Field Notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology

by Luis A. Vivanco

Are you looking for more opportunities to integrate active learning into your cultural anthropology courses? Do you believe that anthropological fieldwork skills--listening, asking good questions, and being observant--are useful life skills? This unique book addresses both of these concerns, integrating an introduction to fieldwork methods, guidance, and practice into one book. Field A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology provides more than fifty activities to help students learn and practice common ethnographic research techniques, to reflect on their experiences doing these things, and to examine the ethical dimensions of ethnographic research.

As they work through the book, students can fill the journal with lists, field notes, visual materials, and rough writings for use in specific class projects, as a record of skill development, or to think about future work. Each chapter includes four to six guided exercises; some are reflections or thought experiments, while others require students to practice skills by involving themselves directly in their social worlds. In order to cultivate an awareness of research ethics, a number of exercises focus on ethical dilemmas and issues.

176 pages, Spiral-bound

Published December 20, 2016

Reviews

[elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very useful entry-level fieldwork guide that includes clear, essential details to keep in mind as an emerging ethnographer, mapping possible approaches and methodological sequences in the field as well as in the data processing phase, after the field. It can be a very good companion to teaching ethnographic methods at BA level especially, as it includes a wide array of exercises to train ethnographic reflection and method.