Doing Field Projects. John Forrest

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Preface (Including a Word to Instructors)

      Most of the projects in this book were originally designed for undergraduate majors in anthropology, and they have been thoroughly tested over more than 20 years of teaching them. However, they may also be useful to anyone with an interest in qualitative methods, including postgraduate students in anthropology as well as researchers in related fields. Prior to the 1980s, there was precious little interest in teaching fieldwork methods to undergraduates, especially in the United States. There were some individual instructors who took it upon themselves to teach and supervise fieldwork projects, but no overall institutional expectation that undergraduates need be trained as fieldworkers, and, in fact, there was a significant contingent within the discipline that was actively hostile to the idea of undergraduates conducting fieldwork. There was not even a uniform interest in teaching field methods to doctoral candidates in those days. Eventually seminars and field schools, such as the one created by H. Russell Bernard, set about ensuring that professional fieldworkers had a solid methodological grounding before embarking on sustained fieldwork. Such seminars produced invaluable written resources for the novice fieldworker, and they continue to proliferate. These resources are, however, geared to a level of professionalism that is unnecessary for many undergraduate projects.

      Undergraduate student needs are highly varied, but, no matter what their personal and professional goals in life are, they can all benefit from having some grounding in anthropological methods. While it is typical for a biology or chemistry course to have a lab component, it is less common for cultural anthropology courses to have a methods course. This is true for a number of reasons. First, anthropological fieldwork does not happen in a self-contained laboratory. Therefore, it is not easy to supervise. Second, fieldwork can take considerable amounts of time