Conceptualizing Fieldwork

[McCreery John]

As part of work on a paper to which I have given the tentative title,
"Ethnography Extended: A Practitioner-Observer Reads Japanese
Advertising's Trade Press," I am currently reading the second edition of
George Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer's_Anthropology as Cultural
Critique_.  On page 29, I find the following remark,

"Geertz's stress on levels or degrees of approximation and
open-endedness as characteristics of interpretation is salutary,
although he has tended to conceive of the interpreter as being a certain
distance from the object of interpretation, as a reader might engage a
text, rather than in terms of a metaphor of dialogue, which more
literally suggests the actual situation of anthropological
interpretation in fieldwork."

I question the assertion that dialogue is a metaphor that "more
literally suggests the actual situation." Undeniably, dialogue is a
vital part of fieldwork. My own view of fieldwork is, however, shaped by
Victor Turner, for whom native exegesis (presumably heard during
dialogue) is only one of three types of data with which the
anthropologist works--personal observations, native exegesis, and a
background composed of other data (census data, for example) and ideas
that inform the anthropologist's perspective. I note, too, that while
Turner had marvelous conversations, in effect regular seminars, with his
key informants, my own research in Taiwan was far more dependent on
observation, not only because of my limited command of Taiwanese but
also because my taking the part of a Taoist master's disciple meant that
what I heard from my master were, in the main, only cryptic or
fragmentary remarks.

I would very much appreciate hearing what others have to say about their
own fieldwork experience and how large a role dialogue played in that
experience.


John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.