References
Index
Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide was, from its very inception, a practical text. It had emerged out of the practice of research supervision and reflected the practical circumstances of a particular instance of supervision: Jan supervising Dong Jie from a distance, while Dong Jie was doing her fieldwork in Beijing and Jan was based in London, with Dong Jie sending Jan long written reports from the field and Jan responding in writing to those reports. This long-distance supervision ping-pong was focused on very immediate and practical issues, on the concreteness of fieldwork and of the learning process it involved. While methodical principles and customs were exchanged and emphasis was put on the ethnographic foundations of the enterprise, most of what we discussed was the fine grain of social facts, of actual things done by actual people in actual contexts and of how to address them most adequately on the spot. And both of us gradually realised that ethnographic fieldwork could be described as just that: a practical learning process in which a handful of general principles and rules of thumb would generally be useful, but in which the fieldworker had to be, above all, sensitive to his or her own position in the field and mindful of the affordances as well as the limitations intrinsic to that position. Our exchanged notes became the raw material from which the Beginner’s Guide evolved.
The book was enthusiastically welcomed by readers and reviewers, and it continues to enjoy a good amount of popularity with its intended readership: research students preparing for ethnographic fieldwork or being involved in it. Out of the many positive reactions we received on the book, the most gratifying ones were those that underscored, precisely, its practical nature and its focus on the immediacy and concreteness of fieldwork events and processes. It turned out to be a useful book, one that provided answers or insights not always found in more rigorously constructed textbook accounts of fieldwork. Perhaps the most crucial insight we offered was that ethnographic fieldwork (and ‘ethnography’ in general) is not a fixed set of methods to be replicated in the field the way one replicates a recipe in the kitchen, but an intellectual journey in which theoretical reasoning equals practical problem-solving, in which ‘subjectivity’ is an indispensable and crucial tool rather than an obstacle for scientific work, and in which the chaos of everyday social conduct should not be simplified or watered down – complexity needs to be addressed as such, understood and explained. We are definitely not the first ones to sketch these insights – they belong to the foundations of the ethnographic tradition – but we were perhaps among the rare ones to bring these insights to our readers in a relaxed and practice-oriented fashion.
Thus emerged a decade of pleasant and stimulating dialogue with readers who had used the book in their work and who had drawn intellectual and technical resources from it in diverse stages of their development as scholars. Some of our early interlocutors have, in the meantime, become supervisors themselves and have passed the book on to a second generation of fieldworkers. This dialogue is still ongoing, and this is the reason why a second edition of the book could be considered.
We decided to leave the original version of the book largely intact. Its major arguments and its outline of the learning process during fieldwork have stood the test of time, and it would have been impossible to incorporate the research done over the past decade in which this book was explicitly referenced or tacitly applied. What the new edition needed, however, was an update on the nature of the field in which fieldwork is performed. Over the past decade, online infrastructures have become fully integrated in everyday life on a global scale. While there are important differences in the way in which such infrastructures are available and accessible in different parts of the world (Wang et al., 2014), their presence and effects are pervasive. So pervasive that we now have to reimagine social life as developing in what we call the online–offline nexus – the intersection of online and offline spheres of life and activities, mutually influencing each other in often unexpected ways and transforming almost any social activity we currently perform (cf. Blommaert, 2018).
Our field has partly moved online, and in this new edition, we provide a postscript in which some of the critical aspects of this shift are highlighted and discussed. We believe that this discussion is among the first of its kind in relation to fieldwork, and that the book gains credibility as well as renewed and expanded applicability because of it. Preparing this new part of the book was greatly facilitated by the feedback and comments we received from Piia Varis and Ico Maly, both of Tilburg University, whose input is gratefully acknowledged here.
We offer this updated edition of Ethnographic Fieldwork to the same kind of audience: a generation of research students involved in, or preparing for, ethnographic fieldwork. If this new version continues to inspire them, to assist them in finding concrete solutions to fieldwork issues, to engage them in intellectually rewarding discussions about their fieldwork and how they performed it, and takes just a weekend of concentrated reading to achieve all that – we shall be happy authors.
Jan Blommaert and Dong Jie
Antwerp and Beijing
April 2020
It is a scary thing, isn’t it: the idea of being alone ‘in the field’, trying to accomplish a task initially formulated as a perfectly coherent research plan with questions, methods, readings and so on – and finding out that the ‘field’ is a chaotic, hugely complex place. Fieldwork is the moment when the researcher climbs down to everyday reality and finds out that the rules of academia are not necessarily the same as those of everyday life. Unfortunately, the only available solution to that is unilateral adaptation by the researcher. Everyday life will never adjust to your research plan; the only way forward is to adapt your plan and ways of going about things to the rules of everyday reality. There is no magic formula for this, and this book should not – not! – be read as such.
But there are things one can do better or worse, and whichever way we look at it, fieldwork is a theorised mode of action, something in which researchers still follow certain procedures and have to follow them; something in which a particular set of actions need to be performed; and something that needs to result in a body of knowledge that can be re-submitted to rigorous, disciplined academic tactics. This book is aimed at providing some general suggestions for how to go about it, at demarcating a space in which what we do can be called ‘research’. It is a complex space, not something one immediately recognises, and given the increased emphasis on fieldwork – ethnographic fieldwork – some things may require structured attention.
We will start with a number of observations on ethnography. These are crucial: whenever we say ethnography (and formulate fieldwork as part of that procedure) we invoke a particular scientific tradition. It is amazing to see how often that tradition is misunderstood or misrepresented. Yet, a fair understanding of it is indispensable if we want to know what our fieldwork will yield: it will yield ethnographic data, and such data are fundamentally different from data collected through most other approaches. Informed readers will detect in our discussion many traces of the foundational work by Johannes Fabian and Dell Hymes – the two main methodologists of contemporary ethnography, whose works remain indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in ethnography. Next, we will go through the ‘sequence’ usually performed in fieldwork: pre-field preparation, entering the field, observation, interviewing, data formulation, analysis, the return from the field.
One should note that we do not provide a ‘do and don’t’ kind of guide to fieldwork. We will rather focus on more fundamental procedures of knowledge-construction. There are several purely practical guidelines for aspects of fieldwork.
