Question

Some famous instances of field work include the following: Radcliffe-Brown on the Andaman Nicobar islands; Evans Pritchard on the Nuer in the Sudan; Franz Boas on various Native American tribes in the USA; Margaret Mead on Samoa; Clifford Geertz on Bali etc.

Locate these places on a map of the world. What do these places have in common? What would it have been like for an anthropologist to live in these places in a ‘strange’ culture? What could be some of the difficulties they faced?

Answer 1

The prompt in activity focuses on foundational ethnographic fieldwork conducted by early anthropologists and sociologists.

Here is a sociological analysis of these historical fieldwork instances:

1. Commonalities of the Locations: When mapping places like the Andaman Nicobar islands, Sudan, Samoa, Bali, and Native American territories in the USA, a distinct pattern emerges. Historically, these locations shared a common trait: they were largely non-Western, pre-industrial, and geographically isolated indigenous societies. During the formative years of anthropology, these regions were frequently under colonial rule or marginalized within broader nation-states. They were targeted by Western scholars specifically because they were perceived as radically different, offering a stark contrast to industrialized capitalist societies.
2. Living in a ‘Strange’ Culture: For researchers like Radcliffe-Brown, Evans Pritchard, Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, and Clifford Geertz, living in a ‘strange’ culture required the rigorous method of participant observation. This meant total immersion into the daily routines, rituals, and kinship structures of the community. Sociologically, it involves experiencing profound “culture shock”—the intense psychological disorientation of losing all familiar cultural, linguistic, and behavioral cues. The anthropologist must unlearn their own socialization to understand the new society from the “native’s point of view.” 
3. Difficulties Faced during Fieldwork: Conducting this immersive research would have presented severe structural and personal challenges:
   • Linguistic and Cultural Barriers: Researchers had to learn complex, often unwritten local dialects without formal dictionaries, relying entirely on observation and trial-and-error to decipher cultural scripts.
   • Building Trust: Gaining entry into a community required overcoming deep-seated suspicion. Because anthropologists often arrived via colonial networks, indigenous populations had valid historical reasons to distrust outsiders.
   • Physical and Ecological Hardships: As discussed in our earlier exploration of ecological determinism, adapting to drastically different climates, unfamiliar diets, and the absence of familiar medical infrastructure posed significant physical challenges.
   • The Struggle for Objectivity: The most profound difficulty was battling one's own ethnocentrism—the ingrained tendency to judge another culture by the normative standards of one's own. Anthropologists had to constantly monitor their own biases to ensure they were recording objective sociological data rather than projecting their own cultural judgments.