Essay On Fieldwork

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Abstract: In this short essay my goal is to venture into the role of story-telling and narratives in anthropological discipline and give one take on how it is possible to understand the given role. By drawing on Tim Ingold`s understanding of the processes of getting to know phenomena existing in the world around us I shortly discuss the idea of fieldwork as a cognitive journey defined by reflexivity. When doing fieldwork the anthropologist inevitably joins the stories shared with her with personal stories, meaning that ethnographic work presents conjunction between at least two narratives at a time. Lastly, fieldwork itself is a narrative animating the story of anthropology as a discipline. Key words: fieldwork, story-telling, narrative, anthropology, reflexivity My goal is to briefly investigate the concept of story-telling and life histories in the field of anthropology especially in regards to the fieldwork experience. My starting point is that the fieldwork itself is not an emplaced practice involving data collection, but an internal narrative animating the journey of getting to know the world one becomes a part of, and furthermore the performance one is staging while writing anthropology. I am drawing heavily on Tim Ingold`s theoretical approach and understand the…show more content…
By following the paths others trace for us we follow the paths of our own stories. As it was already stated humans poses a possibility of venturing beyond their own experience and inhabiting the world of others and fieldwork is one of the possible ways in which an individual is borne into another social reality. Fieldwork practice is guided by an internal narrative that animates our way of being in the world and creating and following the journey of

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