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 …
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 …
+ Read More ‘GUILTY’ daughter-researcher: Ethnography, familial politics, and guilt
[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 …
+ Read More On The Culture of Harassment in Archaeology: An interview with Barbara L. Voss
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 …
+ Read More Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew
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 …
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 …
+ Read More (E)thnographic Correspondence and Collaborative Improvisation
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, …
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 …
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 …
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. …
+ Read More Connecting through the Layered Traumas of Fieldwork