What is “Anthropological” about Anthropological Fieldwork?： Reflections on its Epistemology and Ethics

As “fieldwork” becomes more popular than ever among researches in other social sciences , anthropology suddenly finds itself increasingly losing control over one of its most cherished trademarks. With the dissipating of so called “primitive cultures”, the traditional intensive study of a single site in the field has become a questionable methodology to cope with a fast moving world. Anthropology needs to go back to its methodological foundation to reflect on its nature and its ethical commitment to conduct “Anthropological fieldwork”. This essay argues that there are at least four basic experiential dynamics at work in the fieldwork situation that continue to shape our discipline’s epistemological and ethical orientations. They are: the ethics of an open and relational self, uncertainty in locating subjectivities, a highly critical and reflective sense of politics, and the labor of emotion and ethics. Thus, we reject efforts to differentiate anthropological fieldwork from other empirical studies with various formalistic criteria, such as long duration or fluency in native languages, and also argue against those post-modernist attempts to obfuscate the unequal conditions intrinsic to any ethnographic writing by deploying various textual innovations. We insist that fieldwork should continue to be the central endeavor in learning and pursuing knowledge of the unfamiliar. In conclusion, we outline some of the most pressing challenges to anthropological fieldwork in the contemporary world and our possible responses.