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0:00
The method of understanding people's experiences through their own interpretation and trying to figure out why and how people do things from their own perspective, not from simply some kind of outside perspective that might see ourselves as above others or that they are trapped in
0:21
their weird beliefs. Try and figure out their beliefs. One of the best quotes that always sticks with me about fieldwork is by a professor that I had the privilege of working with,
0:36
and that is Sidney Mintz. He was one of the first anthropologists to go to a place that was not
0:52
extremely far away in terms of its cultural outliness. It was not the Trobriand Islands, it was not the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast, it was not the Balinese. It was when Puerto Rico was becoming or was transitioning to become a colony of the United States. He went there - he gets described later on page 88 in Guest. He went there originally with a team of fieldworkers and they wrote together a book called *The People of Puerto Rico* and it was
1:32
in some ways a pretty landmark difference from what other anthropologists had done. So what Mintz wrote about was what he called a "traditional anthropological
1:52
catechism." Catechism - anybody have to go through catechism?
2:02
That is kind of a Catholic word. We will say it is a belief, it is a traditional anthropological belief or a creed that you go through. The creed went like this: "Study what you can see and hear; record everything you can" (Mintz 1982, 186). So basically, you go there and you try to get everything you can, record it in some way. Maybe it is tape recorded, maybe it is filmed, maybe it is pictures, field notes, or most traditional method.
2:40
"Do not expect it to be entirely consistent." This is wonderful, going and talking to people and then trying to figure out how individuals and different people thought about the world. This is something that when you come back from the field and you are trying to figure out how to write these things up, there are going to be a lot of things that are not entirely consistent and you have to, because people are not consistent, and that is an important section of fieldwork.
3:15
*Listen.* I have made this word bigger because I think it may be the most important part of doing anthropological fieldwork - to really listen, to really try and figure out what people are saying and expressing, or when you are with them. In the case of Mintz, he actually did work with people. He then wrote a life history of Taso, a person who was working in the sugarcane plantations as they were being taken over by the United States. Listen.
3:56
"Count the ancillary blessings of discomfort."
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Ancillary - the additional, the added on blessings of being out of your comfort zone.
4:13
How might we be out of our comfort zone? What is that called when we go into another place and all of a sudden - culture shock. And then you get used to that place and you come back and
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you might experience reverse culture shock, or you become so in that speaks to us of how we can learn to be comfortable perhaps in a different place, and then to the extent that when we return, our own place can feel uncomfortable.
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Mintz would later go on to write his most famous book called *Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History* which describes the way in which sugar went from being a
5:06
high-end luxury commodity that only the richest could afford to being a necessity of the working class of our time - make things sweeter and provide more calories.
5:23
"If those items in the catechism do not add up to a methodology for other, sterner disciplines, so be it" (Mintz 1982, 186). Who are those sterner disciplines, you think?
5:44
What is a sterner discipline out there? You said you were surprised to find out that fieldwork was a science and an art. When you usually refer to sterner disciplines, it is those people who try to be all serious and scientific and think they are doing science. And Mintz says, if just going there and being with people and listening to them does not add up to much for those people who want to think of themselves as scientists, who cares? We are doing some art here as well.
6:21
"They have, I believe, nonetheless helped to reveal worlds otherwise hidden or unimagined" (Mintz 1982, 186). So what Mintz is saying is, sure, maybe we did not always have a hypothesis to test and experiments to do, but if anthropologists had not gone there and talked to people and listened to people in the way that we did, these worlds would have never been perhaps revealed or even imagined.
6:55
That was what you said - you said you were surprised by the depth. True, are we deep
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into this? Worlds that would have never been imagined. As I said, Mintz appears later in Guest - we will talk about them a little bit on page 88.
7:16
For those of you who get crazy about citations, when somebody quotes somebody else in a book and then you want to quote them, you do it like this: Mintz in Guest, page 88.
7:32
So in an ideal world, fieldwork should, as we just talked about, document the lifeways,
7:46
the things that might have otherwise been hidden, especially among people who might be outside of what we might call the powerful or the mainstream, who are not represented in our laboratories and classrooms typically.
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You said you were surprised that there were pseudonyms for people. Yeah, because I feel I understand not wanting to reveal their names, but I would expect it would just say, quote, "anonymous" of this tribe or whatever. So I am surprised about that. If you - we
8:31
do not in this class read an extended ethnography. So an ethnography would be - it basically means a writing about other people. It would be a book-length treatment. And oftentimes in anthropology, when you are writing this book-length treatment, you are trying to actually, as you would in a novel, develop characters along the way. You are talking to people who recur throughout your thing. So, to just call them anonymous,
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then you would not get confused along the way. I guess you could give them numbers or something.
