What Is Field Work?

Field work refers to the process by which specially trained human scholars personally enter a community and obtain first-hand research materials through participation methods such as direct observation, interviews, and living experience. Field work is the core of anthropology and a clear feature of anthropology. It is not only a way to gain cultural understanding on the ground and its research techniques and tools, but also contains a cultural practice epistemology and methodology.

Field work

Early anthropologists based on the socio-cultural data of "barbarians" or "primitives", archives of colonial authorities, travellers, and missionary descriptions carried out theoretical construction on the "easy chair". But for almost a century, British masters of functionalism

Early anthropology to serve Western powers worldwide

Traditional anthropology takes different culture as the research object, so the identity of the field worker is different from that of the researched person.

The community research that aims to "see the big in small" has always been

Traditional anthropological fieldwork separates the West from the non-Western, tradition and modernity, cities and villages, customs and rationality, and considers that what is traditional is rural and customary, and what is modern is rational and urban. This dichotomy determines that fieldwork adopts a top-down approach of "civilization" and "barbarism" to place Western society at the center. However, the cross-cultural communication and cooperation, the development of science and technology, and the movement of population in today's world have greatly shortened the distance between fieldworkers and research subjects. These facts overthrow the concept of the opposition between tradition and change, the convention between custom and reason from the West. In fact, in field work, anthropologists and research subjects are equal, and they are both cultural presenters.

1. The "long" and "short" of time

Anthropology

In general, science pursues general principles and humanities pursue individual cases.

The dispute between academics and applications is a long-standing practical situation in the field of humanities and social sciences. Li Qi and Fei Xiaotong hold different views on the academic and applied contention. Leach focuses on theoretical construction. He opposes the combination of academics and applications, and believes that the mission of anthropology is to reveal or explore the sense of ethnic (ethnic / ethnic) superiority. He believes that the knowledge obtained through in-depth and detailed local research is applicable to any investigation of human society. Fei Xiaotong advocated a combination of the two, and advocated an anthropological type based on practice, and criticized Li Qi's pure academic research.