Anthropological Fieldwork and Sociopolitical Change

Abstract

Fieldwork is a magical word to an anthropologist. It evokes far away and different that make East Africa sound more like fieldwork than downtown Philadelphia. Beyond its exotic connnotations, term refers to very heart of anthropological approach. Face-to-face interaction, observation, and cultural immersion describe situations in which anthropologist comes to know what it means to be a member of group under study. The anthropologist seeks to become as much a member of group as possible-a marginal native (Freilich, 1970)-to understand behavior and world view from the inside looking out. While other social sciences utilize a variety of methods, fieldwork has become hallmark of anthropology (Pelto and Pelto, 1976). The major instruments for anthropological data collection are anthropologists themselves. Fieldwork deals with primary rather than secondary data, emphasizes inductive rather than deductive reasoning, and focuses on immediate personal experience rather than armchair theorizing. Central to its practice is suspension of judgment: anthropologist must adopt attitude of novice or learner, rather than critic. The anthropologist is learner being taught both by formal process of data collection and by informal involvement in human interaction. The for anthropologists has traditionally been residentially/geographically defined community. Such communities have most often been distinct ethnically and culturally from national system of which they are a part. These have also been communities which lacked political and economic power and access to resources within wider society. The fieldworker enters these communities with need to develop personal relationships, rapport and key informants. Relationships are built on a growing knowledge of appropriate expectations, sharing of experiences, exchanges of favors, and other kinds of personal reciprocities. To achieve these approximations of group membership, anthropologists have helped with harvest, participated in sports and games, danced and drunk, given people rides, and helped at times of personal and community crisis. Such participant observation is as much a part of ethnographic method as field notes, interview schedules and kinship genealogy. The same investigators who attempt to be so much a part of group under study, however, are also involved in a scientific endeavor which has little relation to their adopted community. The issues of why ethnographer is there, what questions will be asked, and how results will be utilized, are decided, not by results of those significant relationships, but rather in response to theoretic concerns in discipline, advance within University, or by developmental concerns of institutions or agencies external to community. In this paper I will argue that ethical issues of fieldwork enterprise are rooted in a basic contradiction: between personalistic methods of fieldwork and impersonalism, and remoteness to needs of community, of its scientific objectives. The fieldworker enters community both as an individual and as a representative of a scientific discipline, and of science as an institution. As such, investigator must be concerned not only with personal relationships but also with relationship between institution of science and community as a social institution. A concern with personal reciprocity, without a concomitant concern for reciprocity between scientific objectives and community needs, raises serious ethical issues.