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The city name, though - but you would have an imaginary name for that place all throughout the book and a person all throughout the book. And the reason people did that is because the people that were often talking to you might be afraid of being discovered by the authorities. These were often people who were - one of my professors, for example, did fieldwork in Romania when it was a
9:41
socialist country or a communist country, which later found out that she was being spied on as she was doing her fieldwork. So although she was trying to get informed consent, which you talked about, the people knew that she was doing fieldwork. It was important not to reveal the names or perhaps disguise even the place where you were. So there are some anthropologists, and depending on the people you are studying, do reveal names and places.
10:15
I felt comfortable enough that the place where I was studying, you could know the place name. I did change the names of the people involved. In an ideal world, fieldwork should also provide evidence for this thing we talked about in the last class - culture, how culture is something that is changing, contested, all those things. In fact, you said it should be - we should aspire to something that Boas wanted to do.
11:00
Remember that, bringing in Boas?
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Aspiring to the cultural relativism of - I threw in Ruth Benedict too, because for me, she outlined this better than Franz Boas did, but they were buddies. They kind of had the same idea that social life is not something you can rank on a scale. And so by doing this kind of fieldwork,
11:27
it would certainly be, first of all, against these kinds of ethnocentric categories and ideas
11:36
that especially were true in the 19th century, early 20th century, are probably still true today - hopefully less so, but probably so.
11:49
And so that fieldwork would be against that. And hopefully we might even extend it to say that if you did your fieldwork among people who were of a different,
12:02
more of a different racial category, that you would realize that the grouping of people and the idea that everybody did the same thing or had the same abilities according to their race or according to their culture or their stage in society, or were determined by these things - that fieldwork would help to document the range of variability within any given population.
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That it would also be a way in which you realized how, when you do fieldwork, you almost have to
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be a kid in relationship to the people you are studying with. And so you become dependent upon them for everything, and you quickly realize that you could not survive without the people you were supposedly studying. They are actually more important than you are to your survival there. And so if you had these ideas before you went, hopefully the process of fieldwork would help to shake up your head about these things. And as Mintz said, do not expect
13:11
it to be entirely consistent. People in every society have their own beliefs and variability.
13:35
And that fieldwork is, as Guest put it, transformative (Guest 2023, 81). I guess that goes along with what we just said - that by doing fieldwork, you grow in tolerance. And you used the word empathy, or maybe Guest used it (Guest 2023, 81). What does that word mean?
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Basically, you try to understand them, and it is while you are there -
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empathy is kind of sympathy, except it is a little more extreme. We are going to have sympathy for other people and their problems, but with empathy, we are trying to actually feel things from other people's perspective. Now, you never can do that totally, but that is kind of one of the goals.
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Tolerating or accepting a certain behavior of culture and sort of understanding why and how that can be continued, I guess, survive and be accepted by us outside of that culture.
14:59
I think so. I think that is part of the goal, to try and understand people's views from their own point of view. Have a tolerance of the differences between perspectives.
15:21
I was imagining that you were about to ask me a different question, which is, what if you are studying people who are mean to another group of people? Should you have empathy and tolerance for people who are intolerant? And to that, I would say the purpose of fieldwork is not necessarily to accept what people have, but at least you should understand their reasons for doing that, and the reasons for that. Even if we do not ultimately accept that and may
15:50
disagree with that, we at least want to understand what is going on from inside.
15:56
So, hopefully that makes you, as the fieldworker, more empathetic. And hopefully - well, it is not just transformative for you. Who else might it be transformative for?
16:20
Yeah, I just heard cultures in general, understanding, having someone go in and deeply study the culture. And then they mentioned the book a few times, that is important for the people to also communicate that effectively. So other people and other cultures try to
16:45
share that understanding of their culture, so it can change other people's perspective who maybe just might be really hard on them, if anything. Yeah, an anthropologist can never be neutral. And the only way that you can be an anthropologist is by talking to people and having a dialogue with people and accepting that what they say might be important. And you hope that in some ways, you can also talk. You are not just a recording device.
