Strategies in the art of field work

Anthropologists have awakened to the need for a thorough examination of the processes of data collection in the field. Research in human communities is inevitably complex and personalized, but many parts of it can become more systematic than they have been in the past. Open discussion of ethnographers' experiences and methods is removing some of the mystique of field work and is helping to identify those aspects that can be made more explicitly operational and quantified. Some of the important literature on field work includes edited collections of papers such as Freilich's Marginal Natives (1969), Epstein's The Craft of Social Anthropology (1967), Anthropologists in the Field (Jongmans and Gutkind, 1967), and Spindler's Being an Anthropologist (1970). Powdermaker's autobiographic recollections in Stranger and Friend (1966), Bowen's Return to Laughter (1954), Beattie's Understanding an African Kingdom (1965), and Berreman's Behind Many Masks (1962) are good examples of the growing collection of illuminating personal documents on field work.

Anthropological research has most often been carried out through intensive study in one or a few relatively small communities. Thus the anthropologist who engages in field work in a society (e.g., Navajo, Zulu, Tiv, Mexican peasants) does not generally take that entire society as the unit of study. Instead, some community within that society is selected as the primary base of operations.