ABSTRACT
This intervention considers what it might mean if the people approached field/s undisciplined: to expand understandings of what counts as ethnographic fieldwork, to destabilize conventions that restrict, and to re-envision the field/s as something else altogether, opening up spaces for unruly scholarship and for caring relations. In response, anthropologists try to find significance, especially with every global crisis, promising to help solve the world’s problems, even though the very practice of fieldwork has so often reproduced the liberal (Boasian) logics involved in the creation of those world problems in the first place. Fieldwork, and field techniques, remain a vestige of our colonial histories and our imperial presents. Despite robust critiques of the empire hauntings of which anthropology consists today, the field remains central to how anthropologists approach ethnographic research. Despite robust critiques of the empire hauntings of which anthropology consists today, the field remains central to how anthropologists approach ethnographic research.