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You are also trying to figure out what is going on. Now, of course, we are not - the goal is not to radically change people. But, many people have written about this. Even sometimes people who have been involved with anthropologists have talked about that involvement and how it brought a different perspective on their own life as well. So, it is always - you want to be ethical, and this is always something that you have to be careful with. But it is not unusual. It should not be
18:01
necessarily avoided, let us say. And so, of course, this is what we call participant observation. So you are trying to be a participant. You are not, though, trying to lose that observer status. You are not trying to fully become or be so immersed that you have lost that
18:23
you are also an observer. And you can never be fully participating.
18:32
One of my favorite phrases for how to deal with this comes from an anthropologist named Tim Ingold who says that we should not be studying people, we are "studying with" people. And so you are learning with them, from them, and it does often involve
18:55
backing away from your own presuppositions and making yourself more childlike you might say in a different society. Or as Guest puts it, it "begins with people" (81). So you start not necessarily with this abstract scientific question, but with people and their concerns and their needs.
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You used a word for these people which anthropologists sometimes use, although some people get nervous when they use this word. Key
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informants (94), yeah? Who are those people?
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Feedback or things like that. Some people get a little nervous with this word informant. It sounds like somebody is telling on you or, there is an informer. Usually it is kind of like a criminal investigation. You are collecting informants. But it is supposed to be, you might say, key colleagues or key people in your field site. And really, going back to the notion of using just a few names, most anthropologists develop a relationship with
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just a few people in the field. It is an extended relationship with a number of people. In some cases, in the case of Mintz, he had a super key informant, Taso, who he later wrote his life history, who basically helped him do his fieldwork. He went around and talked to people and made maps of his town and kinds of things. And so, oftentimes during fieldwork, you are talking to people who are kind of knowledgeable, but then you also want to add on sort of a broad, you might
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say a survey approach. So during my own fieldwork, I got super close to probably about a dozen people who I was very friends with. But then towards the end, I am thinking, "Hey, are these dozen people representative of the people I am with? Or are they simply the dozen people that are nice to me?" So at that point, I did what is more known to do in perhaps sociology. I did a random sample survey where I made - I got a map of the whole town and basically picked out areas and talked
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to about 200 people to try and figure out some of the questions that I had, but to get a broader sense of what was going on in this town. So kind of the interaction between that personal flavor and trying to get a larger sense is something that anthropologists are always trying to do. Yeah, I think if possible, it is probably best to find an informant that has experience of both cultures to explain nuances and stuff that you do not understand.
22:21
And locals would not really feel a need to explain it, so they would not.
22:28
Yeah, often the people who you end up with are people who have gone to different places already and understand that experience and can kind of - and they may even help you with translation and stuff like that because, they have been elsewhere. So yeah, that is a good point.
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There is a film that many anthropologists like to show in class to illustrate doing anthropology. Do not worry, it is only about eight minutes long. [Film shown] So this time a week ago, I think it was, we discussed how we had just received the culture tool - the idea of learned behavior that people share and contest learned behavior.
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Now we get our next tool - the fieldwork tool - immersing yourself in another place, talking to people, helping them make cheese.
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So, as I asked in two classes ago, how happy and excited are you to get the fieldwork tool?
23:48
Another thumbs up. But in the first class, in the culture tool, you gave me a 5.3 out of 10. What would you say about the fieldwork tool? 5.31? Barely above 5.3?
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Anybody else want to chime in?
24:20
The seven and a half? There you go. We are above the very highest number that we got for culture, which was a seven, though that was a suspicious number. But we are up to a seven and a half. Anybody want to go higher?
24:39
Anybody want to go lower? Anybody want to give it a thumbs down?
24:45
Yeah, I agree. Well, I thought actually you would go higher than a seven and a half, certainly higher than a 5.31. I think fieldwork still has a certain kind of, "Yay, I really want to do that," whereas culture, that has been around. I mean, fieldwork has been around for a long time too, but I think it still has that - I do not know, people like to imagine themselves doing it. It seems more fun than talking about
25:15
culture. But anyway, I will take 5.31 and seven and a half. That is more than 5.3. In anthropology, as we talked about, it took a little bit of time
25:31
to get fieldwork instituted as something that anthropologists did. Before Malinowski, for example, many people were simply in the classroom or in their offices, in their libraries, and they would not go out as much. But over time, things became - there was a kind of idea that to get a degree in cultural anthropology, that you had to go out by yourself as one fieldworker and go to one place, one town or one village, and stay there for one year. And then you could come back,
26:17
write it up, and talk about it. And so some people call this the "fieldwork trilogy." There are three parts: one fieldworker, one village, one - what would be the advantage
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to being a solo fieldworker out there? The one fieldworker?
