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Field Observational Research in Anthropology and Sociology
Field Observational Research in Anthropology and Sociology Roger Sanjek, City University of New York, Flushing, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 8, pp. 5620–5625, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract Find observational research, or ethnography, has a 150-year history in anthropology and sociology. As a form of ‘I-witnessing’ ongoing social life, it triangulates fieldwork data preserved in notes and records with comparative social theory and documentary contextualization. The research process begins with problem and site selection considerations, access to natural behavior-stream events, and development of rapport with research subjects. As the fieldwork ‘funnel’ narrows, discovery procedures progress from situated listening and observation, to interviews. Fieldnotes, combined with headnotes, are later employed in constructing written ethnographies that may be assessed by canons of validity rather than reliability, which attaches more centrally to other research modalities.
Field observational research in anthropology and sociology – or the process of doing ethnography – brings the social science investigator directly to the scene of the human behavior she or he describes. It involves ‘being there,’ or ‘I-witnessing.’ So also, of course, do other forms of documentation: journalism, film, travel writing, explorer or missionary’s report, even background research by a novelist. What makes ethnography distinctive as a research practice is that it forms one point of a triangular process of knowledge construction which also includes comparative social theory and documentary contextualization. The fieldnotes that result from ethnographic discovery procedures are not merely ‘written up,’ but are filtered and interpreted against theoretical propositions and the comparative record of other field observational studies; they are also grounded and enhanced by historical, ecological, demographic, economic, and other documentary sources that provide background and context. As the products of this mode of research are read – monographs and articles also referred to as ethnography – they stimulate new comparative theoretical thinking, which in turn suggests further problems and interpretations to be resolved through more field observational research. Ethnographies also regularly lead to new demands and rising standards for documentary contextualization – more history, more ecological or demographic backgrounding, more attention to state policy, economic trends or the world system. This triangle of ethnography, comparison, and contextualization is, in essence, the process by which field observational research in anthropology and sociology is utilized to explain and interpret human cultures and social life.
History and Scope in Anthropology and Sociology In 1851 Morgan published his League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois; combining fieldwork and comparative and theoretical interests in political organization, this book was the first anthropological ethnography. It depicted the structure and operation of Iroquois society, detailing matrilineal kinship, political and ceremonial life, material culture and religion. After formation of the US government Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, a stream of ethnographic accounts of native
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 9
American societies began, including landmark field observational studies of the Zuni by Cushing, the Baffin Island Inuit by Boas, and, after 1900, ethnographies of Plains, Eastern Woodland, and California groups by Boas’ students trained at Columbia University. During the 1930s the scope broadened to include rural and urban studies in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, and also in contemporary US settings. In Great Britain’s colonies, local government official or missionary fieldworkers followed the topical guidebook Notes and Queries on Anthropology, drafted by Oxford University theorist Tylor and others, and first published in 1874. This armchair scholar/man-on-the-spot division of labor ended two decades later when Oxford-trained Spencer collaborated in field observational study with local expert Gillen, producing their Central Tribes of Native Australia in 1899, and providing detailed coverage of cosmology, ritual, and social organization which revealed unheralded complexity, and which sparked theoretical work by Durkheim and Freud. In 1898 a team from Cambridge University conducted fieldwork in Torres Strait north of Australia, and member Rivers used genealogical data to probe community history, migration trajectories, marriage patterns, demography, and inheritance. Rivers and his students conducted further ethnographic studies in India and the Pacific, but their work was eclipsed by the more thorough Trobriand Islands field observational research of Malinowski, resulting in Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922 and its famous first chapter on method. Malinowskian ethnography dominated British social anthropology thereafter, and by the 1940s reshaped American cultural anthropology as well. In sociology, there is less agreement about the disciplinary origin of field observational research methods. Conventionally, the monographs of the University of Chicago department during the 1920s and 1930s are cited (Madge, 1962): studies of itinerant ‘hobo’ workers, youth gangs, dancehall employees and patrons; Italians, Poles, Jews, French Canadians, Mexicans, and Chinese; and central city ‘gold coast’ apartment, artist colony, and rooming house dwellers. Two decades before this research, however, Du Bois used similar methods (both he and the Chicago school were inspired by British and American urban survey and settlement house movements) to produce The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which depicted life in an inner
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city neighborhood comprised of southern migrant and northern-born African-Americans. Even earlier, Engels in 1844 studied new classes, Irish labor migration, urban spatial arrangements, symbolic attachments, and modes of observable behavior in Manchester and other rapidly industrializing British cities, although his Condition of the Working Class in England was not published in English until 1892. Since the 1920s there has been much cross-fertilization between anthropological and sociological ethnography. A few of the Chicago studies were conducted by researchers identifiable as anthropologists, and the Lynds, authors of Middletown (1929) which credits anthropologists Rivers and Wissler for methodological inspiration, and Whyte, author of Street Corner Society (1955 [1943] ) and influenced by Harvard anthropologists, are presented as major figures in the development of American sociology (Madge, 1962). Gluckman, a Manchester social anthropologist whose fieldwork was conducted in Africa, was influential in the development of ethnographic fieldwork by British sociologists working in schools, gangs, and factories during the 1950s and later (Burgess, 1984). In recent decades, both anthropologists and sociologists have undertaken field observational research in a wide range of overlapping settings, at home and abroad; so increasingly do scholars from folklore, education, environmental psychology, political science, and other disciplines. Ethnography, however, remains central to credentialing, teaching, publishing, and theory-construction in anthropology, while it occupies a more marginal position in contemporary sociology, or in other fields.
