Doing Anthropological Research

A Practical Guide

Natalie Konopinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135010126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Doing Anthropological Research provides a practical toolkit for carrying out research. It works through the process chapter by chapter, from the planning and proposal stage to methodologies, secondary research, ethnographic fieldwork, ethical concerns, and writing strategies. Case study examples are provided throughout to illustrate the particular issues and dilemmas that may be encountered. This handy guide will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students who are studying or intending to use anthropological methods in their research.

1 Getting started

The search for anthropological questions

Tobias Kelly

This chapter examines how to come up with a viable and interesting topic for an anthropology research project. The key issue is to focus down on a relatively small-scale, self-contained project that can also be used to address issues of wider analytical and comparative importance. This chapter discusses different approaches to the posing of distinctively anthropological problems, and explores the relationship between library- and fieldwork-based dissertations. It also stresses that a successful choice of topic will bear in mind the existing skills of the student, as well as those that they wish to develop.

Coming up with a research topic

What sort of topics make for the best anthropological research projects? There is no simple answer to this, and the best projects can be very varied indeed. However, one thing is probably universally true about all good projects: they have a specific focus. Focusing down on a specific topic or issue can be very difficult, particularly if you are interested in lots of things. However, it is worth spending considerable time thinking about what exactly it is that you want to study and why, as it will make the research and the writing up a great deal easier.

Anthropologists are historically very bad at coming up with specific questions. There once was a time when they would simply head off somewhere, find themselves a village, live there for a few years, and write about as many aspects of life as they possibly could. They did not need explicit questions, as they were studying everything. There was also a sense that you did not want to limit what you found by overly narrow research questions. The assumption was that it was therefore best to slowly absorb what was going on, without any preconceived ideas about what the important issues were.

However, for several reasons, such an approach is not really tenable any more, if it ever was. It is particularly ill-suited to a student research project. Limitations on time mean that you cannot simply try to collect information about everything that goes on. If you have a few months to carry out the research, you have to get very specific, and find ways of distinguishing between what is relevant and what is not. If you try to record everything you will be overwhelmed. Equally importantly, most research projects do have questions behind them, even if they are left implicit or vague, so it is therefore useful to work out what these are early on.

If you can come up with some way of narrowing down your research it will therefore be of great help. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised by how few people do it. Precisely because it is hard people often skip it, or hope it will become clear later. However, spending time on it right at the beginning before you dive in will help you in all sorts of ways. It will make carrying out the research that much easier as you will be able to work out what sorts of information you will need. It will also stop people giving you blank looks when you give them a ten-minute rather vague explanation of what your project is about. If you can give them a two-line answer they are much more likely to agree to be interviewed or to give you access. Having a specific question will also make reading the secondary literature that much easier, as it will help you identify the key texts that have tried to answer similar questions. Finally, it will also make writing up your project that much easier, as it will give you a structure around which to write. Ideally, this means coming up with one, two or several questions. It is important to remember though that these questions may change and need tweaking as you go along and realize that they do not quite fit what you are finding out, or there are more interesting issues to explore. However, starting out with some good questions will mean that you set off on the right foot. How then do you come up with a suitable question or topic? This chapter will try to help you find ways to do so.

Key points

• Coming up with specific questions early on will help you focus at all stages of the research project.

What is anthropology about anyway?

One of the first things to think about is what exactly is anthropology about? Doing so will help you reflect about what the actual aim of your research project is and how you can go about formulating your questions, or identifying the issues you want to examine. The first thing to do is not to get hung up over the differences between cultural and social anthropology. For all practical purposes, they are pretty much the same thing. The next thing to do is to let go of the sense that there is some great big secret to anthropology. It is a very common student experience to feel one does not understand what anthropology is all about, and to hope that at some point it will all simply fall into place. I am afraid this will probably not happen. One of the great attractions of anthropology for many people is its very disparateness, and this can be liberating. The third thing to do is remember that the issue of ‘what anthropology is about’ is different from the analytical or theoretical frameworks you use. You do not need to decide if you are structuralist, or a Marxist, or a whatever right now. You need to think about what your questions are about before you decide how you are going to answer them. Theoretical perspectives will become important later on and we will deal with them in Chapters 4 and 7. The final and perhaps most important thing to do is try to think about what it was that drew you to anthropology in the first place. What was it that made you pick up an anthropology book or sign up for an anthropology course? What were the types of questions that you hoped you would find the answers to? Try to uncover some of that initial enthusiasm that may have got lost as you prepare for exams or write essays. A research project can be an immense amount of fun, and probably the most interesting thing you will do during your degree, so treat it as something to enjoy rather than dread.

