ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK AND SOCIOPOLITICAL CHANGE

Fieldwork is a magical word to an anthropologist. It evokes the "far away" and the "different" that make East Africa sound more like fieldwork than downtown Philadelphia. Beyond its exotic connnotations, the term refers to the very heart of the anthropological approach. "Face-to-face interaction," "participant observation," and "cultural immersion" describe situations in which the anthropologist comes to know what it means to be a member of the group under study. The anthropologist seeks to become as much a member of the group as possible-a "marginal native" (Freilich, 1970)-to understand behavior and world view from "the inside looking out." While other social sciences utilize a variety of methods, fieldwork has become the "hallmark of anthropology" (Pelto and Pelto, 1976). The major instruments for anthropological data collection are the anthropologists themselves. Fieldwork deals with primary rather than secondary data, emphasizes inductive rather than deductive reasoning, and focuses on immediate personal experience rather than armchair theorizing. Central to its practice is suspension of judgment: the anthropologist must adopt the attitude of the novice or learner, rather than critic. The anthropologist is the "learner" being taught both by the formal "scientific" process of data collection and by informal involvement in human interaction. The "field" for anthropologists has traditionally been the residentially/geographically defined community. Such communities have most often been distinct ethnically and culturally from the national system of which they are a part. These have also been communities which lacked political and economic power and access to resources within the wider society. The fieldworker enters these communities with the need to develop personal relationships, "rapport" and "key informants." Relationships are built on a growing knowledge of "appropriate expectations," the sharing of experiences, exchanges of favors, and other kinds of personal reciprocities. To achieve these approximations of group membership, anthropologists have helped with the harvest, participated in sports and games, danced and drunk, given people rides, and helped at times of personal and community crisis. Such participant observation is as much a part of the ethnographic method as field notes, interview schedules and kinship genealogy. The same investigators who attempt to be so much a part of the group under study, however, are also involved in a scientific endeavor which has little relation to their adopted community. The issues of why the ethnographer is there, what questions will be asked, and how the results will be utilized, are decided, not by the results of those significant relationships, but rather in response to theoretic concerns in the discipline, advance within the University, or by developmental concerns of institutions or agencies external to the community. In this paper I will argue that the ethical issues of the fieldwork enterprise are rooted in a basic contradiction: between the personalistic methods of fieldwork and the impersonalism, and remoteness to the needs of the community, of its scientific objectives. The fieldworker enters the community both as an individual and as a representative of a scientific discipline, and of science as an institution. As such, the investigator must be concerned not only with personal relationships but also with the relationship between the institution of science and the community as a social institution. A concern with personal reciprocity, without a concomitant concern for reciprocity between scientific objectives and community needs, raises serious ethical issues.