Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology

FIELD NOTES The Makings of Anthropology

Edited by

ROGER SANJEK

CORNELL. UNIVERSITY PRESS Itlzaca and London

Copyright @ 1990 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in

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a

review, this book,

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permission in v-rriting from the publisher. For information. address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca,

Nc\�· York 14850. First published 1990 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1990. Third printing IC)C)J. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2436-4 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o-8014-9726-4 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-46169 Printed in the United States of America

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We dedicate this book to the next generation of ethnographers.

Contents

(Examples of anthropologists' fieldnotcs folio�· page

I

23.)

I>rcface

XI

Livi11g with Fieldtlotes

I

"I Am a Fieldnote'': Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional

3

Identity

JE��N E. JACKSON Fire, Loss, and the Sorcerer's ...1\ppretJtice ROGER

II

34

S.ANJEK

LTnpackitlg aFieldnotes"

Notes on (Field)notes

47

JAMES CLIFFORD Pretexts for Ethnography: On Reading Fieldnotes

71

RENA LEDERM �N ...

VII

CoNTENTS

Vlll

92

�4 vocabulary for Fieldnotes ROGER SANJEK

III

Fieldt1ote Practice

Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing

Relationships to

the

Text

139

SIMON OTTENBERG

Quality into Quantity: On the E thnograp hic Fieldnotes

AlLEN

JOHNSON AND

O R NA

Measurement R.

Potential of

161

JOHNSON

The Secret Lije of Fieldnotes ROGER

IV

SANJEK

Fieldnotes in Circulation

Fieldnotes: Research in Past Occurrences

273

GEORGE C. BOND

Adventures ·"vith Fieldnotcs CHRISTINE

290

OBBO

Refractions of Reality: On the Usc of Other Ethnographers'

303

Field notes NA�CY LUTKEH.AL'"S

Fieldnotes and Others

324

ROGER SANJEK

V

From Fieldnotes to Etlznography

C hinanote s : E ngendering A nthropolo gy MARGERY

WOLF

He aring Voices,

Joining

Else's Fieldnotes

ROBERT J.

343

SMITH

the Chorus: Appropriating So m e one

35 6

Contents

Fieldnot es, Filed No tes, and the Conferring of Note

IX

371

D �VID W. PLATH ..

On Ethnographic J,�lidity ROGER

Index

SANJEK

419

Preface

After a long American Ethnologic a l S ociety board of directors ses­ sion on the first day of the 1984 American Anthropological Associa­ tion meetings in Denver, I met Shirley Lindenba u m editor of Ameri­ ,

can

Ethnologist and a fello\v member of the board, in the hotel lobby�

We \Vcrc later j oined by J a m es Clifford, a historian of anthropology.

The three of us talked about current concerns in anthropology, includ­ ing the growing interest in ethnographies as texts. By eleven o'clock in the evening \Ve \\7ere all hungry and decided to eat in the hotel. We de scended several Rights to the one restaurant that \\'as still open. The se rv ice \vas sl o\\ and uncoordinated. As Linden­ '

baum and Clifford sat eating their dinner and I sat \Vaiting for mine, Clifford brought up the subject of fieldnotes. He said that in all the recent discu ssion about \Yriti n g ethno grap hy and ab out ethnographies as V�"riting, no one had addressed ""'·hat anthropologists V�·rite

be_{ore

they \Vrite ethnographies-fieldnotes. This led o ur conversation

to

a

chain of associations, comments, and ideas about fieldnotcs and about \v h y ethnographe rs have \\lritten so little on the subject. When I learned at the next day's AES board meeting that I \\'as to chair the program committee for the AES Invited Sessions at the Washington AAA n1cetings, in 1985, I immediately thought of doing a panel on fieldnotes. In the next t"vo d a y s I discussed this \Yith Linden,

XI

PREFACE

Xll

baum and AES president-elect Judith Shapiro, both of '\\'"hose ideas on themes and poten tial panelist s were extremel y helpful. Clifford also

was amenable, and willing to do a paper. The next step, early in 1985, was to \Vritc to a score or so of anthropologists, to gauge their in teres t in joining the Washington

sym po s i um I approached people of substantial ethnog raphic accom­ .

pli sh m ents peop le I believed Vlould be able to reflect upon such \Vork. ,

Some I knc'\\r well; others only slightly; some not at all. My bait was a ske t c h of topics and issues to consider: Unlike historians, anthropologists create their O\\rn documents. We call ""them fieldnotes, but \VC speak little about them to each other. This symposium seeks to open up discussion about ficldnotes \Vithin the profession. The aim is less to concretize what various theoretical schools think ought to go into ficldnotcs than to examine what anthropologists do with fieldnotes, how they live \Vith them, and how attitudes to\vard the construction and use of fieldnotes may change through individual professional careers.

We hope contributors '\viii present a variety of perspectives. Among the topics that might be considered are these: I.

What are the relationships between fieldnotes and ethnographies?

Are ethnographic writings \\'ritten "fro�" fieldnotes, from fieldnotes plus other sources, or does one or more intermediate stage of writing follo\v between fieldnotes and ethnographic product? Ho\v do field­ notes provoke and animate memory? 2.

W hat are the different 'ckinds'' of fieldnotes an ethnographer pro­

duces-running accounts of events, texts, reports, impressions, and other forms? How do these fit together in pro";ding the first-stage ethnographic record?

3. When they are available, V�·hat is the impact of earlier ethnogra­ phers' fieldnotes on later researchers? Should access to such fieldnotes be a

regular process of professional courtesy? If so, v.rhy, and how; if not,

\\'hy not? Hov.r successfully may one ethnographer's fieldnotes be used by another in -w·riting ethnography? 4· How does an ethnographer ulivc v.rith" fieldnotes over time? What

sense of responsibility to one's notes do anthropologists feel? Do field­ notes become a burden from \\'hich one must v;in freedom before going on to ncv.' work? How long can fieldnotes remain useful to an anthro­ pologist? Ho\v does the ethnographer's reading of her or his O\\'n field­ notes change \Vith professional development and maturity? Can ethno­ graphic v.'ritings become "obsolete" but fieldnotes remain a source for ne\v ethnography? s.

Ho\v do ethnographers in return visits change their conceptions of

what fieldnotes should be? How do such conceptions change pologists take on second or third field\vork projects?

as

anthro­

Preface

Xlll

How is access to fieldnotes handled when two or more ethnogra­

6.

phers work cooperatively-in team research, or in parallel investiga­ tions? 7. What uses rnay be made of fieldnotes-directly-as part of ethno­

graphic writing? Ho\\· do canons of scientific method, responsibility to informants, and desires to write persuasively and authoritatively all intersect in the use of fieldnote material?

8. Should fieldnotes become available to anyone (including non­ anthropologists) other than the ethnographer? When; to \\'hom; in what forms?

I appende d a list of useful sources, including Srinivas's

Village

Remembered

and Pehrson and Barth's book on the Marri Baluch; papers by

Clifford, Larcom, and Marcus and Cushman; and the collection of essays on field research edited by Foster and others. The bait \Vorked. Fourteen contributors prepare d papers, and eleven

of those papers , in revised form, are included in this volume (the press of other commitments prevented Emiko Ohnuki- Tierney, Triloki Nath Pandey, and Michael Silverstein from r evising their papers for inclusion here). The topic of fieldnotes proved to be ti mely A report on the sym­ .

posiu m followed in the

Chronicle ofHigher Education immedia tel y after

the Washington meetings (see Ellen K. Coughlin, "Anthropologists' Archives: Scholars Examine the Problems and Possibilities of Field Notes," December r8, 1985, pp. 5, 7). In the next three years, sev­ eral Vlorks on ethnographic \vriting appeared, some dealing directly and some indirectly with the uses of fieldnotes ( including books by Agar, Clifford Clifford and Marcus, Friedrich, Geertz, Marcus and ,

Fischer, Van graphic

w ri

Maancn).

Pointed and controversia l pieces on ethno­

ti n g by Richard Sh\ve der in the I\'ew Yo rk

Times Book

Review-"Storytelling among the Anthropologists," September 20, 1986, pp.

I,

38-39; "The How of the Word," February 28, 1988,

p. 13-provoked reactions in anthropological circles and beyond.

When my work on this collection of essays began in 1985, a t'\vo­ decade mix of theoretical, political, methodological, and fieldwork experiences had primed my thinking about the role of fieldnotes in doing anthropology I teach at Queens College in Powdermaker Hall, .

named for Hortense Powdennakcr, who ta ught there for many years. Soon after I a rrived in 1972, I rea d her book S tranger

Way of an

and Friend: The

Anthropologist (1966). What stayed with me most from this fascinating personal history was the sense of drudgery involve d in

PREFACE

XlV

diligently typing up fieldnotes from handvlritten notes on observa­ tions and informants' statements. This resonated \Vith the feelings I had during my o\vn fieldwork in Adabraka, Ghana, in 1970-71. I ha d kept a small notebook in my back pocket, a suggestion made by Lambros Comitas in a field training seminar in 1965. I \Vrote in this notebook all kinds of things seen and heard and struggled to keep my typing from it up to date. It resulted in 397 single-spaced pages of fieldnotes covering e ightee n months, al­ though the last one hundred pages \Vere not typed until the Wa terga te summer of 1973, a year after my Ph.D. thesis \Vas completed. That thesis and my publications on Adabraka since have been based on nc;arly as many pages of net\vork intcrvicvls and other systematic records, kept separate from my \Vide-ranging fieldnotes. The notes remain to be used, someday perhaps, in as ye t unbcgun ethnographic writing. The attention to records in my Adabraka fieldwork and \Vriting is a

product of my times. I first did field\\'ork in 1965 in Bahia, Brazil, as part of a Columbia University undergraduate summer program. This \\l"as preceded by a field training seminar, led by Comitas and Marvin Harris, in which the focus was on the practicalities of getting to and around in Brazil, and on es t ablishing rapport with informants. Several students from the previous year's program spok e about their experi­ ences. The assigned reading from Adams and Preiss's Human Organi­

zation Research

( StratJger and Friend \Vas not yet published, nor were Epstein's Cra_li of Social Anth rop o logy and Jong­ mans and Gutkind's Anthropologists in the Field; they would appear in 1966 and 1967, and begin the flood offieldv.,"ork and methods literature

in the

1 970s.)

v..t ashe d

over me.

I was more concerned about Brazilian ethnography and

the ethnoscience literature to which my planned field\vork on racial vocabulary related. Others in the Brazil group I met that year-Dan Gross, Maxine Margolis, David Epstein, Conrad Kottak, Betty Kot­ tak-men tione d Levi-Strauss's

Tristes

Tropiques, but I did not read it

then. In B raz il I took no fieldnotes; I tried, but had no idea of \\'hat to

write. Instead,

I collected records ofintervie\vs, and responses to a set

of dra\\'ings of varying combinations of skin color, hair, and nose form. This led to my second published paper.1 My first, \\'rittcn in the l Brazilian Racial Terms: Some Aspects of Meaning and Lc�rning, American AntiJro­ pologist 73

(1971): 112�43.

X\'

Preface aftermath of the Columbia revolt of 1968, captured the intert"vined concerns with ecology, underdevelopment� political engagement, sci­ ence, and method ,�,..hich influenced me in my 1967-69 graduate stu­ dent days. 2 It reflected Harris's teaching and \Vriting. I was especially imp ressed by ho\v his field encounter '\Vith racial inequality in Mo�am­ bique had led to his thinking about the emic-etic contrast, and ho�,. this in turn shed light on understanding the sacred role of the

C0\\7

in

preventing even greater immiseration in India. Politics, science, and rigorous data-gathering \\7ere all one piece for me. My concerns about race, ethnicity, and class \vere crystallized in my Adabraka research on \vhether htribe" or class '�ras more impor­ tant in daily life, and in my interest in testing the plural society separatist thesis that M. G. Smith and others had applied to Africa. The careful studv of the dailv life and interactions of Adabraka \\'omen �

.I

and men which Lani Sanjek and I conducted ,,,.as rooted in Harris's

l\lature o._(Cultural Thitlgs ( 1964), a theoretical book that I read as having

political implications. I \Vas also strongly influenced by �':hat I sa'\\I· as a parallel interest in charting interaction among the Manchester anthropologists. Comitas had turned me on to British social anthropology� in '"'·hich I read V�idely. I \\'as fortunate also to work \Vithjaap van Velsen at Columbia in 1968. His

Politics

of Kinship

(1964) \vas a demonstration of how

careful fieldnotes on actual behavior could be analyzed to throvl light

on larger questions of process and social structure; his paper in the Epstein volume, and Epstein's own 1961 paper on net\vork analysis, I sa\v as a next step from Harris's theoretical approach. Thus� detailed attention to daily activity marked both my Adabraka net\vork records and my fieldnotes. George Bond and Allen Johnson, \vho came to Columbia in

1968 and served on my dissertation committee, rein­

forced this combination of intellectual clements for me. The impor­ tance of dedicated perseverance in fieldwork \Vas also impressed upo11 me by Simon Ottenberg, '"rho ·\\ras in Ghana \vhile we were . The mix of political concern, respect for systematic data, and meth­ odical attention to detail, '"'·hich I have tried to make evident in my Adabraka publications, 3 has continued to be important to me. This 2Radical Anthropology: Values, Theory. and Content, Atul�ropology (JCI_l\

21-]2.

1

(1969):

3�1hat Is Network Analysis, and Wnat Is It Good For? Reviews in �4flthropolo.�· 1 (1974): s88-97; Roger Sanjek and Lan.i Sanjck, Notes on w·omcn and �'ork in Ada­ braka, A_fricatl l1rban No1ts 2, no. 2 (1976): 1-25� Ne,-...· Perspectives on w·cst African

XVI

PREFACE

mix also marked my \Vriting

in the 1970s about the employment of

anthropology. 4 The victory achieved on this issue, how­ ever, had as much to do \vith the politic al e x perien ce I gain ed in 197678 at the Gray Pan thers' Over 6o Health Clinic in Berkeley5 as with methodological and quantitative skills. My two years as an applied and advocacy anthropologist in Berkeley, however, pro duce d few writ ten fieldnotes, though they did result in a large file of other women in

documents. I continued as a Gray Panther activist on health,

housing , ageism, and econo mic just ice through the 198os after I returned to New York . 6 In 1981 I decided to write a book about the Berke le y Gray Panthers arid their health clinic. I d is co vered , however, a treasure of documents on the origins and history of the Gray Panther movement at the Presbyterian Historical Archives in Philadelphia, and my plan shifted to a study of the national organization, with the local Berkeley story as

one chapt er . In working on this project in 1981-82 and the summer of 198 5,

I refl ected often that the documents were my fieldnotes.

I had

not been present at the formative 1970-76 events detailed in

Thoug h

them, I knew all th e major actors, had seen the place s where events

Women9

RevieUJ5 in Anthropology 3 (1976): 1 15-34; C ognit ive Maps of the Ethnic

Domain in Urban Ghana: Reftections on Variability and Change, ..4merican Ethnologist 4

(1977): 603-22; A N e tv.' ork Method and Its Uses in Urban Ethn ograp h y, Human Organization 37 (1978): 257-68; Who Are uthe Folk" in Folk Taxonomies? Cogniti ve Diversity and the State, Krotbtr Anthr"Pologiutl Society Papers 53l 54 (1978): 32-43; The

Toward a Wider Comparative Perspective, Compara tive Studie5 in Society and History 23 (1982): 57-TO]; Female and Male Domestic Cycles in Urban Africa: The Adabraka Case, in Femalt and A,fale in ���.st AfriCil, cd. Christine Oppong, 330-43 (London: Allen & U n\v in , 1983); Maid Servants and Market Women's A p pr ent ices in Adabrak� in Ai "'o'* in Homt5: Household H'orkers in Korld Ptrspective, cd. Roger Sanjek and Shellee Colen (Washington, D.C.: American Organization of Households in Adabraka:

Ethnological Society.

I 990 ).

4The Posicion of Women in

the

Maj o r

Departments of Anthropology9

1967-1976,

i\merican Anthropologisi No (1978): 894-904; Roger Sanjek, Sylvia H. Forman, and

Ch ad McDaniel, Emp lo ymen t and Hiring of Women in American De pa rt m ents of

Anthropology: The Five- Year Record, 1972-1977, .4nthropology J'\'�'sletter 20, no.

1

(1979): 6-19; "The American Anthropological Association Resolution on the Employ­ ment of Women: Genesis, Implementation, Disavov.,yal, and Resurrection, Signs; Jour­

nal of l+omtn in Culturt and Soc ie ty 7 s A nthr op ological

Work at a

Advocacy Goals, in Citits

(1982): 845-68. Gray Panther Health

of the United 514ltes: Studits

Clinic: Aca dem ic , Applied, and in L'rban

.l\nthropolo�y, ed.

Mullings, 148-75 (New York: Columbia University Pre s s , 1987). 6Crowded Out: Homele5sne55 and the Eldtrl}' Poor in 1\.'tu' 1-'ork

Leith

City (New York:

Coalition for the Homeless and Gray Panthers of New York City, 1984).

Preface

XVll

occurred, and had participated in similar events in Berkeley, in New York, and at national Gray Panther meetings. To me, the process of building ethnographic description and analysis from these documents Y�"as similar to van Velsen's extended case method and to the account of Adabraka life which I had built more quantitatively in my net\vork analysis dissertation and in papers. My thinking about fieldnotcs \vas stimulated, as well, by the part­ time, long-term fieldwork I began in Elmhurst-Corona, Queens, in late 1983, which continues at present. In this incredibly diverse neighborhood of established \\l·hite Americans of several ethnic back­ grounds, newcomers since the late 1960s have included Latin Ameri­ can and Asian immigrants of many nationalities, Black Americans, and white not-quite yuppies. With a team of researchers

as

diverse as

the local population, I have been studying changing relations among these varied groups. My fieldnotes cover mainly meetings of political bodies and associations, public festivals and ceremonies, and services and social occasions at three Protestant churches, with scores of de­ scriptive accounts of events in each of these three categories. My· chronological ficldnotes to date amount to 930 single-spaced pages, "\Vith more notes from ethnographic interviews. My analyses of these three domains begin "With the fieldnotcs. They have more in common \vith van Velsen's extended case approach than with the quantitative analysis of behavioral records of my Adabraka net\vork study. Political concerns about the future of racial, ethnic, and class differences con­ tinue to give meaning and purpose to

this work.

Most of the revised essays for this �yolume reached me during 1986. In June of that year my father died, and

in the follo\ving t\vo years

several responsibilities overtook me. It Vlas not until 1988-89 that I v.ras able to return to the introduction for

Fieldnotes: The �'vtaking.s oj­

Anthropology. Once started, the introduction seemed to take on a life of its O\\'n; it is novl divided in to essays that address the issues raised in each of the book's five sections. 7 The eleven other authors are not entirely blameless for this extended "introduction." They raised so many compelling issues that adequate treatment of the wider literature

7For reading and commenting on se ctions of my contribution to this book I thank Lani Sanjek, David Plath, Robert J. Smi th Simon Ottenberg, Peter Agree, Linda ,

Wentv. orth James Cl i ffo rd Nancy Lutkehaus, Rena Lederman, C aro l Greenhouse, '

,

,

David Holmberg, Judith Goldstein, Moshe Shokeid, and Jean Jackson, who always sent just the right signal at just the right time.

PREFACE

XVlll

and context-the proper job of an introduction to an edited collec­ ti on p roved a formidable task. W ith their joint examination of an­ thropology from fieldnotcs "up" rather than from t heory "down, " the whole history of the discipline looked different. Theoretical concerns vlere very much present, but they were extended to include qu estion s of "when theory , '' '''''here theory," ''\vhy the or y, in addition to """'·hich theory." Several \v ritin gs have been extremely hel p ful to my \\'ork on this book. They include Cliffo rd Geertz's "Blurred Genres: The Refigura­ tion of Social T h o u g ht, " in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpre­ tive Anthro pology, pp. 19-3 5 (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Peter C.. W. Gutkind and Gillian Sankoff's ''Annotated Bibliography on Anthropological Field Work Methods," in �4nthropologist.s in the Field, ed. D. G. Jon g m an s and P. C. W. Gutkind, p p. 214-72 (Ne\v Yo rk: Humanities P r e s s , 1967); Nancy McDo\.vell's ap tl y titled "The Ocean­ ic E t hn og raph y o f Marg are t Mead, " Americatt i4nthropologist 82 ( 1980): 278-303; and several essays by the historian G e o r g e W. Stocking,Jr.­ anthropology is blessed that he has devoted his pr o fe s sio nal attention to our d iscipline . But most valuable of all are the essays in this book by George C. Bond , James Clifford, Jean Jackson, .Allen and Orna Jo hns o n , Rena Lederman, Nancy Lutkehaus, Ch ri stin e Obbo, Si m on Ottenberg, David Plath, Robert J. Smith , and Margery Wolf. Every one of the authors surprised me , d o in g much more than I expected, rev·ca lin g sides of themselves to the ""'·orld, or dealing vvith themes and issues far b ey ond \\'hat I imagined back in 1984. As editor, I am honored. As reader, you are in for a treat. -

"

RoGER s.l�JEK New York City

PART

I

Living with Fieldnotes A significant attribute of \\ riting is the ability to '

comnlu­

nicatc not only \Vith others but with oneself. A permanent record enables one to re re a d

as

well as record one's own

thoughts and jottings. In this way one can review and re­ organize one's own work, reclassify what one has already classified, rearrange \vords, sentences, and paragraphs in a variety of ways The \\ray that information is orga­ .