26:38
If you bring too many people with you, it sort of still keeps you isolated from the people you are studying. It sort of puts you in this little bubble with your own group, that you do not really go out as - the bubble with your own group. Yes, kind of when you go abroad and you only hang out with people there in your group. Yeah, this happens to people when they go abroad. So in some ways, being one person, you have to - you are forced to be immersed in that place.
27:16
How about only staying - I am not sure - how about we will call a village a village. Does anybody live in a village?
27:27
There are villages in New York state, official villages. Anybody come from a village?
27:34
No? All right, we will call a village a little place of, say, 400 people. What would be the advantage of choosing one village? One - what is the advantage of village size?
27:51
Your school is in a village.
28:03
Yeah, so that, I think, was the idea that in this limited amount of time, that you could go around and meet everybody in the village. I am not sure what New York officially calls a village. It always makes me laugh when I drive through a village. But yeah, so 300 people, it is people that have been with each other all their lives. They all know each other. If you can know a couple of them, you will probably get introduced to everybody. There
28:36
is - it is not - it is manageable. And I think this - one, you may, in again, maybe a hundred years ago, this was more true than today. But anthropology was seen as this new budding academic discipline. And the idea was that we got to get out there and we got to send people to all these different places fast. And so it seemed there were only a few anthropologists and there were so many places in the world to go, that you would only want to go to one place and report back from
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there. And then somebody else would go to this other place and report back from there, so that you could cover the world. Now there are probably - probably realize that is not going to work. Yeah, until about 100 - the mass majority of people that lived in cities or towns stayed within villages. Yeah, I mean, I think the world was - it was much more sensical to do fieldwork in their village rather than a city, because most people lived in villages. Yeah,
29:39
we have passed a kind of urbanization tipping point. And that does have implications for the way we live and the way we do things. But certainly, in this stage, it probably was demographically speaking, most people lived in these kinds of circumstances and fewer people lived in cities.
30:01
What about the year?
30:09
One year, one year. What happens in a year in a village?
30:21
[Student speaks, unclear]
30:39
Yeah, that - they would probably have - that probably helps with the, you know - you do not have to stay that long. But yeah, there was this idea - you kind of - giving you that little wheat field there is a cue. And I mean, I am not sure how much this idea actually applied to all parts of the world. It was, in some ways, a kind of European and North American idea that if you have lived there a year, you would go through the planting, and then you would go through
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the growing, then you go through the harvest, then you would experience the harvest festival.
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And then all these things kind of had a cyclical rotation where every year you had Thanksgiving, it is the same way that we typically think about our year. You go through this seasonal cycle. [Student speaks, unclear] Thank you.
31:31
To stand out, give birth, and also - yeah, you would probably be there enough that you would see some of those things happen. So, I mean, in some ways, there was always going to be a serendipitous aspect or by chance. But you are hoping to catch some of those things. And you can see how they, maybe you can catch a few births so that you know how that varies over time. As I said, I think this
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is somewhat of an assumption from certain kinds of climates. Certainly where I did fieldwork was more on the equator but high in the mountains. And so there was not that same seasonality, and people would be planting crops all the time. And, but, some of the festivals were certainly annual.
32:24
What else might you have to do if you are going to be there for a year?
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You have to talk to people. You are probably going to at least get some language. So you might not be able to, I mean, you might not be able to study that particular language or that particular version of the language before you go away. And you may rely on intermediaries to some extent, interpreters. But you are hoping to go beyond - you are hoping to at least get some language, if not a form of fluency. And so, I mean, I think these were the things that people
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liked about this and why it became kind of the standard for anthropological fieldwork at the time. People were like, "All right, go out, do my 7.5 field - " But I think it is also important to talk about the things that fieldwork - doing these kinds of fieldwork - should not. What you might not see, what you might be less able to apprehend.
33:32
So I think, obviously, if you were a single fieldworker, you are also going to have one perspective of things. And some of - when I did some follow-up fieldwork about seven years after my original one, and I actually worked with another fieldworker, another anthropologist, and I was quite surprised at how when we would observe similar events or even talk to the same person, we would come out with different ideas about what happened there. And so,
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sometimes when you are just one person, it can be pretty limited.