There are dozens of different ways of understanding the anthropological project. You do not have to choose between them, and indeed, many practicing anthropologists will hold to several different definitions at the same time. Different departments might emphasize some over others, but it would be very rare for a department to stick to any one definition.

For some people anthropology is simply the ‘attempt to understand the internal logic of another society’. This is an approach that assumes that societies can be understood as wholes, as distinct units. People attracted to this approach would therefore try to locate a particular society and then study how it fits together. Much classic anthropology can be seen as taking this direction. Evans-Pritchard, for example, went to what is now Southern Sudan in the 1930s and produced books that claimed to show the Nuer religious system, Nuer economics, Nuer kinship and Nuer politics (see, for example, Evans-Pritchard 1987). Such an approach is attractive to some people because it stresses that you should not dismiss other ways of doing things simply because they are different, but instead you should try to understand them on their own terms. Critics would argue, though, that this approach is in danger of treating societies as if they are static and organic objects. The assumption is that you can compare, for example, ‘Scottish society’, with ‘Nuer society’ or ‘Malay society’. Anyone who has ever been to Scotland, or Southern Sudan or Malaysia will be able to tell you that these are very diverse places, and that it is very difficult to see any kind of overriding or consistent logic at play in the way in which people go about things.

Another way of thinking about anthropology is as the ‘comparative study of societies and cultures’. Although very few projects are directly comparative, they more often than not involve an implicit comparison. Malinowski, for example, was interested in the patterns of gift giving among the Trobriand Islanders of what is now Papua New Guinea, not simply because he thought they were interesting in and of themselves (see, for example, Malinowski 1978). More importantly, the system of economic exchange and political alliance based on the continual transfer of seashells offered a direct counterpoint to the economic and political systems of Europe and North America. Making comparisons between the ways in which people go about things in different places, can help us understand what is specific to a particular place, and what is part of a more general phenomenon. In practice such comparisons are seldom made explicit, and this is perhaps one of the most common failings of much anthropology. However, there are good practical reasons for this. It can be hard enough to carry out a project in one place, let alone two. Especially in the context of a student research project, choosing two places can make the project simply unwieldy.

Another approach that is linked to the one in the preceding paragraph sees anthropology as the ‘attempt to make the peculiar look mundane and the mundane look peculiar’. This approach is often comparative, but not necessarily so. More importantly, it is an attempt to challenge what are often seen as taken for granted or universal assumptions about the way we live our lives. On the one hand, this means looking at practices that at first glance look to be a bit wacky and exotic, and then showing how, in their own terms, they make perfect sense. In many ways this is a very traditional anthropological approach, and can be seen in Malinowski’s attempts to understand Trobriand economics, or Evans-Pritchard’s attempts to examine Nuer religion, for example. On the other hand, this also means trying to show that things that we often assume are self-evident or banal, are actually weird, wonderful and peculiar. Such an approach is often associated with what is sometimes called ‘anthropology at home’, that is, research on North America and Europe. Caitlin Zaloom (2004), for example, has studied the culture of stock market traders in New York and London, and shown how it is every bit as strange as Trobriand or Nuer economic systems. Perhaps an even better example is Margaret Lock’s comparative study of organ transplants in the US and Japan, Twice Dead (2001). In this book Lock takes something seemingly as self-evident as death, and shows how attitudes to what counts as death, and when it takes place, are very different in the US and Japan.

Rather than the type of questions it asks, another approach to anthropology sees it as defined by its methods: primary ethnographic fieldwork. From this perspective what marks out anthropology is its commitment to the ethnographic method. It is because anthropologists go out there and live among the people they are studying for long periods of time that they can produce fine-grained, textured and qualitative accounts of what actually happens on the ground. Once again, this is not a new approach to anthropology, and can be seen as stretching back to the early twentieth century. However, the things that we study have changed. Whereas anthropologists may well have once tried to study what they saw as ‘traditional’ small-scale societies, often seen as being located in villages, in the twenty-first century they can equally be found in factories, human rights organizations, hospitals and prisons, among other places. However, it should be noted that anthropology is now far from being the only discipline that carries out ethnographic fieldwork. There are strong ethnographic traditions in sociology and geography, as well as other disciplines. Furthermore, not all anthropology or ethnography is necessarily based on long-term field-work. ‘Ethnography’ also includes secondary research methods and many works of anthropology are theoretical, or based on secondary sources (see Chapter 3 for more on this topic). Those of you who are thinking about library-based dissertations should therefore not necessarily think of them as a second-best option. There is a long tradition of very fine and influential anthropology based on secondary sources.