Selection, Access, Rapport The selection of a particular population or site for field observational research is ordinarily related to some unanswered question or outstanding problem in social theory. Personal connections or predilections of researchers also shape this selection, but the fieldworker must justify his or her choice in terms of some significant theory to which the project is addressed. Usually this is made explicit in a written proposal for funds to underwrite the fieldwork. While ethnography is thus lodged from conception in social theory, a comparative viewpoint also molds the fieldwork process. First, investigators acquire a cross-cultural or cross-site perspective by training and reading; when addressing any aspect of social life – marriage, leadership, ethnicity, etc. – field observational researchers recall examples of similarities and differences elsewhere. Second, the comparative perspective focuses attention on trends and transitions, not just on similarities and differences at random (which are infinite). Rather than treating each fieldwork case as unique, ethnographers place the social phenomena they study within comparative frames (foraging, horticultural, agricultural, pastoral, industrial, colon ial, neocolonial economies; cooperative, competitive, individualistic societies; gender subordination, complementarity or equality; etc.) Ethnographic results in turn provoke debate, revision, and innovation in such theorizing. While significant theories bring fieldworkers to particular locations, actors, and activities, once they arrive they begin to observe and listen. Often they must learn to listen – by learning the language, the local vocabulary, and current verbal
conventions. Field observational research now turns away from theoretical discourse to the viewpoints and concepts of the people (informants, subjects, actors, consultants) themselves. Ethnographers aim to document how the people see and talk about their everyday social activities and groupings, and about the wider worlds they live in. It is their normal scenes of activity, topics of conversation, and standards of evaluation that are the objects of field observational research. This does not begin by announcing: ‘I’m your ethnographer; when can I interview you?’ Investigators must be honest about their role and sponsorship (covert field observational research remains controversial and rare), but their paramount aim is to listen and to move as quickly as possible into the natural settings of social life, the places people would be, doing what they would be doing, if the ethnographer was not there. This involves a continuing process of requesting and obtaining access to the many locations, activities, and groups that comprise the overall fieldwork arena. As ethnographers observe and listen in a wide-ranging manner, within parameters set by the significant theories that bring them there, they begin to understand culturally meaningful behavioral conventions, and to formulate culturally appropriate utterances. This indexes a second continuing process of building interpersonal rapport with informants, a topic that preoccupies many autobiographical accounts of field observational research – one of the most instructive being Whyte’s, 1955 [1943] Appendix to Street Corner Society. As the ethnographic process unfolds, the fieldworker must constantly make decisions about where to be, whom to listen to, what events to follow, and what to safely ignore and leave out. These decisions are guided both by the significant theories prefiguring fieldwork, and by new theories of significance that arise in the field. These latter theories – hunches, hypotheses, ideas about connections and relationships – emerge as listening and observation proceed. They suggest which persons and activities to focus upon, what places and events to attend to, and which objects and their circulation to follow. As this occurs, the fieldwork ‘funnel’ narrows, to use Agar’s (1980) apt metaphor. The early phase of securing access and building rapport is wide, open, and nearly all-encompassing; as theories of significance emerge, pan out, or are discarded, the funnel of informants, events, and activities narrows. Goals crystallize. Research design sharpens.
Discovery Procedures: Listening Ethnography’s greatest strength is situated listening. Interviews become useful at later stages of fieldwork, but field observational research begins by listening to what British anthropologist Richards (1939) called ‘speech in action.’ Here the actors control topicality – talking to each other about what they usually do – and the researcher secures access to their turf – the locations they usually occupy. Early on, as rapport begins to be established, fieldworkers deliberately place themselves in a wide sampling of such situations. Then, as the research funnel narrows and other methods are deployed, the ethnographer becomes more selective about where to listen. The importance of situated listening was emphasized memorably by Whyte. After he asked an intrusive question
Field Observational Research in Anthropology and Sociology
during illicit gambling activities, and stopping the ongoing flow of behavior, Whyte’s key informant Doc told him, ‘Go easy on that “who,” “what,” “why,” “when,” “where” stuff, Bill. You ask those questions and people will clam up on you. If people accept you, you can just hang around, and you’ll learn the answers in the long run without even having to ask the questions.’ ‘I found that this was true. As I sat and listened, I learned the answers to question that I would not even have had the sense to ask if I had been getting my information solely on an interview basis’ (1955 [1943], p. 303). Situated listening becomes the basis for understanding both what can be talked about in later conversations and interviews, and what categories and evaluations the actors use to observe and interpret ongoing behavior.
