On Theories of Fieldwork and the Scientific Character of Social Anthropology

Abstract

Theories of fieldwork explain why anthropologists do fieldwork. They are theories of method, since fieldwork is a method of doing anthropology (other methods include the arm-chair, the library, by proxy, the questionnaire, informants, and so on).² There are parallel theories to explain why natural scientists employ the empirical method, i.e. observation and experiment. All schools of anthropology emphasize that fieldwork stands at the center of the subject. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, who thought anthropology was a science, placed the same emphasis on fieldwork as does Evans-Pritchard, who denies that it is a science. My concern is to pin down exactly what benefit anthropology and anthropologists derive from fieldwork.

The following intellectual as opposed to practical reasons for all anthropologists doing neldwork are examined: neldwork: (1) records dying societies, (2) corrects ethnocentric bias, (3) helps put customs in their true context, (4) helps get the “feel” of a place, (5) helps to get to understand a society from the inside, (6) enables appreciation of what translating one culture into terms of another involves, (7) makes one a changed man, (8) provides the observational, factual basis for generalizations. None of these is found sufficient to make neldwork imperative for all anthropologists, although they are quite sufficient to allow that it is imperative for anthropology as a whole that field-work in some form by some people continue. In place of the view of neldwork as an essential preparation for doing anthropology, an alternative role for it is explored: namely as a testing procedure. The implications of this—that the study of problems and the articulation of theories can usefully proceed prior to or even independently of neldwork—are drawn out, and a new institution of selective neldwork is proposed.

Received February 1966.