ABSTRACT

Allowing themselves to be guided…by a system of implicit criteria. (Bourdieu, 1988:137)

Introduction

Fieldwork is a dominant mode of data collection in several major disciplines. It means different things in different academic contexts, of course, and we do not mean to imply in this chapter that there is one single ‘fieldwork’ approach to research. It is of particular significance to the discipline of social anthropology, and in this chapter we focus particularly on the place of fieldwork in the socialization of anthropologists. Field research of a broadly similar nature is also significant for at least some students in other disciplines —including human geography, development studies and urban studies. In this chapter we have attributed a discipline to non-anthropologists who conducted fieldwork; quotes without a disciplinary attribution are from anthropologists. Field research stands in contrast to the work of the laboratory scientists that we outlined in the previous chapter, but there are also some general similarities and continuities in the personal and intellectual experience of individual research, whether in the laboratory or in the ‘field’.