Discovery Procedures: Observing Many veteran field observational researchers bristle when they are told that their methods are not quantitative. Using both emic categories articulated by the actors, and etic categories formulated by the community of social science observers, ethnographers count, sample, and calculate ratios, proportions, and probabilities as part of their fieldwork activities (Johnson, 1978). These countable quantities include numbers of people in events, their positions, their comings and goings; objects, inventories; and exchanges, movements, orderings, sequences, associations, assemblages, and arrangements of many sorts. Malinowski’s classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) incorporated his numerous observations of the interisland kula exchange of seashell valuables – necklaces traded for armlets – as canoes from one community arrived at another, exchanges were conducted, and then additional exchanges of items including foodstuffs, timber, greenstone, and pottery followed. Who exchanged what, the order, etiquette, volume, frequency, and other variables were all counted and analyzed. In Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1955 [1943]) the size, composition, duration of activity, and initiation of interaction were recorded and analyzed for numerous group events; Whyte even demonstrated quantitatively a relationship between hierarchical group leadership structure and bowling scores. Harris (1964) furnishes field observational researchers with an etic model of ‘the great stream of uninterrupted behavior’ that extends backward in time and unfolds continuously. He provides a technical vocabulary to operationalize recording of isolatable events and linked segments of the behavior stream – from individual body movements and their environmental effects at the most basic level, through sequences of multiactor scenes connected by actor, place, or object. Sanjek (1978) applied this approach in a multiethnic Ghanaian urban neighborhood to collect (through interviews) sequences of multiactor scenes for 40 adults, each over four-day periods, in order to test whether their social networks were structured more by common ethnicity or by class position, and in which behavioral settings ethnicity and class were stronger or weaker. Johnson (1975, 1978) developed an observational fieldwork approach to formulate statistically valid time allocation patterns in his research among the Machiguenga of Peru. By randomly selecting actors and times for observation at their most likely location, and recording their ongoing behavior at
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the time of each random visit, a powerful quantitative record of how a given population allocates its activities among production, reproduction, leisure, and other categories resulted. This and similar methods have been employed in a wide range of fieldwork settings (Gross, 1984).
Discovery Procedures: Interviewing Barth recounts of his highland New Guinea research, ‘My field procedure was . to rely very heavily on observation of spontaneous, unelicited word and act. I paid particular attention to this in Baktaman questions and explanations to each other – in men’s houses, in the fellowship of hunting and working, during initiations and other rites. Only secondarily, and with much reticence, did I ask my own questions, and then only when they seemed cast in a native pattern and received easy and natural response’ (1975, p. 226). Interviewing is problematic (Briggs, 1986). Human beings are apt to reinterpret or reformulate the past to make it conform with their ongoing sense of the present. Moreover, the ever present danger of an observer effect in fieldwork – that the presence of the observer affects and reshapes an actor’s behavior and response – is especially difficult to control in an artificial one-to-one interview situation where normal social activity is suspended. Still, interviews are essential to field observational research. They are best left for later stages of the ethnographic encounter when, to use Agar’s funnel metaphor, the speech events of fieldwork move from wide and open to narrow and more focused. After the investigator has become at ease with the language and local codes and references, and has successfully gained access to natural conversations and amassed a stock of cultural knowledge via situated listening, deliberate intervention into speech events may begin. These steps may be graded from least to most intrusive and controlled. 1. Still on the informants’ turf, and still in the accustomed activities of daily life, the field observational researcher begins to enter natural conversations as a speaker, and begins to shift topicality to her or his own interests. This process starts gently, by moving appropriately into rounds of chatting, gossiping, and ordinary comment. As cultural competence increases, and as theories of significance emerge, the fieldworker attempts to direct conversations by introducing questions and suggesting topics for responses from informants. 2. After an initial period of fieldwork – a few months perhaps – arranged interviews may begin. This class of speech events is disruptive – the informant is removed from her or his turf, either to the ethnographer’s household or office, or by transforming an everyday location into a scene of ethnographer–informant dialogue – an activity that would otherwise not be occurring there. Typically the earliest of these deliberate breaks in time–place behavioral flow reserve topicality for the actor. In such open-ended or discovery interviews, the informant is encouraged to move the conversation according to his or her own interests. 3. In later and more productive interviews, the ethnographer begins to assert control. General topics are introduced, allowing informants to expand freely upon their own points
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of view and knowledge. In more structured ethnographic interviews, topicality is more firmly shaped and directed by the fieldworker; informant responses now move away from orations and free commentaries and to more specific responses to questions. 4. In the most focused forms of interviewing, the ethnographer controls both turf and topicality as fully as possible. Questionnaires and interview schedules may be used, and the objective is to obtain particular types and pieces of data. These may include household interviews, psychological tests, or reports of disputes, or may encompass repeated interview sessions to secure lengthy life histories, with the fieldworker now guiding the subject according to preset standards of scope and comprehensiveness. 5. Though not a major part of ethnographic practice, in some instances, and when still on the informants’ turf, the fieldworker may ask direct and pointed questions, and attempt to secure precise pieces of data for his or her records. Interventions of this sort are especially dangerous – the inappropriateness of such seizures of topicality in everyday settings may be jarring to the actors. Typically speech events of this sort occur in the final days of fieldwork, when local rapport is at its peak, research goals are most pressing, and the fieldwork funnel approaches its vanishing point.
