Tag: fieldwork

Nothing easy about this one

Nothing easy about this one

I’m sitting in a semi-dark room, the electricity has just cut out, and there’s a slight chill in the air. I love being in MohenjoDaro (Sindh, Pakistan) in December. It’s cold at night and it’s hot during the day, unlike the summer, where there is nowhere to hide from the heat. The winter is more playful with the weather. However, living on the site isn’t play. Without being romantic about it, there’s little electricity, hardly any internet, no consistent mobile {+}

‘GUILTY’ daughter-researcher: Ethnography, familial politics, and guilt

‘GUILTY’ daughter-researcher: Ethnography, familial politics, and guilt

By Bhargabi Das I would like to begin by giving a little context of my research and my family and possibly how they overlapped over the course of my fieldwork. My research looks at char areas in Assam, India. Chars are river islands and are extremely unstable, undergoing constant erosion. In Assam, the chars are largely inhabited by Bengali Muslims whose ancestors were encouraged to come during colonial times to increase productivity from such fertile riverine lands. However, as more {+}

On The Culture of Harassment in Archaeology: An interview with Barbara L. Voss

On The Culture of Harassment in Archaeology: An interview with Barbara L. Voss

[Content advisory: This article discusses harassment and discrimination in archaeology, including discussion of sexual assault.] On the morning of March 30, 2021, three articles on the culture of harassment within archaeology dropped. And it was epic. Across three articles, Barbara (Barb) Voss reviewed and analyzed current research about the prevalence and patterns of harassment within our discipline. Most useful was her list of proven interventions that have demonstrable results in reducing harassment. Most difficult and heart wrenching to read were {+}

Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew

Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew

By Adam Fleischmann The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in {+}

On Gutters and Ethnography

On Gutters and Ethnography

In a departure from more conventional communication methods in academia, I’m exploring how comics–a medium I love to read and am learning to make (thank you to my teacher in pre-pandemic times, Julian Peters!)–speak to ethnographic practice. In particular, I am wrestling with how the gutter between comics panels is something to consider in terms of ethnographic narratives. The work I refer to below is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is an excellent resource for comics artists and readers alike. {+}

(E)thnographic Correspondence and Collaborative Improvisation

(E)thnographic Correspondence and Collaborative Improvisation

by Joelle Powe, Thea McRae, Christina Jones and Laith A. Ayogu. This piece emerged from our experiences as a group of four students in an undergraduate anthropology methods course at Bard College, “Doing Ethnography.” In response to changing circumstances that rendered more conventional face-to-face forms of engagement—presumed by our methods curriculum—no longer possible, we undertook a collective reconstitution of our ethnographic projects, launching a (web)site as a platform for improvisation. This platform allowed us, and other contributors, to make sense of {+}

Home, Work, Homework, and Fieldwork

Home, Work, Homework, and Fieldwork

by Yukun Zeng (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) China was the first country hit by COVID-19. Due to the government-enforced Wuhan lockdown and strict self-isolation, most Chinese people—including me—have stayed at home since January, becoming pandemic spectators, both national and global: reading news, watching the case numbers waxing and waning. In this spectatorship, only macro-scale actors like governments and WHO seem to do the real work. As China’s situation has improved, and China became seen as an expert {+}

Disaster, Dystopia, and Disphony

Disaster, Dystopia, and Disphony

by Pranathi Diwakar (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) My last day of “fieldwork” was on March 14th, 2020. A chart-topping Gaana singer from the 1990s had agreed to meet with me, and what was supposed to be a casual chat ended up becoming an impromptu house concert for an audience of one—me. Gaana is a musical style that acquired prominence in 1980s Chennai with the cassette revolution, but it originated in the early 20th century as a funeral {+}

Pandemic Productivity

Pandemic Productivity

by Hanna Pickwell (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) There were two moments when it became clear that the dissertation project I had developed for four years was not going to happen in the way I had planned. The first came at the beginning of February, when I received notice that, out of concern for our safety in the wake of the first outbreak of COVID-19, the granting agency supporting my work was ordering all grantees to leave China {+}

Connecting through the Layered Traumas of Fieldwork

Connecting through the Layered Traumas of Fieldwork

By CD Green (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) Within the span of two hours on April 15, I received two coronavirus-related alerts from the Kanaky/New Caledonian news. The first was a notification about another day with zero new cases of the virus—the small Pacific island had been relatively protected up to this point. The second was an announcement: according to the Overseas Minister of France, the referendum on Kanaky/New Caledonia’s independence from France would continue as scheduled on {+}