Response to Amy Pollard’s paper “Field of screams: difficulty and ethnographic fieldwork”

Abstract

Pollard’s paper raises important issues around PhD (and other) fieldwork in anthropology. All PhD students will experience some emotional responses during their studies. I have written myself in this journal about the emotions I experienced coming out of the field in my own doctoral fieldwork (Barry 2002). The fact that the doctoral ride is a bumpy one, whilst recognised by any peer support group of PhD students, does not tend to feature much in printed discussions of the PhD process. It is more of a hidden discourse – part of what Latour and Woolgar (1986) describe as informal accounts that never make it into formal presentations and publications. For example, Potter’s (2006) book Doing postgraduate research does not mention the ups and downs and the possible roller-coaster of emotions that might be in store. Murray (2002) does describe “fear and loathing”, but only in the final stages of the write-up of the thesis. So it is a breath of fresh air to read an honest account of the arduous path of Amy Pollard and her fellow PhD students. My hunch is that many students feel they are the only ones having such problems, and to bring this debate into the public eye can only be of help to students and their supervisors. I do feel it is a particularly relevant discussion for students of anthropology and their teachers to be having. I have had the benefit of moving between academic disciplines. I studied psychology for my undergraduate degree, then worked as a researcher in sociology departments for eight years before deciding to do my PhD within the discipline of anthropology. I particularly chose anthropology to learn ethnographic methodology from the discipline that invented it. It is my perception, from this cross-disciplinary viewpoint, that doctoral research in anthropology is by far the hardest to conduct in the social sciences. The rigours of fieldwork are usually greater, as has been clearly highlighted by the students canvassed by Pollard. The burden of analysis is much greater with the mass of unstructured data that a long participant observation stint can produce. Then there is the lack of a clear, well-defined method for writing up, certainly compared to psychology which utilises an experimental model. Dealing with each of these stages of the PhD offers the opportunity for difficult emotions to arise in any discipline (for example see Kleinman and Copp [1993] for a discussion of emotions that can arise whilst doing fieldwork, and Ball [1990] on emotional responses to the process of analysis). Given the unstructured nature of anthropological fieldwork analysis and