Between “Chaos” and “Order”: The Czech Anthropologist and his Experience in the Changes of Time

Abstract

The main purpose of this text is to show how complex and long the disciplination or disciplinary practice of an anthropologist conducting his fieldwork in non-European areas can be. In the first part, the text is very much retrospective. I focus on my long formative period, during which my ideas about becoming a full-time ethnologist were born in a kind of unconscious vacuum. I revisit my first field entry among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) people of northwestern Mexico and attempt to bring the reader up to speed on my determined efforts to reach out to native communities and my chaotic actions during this first field experience in a non-European setting as a then third-year ethnology student. This will be followed by a reflection on my next two field researches among the Tarahumara in 1996 and 2001, the first of which resulted in an M. A. thesis and the second in a dissertation. In this section, I try to show a certain shift in the approach to fieldwork, which was no longer mere chaos, but led to a more systematic organization of fieldwork findings and their elaboration into a more extensive qualifying thesis and several technical studies. While in the first part I go back into the deep past in order to show the complexities that a budding ethnologist can or must deal with if he wants to penetrate a completely different environment from his own, in the second part I discuss some of the methods of field research that I have not been familiar with in the past, or have used unconsciously or without better understanding of them. These I find useful in current and forthcoming return research among the Tarahumara. They resonate strongly in contemporary anthropology, and are constantly being refined. In this section I will also outline, with respect to methodological horizons, my current planned research project focusing on the human relationship to biodiversity in the context of environmental and climate change, which is increasingly impacting (not only) Tarahumara communities.