Читать книгу Doing Field Projects - John Forrest - Страница 8

Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark research approach of sociocultural anthropology. Its centrality has not waned since its inception more than a century ago, yet the variety of questions that fieldwork answers has expanded greatly. For instance, anthropologist Olga Lidia Olivia Hernandez studies Aztec dance collectives in multiple sites in Baja California, Mexico; and California, USA. She conducts fieldwork to understand why Aztec dance emerged as a form of ethnicity on the US-Mexico border among non-indigenous participants, and how national, political, religious, and bodily processes are involved in the reappropriation of Aztec dancing (Olivas 2018). Taking a more multidisciplinary approach in her fieldwork among Orangutan care workers in Borneo, anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas draws on anthropology, primatology, Southeast Asian history, gender studies, queer theory, and science and technology studies. She explores the violence care workers and Orangutans experience. She asks if conservation biology can turn away from violent techniques to ensure Orangutan population growth and embrace a feminist sense of welfare (Parreñas 2018). Anthony Kwame Harrison conducts fieldwork in San Francisco among the underground hip-hop scene. Harrison interviewed area hip-hop artists and also performed as the emcee “Mad Squirrel.” His immersion in the subculture allowed him a unique vantage point to examine the changing nature of race among young North Americans, as well as issues of ethnic and racial identification, and how different ethnic groups engage hip-hop in different ways as a means to claim racial and establish subcultural authenticity (Harrison 2009).

Fieldwork is an extraordinarily flexible and expansive methodology, allowing researchers to ask challenging questions and uncover deep, nuanced, and contextualized answers that are rarely self-evident. The purpose of this book is to guide you step by step as you learn ethnographic techniques. Ultimately, I hope you will use them to answer the types of questions you are most passionate about. However, in order to gain competence in ethnographic fieldwork techniques, it is important to understand what ethnographic fieldwork is, what makes it special, and how it evolved into the preeminent research approach in cultural anthropology