The practice of anthropology: fieldwork and ethnographic methods practice questions.

Over eleven months an ethnographer recorded who actually lent tools and labour at each maize harvest in a farming settlement. Interviews carried out in her first weeks had produced a consistent statement that 'everyone helps everyone'; the record of observed exchanges showed help circulating mainly within three sets of related households. The value of participant observation demonstrated here is that it

• shows that the people interviewed had deliberately misled the researcher about their obligations to neighbours
• brings the norm people state and the pattern of help they can be observed giving into one record
• replaces interviewing, which anthropologists treat as unreliable
• produces a sample of households large enough for the findings to be generalised to the whole region

Answer: brings the norm people state and the pattern of help they can be observed giving into one record

What people say they do and what they can be observed doing are both data, and the interest lies in the distance between them, which only long co-presence reveals. The statement was not a lie but an expression of a norm, and observation checks interviews rather than replacing them.

Before 1914 much anthropological writing was compiled at a distance from the reports of missionaries, officials and travellers. Malinowski's account of his Trobriand fieldwork, published in 1922, is usually credited with establishing which methodological standard?

• Assembling comparative tables of customs supplied by others
• Distributing a standard questionnaire through local officials so that answers from several islands could be counted
• Extended residence at one site, taking part in daily life and working in the local language
• Brief survey visits to several settlements, with conclusions checked against the reports of resident missionaries

Answer: Extended residence at one site, taking part in daily life and working in the local language

Argonauts of the Western Pacific made the case for first-hand, long-term participation rather than compilation at a distance. The vernacular matters because categories translated for the researcher arrive already interpreted by whoever did the translating.

Boellstorff carried out fieldwork between 2004 and 2007 entirely inside the virtual world Second Life, as an avatar among avatars, and did not seek out the offline identities of the people he met there. His methodological claim was that

• online material becomes usable only once each participant has also been met and verified in person
• virtual worlds are best studied by counting activity logs, since observation cannot be sustained in them
• the methods developed for face-to-face settlements have to be abandoned when research moves online, and new ones invented
• a virtual world can be taken seriously as a field site in its own right, entered and lived in as its residents do

Answer: a virtual world can be taken seriously as a field site in its own right, entered and lived in as its residents do

Boellstorff argued that participant observation transfers to a virtual field site because what people do there is social life rather than a shadow of it. Requiring offline verification would assume in advance that only offline conduct is real.

An anthropologist studying the trade in second-hand clothing works for four months at a sorting warehouse in northern Europe, three months with the wholesalers who buy the bales, and five months in a West African market where the bales are opened and resold. Marcus's term for research designed in this way is

• comparative fieldwork, since three separate communities are being described and set beside one another
• a survey, since the researcher does not remain long enough anywhere to take part in daily life
• multi-sited ethnography, in which the object followed defines the field rather than a single place
• team ethnography, in which several researchers divide a large field between them by agreement

Answer: multi-sited ethnography, in which the object followed defines the field rather than a single place

The unit is the chain, not the settlement: the ethnographer follows the thing and each site is chosen by where it goes next. That is different from comparison, which sets independently chosen cases side by side, and it carries its own costs in depth at any one site.

Rivers set out a procedure by which the fieldworker records, household by household, every person's relatives together with the terms used to address and refer to them, before attempting any interpretation of the material. The main methodological reason for collecting genealogies in this systematic way is that

• the terms and the connections people actually use can then be established rather than assumed by the researcher
• the genealogies establish the biological relatedness of the people concerned and settle disputes about paternity
• it is the quickest way of arriving at an accurate count of the population of a settlement
• the information supplied is more reliable than anything obtained through observation, since it is given directly by those concerned in their own words

Answer: the terms and the connections people actually use can then be established rather than assumed by the researcher

The method makes the local categories visible: who is called by the same term as a father, which links are remembered and which are dropped. It records what people say about relatedness, which is exactly why it is not evidence about biology.

Bateson and Mead took many thousands of photographs during fieldwork in Bali in the late 1930s and published them in sequences, several frames to a page, showing how a mother held a child or how a dancer's hands moved through a phrase. Their methodological argument for working this way was that

• sequences of images hold detail of posture and timing that written notes summarise away before it can be compared
• photographs remove the observer from the record and therefore produce an account free of the ethnographers' assumptions
• images can be published without consent because they record public behaviour rather than private opinion
• a photographic record makes written fieldnotes unnecessary and shortens the time required in the field

Answer: sequences of images hold detail of posture and timing that written notes summarise away before it can be compared

The claim is about what a medium can retain: a note reading 'the child was carried on the hip' has already discarded the grip, the angle and the sequence. The camera does not, however, remove the observer, since every frame reflects a decision about where to stand and when to press the shutter.