Notes and Records The production of notes and records (Sanjek, 1990) begins to move the field observational research process toward its ultimate written products. Focused interview sessions with seated informants often permit direct transcription of verbal statements, but in open-ended and ethnographic interviews, brief written notes – what Ottenberg (in Sanjek, 1990) terms scratch notes – are taken during the session, and these form the basis for the construction later of fuller written fieldnotes. Fieldworkers often go through this two-step process even when interviews are tape recorded, both as a backup to and index of the taped session, and because of the analytic gains many ethnographers note in transforming their scratch notes into fuller descriptive fieldnotes. In field observational research in natural behavior stream settings, similar brief jottings may be inscribed, but major attention is directed to the event in progress. Often it is not even possible to record scratch notes, and both they and fuller fieldnote description occur later. Mead (1977) wrote about the nagging pressure to type up fieldnotes from scratch notes, and about the danger of scratch notes growing ‘cold’ when this was delayed, even by one day. But she also wrote of the satisfaction of being caught up with this work, and of the importance for later ethnographic writing of the insights gained in moving from scratch notes to descriptive fieldnotes. Ottenberg sees this process as the interaction of scratch notes and headnotes – the stored memories and interpretations that arise from direct participant observation as filtered by the ethnographer’s overall theoretical stance. Headnotes form an essential complement to fieldnotes (and to more formal fieldwork datasets or records). Headnotes are employed to make sense of one’s fieldnotes when they are re-read later for ethnographic writing projects. The importance of headnotes is
particularly evident when one ethnographer attempts to use another’s fieldnotes, and quickly realizes how difficult it is to understand them without headnotes of one’s own (Sanjek, 1990). Fieldnotes typically are kept in running chronological order, and may minimally be indexed separately by actor and topic. Additionally, field observational researchers often generate records, or well-defined sets of data organized by topic, person, or other category. These may include records of household composition, land holdings, ritual performances, life histories, folktales, etc. Sometimes decisions to collect sets of records are part of the initial research design, and preset forms to enter such data may be brought with the investigator to the field setting. In other cases, a decision to collect a systematic body of records develops during fieldwork, often emerging within general running fieldnotes and then being separated out in new record files. Fieldnotes and records present ethnographers with great masses of information – hundreds, even thousands of pages – that while being accumulated may be arranged only by chronological order or by topic. Malinowski (1922) urged that ethnographers constantly re-read and begin to organize and analyze their notes while still conducting field research, but commonly the more focused work of indexing them occurs when fieldwork is over. As ethnographers then turn to ethnographic writing, they readdress the theoretical discourse they turned away from in fieldwork. Fieldnotes and records must now be related directly to the comparative and contextual points of the knowledge-construction triangle.
Canons of Validity Field observational research aims to maximize validity – ‘the degree to which scientific observations actually measure or record what they purport to measure’ – rather than reliability – ‘the repeatability, including interpersonal replicability, of scientific observations’ (Pelto and Pelto, 1978, p. 33). Reliability is valued in survey, medical, and product safety research. In ethnography, restudies to assess change may be conducted, but independent investigation of the same locale or population is unlikely or impossible. Validity depends on the intensity and depth of field observational research, but it always remains a goal rather than a property that can be independently measured (Wolcott, 1995, pp. 167–70). A quantitative, and highly reliable, randomized sample study that investigates the gender, ethnicity, class, and other characteristics of the five best friends of members of a given population would be less valid than one in which cultural meanings and categories of friendship were first discovered through listening to natural conversations or eliciting such information in interviews. In the case of Indian immigrants in New York City, for example, the ‘five best friends’ study might miss entirely the category of rakhi ritual friendships between adult males and females which are affirmed in an annual festival where the man ties a flower bracelet on the woman’s wrist. If validity remains important, but elusive, how can it be assessed in field observational research results? Sanjek (1990, pp. 393–404) proposed three canons of validity by which
Field Observational Research in Anthropology and Sociology ethnographic writing may be evaluated. The first is theoretical candor, the openness with which the ethnographer addresses the significant theories, and even more, the local theories of significance that structured the fieldwork process. A second canon calls for explicit depiction of the ethnographer’s fieldwork path – the number of informants from whom information was obtained, in what ways, and their relationship both to the wider population the field observational study concerns and to each other. A third canon concerns information about the fieldnote evidence itself: not simply ‘how much’ and its basis in listening, observing, or interviewing, but more significantly the precise relationship of notes and records to the written ethnography. Some ethnographies utilize fieldnotes directly, even masses of them; others, for rhetorical or narrative purposes, do not, and need not. What matters in the end is that readers of field observational research have a clear picture of what the ethnographer did and why, who they talked to and learned from, and what they brought back to document it. Field observational research produces results that can be obtained in no other way. This ethnographic tradition entails that ‘the description of people’s activities, their interactions with each other, [and] their verbal behavior’ be ‘copious and detailed’; ‘cumulative development . consists above all in the fact that such data, provided they are adequate, never become obsolete and can be used by analysts . in researching questions not visualized by the researchers who collected them’ (Anglin, 1979, p. 49).
See also: Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology; Observational Studies: Overview; Participant Observation.
