ABSTRACT

One of the worst things that can happen to fieldwork is not finishing it. Until the research is written up, the thesis submitted and the book and/or article published, the fieldwork is not finished. Coming out of the field is not the end: the polished research report is. Mandy Llewellyn (1980), for example, did a year’s ethnography in a girls’ grammar school and a girls’ secondary modern school. The glimpse of her mater ial we get from one published paper is tantalizing: her PhD was never written and submitted, so her data are lost. Peter Levi (1980:73) offers this sad vision of the scholar who does not finish her work. He is describing the wide range of people he found working at the British School in Athens:

Then there was the boy everyone loved who plunged into the Greek countryside like a dolphin into the sea, who had the most Greek friends and spoke the best Greek, who had not a talent but a genius for his subject, but who could never finish any piece of work.