We have just heard the voices of Raymond Firth and W. M. Williams, two of our oldest Pioneers. Firth is setting out in 1928 on a lonely voyage into a new culture. He makes his solitary way to a remote island to study the way of life of its people. Ultimately published eight years later, his book, We, the Tikopia, became a classic of anthropology. Williams is describing how he studied a village in England. His book The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (1956) was one of the most notable British community studies. Through their voices we can sense the development of a new approach to research: an ethnographic approach less concerned with measuring, counting and science and more sensitive to feelings, understanding, imaginations. Firth was on his own and in a sense had to invent how to do his research as he went along. Helped a little by the earlier comments of missionaries, seamen and travellers, and the few cultural anthropologists before him, his work was full of risk. In his time there was scarcely any fieldwork training and not yet any manuals on how to do it. Researchers just had to get on with it. Williams came two decades later and he did have the benefit of some training and advice from his supervisor. This difference shows how things were already changing – and hints at how much they were to change!

So in this chapter we look a little at the early days of a ‘soft’ human methodology in the making in Britain. Some of our researchers went out into the field, and into the natural world, in order to understand different lives and human worlds through living very close to people in other cultures, trying to see and sense their world from their point of view. Like poets and writers, philosophers and dreamers, they wanted to understand human meaning, to capture the fragility of human inter-subjectivity, to become intimately familiar with human stories, and to document this for others. All this set profound challenges for good research: both practically and theoretically. This chapter will explore how this humanistic research style began to evolve. It will listen to what some of our Pioneer practitioners had to say as they struggled with these early first challenges to create a human social science.