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This chapter explores the nature of “fieldwork” and its central place in the identity and methods of anthropology. It begins with a brief history of the fieldwork as anthropology’s hallmark methodology, its role as a rite of passage in becoming an anthropologist, and the preparations anthropology students receive before going off to the field. It also introduces the authors ad their own training in anthropology.

This chapter contextualizes the two schools in New York’s South Bronx and Southeast Amsterdam (or the Bijlmer) and demonstrates how Paulle got access to them. This chapter also reveals how Paulle began identifying what gradually evolved into the main themes taken on in each of the chapters at the heart of the book. Chapter One provides a detailed discussion of both the leading social scientific approach to troubled urban schools and the alternative conceptual framework upon which Paulle relies most heavily. Although an expanded discussion of data collection methods is offered in the Appendix, this chapter also offers a preliminary account of the fieldwork techniques upon which the comparison is based. In the interest of illuminating what students and teachers saw and felt when they entered the two settings, Paulle gets underway by fleshing out some of his initial encounters with and reflections on Johnson High and the Delta School.

This chapter opens with an ethnographic description of a refugee woman’s encounter with an aggressive Israeli soldier on her way home to the Dheisheh camp. Taking this description as the point of departure, the camp inhabitants and their lives are briefly presented. The introduction then explains the focus of the book and its main argument. The interlocutors are placed in a theoretical framework referring to the scholarly and mostly anthropological debate on refugees, violence, and agency. The introduction also discusses three main themes used in the book: ‘normality’, social continuity, and morality. Here, some theoretical concepts are brought up, such as tactics of resilience, resistance and displacement, as well as Bourdieu’s illusio. Lastly, the chapter describes and problematizes fieldwork methodology and some ethical challenges.

This chapter develops the book’s analytical framework and situates the monograph within the field of studies on migration and religion. It argues that ritual performance can be used as a ‘cultural prism’ to shed new light on important themes in anthropological research on migration: social networks, processes of place-making, and the reproduction of practice. The author claims that migrants’ relations to place can be understood by examining their notions of relatedness to others. She further discusses the change and continuity of social practice in a migration context. The final part of the chapter introduces the 15 months of fieldwork among Iraqi women and their families and it discusses the methodological and analytical implications of the author’s approach.

Fieldwork in Egypt slackened for a time after the early 1830s but it did not cease entirely. Richard William Howard Vyse and John Shae Perring performed valuable though sometimes rough work at the Pyramids of Giza and other pyramid fields. Émile Prisse d’Avennes raised the copying of ancient monuments to a high standard. But efforts to establish Egyptology in Egypt on an institutional basis faltered. On the other hand, Richard Lepsius emerged as Germany's leading Egyptologist with encouragement from Alexander von Humboldt. The king of Prussia supported a large expedition to Egypt and Nubia with Lepsius as its leader. Ranging far into Sudan, the Prussian Expedition accomplished an astonishing amount of work of extraordinarily high quality that was to have a profound effect on Egyptology. The published result of the Prussian Expedition, the Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, is comparable in size and impact to the great French Description de l’Égypte.

The introduction makes it clear that the book’s intention is to display the social representations created by the Rio Favela. The book proceeds to speak of the author’s journey through sociology as she finds her research focus. She recounts favela removal in Brazil, done in the sixties and resourced from the Alliance for Progress, a program funded by the U.S Agency for International Development. It is explained that the removal was uncalled for, and on the contrary, urban improvement is what there a need is for. It is further explained that the working-class housing market should be considered separate from the regular housing market because it has its own set of rules, adapted to working-class residents’ living situation.

