Foxes in the Field: An Essay on an Historical Methodology

Abstract

Fieldwork fascinates us, at least those of us who have done fieldwork. Whenever two or more fieldworkers gather, they begin to exchange fieldwork But as those of us who have worked with oral narratives know, people tell stories for reasons. Our stories are more than just stories. By telling stories, we try to come to terms with an and to convey to others what it was like. Why do memories of fieldwork preoccupy fieldworkers so? If fieldwork stories belong to a genre, they are bildungsroman. Fieldwork allowed fieldworkers to reexperience intense education of childhood, but with an adult consciousness. They entered field as children and were educated by people with whom they lived. Even most basic skills that our parents taught us when were toddlers eating and personal hygiene had to be relearned in field. The education of fieldwork is such a powerful because it is a total experience: physical, social, and cognitive. Here I address cognitive or intellectual aspect of fieldwork. But, even as I focus on fieldwork as an intellectual experience, I must note that cognitions acquired during fieldwork take on special power because they derive energy from those physical and social experiences. The dichotomy between hedgehog and fox lies at core of this essay. Isaiah Berlin translates Greek poet Archilocus: the fox knows many things, but hedgehog knows one big thing (Berlin, 1978: 22). The fieldworker's knowledge is knowledge of fox. Berlin elaborates: There exists a great chasm between those who relate everything to a single central vision hedgehogs and those whose thought moves on many levels, who seize upon a vast variety of experience without seeking to fit it into any unitary inner vision (Berlin, 1978: 22). This is fox's perspective, and it is this perspective that gives fieldwork its value and its future. Hedgehogs criticize foxes and their methodology. Two hedgehogs like scholars, for example, greeted publication of a journal devoted to method by accusing African historians of elaborating a methodology at expense of neglecting theory (Bernstein and Depelchin, 1978, 1979). The author of a recent textbook in African history seized on this criticism, implying that fieldwork belonged to a particular state in development of African historiography, a stage that he called Africanist stage. He admitted that Afri-