.

.

.

nized as it is recopied gives us an invaluable insight into the \Vorkings of the mind of homo

legetJS. -jACK

Gooov

JEAN E. JACKSON

''I Am a Fieldnote'': Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity

This essay began

as

an exploration of my ovln relationship

ficldnotes in preparation for a symposium on the topic.

1

to

my

When I began

to chat vlith anthropologist friends about their experiences with field­ notes, however, I found what they had to say so interesting that I decided to talk to people in a more systematic fashion. My rather nonrandom sample of seventy is composed of all the anthropologists I contacted; no one declined to be intcrvie\ved. Intervie·\�tees are thus mostly from the cast coast, the Boston area being especially overrepre­ sented. With the exceptions of one archaeologist, one psy . chologist,

two

sociologists, two political scientists, and one linguist (each of

whom does research "in the field"), all arc card-carrying anthropolo­ gists by training and employment. The only representativeness I have attempted to maintain is a reasonably balanced sex ratio and a range of ages. To protect confidentiality, I have changed any potentially identi­

fying

details in the quotations that follo\v.

Given the sample's lack of systematic representativeness, this essay should be seen in qualitative terms. The reasonably large sample size

1 An earlier version of this essay \vas read at the 84th annual meeting of the A1nerican Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C.� December 4-8, 1985. in the sym­ posium on ficldnotes.

3

LIVING W'ITH fiELDNOTES

4

guards against bias in only the crudest fashion, since so many complex variables are present. While I cannot claim to represent the entire field, I do think the sample represents practicing anthropologists living in

the United States. Some are famous, others obscure; some have re­ flected on fieldwork and fieldnotes a great deal (a few have written about these topics), while others describe themselves as having been fairly unconscious or even suspicious of such matters. My sample is thus more representative of the profession than if I had written a paper based on what anthropologists have published about fieldnotes-the last thing many of my intervie\\'ecs contemplate undertaking is \\'rit­ ing on this topic. I believe that the fact that some common themes .. have emerged from such a variety of individuals is significant. 2 Although readers might justifiably \\'ant to sec connections made bet\vcen an intervie\vec's opinions about fieldnotes and his or her \\lork, I provide none because I very much doubt that many anthro­ pologists would have spoken \tVith me if I had indicated that I \\'as endeavoring to \\'rite up the intcrvievls in journalistic format, or \\�·rite biographical sketches, or compare different anthropological schools represented by named or easily recognizable individual scholars. Thus my "data" prove nothing, divorced as the quotations are from the context of the intervic\\l·ee's personal background, personality, field­ work project, and published ethnographies or essays on theory and method. The quotations given are illustrative anecdotes and nothing more. Rather than write a polemic about what is \Vrong Vlith our methods, I hope to gently provoke readers, to stimulate them to ask questions about their own fieldnote-taking. Hence, this essay is to be 2 Although

this essay is inspired by the current interest in "ethnographies as text" (see

Marcus and Cushman 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; (;eertz 1988; Clifford 1988), n1y methodology necessarily produces findings that differ from these and similar work in

two crucial respects. First, most of the anthropologists I intervie\ved are not enamored of the '•anthropology as cultural critique., (Marcus and Fischer 1986) trend, even though all of them had very interesting comments to make about fieldnotes. Second, given the frankness and the strong feelings-especially the ambivalence and negativity-that

emerged in the interviews, I doubt that some of what my intervie\vees said to me \''lould

ever be said in print, even by those \vho might be inclined to write about fieldnotes one day. For alii know, some might later have regretted being so frank with me, al though this does not necessarily make what they said any less true. Thus. while I certainly do not think I got the entire truth from anyone, given that the confidential interaction of an

intervie\v setting can pu11 out of people ideas and feelings they 1night not come up \\'ith

by themselves, I believe that the ntatcrial I did get is different from \\'hat I '\\'ould get a literature search about fieldnotes, even given that authors make extremely

from

negative con1mcnts about fieldnote-taking fron1 tin1e

to

tin1c.

"I Am

a

Ficldnotc',

5

seen as nei th er a philoso p hi cal nor a hi storic a l treatise on anthropolog­ ical epistemo l o g y but rather as a some\vhat lighth ear ted e x p lo r ation of the e mot io nal dimension of one stage of the an th ro p olog ica l enter­ prise, one that heretofore has n ot received much attention. With a few e xce p ti ons , my procedu re has been, fi rst , to ask int er­ vie'\vees to tell me \vhatever they mi ght want to say about the subject of fieldnotes . Almost all have been \villing to comment. T h en I ask about (1) their d e fi nitio n of fieldnotes; (2) training-prep aration and me nto rin g, for m al a n d inform a l ; (3) sharing ficldnotes; (4) c onfiden­ tiality; (S) dis position of fieldnotes at d e ath; (6) th eir feelings about fieldnotcs, particularly the actual, p hy s i cal notes; (7) whethe r ''unlike historians, an thr op o logis ts create their O\Vn documents." 3 I als o try to query th ose �·ho have had more than one field e x p eri ence a b out any cha n g es in their a p p ro a ch to fieldnotes over the years an d to ask older anthr o p o log i s ts about c h an ges over the span of their careers . lntervie\\'S last at lea s t an hour. Lackin g funds for transcription, I do not tape them, but I do try to record v er b atim as m u ch as p os sib le. Along the \vay, of course, I have disco v e red other iss u es that I \\'ish I h ad been co v e rin g s y stematically: for in stance, the interdep e n dence of � \\' h a t Simon Otten be rg ter m s " hea d n o te s ' (r em e mbere d o b servation s) and �·ritten notes. In m ore recent intervievls I h av e added ques­ tions about a p os s ib l e my s ti qu e su r r oun din g ficldnotes, and whether fieldnotcs are co nnected to anthropologists', or anthro p olog y 's , iden­ tity. Whatever their initial attitude, by the end of the inte r v i e w all i nte r­ viewees seem to have become i n t e re s ted in one or t\VO of the deeper is sues that the topic introduces. Most comm en t that my q ue s tions and th eir ans\vers hav"'e made them realize that fieldnotes are not by any m eans limited to nuts-and-bolts matters. The s ubj e ct is clearly com­ pl ex , t o u c h y, and disturbing for m o s t of us. My intervie\vees have in di c ated their unease by using familiar \V ord s from the anthropologi­ cal lexicon such as sacred, taboo, _fetish, exorcise, and ritual, an d by co m m ent in g on ou r tendency to avoid talk i ng about ficldhotes or only to joke abo ut them (comments rem in is cen t of the literature on avoid­ ance and j ok in g relationships). Anth ro po log is ts h a v e man y in sights to offer, even in discussi n g the n u ts-and-bolt s issues connected to the actual rec o rding of n o tes . Fi eld3This phrase \\'as part of Roger Preface.

Sanjek's

abstract

for the 1985 symposium; see

LIVING \\'ITH fiELDNOTES

6

notes sc..�m to make a remarkably good en try point for obtaining opinions and feelings about bigger issues (such as this paper's topic,

the relationship between fieldnotes and professional identity), proba­

q uestions about these larger issues. The monologues I encourage at the beginning of the intervie\vs seem to bly better than point-blank

put informants at ease, reassuring them that I am genuinely interested

in vlhatever they have to say and piquing their interest in the topic. All

the intcrvie\vs have gone smoothly-although one intervie\vce said he was "leaving with a dark cloud"' over his head: "Hov.r am I going to get ready for class in the next ten minutes?"

Why has this project turned out to be so interesting both to me and ,

·seemingly to all those I intervie\v? For one thing, because at least one of my q u estions (although the dialogue becomes

an

u'hich one varies) aro u ses each intervievlee,

en gaged one. Also, while some responses are

Vlcll-formulated ansvlers, at other times the reply is anything but prepackaged, neat, and tidy._ allowing me to sec thinking in action.

Overvieu' o_f Answers to the Specific Questions Let me try to summarize the perplexing and ch allenging

v ariety of

responses to the specific questions. This section does not address professional identity per se, but it provides necessary background.

Definition What respondents consider to be

tieldnotes varies greatly. S o me will

include notes taken on readings or photocopied archival material; one person even sho\ved me a fieldnot c in the form of a ceramic dish for roastin g sausages. S ome give local assistants blank notebooks and ask

them to keep fieldnotes. Others' far more narrow definitions exclude even the tran s cripts of taped intervie\\'S or field diaries. It is evident that how people feel about fieldnot es is crucially linked to how they

define them, and one must always determine just

'A" hat

this definition

is in order to underst and what a person is saying. Clearly, \vhat a "

fieldnote is precisely is not part of our profession's culture, although ''

many respondents seem to believe it is. Most intervie\vees include in their definition the notion of a running log written at the end of each day. Some speak of fieldnotes as repre­ senting the process of the transformation

of observed interaction to

''I Am a Fieldnotc"

7

\Vritten, public com munication: "ra\v" data� ideas that are marin ating , and fairly done-to-a-tu rn diagrams and genealogical charts t o b e used in appendixes to a thesis or book. Some see their notes as scientific and rigorous because they are a record, one that helps preven t bias and p rovides data other research ers can usc for other ends. Others

contrast

fieldnotes with data, speaking of fieldnotes as a reco rd of one's reac­ tions,

a

cryptic list of items to concentrate on, a preliminary stab at

analysis , and so forth. Some definitions in clude the fun ction of fiel dnotcs. Many people s tress the mnemonic function of notes, saying that their purpose is to help the anthropol ogist recons truct an event. Con text is often men­ tioned. You try co contextualizc. I never did it and I regret it bitterly. I don't have peop le �s words on it.

I don't h a ve a d aily diary. There are a lot of thin gs that became a part of my daily life I \vas s u re I'd remember and I didn't. Things you take for granted but you don't know why any more. Pid g i n \•ttords, stuff about mothers-in-l aw. You can recall the emotional mood, but not the exact \\'ords.

One intervic\\'ee commented that at the beginning of her field�·ork she generated fieldnotes in part because doing so reas sured her that she \\'as doing her job. An insight that she could use materials her informants \Vcre generating ( memos, graffiti, schedules) as fieldnotes gr eatly aided her fieldwork. Here a shift in definition seems to have been crucial . Most anthropologists describe differen t kinds of fieldnotes , and so me wiiJ rank these acco rding to the amount of some positive quality they possess. But what this quality is, varies. For some, those notes containing the hardes t data rank highest; o thers have found thei r diaries to be the best resou rce: That journal, of course, is also

a

kind of data, beca use it ind i cat es how to

learn about, yes, myself, b ut al so ho\v to be

a

person in this environ­

ment. Subsequently I s ee it as part o f the fieldnotes.

The category "hunch" is so mething anthropologists don't bring to the field. This is why you sh o ul d take a j ou rn al .

A moral evaluation often colors the definition itself and how re­

s pondents feel about fieldnotes in general . Clearly, those who see

LIVI�G \\'ITH fiELDNOTES

8

fieldnotes as interfering with "doing'' anth ropology, as a crutch or escape, or as the reason v.te arc not keepin g up "vith the competition (c. g., sociology) in rigor, differ from those "vho characterize fiel dnotes as

the dis tinguishing fea ture separatin g superior anth rop ologi s ts from

journalists , amateu rs, and superficial, num ber-crunching sociologists . Training

and Mentors

The ques tion of training often elicits strong reacti ons. 4 Virtually all respon den ts compl ain in some manner� mo st s aying they received no •

formal ins truction in fieldnote-taking, several pointing out that their graduate departments are proud to "do theory" only. So me ap prove of this state of affairs, and some do not. Many speculate about hov..· to improve the situation; a fe\v intervie\.\l·ees spoke approvingly of the training received by students in other soci al science and cli nical fields. But the complaints from those who did

receive fiel d\vork training

reveal this to be an extre mely thorn y issue. Desi gning a co u rse on fieldwork and fieldnotes tha t will be useful fo r all anthropologists, \\'ith their different stvlcs, research focuses, and fieldwork situation s, "

appears to be a challenge fev..· ins tructors meet

successfully. One inter-

vie\vec said that much of what is published on fieldwork today is not , ''ho\.\1·-to , material so much as reflections on vvhy it is so difficult to tell people ho\v to do it. The best tack \\70u)d appear to be to provide a smorgasbord of techniques fo r studen ts to learn about, '"'·ithou t i nsist­ ing on a p articular approach . Matly of those most adamant ab out the vvorth lessncss of

\\-..

hatcver fo rmal advice they received nonetheless

report that little bits and pieces picked up along the way have been extremely useful.

Sharing Fieldnotes Interviewees arc very touchy on the topic of shari11g notes. Ques­ tions of p rivacy, both one's own and one's informants'., enter in. 4Scveral readers ofearlier drafts of this paper have commented on ho\\' a nutnbcr of the responses quoted secn1 quite '•studcnty. As noted above, I have obtained a roughly representative range of ages for intervie\\tees, an d I have avoided overrepresenting recently returntxl graduate students in the quotations I have chosen to presen t Yet regardless of intervievvees' age� stature V\'ithin the field. a n d number of separate fidd­ \vork projects, 1nost of them chose to answer my q u es tio ns by referring to their early fieldVw·ork experiences. My conclusions suggest son1e reasons ,._·hy these initial research ,,

.

periods vverc: n1ost �alient in intcrvic:v-.·ccs� minds.

'' I A m a Field no tc "

9

Also, because \Ve don't demand access to fiel dnotes, people don't de­ mand , " Look , you say such-and-such, I want to see the notes. " . . . It 's

like saying to a s tuden t, hWe do n 't trust yo u . " I haven ' t , and I'd be o f t w o min ds . \\rho they are and what they'd \van t it for. Fieldnotes are . it's s trange how intimate they become and ho'"' possessive \\'e are . .

.

.

.

Yet man y r ecog n i ze the myriad potential values of s h ar in g : It woul d be such an advant age

.

. . to enter a place \vith som e of that

ba ck ground .

I think for someone else \1\.'ho's gone there , your notes can be an aid to his n1em ory, too. They are still helpful , sort of like another layer of lacquer to your own notes .

An em i n ent anthropologist's fieldnotes can be a v aluable source of

in formation about both the p ers o n as a scholar and a culture g reat ly changed in the interi m . One intervie�"ee commented on Franz Haas's diary : The n otes reveal a lot and for that reason they are valuable documen ts . Does the anthropologist see the culture, o r see himself in the culture . . . sec t he social context from which he comes as somehow replicated in the culture?

Interestingly, this respo n de n t thinks she \Vill even tually destroy her own fieldnotes . Many speak of the p r ivacy of fieldnotes with a touch of wistfulness , sayin g they have ncv·er seen anyone else's: There are stron g rules i n anthropology about t h e intensely private nature of fieldnotes . I 'd like to have this protection ''It's in my notes , '' or "It 's not in tny notes, " and hide behind this . .

.

.

.

r d sho\v min e to people and they 'd say, " O h , '"'ow, I ' ve never seen notes lik e that. Fieldnotes are really hol y. "

Confi dentiality Comments about the confiden tiality of n o tes depend in large part on

the field situation and type of research conducted . Worries about

promi ses made to informan ts emerge, as do ethical considerations

LIVING WITH fiELD N OTE S

10

about revealing illegal activities or giving amm unition to groups "vho do not have one 's field site community's best interests at heart. Waiting until one�s inform an ts die mav not be a s olu tion : I

I ' m \vorking \\'ith people who h a ve a lot of in terest in h istory as a

determinan t force, and therefore for so meone to read about a scandal his family was in a hundred years ago is still g oing to be very em barrassing .

On the other hand, some anthropol ogists' informants �·anted to be mentioned by name . And members of some communities disagreed among themselves abo u t ho\v much should be made public. l)cath Several anthropologists, particularly the ones \\'ho took fe\v field­ notes and relied

a

lot on their memories , commented on ''' hat \vould

be lost when they died : It's not

a

random sam ple, it's much better designed. But because the

design an d values are in m y head , it 's dead data \\·ith out me.

Very fe\\' interviewees, even the older ones , have made an y provisions for the disposition of their fieldnotes . Many �·orry about compromis­ ing their informants, and

a

large number s a y their notes arc \IVOrthles s

or undecipherable. Some speculate about possible \vay s to preserve the valuable information in them, but apart from sys tem atically organiz­ ing and editing for the express pu rpose of archiving the n otes them­ selves, n o other practical solutions have been des cribed .

Feelings abou t Fieldno tes The subj ect of fieldnotes turns out to be one fraugh t with emotion

for ·virtuall y all anthropologists , both in the field and later on . I found

a

remarkable amount of negative feeling : my intervic"\.\1· transcripts con­ tain an extraordinary nu mber of images of exhaustion, anxiety, inade­ quacy, disappointment , guilt, confusion , and resentment. 5 Many in5 It has occurred to me that since anthropology provides no forums for dis cus sing

during co rridor talk '' or at parties , one reason so much emotion comes out durin g an in tervie\v is tha t it provides a rather rare opportunity to express such feelings confidentially and reAcctivcly. (Even in field methods co u rses that system a tically expl ore fiel dno t cs , one 's defenses are likel y t o b e in

so me of these issues, excep t anecdotally

..

" I Am a Ficldnote"

I I

tervie'\\l·ees feel that \\' ri ting and processing ficldnotes a re lonely and isolating acti vities, chores if not ordeals . Many mention feeling disco mfort taking notes in front of the nati ves: I think p a rt of that process i s forgetting your relationship, letting them become objects to some extent . . . . The way I rational ize all tha t is to hope that \\'ha t I publish is someho\\' in their interest.

O thers mention discomfort when at times they did not take notes and an

informant responded: " Write this do\\'n ! I s n ' t what I'm telling you

important en ough?" Working \V ith fieldno tes upon return can also evoke strong me mo­

ries and feelings, and a nu mber of interviewees dis cuss t his in fetishis­ tic terms : Th e notebooks are covered w i t h paper th at looks like batik . I like them. They're pretty. On the outs ide. I never look on the inside .

Several people have rema rked that since fieldnotes are

a j og

to mem­

ory about such an important time in their lives, strong feelings are to

be expected . Some inter viewees com m ent on ho\\' wri ting fieldnotes can make you feel good, or proud to be accumulating lots of valuable data.

Others remark on the reassurance function of taking notes, parti cu­ larly at the beginning of fieldwork : You go th ere, a stranger. It gives you something to do , helps you organize your tho ughts .

Still others mention th e value of fieldnotcs in gettin g an idea off one's

mind or using the notebooks to let off steam- what Malino�,.skian garbage-can fun ction .

�

..

e

might call the

Fieldnotcs allo \\. you to keep a grip on your sanity. Of cou rse I cou l dn't show that I w as unhappy. My diary helped me talk about myself-my angst, my inadequacy. I \\'asn 't experiencing the exhilaration I

was

supposed to.

pl ace . ) A number o f respondents co1nmcntcd at the end of the in tervie,�· t h at thev felt re liev ed and appreciated h aving been able to talk a t length abou t the topi c . ·

L I VIN G \\' I TH f iEl D N OTES

Fieldnotes can reveal '\\�· hat kind of person you are-mes s y� pro­ cras tinating, exploitative, tidy, responsible, generous . Some inter­ vi ewees fi nd this valuable; others find it upsetting: Rereadin g th e m , some of them look pretty ]ante. Ho\v could you be so stupi d � Or pue r ile� You could do an archaeology of my unde rstanding . . . but that 's so hard to face.

And a nu mber of respondents dis cuss ho\v fieldnotes , in tandem \Vi th their emo tions, produce good anth ro p ology: I t ry to rel ate the ana lysis to th e fieldnotes and n1 y gu t sense of what's going on . . . do you _feel tn ale don1inan ce ?

Quite a nu mber of responden ts mention feelin g oppressed by thei r fieldno tcs : I experien ce th is still when I lis ten to t hcn1 . A ho rror, shock, and disorientation. Pa ranoia, uncertainty. I think I res i sted lookin g back at th e journal for that rea son.

If I look in them , all this emotion co mes out, so it's like hiding some­ thin g aw a y so i t \-.ron 't remin d you . Son1etin1 es I've wished they ju st weren' t there. So they aren 't just ph ysi cally unV\'ieldy, bu t mentally as \vell.

And othe rs' fieldn o tes in'\tite in vidious com parisons: I had a sense o f in sufficiency. I hadn't done i t a s \\'ell . I w oul dn't b e able to access mine as easily as she had hers . She, on the other h and, felt the same way.

