Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

One of my main goals of this round of field work is to consciously improve my skills as a fieldworker — to do very uptight, professional, even ‘scientific’ fieldwork. There are several reasons for this.

First, I am teaching the methods course for my graduate students when I return from PNG in the fall so I figured I’d better have something to teach them. Of course, I’ve done fieldwork before, but I felt that I wanted to take the high road, as it were, and give them a very formal version of fieldwork, and then try to let them know about other, more casual options out there. The other option, which is to tell people that field work is ‘just hanging out’ but that somewhere there are books with ‘scientific’ methods that are morally and epistemologically dubious, is not really very responsible — its much easier to learn how to hang out when you’re in the field than it is to come up with your own system of coding fieldnotes. How to ratchet ‘down’ rather than ‘up’ as it were.

Moreover, I actually brought the books I’ll be using in the methods class to the field with me, and I’m reading them as I do my fieldwork. Hopefully this will allow me to teach them better, since just reading about what sort of fieldwork strategies they suggest is quite different from reading them while you are waiting outside someone’s office for an interview. And waiting is something I am doing a lot of — my fieldwork this time around involves formal interviews with busy, important people who are concerned about how they will be represented in the press and the wider world. Unlike my earlier fieldwork, which was in part classical ‘living in the village’ type of stuff, my current research is much more typical of what I imagine a certain type of urban sociology is like. People want to see a professional, courteous researcher and are willing to talk to people who think adhere to professional standards. So… I am trying to adhere to them! Of course, I’ve always done my best to be a careful, prudent scholar. But now I have an entire apparatus to signal to people who have only just met that this is what I’ve always done.

Second, when I moved to a four-field anthropology department, I really took on board the critique of loosy-goosy cultural anthropology that came from the Other Fielders. I was already sympathetic — the rigorous, humanistic anthropology I was trained in was, in general, skeptical of the excessive epistemological cynicism that marks a lot of cultural anthropology today. So the question became: Instead of talking with your friends in your fieldsite about what an interesting and unanswerable question some topic was, and rather than write essays in which you wondered what the answer to it might be, what if you actually tried to find out what the answer was. I’ve designed my research this time around to be very focused around an empirical problem, while still leaving room for all of the general ‘hanging-out’ which is an important part of fieldwork.

I think this willingness to embrace a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘humanistic’ notion of rigor has been a major turning point for me in my post-doctoral career. At the same time, it is a qualified turning point. Nothing is more boring than the moral and personal agendas of people who feel ‘science’ provides some sort of deep truth/is a replacement for religion or the meaning of life (Mars In Our Time!) and naively worship fantasies of assembly-line 100% accurate bench science which are light years away from the experience-actual experience of lab work as described over and over again in memoirs ethnographies of science. But I figured, as long as you approach it in a decentered way (as Habermas might say), it would be fun to see what this sort of mind-set yields?

So I think my first realization was the power and utility that comes from being willing to wean oneself away from epistemological commitments that one gets thoroughly stuck to in graduate school. Its called ‘growth’.

Shortly after arriving back in Papua New Guinea though — my fourth trip to the country in the past 11 years — I found myself immersed in all of the precise, demanding, microscopic interaction that comes with fieldwork: learning to see through the lens of long experience in a country, but also having to learn how to give up what you know in order to see the things that will make you learn; learning to be who people want you to be interview situations, without being untrue to yourself or to them — finding that version of yourself that fits best with them; learning to be a guest with people who you are living with and with whom pretense really does not solve the big problems of how you will share space and time; managing the delicate balance of reciprocity that is so much a part of life in PNG, ‘even’ in urban Moresby, a balancing act I’ve spent so much of my life learning how to do, and even more learning how to think through; and most importantly, telling the next chapter of my life together with the friends and family I’ve come to have in this country, trying to make sense of our relationships now that my two-years stay moves more and more into the past and our biographies change in ways that none of us could have imagined when we first met.

One of the things that my insanely broad-scoped reading around for my methods course has taught me is that I’m much more sympathetic to the how-to literature in ethnographic sociology than in anthropology, and as I designed the syllabus I kept asking myself ‘what is anthropological about this? If ethnography is a method used by many disciplines, what is distinct about anthropology’s take on it? Except perhaps that that is the part I like least?’ Having come to the field expecting to be taught the powers of a ‘scientific’ conception of research, what I discovered was the incredible human potential that inheres in the occasion of ethnographic fieldwork: like raiding in World of Warcraft, ‘the field’ is a space charged with emotional importance, deeply attached to your sense of self and self-worth. And above all, it is a space full of other people. As one wise member of my guild once said about raiding “the possibilities for progress or regression are immense” — I feel that, in fieldwork, you are faced with such an enormity of relationships, simultaneously over-analyzed and also only intuitively half-grasped, that the only way to do good work and maintain your mental health is to become a good person. Of course, there are shortcuts and temptations: the license that comes from being a first world white in a third world black country, the ease of deceit and dissimulation. This time coming through Port Moresby I feel as if life is applying tremendous pressure to every joint in my body, forcing every dislocated sentiment and inclination back into its proper place and warning me that the nay options involve pathological tearing of the ligaments of my soul. (I also think that the best way to be a great anthropologist is to be a good Jew, but I’ll save that rumination for Sof).

Of course, this is true of many kinds of fieldwork, including ethnographic sociology. But I think maybe this sort of potential for self-transformation is particularly present in anthropological fieldwork, where ‘immersion’ is so prized. Of course, anthropological fieldwork is classically also the least ‘answerable’ since it is the most get-away-with-it-in-the-field-y discipline of all social sciences. But despite the fact that not all of anthropology’s previous practitioners were as great as they could be, the fact still remains that the intensity of social contact in anthropology, and the willingness to blur boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’ may make it unique in the opportunity it affords one to straighten out one’s internal and external object relations. This was my second realization doing fieldwork this trip — or at least in the first two weeks! — that I came for the ‘science’ but stayed for the ‘humanity’.