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Bibliography Agar, M., 1980. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. Academic Press, New York. Anglin, A., 1979. Analytic and folk models: The Tallensi case. In: Holy, L. (Ed.), Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Department of Social Anthropology, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Ireland. Barth, F., 1975. Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Briggs, C.L., 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge University Press, New York. Burgess, R.G., 1984. In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research. George Allen and Unwin, London. Emerson, R.M., Fretz, R.I., Shaw, L.L., 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gross, D.R., 1984. Time allocation: A tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology 13, 519–558. Harris, M., 1964. The Nature of Cultural Things. Random House, New York. Johnson, A., 1975. Time allocation in a Machiguenga community. Ethnology 14, 301–310. Johnson, A.W., 1978. Quantification in Cultural Anthropology: An Introduction to Research Design. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Madge, J., 1962. The Origins of Scientific Sociology. Tavistock, London. Malinowski, B., 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Routledge, London. Mead, M., 1977. Letters From the Field, 1925–1975. Harper and Row, New York. Pelto, P.J., Pelto, G.H., 1978. Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry. Cambridge University Press, New York. Richards, A., 1939. The development of field work methods in social anthropology. In: Barlett, F.C., et al. (Eds.), The Study of Society. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 272–316. Sanjek, R., 1978. A network method and its uses in urban ethnography. Human Organization 37, 257–268. Sanjek, R. (Ed.), 1990. Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Whyte, W.F., 1955 [1943]. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, second ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Wolcott, H.F., 1995. The Art of Fieldwork. AltaMira, Walnut Creek, CA.
Abstract Find observational research, or ethnography, has a 150-year history in anthropology and sociology. As a form of ‘I-witnessing’ ongoing social life, it triangulates fieldwork data preserved in notes and records with comparative social theory and documentary contextualization. The research process begins with problem and site selection considerations, access to natural behavior-stream events, and development of rapport with research subjects. As the fieldwork ‘funnel’ narrows, discovery procedures progress from situated listening and observation, to interviews. Fieldnotes, combined with headnotes, are later employed in constructing written ethnographies that may be assessed by canons of validity rather than reliability, which attaches more centrally to other research modalities.
Field observational research in anthropology and sociology – or the process of doing ethnography – brings the social science investigator directly to the scene of the human behavior she or he describes. It involves ‘being there,’ or ‘I-witnessing.’ So also, of course, do other forms of documentation: journalism, film, travel writing, explorer or missionary’s report, even background research by a novelist. What makes ethnography distinctive as a research practice is that it forms one point of a triangular process of knowledge construction which also includes comparative social theory and documentary contextualization. The fieldnotes that result from ethnographic discovery procedures are not merely ‘written up,’ but are filtered and interpreted against theoretical propositions and the comparative record of other field observational studies; they are also grounded and enhanced by historical, ecological, demographic, economic, and other documentary sources that provide background and context. As the products of this mode of research are read – monographs and articles also referred to as ethnography – they stimulate new comparative theoretical thinking, which in turn suggests further problems and interpretations to be resolved through more field observational research. Ethnographies also regularly lead to new demands and rising standards for documentary contextualization – more history, more ecological or demographic backgrounding, more attention to state policy, economic trends or the world system. This triangle of ethnography, comparison, and contextualization is, in essence, the process by which field observational research in anthropology and sociology is utilized to explain and interpret human cultures and social life.
History and Scope in Anthropology and Sociology In 1851 Morgan published his League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois; combining fieldwork and comparative and theoretical interests in political organization, this book was the first anthropological ethnography. It depicted the structure and operation of Iroquois society, detailing matrilineal kinship, political and ceremonial life, material culture and religion. After formation of the US government Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, a stream of ethnographic accounts of native
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 9
American societies began, including landmark field observational studies of the Zuni by Cushing, the Baffin Island Inuit by Boas, and, after 1900, ethnographies of Plains, Eastern Woodland, and California groups by Boas’ students trained at Columbia University. During the 1930s the scope broadened to include rural and urban studies in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, and also in contemporary US settings. In Great Britain’s colonies, local government official or missionary fieldworkers followed the topical guidebook Notes and Queries on Anthropology, drafted by Oxford University theorist Tylor and others, and first published in 1874. This armchair scholar/man-on-the-spot division of labor ended two decades later when Oxford-trained Spencer collaborated in field observational study with local expert Gillen, producing their Central Tribes of Native Australia in 1899, and providing detailed coverage of cosmology, ritual, and social organization which revealed unheralded complexity, and which sparked theoretical work by Durkheim and Freud. In 1898 a team from Cambridge University conducted fieldwork in Torres Strait north of Australia, and member Rivers used genealogical data to probe community history, migration trajectories, marriage patterns, demography, and inheritance. Rivers and his students conducted further ethnographic studies in India and the Pacific, but their work was eclipsed by the more thorough Trobriand Islands field observational research of Malinowski, resulting in Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922 and its famous first chapter on method. Malinowskian ethnography dominated British social anthropology thereafter, and by the 1940s reshaped American cultural anthropology as well. In sociology, there is less agreement about the disciplinary origin of field observational research methods. Conventionally, the monographs of the University of Chicago department during the 1920s and 1930s are cited (Madge, 1962): studies of itinerant ‘hobo’ workers, youth gangs, dancehall employees and patrons; Italians, Poles, Jews, French Canadians, Mexicans, and Chinese; and central city ‘gold coast’ apartment, artist colony, and rooming house dwellers. Two decades before this research, however, Du Bois used similar methods (both he and the Chicago school were inspired by British and American urban survey and settlement house movements) to produce The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which depicted life in an inner
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.44026-2
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city neighborhood comprised of southern migrant and northern-born African-Americans. Even earlier, Engels in 1844 studied new classes, Irish labor migration, urban spatial arrangements, symbolic attachments, and modes of observable behavior in Manchester and other rapidly industrializing British cities, although his Condition of the Working Class in England was not published in English until 1892. Since the 1920s there has been much cross-fertilization between anthropological and sociological ethnography. A few of the Chicago studies were conducted by researchers identifiable as anthropologists, and the Lynds, authors of Middletown (1929) which credits anthropologists Rivers and Wissler for methodological inspiration, and Whyte, author of Street Corner Society (1955 [1943] ) and influenced by Harvard anthropologists, are presented as major figures in the development of American sociology (Madge, 1962). Gluckman, a Manchester social anthropologist whose fieldwork was conducted in Africa, was influential in the development of ethnographic fieldwork by British sociologists working in schools, gangs, and factories during the 1950s and later (Burgess, 1984). In recent decades, both anthropologists and sociologists have undertaken field observational research in a wide range of overlapping settings, at home and abroad; so increasingly do scholars from folklore, education, environmental psychology, political science, and other disciplines. Ethnography, however, remains central to credentialing, teaching, publishing, and theory-construction in anthropology, while it occupies a more marginal position in contemporary sociology, or in other fields.
