Chapter 3: What Is Ethnographic Fieldwork?

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fieldwork

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an extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life an anthropologist is interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data

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participant observation

Back 2

the method anthropologists use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible

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ethnography

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an anthropologist's written or filmed description of a particular culture

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positivism

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the view that there is a reality "out there" that can be known through the senses and that there is a single, appropriate set of scientific methods for investigating that reality

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objective knowledge

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knowledge about reality that is absolute and true

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informants

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people in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life (also called teachers or friends)

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intersubjective meanings

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the shared, public symbolic systems of a culture

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reflexivity

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critically thinking about the way one thinks; reflecting on one's own experience

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multisited fieldwork

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ethnographic research on cultural processes that are not contained by social, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries, in which the ethnographer follows the process from site to site, often doing fieldwork at sites and with persons who traditionally were ever subjected to ethnographic analysis

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dialectic of fieldwork

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the process of building a bridge of understanding between anthropologist and informants so that each can begin to understand the other

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culture shock

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the feeling, akin to pain, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them

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fact

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A widely accepted observation, a taken-for-granted item of common knowledge. Facts do not speak for themselves; only when they are interpreted and placed in a context of meaning do they become intelligible.