Experiences of Field Work and Writing

Anthropology and fieldwork we Siamese twins. The method of fieldwork boil its genesis in anthropology. With the passages( time its importance was realised by the other disciplines of social sciences and humanities. In the beginning, fieldwork was largely conducted with the so-called `primitive' communities, but later it came to be carried out in all locations, including the modern urban society and its various institutions. This edited volume, divided in two parts, comprises articles on experiences of carrying out fieldwork in different contexts. The writers address the issues of rapport-establishment, veracity and reliability, jotting down the notes, and the ethical and political aspects of data collection. The volume notices that it is just not enough to collect data and analyze the details. The job of the fieldworker is to write up an ethnographic account, which is a detailed, nuanced, and interpreted description of a situation. And, it is here that many fieldworkers face a gargantuan task —of writing up the text. Many suffer from what has come to be known as the "writer's block", which is the inability of one to write persuasively and cogently. The second part of this volume is devoted to this, wherein the authors give first-hand accounts of how they wrote up their doctoral dissertations, and also the points that the budding writers should keep in mind. The volume argues that conducting fieldwork and writing up ethnographic accounts are two sides of the same coin, but expertise in one does not necessarily increase one's expertise in the other. One has to 'learn' writing in as much as one has to `learn' the craft of fieldwork.