The introduction establishes the significance of King Philip’s War, called the “great watershed” for the powerful ways in which it reshaped Native and colonial communities, lives, and memories in the Northeast. It provides a general overview of historiographical debates on the topic, including the importance of localizing scholarly studies of North America and the Atlantic World; incorporating material culture and ethnography sources as well as documentary/archival evidence; and pursuing “decolonizing methodologies” in which researchers create more reciprocal relationships with tribal descendant communities. The introduction also stresses the necessity of locally grounded “fieldwork,” and highlights some considerations in choosing to focus on historical violence. It emphasizes that the violences of the seventeenth century continue to reverberate among descendant communities—Native as well as Euro-American—and that these legacies merit serious attention.

Chapter 2 examines the role of fieldwork in grounding the Chinese geological enterprise by reshaping both the bodies and self-images of Chinese scientists. The chapter follows Zhang Hongzhao, Ding Wenjiang, Weng Wenhao, and Li Siguang from their study-abroad experiences through the establishment of research and training institutions, such as the Geological School, Geological Survey, and Peking University Department of Geology. Fieldwork was not only important as a critical skill for conducting geological research, it was also the primary means for transmitting geological concepts to uninitiated students and assimilating Western learning to the native environment. The strenuous physical nature of fieldwork challenged traditional Chinese notions of proper behavior and helped promote the idea of the Chinese intellectual as a vigorous, active individual capable of productive labor.

Although texts written by Lévi-Strauss at the end of the 1930s indicate that his research trip to Brazil was made in search of a supposedly pure form of alterity, the structure and content of Tristes Tropiques, written fifteen years after his return, announce the abandonment of such a perspective. Beginning from the observation that “literature” for Lévi-Strauss does not seek to compensate for the shortcomings of science, this chapter works out precisely how Tristes Tropiques is connected to its author’s broader anthropological project. In so doing, it argues broadly that literature for Lévi-Strauss allows for the completion in writing of an ethnographic experience that was initially unsatisfying because it was found to have been undertaken under flawed premises. By rejecting travel writing, Tristes Tropiques also rejects any continuity between fieldwork and the finished anthropological texts, all of which severs anthropology from its perceived connections with early forms of voyaging and exploration.

This chapter lays out the context behind the shamanism that has proliferated in Mongolia in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism. It discusses existing assumptions behind shamanism, what constitutes shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia, and its multiple meanings in the context of Buryats’ relationship with the state. The supernatural and material are interconnected, but these connections are insecure and volatile, mirroring the chaotic political and economic conditions of a weak postsocialist state.The author argues that while Buryat shamans and their clients strive to engage in capitalism and gain economic resources, shamanic practices cause them to gain history instead. Thus this book adds to the study of different life-worlds beyond the universalization of capital, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words. Shamanism starkly shows the limits of capitalism; even the people who actively seek to be a part of capitalism end up creating a world alternative to it. This process also shows the dialectical, mutually-constitutive, but conflicting and colliding nature of different life-worlds, despite the fact that shamanism has often been modernity’s disowned creation. In this chapter, the author also introduces her fieldwork, which revealed shamanic competition and rivalry, clients’ suspicions, and the connections between gender, space, and power.

This chapter examines the birth of anthropology as an institutionalized academic discipline in early twentieth-century France. It looks at the founding of the Institut d’ethnologie and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the key roles played by such figures as Paul Rivet, Marcel Mauss, Marcel Griaule, and Arnold Van Gennep in the early history of French anthropology. Additionally, the chapter addresses the increasingly central role played by fieldwork in anthropological research and scholarship and how the ethnographer’s sense of self also became an object of investigation. Through fieldwork, anthropologists began to study “man” in its broadest sense, a perspective that seemed to betoken the return of a universal form of experience in the face of increasing social segmentation.

The relationship between anthropology and “literature” writ large in the early history of the French anthropological tradition is the subject of this chapter. Unlike the national traditions of the United States, the United Kingdom, or Germany, France lacked rigorous methodological models for fieldwork and thus many French ethnographers drew from literary themes in order to make sense of lived experience in the field. This chapter explores how the French tradition crossed paths with literature as a discourse that saw itself as a repository for the knowledge of all of humankind, such that French anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss could trace their intellectual lineage back to Montaigne or Montesquieu. An extended case-study of Malinowski serves as a counterexample and highlights the cultural specificity of the French approach to anthropology.

