ABSTRACT
Early field studies conducted by social anthropologists rarely used written documentary evidence, as the societies they studied were pre-literate and did not possess or spontaneously produce written evidence. However, when field research was utilised in the study of urban America in the 1920s and 1930s documentary sources were added to the range of evidence that could be used, for the people who were studied produced and received written documentation that related to their own lives. The documents that were utilised constituted natural subjective accounts of the people’s social world and included autobiographies, letters, diaries, notes, memoranda, minutes of meetings, logs of decisions and official records. In addition, there were also visual documents in the form of photographs and films together with oral documents that sociologists, anthropologists and historians invited the people to produce.
