The selection of a particular population or site for ethnographic research is ordinarily related to some unanswered question or outstanding problem in the body of comparative anthropological theory. Personal predilections or connections of researchers also shape this selection, but the field-worker still must justify his or her choice in terms of some significant theory to which the project is addressed. Usually this justification is made explicit in a written proposal for funds to underwrite the fieldwork.
While ethnographic fieldwork is thus lodged from conception in comparative anthropological theory (in one of the many varieties or schools discussed in this Encyclopedia), the comparative point of the anthropological triangle also moulds the ethnographic process in two further ways. First, anthropologists are imbued with a crosscultural perspective by training and reading. At each step in the ethnographic process they constantly refer to the global range of societies with which they are familiar. When addressing any aspect of social life—marriage, leadership, *ethnicity, etc.—mentally they run through examples of similarities and differences elsewhere. Unlike other social sciences that see Western experience as the centre and as the norm, anthropology fixes each case within the widest co-ordinates—all social formations, globally, through human history.
Second, the comparative perspective focuses ethnographic attention on trends and transitions, not just on similarities and differences at random (which are infinite). Rather than treating each ethnographic instance as unique (which in terms of extreme cultural *relativism it is), ethnographers place the social phenomena they observe within comparative frames (*hunting and gathering, †horticultural, †agricultural, *pastoral, †industrial, *colonial, neo-colonial regimes; co-operative, competitive, individualistic societies; *gender subordination, complementarity or equality; etc.). Ethnographies in turn provoke debate, revision and innovation in theorizing. And behind this, and behind the ethnographic process itself, lies the problem of identifying what is most deserving of close attention within the flux of daily life—the patterns of behaviour and change that effect shifts in the social order at large.
While significant theories bring ethnographers to particular locations, actors and activities, once they arrive they begin to listen as well as watch. Often they must first learn to listen—learn the language, the local vocabulary and the current verbal conventions. Ethnographic fieldwork now turns away from theoretical discourse and to the viewpoints and concepts of the people (informants, subjects, actors, consultants) themselves. Ethnographers aim to document how the people see and talk about their everyday social activities and groupings, and the wider worlds they live in. It is their normal scenes of activity, topics of conversation and standards of evaluation that are the objects of ethnographic fieldwork.
This is not begun by announcing: ‘I’m your anthropologist; when can I interview you?’ Ethnographers must be honest about their role and sponsorship, but their paramount aim is to listen, and to move as quickly as possible into natural settings of social life, the places people would be, doing what they would be doing, if the ethnographer were not there. Interviews become useful at later stages of fieldwork; participation observation begins by listening to what British anthropologist †Audrey Richards called ‘speech in action.’ As ethnographers watch and listen in a wide-ranging manner (though within parameters set by the significant theories that bring them there), they learn to understand culturally meaningful conventions, and to formulate culturally appropriate questions.
As this initial stage of the ethnographic process develops, the fieldworker must constantly make decisions about where to be, whom to listen to, what events to follow, and what safely to ignore and leave out. These decisions are guided both by the significant theories prefiguring fieldwork, and by the theories of significance that arise in the field. These latter theories (hunches, hypotheses, ideas about connections and relationships) emerge as participant observation and listening to speech in action proceeds. They suggest what people and activities to focus upon, what places and events to attend, and what objects and their circulation to follow.
As this occurs, the fieldwork ‘funnel’ narrows, to use Michael Agar’s (1980) apt metaphor. The early period is wide, open, and nearly allencompassing. As theories of significance emerge, pan out, or are discarded, the funnel of informants, events, and activities narrows. Goals sharpen; research design crystallizes as cultural knowledge grows; wide-ranging fieldnotes are reread, and suggest more precise directions to follow; specific bodies of records (of *household composition, *land tenure, ritual performances, life histories, *folklore, etc.) are collected systematically.
One side of ethnography is unmediated by communication with the actors. As observers, ethnographers watch, count, and record things in their fieldnotes—numbers of people in events, their positions, their comings and goings; objects, inventories, exchanges, movements, orderings, sequences, associations, assemblages and arrangements of all sorts. The other side of ethnographic work consists of †speech events, scenes of communication in which the ethnographer is a passive or active participant. And like Agar’s funnel, the speech events of fieldwork (here classed in six categories) also move from wide to narrow, from open to more focused.
(1) Ethnography begins with situated listening. Here the actors control topicality (talking to each other about what they usually do), and the anthropologist is admitted to their turf (the locations they usually occupy). Early on, as trust is established, fieldworkers place themselves in a wide sampling of such places; as the research funnel narrows, an ethnographer becomes more selective about where to listen.
(2) Still on the informants’ turf, and still in the accustomed activities of daily life, the anthropologist soon starts to enter natural conversations, and begins to shift topicality to his or her own interests. This process starts gently, by moving appropriately into rounds of chatting, *gossiping, and ordinary comment. As cultural competence increases (and as theories of significance start to emerge), the fieldworker also attempts to direct conversations by introducing questions and suggesting topics for responses from informants.
(3) Though not a major part of ethnographic practice, in some instances, and while still on the informants’ turf, the fieldworker may ask direct and pointed questions, and attempt to secure precise pieces of data. Interventions of this sort are dangerous—the inappropriateness of such seizures of topicality in everyday settings may be jarring to the actors. Typically speech events of this sort occur in the final days of fieldwork, when local acceptance is at its peak, research goals are most pressing, and the fieldwork funnel approaches its narrow end.