For one respondent \vho " \vondered ho\\' i t felt to be responsible for so much (vlritten] m a terial , " the contrast between having som ethin g '"'·ritten down rather than stored in memory is troubling . The written notes beco me more separated from one's control, and their presence in creases one's o bligations to the profession , to posterity, to the na­ tives . It sort o f makes me nerv ous seein g those file dra \vcrs full of notes . It

reifies ce rtain things , to get it into boxes . For n1e . . . a lot gets los t V\'hen they're t ranslated on to these cards.

13

" I A m a Fiel dnote " Several intervie\vees mention the p roble m o f ha ving too much m ate rial, of feeling do minated or ovcrurhel med. They can be a kind of al batross around your neck. They seem like they take up

a

lot of room

.

.

. they t ake up too much

roo m .

particularly true of audio tapes.

Several find this to be

I ssues o f \VOrth , co n trol� and protection often fi g u re p rominen tly. An entire study could be devoted to \vhether ficldno tcs are thought of

as valuable, po tentially valua ble, o r \Vorthless . Anxiety about los s emerges in many interviev�' s . The no tion of b u rning fieldno tes (as opposed to merely thro\vin g them a\.\lay) has arisen q u ite often . I have also been struck by hovl many interviewees men tion , sometimes '"';th great relish, legend s (apocryphal or not) about lost ficl dnotes .

Though

fieldnotcs in general have recei ved little atten tion until recently, this is not true for the theme of lost fieldno tes in the profession's folklore. So m ay be the people who los t their no tes are better off.

[Withou t notes the r e s ] more chance to schcm atize, to order conceptu­ '

al ly . . . free of nig gling excep ti ons , grayish half-truth s you find in you r 0 \\rn data.

Several interviewees spoke of the phy sical lo cati on of their notes and meanings attache d ; one admitted a strong awareness of the physi ca l n otes, in pl ace next to m y desk a t home

And quite

.

.

.

a

symbolically important

a n1ana qu ality.

a n umber of respon dents report feelin g great plea sure, in

some cases visceral pleasure, at thinking about their notes , looking at them, reading them (sometimes aloud) : I do get pleasure in \Vorking with them again, particularly my notes fr o m my first work . A feeling of sor t of, that is V.'here I came in, and I can someti mes recapture some of the intellectual and physica l excite­ m ent of b ei n g there. So

a

feelin g of confidence th at if one could manage thi s, one could

manage almost any thing .

sacri fice , ho "v it's done. When reading �y notes I rcntcm ber how it smelled . everyone's reall y pleased when t t con1es time to eat it .

For example, you \\'ri te about

a

.

.

LIV I NG WITH FIELDNOTE S

14

Black ink , very nice; blue carbon, n o t so nice.

Some respondents seem to see their fieldn otes as splendid in them­ selves and invaluable for helping with recall ; others say their fieldnotes are rubbish compared to their much more real memories of the events . Th ese memories may be described in terms of visual or aural qualities that fieldno tes cann ot provide . One in tervie\vee said his ficldn otes were not real for him until he combined them with his memories , the theory he was vlorking on, and his \vife's critiq ues to make a p ublished \Vork . For some reflective types , fieldnotcs p o ssess a liminal quality, and strong feelings may result from this alone. Fieldnotes are liminal­ betvlixt and betv�recn- because they are bet\veen reality and thesis , bet\�leen memory and publica tion, bern·een training and professional life (see Jackson

I 990) .

It seems that fieldnotes may be a mediato r as well . They are a " translation' ' but are still en route from an internal and other-cultural state to a final destination . And becau se some anthropologists feel that fieldnotes change with each rereadin g , for them that final destin ation is never reached.

Fieldnotes as Docu ments "Creat ed"

by

the Anthropologist Despite being the premise of the

1 98 s A A A s y mposium on field­

notes, the statement that anthropologists create their own documents elicits quite va ried an d usuall y strongly opinionated responses . So me say this is absolutely true : Yes , you do create data in a self-conscious way that is quite special . Each an thropolo gist knows it's a dialectic. The informant creates it; you create it togeth er. There must be a tremendous sense of responsibili ty in it, that is, a sen se of po litical history. one version . It seem s plausib le . . . one is creating s ome special kind of fabricated eviden ce . Especially after time has

passed ,

and you go back and it's as if

they 're \\'ritten by someon e else. So we do more than his torians

.

.

.

,..,,e

create

a

'"'orld, not just

docu­

m ents. Fieldn otes are , my creation in the sense that my so me sense that they be recorded.

energies

saw to it in

15

"I A m a Fiel dnote '' It's crea ting something, not crea tin g it in the imagi n a tion s ense cr ea t ing it in terms of bring ing it out as a fact. ,

says as he's In some senses we do. We see ou rselves . Malinowski . h co m ing into Kiri\\"in a, '• It's me \Vho 's going to create t em for the world . " .

.

But some consi de r "create'' as a pej orative term : Thi s (st atement] says t h a t an thropolo gis ts fu dge and his torian s d on ' t I d on 't agree. .

I te nd to believe my notes reflect re ali t y as cl osely

as

possible.

object to the im p lica tio n that anthro­ polo gists use onl y those docu ments they have c eated . To o thers, the statement seems to d is p a r a g e t h e n at i e s A lar e number of in tcrvie\vees

g

r

v

:

The r eason why I ' m having a hard time r espon din

g is I never think of

m y fiel dn o tes as a do c u m ent I feel the people are sort of a document. I .

did n ot create these people, and they are the documents.

Maybe I just view my task not so much as being a brok er, an intermedi ary, a partner

Still others disagree \Vith the

cont

r

.

.

c rea ti n g .

.

bu t transm i tting,

It's their words .

as t made between anthropologists

and historians : Of course anthropolo gis ts create their own documents. The argument would be to what extent historians do that.

Fieldnotes, the Atzthropologist, and �4nth ropology H a v in g sketched in so me neces sary background , \V C can novl ex­ pl ore th e ex t e n t to �vhich the interviewees s ec fieldnotes as svmb oliz­ i n g the anthropological endeavor. Some make very direct st� tcments :

i

It's a symbol of your occu pat on . A materi al symbo l .

An t h ro pologists are those \1\tho w rite t h in It's ou r dat� it

g

s

do\vn a t the end of the day.

in chronological order. N ot neatly classi fied the mo ment you receive or en e ra te it. c om es

g

L I V I N G W I TH f i E L D N O TES

16

Clearly, one reason for the s trong feeli ngs my questions freq uently elicit is tha t "fieldnotes'' is a synecdoche fo r '' ficld \\'ork .

'�

One woman

described the differences bct\vecn anthrop ology and other social sci­ en ces in terms of ho\\' vle do field\vork, sayin g that ours was feminine and osm o tic, '' like a S co tt to wel soaking up cult u rc. " 6 Another female res p ondent said that she found fieldwork and traditional fieldnote­ taking to o feminine� and this was why ethnoscience was so appealin g : it promised t o introduce ri gor into fieldnotes , elimin ating the touch·y­ feely aspects (see Kirs chner I 987). Yet several others sa\\' no special link bet\v een being an anthropolo­ g i st and taking tieldnotes : N o. I've read the ficld notes of so ciologists an d ps ychologists . They ' re verv sin1 i l ar. I

I don 't feel they 're uniqu e. In order to col lect data, you h a ve to take notes of som e kin d. No. Our fieldno te tra dition comes out ofnatu ralist expl orer-geographer background . Le""·is and C:lark

.

.

.

r were] not that different.

This is a \Vay anthropologists have of alien ating themselves from o ther disci plines because we are alienated from n umber-crunching so ciolo­ gists.

'-•

We jus t feel su perior to social ps ychologists becaus e V..'e say thi s isn't social. They don ' t do tieldwork, \Ve say.

Still , the majority of interviewees do say that ficldnotcs are unique to anthropology, even if they disagree as to \vhy. It is in their O\\'n varied definitions offieldnotcs that we find cl ues about how fieldnotes are seen as unique to anth ro pology an d therefore em blematic of it. For al most all, ficldnotcs are li mited to the fiel d (it is perhaps sig nificant that the fevl nonanth ropologists I intervicvv ed did not make this dis­ tincti on) : Notes taken in the field. Ha rd-core fiel dnotes are \Vri tten records of obser vations and interv iews . Anything I \Vrote down in the field A n d didn 't thro w out. .

Before going I rea d a bout the place and take notes . I keep the no tes but I don ' t consider them

as

ficldn otcs.

6 LCvi-Strauss com ntents : '• U'ithout any pej orati v e in ten t-quite the co ntra ry- 1

\\ ou l d sa y that ficldv...· ork is a l i ttle bit '\\'Oot en \ \\'ork ! ' "v hich is pro b a b l y "vhy '

succeed sec

so

\.V elJ a t i[. For my part. I

also C:aplan ( 1 9S�).

was

lacking in

care

women

and pa [iencc" ( E ribon 1 9 8 8 : 3 ) �

" I Am

a

I7

Ficldnotc''

An o ther ingredient formd in many dctinitions is the no tion that fiel d­ notes come from primary sou rces : Notes take n on a book in the field ar e not fi eld not e s But if a K wa kiutl .

brought d ow n Boas's book, then yes . I suppose, stri ct l y speaking, fiel dno tes a rc the records of ver b al con ver­ sational a nd observational kinds of work vou did, rat h er than archives . I

However� as alvlays seems to happen vv·ith this topic, ambiguity soon enters

the picture:

The q u es ti on is : is it onl y no tes on the in tervic\\"S, or everything else?

Or \vhat I ' m note-taking in Bah i a versus Nc,.v Yo rk City? I ' m not sure there's a neat di stin ction in B ra z i l I ' m in the fie l d But \\ h a t if i'm doing r e se a rch in Ne\\' York City? It's sort of a n infinite regress . .

.

.

.

'

For examp le; in N icara gua, it 's such an ongoing ev en t and I can ' t say, ,

"So methin g's h appening bu t it's not of relevan ce. "

Several intervie\\�""c cs co mmented on the problem of defining the

field,

particularl y those Vlorking in nontraditional settings:

Sometimes I don t take notes on p urp ose A round here I use it as a '

.

protective device . My V\'ay of turning off.

For many respondents this "field" component of the definition, '\\" hile historically and sociologically importan t, is not the only reason field­ notes are unique to anth ropology. B u t "the field " for the majority is seen

as exclusive to anthropology, for it is characterized by various

criteria that are not seen as applying to the research sites

of

other

disciplines . While field\\'ork is carried out in other behavioral sciences, anthropology is seen by many as hav·ing imp arted a special quality to '' the field" tied up Vv;th the intensive, all-encompassing character of p articip ant-observation, v.rhich is not found in notions about field­ Vlork in related dis ciplines . Your try h a r d to be soci alized . You r measu re of su ccess is ho \\ comfort­ ab l e vou feel . We trv l ike m �d . '

..

�

I feel no \v that I am p rep a red to not fmallv become o ne of the locals . '' I .. did have t hat ex pectation . "

Th is atti tude toward the field has conse q uences fo r fieldnote-taking:

L I V I N G \1/ I T H f i EL DNOT ES

18

I think ( fieldnotes are] unique . . . because of the kind of data being coUected and because of the kind of relationships . The fieldn otes are the record of these. . .

.

I don 't think the fact of notes is unique, but the type of n otes is . Maybe not uniq ue, bu t special . We try so hard to get close to the people we 're working on . Most an thro pologists are not real ly satisfied until they 've seen them, s een the country, smelt the m . So there 's a so mewhat im me­ diate qualit y to our notes . The sense of intimacy \Ve pretend to develop with people we work vvith. I think if it's done correctly, then you get good in formation, not the trivial stuff that frequen tl y comes fro m su rveys . Fo r exam ple, th e theo ry o f the culture of p overty is worthless , but Children of Sanchez [Lewis 1 96 1 ] will survive.

Dialo gic consideration s enter the pict u re for some : In many ways I see anthropology as the art of lis tening to the other. Doin g fieldwork happens when you ex pose yoursel f t o the jud gment of others .

Several intervie\vs indicate that the an thropological fieldworker frequen tly worries about intellectual exploitation . Ha ving material in one's head is somehow less guilt-inducing than having it on paper. Some of this may be the " t\vo-hat'• problem : one is in some wa·ys a friend of the natives, yet one is also a student of them, and one cannot \Year both hats simultaneously. Writing fi eldnotes can make repressing the contradictions in this balancing act more difficult : I found (troubling] th e very p eculiar experience (of] gettin g to k nov-,' people, beco m i ng their friend, their confidant, and to be at the same time standing on the side and obser\'ing . . . . So when I came back from the field, it was, yes, years before I was able to write up that ex p erience. In traditional types of "deep bush" fieldwork, the category ''field­

notes'' can be conceptually opposed to " the natives" (usually seen as illiterate). 7 Many intervieVv·ees revealed complicated opinions and feel­ ings about colonialism and cultural imperialis m , literacy and power, and their own image of themselves both as hard working ob servers and sensitive, mo ral pers ons . all field situations fit this stereot ype. So me interviewees plan to leave their fieldnotes on file in a local museu m run by the people they study. 7 Not

"I Am a Fiel dn ote ,

19

A g en eral pattern for most interviewees is t o couch their answers in terms of hovl thei r fieldV�"ork-and hence fieldnote-t aking-differs fro m th e stereotype. I think in p art this sig nals a defensiveness about

o n e's fi eld\vork not living up to an imagined s tandard . It may also r e fle ct what vve might call the Indiana Jones S)rndrome: a ro mantic ind i vi d u alis m, an " I did it my vv ay " at titude. A substan tial number of intervievlees expressed pride in the uniqueness of their field sites , in their

0 �11

iconocl as m , and in being autodidacts at fieldnote-taking .

The s tereotypical research proj ect involves isolation, a lengthy stay, and l ayers of difficulty in obtainin g information . One needs to arrive, to get settled, to learn a language, to get to kno\v indi vidual s , and so fo rth . Overco ming such difficulties is seen as dem anding a near-total marshaling of one's talents

and re sou rces . These and other ch aracteris­

tics of field""'·ork turn any written notes into so mething valuable, becau se to replace the m is difficult if not impossible.

[Given ]

the whole aspect of re moteness , remo te areas , not much \vrit­

ten, your fieldnotcs beco m e es pecially p recious .

One factor is the conditions of tradi tional field\\lork, the role o f isola­ tion and loneli ness in producing copious fieldnotes that the research er will be attached to. In modern urban setti n g s this factor may not apply, yet it appears that at least for some "margin al " an thropologists­ people carrying out research in nontraditional settings-fieldnotes are an important s ymbol of belonging to the tribe. Another often mentioned characterist i c of t rad itional fieldwork is the attempt to supply context, to get the \vhol e picture. This is spoken

of in m any ways, often \Vith ambivalence. I su ppose I had a desire to record the com plete pictu re. The ideal video in my mind .

is like a

I have t rouble \\'ith my students . I s a y, uWri te down what they ' re wearin g � what the room looks like . " I guess what strikes m e i s that fo r all the chaos I associ ate v.'ith field­ note s, there's also a richness , and that somehow that is distin ctive to anthropolo gy.

An o the r im portant idea is that the investigato r is a cru cial part of the fiel dw ork / fieldnotes p roj ect : Fiel dno tes cnbody the in dividual fieldv.rorker's reactions . It 's O. K . for

20

L I VI N G WITH fiELD N O T E S m e t o be part of [ anthropologicalJ fieldnotes, bu t n o t O. K. i f I'm p art of [notes from] a child observation [in a ps ychology research p roject ] .

Often, notions o f personal process, of the investigator's own evolu­ tion and investment, enter in: In that case, the intervic\v t ranscri pts woul dn't count ( a s fieldnotes; they are] data but not fieldnotes . Th ey're more inseparable from you, I guess . An aura, an in tensel y personal ex perience, an exposu re to the other, a relu ctance to reduce to or translate, so un \villing to do this [ to \'\'rite down field notes ] .

The individual is further tied to the fieldnotes because he o r she "s\Yeats blood" for them in the field. This is often remarked on in connection \\'ith reluctance to share notes. Frequently mentioned too is fieldnotes' mnemonic function ; thev become "a document of ·"vhat �

happened and device for

triggering ne\\'

analysis. "

All these personal aspects of fieldnotes bring us far from formal , spa­ tial , and temporal definitional criteria. A frequently mentioned theme does seem to be that of

the

anthropologist-as-participant-observer in

the very process of reading and \vriting from fieldnotcs, revealing the close ties between fieldworker and fieldnotes : That might be closer to a definition of a fieldnote: someth ing that can't be readily comprehended by another person . A ne\\"spaper clipping can be interpreted . The clippin g has more validity of its own, but it can be a fieldnote if it needs to be read by me

. Ies \'\'hat I remember: the notes mediate the memory and the interaction . .

.

.

This tie is illustrated by one anthropologist's reactions \\'hen her notes \Vere subpoenaed: "The y're dog's breakfast! '' they [opposi tion law yers ) woul d say. "How can you expect anything fro m this?' . . . (They] had been writ ten on the back of a Toyo ta [i. e . , scribbled on paper held ag ainst the trunk of a ca r in the field] and \\"ere totall y inco m prehen sible to an yone but me. But it was an attack on my credibility .

.

. I said , ''This is a genealo gy. " " Th is is

a genealogy? " Our law yer \Vould jump in, " Yes, of cou rse. "

Securing the document's acceptability as a genealogy demonstrated her credibility as a professional anthropologis t.

'' I A m a Fieldnote "

Some people see the centrality of the personal component in field­ w o rk and fieldno tes as a stren g th: Something about the identity of anthropology, first of all, concerns the subj ectivity of the o bserver. Being a so cial science doesn't exclude this . . . the definition of field notes is a personall y bounded [in the field] and personally referential thing . [Fieldnotes are] personally referential in terms of this dialectical rela­ tionship with memory. Otherwise you ' re dealin g with "data"-socio­ logical, demographic, computer card , disks .

A political scientist notes: Anthropologists are self-conscious about this process called the creation and use of personal fieldnotcs . I think it's dangerous that political scientists aren't.

Yet many intcrvievlees arc reluctant to sec fieldnotes in overly subj ec­ tive terms: They're uniq ue to anthropolo gy because anth ropology has consciously made it a methodology and tried to introduce some scientific meth­ ods. . . . in anthropology \Ve don ' t see it only as an extension of someone's sel f but also a methodology of the discipline. If I felt tha t ethnography j ust reflected internal states, I \\·ouldn 't be in this game.

The pers onal issue emerged strongly when intervie\\'ecs considered the interdependence of ficldnotes and memory: An event years later causes you to rethink . . . . What is the status of that material? Is this secondary elaboration? . . . the mem ories one has, we have to give some credence to, an d the notes themsel ves are subject to di stortion, too. Are memories fieldnotes? I use them that way, even though they aren' t the same kind of evidence. It took a \\"hile for me to be able to rely on m Y memory. But l luld to, since the idea of \\rhat I \\ras doing had cha n ged, and I had memories but no notes. I had to say, u well , I Sa\V that happen . " I am a fieldnote.

This interviewee's willingness to state

"I am a fieldnote" reflects the

sh ifting, ambiguous status of fieldnotes . At times they are seen as

LIVIN G WIT H fiE L D NOTES

22

"data"-a record-and at times they are seen as "me. " I create them but they also create me, insofa r as

w

ri ting them creates and maintains

my identity as a j o u rney man anthropologist . A number of anthropolo gists link the uniqueness o f their fieldnotes

directly to issues of privacy: fve never system atically studied anyone else's, which says something about anthropolo gis ts. It co mes fro m the British teachin g ofkeeping one's personal ex periences private. You can read all through Argonauts \vith out finding out how many natives Malinowski talked to about p aintin g canoes .

I do think about \vhat to do \\;th them. I would hate fo r it to come to light if so mething happens to me. The people being observed fo rg et you' re there. There is so methin g unethical about that: they go on abou t their business, and you're still observing . So to have fieldno tcs that reflect your direct observations become pub lic property is to me a b etraval of trust. "

It's secret. Part of it is a feeling that the d a ta is unreliable. We \Van t to be tru sted when we say " the X do Y" ; V\'e don 't wan t them to be chal­ lenged .

Many respondents point out that t.he highly personal nature of field­ notes influences the extent o f one's Fieldnotes

can

w

illingne s s to share them :

reveal how worthless yo ur work \Vas , the lacunae, your

linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.

But several note that such secrecy is unacce p table in other fields : Think of ho"'' it would be for a graduate chemis try student saying "You 'll have to take my word for this. " We've built up a sort of gentlemanly code dealin g \Vith one another's ethnog raphy. You criticize it, bu t there arc limits, social conventions . . . you never overs tep them or you beco me the heav y.

