Doing Field Projects

5 Self-Study

In this chapter, you will engage in one or two introductory exercises designed to sharpen your observational skills and better understand your individual strengths as a fieldworker. While all people live in social worlds and observe things around them, doing so ethnographically is a distinct skill set. Knowing what to look for, recalling the important details, and describing and documenting phenomena accurately and contextually are foundational ethnographic skills introduced in this chapter. Equally important is knowing what you as an individual bring to the field. Because you are the instrument used in ethnographic observation, it’s important to appreciate the lens through which you interpret things and how you are interpreted by others.

Learning Goals

1. Explore your potential strengths and weaknesses as a fieldworker.
2. Develop observational and descriptive writing skills.
3. Consider problems that you might encounter during fieldwork based on a variety of personal factors, such as, age, gender, ethnicity, or other significant sociocultural factors about yourself.

This starting set of projects, which you can choose between (or do both), involves exploring yourself and developing observational and descriptive skills as the necessary preliminary steps before conducting fieldwork. If you were a biology student learning to use a new kind of microscope or an astrophysics student using a new kind of telescope, you would not get involved in observations until you knew ...