyte anthropologists continues to revolve around the traditional, Malinowskian paradigm. While none would deny the utility of studying this tradition, it is reassuring that there is a more, dare I say, contemporarily realistic genre emerging.
Understanding the complexities of our time requires fieldwork, Fischer observes in his foreword: this volume is an important contribution to the growing body of work on its contemporary teaching and practice. Edited by those bastions of the Rice Anthropology Department, James D Faubion and George E Marcus, with contributions from Rice graduates, it is perhaps unsurprising that its pedagogical and methodological insights further that department’s already rich output on anthropological theory and practice, notably Marcus and Clifford’s edited volume Writing Culture (1986) as well as Critical Anthropology Now (Marcus, 1999).
The book is subdivided into three sections: the complexities and challenges of the contributors’ first fieldwork projects (Part 1), the ethics of conducting field research as an anthropologist today (Part 2) and reflections on teaching fieldwork in the contemporary context (Part 3). Taken together, the papers cover a range of issues confronting contemporary fieldworkers as they negotiate the complex topologies of a rapidly changing world, often involving complexities of both scale and context, particularly at the interface with science and technology.
Each paper demonstrates that anthropology is particularly well-placed to understand this ‘time of transition’, and Fortun (p. 169) explicitly locates anthropology ‘at the vortex’ of this challenge in its ability to provide thick, particularistic description and comparative perspective, investigating the global and the local, and the interrelation between the two.
Fortun’s chapter on fieldwork teaching opens with a metaphor: her daughters enjoy a game in which they must draw from a cloth bag both a wooden animal shape and the corresponding rectangle from which it was cut, a process she finds analogous to the ‘figuring out’ of ethnographic projects, which ‘also requires patience and detail, creativity and extrapolation’ (p.167).
Fortun’s metaphor seems similarly applicable to the contributors’ identification of new research domains, which show, as Fischer observes, that it is ‘often as important to understand the structures of the circuits as to challenge or guesstimate the veracity in the information packets’ (Foreword). Peterson, researching capital flight in Nigeria, documents the impact of ‘phantom epistemologies’, empirically elusive fieldwork data, to show ‘how the presence of any “ghost” becomes visible to those who believe’ (p. 138). Chung tests ‘traditional’ fieldwork boundaries by researching a fieldwork object delimited by knowledge rather than space, her research on the South Korean venture capital market demonstrating that modern objects of enquiry ‘are cobbled together from partialities but nevertheless partake in more enduring sets of structures’ (p. 56). And Hamilton draws insights from difficult fieldwork and ‘unusable’ data. Each paper in Part 1 describes, with often painful honesty, the extent to which contemporary fieldworkers must find their own path through an often unknown ‘field’, identifying new realms of engagement by tracing the flow of knowledge, people and processes to gain understanding of new research contexts.
And this is the third respect in which Fortun’s metaphor is apt: concomitant with questioning fieldwork’s all-illuminating capacity is the realization that the ethnographer’s object may not be visible to the researcher at first. Ethnographers must patiently feel their way around hidden or unknown contexts, cultivating sensitivity to the unexpected. This is particularly the case with the rapid development of science and technology, bringing new sites of interaction and engagement, both in the field itself and the field research process. Such new research contexts require a re-evaluation of ethics, Faubion argues, as well as new pedagogical approaches, as the collection’s concluding collaborative chapter on fieldwork ‘after the Internet’ evidences.
What particularly stands out in this volume are the accounts of ethnographic ‘failure’ as a valid part of the research process offering their own contribution. In acknowledging that a coherent research ‘story’ is not always possible, or even necessarily desirable, it recognizes that the insights yielded by the narrative integrity of presenting ethnographic fragments may be significantly more valuable.
This has important implications for the teaching and practice of fieldwork. Significantly, all six ‘first projects’ were undertaken in the Rice Department of Anthropology, its rich outputs testament to the importance of providing a stimulating, supportive environment encouraging the creativity, integrity and confidence necessary for such research outputs. Such psychological aspects of research practice are important and need recognition: Fortun observes, ‘[c]ertitude about what one is doing should not be the goal. Anxiety should be played rather than mastered’ (p. 183). Ethnographic practices and pedagogy, she concludes, must create playfulness. In such observations, this book is a valuable resource for those embarking on fieldwork, offering a guiding light for those navigating difficult conditions, as well as those involved in its teaching.
As such, the book’s contributions animate the editors’ argument that fieldwork’s relevance rests on its adaptation to this ‘time of transition’. Each paper contributes new evidence of fieldwork’s continued engagement with the rapidly changing, increasingly mobile and technologically-engaged conditions of modernity.