A numb e r of anthropol ogists mentioned that field notebooks serve

as reminders that one is an anthropologist and not a native: I'm not just sitting on a moun tain in Pakistan drinking tea. [I had ] to '\Vrite ·s omething dovin every day. To not accept everyth ing normal.

as

23

"I A m a Fiel dnote ''

They can also be a reminder to informants that the information will used:

be

I feel better taking notes and tape reco rding, beca use it 's clear that \ve re in tervie\\rin g. '

But ot hers saw the no tebooks as hinde ring the resea rcher from obtain­ i ng info rmation and creating distance bet\veen the observer and the

observed: The record is i n m y h ead no t on paper. The record on p ap e r it , because it's s tatic, it interferes "''ith fiel dwork keeping fiel dnotes interferes with w h at s really i m portant. ,

,

.

.

.

'

First, it took up far too much time, like the addiction

to

reading the J\Jew

York Times . Fieldno tes get in the \\ray. They interfere "''ith \\'hat fieldwork is all

about- the doing . This is what I would call fiel dwork . It is not taking n otes in the field but is the i n t era cti o n between the researcher a nd the so-called res earch

subjects.

One intervie\vee

criticized

at length the pro fession's mythology

about fieldwork, saying that most anthropolo gists

thro\v

away their

original research pro pos als . They begin without a clue as to ho\v to do it, or if they have a clue , it turns out not to work. Most of the time in the field is wasted , and man y unsavory emotions em erge. Not only ar e y ou no t uliving l ike one of the n atives" much of the ti me, he sai d,

but the anth ropological en t e r p rise requires that you d o not; your \vife and kids will probably go more "native '' than you . This man con­ cluded that many people know their fieldnotes are \VOrthless , but, as with the emperor's ne"· clothes, mutual deceit is necessary to underpin the fate of the empire . Another man noted : One al�'ays doubts . Anthropologists mask their doub ting \\'ith a cer­ tain amount of masculine bra vado.

The \vays a nu mber of intervi ewees discu ss the mystique of field­ no tes reveals the p roblematic association bet"vccn field\vorkers and thei r notes . Many speak, usua lly ironically, about the fieldnotes as s a cr ed, "like a saint's bone. , Some even volunteer that their fieldnotes are feti shes to them . The l eg en d s about lost notes and the frequent •

the m e of b u rning suggest t he p resen ce of a mystique.

L I V I N G W I T H FIEL. D N OTES

24

The high degree of affect expressed by many interviewees is proba­ bly also evidence of a fieldnotcs mystique. That some do not feel this \vay� or at least say they do not, does not necessarily argue against the existence of a mystique, for these anthro p ologists note that their feelings are not shared by others; they "don't have the same kind of mystical attach ment" that some people do. Linked to the issue of mystique is the frequent observ ation that graduate sch ool is an a pp rent i c eship period and field\vork an initiation rite. S tudent-advisor interaction can p ro voke long-standing problems of a u thori t y sometimes for both student and advisor. Mentors were identified as the generous givers or mean v.tithholders of fieldnotes advice. St r o n g feeli n g s abo ut ad v i sor s also emerged when several in­ formants discussed hovl they ''liberated'' themselves from their field­ notes-or at least from the variety they had initially attempted to p r oduc e us i n g such p hrases as "the i ll us io n of control , " "positiv­ is m , , , "em p i ri cal trap. " One called ficldnotc-taking "a self-absorption, a \vay of retrea ting from data. " Many interviewees comment that their tr a ining reflected the mys­ ti qu e of field\\'ork and fieldnotcs. The fo l lowi ng ex p lication of this connection summarizes and "translates" the i r remarks. ,

-

1.

The only vvay you learn is throu gh the sink-or-swi m ap proach .

''Yo u go to the ti eld with Hegel an d yo u d o it or you don 't. " (I V\'ent through hazing \Veek ; you sho uld too. ) 2.

T he only \7\'ay that you become attached. cathected , trul y initia ted

is through the sin k-or-S \\tinl app roach. (An importan t feature of be­ co min g a profes sional anthropologist is to di scover that the standard operatin g procedure is wron g, and then modify it. ) 3.

Each resea rch site i s different, each research proj ect is different,

each anthropolog ist is differen t . (So any fieldnotes training will resem­ ble the "take a big stick for the dogs and lots of m a rm alade, jokes . Any advice

"viii

even tual l y h ave to be thrown aV\'ay. )

knows the Bes t Way. 5 . Tailo r-made solu tions are the \7\'ay t o go, to be \vorked o ut be­ t ween g raduate stu dent an d advisor. 6. There is alv-,'ays competition bet\veen the ()}d Guard and the Yo ung Tu rks regardin g theory an d method. and so any beginnings of a contin uous tradition of train ing abou t fieldnotes \viii be sabo ta ged . 4· An thropology i s not at a s tage ·"vhcre it

We can argue that first-field\vork fieldnotes are a diploma fron1 anth r opology's bush school, even if it is almost never displayed. Fur­ ther, insofar a s being a n1ember in good standing of the anthropolo gi-

" I Am a

Fieldnote''

ca l cl ub requires continued resea rch, continued production of field­ no tes is evidence that one is not letting one's membership lapse. But v·.re h av e seen that a fe\v interviewees speak of fieldnotes (and here a g ai n, defi nition is crucial) less as tools of the trade than as tools of the a pp r en tice . For these anthropologists-a small minority-fieldnotes are a beginner's crutch, to be cast aside '\\th en one has learned to \valk pr ope rly. While most anthropolo gists, by far, do not hold this view, it is a remarkably clear, albeit extreme, illu stration of the ambivalent emotions revealed in many interviews. Some intervie\vees suggL'Sted that 011e reason fieldnote-taking is rarely taught may be that part of the hidden curriculum of graduate training in anthropology is to promote a mystique about \vriting and ethnographic documentation. Perhaps in some \vays it is necessary to unlearn assump tions about the connections between observing and recording to become a good fieldworker. One respondent s p oke of receiving an insight into Australian Aboriginal symbolism about the ground while on the ground: You notice i n any kind of prol onged con versation , people arc squ at ting

,

or l ie on the g r o u n d I came to be qui te in trigued by th a t partly becau se I'd hav e to too . . . endless dust. .

,

,

This is participant-observation, ethnography-by-the-seat-of-your­ pants par excellence. The lesson this anecdote imparts about ho\v to do fieldwork \Vould be difficult to teach explicitly. The important insight that folloVi"ed his paying attention to the groun d is quite divorced from for mal academic models of observing and analysis. In p art, what intervie\vees are talking about is that the \\'riting versus the doin g of ethnography creates a tension sometimes difficult to bear. Thoreau \Vrote that he could not both live his life and \vrite about it. Some anthropolo gists grapple with the problem by beco m­ ing heavil y invol""ed with recording and even analyzing their field data in the field. For them, "field\vork " includes data-sort cards, audio tapes, even computers: I s o m etime s fel t li k e a charac ter in a Mack Sennett co nt edy tryin g to manipul ate the camera� tape reco rd er, pen s A mental image of myself try ing to \Vrite with the micro phone and po i n t the pen at someone. .

I always m anaged to j u stify it to my self that it \Vas more imp ortant to

analyze \\'hile y o u re still in the fi eld so you can check on things it's also a p reference. '

.

...

B ut

L I V ING WITH f i E L D N OT ES

26

But others become convinced , at leas t at times , that the road to succes s is to minimize these trappings of acade me and the West. Clearly, many anthro pologis ts suffer duri n g field work because of this tension , which is exacerbated by not knowing what the method­ ological canons are: We ought to have the kind s o f exchanges of methods and tech nolo gies that scientis ts d o rat her than the highly individuated kinds people do in the humanities . It w ould make li fe interpersona lly more comfortable if you k new others \verc having to make thi s kind of decision .

..

The lack of stand ard metho dol ogy is also revealed in the huge variety of definition s of fieldnotes offered by in terviewees. While in our "co rridor talk'' ''' e anthropolo gists celebra te and harvest anecdotes about the adventure and art o f fieldwork, playing doV�n and poking fun at our attempts to be obj ective and scienti fic in the deep bush, the tension remains-because at other ti mes vve use our ficldnotes

as

evidence of objectivity and rigor. Ficldnotes , as symbol o f fieldwork , can capture this tension but not resolve it . They are a mystery to me

.

.

.

I never k no\\r what is material.

Ho�' do you know '"'hen you kno"v eno ugh ? Ho\\r do you kno�' �'hen you' re on the rig ht track ? If there was something happening, I'd write it d0 \\'11 . Not very helpful info rmation, and I \Vas looking to the lis ts of words to get a clue as to \Vhat to do. You have no criteria fo r determining what 's relevan t and \-.rhat isn ' t . And collecting no tes: '"'hat d o you \\'ri te do�'n?

Some anth ropologists connected this l a ck of explicitness and ag r e e

­

ment regarding methods to the anthropological enterprise as a v.rholc , and to its position vis-a-vis other social sciences . What is lost in that , I feel, is that there is a sense that disciplines are cumulative in thei r knowledge. We're not j ust collecting mosaic tile and laying them nex t to each o ther. [Yet] anthropology has performed a real service in being [politicall y and intel lectually] slippery. So I feel

a

certain

ambivalence.

Such feeli ngs -.of loss of control, inadequacy, or confusion about \Vhat one is supposed to do-influence the stan ce one takes regarding fieldnotes .

27

"I Am a Fieldnote"

Fie/dn otes a tld the Indiv idr�a/ Anth ropolo�ist 's Idetztity The topic of ficl dn otes sooner or later brings up stro ng feelings of guilt and inadequ acy in most of my in tervic\vces . I ��ish I had recorded how many of them made negative statements (u sing \Vo rds like "anx­ ious , "' ''emb arra ssing, " "defensive, " " depressing"') \vhen I first asked to interview them. Some even accused me of hidden agend as, "of trving to make me feel guilty my fieldnotes aren 't in the public do­ � m ain . " Most often , people worried about the in adequacy of their fiel d­ notes, the disorder they were in , th eir in decipherability : Oh, Christ, another th i n g I don ' t do very \•tt ell, and twen ty years la t er l sti ll feel thi s qu ite st ro n gl y .

Fieldnotes can bring up all sorts of feelings about one's p rofessi on al and personal vlorth . Sev eral in tervie\vees have commented on ho�.. disap poin ted they are \\'hen rereading their notes : they are skimpy;

they lack magic: I \vent back last year and they \\'ere crappy. I didn' t have in them what I remembered, in m y head, of his beh avior, w hat he looked like .

And vet � What the field is is interesting. In Africa I [ initially ] wrote down every­

thin g I sa\v or t h o u g ht , w hether I understood it, thought it signifi cant , or no t-300 photog raphs of trees full of bats. Ho\v peo ple drove on th e . Havin g sent [ my ad vis o r ] back al l that crap, h e left side o f the ro ad di d n ' t say anythin g . .

.

.

I n one case the fieldnotes are inadequate because they are skimpy; in ano ther they are inadequate because of an "everything including the

kitchen sink " quality. . With inte rvi ewees opinions on training and preparation, and so me­ tl me s \Vi th th e fieldnotes-as-fetish issue, come expressions of attach­ m en t to one's first fieldn otes :

They 're l ike your first child ; you love them all but y ou r fi rst is y our firs t, and spe cial .

I d o like m y fieldnotes from the very be inning . There's m ore fresh­ g nes s , cxc itetnen t. The sense of discovery of things V\'hich by now seen1 ver y o ld hat.

LI V I N G \\l i T H fi E L D N O TES

28

My fiel d notes of the ' 50s, t hat's \vhcre I have m y emotional invest ment ,

even though my work in the '7os \1\.' as superior.

I sti ll have my I 93 5 Zuni notes. I couldn ' t bear to throw them away.

nu m ber of interviev.rees co mmen ted to the effect that "an impor­ tant part o f myself is there" ; they find it natural to be anxious ab o u t the A

notes because they represent a period of anxiety, di fficul ty, and great significance to ""�hich their career, self-esteem, and

p resti ge may

ap­

p ear to be ho stage . Several made direct links between fieldnotes and thei r o\vn p rofessional identity : Wben I think of acti vities I do. that's a lot clo ser to the core of m y

iden ti ty than mo st things . I ' m sure the at titude to\vard the notes them­ selves has a sort of fe tish istic quality- I don 't go stroke them, but I

spent so much titne get tin g, guarding, and p rotectin g them

.

.

house were b urning do\vn , I 'd go to the notes first.

. if the

I have a lot of affection for m y notes in a funny way . . . their role here­ in the U. S . A . , my study, in terms of my professional self. So methin g

about my aca demic identity. I ' m not proud of everythin g about them,

but I am proud of some things about them . . . that the y represent .

Probably in a less conscious way so me motive for my n ot \Van ting to make them too p ublic . My primary identity is someone who w rites things do\1\."n and \vrites about them . N ot just han ging out. That particular box is my own first real claim to being a s chol ar and

gives me the iden tit y of a person doing that kind of work . Lookin g at them, ""·hen I sec this dirt , blood, and spit, it's an external,

tangible sign of m y legitimacy as an an thropologist.

A number of anthropologists sa'\Al their ftcld notebooks as establishing

their identity in the fiel d : "a s mall n oteb ook that �·ould fit into my

pocket " bec a m e

"a kind of badge. "

Frustrations in the field

r egardin g

\vh i ch intellectual econo mics to

make add to the compl exity: fieldnotes

can

be a

va lidatio n of one 's

vela tion of h o \\' much one is a fraud . Bu t ho\v to decide v�.rhether one is or is not a fraud is far from clear. A s we have seen , fieldnotcs are not done by filling in the b la nks . Adv i s o rs c a n tell you only ��ha t they did and \Vhat you should do , but one pe rs on s method does not ��ork for m o s t others , and many advisors and g ra d u at e s chools refuse tp cover thes e topics . J)oin g fieldwork p r ope r l y ap par-

worth or a

re

'

"I A m

a

29

Fiel dnote "

en tl y inv olves strategies other than fo llowing \\tell-specified rules . I t ap p ea rs that one must create some o f the rules , prcdissert ation research pr o pos als with i mpressive methodolo gy sections notw i thstan ding. To

so m e ex ten t, perha p s , one is expected to define or design the problem in the field and is subsequently j udged according to ho\\t well one has l iv ed up to those expe ctations . The se in tervie\vs make it almost seem that fieldwork involves the dis covery of one 's own True Way. The advisor-shaman can only pro­ vide s ome obscure \�larnings, like the aids in a game of Dungeon s and

Dragons . If the initial period of fieldwork is part of a coming-of-age process, then the fieldnotes aspect of it seems a well-designed and effective ordeal that tests the anthropologist's mettle . Clearly, insofar as

firs t fieldno tes sym bo lize f1 rst field\vork, they represent a lim i n a l

period in our p reparation a s professionals . As i n othe r initiation rites , items ass ociated vlith su ch activities take on a heavy emotion al valence and sacredness . We need s o me answ·ers as to why many inten,.ic\vs do offer evidence

of a fieldnotcs mystique, for although a m inority ofintervie\vees assert that their ficldnotes a re j ust a tool , most res pondents relate to field­ notes-their O\Vn and as a conce pt-in an am bivalent an d em otionally charged manner. Despite some an thropologists' a p parent nonconfu­ sion about \vhat fieldno tes are and how to teach about them , one co uld make an overall argument that ambiguity and ambivalence about fieldnotes are pro moted in the occupational subculture. Perhaps the idea that field\vork requires one to invent one's own methods explains

\vh y such advice as is given is so often j oked about ,

even v�lhen it was originall y offered in utter seriousness . You kno�-,

"Take

plenty of marmalade and cheap tennis shoes. ''

K roeber s ai d to t a k e extent of his ad vice to me. ]

[Alfred]

a

big stick for t he dogs . [That

\1\'

as

the

T he n umerous co m plaints about useles s advice con cerning stenogra­

p he r's p a d s , data-sort cards, or multicolored pen sets-all of \vhich �ere spoken offa·\torably by other intervi ewees-need a deeper analy­ s ts t ha n merely that only some advice works for only some people

o nly so me of the ti me .

Du rin g fieldwork o n e must work o u t one 's relationship t o the fiel d , �o t he nati ves , a n d to one 's m i n d a n d emotions ( a s data-gathering 111st ru men ts and as bia s-producing im pediments) . Working out a rela-

LIV I N G W I TH fiELD N O TES

30

tions hip to one's field n ot ebooks i s a part of this proces s and since fieldnotes are m aterial items that con tinue to be u sed upon o n e s return , they app a rentl y o ft en c o m e t o symb ol i z e these ot her i mp ortan t processes . Furthermore, since the v'rri ting of fieldnotes validates one s me m b ership in the anthropo l og i cal subculture, fieldnotcs symbolize r elations \Vith one's fello\v professionals: "You have to do something to justify you r existence as a n anthropologist. " Th ose interviewees \\'ho exasperatedly disagree with this view do for th e most p a rt ac­ kno w l e dg e its hold on th ei r fello\\' anthropologists . Even th e most adamantly anti-fieldnote respondent indicated that he did not consider himself a t r u e anthropologist in a number of r es pect s A n ot h er s ai d : ,

'

'

.

I re memb e r reading a novel by Barbara Pym w her e one ch ara cter burned his field n o tcs in a ritual istic bonfi re in the back yard. It \\'as inconcei vable

.

.

.

someone d oi ng tha t an d remai ning an an thropologis t .

I found this passage t o be fa s cinati n g and very provo cative.

My ma t er ial on c o mpet itive feelings, in th e fo rm of smu g ness or anxiety, s h o\\'S that p eo p l e are curious and judg m en t a l a b out e a ch ot h er s fi el dn ote s : '

I've been astonished at the

a m o u nt

,

bo th more or les s

,

of fieldnotes

p eo ple have come back with .

some of the ex press ed i ntervi e w ees sec value in s ha ring :

This accounts for though

reluctance to share, even

The irony in a n th ro polo g y is that [ because fi e ld no tes are really exerci sing acts of faith a lot of the time.

Perhaps

some

private, ] we're

anth rop ologis ts see th ei r fieldnotes as a s o rt of holy text

which, like the tablets

Moroni gave to Jo s eph Smith , need to be de ciphere d \vi t h gol den spect acles or a s i m il a r aid; o t h erwis e the possi bilit y arises of one's fieldnotes lea di ng to misunders tanding-by colleagues and by natives. In p art , fears about notes being used \Vith­ out their author's s u p erv i sion are fears about potential abuse, b ut t he y may also go deeper: hovl could so met hing so mu ch a part of you be ( p otent ially) so ali ena t ed from y ou ? In this , Bronislav.r Malino'"'ski's diary (which many intervie\vces re ferr ed to one \vay or another) stands not only a s evidence that all gods have feet of clay but as a dire ·\\ra rning. His diary \vas deciphered V\titho ut his p e r mi s s io n or par,

''1 Am

a

31

Ficl dnotc "

tici p ation and most of us w an t to feel c o mfo rt a b le and secure a bout a text so linked to our identit ies. We a re also pulled in the o pp osite direction, u rged to a rchi v e our notes, to be respo n si ble scientists about them: ,

It's tak en me fou r years t o tu rn this over to an a r c h i v e . . . rm ab out to do it.

The interviews pro vide d many examples of ho\v the boundaries between the anthropologist an d his or her fieldnotes are fuzzy. One interviewee, \\rho c o mm ent ed on how useful Boas's diary is because of its re v el a tions abou t his motives . concluded: On the o ther hand . . . by ta k ing fiel dn otes w e re reporti ng on the pu b lic '

and pri v ate lives of the natives . To what ex ten t are th e documen ts our own ? And fo r either side , the observer and the o b s er ved I don 't think .

the re s '

an easy ans\\"Cr.

