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The Sequence 1: Prior to Fieldwork

Put simply, fieldwork-based research has three sequential stages:

(1) Prior to fieldwork.

(2)During fieldwork.

(3)After fieldwork.

Roughly, these stages correspond to:

(1) Preparation and documentation.

(2)Fieldwork procedures.

(3) Post-fieldwork analysis and writing.

Of course, each of the stages falls apart into more parts. But whereas the three parts here are necessarily sequential, sub-parts can be overlapping and simultaneous, as we shall see.

Prior to fieldwork, several activities are required, and they can be captured under preparation and documentation. Preparation, of course, starts as soon as one begins research, develops an interest in a particular topic or field, and starts working on a proposal and a work plan. You read con­siderable volumes of theoretically and methodologically informative work, which is invaluable because it directs your gaze to particular aspects of social reality and sharpens your eyes and ears for particular phenomena and events. That is general preparation, and we need not dwell on it here.

But there will be a decision at a given moment that your research will include fieldwork – ethnographic fieldwork. And this decision has far-reaching consequences, because it places your work on a track which has its own requirements and peculiarities: you now have to subscribe to the general epistemological and methodological principles developed in the previous chapter. You have to adopt an ethnographic perspective on your work, and as we saw above, this includes a number of things and excludes a number of others. The result of your research will now not be a body of findings which can claim representativeness for a (segment of the) ­population, it will not be replicable under identical circumstances, it will not claim objectivity on grounds of an outsider’s position for the researcher, it will not claim to produce ‘uncontaminated’ evidence, and so on. It will be interpretive research in a situated, real environment, based on inter­action between the researcher and the subject(s), hence, fundamentally ­subjective in nature,1 aimed at demonstrating complexity, and yielding hypotheses that can be replicated and tested in similar, not identical, ­circumstances. Ethnography produces theoretical statements, not ‘facts’ nor ‘laws’. That does not mean that your research will be a game without rules. The rules of ethnographic analysis are as strict and rigorous as those of statistics, and there are more things one can do wrong in ethnographic work than perhaps in any other branch of science.

Your preparation, thus, needs to be rigorous, and it needs to start from a particular way of imagining your object. The object of investigation is always a uniquely situated reality: a complex of events which occurs in a totally unique context – time, place, participants, even the weather, quarrels between the subjects and the ethnographer: you are always working in a series of conditions that can never be repeated. Even if events look completely the same (think of rituals such as religious services), they never are, because they are different events happening at another time.2 So the thing you will investigate will be a particular point in time and space, a microscopic social mechanism: people talking to one another in a village in West Africa, on the 24th of October 2009, a rainy day when Diallo, one of the interlocutors, had a stomach ache which made him flinch every now and then so that the conversation drifted from your favourite topic to that of health and remedies. This is mundane, trivial, seemingly ­completely irrelevant as a social fact.

It would be, were it not that we conceive of social events as contextualised and as ordered, not random. Whatever people do, they do in a real social environment on which all sorts of forces operate: culture, language, social structure, history, political relations, and so forth. Being a man or a woman, 22 years old or 47 years old, rich or poor – all of that makes a difference in any society, for everywhere we will see that such seemingly self-evident characteristics carry rich cultural meanings and have particular social features. There are societies, for instance, where a 22-year-old person would never consider contradicting a 47-year-old person; there are societies where this can be permissible when the younger one is male and the older one is female, and there are societies where this is the opposite. So here is a central insight: uniquely situated events are the crystallisation of various layers of context, micro-contexts (changeable, accidental, unpredictable contexts, such as foul weather, a power failure during a meal in a restaurant, your recording device refusing duty or the father entering the room just when a conversation with the children had turned into a juicy gossip session) as well as macro-contexts (historical, larger political, social and cultural ones, less changeable and more stable, hence predictable).

To illustrate the difference between these various layers of context: the fact that people speak, for example, Zulu is typically a macro-context. If it is part of their developmental trajectory, they cannot change it, and one will find many people with similar developmental trajectories (coming from the same region, born from parents speaking Zulu, belonging to a Zulu social network) speaking Zulu. A micro-context would be the fact that the Zulu speaker you meet during fieldwork might be particularly articulate, a fantastic storyteller and someone who is really good at establishing contacts on your behalf. The micro-contextual factors operate locally: they offer distinctions between Zulu speakers. Macro-contextual factors have wider scope: they offer distinctions between speakers of Zulu and speakers of Xhosa, Ndebele, Swahili and so forth.

Let us, for the sake of clarity, summarise this in a drawing:

Your object is a needle point in time and space, and it can only gain relevance when it is adequately contextualised in micro- and macro-­contexts. This contextualisation explains why your object has the features it has and why it lacks others; it also allows you to see, in microscopic events, effects of macroscopic structures, phenomena and processes. When someone says ‘yes sir’, this is a microscopic, almost trivial thing. Context tells us, however, that this innocuous formula draws on enduring systems of power and authority in our society, as well as on gender roles and ­structures, ideologies of politeness and etiquette. The microscopic, trivial instance of using it now becomes something far richer: we see that the user of the phrase summarises a world of (macro-contextual) social rules and conventions in his/her innocuous, routinised utterance, and submits to it. He/she displays ‘conventional’ behaviour, that is, behaviour that exudes the dominant social structures and expectations. The event in itself does not tell us that; the contextualisation of the event does that.

