In this article I explore links between fieldwork experience and different conceptions of time as they are encountered in what I term 'episodic fieldwork'. I use 'episodic' to emphasize the importance of absence and return for fieldwork relationships and the ethnographies that are founded on these relationships. I draw on Simmel's concept of sociability to explore the significance of the recurring updates that are so much a part of long-term and thus episodic fieldwork. Updating suggests participation, positionality, and transformation-as well as play and familiarity. The presumption of familiarity, which is at the heart of sociability, becomes a tool for exploring time and new social experiences and the ways in which chronology is interwoven with shifting social positions.
Fieldwork through the Zoomiverse
Sensing Uganda in a Time of Immobility
Richard Vokes and Gertrude Atukunda
’ many fieldwork visits to Uganda and, to a lesser extent, through Atukunda's research trips to Vokes’ home universities in (variously) the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. However, over time, the research engagement has also become
Fieldwork at sunset
Visual representations of anthropology online
Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins and Hannah Gould
methodology ( Morphy and Banks 1997 ), the camera remains an essential fieldwork tool, and “the field,” broadly conceived, is the substance of most photographs in our data set. “Seared with reality” ( Benjamin 1999: 512 ), field photographs evidence what
Francisco Martinez
Is fieldwork as anthropologists do it simply a method among others? This article disagrees, drawing on the concept of “serendipity” as introduced by German scholar Ina-Maria Greverus. Beyond the prescribed way of any method, anthropology’s specificity articulates as “discovery”, in this case: an unexpected discovery of remains of the Soviet past in Estonia, through the author’s family life.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–6
Introduction
Time and the Field
Steffen Dalsgaard and Morten Nielsen
Prompted by the postmodern turn in anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork has been subjected to considerable analytical scrutiny. Yet despite numerous conceptual facelifts, definitions and demarcations of 'the field' have remained fundamentally anchored in tropes of spatiality with the association between field and fieldworker characterized as being maintained by distances in space. By exploring and unfolding the temporal properties of the field, anthropology can favorably complement and extend the (spatially anchored) notion of multi-sited fieldwork with one of multi-temporal ethnography. This approach implies not only a particular attention to the methodology of studying local (social and ontological) imaginaries of time; it furthermore unpacks the (multi-)temporality of the relationship between fieldworker and the field. This special issue may thus be taken as a fresh invitation to a temporally oriented ethnography.
Methods Applied
Political Transformation and Recent Ethnographic Fieldwork in Iran
Mary Elaine Hegland and Erika Friedl
In the 1970s social cultural anthropology in Iran was beginning to flourish. However, with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent Islamic Republic of Iran, fieldwork in Iran became extremely problematic. Foreign anthropologists faced formidable obstacles to obtaining visas and permits. Anthropologists working inside Iran were also discouraged from anthropological participant observation. As a result, during the post revolutionary period, few anthropologists have been conducting fieldwork in Iran. Recently, some hopeful signs for a possible reestablishment of anthropology can be noted, among them the return of young Iranian anthropologists, from countries where they have grown up and gained an education, to their homeland for dissertation research. This article discusses the influences on fieldwork of politics—international, national and local—and projects, problems and strategies of some anthropologists who have conducted recent ethnographic fieldwork in Iran.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2006
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–19
Khaled Furani
foundational, if contestable, concepts (e.g., culture, humanity) and its constitutive practice of ethnographic fieldwork. As a result, theology does not end with anthropology; rather, it becomes reconstituted within the latter’s secular syntax. Anthropology
From Khariji to Kabuli
Being an 'Insider/Outsider' in an Afghan Woman's Fieldwork
Shaharzad Akbar
This article reflects on the challenges of being an 'outsider' in one's own culture and on the journey from being a complete outsider to an 'insider/outsider'. Reflecting on fieldwork among women in north-east Afghanistan, the article explores assumptions and perceptions about Badakhshan and its people and the role of fieldwork in shattering them. It is also a reflection about values and compromises and the researcher's struggle to negotiate the appropriate balance. The article sheds light on the researcher's search for and discovery of different versions of herself when faced with a different version of 'home'.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 69–77
Early Field Photography and Visual Documents of Northern Indigenous Cultures
Ivan Poliakov’s Collection, 1876
Ekaterina B. Tolmacheva
research of fish and fishing. The river became free of ice rather late that year, and fishing only commenced when there was no ice. On 27 May the researcher started his fieldwork. He had to get to the conflux of Irtysh and Ob’ rivers by boat studying its
Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested?
Anthropological knowledge production in question
David Mosse
This article draws out some of the implications of the fact that what anthropologists claim to know, or want to say, is unavoidably and in complicated ways bound by the ethics of involvement, detachment, and institutional location. I will first consider the increasingly common practice of circulating the output of anthropological research within the social context of its fieldwork, among the various research participants and interlocutors. Second, I will try to account for the sometimes negative reception of ethnographic accounts, especially where the research has focused on organizations (e.g., NGOs), activists, or others professionally concerned with public representations of their work. Third, I will reconsider the notion of “speaking truth to power” by pointing to the unacknowledged power of ethnographic description. Finally, I will suggest that ethical concerns are generated as much by the theoretical framing of research as by fieldwork practice, and that these are matters of choice rather than inherent in the ethnographic method.