As we have seen, some re sp o nd ent s conside r themselves to be a kind of fieldnotc, spe a ki n g of both written notes and memory in similar fa shion . As noted above, for some interviewees fieldnotes from the b eg in­ ning of a fieldwork period arc "all garbage, '' yet for others these are u the most valuable" b ecause one h as not vet become too socialized; on e has not yet come to take things too m u c h for granted: 1-.oebe 1 s notes. Egbo erosi, �gbo1s tree, .538. Cr o fs River trosi, 5411-45. Seven animals, 2!�lft,r./,� ),/,.}� *ftl t·'v . (h·•��j.,� 0/(' k.u. AA 1s -� · N o�� ·u vtu.l LtJL� a.bdkf tlA.af aJ- d � �u lA ,u. aa, d L/1 1 � o..-. lo ��:b o� h.t MM 1 s � (�� - th c u5t.. , W... tiu� CllM J S k.P uu.1.cJ � SI II U iJr � ! 2 (Egu-i ' 'fotA) 0 j A {kWMQ M.Q.Kc..p) &W+- Su.�

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G8n . Ankrah 1 a' moiher waLJ.isitiD£ 1/1 Q todv. He �� "Madam luaynor" at the family accoun t in g. She i;-the -�-eni��'d - woman rnue--� family.----0: " 2 1181l -ir1ai:ted Mr. Q in the at.temoon. One livee at lC'J{§P�Jl.!� ---� � at the A mio Emergy install ation . 'l'he ot he r , w1 th a Fanti s ound ine�..t... t :&ohie Daviiaon , was a pri-ni&.ry teao Ona"t-iR the 8&l'lyl95().!a.-Ea-aaid- then "T.ha- o l d men _pre f igbti.ng f --._"better p� and o� i t ions for ua . " He ie now a soo iologi a t wi th ani studied at Rutgers . "!'tie7 were dririking aohiiappe . � --... � _,At til;p&-�t-ah�to be nxed � 1 nt.nere tnt ta1 ) .. wbo se� � hi�- � ao_!li� i n front of the Q. house . �� _ _ T 8BVI me d ata on thi fimily ana fUDerii -a:rr&ire . ------� -�1/2 men Mre. - Solo+-fte-i-ted-- lt/M--Q-iA-'Ule-mUDiRS• Le s!?��__!lo� s , m 5 a 30. we me t Ben end Alu at 7p11 8rid walked to-"lhi AdoverS: -- ----. -A:l:ez·- aeke4 :Beft--to- � .,.,.,ea. aaa:tohe • ""bt.attePtl iea• -tor- h.1m... u__ --.. _:tb� k.ios_�- �!. _rankah - �o �e ue be sqs th e Ghana matches are no good. HJ said t hey vouldnot se l l to hi• beoasue they thouSht he 1ras a· c op;---_ --- - -- - l!arUi:tt not �t -an.r �ther. Al�&i 4---beoasue :Ben-:l&-lmown4bev -1JOuU . - ·- · · - ----j!illJ_Q hi •�--We tral.lced to t he Ado7or • s house and met. . AttikpowliOW! svisiting ---IIDII1JOne-B"h! a- t�Rtte -.---.e---alao used to--l-!-.e thelte -We- wea t-- JJ -and_Alex -� ed __biutif !_ � s . Ad�C?;r o a.me ��� - the �i t c b e_!l� She a aid Jlr . Adovor ' e c ousi n had t.i e T'.t stol en tad � and.ICr�Adovor -­ - - · -·---- ----or---.n to11"ellf-111•.- ·Xr-.; - --J. •v-brother-eame- -b7 and asked-abou-t --the- &f.f-e:ir-.-. . i.e_.diaouasecLIWJI tood .vhioiL�I!tli.Y see ae i dentibi�m a.a _ �and di:rterant , aq :f"rom the .lshanti s who e a t only "fufu and aapesi , • aas 1ftio ll.1CilC61'«6Y 8l'l4 batlku� Hwea the) 88\Y ha�e- •so man, - fooD� � �d frieDda tokin over��� BtrL_f.9od _ha�_aent llt_ -� - la.tel: - talked..-abo

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amenth a ft111n4 VIla-ta-tro• •zod ze wid o wwks for the - - - - - --- - - ----ftA- -&t--Ako8011bo J- be ia vi s J..ting _ in�cr.a . _lie_ �rka in tpe :ris beri��- ' studied fish larm ng in Sea\�le for 2 y ears . He told ua how he used �ari n& ancrpeanutouner to ub-iftl"t tU tt · tor gar1 B!id groundnu t pas te .s - - · - - B•-eaW-� -�-b.- miaaee .ae.t...1r om us ve pie , e G ._l MOD »i.e.. He a ai d Accra is too fas t and ax� ens ive for him . -· � sa1d-7ou o an ""t--wn- -n�o�fl'b1'--are mrtn -c�mmr "becaii ae -o .the-Ga--an4-- Akar1 --IIACi- -Ella--WOmen all dress al i ke ( also truLiiL.LOmt -1- ----"EYen by the face you cant te l l , " if there are no marks , he sa id . � A e ald --lneAciis are related to "the a as , out t!i�JH-bmr �· --- · - be tm--eome- -m�age ---lfi.th..Zwea-on. . .tbe bozater.� tb� go to_e ach othUA--- --. mar�et_s� Som� of t!le board er speak Ewe . He a aid the ir name a are ei t�� -___... · Ewe or Ga. The Ewes- - he sald· -liive ver't dlstinot11ii names . "Our--n�- - e.J�e--¥e�i.f-tueD:t •• -We. t alked abr:ut dra a e diftere�es i n aen 1 e traditio nal -The Akana dont wear jumpers , but the Gas , Eves �{1s d o , ,;r-tD c-0 . ' -"" - - - - ------- xr;-.l--.nd;d·.-- --i'be-&u wei!:r the- lcmg eMit�'lihe;v--eeid--t.he-·BtoGki� � ___R!9 •!l_e_. _Mly wo�n by A.t� l� � __./ The E "es al ong the Vol ta river, q. Sogaltof'a , h av e a very t..o ad.... Adamar-he eaid A -Mrs. BJ'eak. to Ewea --4�'1ll t d1aleo-t·-for o tbE 1 the .o.p_praation epel.lkL1hla.. diM_'!l.c t, trom Sogako:fe . ..../ / -·

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_/

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Adabraka, Ghana, fieldnotes .

(S ize:

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EC-FN 1 9 8 8

- page 6 6

7 MaY 19 8 8 - Carmela G8orqe ' s Cl eanup Day Mil aqros and I a r r iv ed at 1 0 am , a s Carmela to l d me , but 9 7 th st r e et , the deadend , wa s a l ready c l eaned o u t , and the l arge rbage p ickup t ruck , w ith rot a t ing b l ades that c rushed e� ing , was in the midd l e of 9 7 th Place . I found Carmel a , and P e m t Ph i l i roz z i o f Sanitation , wh o had three men work. in g on the The men us the sweeper that arr ive d a l i tt l e l ater pl p , u 01 8an and boys on 9 7th p l ace he l p ing to l oa d their ga rbag e into the t ruck i nc l u ded several Guyane s e Indians i n th eir 2 0s , whoa CArme l a sa id have been here 2 - 3 y ears [ ' They ' re good . ' ] ; s ev era l fami l i es They were lo ad in g tv s et s , o t H i sp an i cs , and Korean and Chinese . wood , o l d furnit ee bra nches and prun i ng , re , t ca rt s , u r ng pi op sh garbage . Most hou ses had larqe p i l e s o f and boxe s o f s bag d an The l ittle boys hanqinq on stu f f i n front , wa it i ng f or the truck . They spoke a and h e l p in g were H i span i c , except for one Ch ine s e . mix tu re o f Sp a n i sh and Engl i sh together , when p a int ing the LIRR wa l l s .

�

carme l a h a d put f l ye rs at ev ery hou s e Pa rkin S a t ur d ay • s igns [ D ] were up few c a r s were pa rked at the curb , b u t thre e b l o cks was empty so the sw ee pe r

on Wednes day , and Po l i ce ' N o on the t e l eph one po les . A most of the curb s ide on the c ould c l e a n the gutt ers .

!be sweeper t hi s ye ar was smal l er than the one in 19 8 6 , and there no sp ray i ng of the str e e t s , on l y sweep i ng the qutt ers . As before , peop l e swept their curb s , and i n some cases driveways , into the gutter . c a rm e l a was a wh irlw ind . She a s ked her elderly I t a l ian ne ighborh J enny , who d i d not c ome out , if she cou ld sweep the sand p i l e near Jenny ' s hou s e in their common driveway . J enny said do n ' t bother , but carme l a did it anyway . She was ru nn i ng a l l around with pla stic garbage ba g s , qet t ing kids to he lp paint o f f the gr a f itt i o n the L I RR pane l s she had p a inte d i n the p ast , and commandeer ing wo•en to cle an out the qra s sy a r e a nea r the LIRR bridge at 4 5th Ave and Nat ional Street . She got a Co l omb ian woman froa 9 7 th Place , and qave her a rake and p l a s ti c bag . She then ranq the door bel l ac ross from the grassy area , beh i nd the bodeqa , and an Ind i an- l ookinq Hispan i c women came down , and l a t e r did the work w i th the Colomb i an woaan wa s

•

•

Mareya Banks was out , in smock , h e lp i ng o rg a n i z e and s uperv i s i n g the ki ds doing the LIRR wa l l pa i n t in g . Mi l aqro s h e l ped with t h is , and s et up an int erv i ew appo intment wit h Ma reya . S he a l so met a Bol iv ian woman , t alk i ng with Ma reya , and sw eep i ng her s idewalk on 4 5th Avenue . Carme l a a l so had potato ch ips a nd Peps i for the ki ds , Co lomb ian wom en gave out to th em , and OTB t - sh i rts .

wh ich th e

Phi l sa id th i s was the on ly such c l ean up in C B4 . A man i n rst d Elmhu oe s something l ike th is , but j ust fo r h i s o n e b l ock . �ey Dept . l i ke s th i s , and hopes the sp i r i t w i l l be contagious . e l i ke a nythin g that g e ts t he commun i t y involved . He s a i d i t egan h e re b ecau s e the new peop l e di d n ' t unde r s tand how t o keep b th e a re a a n i ce p l a ce to l ive . carme l a we nt t o them , a nd now they are i nvo l ved .

S anjek's r 98 8 El mhurst-Corona. Queens, Ne\\t York, field­ co mputer word-processing p rogram . (Size: 8 . 5 by 1 1 inches. )

1 I . A pag e fro m Roger

note s , p ri n ted fro m

a

PART

III

Fieldnote Practice

Most good inv estigato rs are hard l y av"'are of the precise manner in v.rhich they gather their data.

- PA U L R A D I N

S IM O N OTTEN B ER G

Thirty Years of Fieldno tes : Changing Relationship s to the Text

When I \vas out i n the field as a graduate student at N orthwestern University, Vle 'V'lere instructed by our major professor, Melvill e Her­ skovits, to send home a copy of our typed notes a s our research pro­ gressed so that he could read and co mment on them . I did this every few months during my first field trip to the Afikpo, an I gbo group in southeast Nigeria, in 1 9 5 2- 5 3 . 1 The comments I recei ved, I later learned, came mostly from his wife, Frances, who vvas not a trained

anthropologist but had collaborated with her husb and on much of his research and m any publications . So me of the replies \\'ere useful, but man y did not make sense to me . Those th at did not \Vere based up on th e H erskovitses' interviews in Evanston years before with a man who came

from a different Igbo area. I resented my professor's intrusions

and wa s anxious o�,.er negative criticism . I \1\ranted to be in the field just Wi th m y wife and not have the Herskovitses with me . 2 I th a nk John B arker. Jean-Paul Du mont. Charles Keyes, Lorna Rhod es , Mel for d Spi ro , and Pierre van den Berghe for their com ments on this pape r . 1 1 ha d already carried out a su mmer's field research i n a Gullah community in Geor gi a in 1 9 50, w hile a student at North\�lestern, but there I had not been re quire d to follo w this procedure.

20n the other hand, John Messen g er, a fell oVw· st u den t at Northwestern. enjoyed sendi ng back a cop y of his notes, felt that t he responses he got v.·ere helpful, a nd uses the same procedure toda y with his studr Old: Cr4 ltural Transformations-.\-tanus, 1 928- 1 953 · Ne\v

Yo rk : M orrow. 1970. The Art and Technology of Field\\ o rk . In Naroll and Cohen 1 9 70, -· r

246-6 5 . i - . 1 972 . Blackbe"}' l.f-'itJter: t\fy Earl er l'ears . N ew Yo rk : MorrO\\'. - . 1 974. Ruth Benedict . N ew York: Col u m bia U niversity Press. Messerschmidt, Don a ld A . . ed. 1 9 8 1 . ..1 ,a thropologi.sts at Horne ;,J 1\7orth .4 merica : A-lethods and Issues ita the Study o_.f One 's Ou'n Society. New York : Camb ridge University Press .

�1inturn, Leigh , Willia m Lamber t , et al. 1 96 4 . �1others o_.fSix Cultu res : .A. n teceden t.s af Child R earing . New York : Wiley. Murphy, H.obert F. , and B uell Quain. 1 95 5 . The Tnnnai Indian.� oJ Central Brazil . Seattle: U niversi ty of Washin gto n Press .

Naro ll, H.aoul , and Ronal d C ohen, eds . 1 970. A Handbook oj� ...\-1ethod itJ Cu ltural .4 nthropology. N e w York: Col umbia University Press.

Opler, Morri s, ed. 1 97 3 . Gren ville Goodwin amo tJg the l.f-estern Apache� Lettn-s .from

the Field. Tucson: University of Arizona Press . Osgood, Corneli us . 1 940. Informants . In Inga lik �1aterial Cu lture, so-s s . Ne\v Haven, Conn. : Yale Uni versity Publ i cations in Ant h ropol og y. Pandey, Triloki Nath . 1 9 7 2 . Anth ro polo gists at Z un i . Proceedings of the �4,nerican Philosophical Society 1 1 6 : 3 2 1 -3 7 .

Pau l , Benjam i n . 1 9 5 3 . lnterviC\\' Techn iques and Field Relati onships. In l\ nth r� pology Toda y, ed . A . L. K roebc r, 430- 5 1 . Chicago: Univers ity of Chicago Press. Pehrson, �obert H . 1 966 . The Social Organ ization of the �1arri Baluch . C omp. and ed. F rcdrik Barth . Viking Fund Publicatio ns in Anthropology 43 · New York:

We nne r-Gren Founda tion for Anthropolo gical Research. Pel to , Pe rttij. 1 9 70. R es earch in Individualistic Societies. In F reilich 1 9 70, 2 5 1 -9 2 . Po\v der maker, Hortense. 1 966. Stranger and Friend: l·he '+ay oj"an Anthropolo�ist .

Ne w York : N orton . Ra spi n, Angela. 1 984 . A Guide to Ethnographic A rchives . In Eth nog rapiJ ic Re­ sra rch : ..1 Guide to General Co nduct , ed. R . F. Ellen, 1 70-7 8 . San Diego: Aca­ demic Pres s.

R� ad , K enneth E . 1 9 65 . The High I/al/ey. Nc\v York : Scribner. Ri ch a rds , A u dre y I. 1 9 3 5 . The Vil l a ge C ensus in the Stu dy of Cultu re C ontact. i\.frica 8 : 20-3 3 .

--

. 1 9 3 9 . The Development of field Work Methods in Social Ant hropology. I n

f i ELDNOTES I N CIR C U L A T I O �

3 40 Th e Study of Society,

ed. F . C . Bartlett e t

al.

�

272-3 1 6 .

London: Routle dge &

Kegan Paul. --

. 1 977. The

Colonial Office and the Organization of Social Research . A tl th ro ­ .

pological Foru m 4: 1 68-89. . 1 98 1 . Forev.'ord . I n

Strathcm 1 9 8 1 , xi-xxvi . Scudder, Thayer, and Elizabeth Colson. 1 979 . Long-Term Research in Gwe n1b e Valley, Zambia. In Foster ct al. 1 9 7 9 , 2 2 i- S 4· Seligman , C. G . , and Brenda Z . Seligman. 1 9 3 2 . Pagan Tribes oj-the Nilotii S uda �J . London: Routledge. Shah , A. M. 1 979 . Studying the Present and the Past: A Vill a ge in Gujarat. In The

--

Fieldworlen- and th e Field: Problems and Cluzllenges in Sociological Investiga tion : ed .

M. N . Srinivas, A. M. Shah, and E . A . Ra maswamy, 29- 3 7. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Smith, Robertj. , and Ella Lury Wisv.'el l. 1 982. The U,�men oj.Suye J\114 ra. Ch i cago : U nivcrsity of Chicago Press. Stanner, W. E . H. 1 960. Durmugam, a N angiomcri. In Casagrande 1 960, 6 3 - 1 00. Strathcm, Marilyn. 1 98 1 . Kinsh ip at the Core: l\ ra A nth rop ology ofElmdon , a ��rilla,g r in ��iorth-west Essex in th e }\lineteen-sixtits . Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press. Van Maancn, John. 1 9 8 8 . Tales of the Field: O n ��'n'tin� EtiJn ography. Chicago: Universi ty of Chicago Press. Wagley, Charles. 1 9 5 5 . Foreword. I n Murphy and Quain 1 9 5 5 , v-ix. . 1 977. Welcome of Tears : The Tapirape Indians oj- Central Brazil. Ne\\' York: Oxford University Pres s. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Paul Lunt. 1 94 1 . The Social Life of a �\tfodern Co 1nt11U11 ity. New H aven, Conn. : Yale University Press. Whiting, Be4tr ice . 1 966. Introduction. In Fischer and Fischer 1 966, v-xxxi. Whiting, Beatrice� and John Whiting. 1 970. Methods for Observing and Reco rd­ in g Behavior. In Naroll and Cohen 1 970, 2 8 2 - 3 I ) . . 1 975 . Children o�f Six Cultr4re.s : A P.sych o-Cultural A.nalysis . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. Whitten , No rm a n E Jr. 1 970 . Net\\'ork Analysis and Processes of Ad aptation among Ecuadorian and Nova Scotian N egr oes In Freilich 1 970 , 3 39-402 . Whyte, William Foote. 1 9 5 5 . Appendix: On the Evolution of "Street Co rner Society. " In Street Corner Society, enl. ed. 279-3 5 8 . Chicago: Univers ity of Chicago Press. --. 1 900 . Interviev.�ng in Fi el d Research. In Adams and Preiss 1960, 3 5 2- 7 3 . Wolcott, Harry F. 1 98 1 . Ho me and Away: Personal Contrasts in Ethnogr ap h ic Style. In Messerschmidt 1 98 1 , 25 5-65 . Wolff, Kurt. 1 960 . The Collection and Organization of Field Materials : A Re­ search Report. In Adams and Preiss 1 960 , 240- 5 4 .

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. •

.

PART

V

From Fieldnotes to Ethnography I have long ago discovered that the decisive battle is fought in the field but in the stud y after\vards.

n ot

- E . E. E v A Ns-PRIT C H .� R D

M A R G E RY W O L F

Chinanotes : Engendering Anthrop olo gy

Perhaps more than any other, the last decade has brought anthro­ po logists to the realization that their products , both uncooked (the fieldnote) and cooked (the ethno gra phy), are but personal in terpreta­ tions of others' equ ally nebulous realities. Our uncooked ''facts , '' gathered so carefully in the field, are infected with the bacterial subj ec­ tivities of our O\Vn as \veil as our in formants' particular biases . And our cooked descriptions, unlike o ther culinary concoctions, are even more likely to contain fo reign particles if they j ell into a pleasing \Vholc . Refl e xive anthropology, the la test treatment for our disease, seems to do li ttl e m ore than expose our \Y ounds to light-a primitive cure that with more carnal injuries has had serious and even fatal conse q uences .

Literary theorists , for all their exquisite tools , can dissect but offer us no hop e of recovery.

Sh ort of abandoning the patient, \vhich I suspect fevl of us arc pr ep a red to do, ho\v are vle to proceed with the doin g of an thro p ol­ ogy? F or starters, hovl are �·e to handle those apparently seriousl y co mp r o m ised texts we call fieldnotcs ? I s there a �"ay of continuin g to col lect field data that will preserve the contextual reality without

h

Th e �omments

and su g ge stions of Ro ger Sanjek and Robert J. Smith \Verc very talk into so me semblance of an cssa'-'' and arc g ra tefull y ackn o wl-

e)pful tn revising a edge d .

... .

.

3 43

fRO.l\1 f i E L D �O T E S TO E T H N O G R A P H Y

344

re q u i ri n g a n e x p l a n at or y essa y fo r each observation ? A nd h o w

d o \V e retrieve the vario us p rej ud ici al influen ces that surrounded field da ta collected decades in the past, a past fo r this wri ter at leas t overlaid \\' i th

too many o ther realities to provide hope (or desire) for resurrecti o n? When I read back over my fieldnotes -some t\ven ty-five years' ac­ c u mu l atio n of no te b o o ks

pie c es of p a pe r

-

I

,

five-by-eight card s, and other bi ts and

also read back ove r my O\Vn l ife but I sus pect

that

,

only I can see the life that is in them. Perceiving (as dis tinguished from seeing) V�·hat is in

m y fieldnotes­

deco n st ru c tin g or, more ac cur a tel y, reconstru ctin g the text-is

acti vity that \Vas unanticipated \vhen my o ri gi nal

fi el d notes

an

w er e

made. This is in p art because mos t of them w ere coll ect ed in a t i n1 c

when anth ro p ol ogy '""as less se l f-con s ci ous about its process a n d in

part because of t he na t u r e of my personal odyssey in to an thro p olog y.