A further way of looking at anthropology is simply as ‘philosophy with the people left in’. Whereas philosophers might try to answer questions about the nature of knowledge, or being, for example, in the abstract, anthropologists try to answer such questions with reference to what people actually do and say. Anthropologists are interested in the same questions as philosophers, but try to answer them in a different, largely ethnographic, way. If a philosopher tries to answer questions such as ‘how do we know that other people exist?’ through deductive reason or logic, an anthropologist would try to understand how people on the ground themselves grapple with this problem and what types of answers they come up with. More specifically, it is possible to understand anthropology as a form of humanistic philosophy. This is to say that anthropology seeks to answer the specific philosophical question, ‘what is it that makes us human?’ As a fundamentally comparative discipline anthropology is well placed to examine what it is that all human beings have in common.

Finally, anthropology can be understood as a political project, in that its purpose can be seen as the attempt to ‘make the world safe for human differences’. Given that anthropologists often explore the meanings and implications of human difference, anthropology can be seen as part of a progressive project to make human difference more acceptable. Early twentieth-century anthropologists were often, but not always, part of wider anti-colonial and anti-racist projects, and they saw their task as about challenging prejudice. Franz Boas, often seen as one of the founding figures of American anthropology, was, for example, a prominent critic of racist ideologies. It might be argued though that the anthropological emphasis on difference has often blinded anthropologists to injustices. The claim of cultural difference can be used to justify practices, such as what is often called ‘female genital mutilation’. More broadly, the fact that anthropologists spend a great deal of time with the people they work with, and develop long-lasting relationships with them, means that many anthropologists argue they have a moral and political responsibility to campaign on their behalf (Scheper-Hughes 1995). In response it might be claimed that although such an approach is well meaning, it is questionable whether anthropologists are the best and most appropriate people to bring about political change. To think that we are is just self-important. The debate here is long and contentious, and there is not the space here to go into it in detail. The point is simply to raise the argument that anthropology, for some people, cannot simply be an academic project, but must also be inherently political.

All these perspectives have their own adherents, as well as critics, and there are many more that have not been mentioned. You may well have your own ideas. What is important is that before you embark on your project you think about what the larger discipline is about and therefore the types of issues you might want to address. If you think anthropology is about making the peculiar mundane or the mundane peculiar, you will try to find sites of peculiarity or apparent mundaneness and think of ways of turning them on their head. If you think anthropology is ‘philosophy with the people left in’ you will seek to answer philosophical questions. If you think anthropology is a fundamentally political project, you will seek to address fundamentally political issues. If you think anthropology is ultimately about ethnographic fieldwork, you will focus on the insights that fieldwork can give us, and so on.

Key points

• Decide what sort of project or discipline you think anthropology is.

The rest of this chapter and the rest of the book will use two concrete examples of students developing their own projects in order to better illustrate how the process might work.

First, let us start with Janet. Janet is an undergraduate student preparing for a long essay or dissertation in her final year. Since she started her degree she has become increasingly interested in philosophy, and the types of anthropology she finds most interesting are those that address big philosophical questions about the nature of life and death. However, she also finds philosophy too abstract, and what she likes most about anthropology is the way in which it is always linked to what real people do, think and say. Janet therefore decided that she wanted to undertake a project that would ask big philosophical questions but through ethnographic examples.

Our second example is John. John was initially attracted to anthropology because he thought it would help him to understand different cultures and societies. However, as he set about preparing for his long essay or dissertation in his final year he realized that what interested him most was not the exotic, but the seemingly familiar. He enjoyed reading those books that made him question things about his own life that he had previously taken for granted. He therefore decided that he wanted to do a project that would hopefully do the same.

Think practical

The next step is to think practical. This means thinking about what skills you will need to carry out a piece of research and which skills you have. If you will need to speak a foreign language and you currentl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: about Doing Anthropological Research
• 1. Getting started: the search for anthropological questions
• 2. Planning your research project
• 3. On the primary importance of secondary research
• 4. Doing research: anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork
• 5. Doing research: fieldwork practicalities
• 6. Ethics
• 7. Sorting things out: organizing and interpreting your data
• 8. Communicating the research and writing up
• Conclusion: after the dissertation
• Index