Doing Field Projects

10 Engaged Anthropology

Engaged ethnography is an emerging research approach within anthropology. While traditionally, interviews and participant observation involved an unbalanced power relationship between the researcher and participant, engaged research techniques are designed to better level out these differences and even produce new knowledge or uncover different perspectives. In this chapter you will use your ethnographic skills to document an event in which you are a cultural insider. You will explore what can be gained from moving away from outsider observation, as well as some of the drawbacks of such an approach.

Learning Goals

1. Re-examine old ways of understanding the relationship between the fieldworker and the people/community investigated in research.
2. Understand how engaged interviews differ from classic ones.
3. Experiment with engaged participant-observation.

The recorded interviewing and participant observation projects are classic approaches and techniques that are important to both practice and master. As has been well discussed in anthropological circles for many years, they have many drawbacks. The classic interview separates the interviewee from the topic under discussion, and also separates the interviewee from the interviewer in significant, sometimes critical, ways. I have already discussed (p 78 ) the first shortcoming in relation to anthropological theorizing in the past. Malinowski’s development of participant observation methods was a giant leap ...