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Introduction

It is a scary thing, isn’t it: the idea of being alone ‘in the field’, trying to accomplish a task initially formulated as a perfectly coherent research plan with questions, methods, readings and so on – and finding out that the ‘field’ is a chaotic, hugely complex place. Fieldwork is the moment when the researcher climbs down to everyday reality and finds out that the rules of academia are not necessarily the same as those of everyday life. Unfortunately, the only available solution to that is unilateral adaptation by the researcher. Everyday life will never adjust to your research plan; the only way forward is to adapt your plan and ways of going about things to the rules of everyday reality. There is no magic formula for this, and this book should not – not! – be read as such.

But there are things one can do better or worse, and whichever way we look at it, fieldwork is a theorised mode of action, something in which researchers still follow certain procedures and have to follow them; something in which a particular set of actions need to be performed; and something that needs to result in a body of knowledge that can be re-submitted to rigorous, disciplined academic tactics. This book is aimed at providing some general suggestions for how to go about it, at demarcating a space in which what we do can be called ‘research’. It is a complex space, not something one immediately recognises, and given the increased emphasis on fieldwork – ethnographic fieldwork – some things may require structured attention.

We will start with a number of observations on ethnography. These are crucial: whenever we say ethnography (and formulate fieldwork as part of that procedure) we invoke a particular scientific tradition. It is amazing to see how often that tradition is misunderstood or misrepresented. Yet, a fair understanding of it is indispensable if we want to know what our fieldwork will yield: it will yield ethnographic data, and such data are ­fundamentally different from data collected through most other approaches. Informed readers will detect in our discussion many traces of the foundational work by Johannes Fabian and Dell Hymes – the two main methodologists of contemporary ethnography, whose works remain indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in ethnography. Next, we will go through the ‘sequence’ usually performed in fieldwork: pre-field preparation, entering the field, observation, interviewing, data formulation, analysis, the return from the field.

One should note that we do not provide a ‘do and don’t’ kind of guide to fieldwork. We will rather focus on more fundamental procedures of knowledge-construction. There are several purely practical guidelines for aspects of fieldwork. Fieldwork here is treated as an intellectual enterprise, a procedure that requires serious reflection as much as practical preparation and skill. Still, it is our hope (and silent conviction) that these reflections are, at the end of the day, very practical. One can never be good at anything when one doesn’t really know what one is doing.

A second disclaimer is this. We are both linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists; our views on ethnography and fieldwork necessarily have their roots in experiences with working on languages and linguistic/sociolinguistic phenomena. Most of the concrete examples or illustrations we provide will, consequently, relate to such issues, and we hope that the non-language-focused student will not be scared by them. An effort may be required to convert these illustrations and arguments into other topics; do try to make the effort. Throughout the book, we will also provide vignettes from Dong Jie’s fieldwork on identity construction among rural migrants in Beijing. Her research, carried out between 2006 and 2009, will run through the book as a steady beat. This does not mean that Dong Jie was the only of the two authors who learned and experienced fieldwork; the trials and errors of fieldwork were also very much part of Jan’s experience as a researcher. Elements from Jan’s experience will occur throughout the book, especially in the final chapter. But Dong Jie’s fresh materials may speak in a more authentic voice to our preferred readers: young researchers who are embarking on their first fieldwork jobs.

Finally, we want to use a motto for this text, something that provides a baseline for what follows. It’s a quote from Hymes (1981: 84), occurring in an argument about the need for analytic attention to ‘behavioral repertoire’ – the actual range of forms of behaviour that people display, and that makes them identifiable as members of a culture. This repertoire of individuals does not coincide with that of the culture in its whole: it is always a mistake to equate the resources of a language, culture or society with those of its members. Nobody possesses the full range of skills and resources, everyone has control over just parts of them, nobody is a perfect speaker of a language or a perfect member of a culture or society. In addition, Hymes alerts us to

the small portion of cultural behavior that people can be expected to report or describe, when asked, and the much smaller portion that an average person can be expected to manifest by doing on demand.

And he caustically adds, between brackets, ‘Some social research seems incredibly to assume that what there is to find out can be found out by asking’.

Let us keep this motto in mind. People are not cultural or linguistic catalogues, and most of what we see as their cultural and social behaviour is performed without reflecting on it and without an active awareness that this is actually something they do. Consequently, it is not a thing they have an opinion about, nor an issue that can be comfortably put in words when you ask about it.1 Ethnographic fieldwork is aimed at finding out things that are often not seen as important but belong to the implicit structures of people’s life. Asking is indeed very often the worst possible way of trying to find out.

Note

(1) Don’t overlook the importance of this point. As Bourdieu reminds us in ­various places in his work, people have no opinion about most of the things that happen around them. And this is normal: there are very, very few issues in the world that are everybody’s concern. Some forms of opinion research, and our media these days, have created an opposite image: that everyone has an opinion about everything, that we all should have opinions about everything, and that we all have good and valid opinions about everything.

Read up on it

Agar, M. (1995) Ethnography. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman and J. Blommaert (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual (pp. 583–590). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fabian, J. (1991) Rule and process. In Time and the Work of Anthropology (pp. 87–109). Chur: Harwood.

Fabian, J. (1995) Ethnographic misunderstanding and the perils of context. American Anthropologist 97 (1), 41–50.

Fabian, J. (2001) Ethnographic objectivity: From rigor to vigor. In Anthropology with an Attitude (pp. 11–32). Stanford: Stanford University Press.