Professor Deborah James, A506

For MSc Social Anthropology (Research) and MPhil Social Anthropology students preparing their detailed research proposal prior to embarking on fieldwork and other forms of empirical research.

The course aims to give you a thorough understanding of what is involved in carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, and what kinds of knowledge it can and cannot generate. It focuses both on the classic fieldwork methods used by anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century, and on more recent methodological developments and techniques that correspond to transformations in the nature of the social. It examines the realities of turning research ideas into realistic plans, in the context of your chosen area of fieldwork.

The first half of the course deals with general ethnographic methods. These include participant observation; field notes and the organization of data; visual methods; media, including internet and email, as fieldwork sites; ethics and anthropological ‘codes of ethics’; interviews and discourse analysis; creativity, collaboration and plagiarism; written ethnography, ethnographic knowledge, and problems of representation; critical approaches to existing ethnographic texts; place, multi-sited ethnography, the local and the global; research into family, kinship and the genealogical method; archives and how to use documentary material; fieldwork methodology and the research proposal. In the second half of the course, the emphasis is on students’ projects and thinking through associated methodological and ethical issues.

20 two-hour seminars in the MT and LT.

Students are required to write and present a paper in the LT.

P.Caplan (ed), The Ethics of Anthropology Debates and Dilemmas (Routledge, 2003); M Banks & H Morphy (Eds), Rethinking Visual Anthropology, (Yale UP, 1999); R Ellen, Ethnographic Research: a Guide to General Conduct, (Academic Press, 1985); A Gupta & J Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, (Duke University Press, 1997); M Jackson, Paths Towards a Clearing, (Indiana UP,1989); G Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, (Princeton, 1998); ; K Narayan, ‘How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?’ American Anthropologist, 95(3), 1993; P Steven Sangren, ‘Rhetoric and the authority of ethnography’ Current Anthropology, 29(3), 405-435, 1988; R Sanjek (Ed), Fieldnotes: the Makings of Anthropology, (Cornell, 1990); H Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, (Sage, 1990); N Schepher-Hughes, ‘The Primacy of the Ethical. Propositions for a Militant Anthropology’ Current Anthropology 36(3), 409-420, 1995; M.Bloch How We Think They Think (Westview, 1998); ASA Ethical Guidelines http://www.theasa.org/ethics.htm.

Students’ progress is monitored throughout the course by the teachers responsible. The work undertaken for this course is expected to feed directly into the preparation of your Research Proposal (AN443): the formal examination of the Proposal constitutes the assessment of the course.