Selection, Access, Rapport The selection of a particular population or site for field observational research is ordinarily related to some unanswered question or outstanding problem in social theory. Personal connections or predilections of researchers also shape this selection, but the fieldworker must justify his or her choice in terms of some significant theory to which the project is addressed. Usually this is made explicit in a written proposal for funds to underwrite the fieldwork. While ethnography is thus lodged from conception in social theory, a comparative viewpoint also molds the fieldwork process. First, investigators acquire a cross-cultural or cross-site perspective by training and reading; when addressing any aspect of social life – marriage, leadership, ethnicity, etc. – field observational researchers recall examples of similarities and differences elsewhere. Second, the comparative perspective focuses attention on trends and transitions, not just on similarities and differences at random (which are infinite). Rather than treating each fieldwork case as unique, ethnographers place the social phenomena they study within comparative frames (foraging, horticultural, agricultural, pastoral, industrial, colon ial, neocolonial economies; cooperative, competitive, individualistic societies; gender subordination, complementarity or equality; etc.) Ethnographic results in turn provoke debate, revision, and innovation in such theorizing. While significant theories bring fieldworkers to particular locations, actors, and activities, once they arrive they begin to observe and listen. Often they must learn to listen – by learning the language, the local vocabulary, and current verbal
conventions. Field observational research now turns away from theoretical discourse to the viewpoints and concepts of the people (informants, subjects, actors, consultants) themselves. Ethnographers aim to document how the people see and talk about their everyday social activities and groupings, and about the wider worlds they live in. It is their normal scenes of activity, topics of conversation, and standards of evaluation that are the objects of field observational research. This does not begin by announcing: ‘I’m your ethnographer; when can I interview you?’ Investigators must be honest about their role and sponsorship (covert field observational research remains controversial and rare), but their paramount aim is to listen and to move as quickly as possible into the natural settings of social life, the places people would be, doing what they would be doing, if the ethnographer was not there. This involves a continuing process of requesting and obtaining access to the many locations, activities, and groups that comprise the overall fieldwork arena. As ethnographers observe and listen in a wide-ranging manner, within parameters set by the significant theories that bring them there, they begin to understand culturally meaningful behavioral conventions, and to formulate culturally appropriate utterances. This indexes a second continuing process of building interpersonal rapport with informants, a topic that preoccupies many autobiographical accounts of field observational research – one of the most instructive being Whyte’s, 1955 [1943] Appendix to Street Corner Society. As the ethnographic process unfolds, the fieldworker must constantly make decisions about where to be, whom to listen to, what events to follow, and what to safely ignore and leave out. These decisions are guided both by the significant theories prefiguring fieldwork, and by new theories of significance that arise in the field. These latter theories – hunches, hypotheses, ideas about connections and relationships – emerge as listening and observation proceed. They suggest which persons and activities to focus upon, what places and events to attend to, and which objects and their circulation to follow. As this occurs, the fieldwork ‘funnel’ narrows, to use Agar’s (1980) apt metaphor. The early phase of securing access and building rapport is wide, open, and nearly all-encompassing; as theories of significance emerge, pan out, or are discarded, the funnel of informants, events, and activities narrows. Goals crystallize. Research design sharpens.
Discovery Procedures: Listening Ethnography’s greatest strength is situated listening. Interviews become useful at later stages of fieldwork, but field observational research begins by listening to what British anthropologist Richards (1939) called ‘speech in action.’ Here the actors control topicality – talking to each other about what they usually do – and the researcher secures access to their turf – the locations they usually occupy. Early on, as rapport begins to be established, fieldworkers deliberately place themselves in a wide sampling of such situations. Then, as the research funnel narrows and other methods are deployed, the ethnographer becomes more selective about where to listen. The importance of situated listening was emphasized memorably by Whyte. After he asked an intrusive question
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during illicit gambling activities, and stopping the ongoing flow of behavior, Whyte’s key informant Doc told him, ‘Go easy on that “who,” “what,” “why,” “when,” “where” stuff, Bill. You ask those questions and people will clam up on you. If people accept you, you can just hang around, and you’ll learn the answers in the long run without even having to ask the questions.’ ‘I found that this was true. As I sat and listened, I learned the answers to question that I would not even have had the sense to ask if I had been getting my information solely on an interview basis’ (1955 [1943], p. 303). Situated listening becomes the basis for understanding both what can be talked about in later conversations and interviews, and what categories and evaluations the actors use to observe and interpret ongoing behavior.
