DISCIPLINE & PRACTICE: "The Field" as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology (Gupta & Ferguson)

T H E F I E L D

"As a metaphor we work by, "the field" thus reveals many of the unspoken assumptions of anthropology (11)."

• Be critical and thorough of your choice of field. Do not settle for a "chance" site.
  G&F warn of chance sites: "The very significant premisis and assumptions built into the anthropological idea of "the field" are in this way protected from critical scrutiny, even as they are smuggled into the discipline's most central practices of induction, socialization, and professional reproduction (11)."
  
• "A "good" field site is made, however, not only by considerations of funding and clearance, but by its suitability for addressing issues and debates that matter to the discipline (10)."
  
• "Our focus on shifting locations rather than bounded fields is linked to a different political vision, one that sees anthropological knowledge as a form of situated intervention. Rather than viewing ethnographic intervention as a disinterested search for truth in the service of humanistic knowlegde, we see it as a way of pursuing specific political aims while while simultaneously seeking lines of common political alliance with allies who stand elsewhere- a mode of building what Haraway (1988) has termed "web-like interconnections" between different social and cultural locations (38-9)."

E T H N O G R A P H Y & P E R S P E C T I V E

• The strengths of ethnographic contribution
  "Ethnography's greatest strength has always been its explicit and well-developed sense of location, of being set here-and-not-elsewhere. This strength becomes a liability when notions of "here" and "elsewhere" are assumed to be features of geography, rather than sites constructed in fields of unequal power relations (35)."
  
• Ethnographic location is less about physical geography than power relations
  "... ethnography has always contained at least some recognition that knowledge is is inevitably both "about somewhere" and "from somewhere" and that the knower's location and life experience are somehow central to the kind of knowledge produced (35)."