Fieldwork

Anthropologists’ relationship with fieldwork is akin to historians’ relationship with archives. The field is generally perceived to be located inside a space-time coordinates, seen as a contested terrain of power dynamics, a place of social hierarchy, with competing ideologies and motivations, and a space of historical manifestation. An anthropologist going into a field means, she is not going into a vacuum. From a classical anthropological perspective, the purpose of going into a field is to get a native’s point of view, usually seen as a raw data, which ethnographer writes as fieldnotes, and then report it in a systematic scientific form. This seemingly simple reporting process of representing a native’s point of view has gone through a radical critique. Doing fieldwork is not just as simple as it is usually presented. When an ethnographer enters into a field, her biases and assumptions comes under erasure or at least get challenged from a competing point of view, which opens up a possibility for something new. Drawing on a radical possibility the field offers to ethnographers, this page is designed for students to express their fieldwork and fieldtrips experiences undertaken during the semester.