Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition

by George E. Marcus (Editor), James D. Faubion (Editor), Michael M.J. Fischer (Foreword)

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts. The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become―and to be―an anthropologist today.

Genres: Anthropology, Ethnography

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2009

About the author

George Emanuel Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites.

Reviews

[Ghm · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are theoretical moments in this text- the "big questions" the wide perspective of what and how fieldwork has come to be defined and practiced the way that it is. If you are looking for those historical considerations they are here.

More to my purpose as a graduate student writing the dissertation there are helpful chapters that model how to work through fieldwork and ethnographic moments, and explicit questions and exercises to help you think.