ABSTRACT
So wrote John Bunyan in ‘The Author's Apology for His Book’ at the commencement of The Pilgrim's Progress. I have some sympathy with how he felt. Except amongst the most inflexible, the process of social research is, like the skills of navigating among the Trukese ‘argonauts’ of the South Pacific described by Gladwin (1964), one which involves a continuous process of ad hoc adjustment and realignment, major and minor changes of course and speed, appropriate responses to the onset of unexpected adversity, and so on. Unlike the Trukese, however, who almost invariably succeed in reaching their desired destination, for the social researcher it is often not just the route that changes, but the destination too. When the research voyage must be undertaken alone, as ethnography and historical enquiry commonly are, and with the minimum of appropriate previous experience, as is the case with the majority of higher degree students, it presents not just technical challenges but deeply personal ones too. The purpose of a research biography is to unfold and retrieve the technical, personal and social aspects of this ever-changing research process, not just as a procedure for expiating methodological sins (though there is something to be said for that), but for illustrating how irremediably social (a point of strength as well as weakness) the process of social research actually is.
