Field Working:Reading and Writing Research

Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater work on Field Working: Reading and Writing Research discusses extensively what it means to take field note while doing an academic research especially doing that “in the field” (1). They describe working in the field for an anthropologist to mean, talking, listening, and recording, observing, participating, and sometimes even living in a particular place. The field is the site for doing research, and fieldworking is the process of doing it (1). It is interesting to know that not only anthropologist does all of these tasks, but even those outside this specified field could also do all of these in other to come up with a coherent and fantastic research project.

According to Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater quoting from Powdermaker, fieldworking entails studying and asking questions about everyday ways of behaving, talking, and interacting (2). In other words, fieldworkers research people, places, languages, and behaviors and have the ability to make the strange familiar and familiar strange. Studying people and their languages means studying the culture of the people because language can not be separated from culture. They are both connected or related if you like. Therefore, A fieldworker must realize that every group has a culture of their own, and in view of that, no culture is high than the other. This means that there is no high culture and no low/salvaged culture. Every culture is unique to the group of people be it ethnic groups or nations that practice them no matter how strange it might look or sound.

When I read the story on Body Ritual among the Nacirema people in North America, I found it strange and fascinating. It is fascinating in the sense that I have never heard anything like that before in terms of ritual, and I am learning a new thing different from mine. And it is strange because my belief system is different from this group of people’s ritual practices. The author on one hand had succeeded in making the strange actually familiar and making the familiar strange as far as I am concerned.

Another fact is that for a field worker to be able to study the behaviors, language, and culture of a certain group of people, he must live, observe, and describe the daily life, especially the language of that group for a long period of time, and this process is referred to as ethnography. Therefore, an ethnographer is however, also an insider when he is immensely involved in doing all of this stuff described above. Reading Sustein and Chiseri-Strater has actually changed my perspective of reporting field note because it gives every single detail of what a fieldworker should know and how to take and report field notes with different illustrations.