Discovery Procedures: Observing Many veteran field observational researchers bristle when they are told that their methods are not quantitative. Using both emic categories articulated by the actors, and etic categories formulated by the community of social science observers, ethnographers count, sample, and calculate ratios, proportions, and probabilities as part of their fieldwork activities (Johnson, 1978). These countable quantities include numbers of people in events, their positions, their comings and goings; objects, inventories; and exchanges, movements, orderings, sequences, associations, assemblages, and arrangements of many sorts. Malinowski’s classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) incorporated his numerous observations of the interisland kula exchange of seashell valuables – necklaces traded for armlets – as canoes from one community arrived at another, exchanges were conducted, and then additional exchanges of items including foodstuffs, timber, greenstone, and pottery followed. Who exchanged what, the order, etiquette, volume, frequency, and other variables were all counted and analyzed. In Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1955 [1943]) the size, composition, duration of activity, and initiation of interaction were recorded and analyzed for numerous group events; Whyte even demonstrated quantitatively a relationship between hierarchical group leadership structure and bowling scores. Harris (1964) furnishes field observational researchers with an etic model of ‘the great stream of uninterrupted behavior’ that extends backward in time and unfolds continuously. He provides a technical vocabulary to operationalize recording of isolatable events and linked segments of the behavior stream – from individual body movements and their environmental effects at the most basic level, through sequences of multiactor scenes connected by actor, place, or object. Sanjek (1978) applied this approach in a multiethnic Ghanaian urban neighborhood to collect (through interviews) sequences of multiactor scenes for 40 adults, each over four-day periods, in order to test whether their social networks were structured more by common ethnicity or by class position, and in which behavioral settings ethnicity and class were stronger or weaker. Johnson (1975, 1978) developed an observational fieldwork approach to formulate statistically valid time allocation patterns in his research among the Machiguenga of Peru. By randomly selecting actors and times for observation at their most likely location, and recording their ongoing behavior at
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the time of each random visit, a powerful quantitative record of how a given population allocates its activities among production, reproduction, leisure, and other categories resulted. This and similar methods have been employed in a wide range of fieldwork settings (Gross, 1984).
Discovery Procedures: Interviewing Barth recounts of his highland New Guinea research, ‘My field procedure was . to rely very heavily on observation of spontaneous, unelicited word and act. I paid particular attention to this in Baktaman questions and explanations to each other – in men’s houses, in the fellowship of hunting and working, during initiations and other rites. Only secondarily, and with much reticence, did I ask my own questions, and then only when they seemed cast in a native pattern and received easy and natural response’ (1975, p. 226). Interviewing is problematic (Briggs, 1986). Human beings are apt to reinterpret or reformulate the past to make it conform with their ongoing sense of the present. Moreover, the ever present danger of an observer effect in fieldwork – that the presence of the observer affects and reshapes an actor’s behavior and response – is especially difficult to control in an artificial one-to-one interview situation where normal social activity is suspended. Still, interviews are essential to field observational research. They are best left for later stages of the ethnographic encounter when, to use Agar’s funnel metaphor, the speech events of fieldwork move from wide and open to narrow and more focused. After the investigator has become at ease with the language and local codes and references, and has successfully gained access to natural conversations and amassed a stock of cultural knowledge via situated listening, deliberate intervention into speech events may begin. These steps may be graded from least to most intrusive and controlled. 1. Still on the informants’ turf, and still in the accustomed activities of daily life, the field observational researcher begins to enter natural conversations as a speaker, and begins to shift topicality to her or his own interests. This process starts gently, by moving appropriately into rounds of chatting, gossiping, and ordinary comment. As cultural competence increases, and as theories of significance emerge, the fieldworker attempts to direct conversations by introducing questions and suggesting topics for responses from informants. 2. After an initial period of fieldwork – a few months perhaps – arranged interviews may begin. This class of speech events is disruptive – the informant is removed from her or his turf, either to the ethnographer’s household or office, or by transforming an everyday location into a scene of ethnographer–informant dialogue – an activity that would otherwise not be occurring there. Typically the earliest of these deliberate breaks in time–place behavioral flow reserve topicality for the actor. In such open-ended or discovery interviews, the informant is encouraged to move the conversation according to his or her own interests. 3. In later and more productive interviews, the ethnographer begins to assert control. General topics are introduced, allowing informants to expand freely upon their own points
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of view and knowledge. In more structured ethnographic interviews, topicality is more firmly shaped and directed by the fieldworker; informant responses now move away from orations and free commentaries and to more specific responses to questions. 4. In the most focused forms of interviewing, the ethnographer controls both turf and topicality as fully as possible. Questionnaires and interview schedules may be used, and the objective is to obtain particular types and pieces of data. These may include household interviews, psychological tests, or reports of disputes, or may encompass repeated interview sessions to secure lengthy life histories, with the fieldworker now guiding the subject according to preset standards of scope and comprehensiveness. 5. Though not a major part of ethnographic practice, in some instances, and when still on the informants’ turf, the fieldworker may ask direct and pointed questions, and attempt to secure precise pieces of data for his or her records. Interventions of this sort are especially dangerous – the inappropriateness of such seizures of topicality in everyday settings may be jarring to the actors. Typically speech events of this sort occur in the final days of fieldwork, when local rapport is at its peak, research goals are most pressing, and the fieldwork funnel approaches its vanishing point.