M y first field e x per i e nce \V as not as a graduate sntden t in anthro p o l­ ogy b u t as the "vife of one . A r thur Wo l f

and I s et out for Taiwan in 1 9 5 8 with the overly ambitious in ten tion of replicatin g and enlarg in g on the Six Culture P r oj ec t d e s ig n e d by Beatrice Whi ting , John Whit­

in g and William Lambe rt. 1 Our work required hun dreds of hours of ,

ch i l d observations, formal intervie\\1-s \vith children and thei r pa re n t s

,

�11 of these "inst ruments" were fo cused on a p articular set of b ehavi o ral variables. I q u i c k l y became adminis trator and scribe, spending long hours typing and translating verbatim ac cou n t s of o b se r v at i o n s as they and the adminis tering o f questionn aires in local pri mary schools

.

..

\vere brou ght in by the field staff.

In Chinese school s, s tudents arc r e q uire d to co m m i t vast amo unts

of material to memory, a s k i ll on the part of our assistants that stood

in good s tead in the field, for we

soon discovered that they coul d

tim e d in teraction among a group of word of it an hour later. T hey could mak e

o b se r ve u p t o four minutes o f children and repeat every

us

several of these observations and with the aid of onl y a few notes gi ve us co mp l ete de sc rip t io ns of v e r b a l and physical interaction . We h av e literally thou s ands of t yp ed pages of ob se rvati on s of this sort . The proj e ct also produced many hundreds of pages of open-ended in te r-

the Six Cul tu re Proj ect might in itsclfbe the b asis of a study o f the use of fieldnotes collected by o the rs There is no\\y a lon g list of pu blications that derived fro nl this project, but the fi rst V\ra s the publica tion of six con cise ethnographies w i th a sint ilar fo rma t {Whiting 1963). It \Vas follo,-.,·cd by specialized studies by the senior investi ga­ tors of parent and child beha vior in all six cul t u res, as V\tell as culture-specific studies b y t h e field teams them sel ves . 1

Data from

.

•

C hin anotes

vieW re sp onses and some

345 700 questionnaires filled out by local school

chil d ren . Bu t like all anthropologists of his generation, A rthur Wolf also ho p e d to produce a village ethnography from this trip, so we have some

6oo clo sel y typed pages of what we ca me to call

G (for general)

d ata. These notes in clude detailed descriptions of funeral ceremonies, in ten se int erviews with unhappy young \\'omen, lengthy explanations by vill a ge philosophers, and rambling gossip sessions among groups

or p air s of women and men . Neither A rthu r nor I was present at all of the events an d conversations recorded in these notes , for as our visit in this first village lengthened and we began to appreciate the qualities of our as sistants, \\'e frequently sent them out to gather particular kinds of information or simply to ch at and observe and report back . Some­ rimes the con v ersations they memorized and repeated to us made no sense even to them, but often the pages I typed from their dictation recorded material that we as forei gn ers \vould have found difficult

to elicit-not b ecause it vlas particul arly p rivate but because it was

pithier, more judgmental, less considered.

Durin g this period , \\'hen I fancied myself a gesta ting novelist, I

kept a j ournal , a very personal document; I would have been outraged had any of my co-\vo rkers a ttempted to read it. At the time I did not think of it as fiel dnotes. My j ournal recorded my irri tation with villa ge life, some wild h ypotheses of causation, an on going analysis of the Chinese personality structure , various lascivious though ts , diatribes against injustices observed, and so fo rth. I expected the journal to keep the " real" fiel dnotes free of my nonprofes sional editorializing, to be fun to read \Vhen it vlas all over, and to tell me more about m y self than

about the society in which I \Vas living.

By and large this turned out to be the case , with one exception . All th e tim e Vle were in this first vill age-almost two years for me and

lon g er for Arthur-we lived vlith the same farm family. M y j ournal fre q uentl y recounted interactions \Vith my housemates, as it would have wherever I had been living . But ins tead of shaking the youngest me m be r of the Lim family, who never on ce woke up from a nap Wi th o ut imposing on us all at least a h alf-ho u r of peevish howling, I t ol d m y j ou rnal abou t his nasty character and declared he woul d come

n o good end . (He is no\v, incidentally, a very successfu l engineer in aipei, having graduated from university \Vith hono rs . He is noted fo r h ts sunn y disposition. ) Rather than telling Tan A-hong \\'hat a cruel to

�

lll o th er I thought her to be , I record ed in loving detail the gossip I

f R O M fiE LDNOTES TO ETH N O G R A P H Y

he a r d

ar o u n d the v i l l age about her past a n d p resen t and argu e d with mysel f about the nature / nurture causes of h e r {to me) reprehensible treatment of her poor da u gh ters I also p o n d e red ho\\' my houscm ates cou ld tell each other one thi ng our local staff another, and the fo rei g n .

,

anthropologis t a third .

from this first field tri p, I \Vas for tun a te en o u gh to be g iv en a s m all office and a pit tance that allowed me to b e g i n the l o ng a nd ext remely tedious task of coding th e reams of child o b s er v a tions Arthur and I h ad collected. But I missed the Lim family an d t h e daily drama of thei r q u arrels a n d s trug gles . And I worried a bo ut then1 , for they \\'ere in a phase of the Chinese family cycle that "\v as c au s i n g p a in and distress to some fa mily members an d pride to o th e rs I cannot for the l i fe of me r e me mb er when I s tar te d or why, but at s o m e point I began to sort through our G data, my j o u r n a l the mother interviews , and even the time d o bserva tions o f their chil d re n to pull t og et h er ali i knew about the Lims as individuals . In this alm o st casual re-s o rt in g of our field n ot es I found thi n gs that as tonished me. Some i tems I had reco rd ed mysel f and to tally mis­ un derstood; of others , recorded by Arthur or m em b ers of th e field s taff and in many cases ty p ed by me, I had fa il ed to see the i mp o rt 2 It seemed incredible that the Lims, fourteen of whom shared their house with us and with another fifteen ,�,.ho were in and out of it all day l o n g could h av e told u s so much about themselves as individuals, as p er s o n ­ alities . But it \vas only when I looked ca re full y at all the b its and piece s the child o b se r v a tions that revealed s olida rity among the chil­ dren with one part of the famil y and hostility to "h a rd the other, the mother interview d eli n eatin g the process by whic h a \Voman pai d back her husband's battering, the misleadi ng l y g ene r al dis course of the head of the household on the im po rtance of face-that I began to see the histo r y of their family and r e cog ni ze the stress they endured in ord er to maintain a cultural ideal . Ho\\' is it that I c o ul d not have seen du ri ng those years in their household the i nevit a bil ity of their fam i ly s division and t he forces that \vere set t i n g it in mo t i o n ? I s u pp o se at the ti m e I Vlas too i n v o lved "h"ith them as individuals \\'ho spent to o long in the shared ou th ou s e or used up all the h o t \Vater on bath n ight to see the m as actors in the age-old Returning to Cornel l

­

..

.

,

,

.

,

-

"

'

2See R. J. S m ith's essay in this volume. The re is em p lo yed to free the voices in our ficldnotes,

struggling

were

different. Or

were

t he y ?

a similarity in t h e methods w e but t h e barriers again st \\'hich we \v ere

C hinanotes

3 47

and ever fresh d rama of the Chinese family cycle . Wh en I finally began

to w rit e The House of Lim (Wolf 1 96 8), their story·, I bitterly regretted the questions I had not asked but '"'·as equ ally gratified by all the se e m ingly pu rposeless anecdotes , conversations verging on lectu res ,

an d s eries o f complaints that had been recorded . Clea rly, the presence of unfocused , wide-ranging, all-in clusi""C field­ n o tes '"'· as essential to the success of this unplanned project, b u t so \Vere the p urpo sefully subjective " data'' recorded in my journal and the so­ called objective data recorded under the stop\vatch in the child observa­

tions . From parts of each of them I pieced the puzzle t o gether.

Yet another book (Wolf 1 9 72) \v ritten out of this amorphous set o f

ficldnotes illustrates even more vividl y t h e value o f using a variet y o f methods t o record details a n d conversa tions that m a y or m a y not seem to make sense at the time . (I must ask indulgen ce for further n otes on my personal intellectual history. ) 3 Political and intellectual transfor­ mations are fairly co mmon to our profes sion but co me to us as indi­ vidual s in different \va y s . S o me see m to wake up one mornin g \Vith a whole ne�· set of values and beliefs . Others change slowl y" o ften without even noticing it themselves , their new �·orld vic�· emerging more like the metamorphosis of tadpole to frog than the apparently sudden transformation of chry salis to b utterfly. Me, I ' m a frog. I

S\\'am around for a long time in t he pond w atching \Vith interest as my sisters changed colors and lost their tails , not noti cing until the mid­ I 970S that

I

too had lost my undulating tail and gro \\'n the more useful

legs of the femini st.

In no small p art, my recognition of this transformation came out of

a l on g struggle \Vi th both the fieldnotes fro m my first field trip and the n o tes collected on a second trip, primarily by me and a \V oman assis­ tant . To cl arify this some\vhat op aque statement and explain why I

found myself in a relationship of strug g le w·ith my O\vn tieldnotes , I

must sa y a bit about t h e hi story of Chinese ethnology and the study of the C hinese fa milv. I

As an institution, the Chinese family has been subjected to study for

� an y years- in fact ,

one co uld say centuries \\'i thout much exaggera­

ti o n- by historians, philosophers, theologians , sociologists , social 3 N o t su rp risingly, in \\'riting this essay I fo und it quite i ntpossiblc to speak imper­ so n al ly. O ther con tributors with \v honl I have spoken have had the same experience.

An t hropolo gists \\rl th their fi eldnotcs seem to be much like novelists with their \\'riting

te c_hniqu cs: each thinks the relationship b ct\\reen product and process is personal and llntque. Out as Jean Jackson's survey sho\v s, this is not the ca se .

fROM f iEL DNOT ES T O ET H N O GRA P H Y

reformers , novelis ts, and even some anthropologists . That it is a male­ dominated structure and a male-orien ted group is obvious; that it was primarily a male-studied subject was also obvious but deemed un­ i mportant. The consensus seemed to be that Chinese \vomen contrib­ uted to the family their uteruses, a fe\v affines of varying degrees of influence, and considerable disco rd . Other than that, they were of minimal interest in any examination of the Chinese family's strengths , cycles, or romance. They added comic relief and provided support functions , but stage front V�"as totally male. I \Vas vaguely aV�·are of the invisibility of women at the time of my first fieldwork in Tai\\l·an, but since my relationship to academia at that time was strictly marital , I \vas neither interes ted in nor constrained by the all-male paradigm . I hung out \Vith the women, as did all women , and the u nderstanding I acquired of the family was theirs. When I began to write, I dutifully read the important books about the Chinese family and then, turning to my fieldnotes , began the s truggle in which I Vlas ultimately defeated . In \\l"riting Tlte House of Lim I assumed to some degree that the "unusual" influence of the \\'omen in the family resulted from the presence of some unusually strong personali ties among the female Lims. But when I began to look at other families, my fieldnotcs \Vould not conform to the paradigm. Neither the words they recorded nor the voices they brought back fit the standard version of ho\\' things worked. At every turn of the family cycle, where the well­ known anthropologists of China (see, e . g. , Freedman 1 96 1 , 1 970) debated the importance o f the father-son relationship versus the soli­ dary· b rothers against the father, my v·oices spoke of mothers-in-law in , fierce competition \\lith their sons wives for th e loyalty of the son­ husband and, most i mportant, of mothers and t heir children set i n unflagging battle formation against \vhat they saw as the men 's family. I realized that I must either ignore my notes and see the Lim women as unique or ignore the received wisdom and let the \\'omen I kne\v give their version of the Chinese family and its cycle. But tha t was only half the struggle. The other half \\'as Vlith my sisters , \Vho were using their strong ne\v feminis t legs to stir up the mud in our pond and raise our consciousness . You \viii recall th at during those years we Vlere looking fiercely at women 's situation, a t our oppression, our subordination , our pos ition as victims (see, e. g . � Gornick and Moran 1 97 1 ). Once again , the \4Vomen's voices in m y fieldnotes gave me problems . Of course they were oppressed; ob­ viously they \�ere victimized. But victims who passively accepted

C hi nanotes

3 49

th eir fate they \\'ere not. Nor did they seem to s ec themselves as

vi ct ims, although v�rhen it \\'as to their advantage to evoke their po\ver­ }cs sn ess and their lack of influence, they certainly did so. Moreover, the wo m en in my fieldnotes seemed considerably more analytic than the st a n da rd texts on the Chinese family assumed '"�omen to be. Events in th e fa mil)" cycle that were des cribed by social scientists (usually but not

al\\'ay s male) as the result of male interests and needs were seen b y \\'ome n- and b y this \\roman as '"�ell- to have been manipulated b y ,-.,, om en \vith very definite personal goals in min d . I f men were a'"�are

of \vomcn's goals , it \\' as only vaguely, and they certainly did not see th em as relevan t to outcomes . The blinders Chinese men wear result from the centrality of their gender and their institutions in societ)". Chinese

\Vomen, stru ctural

outsiders who participate only peripherally in the maj or ins titu tions,

are much cooler, much less constrained by those insti tutions, and hence freer to work around them, within the m, and eventu ally against

them. My fieldnotcs contain many exa mples of men solemnly discuss­ ing concepts such as filial piety and institutions such as ancestor wor­ ship. They are balanced by the voices of iconoclastic '\\�'"Omen, like that

of one \vho advised ano ther to spend her money on herself rath er than

save it for her funeral:

So what are you worry ing ab out? You ha v e son s . If they

can

s tan d to let

you sit in t he hall and rot, th en you sho uldn't worry about it. You will

be de ad Hurry up an d spend your money an d enjoy you rs elf If you d ie and they do spend all your money to pay fo r a big funeral, people will just sa y "Oh, \\ h at good sons they are . Wh at a fine funeral they gave for her. " They \\"on 't say you paid for it . If it were me, I 'd spend every cent no\v, and if t hey could stand to j u st roll me up in a mat, that would be their worry. [ Wolf 1 96&: 2 J 6- I 7 1 .

,

.

'

Chinese men and perhaps some an thropologists d i s miss these dis­ co rd an t voices as indica tive only of women �s ignorance; Chinese

\\'ome n would be quick to agree. They have found ignorance or the appea rance of ignoran ce to be a valuable resou rce. For tu nately, at about the same time the voices in my fieldnotes were fo rcing me to recognize the po\ver of women , other feminist anthro­

pol og ists were reachin g simila r conclusions. The recalcitrant field­ note s from Taiwan n o longer seemed aberrant . My revisionist per­ spe ct ive fit in \Vei l '"�ith the other essa)"S in Rosaldo and Lamphere's no w classic Jo/otnan, Culture, and Society ( 1 974).

fROM f i ELDNO TES TO E T HNOGR APHY

3 50

Nonetheless, even now, in a tte m p ting a b ro ader consideration of fi el dnotes and their forms and the effect they h av e on w h a t we ul­ ti ma t el y do \\'ith them , these Chinanotes fr om Taiv.ran leave me in a quan da r y At least half of the notes used to \Vritc thos e t w o bo oks \Ve r e recorded by someone else { Arth ur Wolf, and his field assis t a nts) \Vit h an oth er project in mind. Even the material I collected myself du rin g the first field visit vlas in a sense recorded by another pe rs o n certainl y not by a feminist looking for an alternative p e rsp ectiv e on the Chin ese family. How is it, then, that those prejudice s or at least p redilections did not obscu re the strong themes I l at er found in the data? I do n o t suggest that someho\v Vle m ana ge d in our data collection to re ac h the nirvana of obj ectivity-on the contrary. B ut perh a p s because so many of our notes \\'ere re co r d s of conversations, they are open to a variet y of ana l yse s that a rese a rc he r with a single, sharper focus w o u l d have lost. Yet to advise a no v i ce an thro p olog i s t to fill her empty notebooks \vith \Vha tc ver she saw or h eard and vlorry about its meanin g after s h e got back to the university \\ro uld be \V O r se than no a dvi ce at all. My early e x p eri ence wo rking as a res earch assistant to an experi­ mental p s y ch ol o g i st ta ugh t me to value (if n ot attain) the cl arity of thou ght tha t comes from setting a hi erarch y of h·ypo t h e ses de fini n g vari ables , and est ablis hin g �·ith c�ution the dimensions that measure them. Certainly the young a nthropolo gis t who goes to the field � ith a circum sc ribed problem and a clear p icture of the kind of data that '\vill address it will accom plis h the task of disserta tion research in half the ti me . Nonetheless, she must also co nsider whether it \Vill be poss ible to return to thos e data to ask differen t ques tions, to search for s ol u tio ns to conflicting explana tion s or even to add to the general eth no gra ph ic li terature . Such a limited research strategy should be e mplo ye d on ly after a ca ref u l weighing of the advantages and d is a dvan t ag es In 1 98 0-8 1 I spent the a cade m ic year in the People's Rep ubli c of China and made use of this more focused approach-but not by my own choice. I \vould ha ve preferred to do resear ch in a single area, but for a variet y of personal and p olit i c al reasons I spent from four to six weeks ea ch in six di fferent sites s p read across China. I came to th is research car ry i ng baggage di fferent from \1lhat I had carr ie d to Tai\van, having become op enly feminist and pro-socialist. My goa l was to look at the change s in women 's lives , rural and u rban, thirty ye a rs after the establishment of an o ffi ciall y feminist socialist society. I was armed \Vith a set of bas ic q uestions and with '\va rni ng s not to expect to find u to p i a It \vas b ey ond a doubt the most difficult field resear ch I have .

,

,

..

,

.

.

C hinanotes

35 1

d e . I \Vas required to conduct formal interviews , always \\'ith a v e r on in i m u m o f one government official present. In two of the six sites I allo \ved to interview in hom es , and in others I �·as given little v.'a s not o pp o rt un i ty for small talk or casual observation . I was allowed a quot a of fifty women and five men per field site. Obvio u sly, there are ways

�

o f st rik in g up informal conversations and making observa tions out­ side of \v orking hours when one is living on a rural com mune and I

made full use of them, but being around for so short a time did not aU ow m e to build the kinds of rel ationships with informants '''hich

gi ve the deeper insights into individual lives . Nonetheless , the proj ect \\'as successful. It \va s not as complete as I would have liked, but I

learned a great deal from the 3 00 �"omen I talked vvith about their

ho pes, their disap pointments , and the qu ality of thei r liv es . A s a s ide

benefit, the two women \Vho traveled \Vith me throughout the re­ search and heard the a n s \vers to my pointed questions in site after site gradually became radicalized and began to express, covertly of course , their indign ation over the discrepancies between the slogans of gen der equality and the realities th ey were encountering. M y informants in China were far more informative than either I o r

the offici als w h o grudgingly allo�·ed m e t o co nduct my research had anticipated.

A

book (Wolf

1 98 5)

and a few essays resulted-but what

of the fieldnotes? Will they have the same value in ten years that my early notes from Tai\\'an had after ten yea rs ? I doubt it very much. And

if they do, it will be more as documents of a certain phase in the socialist transformation

of Chinese society than as a source of ne\\'

insights into women 's lives . Even though I collected work histo ries and genealogical information for all the women and recorded their attitudes on a number of subjects other than gender, the fo cus \\'as necessarily tight. I could no t ho pe

to

get to kno\v the m \Veil enough to

evaluate independen dy their position in vill age or neighb orhood so­ ciety. Worse y et, I have no reco rds of conversations initiated by them,

for none was. Nor had I the advantage of hearing them talk about their in ter ests rather than \\'hat I (sometimes mistaken l y) took to be mine .

Rich as I believe these intervie'h"S a rc, thcv are frozen in time, d i n iv idual s tatements only vaguel y anchored i� the social and histor­ ica l co ntext that created the m . They a re the responses of my infor­ mants to my questions, in no way a dialogue and in no sense a dialectic sea r c h for mutual understanding of a topic. One might reasonably say

that in these fieldn otes I retained control of the subj ect matter, and m y

Chin ese informants retained cont rol of its content . I have information ,

F R 0 �1 fi E L D I' O TES TO E T H N O G R A PII Y

3 52

but

I

must interpret it al on e By way ofj ustification-or consola tion � .

as the case may be- l can say that I h ad neither the lu xury of rep eated visits over a number o f years nor the luxury of ti me that is required before one 's info rmants

to tell you about themsel ves and their society. The situation in the People 's Republic required all of us t o tvant

comprom ise . My informants tried to satisfy me and their governmen t ;

I tried t o satisfy the goals o f my research project .

I

\Vas forced t o \vri te

a different kind of fiel dnote, and its form determined the kind of ethn ography that resulted, an ethnography in \Vhich I must constantly remind my reader to q ues t i on whether it is my informants or their government s peaking .

The

research in

mortality and

of

the

PRC made me painfully av.rare of m y

0\\711

the sensiti ve nature of fieldnotes. I see two issues

about fieldwork as inextricably rel ated: the protection

of informants �

and the sh aring of fieldnotes . Over the yea rs of do in g field\\"ork in Tai\van I have put a

good

deal of effort into attempts to protect the

privacy of my informants . It neve r occurred to me

'\Vhen I

wro te

1"lze

House oj'Lin• that in ten years I wo u l d find copies of the book staring a t me i n ever·y tourist shop i n Taipei. But because I used ps eudonym s� changed the names of to\\'OS and villages , and even gave the.. com p a ss whirl '''hen I

a

wrote it, my efforts to protect informants have been

successful at that basic level . Yet

in

the original ficldno tes for t h a t

village, even though \\'e assigned everyone an identification number� the names o f the indi-v;duals '''e kne\\" bes t had a vlay

of slipping

in .

