2015 Volume 80 Issue 3 Pages 341-362
Anthropologists generally agree that long-term, intensive fieldwork makes anthropology what it is. If the anthropological knowledge produced through ethnographic field research is qualitatively unique among-and in certain points superior to-other modes of disciplinary knowledge in the social sciences, what aspects of fieldwork contribute to it? Given the centrality of field research in anthropological practices, it is puzzling that few anthropology departments have offered formal training in fieldwork methods. Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to teach fieldwork systematically as a methodology, or as a set of standardized research techniques and methods. What makes fieldwork so difficult to teach? How is it related to the assumed superiority (if any) of the anthropological mode of knowledge production? In a recent theoretical re-evaluation of fieldwork, some authors, emphasizing the open-ended, unpredictable nature of fieldwork experience, argued that producing anthropological knowledge through field research is an incessant process of making and unmaking theories, and is inevitably improvisatory. Though I agree with them, I would also argue that fieldwork, widely known as "participant observation," is, above all, a social practice or practice of living socially, establishing and maintaining intimate relationships with local people, while developing an inimical or distanced relationship with others. The network of such social relations is also the network of daily conversation through which several touchy topics, whose circulation is necessarily restricted, are shared. Long-term fieldwork enables anthropologists to access and participate in that kind of conversation, while raising many ethical matters as well (in the sense of a local moral community) . The knowledge obtained through such personal social networks, which turns out to be crucial in understanding ongoing events and social processes, is normally inaccessible to survey-based research, using questionnaires, structured interviewing, and even open-ended ethnographic interviewing. In order to illustrate that point, I refer to a case recorded in August 2013, when I revisited the Duruma people of Kenya, among whom I have conducted ethnographic research since 1982, after a hiatus of a year. Similar to that of many Japanese anthropologists, my fieldwork style is to make repeated visits to the same place, performing so-called "yo-yo fieldwork," spanning more than 30 years, and totaling some 60 months on the ground. A few days before my arrival, one of the most promising young men in the community died accidentally through electrocution. After I arrived, five different narratives explaining his death were circulating within and around the village in a period as short as four weeks, as follows: (1) The Christian narrative, circulated mainly by the deceased man's father and his Christian friends; (2) a narrative attributing his death to the witchcraft of a certain old man who hates the development of the village; (3) a narrative accusing the man's father of killing his son using witchcraft to get richer; (4) a narrative accusing the father of devil worship; (5) a narrative blaming the young man himself for his blasphemous behavior against a certain Pentecostal church. Those narratives are not simply irresponsible gossip and rumors freely exchanged by the members of the community. With the possible exception of the second group of narratives, which largely circulated outside the village, all the narratives had moral, social, and possibly political consequences, which could have led to a formal accusation of witchcraft, as well as violent incidents against the supposed culprit, or his expulsion, and so forth. To narrate is to relate. When one notices several meaningful connections among the particulars of a situation, both in time and space, such as causal, analogical, or motivational ones,
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