Anthropology is fieldwork!

 Photo by: University of Massachusetts Amherst  

 

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities~Alfred L. Kroeber

Anthropology is a very fascinating and interesting module one that a student can choose to study, and this is because it simply offers many answers to questions about the origins of many existing things hence, the explanation of it being a science study of humankind that studies all facts about the society, human behavior, culture, tools, techniques,traditions, languages, beliefs ,mechanisms ,beauty and art in both the past and the present. Now, the main purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human difference(Ruth Benedict’s quote) and enshrine those differences, because we all know that being unique is beautiful and admirable.

However, I like to argue that without fieldwork none of all the works was gonna be available to us as credible content worth citing in any research. What really is fieldwork then? Anthropologic fieldwork is the actual way of how the anthropologists gather their data about themselves and people among who they do research, using the process of immersing oneself in as many aspects of the daily cultural lives of people as possible in order to study their behaviors and interactions.

One of the founding fathers of these method of gathering information in anthropology is said to be a British man known  as Bronislaw Molinowski. It is said that he advocated to go out into the field to carefully study what his research was about which was something very uncommon since most of anthropologists found gathering of information in the University labs and libraries worth doing. He would go to a village live with them, learn their language, interact with them, learn the ways and eat their food. Since , his time fieldwork has been regarded as a very essential method of gathering crucial and distinguishing aspect of information in anthropology. Fieldwork itself is increasingly a practised in highly contemporary and traditional settings.

Fieldwork is very important since it helps anthropologists by giving them precise and detailed understanding of information about different social acts and relation of different cultural groups of people of a certain chosen place of study. Even if the study takes place at museums or historical sites, if they use this kind of method it would help them with getting very precise and detailed information about underlying cultural and symbolic meanings of texts and objects. Fieldwork is also important because it influences how research is carried out, it determines the prevailing outcomes, determines the results for the study, whose voices will be represented in the final reports or decisions and it helps in acknowledging  and locating views,values, and beliefs to the research process. 

Fieldwork types that anthropologists undertake differ according to factors such as topic of investigation, questions guiding the research, the field of the research, funders, age, sex , political plus economic factors and ethnicity of anthropologists together with their technological facilities they have.But, I have learned that anthropologists don’t use this kind of method only to gather information instead, they may also make use of quantitative information which we know to be the gathering of information through surveys and structured questionnaires especially in interdisciplinary settings. However, most of the social anthropologists use qualitative data research which is gathering information through interviews and fieldwork. Most anthropologists recommend this use of a method. A variant observation method also exists but in the monkey setting.

Then all this information that’s gathered by the anthropologists is then recorded in journals, articles and research notes that are accessible and available to be read and reviewed. Others are recorded at the academic textbooks of students and they come in handy to learners.

Anthropology is life! The most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.And without it there’s just total chaos in the world!