The main task during your fieldwork preparation is, thus, to understand and study the possible contexts in which your object will occur, micro as well as macro. This will expand the range of recognisable things – not everything will be totally strange and unexpected – and lower the risk of asking the wrong questions and behaving totally out of order. It lowers these risks, but does not eliminate them, of course. If you intend to do fieldwork in a primary school in a country called Absurdistan, for instance, it is good to know

(1)That there are in effect such schools in Absurdistan.

(2)Some basic and general things about how such schools operate (do they have daily and full-day sessions, for instance? How large are the classes? Are they gender-separated? What is the language of instruction?).

(3)Whether there are regional divisions, or urban–rural divisions, that could be important foci of research (you cannot draw conclusions about ‘education in Absurdistan’ if there are very deep differences between education in different parts of the country – in Africa it is, for instance, good to keep in mind that outside the cities, many parts of many countries do not have any education provision to speak of).

(4)Some general things about the legal provisions for such schools, and about their institutional structure. (e.g. Are all schools state-controlled or is there a division between public and private schools? Is there a ‘secondary’ market for education – private tutoring, evening schools, commercial internet or correspondence courses, etc.?)

(5)General information about Absurdistan, its history, social structure, politics, major languages, media and so forth.

(6)The tradition of scholarship on education in Absurdistan, the major centres for research, and the major researchers, policy makers and authority figures in the field.

Therefore your preparation is about getting to understand what Bourdieu called the ‘field’ of education in Absurdistan: the whole complex of surrounding conditions in which a single school becomes part of a system and a society, including historical, social, cultural, linguistic, political backgrounds. It is an attempt at constructing ‘normal’, expectable and presupposable patterns, things you can reasonably expect to meet in the field. All these things matter; researching them pays off. If you would have overlooked point (1) above, for instance, you could find yourself in the embarrassing situation of not having a field to do fieldwork in. Having spent substantial sums of money and even more substantial amounts of time, we would prudently qualify this as a serious problem (certainly if you are scheduled to complete your doctorate in the next 16 months ...).

That is obvious, but even inquiries into (5), for instance, may provide immediate answers for other parts. Imagine that Absurdistan would be a People’s Republic with a rather radical communist government; that would immediately trigger an expectation that the education system in Absurdistan would be fully state-controlled. Your research would then by definition focus on work in state-controlled schools, working (probably) with a unified curriculum and employing teachers who have had a very similar training. If, now, you discover the existence of a flourishing but clandestine private education market during your fieldwork in Absurdistan, this insight gains importance, for one can expect this to be at odds with the policy provisions and dominant ideology of the country. It would mean that people perceive the formal education system as deficient, or realise that what they learn in schools is not enough for the kinds of social trajectories they have in mind, or even that there is a lot of dissent in the country, and that education is a focal area in organising this dissent. You may, then, have found the existence of two parallel and complimentary systems of education, one formal and another commercial, around which people organise different views, expectations and patterns of ­performance. This, of course, would be a major finding, because ‘education in Absurdistan’ now becomes a highly complex thing, and your observations in official schools should be balanced against observations elsewhere.

Take another example. You find out that Absurdistan was a communist People’s Republic until three years ago, when the regime changed to a capitalist multiparty system with strong ties to the United States and the EU. These new partners have since become very active in the field of development support, and the education system has been overhauled by American and European technical advisors. You now know that you will in all likelihood encounter a very complex and perhaps paradox-ridden education field, in which teachers trained to be good communists have to induce their pupils into the virtues of pro-Western capitalism (but might not know very well how to do that), in which people would constantly compare the ‘old’ versus the ‘new’ education system, and in which you would probably see a rapidly increasing class division between private, urban elite schools and old-style public schools. Your research would then, in all likelihood, be compelled to address these features of transition and contradiction.

A lot of this documentary research needs to be done prior to departing for the field. Some parts of it, however, may only be possible over there. You might need access to specific archives, for instance, or some things can only be found out by going to the local Ministry of Education and asking people there. As said, it is important, because it leads to, and helps you in, more practical aspects of preparation. For instance, and very importantly, it can help you decide whether the topic you had in mind is

(1)Worth researching: Is it big enough as a topic, is it promising in terms of findings, are there specific documentary/empirical and theoretical issues that may be addressed through fieldwork there?

(2)Researchable: This is very important: many topics are very much worth researching, but practically, legally or otherwise unresearchable. There may be ethical restrictions, legal and political ones (authorities not releasing crucial information, or not granting research permits for particular forms and topics of research), material ones (fieldwork would be too expensive or would require a massive research infrastructure) or others. Research in a war zone, for instance, is as good as impossible, even if the situation in that region cries for thorough and sustained research and even if people there would be genuinely helped by your work. The same goes for many ‘slum’ environments around the world: they are extraordinarily fascinating places and we absolutely need a clear and detailed understanding of life in such environments, but the conditions for research are such that researchers could expose themselves to serious danger even entering the area. There are also people who might put you in grave danger when you decide to do research with and on them – think of gangs or rebel movements.3 Researchability is a major decision you need to make during the preparation phase, and thorough preparatory research is essential in making it.

In addition, preparatory research of course helps you in deciding issues such as the general target(s) of your research, the patterns of work you will develop – observations, interviews, single-site or multiple-site research, etc. – the number and kinds of informants you would probably need in order to get your findings, the amount of administrative pro­cedure you need to follow (visa requirements, research permits, ethical clearance, local reporting and so on). It helps you select the schools you will work in, establish first contacts with local people in schools and ­communities, find out a bit about what goes on there prior to your arrival, and establish interaction with local researchers or institutes. Good preparation helps you to be realistic in all of this.