開発実践のフィールドワーク

―知識が創られるプロセスの共有に向けて―

抄録

This paper examines how anthropological fieldwork in rural development projects can contribute to bridging the realities between sophisticated ethnographic knowledge and of daily practices in development assistance.

Development ethnography as written media has been expected to illustrate the dynamics of development. It is an anthropological approach to evaluating the development practices from the view of locally constructed manner. Several valuable ethnographies of development were produced through profound qualitative analysis. However, it also lead to criticisms by development practitioners that anthropological output is produced only after the fact and the ethnography is always too long and vague to be readable for busy practitioners who have to deal with so many things while under deadlines for implementation.

I have stressed that sharing responsibility for daily events in development fields among ethnographers and development practitioners must be incarnated toward closer collaboration. Fieldwork, however, is done only as a process to write ethnography as the outcome. Those processes have not been clearly considered in relation to development practices which are going on in the same fields. Anthropologists ‘in the field’ seem to be lookers-on without any direct commitment to the practice, although the fundamental attitudes and the view of fieldwork are so stimulating.

Based on the experiences of long-term fieldwork in Indonesia and Cambodia, the essences of fieldwork such as (1) attitudes of outsiders as learners from people, (2) sharing experiences of daily life with people and (3) constructing rapport as a foundation of relationships was observed to be functioning for practitioners in reviewing their own actions relatively and modifying the approach in each specific instance and changing situations based on subjective views of local people who also are changing through inter-experiential learning.

Further discussion on correlation of fieldwork into development practices will bring more concrete synergistic effects of collaboration between a ‘practical’ knowledge of anthropology and development.