"The innocent anthropologist" Notes from a mud hut - a book of Nigel Barley By Penguin Travel Library (1983), Penguin Books

Extract

[...] - the roads were in a catastrophic state : The road gradually became worse and worse until it was just a series of shattered boulders and deep craters. I had clearly wandered from the track. but this was indeed the road. the road was not too bad, though there were two rivers I did not much like the look of , indeed they proved rather a nuisance. My car would make a habit of developing faults half-way across - the rail network wasn't better : the journey, I'd been assured, would last three hours; in fact it took seventeen hours. [...]

[...] How choose a subject of research ? What benefit derives from fieldwork ? It's those points which will interest us now. A methodological choice For 90 years, since the works of Malinowski, the fieldwork has stood out as indissociable of anthropological research. However a new generation of anthropologists raise doubts about this established fact. ( Malinowski, the inventor of fieldwork Malinowski, the precursor : first issued his impassioned cry to the ethnographer to get up off the mission veranda and go out into the villages (28). [...]

[...] but thanks to : - a process of constant error and revision (128) and - a policy of visiting them all, one by one, of asking them to visit me when they passed through Kongle, and of shamelessly playing off one against the other. (154) = It was to take many months of research and detailed analysis back home before the finer points of the system would be worked out, but the basic structure of all that I had witnessed and painstakingly noted in my time in the field suddenly held together and ‘made sense'. [...]

[...] This lack of understanding made the survey difficult: - in a conversation : To begin with I was distressed to find that I couldn't extract more than ten words from Dowayos as a stretch. [ ] Dowayos have totally different rules about how to divide up the parts of a conversation. Whereas in the West we learn not to interrupt when somebody else is talking, this does not hold in much of Africa. One must talk to people physically present as if on the telephone, where frequent interjections and verbal response must be given if only to assure the other party that one is still there and paying attention. [...]

[...] The decision despite everything Nigel Barley was clearly a member of this second category of anthropologists, and yet this book proves that at one point, he decided to obey the tradition and to go on fieldwork. How is the choice made . ( . of departure ? The validity of a such choice was really not conspicuous for him : it was far from easy to determine whether doing fieldwork was one of the unpleasant tasks like national service that might quite properly be suffered in silence, or whether it was one of the ‘perks' of the business that a man should feel grateful for It seems that fieldwork is something that has to be done to make a career in Anthropology, because the older generation had damn well suffered the trials and privations of swamp and jungle and no young whippersnapper should take a short cut. [...]