The children we observed are now gro\vn , and the so-called econo mi c mira cle o f Taiwan has allo�·ed so me of the villagers t o enter profes­ sions that make them socially an d politically quite visible . One is even

electronics facilitv in S ilicon Vallev in California. The responsibility I bear them wil l continue fo r many years to come and precludes my putting the fieldnotes in the pub l i c dom ain . Some of the director of an

I

�

our svstematic data �lould not be at all sensi tive and with care ful I

editing might be safely allowed in

the hand s of people I do not know,

but that editing Vtrould be a big chore.

My data from the PRC are an even hca""V; er burden. I t is unfortunate

but t rue that

in China one can still suffer serious damage for the

exp ression of an unpopular opinion , no matter ho\v innocent that opinion may seem to the unw ary outsider.

For

that matter, today 's popular o p inion may be tomorrow�s heresy. In published material I have taken great care to be m islea din g as

to who

said \Vhat, particu­

larly ''' hen the· statement-ho \\'ever apolitical-\vas made by some-

Ch in anotes ne V�; thin the governmenta l apparatus who \Vas speaking off the 0 cord . But, as with the Taiwan data, how am I to know that today's �e man will not in a decade be a p rovincial officer in the �ll agc w o

�omen's Federation? I would be delighted if this were to com e about ,

but, h o \v ev er unlikely such an event may be , I also feel constrai ned to c on cea l the fact that she once gave me her personal views on a touchy

is s ue . The few names I have used in published material from the PRC and a g ain the geography is moved about, but to a re p seu donyms, e x pu rga te these fieldnotes \vould be more di fficult if not impossible.

M u ch as I \Vould l ike to m ake all our fieldnotcs available to responsible co llea gues for different kinds of analyses and alternative interpreta­

tio n s, m y sense of my obligation to the people who gave me so much is tha t I \Vould be breaking faith with th em by doing so. Those \v ho collec t the ficl d notes are m ost fully a\\'arc of the damage to particul ar

in dividuals that their irresponsible use could cause.

So \vhat is to be the u ltimate disposition of ficldnotes? After their

coll ectors have tu rned to dust , arc the notes to molder in attics and basements until some uninterested dau ghter or grand d aughter re­

cycles them? I hope not . We ha ve all heard too many ho rror stories of

the eager researcher who gets \\' ind of a cache of invaluable reco rds

only to arrive a year or t\vo after they h ave been consigned to the

garbage heap. Perhaps all our notes should be turned over to the Smithsonian to be sealed in some attic room until they can do no harm

to t h e livin g or the dead .

But is the sharing offieldnotes-ignorin g for a moment the pleasant

feelin g of generou s altruism- really in the best inte rests of anthropol­ o gy? Would \\re not be addin g yet another level of co mplexity in our se a rch for mean ing? Would not the young anthropologist \vho looks at m y old Tai\\'an notes have to make a quantum leap back\\#·ard to un ders ta nd the social, historical, political, and (equally important fro m

m y p ersp ective) pers onal context i n \vhich those notes �·ere "\V rittcn ? A nd w ould she not also have to stru ggle to recreate the personality that

ha d re co rded the m? Frankly, even I find that task more and more di fft cult as the ·years go by. Do \Ve \vant to wish it on-indeed, trust it to- o ur descendants ?

Sho uld Vle perhaps treat our ficl dnotes as ephemera, as texts created by a n thropologist and informants in a particular space and time for a

Par �icula r purpose: the creation of an et hn o g raphy or a research report

Whtch in itsel f becomes another kind of text \Vith a set of long­ esta blished rules for its reading? Do \Ve then \\' rite our memoirs and at

353

fRO M f iEL D N OT ES T O ET H N O G R A P H Y

354

the end o f each day 's writing stint sit in front o f the fi repl ace and ceremoniously burn the notes \Ve used that day? I don't think I co uld do that . And I am sure m y historian colleagues \\'ould be horrified

at

the thought of such arson . For arson it \vould be. Howeve r flawed, fieldn otes a rc not ephen1 c ra but docu ments that record one mind 's attempt to come to unders tan d the behavior o f fello\v beings. One day-fly specks, bacterial in fc c .. tion, and all-they must be part of the public record so that if the species should survive or be follo\�,.ed by some other postnuclear being cursed \Vith curiositv, the fieldnotes can be reexamined for \vh a t the v �

J

are: our feeble a ttempts at com munication \Vith one another. Fo r however \v anting anthropology· may be , it h as nonetheless served

to

create a sen se of global humanity-c ross-class, cros s-culture, and cross-gender-that is sorel y lacking in m ost other disciplines . Considering the serious reassess ment of an thropolo g y cu rren tly under \vay, it may seem almost frivolous si mply to muddle o n , m ak­ in g superficial modifica tions in our old field methods. Perha ps the most Vlc can do at this j unctu re is to attempt to be more a\vare of process , both in the field and \\l·hilc trying to make sen se of V.."hat

\\'e

bring back \\l"ith us. H ave �·c really any other choice ? We must reflect on our \Vo rk thus far, but we must not allo\v the inward gaze to blind us to the real achievements of our past . Recent trends in anthropo logy put us in danger of becoming more literary critics than creato rs o f literature, more service workers than producers . Should we cease to p roduce fieldnotes and create ethnography, �·e will cease to do anthro­ polog y, for an thropolog·y is dependent on fieldnotes and ethnogra­ phies for its existence. Theory is exciting and the source of gro\vth, but un tested theory" vlill in time turn a discipline into an art form .

REFEREN C E S

Freedman, Maurice. 1 96 1 . The Family in China, Past and Present.

Pacffic Ajfc11 r.�

3 4 : ] 23-] 6. . 1 9 70. Ritual As pects of Chinese Kinship and M a rriage. In Fatn ily atJd Kin sh ip in Chintje Societ)l1 ed . Maurice F reedman , 1 63 - R7. S ta n fo rd Calif : S ta n fo rd U ni ver s i t y Press. Gornick, Vivi an, and B a r bara K. M oran, eds. 1 97 1 . ��'<JmatJ in Sexi.st Socidy: Studies itJ Po 1vtrlessnes.s . New York: Basic B ooks . Ros aldo, M ichelle Zi mbalist, and Louise Lam phere, cds. 1 974 . �t'clma ft, Cu l ta-t rf , and Society. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press.

--

,

C hinanotes �'bi ting, Beatrice B . , ed . 1 963 . Six Culture� ; Stl4dies ofChild R earing. New York:

Viiley. Wolf, M arg ery. 1 96 8 . TIJe House o_( L im : ..4 Study o..f a CIJ inese Farm Family. Eng lc\\'Ood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall. --- · 1 9 72 . '"'omen and th e Famil)' in Rural Ta iwatl . Stanford , Ca l i£ : Stan ford Universi ty Press . --·

1 98 5 . Revolr4tion Postponed: Komen in Contemp orary China. Stanford , Cal if. :

S ta nford University Press .

3 55

ROBERT

J.

SMI T H

Hearing Voices , Joining ·

the Chorus : Appropriating So meone Els e 's Fieldno tes

Most anthropologis ts have enough tro uble analyzing their

O \Vn

fieldnotes without taking on the .extraordinarily co mplex task of deal­ ing ''"'ith someone else 's . When they do so, it is u sual l y because they plan to conduct research in a pla ce \�there another an thropologist has alread y collected data. The \vould-be secondary user al mos t inevitably �·orks alone, for in the most common case the \Vriter of the notes has died, and there is no one to ans� cr questions p rompted by the dis­ ..

covery of ambiguities, lack o f clarity, seeming contradictions, and simple illegibility likely to characterize such personal materials . My motives for u ndertaking the enterprise I describe belo\v had nothing to do v.dth plans to conduct research in the place "'"here the fiel dwork \\'as carried out. I did not even kno\v of the existen ce of the materials un til a few \Veeks before they p assed into my hands . Fu rth er­ more , when I did at last begin the task o f dealing with the remarkab le journal that for med part of the collection, I enj o yed a distinct ad van­ tage: the \V oman who \Vrote it is very m u ch alive and b eca me an a ct iv e participant in our joint effort to rescue it from oblivion . 1 I

am

grateful to Ella Lury 'W'is,-.,· ell and Margery \Volf for thei r comments on a d ra ft

of this essay.

_

See the p reface in Smith and \ll' isv..· cll ( 1 98 2 : xxi-xxxviii ) . For an account ot �' is weH 's experiences at the fi ftieth-annivers ary celebration of t he Embrees' stu d y� or g aniz ed and fi nan ced by the people of Suye in 1 98 5 . see \(iiswell and Smith ( 1 9� 8). I

3 56

Hea ring Vo ices,

Joining

the Chorus

1 have cho se n to give a fai r l y

ffort.

A t a ti me

\v h en

straightfor\vard

3 57 account of that re s c u e

man y anthropolo gists a re eng aged i n fevered

;cexamination of th e foundati on s of our discipline, my ap p r oach m a y

appea r at best naive , at \Vo rst si mply perv ers e. I t is neither. I take th e ta ck I do b ecau se it seem s to me th a t the curren t c o n cern \Vi th t ext , me an in g , \\' r i t i n g , and r efl e xi v it y is a s much to be a cc o u n te d fo r by its eru ption i n We s t er n intel lectu al li fe in the 1 970s and 1 980s as by any pa r ti cu l a r releva nce it m ay h ave to the ethnographic enterprise per se . Th e p o in t is put Vli t h enviable el egan ce in an edi to r i al comment on a se t of p a p e r s deal ing w ith one or another of the " cri ses " i n a n thro pol-

og y: Anth ro pol ogists have become fond of w ritin g about the culture of

an thropology as a su bject in itsel f and of including themselves in their fieldwork . Th e self-consciousnes s of a disci pline seeking to under stand

the Other is hardly surp ris in g , aside from the fact tha t it fits the tenden­

cies of late-t\vcntic th-cen tury thought so neatly as to be

a

bit sus­

pect . . . . Perh aps the prob lems of an thropology arc less unique than its ambitions . [Grc\\' 1 9 86:

We c an only hope

t

190]

h at Raymond Grc'"'· is righ t .

Ho\\l·ever

th

a t may be ,

I set out here in some detail the circum stan ces that led to mv involve.�

ment \Vith t h e field materials and the process by means

of which I tried to join the chorus of voices speaking through th e m . I a po l ogi ze for the l e n g thy preamble but offe r it b ec a use I thi n k i t ot h cr� ise d iffi cult to ·

see ''.rhy I got involved in the first pl a c e .

h en I \\'as seven t een , I j oine d a unit of the U . S . Army S p ecialized Tr a inin g Reserve Corps at the U n i ve rs ity of Minne sota. It was o ne o f sev e ra l scattered about the country eng aged in \v h a t �...ere then called Jap a n es e lan gu a ge and area studies . A mong our co u rs es was o ne on the ethnograph y of the peoples of the Pa ci fi c ; it w as taught b y Wi l s o n D . Wa l l is , \Vith occasi ona l guest lectu res by his wife, Ru th Saw tell Wallis. In re t ros p ec t , i t is n o t difficult to ima g i n e what a s tr u g gle it must have been for these t\vo anth ropologists-one a s p e c i alist on the Micmac of the C a n ad ia n Mari times, th e ot her a p h y si c al anth ropologi st-to assem ble a d e cen t set of readings for the cour se. For J ap a n , h o vv ever, there \va s one ex cellent book, John F. Embree's SU)1 f J\1ura : .i4 Japanese Villag e ( 1 939). The field resea rch on which it w a s based had been co mpl ete d in 1 93 6 , just a fe\\' yea rs earlier, and in a d di tio n to its s ch o l ar l y merits t h e book had all the fa s ci n a ti on of a n e a rly contem p orary account of life in a n e ne my count r y. I found it interestin g enou g h but had no reason to suppose I In 1 944,

w

fROM f iElDN OTES T O ET HN OGRAPH Y

Walli s c s'

\Vould ever refer to it a ga i n once the final examination in the cou rse \Vas o v e r

.

So much fo r prescience. What had come to be widel y toute d

as

a

ab rup tl y several months later, and a ft er in Japan, I was discha r ge d from the army and

hundred years' \Va r ended s pend i n g most of 1 946

re t urned to the University of Minnes ota as an un der gradu a te maj orin g

in anthropology. The very fi rst quarter's schedule included a co u r se the ethnol ogy of East Asia, taught by Ri cha r d K.

on

Beardsley, him sel f a

p r oduct o f the U . S . Navy's wartime Japanese langua g e program .

Inevitably, the Embree book a ppe a re d on the list of re q uired texts � an d so I read it once more. In light of my o�� recen t experien ce of Ja p an

and its people , I found much in i t that I had mis se d befo re. Eventually I

learned that anthropologis ts do so mething called field�·ork on whi ch

they base ethnographies (I knc\\7 no t hi n g offieldnotes at the tim e)� a n d

it seemed to me that someone should do a similar stud·y that '"'·ould

focus on '"'·hat had h a p p ene d in the coun tryside in posts u rrender Japan. After two years of graduate stud}· at Corn ell U ni v ersit y

,

I found

m y self back in Japan to do j u st that under sponsorship of the C enter

for Jap anese Studies of the Universit)" of Michigan,

\V

here B ea rd sley

had gone from Minnesota. S oon after ar r i v in g , I m o v ed into a village on the isl and of Shikoku, equipped vvith a p on ab l e t y pew riter found out about fieldnotes long sin ce), a

dictionary, and a

\V

(I had

o rn copy

Suye lvlura: A Japanese Village. It was the summer of 1 9 5 1 , a few months after Jo hn Embree and his daughter Clare had been kill ed b y a

of

motoris t who ran th em down on a sno\\'Y street in Hamden , Connec­

had hoped to visi t him at Yale before I left for Japan; no w I had only his bo ok and a few p ub l is hed papers on Suye to guide me in my ticut. I

research . 2 For several years after I took up my tea chin g post at C o rnell

in 1 95 3 , the book \V as a required text in my course on japanese society and culture . It remains in print, a classic of the community study genre.

n othing o f Ella Embree, who had also been in Suy c in 1 9 3 5 save that i n his preface John Emb ree ha d ackno\vledged that she

I knew

3 6,

s po ke Ja p anese fluently, while his own com mand of the language was fr a gm e nt a ry. Then, in th e summer of 1 96 5 , she came to I th aca to visit one of his sisters , and we met for the first time. Ella Wis\vell (she had 2 The results of that research appear in severely

a bri dged

form in C-ornell and S n1ith the aegis of the Uni ver­

( 1 956: 1 - 1 1 2). Four comm unity studies ,-.,· ere conducted under

sity of Michi gan's Center for Japanese Studies: cv,ro appear in Cornell and Smith 1 9 56; the third is Norbeck 1 954, and the fo u rth- capstone of the en ter p rise-is Beard sl ey9 Hall, an d Ward 1 95 9. The Em bree tradition was very m uch alive du ring this perio d.

Hearing b

Voices, Joining

the Choru s

3 59

then re married) pro·vcd to be a h andsome vvoman , inten se and wh o se lightly accen ted En glish caught me by surprise. For

vrbmrane rt,ea s on it had never occurred to me to \Vander ho\v the wife of an �rnerican an thropologist happened to be fl uent in Japanese, but I met s o n1any expatriate Russians in h o l d ha ve guessed after ha ving �ob ejus t after the war. I think we must have i gno red the other guests u

tot a ll y so dcepl�, involved Vlere \Ve in s peaking of the Suye study, the ..

trag ic deat h of her husband and dau gh ter, and my O\\'n research that had be en inspired by his book . It \\' as late in t he conversation that she raised an is sue for which I \Va s

no t p rep ared . When she left Connecticu t for Honolulu t o teach at the Uni ver sity of Havlaii in 1 9 5 1 , she said, she had tried Vlithout succes s to i ntere st someone at Yale in taking over the S uye research materials . Sh e cou ld not b ea r to dis card them, of cou rse , but neither could she fore see anv circumstan ces under \vhich she \Vou l d ever look at them again. They \\'ere stored in the attic of a friend,s house in N ew H aven . �

Did I by any chance kno\v of anyone who might be interested in

l ooking at them to see \\'hcther they contained anything of value? did. When a number of cartons arrived in

mv office several v,reeks later, �

I

I

unpack ed them at once, astonished at their bulk . There vvere t \\'O albums of black and vlhitc photographs that I have since learned number I , 720

t

in all . An o her set of alb u ms contained carefully labeled adver­

tising broadsides , notices of meetings of vill a ge organization s , school ent ertain ment p rograms, paper charms and amulets from shrines and te m ple s , and ne\vspaper clippings- a g alaxy of ephemera of the kind o fte n discarded in the course of field�·o rk. A batch of manila enve­ l op es c ontained hamlet hou sehold census forms , copies of progress

rep ort s to the Social Science Research Committee of the Universin, of C hi cago (which had funded the study), some drafts of unpublis hed paper s by John Embree and others, and cor respondence relating to the resea rch . In one folder there \vas an English-language typescript

he a ded "The Diary of a Japanese Innkeeper's Daughter" \vith an intro­ du cti on by John Embree and a note that the translation had been done

by one Miwa K ai . 3 There \Vas also the t\\'o-volume unedited manu-

3Sho rtl y after \�·e com pleted the manuscript of The �J.'t'tme11 of Su y e �\�lura Ell a , Wis \\'ell reminded me of the existence of the diary. After looking it over again, I

su g g es ted that it be prepared for publicati on , and she put me in tou ch \Vith Mi w a Kai, Y.o·h o gra ci ously agreed to the plan . \'(lith her indispensable assis t ance the diary appeared

forty years after she had co mple ted her transla tion Smith 1 984).

of it during Wo rld ·�1ar II ( S mith and

J 60

f R O �i fi ELD N O TES TO E T H N O G R A P H '\'

script of Suye l\Jura : A japatlese �'illage and a copy of the notes for the lectures John Embree had given at the University of Chicago for th e Civil Affairs Training School for the Far East during the war. I p ut all this \\'ealth of material aside, ho"vever. when I found the core of the collection: t,�,.o typescript journals. John Embree's contained I , 2 76 pages ; Ella's, 1 , 00 5 . Even that initial cu rsory inspecti on of the contents of the cart o ns produced some surprises . The progress reports had been jointly in th e names ofJohn and Ella Embree, for it tu rned out that under the ter n1s of the grant she had borne specific responsibility for collecting infor­ mation on the lives o f the �·omen and children of the village . That discovery cl eared up the puzzle of why there were t\VO research jour­ nals of impressive length but only one book. It \Vas apparent that John had �·ritten his dissertation fro m his notes, using his Vlife's hardly a t all, and revised it for publication. No book on the topic of the other study (as I came to think of Ella's \Vork) had ever seen the light of day. My first task, I decided, was to read her journal . I \\'as quite unpre­ pared to find that its information on Jap anese v-�omen Vlas absolutely unique. One uses the vvord "unique'' to describe an)·thing Japanese advised!)·, for it is badly over\\'orked and almost al\vays inaccurate ; in this instance, hovlever, it \vas entirely appropriate. Not only were the Embrees the first foreign anthropologists to conduct research in japan, but they had also carried out the only stu dy done to this date by a husband-and-\vitc team residing in a rural community for a yea r. In the mid- 1 9 3 as no Japanese social scientist was collecting such material , and nothing like the contents ofher jou rnal had appeared in any language in the intervening years. I wrote to her at once and so began a correspondence about h o ""· it might be possible to make available at last the results of "the other study. " The Suye flies had been put aside some thirty years before; tha t the final result of my good intentions appeared onl)� after anoth er seventeen years had passed can be explained if not excused. In 1 9 69 , while on a visit to Austin, Texas, my \Vife and I narro�·ly escap ed meeting the fate ofJohn and Clare Embree. Recovery fro m our ext en ­ sive inj uries �.. as very slow, and \vhen \Ve finally returned to Ithac a, it was to find Cornell's version of the campus revolution in full sw ing . The years of turmoil that follo\ved, rendered nearly insupportable by my O\\'n greatly reduced level of energy, \\'ere academically unpro du c­ tive. Then in 1 973 came an unexpected opportunity to plan a rest udy of the place "vhe re I had lived on Shikoku, which led to fieldwo rk in

Hearing Voices , Joining the

Chorus

1 97 5 an d an extended p eriod of \vrit ing and sec1n g a man uscript

th ro u g h to publica tion (S mith 1 978). Onc e more I returned to the Suyc m at eri als and arranged to be at the Univ ers i ty of Ha\vaii for the tall sem es ter of 1 978 . Retired long since ,

E ll a W is\\rell and her husband Frederick were l iv ing in Honolulu; it see me d a perfect chance to work tog ether, and I took her j o u r n al \Vith me. A s I set a b o ut reading it once again , \Ve talke d over the many con­ side ra tions that eventually led to our decision to publish S U}'e .�1ura ( Smith and Wiswell r 9R2).

