Before we begin...

● 2012 graduate in Social Anthropology

● 1st class honours, 80% in dissertation

● Dissertation online at www.kularing.info/2012/11/11/fishing/

● Audience: 25 bound copies, 110 views online, 56 downloads

● To do: put on kindle, submit article to journal, translate into Turkish & give to participants

In comparison: Only one other fieldwork based dissertation was done in 2012, which also received a 1st.

Anthropological Fieldwork.....

What's this all about?

This evening we are going to:

● Look at a practical summary of how I did it, and analyse

● Brainstorm with the help of this to highlight questions and queries to be addressed

● Discuss and bring up challenges I encountered

● Complementary ways of 'writing it up' (sharing research).

● Don't just leave it! Visions for 'enlivening' research

● Final thought and helpful resources

Activity

Highlight/Underline

what you want to bring up in discussion

If you want you can colour code e.g.green what resonates with you

yellow what you are unsure about

red what doesn't sit well with you

Just think positive – unsure – negative in whatever way you want! Any questions

Explore through mind-map brainstorming

Challenges encountered that we may not have covered?

● In your own experiences of fieldwork/fieldwork-like situations what challenges did you find?

● Deciding what to do and where to do it

● Deciding what to focus on

● Speaking the language even when you can partly speak it

● Planning my time

● Explaining who I was

● Spending money and staying places

● Promises and negotiations

● Filming, recording, taking notes,

● Organisation and formative assessment

● Writing up, transcribing and the real hard work

● It is most definitely worth it in every way, most important is recognise your motivation and stay focussed with it even when distractions appear, put them aside till after.

Sharing ResearchEthnographic work mainly comes in the form of textual monographs and journal articles. However video and photography as medium are also pervasive. Other complementary forms that usually mix with this are diagrams, tables, graphs, and audio. However these can be combined in different ways, and can also include kinestetic (bodily/theatrical) description. The following are some interesting examples of different areas of inscription as part of the fieldwork process and/or ethnography. They are not all 'anthropology' per se, but have intrigiung approaches to the human subject (please see links for examples):

● Karl Marx's 'A Workers Inquiry'- (1938) http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol04/no12/marx.htm

● Bronislow Malinowski's 'A diary in the strict sense of the term' – (1914-18, pub. 1967) http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tu5-MtE-SVYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false

● Roderick Coover's Cinescapes (Digital collages) - http://www.unknownterritories.org/powell/index.html & http://www.culturesinwebs.com/SAMPLE-CIW/OctoberHarvest2.html

● Graphic novels http://www.cartoonmovement.com/comic/30 & http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eye-Classics-David-Zane-Mairowitz/dp/1906838097 & http://graphicly.com/inverclyde-community-development-trust/identity-the-archivist-s-treasure/gn

● WHR Rivers Kinship diagrams (1898) - http://archive.org/stream/cu31924014458891#page/n45/mode/2up

● Network analysis and visualisation – http://stamen.com/, & http://issuu.com/REMIX/docs/caught_by_the_shore/49 http://www.slideshare.net/jlmccreery/knowing-what-we-know3-12115327

● Para-sites - http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/366

My opinion is to use whatever medium is most applicable to the topic (NOT vica versa)

and secondarily use a medium that you have skill or can develop the skill in using.

Note: A valid criticism of my work was that perhaps I fitted the data to my visual conceptual model rather than more accurately doing the opposite. If you will you should adapt the '-graphic' to the 'ethno-' more than the 'ethno-' to the '-graphic'

If anthropology cannot be put to service as a tool for human liberation why are we bothering with it at all? (Nancy Scheper-Hughes)

Anthropologists go about this in different ways. As a student you can answer this question in your own way to your own extent, and it also depends on your participants. e.g. I explained to the participants in my dissertation as much as I could offer, which was to do justice to their way of life and story and provide them with a translated copy.

www.kularing.info/2012/11/16/pandoformative-movement/

A basic template I am building over time that explains my own particular vision of how I wish to develop further in doing anthropology and overcome and applied/academic alienation.

Final thought from old Atif & Bringa

..only two weeks before I was to return to London, old Atif told me: "when you get back among those people, tell them about us and what you have learned among us. But when you are here among people who know better than you, do not speak but listen." While later trying to write this book in the midst of the horrors of war and the tremendous suffering of most of the people who appear in it, I have kept the old man's words in my heart. I can only strive, given my limitations, to be worthy of the trust of old Atif. As an outsider there is a limit to my understanding of his community. In advising how to avoid being drawn into village intrigues, the local hodza (Islamic instructor) reminded me that there was a limit to my friendship with and understanding of Muslims. Ultimately I was not one of them, I was not a Muslim. Furthermore, he warned, always remember that people do one thing, say another, and think a third. Since the anthropologist rarely gets access to all three versions from the same person, the above warning is also valid for the reader of this ethnographic account.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iqtVESaJUgkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PR16#v=onepage&q&f=false

Resources● Shane the Lone Ethnographer: A Beginners Guide to Ethnography – Graphic Novel

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=Q9YQJ8nQvX4C&rdid=book-Q9YQJ8nQvX4C&rdot=1&source=gbs_atb

● MIT Anthropology course materials, Seminar on fieldwork

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-112-seminar-in-ethnography-and-fieldwork-spring-2008/index.htm

● Previous graduates' dissertations – print copies can be borrowed from Caroline Grundy at reception

● Caught by the Shore: Fish, Fishing, & Fishers in Turkish Cyprus – online version of my dissertation with notes on fieldwork

http://kularing.info/2012/11/11/fishing/

● Search the web, there are 100's of articles on fieldwork and ethnography!!!

● YOU are your main resource and tool in fieldwork, the most sophisticated sensor possible!

Fieldworker's best friends :)

Continually revised Questions to ask, patience & persistence, politeness & assertiveness, respect, & bowels for a lot of turkish coffee!!!

“ [sic] In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow

the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us,

these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find

very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas,

his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a

virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be

systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they

resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic

connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience” (Turner, 1974:23).

In case your wondering Why?

Ethnographic Fieldwork is deeply scientific when applied well in the sense that it is holistic and systemic, and you can also make it trans-disciplinary if you want.

Do it and it makes more sense, as will the 'bigger questions' I posted on the facebook event - https://www.facebook.com/events/498952310138699/?fref=ts