Engaging in anthropological practice: fieldwork and the internal assessment practice questions.

For three visits to a school kitchen a student is answered in short, polite sentences, and the cooks stop talking among themselves whenever she comes in. On the fourth visit she arrives early and helps carry the crates in from the yard; the same cooks then begin explaining, unprompted, why the trays are laid out as they are. What does the change most directly show?

• That covert observation yields fuller material than research announced to those present ever can.
• That the trust which makes candid talk possible is built through what the fieldworker does there.
• That a fieldworker who joins in the work of a setting has stopped observing and begun to belong to it.
• That the first three visits produced nothing usable and should be left out of the observation report.

Answer: That the trust which makes candid talk possible is built through what the fieldworker does there.

Rapport is an achievement of the fieldwork rather than a condition of it: it is won by taking part and it can be lost again. Geertz's much-cited instance is the police raid on a Balinese cockfight in April 1958, some ten days after he and his wife arrived, when running alongside their hosts did what ten days of polite presence had not.

A student records a village produce market from a cafe table at one end of the row on three consecutive Saturdays. Her report notes that almost every exchange she recorded involved the four stalls nearest the cafe. Which comment on the record is the most precise?

• The record is unusable, because observation carried out from one fixed point cannot count as participant observation.
• Three Saturdays is far too short a period for anything about the working of a market to be recorded at all.
• The pattern may be an effect of where the observer sat rather than of how the market works.
• The stalls at the far end were presumably closed, which is why no exchanges there entered the record.

Answer: The pattern may be an effect of where the observer sat rather than of how the market works.

A vantage point decides what can enter the record, so a finding that mirrors the observer's line of sight has to be tested by moving and recording again. Noting where the observer sat is what makes that check possible afterwards.

A student's record of a health centre waiting area lists who arrived, who was called through and in what order, but says nothing about the room itself. Which addition would do most for the record?

• A plan of the room marking the seats, the desk and where each person sat.
• A longer narrative of the same afternoon, written up at home from memory the following week.
• The number of patients the centre records in a year, taken from its published annual report.
• A closing note giving the student's impression of the atmosphere in the room that afternoon.

Answer: A plan of the room marking the seats, the desk and where each person sat.

Where people place themselves is part of what a waiting area organises, and it cannot be reconstructed from a list of names and times once the visit is over. A plan also shows a later reader what lay within the observer's view and what lay behind her.

A student wants an observation record that will show whether the use of a town square changes across the day. Which recording plan yields the most comparable data?

• Ten minutes of recording in a fixed area at 08:00, 13:00 and 17:00 on each of three days.
• One continuous visit of three hours on a Saturday, writing down everything that happens anywhere in the square.
• Short visits whenever the student happens to pass the square, written up from memory at the end of the week.
• A single visit at the busiest hour, on the grounds that this is when the square is used most intensively.

Answer: Ten minutes of recording in a fixed area at 08:00, 13:00 and 17:00 on each of three days.

Comparison needs the same slice of time, the same area and the same recording procedure at each point, so that a difference can be attributed to the hour rather than to the observer's changing habits. Writing up from memory a week later loses exactly the detail that makes visits comparable.

A student's first two visits to a village launderette produce barely half a page of notes: on both afternoons the room was almost empty. What should she do with that material?

• Discard the two visits and choose a busier setting, since an empty room yields nothing to observe.
• Treat when the room is empty and when it fills as a first finding worth pursuing.
• Write the two visits up at greater length, so that the report does not appear thin to a reader.
• Keep the site but record the visits as though they had been busier, so that the account reads well.

Answer: Treat when the room is empty and when it fills as a first finding worth pursuing.

An empty room at three on a Tuesday is a fact about how the setting is used, not an absence of data; the pattern of when people come is often the first thing a record can establish. Choosing a busier site before that pattern is understood throws the finding away with the visits.

A student's first observation at a village mill recorded the men who brought grain and the miller who served them; the women waiting outside with the sacks appear nowhere in the notes. For the second round she plans to record what those women do while they wait. What does the change do to the fieldwork?

• It corrects an error of accuracy, so the first record should now be set aside as mistaken.
• It widens the sample, so that what she finds at this mill can be generalised to others in the district.
• It replaces observation with a method better suited to a question about waiting.
• It changes whose activity is treated as the object of study, and so changes what the data can show.

Answer: It changes whose activity is treated as the object of study, and so changes what the data can show.

A second round is not simply more of the first: changing whose activity counts as the object of study changes the data, which is what makes the extension conceptual as well as methodological. Weiner carried out fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in 1971 and 1972, some fifty years after Malinowski's, and documented women's exchange of banana-leaf bundles and skirts at mortuary ceremonies that the earlier account had treated as marginal — the same shift of focus, at a larger scale.