(4) Usually after some initial period of field-work (a few months perhaps), interviews may begin. This class of speech events is disruptive the informant is removed from her or his turf, either to the ethnographer’s household or office, or by transforming an everday location into a scene of ethnographer-informant dialogue (an activity that would otherwise not be occurring there). Typically the earliest of these deliberate breaks in time-place flow reserve topicality for the actor. In such open-ended (or discovery) interviews, the informant moves the conversation according to his or her own interests.
(5) In later and more productive interviews, the ethnographer begins to assert control. Topics are introduced, allowing the informant to expand freely upon their own point of view and knowledge. In more structured ethnographic interviews, topicality is more firmly shaped and directed by the fieldworker; informant responses move away from orations and free commentaries, and to more specific responses to questions.
(6) In the most focused form of interview, the ethnographer controls both turf and topicality as fully as possible. Questionnaires and interview schedules may be used, and the objective is to obtain particular types and pieces of data. These typically include household interviews, psychological tests, or reports of disputes, but may also encompass repeated interview sessions to secure lengthy life histories, with the anthropologist guiding the subject according to pre-set standards of scope and comprehensiveness.
The production of notes and records (Sanjek 1990:92–121) begins to move the ethnographic process towards its ultimate written products. Focused interview sessions with seated informants often permit direct transcription of verbal statements. But in open-ended and ethnographic interviews, brief written notes—what Simon Ottenberg (in Sanjek 1990) terms scratch notes—are taken during the session, and these form the basis for the construction later of fuller written field-notes. Anthropologists often go through this two-step process even when interviews are tape recorded, both as a backup to and index of the taped session, and because of the analytic gains many ethnographers note in transforming their scratch notes into fuller descriptive fieldnotes.
In participant observation in natural settings, similar brief jottings may be inscribed, but major attention is directed to the event in progress. Often it is not even possible to record scratch notes, and both they and fuller fieldnote description occur later. Margaret Mead wrote about the nagging pressure to type-up fieldnotes from scratch notes, and about the danger of scratch notes growing ‘cold’ when this is delayed, even by one day. But she also wrote of the satisfaction of being caught up with this work, and of the importance for later ethnographic writing of the insights gained in moving from scratch notes to descriptive field-notes. Ottenberg sees this step as the interaction of scratch notes and headnotes, the stored memories and interpretations that arise from direct participant observation as filtered by the ethnographer’s overall theoretical stance. Headnotes form an essential complement to fieldnotes (and to more formal fieldwork data sets, or records). Headnotes are employed to make sense of one’s fieldnotes when they are reread later for ethnographic writing projects. The importance of headnotes is particularly evident when anthropologists attempt to use another ethnographer’s fieldnotes, and quickly realize how difficult it is to understand them without any headnotes of their own.
Fieldnotes and records present ethnographers with great masses of information—hundreds, even thousands of pages—that may be arranged minimally in chronological order or by topic. Malinowski urged that fieldworkers constantly read and begin to organize their notes while still in the field, but more focused work on them ordinarily occurs when fieldwork is over. As ethnographers turn to ethnographic writing, they must readdress the theoretical discourse they turn away from in fieldwork. Fieldnotes and headnotes must now be related directly to the comparative and contextual points of the anthropological triangle.
On paper, two types of documents (each with many iterations and subdivisions) link fieldnotes and ethnographic writings. Book or article outlines key the writing process to comparative theoretical ideas and contextual data sources against which fieldnote evidence will be weighed and interpreted. Indexes of fieldnotes and records are refined to locate relevant data for the topics of concern in the writing outlines. The ethnographer then works back and forth along the fieldnote-index-outlineethnography continuum. At the same time, considerations are made as to format, style, readership, manner of presentation, and direct use of fieldnotes and informant statements. These issues are considered both through emulation of admired models of ethnographic writing, and through attention to a critical literature on ethnographic writing that arose in the 1980s (Clifford 1983; Geertz 1988; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Sperber 1985). This *postmodernist concern with ‘the crisis of representation’ adds to earlier forms of ethnographic criticism that focus primarily on faults of contextualization and which have produced ever higher standards in historical, political-economic, ecological, demographic, statistical and legal back-grounding.
Beyond these textual and contextual critiques of ethnography, and those that address an ethnography’s acknowledgement of, and relevance to, comparative theoretical work, there are also internal canons of validity by which ethnographic writing may be evaluated (Sanjek 1990:393–404). The first of these is theoretical candour, the openness with which the ethnographer addresses the significant theories and the local theories of significance that structured the fieldwork process. A second canon calls for explicit depiction of the ethnographer’s fieldwork path—the number of informants from whom information was obtained, in what ways, and their relationship both to the wider population the ethnography concerns and to each other. A third canon concerns information about the fieldnote evidence itself: not simply ‘how much’ and its basis in participant observation or interviews but more significantly the precise relationship of notes and records to the written ethnography. Some ethnographies utilize fieldnotes directly, even masses of them; others, for rhetorical or narrative purposes, do not, and need not. What matters in the end is that readers of an ethnography have a clear picture of what the ethnographer did and why, whom they talked to and learned from, and what they brought back to document it.