34:16
You mentioned something else that might be very limiting in some societies about where you are able to go. You are a fieldworker. What might limit you in terms of who you can talk to? [Student speaks, unclear]
34:38
Appearance. So it might, depending on who it is, mean that people feel uncomfortable talking to you about certain things that you might not understand. Yeah, might be made uncomfortable. What might make people uncomfortable about you?
35:09
That is what Guest said, it might not connect as well with people because -
35:18
Yeah, I mean, he mentioned a bunch of things like nationality, and those things can be important. But I actually think, to me, at least, the gender thing is something that is always striking to me. Because in almost every society, you go, and there are just certain places where if you are an outsider, you can go, you can range around and do different things. But they will be like, "No, no, men come here." And it is like, you are kind of - or you slip into that without
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knowing that you have slipped into it. You kind of slide into a gender role and you just never talk to the other people. And, that is just - again, it is not that everybody - in fact,
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you might say, we are sort of particularly dual or binary in our gender. But in many societies, there is this idea that, only men do this, or only women do this. And, or, and so, some anthropologists have complained that they could not get access to anything except the women and children. Whereas other books were written that seemed to be almost from their perspective of the sort of male village elders. And like, they never talk to anybody who was actually doing the
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cooking. So this could, is something that you have to be aware of and you have to try and get beyond. Of course, with one village, as some of you mentioned, it is hard to see the larger society. So if you are just in one village and there - the people who have always grown up there, you do not see those interconnections that are there but are often not discussed.
37:12
And this might sound weird, especially for you - to grew up in - people who grew up in small towns, villages. But the other thing you are going to miss are the people who have left the village.
37:27
And this has been happening for hundreds of years in human societies. People have been leaving their hometowns. And so oftentimes, the people who are still in their hometowns are the people who are kind of maybe stuck there. Many of you - how many of you are longing to go back to your hometown as soon as you are done with college?
37:54
The urban people? Yeah, the rest of us are trying to get out of where we came from and leave and go do something else. So this happens too in other societies as well, that people leave, they go, they go to work somewhere, they migrate, they immigrate. And along with that, it is often difficult to see those outside influences, especially if people only occasionally come from where they are. So they might be sending things back, but it is sometimes difficult to see this.
38:35
If you are there for a year, what else might you miss?
38:46
Yeah, been there for a year, I come back and tell you that I know all about these people from - I have been through all their festivals one time. What am I missing though?
39:01
Yeah, you are probably missing the whole way this happened. The historical stuff. And people are - I do not know if this happens to you, but once people get into a routine, it only takes two or three years and people will tell you that that is how it has always been. "And we always did it this way." Listen, my family, I will go do something, we will do it for two years, and we will say, "Yeah, we always do,"
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you know? It was not that long ago we did not have Christmas this way, but now you are telling me we have to cook this thing. "Okay, Dad, all right, you are gonna have it your way." Yeah.
39:54
Cultures are not, you know, stagnant. They do not just stay the same way. So you are not really seeing how it is changing and how it is going to maybe be different. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you come back and then you take another seven or eight years to write your book. Then you put your book out there. By that time, it might be different. But for all your readers, it is like, "There they are,
40:24
the Hartford College people, that is how they are." And then you just read that for years and years and you do not realize that Hartford College might have changed over time. Yeah, so you do not - you get a slice, but you do not see that. It is especially hard, I think, and you know, I mean, it is hard to understand history. It might be especially hard in a society where, let us say you wanted to know what the history was. Let us say you wanted to look in the archives.
40:52
Are there even - are there - has anybody even written about - are things there written down? In some cases, they might even be in a different language than the people you were talking to.
41:04
We had an interesting anthropologist come here and he had grown up in the country where people would go to study the people in the Kalahari. And so, and what he said is, he was able to understand some of the historical stuff because all the archives were in German, because this place was a German colony. But no anthropologists spoke German, so they could not read this stuff. So, this is a hugely important aspect that he might be missing.
41:39
The other thing that you - that is easy to not get is the ways in which people are connected to the rest of the world. And one of the reasons for that is just the way that people trade things around.
41:57
People actually surprisingly adopt things fairly quickly. So within about 50 years of the interchange - of the time that the Americas and the Europeans and Africa came together, they were already growing corn in much of Africa. Corn, of course, maize, comes to us from the Americas, but it spread rapidly around. If you talk to people today -
42:34
Have you talked to Italians today about the tomato? We would probably - it would be seen as an essential Italian thing, hard to imagine Italian food without tomatoes.