When they returned from the field, French anthropologists published both specialized and broadly scientific materials but also texts that were harder to classify, literary and narrative-based renderings of their fieldwork experiences. This trend reflects tensions, outlined by Marcel Mauss, between documentary imperatives and the need to represent the intangible “atmosphere” of a society under investigation in evocative documents. This chapter deals with the ways scholars like Mauss, Griaule, Durkheim, Gustave Lanson, and Alfred Métraux negotiated these tensions, often by producing narrative texts that supplemented more objective, muesum-based attempts at scientific knowledge production by communicating ethnographic knowledge through rhetoric. These and other figures wrestle with the question of narrative evocation and its ties to the potential scientific validity of subjective impressions.

This chapter sets out Henderson’s conception of the folk tradition, and its manifestations in his work as a folk revivalist and as a folklore scholar. In collecting songs and redistributing them, Henderson analysed this tradition whilst also contributing to it. His work can therefore be approached as an interrogation of the limits of the individual’s own cultural ‘mediation’. This dynamic both liberated Henderson’s political imagination and plagued it with doubts over the manipulation and affectations of folk ‘voices’. Henderson’s own contributions to the field of folklore studies are placed in the context of on-going scholarly discourse, but also in relation to his own work as one who sought to operationalize a culture he was convinced belonged to the ages and was immune to interference. Federico García Lorca’s comments on the duende, and the vital folk culture of Scotland’s travelling people helped Henderson to glimpse the unbounded reach of the folk tradition and, consequently, the limited scope of the folklorist-revivalist. Through each of these chapters, Henderson’s struggle with the endless distance between himself – the poet, songwriter, folk revivalist, and folklorist – and the political and cultural lives of ‘the people’, is a constant feature.

The approach of this book makes two important predictions different from those of the Freeze/Kayne tradition: (a.) possession constructions can vary in the place in the structure where the possessor is introduced, (b.) the different ways of building possession sentences permitted by (a.) could have somewhat different meanings, depending on the semantic contributions of the pieces that make them up. This chapter provides existence proofs that these predictions are correct, drawn from new fieldwork data on two understudied Quechua dialects. Prediction (a.) is supported by an analysis of two possession constructions in Cochabamba Quechua, dubbed the BE construction and the BE-APPL construction, which differ precisely in where the possessor is introduced into the structure. Prediction (b.) is supported via a comparison of the BE-APPL construction in Cochabamba Quechua with a similar construction in Santiago del Estero Quechua. Both case studies suggest that the applicative morpheme does not introduce a thematic role of its own, a fact that has important implications for applicative theory. The chapter closes with some preliminary remarks on why Quechua languages vary with respect to whether or not they have HAVE.

The chapter examines in detail the tension in Bourdieu’s thinking between ‘intellectualism’ and ‘practical sense’. It looks at three articles of the late 1970s as a prelude to consideration of his work in the new decade. It examines his analyses of Heidegger and his restatement of his thinking about cultural capital. It examines some of his ‘field’ articles and considers the implications of his appointment to a Chair at the Collège de France and the impact of his encounters with American academics.

This interlude trains attention on demographic surveys of tiny-scale indigenous communities through terms drawn from large-scale societies (e.g., name, gender, age, place of residence). This convention, it suggests, distorts locals’ imaginations of their communities in kinship terms, abstracting relatives from the shifting pluralities within which they live and casting them as individuals classifiable in large-scale terms.

After two decades of taking students to rural Barbados, the authors move their field school to Australia, to the Tasmanian city of Hobart. This chapter explores how different urban fieldwork is from traditional village ethnography. The advantages and disadvantages of urban vs. rural research and the difference between anthropology of the city and anthropology in the city are discussed.