Anthropological Fieldwork: Dialogue, Observation, and Insights
Anthropological Fieldwork: Dialogue and Observation
Fieldwork is the methodology of anthropology itself, defined as a technique both as a science and an experience. The popularized image of an anthropologist is someone lost in a tropical forest, living with wild tribes, participating in hunting expeditions, magic spells, and other strange customs. However, anthropology has long since moved beyond exploring exotic environments to study a variety of scenarios where conflicts and intercultural encounters occur.
Its founder was Malinowski, who in the 1920s laid the methodological foundations of ethnographic research: the method of participant observation, first implemented among the aborigines of the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea).
He is also the founder of functionalist anthropology, based on the idea that each of the components and social institutions are interrelated within a system in which each has its function.
The Anthropological Method: Key Premises
The anthropological method is based on the following premises:
- One must live at least a year with a group of people to know and understand their way of life.
- Adopt a learning attitude through participant observation: as far as possible, do what everybody does.
- Coexistence in which dialogue is indispensable.
- Try to understand the world from the native point of view, express or talk with the terms of the native: Native’s point of view.
- Contextualization: anthropology helps give importance to the context.
- It is important to discover the remarkable cultural diversity we have at home, which has intensified with the arrival of immigrants (but existed before): Cultural diversity.
Participant Observation
You have to earn trust by showing sympathy for the native way of life. After gaining sympathy or identification with the natives, the anthropologist can use their own senses and feelings as instruments to indicate the direction taken in interviews, observations, or hypotheses.
The anthropologist should not disregard their own evidence of a particular emotional state of their informant.
The recall involves fieldwork and analyzing both the general and the particular. From the number of events observed, uniformities should be removed and generalities identified.
Participant Observation Process
The aim is to produce research data through observation and participation.
Observation is: to see how things happen, but knowing that it never amounts to simply watching. We observe not only with the senses but also with our categories, our ideas, and our assumptions. What we really see is the mental distance from our observation to the observed fact.
To observe, we rely on our own culture, but we must enter to the point that we relativize our own culture. Therefore, participant observation is not just moving to the place of observation and seeing. It starts much earlier, with the formation of observation and the preparation and design of the research.
It cannot be seen without a critical study of the theory, without an approach to the problems from the standpoint of the anthropological discipline. We will not find anything unless we know what we want, what it tells us we should look for in the explicit working hypotheses.
Participation involves reciprocal rights and duties, but we must be more attentive to our duties than to our rights. Join some of the information that the observation is going to make to the investigation. The goal is to become powerless and nativize the culture itself.
Necessary Conditions for Good Observation and Participation
- Live with those observed, get into the group (initially, the group tries to defend or alter their behavior, but then returns to their normal behavior).
- Recognize and name: it is difficult for there to fit what is envisaged with the specific terms of our culture. Need to know the native interpretation of their culture to contrast it with ours.
- Discover naturally what we are observing.
- Carry a field journal.
- Write the story line of what we have observed and participated in.
Our goal is to find the meaning they attach to their experience.
The things we have to investigate are:
- The society.
- Physical characteristics.
- Language.
- Art.
- Life cycles.
- Rites.
- The values.
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