Tag: Fieldwork Reflections
The Familiar Strange , February 27th, 2022
I have been asked about my research in China as a researcher from Taiwan by my colleagues in the US. One of them commented: “It’s not common for…
The Familiar Strange , September 12th, 2021
Himalayan travelogues are full of stories. For the most part, those stories fall into a specific genre, one that I tend to refer to as “my magical adventure…
The Familiar Strange , August 15th, 2021
yelling, crawling and rolling. Later, they begin to show some animal-like behavior: hissing, roaring and moving on all fours. This is my fieldwork. The place is Java, the…
Jarrod Sim , June 20th, 2021
“Whatever your eye can see, it’s vecik.” This line resonated with me while I was conducting my fieldwork in Taiwan with the indigenous Paiwan village known as Paridrayan….
Kylie Wong Dolan , April 11th, 2021
Some months ago, I went for an early morning run with a mate at my fieldsite. After a short trot together, she left for work, and I decided…
The Familiar Strange , August 30th, 2020
The notion of the Unreliable Narrator is, for me, not a critique of the perceived moral failings of the anthropological project, but a methodological narrative construct integral to…
The Familiar Strange , August 2nd, 2020
My own fieldwork experience, like many others, demonstrates a blurring in what is ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, what is ‘leisure’ and ‘work’, whether you are researcher, student, or known…
The Familiar Strange , May 24th, 2020
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In a recent social media thread, I…
The Familiar Strange , July 14th, 2019
As an ethnographer of porn, I entered the field with some hard limits and never crossed them. I never ended up doing anything I regretted, but the pressure…
Simon Theobald , June 16th, 2019
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…
The Familiar Strange , June 2nd, 2019
Neither the Fulbright Commission overseeing my work nor the US Embassy in Kathmandu could contact me and, in the interim, the three other visitors to Mustang had all…
The Familiar Strange , May 19th, 2019
I surprised myself by not hesitating. Spinning around, I headed straight back toward one of those that had followed us into the alley—a woman in dark robes, eyes…
The Familiar Strange , October 10th, 2018
My heart was broken not by leaving individual people, but by leaving something much bigger. It takes us too long in anthropology to learn that the communities we…
Jodie-Lee Trembath , September 26th, 2018
Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin etymology of ‘mundane’ is ‘of the…
Ian Pollock , August 29th, 2018
It’s been years since anthropology set aside the fantasy of “the field” — a bounded research site, where the locals, and the researcher studying them, are insulated from…
Simon Theobald , August 22nd, 2018
During my 15 months of fieldwork in Iran, the gripe that a bachelor’s degree was now equivalent to that of a high school certificate from a few years…