The Sea Commands by Paulo Mendes

Author:Paulo Mendes [Mendes, Paulo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, Rural
ISBN: 9781789209129
Google: RyHcDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2020-12-09T02:52:49+00:00

Fieldwork: Framing and First Experience

In the last twenty years, much has been written on the experiential and living aspects of the anthropologist’s work in the field. An example is Paul Rabinow’s text, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1988), a pioneering work in which there is reflection on the subjectivity of the anthropologist in the field and its ethnographic relevance.10 However, if, for many anthropologists, interest in knowledge of the consequences that such an experience can have on the researcher is arguable, the importance of the description of the researcher’s personal conditions, as well as the relationships developed with those we get to know in the field, is already commonly accepted for a better understanding of an ethnographic text. Such revolutionary and radical proposals were already enunciated in the volume edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus and published under the title Writing Culture (1986),11 and have since been continued and even surpassed.

Accepting, rhetorically, Writing Culture as a rupture and/or turning point from which the personal field experience becomes an object of reflection, we can consider that, until then, fieldwork was lived as the rite of passage12 of the anthropologist, and that, similarly to rituals that anthropology itself (still) studies, the flow of information during that initiatory experience has almost always been confined to only a few individuals. The text by Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, is an excellent example of this. Mead tells us that she went into her first period of fieldwork without knowing what it meant, despite having mentors such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict (by then, both already with extensive field experience) (cf. Mead [1972] 1994: 133–48). Earlier, Evans-Pritchard had reflected with humour and some irony13 on the lack of (in)formation among anthropologists regarding fieldwork, despite considering that this preparation should be achieved, firstly, through a strong theoretical component of social anthropology (cf. [1937] 1976: 240–41).

The first violations of the secret appear, many times, under the cloak of the scientist who is also a romantic Western adventurer, and who, in a confessional tone, tells us of experiences in exotic worlds (cf. Marcus 1992: 114).14 However, these texts are already exercises in (self-)reflection that reveal the positions of the field researcher and, as a consequence, paths of access to the desired information.

It is only with the end of colonialism and the consequent turn of attention towards the West that texts began to appear in which the main concern was to describe the anthropologist’s experiences in the field, even if in the form of autobiographies by well-known anthropologists at the end of their careers (in this regard, cf. Descola in MacClancy and McDonaugh 1996: 209–12). The intention was in fact also to rectify a lacuna in anthropology courses, felt by the authors of the texts at the time of their academic qualification, as Margaret Mead and Evans-Pritchard point out in the aforementioned texts and that Rosalie Wax reiterated in her 1971 book dedicated specifically to fieldwork, Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice. In fact, Wax’s volume

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