Notes and Records The production of notes and records (Sanjek, 1990) begins to move the field observational research process toward its ultimate written products. Focused interview sessions with seated informants often permit direct transcription of verbal statements, but in open-ended and ethnographic interviews, brief written notes – what Ottenberg (in Sanjek, 1990) terms scratch notes – are taken during the session, and these form the basis for the construction later of fuller written fieldnotes. Fieldworkers often go through this two-step process even when interviews are tape recorded, both as a backup to and index of the taped session, and because of the analytic gains many ethnographers note in transforming their scratch notes into fuller descriptive fieldnotes. In field observational research in natural behavior stream settings, similar brief jottings may be inscribed, but major attention is directed to the event in progress. Often it is not even possible to record scratch notes, and both they and fuller fieldnote description occur later. Mead (1977) wrote about the nagging pressure to type up fieldnotes from scratch notes, and about the danger of scratch notes growing ‘cold’ when this was delayed, even by one day. But she also wrote of the satisfaction of being caught up with this work, and of the importance for later ethnographic writing of the insights gained in moving from scratch notes to descriptive fieldnotes. Ottenberg sees this process as the interaction of scratch notes and headnotes – the stored memories and interpretations that arise from direct participant observation as filtered by the ethnographer’s overall theoretical stance. Headnotes form an essential complement to fieldnotes (and to more formal fieldwork datasets or records). Headnotes are employed to make sense of one’s fieldnotes when they are re-read later for ethnographic writing projects. The importance of headnotes is
particularly evident when one ethnographer attempts to use another’s fieldnotes, and quickly realizes how difficult it is to understand them without headnotes of one’s own (Sanjek, 1990). Fieldnotes typically are kept in running chronological order, and may minimally be indexed separately by actor and topic. Additionally, field observational researchers often generate records, or well-defined sets of data organized by topic, person, or other category. These may include records of household composition, land holdings, ritual performances, life histories, folktales, etc. Sometimes decisions to collect sets of records are part of the initial research design, and preset forms to enter such data may be brought with the investigator to the field setting. In other cases, a decision to collect a systematic body of records develops during fieldwork, often emerging within general running fieldnotes and then being separated out in new record files. Fieldnotes and records present ethnographers with great masses of information – hundreds, even thousands of pages – that while being accumulated may be arranged only by chronological order or by topic. Malinowski (1922) urged that ethnographers constantly re-read and begin to organize and analyze their notes while still conducting field research, but commonly the more focused work of indexing them occurs when fieldwork is over. As ethnographers then turn to ethnographic writing, they readdress the theoretical discourse they turned away from in fieldwork. Fieldnotes and records must now be related directly to the comparative and contextual points of the knowledge-construction triangle.
Canons of Validity Field observational research aims to maximize validity – ‘the degree to which scientific observations actually measure or record what they purport to measure’ – rather than reliability – ‘the repeatability, including interpersonal replicability, of scientific observations’ (Pelto and Pelto, 1978, p. 33). Reliability is valued in survey, medical, and product safety research. In ethnography, restudies to assess change may be conducted, but independent investigation of the same locale or population is unlikely or impossible. Validity depends on the intensity and depth of field observational research, but it always remains a goal rather than a property that can be independently measured (Wolcott, 1995, pp. 167–70). A quantitative, and highly reliable, randomized sample study that investigates the gender, ethnicity, class, and other characteristics of the five best friends of members of a given population would be less valid than one in which cultural meanings and categories of friendship were first discovered through listening to natural conversations or eliciting such information in interviews. In the case of Indian immigrants in New York City, for example, the ‘five best friends’ study might miss entirely the category of rakhi ritual friendships between adult males and females which are affirmed in an annual festival where the man ties a flower bracelet on the woman’s wrist. If validity remains important, but elusive, how can it be assessed in field observational research results? Sanjek (1990, pp. 393–404) proposed three canons of validity by which
Field Observational Research in Anthropology and Sociology ethnographic writing may be evaluated. The first is theoretical candor, the openness with which the ethnographer addresses the significant theories, and even more, the local theories of significance that structured the fieldwork process. A second canon calls for explicit depiction of the ethnographer’s fieldwork path – the number of informants from whom information was obtained, in what ways, and their relationship both to the wider population the field observational study concerns and to each other. A third canon concerns information about the fieldnote evidence itself: not simply ‘how much’ and its basis in listening, observing, or interviewing, but more significantly the precise relationship of notes and records to the written ethnography. Some ethnographies utilize fieldnotes directly, even masses of them; others, for rhetorical or narrative purposes, do not, and need not. What matters in the end is that readers of field observational research have a clear picture of what the ethnographer did and why, who they talked to and learned from, and what they brought back to document it. Field observational research produces results that can be obtained in no other way. This ethnographic tradition entails that ‘the description of people’s activities, their interactions with each other, [and] their verbal behavior’ be ‘copious and detailed’; ‘cumulative development . consists above all in the fact that such data, provided they are adequate, never become obsolete and can be used by analysts . in researching questions not visualized by the researchers who collected them’ (Anglin, 1979, p. 49).
See also: Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology; Observational Studies: Overview; Participant Observation.
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