This chapter examines skills developed by, and brought to play in, fieldwork. Progressing from generic skills used and refined through fieldwork, the discussion focuses on the geographical nature of skills used across all fieldwork activities, to the key geographical skills and tools that can be drawn upon to construct authentic fieldwork experiences for students. Fieldwork has always been an important facet of geography, helping to inform, validate, and consolidate the study of people and place. Fieldwork remains, to this day, rather simple and straightforward. It involves the gathering of primary data in the field. The ‘process’ of fieldwork occurs through the use and application of a wide variety of geographic and generic skills. The following discussion of fieldwork skills will examine the place of: • fieldwork skills in students wider learning, • fieldwork skills for thinking geographically, • specific geographic fieldwork skills, • geographic fieldwork tools and technology.

Once presented the interactional perspective on sensoriality proposed by this book (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 offers a methodology able to document and to analyze embodied sensory engagements in social interaction. It discusses fieldwork, video-recordings, and multimodal transcriptions, as well as alternate approaches, showing the coherence and adequacy of a video and multimodal methodology for studying multisensoriality. It also presents the empirical case that will be developed in the book, focusing on food as an exemplary field in which all the senses play a crucial role. It presents the field of study, an exemplary activity in which participants sensorially engage with food: practices of looking, touching, smelling, and tasting cheese in gourmet shops. The empirical data on which the remaining of the book is based are video-recordings of shop encounters between cheese sellers and customers, gathered in a dozen of cities in Europe, drawing on a dozen of different languages. This unique and rich corpus of video data enables to develop a systematic analysis of the detailed way in which it is possible, within a praxeological, interactional, multimodal approach, to study multisensoriality in action.

In much of the developing world, legal titling – the registration of land ownership through a formal, judicial process – is viewed as a path to economic development and political order. The introductory chapter explains why legal titling is unlikely to fulfill this promise. It begins by making a case that the new institutional economics and public choice, which were developed and applied to date in mostly Western contexts, are useful in understanding political, economic, and social institutions in the Islamic world. We then introduce our theory of emergence and change in property rights, which explains the situations when we expect the government to define and enforce property rights, when self-governance of property rights can work, and why it is unlikely that legal titling will be feasible as a development strategy in a typical fragile state. We conclude by introducing our empirical study of Afghanistan. The highlights of the empirical study include fieldwork conducted by one of the authors in thirty villages in rural Afghanistan, which resulted in hundreds of interviews with ordinary villagers, customary village leaders, and local government officials.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

Chapter 1 lays out the main argument of the book, asserting that insurgent groups’ dependence on their support networks ensures that to a certain extent they are obliged to respect their supportive constituencies’ ideological preferences and normative expectations. Relationships between armed groups and their constituencies are not stable and change over time as conflicts develop, ensuring that insurgent groups can also lose popular support. This chapter argues that this important dimension of insurgency is sometimes overlooked in favour of structural, ideological or resource-oriented analyses of conflict. It specifies how the book uses (or not) specific terminology and concepts like terrorism and Kurdistan. The chapter proceeds to discuss the difficulties in working with data in research on insurgencies. It argues that all forms of data – quantitative and qualitative – have inconsistencies and it backs the call for greater data transparency in conflict studies. It elaborates on some of the specific challenges related to data reliability on the conflict in Turkey. It describes the interview process, discusses the representativeness of the interview sample and the challenges of fieldwork. It finishes by outlining the structure of the book.

While chapter 3 outlines how colonial indirect rule created the structural conditions for Maoist insurgency through multiple causal pathways, it also emphasizes that rebel agency in the form of ideological frames and organizational legacies plays an equally important role in mobilizing the ethnic networks of lower castes and tribes. In this chapter, I provide qualitative evidence to demonstrate this interaction between rebel agency and structural conditions created by colonial institutions. I first provide a detailed history of the organizational evolution of the various Maoist factions since the 1960s. Then, I use fieldwork interviews and textual analysis of Maoist documents to demonstrate that the Maoists are strategic about their choice of area, based on local politics, terrain, ethnic composition, and level of economic development. However, even within those areas they considered favorable based on terrain, inequality, and politics, they were successful only where the British colonial institutions of zamindari (landlord) land tenure or certain types of princely states were present. This demonstrates that rebel agency interacts with and is constrained by the opportunity structures of land/ethnic inequality available in areas of former indirect rule and revenue collection.

Behaviour can be recorded in either the laboratory or the field. In either setting, it can be recorded using standardised behavioural tests that elicit specific behaviour, or by observing freely-behaving subjects. Observation requires decisions about which subjects to observe (sampling rules) and how to record their behaviour (recording rules). There are four sampling rules: ad libitum sampling, focal sampling, scan sampling and behaviour sampling. There are two basic types of recording rule: continuous recording and time sampling; the latter can be further divided into instantaneous sampling and one–zero sampling. Continuous recording is more demanding for the observer but is the only recording method that produces true frequencies and durations. Estimates of frequencies and durations derived from time sampling will be more accurate if the sample interval is short relative to the mean duration of the behaviour. One–zero sampling is likely to yield biased estimates of frequency and duration.

Frontiers became increasingly central to colonial spatial sciences as the nineteenth century progressed. Examining surveyors’ activities in the field along with the material processes by which maps were produced and circulated, this chapter analyses three broad junctures of frontier surveying based on distinct techniques of seeing and representing space. Route surveys of the 1820s to 1840s mostly gave way to triangulation from the 1850s on, and trigonometrical survey parties increasingly ventured into frontier regions from the later 1860s. By this later period, surveyors and ‘men of science’ in metropole and colony alike deemed comprehending frontier locales a key goal of imperial science. Agents of empire considered these regions as providing unparalleled opportunities, but also substantial challenges to established modes of spatial knowledge and representation. The chapter shows how this ambiguity reached a peculiar resolution, as many surveyors and geographers came to celebrate and to uphold the elusive quality of India’s frontiers.

This chapter describes the sample selection, interview methods, characteristics of the sample, and mixed methods of analysis. It begins with a description of violence and migration patterns over time within Syria. This leads to discussion of unique features of Syrian civilians who had become refugees in Jordan and Turkey at the time of fieldwork. After providing additional detail on characteristics of Syrian refugees within Turkey, it describes the interview methods. Then, it discusses who the sampling missed and descriptive statistics of the sample. It ends with discussion of the mixed methods of analysis.

This essay gives an overview of Albert Lord’s pioneering contributions, through fieldwork and scholarship, to the study of the Homeric epics as oral poems composed in performance.

We outline the place of fieldwork in comparative interpretive research. Detailed qualitative fieldwork is central to most interpretive research, but practical guidance on how to navigate the field remains rooted to the idiographic tradition. The presumption is one of sustained immersion in a discrete setting. Interpretive comparison, however, necessarily requires partial immersion across multiple sites in shorter, more interrupted bursts. We call this yo-yoing. Crucially, the researcher must be alert to the surprises and moments of epiphany that can challenge initial assumptions and open new possibilities. We seek here to develop and illustrate key ‘rules of thumb’ that will enable researchers to manage the challenges and maximise the opportunities.