Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology

Abstract

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, diverse sciences grounded in natural history made a virtue of field research that somehow tested scientists' endurance; disciplinary change derived from the premise that witnesses were made reliable by character-molding trials. The turn to the field was a function of structural transformations in various quarters, including (but hardly limited to) global politics, communications systems, and scientific institutions, and it conduced to biogeographical explanations, taxonomic schemes that admitted of heterogeneity, and affective research styles. Sociocultural anthropology, which took specialized shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, shared many properties with other field sciences, but its method--participant observation-was distinctive. Critical to the method's definition were the efforts of the British experimental psychologist-anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who relied on notions then widespread in Europe and the United States. The discipline's future mythic hero, Bronislaw Malinowski, embraced Rivers's model. For both men, proper fieldwork meant using the researcher's body as an instrument and entailed understanding both the anthropologist's body and the research subject's body as energy systems; this symmetry facilitated a relativist perspective. Participant observation remains central to sociocultural anthropology, but the discipline's pedagogic habits contributed to loss of memory of its energetic conceptualization.

Archaeologies of Emergent Presents and Futures

“…I do not necessarily see this as the sort of work that might be most helpfully undertaken by a sole ethnographer-fieldworker; see, also, Rabinow (2011) and González-Ruibal (2014); in our case, our work is undertaken collaboratively, and I see the data that our research team collects as emerging from the nexus of our interactions both with one another and with the sociomaterial worlds that we study. In keeping with a tradition of anthropological fieldwork, which has its genealogy in the work of W. H. R. Rivers (Kuklick 2011), our bodies remain important instruments in our field practice, as do the mediations of our engagements with the field by way of the instruments-still and moving film cameras, sound recorders, tape measures, drawing tools, trowel, laptop, tablet, paper, and pen-we use to observe and, hence, intervene within it. Like González-Ruibal (2014), we acknowledge that the rhythm of fieldwork might be more punctuated and might involve more rapid and/or directed methods that resonate with traditions of directed observations of material practices in ethnoarchaeology, in which participants are asked to reenact particular quotidian processes, and these are recorded using film, audio, or other graphical methods in ways that allow both informants and researchers to reflect directly on them.…”

Resonant worlds: Cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science

“…As anthropologists of science leave the laboratory and follow scientists into the field, we reencounter activities that share an earlier, common origin (Kuklick , ; Stocking ; Wax ) . At the same time that we are constructing a field to be studied (Amit ; Candea ), so too are our interlocutors.…”

Higher and colder: The success and failure of boundaries in high altitude and Antarctic research stations

“…Perhaps the most significant variation is that between self-experiment and other experiment, which creates different identities for the scientists and samples involved, but which is effectively independent of the field or non-field status of the experiment? Or, as Kuklick (2011) has hinted, could the value of the sample be affected by ideas borrowed from sport, exploration, and colonialism, about heroism, individual sacrifice and intellectual (White, male) dominance over nature (Powell, 2007)? 14 Whatever the answer, we will not find it without reconsidering all the homes of science.…”