Th e ��omen oj­

Ifl ha ve been unduly discursive in t h is personal account, it is bec ause

I want to high light several unus u al featu res of my involvement \Vith someone elsc � s ficldnotcs . First � they were given to me by their autho r, \vho from the outset ent e rtain ed some doubt as to their value. Second ,

I never met John Embree, author of the basic ethnographic sou rc e s on

the community in \Vhich the field\\lOrk had been c arried out. Third , I have never visited the place or met any of its people . (In recent years I

I m a y vlell be the only A merican e t h nologist ofJap an over the age of fifty who has not gone there . ) Insofar as I knovl have come to su spect that

the place and p eop l e at all , it is through the \v rit ings of John Embree

and the numerous scholars \vho have made of restudies of Suye so me­

thing o f a cottage industry, and throu gh the eyes, ears , and memory of Ella Wiswell. 4 This essay is not about texts or p resentation o r re-presentation. It docs not deal vv'ith "'�riting o r inscribin g , pre-scription or de-scription .

I t is abou t voices, and in a purely nontechnical '\.\-" ay i t is about multi­

vocality. It \\' as M a rge ry Wolf '''ho said of

The ��omen o.._f Su y e Mu ra,

"You have gi ve n Ella Wis\vell her voice. " That is in fact \vhat I hoped to do, but it no"'" seems more approp r i at e to say I have helped her speak at least . Consider for a moment the object on ""'"hich all that fo ll o vls is based. The ethnographer- who continues to disavov.." the l abcl- v.."rote down what she h ad seen and heard, and often v.rhat she

th ough t about it, a t the end of every day. The j ournal , ·"rhich b egins on De ce m b er 20, 1 93 5 , a nd ends o n N ovem b er 3 , 1 93 6 , is "'"ritten in En­ glis h , although she might equal1y '''ell have used Russian or F rench.

�s we shall see, and as those \Vho have read our book �;n know, h er s Is a p o \verful voice . Indeed , so po"'�erful is it that as secondary user of her fieldnotcs, I initially found it a s erious p r ob l e m .

"'The major restu dies

1 97 1 ;

and Yoshino 1 95 5 .

include

Kawakami

1 98 3 ; Raper

et

al. 1 9.5 0;

Ushijima

1 95 8,

f R O �i f i E L D N OTE S TO ET H N O G R A PHY

In my earliest readings of her journ a l I beca me fascina ted wit h i t s author, whom I had then met only once and so barely kne\v. O nl y

gradually did it davv·n on me that the v oice I had come to hear so clea rly

in the pages of the j ournal was not that of the woman I had

me t b u t

rather that of a young Vloman in her mid-twenties , a foreigner con­ ducting research in a land she thought of as home by virtue of having spent much of her youth there and vlhere her famil y s till lived . She

was educated at Berkeley and the Sorbonne and had been a gradua te­

student ,,, ife at the University of C h i ca g o The exp erience in Suye .

recorded in her j o u rnal \vas filtered through a highl y cosmo p olit an

screen indeed . 5 I took no co mfort in co mparing her background ""·ith my O\\'n \vhen at about the same age I had taken m y purely A meric an

perspe ctive with me into a similar res earch s ituation. To add to n1 y

dis comfort there was the far mo re obvious p roblem of the differen ce of gender. The author of the journal spoke in a \Voman �s voice, and much of \Vhat she wro te about concerned oth er \Vomen . For son1 c

time I w restled with \Vhat I saw a s linked p roblems . The first was ho\v to extract from this inconceivably rich and impossibly copious record

the parts that ought to be published . The second \V as how to get past

the ethnographer, for vlhom m y admiration and respect in creas ed with each readin g, to the ethnog raphy.

I made several false starts, each abandoned a short \\ray into the

ent erprise and then one day it came to me that I had overlooked the ,

mos t painfully obvious central problem. The journal was not tn ine in

any sense other than that i t h ad ended up on m y desk . Lacking any system of cross-referencingt it �vas in some res pects very like a dia ry. Its auth or had lived in one place for o ver a year, so that every day's

entry v.ras based on her accumulating experience. As a reader-one kind of spectator or audi t or

-

I si m pl y could not keep things straight.

A Vloman who figured in a domestic quarrel reported in a Dece n1bcr entry, for example, would appear again and again in other circ u nl­

stances and as a participant \\'ith many other people in a var ie ty o f activities . With each a p pearance her character and personality became more p alpable, more rounded, better u nders tood, and her voice n1 o re

audible. The difficulty \\'as that increa sing familiari ty led the j o urnal ·s author to use shorthand referen ces to individuals an d pla ce s

.

T his

meant tha t the woman identified earlv on as Mrs . Sa\vada Ta k i o f I

51

was

find it difficult to see ho\\t one rcvie\vcr of the book came to the conclusion that she ua fairly ordinary housewife-cum-scholar who spoke excellen t Japanese" (Moc ra n

1 984).

Heari ng Vo i ces , Joining

the Choru s

oade o r Otsuka's da u gh ter Taki is referred to si mply as Taki in l ater

nd occasionally as Mrs . Sa vvada with no mention of her en tr i es a h a m l e t of residen ce. Furthermore, th ere \¥ere scores o f won1en to k ee p t ra c k of; someti mes they \Vc rc identified by full n ame, occasion­ a ll y by su rna me only, and frequentl y by· giv en name alone. In some pass ag es there \vcre n o n a mes at all; in most of these there \Vas so me cl u e t o the iden tity of the person being vvrittcn about, but the clue

o ften p oin ted in mo re than one di rection . The mo re deeply I got i n to the j ournal , the more compl etel y at sea I felt.

How could I make the j ourn al mi ne? To pose the question \vas to answ er it- there seemed to b e no \vay. What I needed vvas som e means

of dim inishing the po\\-·c rfu l presence of the ethnographer so that the

people of whom she wrote \\7o u ld emerge mo re clearl y. Here I must

ackno"W·ledge membersh i p in that generation of academ ics \vho vv ri te some of our manu scripts in longhand and t y p e othe rs . In either case I

compose as I g o along, and each revision , \vhethe r hand- or type\.\trit­

ten , is also a recomposition . The solution I arrived at reflects th ese

preferences and ha bits � because it seem s to h ave served its purpose \vell,

I report it here. I photocopied the entire j ournal , marked every

passage in the copy not devoted to the \Veather, recipes , a n d the like,

and sat dov.,rn at my typc\vriter. For weeks I spent m ost of every day retyping the m ark ed passages verba tim , beginnin g with th e first entry.

Before I was \veil into this stul tifyin g task , I began to know the people

in a new \vay. Some of the pa yoff was purely technical . For example,

for the fi rst time it became cl ear to me tha t Mrs . Higu chi of the s to re (February

13, 1 936), A yako at th e village shrine festi val (N ovember 1 93 5), old man Saka ta's daughter (May 29, 1 9 3 6), and al most

27, certai nly the unnamed obj ect of some unrestrained gossip on an o u ting Uu ly I , 1936) \verc all the s ame \\'o man . What is more, by the tim e I

got to the gossip about her, it came as no surprise. When I \\'as fi n ally do n e, I had lea rned eno u gh to spot continu i ties and inconsistencies ,

re solve most of the occasional ambiguities , and sec ho'\\1" passages th at h � d ap pea red to be unrelated (or unrelatablc) to anything or anyone

d1 d in fact connect with \vhat had gone before o r came after.

M y aim had been to appropri ate the journal , which has m an y pas sa ges that begin \Vi th something like " It must have been she they W er e

t alk i ng about a t the market in town last \Veek, '' or " I f that is \\"h a t

lll c . "

A s they beca me part of rny field notes, all such jou rnal entries

sh e meant, then Sak ata has got i t all \v ro n g or w a s tryin g t o mislead \\'er e trans formed i n to re fere11ces to conversati ons and observations I

f RO M fi E L DN OTES T O ETH N O G RA P H Y

had typed up myself. In the in nu merable lengthy indirect quotes and n1any direct ones I began to hear fam iliar voices and reco gnize charac­ teristic man ners o f expression . My g ro\ving sens e of confiden ce roo ted in my

O\�ln

\\-· as

fiel d work in another village in Japan j us t fifteen

yea rs after the E mbrees left S u yc. Althou gh a catas trophic wa r an d vast social changes had intervened, it seemed to me that I had spent a year with farmers and shopkeepers who in many respect s \\'ere ver y

lik e their counterparts in prewar Suye. Ella Wis\velrs shy y oun g women , philandering husbands, nei ghborhood scolds , hard vvor k in g

household heads, and ind ulged children v,,.cre fa miliar figures . I

co n�

fes s that the people of Suye discussed some matters in \ovays that did afford me an occasional jolt; otherwise, the landscape was easily recog­ nizable . This discovery \Vas reassurin g , fo r it s uggested that des p i te all

our differen ces in background, \\'e had not1eth eless encountered very similar kinds of people. It s eem ed highly unlikely that we had me rely crea ted them .

So I a m led to make the audacious clai m that the voices of the

\\'o men of Suye could be heard more clearly once I had in terposed myself bct vveen them an d their ethnographer, \\'ho now \Va s far less

salient in my perception

of the

place and its people. Nevertheless, I

\\ras left still "vith nothing more than a year of narra tive . I n n1y abridgment the s tory lines \vere easier to folio\\', bu t I did not kn o w

\\'hat to do \\'i th it. Certainly I had n o desire to try m y hand a t w riting somethin g like " .1'\,fy Year tt1ith

japanese Tlillage �i{,tnetJ

by Ella Lury

Wiswell as told to Robert J. S mith . " Once or twice I flirted ��lith the

idea

" Ella Lury �Jt"isu,ell: An A nthropologist at �J't>rk by Robert J. Smith, " but q uickly concl ud ed that fo r better or \vorse , w e were n o t

of

Ruth Benedict a n d Marga ret Mead. 6

In some despair I \vent through m y ne�·ly typed fi eldnotes agai n !

studied the carefully captioned photographs that allo\ved me to put names with fa ces , and the for the n th ti me reread john Embree's boo k . The effect was startling . A work I had al,�rays found appealing for th e

sense it gave of life as lived by Japanese farmers no\v seemed cur io u sly lifeless, almost bland . All the important topics ""'·ere covered , but t h ere 6 Thc allusion is to Mead 1 9 59, of course. Abour this time a sug gcsrion came fron1 an entirely different quarter that the com plete jou rnals of the E m brccs be translated in to

Japanese to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their arrival in Su ye in 1 93 5 · V'aluablc data

a re.

v..·as

not

as

th.c

this seemed an idea virtu al l y gu aranteed to trivialize their acco mplis hment;

pursued.

Jt

Hearin g Voices , Joining

the Choru s

fe vle r people than I had remembered. Indeed, the text \Vas hardly "'�ere ere blurred, their individual ul e at all; the P plc of Suye o p at d � _w . . . . . m th1s h1ghly normative p1cture of the place. o ic e s in d1stmct ohn E mbree cannot be fa ulted, however, for accomplishing pre­

�

J

at he had set out to do. The " First Report on Field Work: cis e ly ,v h suve M u ra, Kumamo t o , Japan, by John and Ella Embree, dated

F e b ru a ry 1 5 , 1 93 6 , opens �..ith this paragra ph :

We ha v e nov.,' been in S uye three an d a half months . We have learned t h a t a comm unity of s i xteen hu ndred is much more than two p e o p le can ever

hope to know person ally. We are m a ki n g progres s by co nc entra t

­

ing on about a fourth of the village as indivi dual h o us eh old s and study­

ing the activities as a whole o n ly as they are expressed in those mo re formal units of the ·sch ool a nd vil l a ge office.

Further on� John \\'rites : Ella has been picking up m ost. of the liv ing social order (emphasis sup­ plied] b y mean s of con versations w i t h housewives . The n u merous drinking pa rti e s make it eas y to become acq uainted .

The goal of the remaining nine mo n ths of fieldwork , he adds , is " to

have enough material for a fairly good picture of a Japanese village , "

including data on the kin ship s y s tem and life-cycle rites, the hamlet­ level cooperative system, the economy, social clas ses and cli ques, and religi on .

I \vas s truck by the aptnes s of the phrase "the living social order. " It

is echoed in Plath 's revievl

(1984: 340)

of The JVomen

ofSuye 1"fura :

"If

John E mbree 's book is a sort of official group photograph of the people

of S uyc, Ella Wis\vell's journal is an album of snapshots of thos e

peop le milling around before and after they struck a p ose for t h e lens

of science. '' To recast this characteristically astute observation in my ow n metaphor, John Embree takes us to the public p erfo rmance of the villa g e cho rus made up m ostly of men who hold the sheet music fi rm l y b e fore their eyes; Ella Wis \vcll gives us material of which onl y a fra c ti o n is incorporated into the concert, for there \Vas much singing,

Whistl ing, and humming offstage , especially by women �"ho never got to perform in pu blic at all . Not everyone can read music or carry a tu ne , after all, an d whether sharp or flat, the off-key singer is seldom \Velco m ed into the chorus . The Ella Emb ree "\Vho wro te the journal

f R O M fiE L D N OTES TO ETH N O GR AP HY

..

\vould probabl y have added some caustic comment to the effect th at the v.romcn were there only to serve tea and refreshments to the mal e public performers any"vay. And so we have returned to the ethnographer. I cannot i magine th at my effo rts would have come to anyth ing had I not been able to con su lt with her time and again. Perhaps the most egre giou s request I made of her Vlas that she reread her journal, for it must have been a \Vrenchin g experience. While she �·as so occupied, I set abou t deciding ho\v to reorganize the narrative I had appropriated in such a \vay that the pages , o f John Embrce s _b ook would be peopled, ho\vever disorderly the crowd and ragged its voices . The standard chap ter headings of his study would not do, fo r they arc not v.that Ella Wiswell had been about in Suye. I ended up by repackaging, telling myself that by and large the categories I developed from my ficldnotes had congealed out of the array of topics most extensively repo rt ed in her j ourn al. There remained the problem of mul tivocality. Concerned to k e ep the identity of the speaker clear and to retain her Vlords verbatirn , inso far as that \\'as possible, I a dop t ed a necessarily cumberson1e technique, an account of which appears in Smith and Wiswell ( 1 982: xii) : The p as s ages in doub l e quotation marks are taken directly from t he

journal., edited to reduce r ed u nd an cy and to c la rify wher e nec e ssa ry Materials between s in g l e quotation marks w it h i n thes e p assa ges

.

a re

quotations from conversations an d com ments m ade by th e v illag e rs . Paren thetical passa ges are i n the original. B racketed ones t h e balance o f the text. Thus :

are mine,

as i s

Th at �'as precisely wh a t had h a p p e ned . " Of the Maehara chan ge of

wives the �'omen tho ugh t

favorably.

This one is said to be a good

worker and not 'an okusan type' [by im pl icatio n a lady] like the one \vho has le ft She gave a kao m ishiri r a 'face-shO\\"in g' party given by on e who moves into a new com munity I \vh en sh e arrived. 'A t Maeha ra's, ' they .

laughed, th e y had t o throw su ch a party b e c a use the wives chan g e s o oft en (I learned l a ter th a t his real wife-the fi rst o n e - i s not offici ally '

.'

regi st ered as

such . ) "

The first draft o f the manuscript I sen t to Ella Wis\vell, therefo re , was the j o u rna l dismembered , cut an d pasted, its p i eces patched to-­ get her with transitional passages and observations pro vided by the u l ti m ate outsider-a man '\\"ho had never even been near the sn1al1 world of �·hlch she had written . The c u tt i ng and pasting had in t ro duced a ne""" kin d of order; the transitions and observations in tro duce d

...

H ea ring

Voices ,

Joining the Chorus

v oice. Along vvith the d raft I sent a list of q u es tions about many m atte rs that still puzzled me . Had I got this particular dispute right? H ad I confused two women because th e y bore the same given nam e ? Was a certain marriage r eall y bet\veen cousins? Was this woman's h u sband her second or third? She could not answer them all, for as any eth n og rapher knows or will learn, despite the early conviction that y ou will never forget anyone or anything en countered during your first extended fieldvlork, memory fails \vith alarming speed. Small wonder, then, that for ty- fi\l"e years after the event Ella Wisvlell co u ld not even recall some of t h e individuals whose activities take up many pages of her j ournal. But memory is se l ecti v e, of course, and for th e most pan I found hers p h e no menal , refreshed as it was by rereading her journ al . Waiting for her re a c tion to the m an u s c rip t '"'.. as an anxious time, for I was concerned to know w h et h e r I had got the tone right . Had I been true to the character of p a r t icular individuals she had kno\\rn so well? Had I given this or that event the proper emphasis? Did I overint erp ret here? Most impor t ant I wondered w heth er she vlould feel that the manuscript revealed too much about ethnographer and villager alike. Those who have re a d the book wi ll kno�\,. that it reveals a great deal . What had been muted voices no\\o.. speak quite loudly in some of its passages, and occasionally V��hat had been a w hisp er has b een raised to the level of full-throated declamation. For the most part, ho�..ever, I fel t confident that the voices \Vere tellin g us \Vhat the speakers "'�anted Ella Wiswell to hear and see, w hich is some version of what every­ body-or nearly e·very·body-in Suye already knew. But that was then, and this was forty-five years later. The young village women of th at time had become today's grandmothers or j o i ned the ances tral sp irits of their house. Had we revealed too much in light of the sen sibilities of Suye people in the 1 980s? In the end \\'e decided that in on ly one instance had '\\l""e gone too far and at the last minute deleted ei ght pa ges from the copy edited manus cript 7 Those pages dealt with wh at anyo ne \vho has done extended fi eldw ork \vill recognize as perh ap s the most painful period: the sev·eral d a ys just prior to lea";ng 3

new

,

.

7See S mith and Wis\v cll ( 1 982: xi , 273-28 1 ) fo r our j ustifi cation of t h e decision to th e book in its present form. In the final version of the manuscript I adopted the arnahar ta ctic of ch an g in g all p e rson al na mes , co nfusin g directions� shufflin g people pl aces , and otherwise misleading the reade r When El la Wiswell co mpl ained that �ou)d no lon g er keep the people straight, I felt I had succeeded in this exercise in

�ub��h �d �·

Issunulation.

.

F RO M F I E t D N OTES TO ETH N O G R A P H Y

] 68

the place. The difficulty o f disengaging yet leaving the tempers and dignity of all parties intact is a matter far less frequently dealt \\lith in courses on "field methods" than ho\v to "gain entry" and " build an d maintain rapport ." It can be a highly stressful time for all concern ed · ho\\' stressful and in \\'hat �·ays it Vlas so for the Embrees and the people of Suyc, vle have chosen not to say. We "\\l"ent to press . Unlike other books that exploit the fieldnotes of another, 8 the prologue to this one is ent i rely in the field�vorker's voice (S mith and Wis\\'ell 1 98 2 : xxi-xxxviii). I do not remember ho�y \Ve came to decide against making it an epilogue, but I think our instincts were right. Once again the voice of the ethnographer dominates , as Ella Wiswell of the I 98os tells us ho\\' it came about that she \vent to Suye and , in retrospect, \Vhat that long-ago year was like . In the chapters that follovv, using the a\\'kv�rard notation system describ ed above, I tried to make hers only one voice among the many s p eakin g from the past. On occasion the outsider speaks, touching on \vhat seems to be the larger meanin g of an event, drawing comparisons, a n d offering presentiments of things to come. The introduction o f the intruder's voice, clearly distinguished from all the others , can be justi­ fied only to the extent that it is doubly alien . Neither of us has ever imagined for a moment that this account is the only conceivable version of what rural Japanese \\o·erc like son1e fifty years ago. Hers is a very personal voice , as is the one I adopt in my appropriation of her journal. Fu rthermore, Ella Wiswell 's reading of it in the 1 980s is not the same one that Ella Embree \\'ould have given it in the I 9 J OS , nor is my O\Vn more distanced one of the 1 980s like the reading I �·ould have given the journal in the 1 9 50s-for despite fashionable claims to the contrary, most anthropologists I know think of \vhat they Vi�rice as highly informed opinion rather than Holy Wr it. Yet ho\\'ever defective a record it mav be and ho"\\l·ever colored bv the field worker's personality and interests, her journal nonetheless has thi s ultimate value: it is the only contemporary account of the lives of ru ral women in Japan at that moment in history. Thanks to her field"vork, we are not forced to try to imagine '\vhat their lives v..�ere like then, nor need we ask people today to try to remember how they lived . She set ,

I

�1 kno\\'

�

of on l y one exception, which in v ol ve d the editin g and annotating of

a

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