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14 Forum 36: from Fieldwork to Written Text FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE, 2018, NO 14 FORUM 36: FROM FIELDWORK TO WRITTEN TEXT From Fieldwork WrittenFrom to Text Forum № 14 2018 From Fieldwork to Written Text for Anthropology and Culture and Culture Anthropology for Forum Expeditions Reviews Forum Articles Personalia 2018 №14 A b s t r a c t: This edition of ‘Forum’ addresses the issues raised when anthropologists attempt to transform their preliminary records into an academic analysis. Participants of the ‘Forum’ answer the following questions: What are the processes by which encounters and conversations with informants become a ‘written source’? Is it acceptable to edit field notes? By what processes do these ‘written sources’ turn into the text of a publication? Is it acceptable to share one’s own field notes and interviews with other researchers? Is it possible to carry out productive research using field data gathered by others? K e y w o r d s: fieldwork, field notes, interview, written text. To c i t e: ‘Forum 36: From Fieldwork to Written Text’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2018, no. 14, pp. 11–96. d o i: 10.31250/1815-8927-2018-14-14-11-96 URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng014/forum.pdf FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 2018 No 14 10 Participants in Forum 36: From Fieldwork to Written Text: Andrei Andreev (independent scholar, Moscow, Russia) Leonid Barandov (Herzen State Pedagogical University, St Petersburg, Russia) Tatyana Barandova (National Research University Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russia) Olga Boitsova (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia) Ugo Corte (University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway) Stephan Dudeck (University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland / European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia) Marina Hakkarainen (University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland / European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia) Alexandra Kasatkina (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia) Ekaterina Khonineva (European University at St Petersburg / Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia) Olga Khristoforova (Russian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration / Russian State Humanities University / Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Moscow, Russia) Mikhail Lurye (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia) Olga Sasunkevich (University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden) Inessa Tarusina (North-Western Institute of Management, Russian Presidential Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration, St Petersburg, Russia) Andrei Tiukhtiaev (European University at St Petersburg / Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia) Nikolai Vakhtin (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia) Aimar Ventsel (University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia) 11 FORUM Forum 36: From Fieldwork to Written Text This edition of ‘Forum’ addresses the issues raised when anthropologists attempt to transform their preliminary records into an academic analysis. Participants of the ‘Forum’ answer the following questions: What are the processes by which encounters and conversations with informants become a ‘written source’? Is it acceptable to edit field notes? By what processes do these ‘written sources’ turn into the text of a publication? Is it acceptable to share one’s own field notes and interviews with other researchers? Is it possible to carry out productive research using field data gathered by others? Keywords: fieldwork, field notes, interview, written text. EDITORS’ QUESTIONS When we go into the field, we look, we listen, we smell, we touch, we absorb the atmosphere, and then we transform our impressions into a research text that describes, analyses and explains . On the face of it, the ways in which sensory experience gets changed into a written text are familiar and obvious: the recording and transcription of interviews, the composition of a field diary (or field notes or other such records) . And it is these in turn which underlie any publication . Nearly thirty years ago, US anthro- pologists already noted the crucial role of these field notes to the career path of the anthropologist and to the construction of anthropology as a discipline [Sanjek 1990] . But how exactly do these processes work? Can we describe them, formalise them, predetermine the manner of the transformation, the reduction of the diversity and multidimensionality of the fieldwork situation to verbal form? Is that reduction once and for all, or can we move back to complexity again? As the authors collected in [Sanjek 1990] made clear, there is no once-and- for-all answer to such questions, but we have at least to grapple with them, constantly returning in our professional community to discussions about how we work with fieldwork material, about the transformations it goes thorough and about how our analytical text comes into being . FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 2018 No 14 12 This ‘Forum’ is devoted to these processes . We presented the participants with the following questions as rough landmarks . How do you set down what happens in the field? If you keep a diary, 1 what becomes of your field notes afterwards? Does your diary become a stable document, a ‘written source’, or is it legitimate to edit it? How are informants’ oral communications, with all the typical features 2 of spoken language (fragmentary, incomplete, contradictory, illogical) turned into a ‘written source’? What changes, is added or distorted in the course of this process? May the transcription of a field interview be regarded as a completely adequate replacement for the audio recording, a definitive stable document that is not to be altered? Have you had to introduce changes or corrections into the text of a transcription after the event, if so, on whose initiative or for what reason, and what is your attitude to this? Do you consult the audio recording after the transcription has been made, and if so, what for? How are the ‘written sources’ created by you in the field subsequently 3 converted into the text of a publication? Do you develop the text directly from your diary, or do you include quotations, with reference to your field notes, in the article? Do you use quotations from interviews to illustrate your own ideas, or do you let the informants ‘speak for them- selves’ by introducing their points of view into the text? Which alternative do you regard as correct, and why? Should an anthropologist make use of techniques for working with spoken language developed in other disciplines — conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and so on? Discussions about whether it is permissible to use other peoples’ field 4 materials have become very lively in the international social science community (mostly among qualitative sociologists, with little input from anthropologists so far) over the last twenty years, as a result of funding bodies’ requirements that research data should be deposited in archives. In particular, a number of questions were raised about the status of the experience of personal presence in the field and its role in research [Forum… 2005; Moore 2007; Mauthner, Parry 2009; Hammersley 2010]. Do you think it possible to make your field notes and interviews available to other researchers? To what extent do you consider the experience of personal presence in the field important? Can research based on field data collected by someone else be productive? References Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 2005, vol . 6, no . 2 . <http://www .qualitative-research .net/index .php/fqs/ issue/view/12> . Hammersley M ., ‘Can We Re-Use Qualitative Data via Secondary Analysis? Notes on Some Terminological and Substantive Issues’, Sociological Research Online, 2010, vol .15, no .1 . <http://www .socresonline .org . uk/15/1/5 .html/> . [Restricted access to full text] . 13 FORUM Mauthner N . S ., Parry O ., ‘Qualitative Data Preservation and Sharing in the Social Sciences: On Whose Philosophical Terms?’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 2009, vol . 44, no . 3, pp . 290–305 . Moore N ., ‘(Re)Using Qualitative Data?’, Sociological Research Online, 2007, vol . 12, no . 3 . <http://www .socresonline .org .uk /12/3/1 .html> . [Restricted access to full text] . Sanjek R . (ed .), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, 432 pp . From Fieldwork to Written Text FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 2018 No 14 14 ANDREI ANDREEV The hero of Wim Wenders’ film Alice in the 1 Cities is compelled to travel around the cities of Germany in search of Alice’s house . He is employed at a publisher’s, where he receives a commission for printed material from the editor in chief . In the course of his travels he photographs various subjects with a Polaroid camera, and from time to time he lays out his photographs with the aim of writing the reportage that has been commissioned from him . Two aspects of this (one of the subjects of the film) are significant for us . The first lies in the laying out of the photographs in a particular order . The order of the snaps, and their reordering, stimulates the thinking of the man who writes . Researchers call this sort of use of photographs the evocation of the ‘extrasomatic memory’ (i .e . the memory of the researcher’s previous state), and the photographs themselves ‘a visual record’ . A participant in research may be asked to comment on a photograph that the researcher has taken . A photograph very often serves as a stimulus in the course of research, and the method that uses this technique has been called ‘photo elicitation’ . The second aspect which we may conceptualise out of the film’s subject is connected with one Andrei Andreev of the basic characteristics of a photograph: it independent scholar converts the three-dimensional space visible to Moscow, Russia [email protected] the eye into a framed image in a single plane 15 FORUM which is material in nature .
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