42:46
But we know there were never tomatoes, because tomatoes come to us from what is now Mexico, that area of the world. There could not have been tomatoes in Italy 500, 600 years ago. But now it seems like a bedrock thing. Oh, as is polenta, which is a corn-based - that the Northern Italians, where I came from, ate so much of that they ended up being malnourished, because you are supposed to eat corn with other things like beans. But they just saw it as cheap food. Potatoes,
43:20
of course, come from the Americas and spread around so fast. And in the same way, horses were acquired by Indigenous people, some of them probably stolen from the Spanish. But pre-Columbian Indigenous societies in the Americas did not have horses. But they quickly adopted them and got better at riding them than the Spaniards were a problem. So that by this time, people showed up in the west of the United States,
43:49
the horse was fully integrated into Indigenous society. And it is also - I mean, it is also the fact that they did not - the way these things got traded is, you would trade a horse and then you would sell it along the way, or trade it up for a thing. And so the person you got the horse from was not a Spaniard, it was your next-door neighbor. And they are like, "Hey, look at this cool thing I got."
44:16
But you had no idea of where it came from. And the next thing you know, you are excited about it. And same thing with tobacco, horses, they - all these things move without kind of being culturally connected. And they quickly lose that and get adapted and adopted into the local community. Yeah, it sort of reminds me of that article we read about a year ago, about pseudoscience, zoology, and how some cultures and tribes, particularly in the Congo of Africa, actually
44:44
want some - basically pseudo-anthropologists to come there because it is free tourism.
44:49
Anthropologists do not really understand that. They - okay, so basically that cryptid, creature that these pseudo-anthropologists are looking for is called [unintelligible], which does not actually mean anything in the Congo language. But they think they are going to go out here and find what is essentially a dinosaur that does not actually exist. But these tribes in the Congo will watch them and say, "Yeah, I saw it," just to get them to come there, because it is free tourism and
45:20
it is free money. So, they probably just do not really understand that because people have TVs, they know what a dinosaur is, they had, you know, a full understanding of the world around them.
45:31
Yeah, I mean, I do want to talk about this idea that, you know, they - as often a kind of - as
45:40
a vision of anthropology that says that we study - we study the isolated. Look, we are looking - yeah, so exactly. And, but, that is the idea. All right, I mean, it still remains in the public imagination that we can - we can - we can do this, which is a good way of talking about the biggest danger, I think. And we have talked about this a little bit. The biggest danger of doing this one year of anthropological fieldwork and coming back.
46:13
What did you say the biggest danger is of anthropological fieldwork? The biggest limitation?
46:24
No, the worst thing an anthropologist can do.
46:30
Well, no, I do not know if it is the worst. I am sure they can do worse than what you are about to - what I am about - but what is the worst part of doing fieldwork and coming back and talking or writing about it? What is the danger there?
47:25
Yeah, so the big danger here is, you know, we have talked about this. You - you do not - might not know the history, you might not know the future. Big danger is to assume that in your one year of fieldwork and with the 12 people that you talk to, that that is all you need to know about the people. And that then you can write a book about them called *The Nacirema: Superstition and Body
47:53
Ritual*. Now, for those of you who might have missed that class and missed the Nacirema article, remember, that is "American" spelled backward. And it was supposed to be a kind of - but imagine that Horace Miner had written a book about the Americans and basically said, "This is all you need to know. I got it. This is - this is what - this is what you need to know." And so, you know, it was a - the problem or the - the issue of that fieldwork trilogy is that many of the books
48:23
that were written, we call "ethnographies," were basically describing a group of people as if they were this people kind of locked in time and locked in their customs and locked in their festivals. And it just became, "Okay, well, this is - this is - this is the Hartford College people. This is the Balinese. This is the Indonesian way." Without - what we want to know or what we hope we know is
48:53
that there is variation and contradictions within a society, that people contest or challenge the culture, that is changing. And those things are more difficult to know if you only have a relatively brief amount of time. Three years a long time, but it is also a short time.
49:12
The other issue with this is that fieldwork basically became the way to get a job. So if you went and did your studies, then you did your year, and then you did your write-up, then you are like, "Aha, I am ready to teach." And then so, instead of trying to, you know, kind of figure out what was going on with people, it was rare that anthropologists would do fieldwork after that.
