Fieldwork as Commitment

Abstract

********** To me, fieldwork is the heart of geography. I consider it the most magical, essential, and challenging part of being a geographer. Fieldwork is the ultimate mode of geographical exploration. It renews and deepens our direct experience of the planet and its diversity of lands, life, and cultures, immeasurably enriching the understanding of the world that is geography's core pursuit and responsibility. Fieldwork takes us beyond current frontiers of knowledge and preconception, enabling firsthand discoveries that no amount of theorizing or study of preexisting accounts or maps could ever reveal. Without fieldwork, geography is secondhand reporting and armchair analysis, losing much of its involvement with the world, its original insight, its authority, its contributions for addressing local and global issues, and its reason for being. This essay examines the rewards and responsibilities of long-term fieldwork with indigenous peoples that involves many rounds of returning to communities over many years. Such fieldwork is based on a continuing commitment to people and places. It is built on relationships and reciprocity, requiring a dedication to research that is as relevant to indigenous peoples' concerns as to academic ones. It demands time, sensitivity, and an involvement as much emotional as intellectual. In return, it makes possible research that differs fundamentally from short-term studies in depth and breadth of inquiry. The best fieldwork reflects a level of local knowledge, indigenous insight, and regional understanding attainable only through long relationships with a particular people and particular places. With this come new obligations and responsibilities that may reshape the direction of your career and the goals of your research. FIELDWORK AS A WAY OF LIFE My fieldwork revolves around indigenous communities and homelands. A quarter of my life over two decades has been spent in the Nepal Himalaya. Much of that work has focused on the Sherpa-inhabited areas of northeastern Nepal, including five years in the Khumbu Sherpa villages within Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and in the many Sherpa settlements of the lower-altitude Pharak and Katuthanga regions just to the south (Stevens 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1997, n.d.). I have worked in forty-five Sherpa villages in these three settlement areas (Figure 1). For twenty years I have returned annually for fieldwork on cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental history, conservation geography, and tourism studies. This work involves wide-ranging interviews, observations, household surveys, and mapping of many facets of local life, including: indigenous geographical, environmental, and agropastoral knowledge; agricultural and pastoral practices and forest use; community-based natural resource management and co nservation; interregional and trans-Himalayan trade; settlement, economic, environmental, landscape, and cultural history and recent change; tourism development and impacts; and the many issues created by the establishment and management of inhabited national parks and protected areas in indigenous homelands. In part, it was the opportunity to conduct such fieldwork that brought me to geography, and it has become the main focus of my time and work. For me, nothing can compare with the rewards of fieldwork--the intellectual excitement of firsthand discovery and of gaining increasingly deep local knowledge and regional understanding, the satisfactions and meaning of living and working for extended periods in remote and wild country and in magnificent places, the chance to learn from people whose ways of life and attitudes toward living you admire, the opportunity to experience rhythms of everyday life and community that are impossible to find at home in twenty-first-century America, and the way in which the work itself both demands and evokes alertness, resourcefulness, adaptability, self-reliance, judgment, compassion, and original thought and insight. …