The Good, the Bad or the Ugly: Considerations on Fieldwork and Bronislaw Malinowski

Extract

The activity of fieldwork, that is research conducted with individuals and groups in a real-life and by implication, real-time setting or living environment rather than research under controlled conditions and specific time-frames, continues to draw strong attention and criticisms. Given the plethora of these schools of thought and their critiques over the past decades including relativism in its intense expressions, emphases on quantification as a sine-qua-non, hermeneutics, praxis, semiotics, deconstructionism and essentially “post-modernist” approaches to enduring questions of objectivity, recording behaviour, methodological rigor, meaning and their epistemological references, it is significant that (1) fieldwork still continues and does so in a variety of disciplines, and (2) most criticisms have been directed essentially at issues of validity, viability and reliability in relation to “data”, rather than some grand meta-disciplinary demise.

There are those who would dearly like to throw baby, bathwater and the entire endeavour out, and such critiques are important: in their confabulations, they evoke enduring and profound issues with trenchancy. Nor have political assaults been slow to enter the battle: fieldwork, especially as perceived via an increasingly hapless anthropology, is seen as an enduring colonial tool, an exploiter of the ethnic domain, a servant of capitalism and product of the western will to power.