49:42
And so this results in something that, you were talking about, is that the image of anthropology
49:51
is still that, you know, we do that - anthropology studies people that are isolated, exotic, or as PJ put it, thousands of miles away. If you have not gone a thousand miles away, you are not doing anthropology yet. So that is the idea. And I think that is pretty cemented in the public mind. I do not think that is gone away, the idea that you have to be far away. If an anthropologist came to us and said, "Hey, I am an anthropologist, I am doing a study,
50:27
can you help me out?" That you would be like, "Nah, you are not - no, that cannot be right."
50:36
Has anybody ever done that to you? Anybody ever come up to you and said, "I am an anthropologist, I am gonna - can you help me out with my study?" Yeah, it is a little bit of power involved there too, because it is usually, you know, the people who take anthropology classes in college and they go thousands of miles away to where people have, you know,
50:59
other things to do, but they will talk to you for a while.
51:05
Several - many - perhaps most anthropologists are now trying to go beyond that idea of a fieldwork trilogy. So a few - I talked about Sidney Mintz. And one of his team members on the people of Puerto Rico was a - one of my favorite anthropologists named Eric Wolf,
51:31
who later wrote a book about how people are interconnected. But that was their point, is that you cannot study a local society, you cannot study just a village in Puerto Rico, without understanding the global context of those influences (88). And so this came to us from the 1960s and 1970s, but it is still something that anthropologists tried to do today.
52:09
Yes, mentions the work of Annette Weiner, who went back to Malinowski's field site in the Trobriand Islands after, you know, 70 or 80 years that he had been there, and talked to different people and found out that Malinowski did some good things, did some good fieldwork, but also missed all kinds of things (88). Not surprisingly, there were all sorts of gendered areas of life that he did not tell us anything about. And so, this was kind
52:46
of a way of being reflexive or a way of thinking about, thinking about life from a - from the - a
52:56
different perspective. And then he also discusses Barbara Myerhoff's work, who was one amongst, I would say, several anthropologists who would study in their own society (89).
53:15
So, in today's world -
53:19
We have to think about global issues, the ways in which any society is embedded in a larger context. This is a huge - a huge issue, which we - we should have been paying attention to all along, but we definitely need to be paying to attention to it now.
53:40
We have to be where people are. Where are the people now?
53:48
They are online. And so you might be in your village or your town, but you probably should be on Facebook too (108). At least my people that I studied with, they are all on Facebook. I know you are not on Facebook, but they love Facebook. So that is where I am, if I am doing fieldwork, you should be there too. I know, yeah, so you might have to be on TikTok. You should also talk to people, though. I think
54:13
if you are only on TikTok, that might not be good enough. But it is important to be doing what the people are. If they are on TikTok, be on TikTok. I also think that whoever you are,
54:28
be a feminist. You may - if you are going to be an anthropologist, you better be a feminist. So you better at least think about that. You better think about things from different perspectives. If not, just do not even do it. You have to get all perspectives. And so that might mean that - and be reflexive, which means think about your own position,
54:50
think about your own identity and how people might be reacting to you because of that identity.
54:59
Now, on the one hand, we have to get out of the idea that anthropologists only go to these places that are thousands of miles away and exotic and isolated. Anthropologists in general now realize that this is true. We should not do that. On the other hand, I think it is still important that anthropologists go where other people are not going. And so, sometimes anthropologists perhaps want to get too comfortable. You might say, "I am just going to study my own home here.
55:32
I do not want to go anywhere." And as Mintz and others have pointed out, there are a lot of places that - that still need to be - people need to go. And so, they may not have the dinosaurs there, but at least you should talk to them about their lives in today's world. Yeah. I mean, homeless people, for example. Absolutely. So, you know, you can - you do not have to - you probably - you probably do not have to go very far to find people that are completely ignored
56:09
by our - our larger society. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think that, one of the things that - that does worry me is that, I mean, I think that - we are - people still want to read about -
56:26
The strange people. And they still do not consider it anthropology if you are not doing somebody that is exotic or weird. And so, on the one hand, there is the public image of anthropology, but I will also say that - that still to this day, getting a PhD in anthropology is still too - too White and too male. And I do not know if that is going to change. Maybe it will, but,
56:55
we have not perhaps helped ourselves out. PhD level of anthropology - our undergraduate classrooms are more diverse than they used to be, but at the graduate level, people are going on to do this, that is, you know, it is hard.
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