Fieldwork Quotes:

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

- Margaret Mead

topic: Inspirational, Inspiring, Laughter, Individual Differences, Anthropology

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

- Margaret Mead

topic: Air, Way, Metamorphosis, Fieldwork

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.

- Lily King

source: Source: www.guernicamag.com

topic: Writing, Culture, Hell, Fieldwork

I find myself doing fieldwork physically, in the tradition of anthropology. I literally go to the opposite end of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can, only to find the closest things to me when I get there.

- Aleksandra Mir

source: Interview with Christopher Bollen, believermag.com. January 1, 2004.

topic: Opposites, Exotic, World, Faraway Places, Fieldwork

Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.

- Marvin Harris

topic: Mean, People, Culture, Ethnography, Fieldwork

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Important, Legends, Fierce, Fieldwork

I was a lousy academic. I spent most of my time in the cafeteria. But I met fantastic people from all kinds of fields; law, medicine, history, and they eventually dispersed all over the world to do their fieldwork. I liked the way these people committed to the long term in a sincere, visionary way. Their projects weren't about "next season." They were ten-year commitments. They were lifestyle choices that had traditions of fieldwork built into them - moving around, living on location, discipline, a real rigor for research.

- Aleksandra Mir

topic: Real, Moving, Commitment, Cafeteria, Lifestyle Choices

The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

- Sherry Ortner

topic: Powerful, Reflection, Assessment, Serials, Fieldwork

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

- Marlene van Niekerk

topic: Writing, Exercise, Thinking, Hamstrings, Paleontology

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

- Alan Dundes

topic: Inspirational, Funny, Graduation, Library Research, Folklore

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.

- Nick Hornby

topic: Sports, School, Europe, Fieldwork

Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago.

- Richard Leakey

topic: Airplane, Years, Legs, Fieldwork, Airplane Crashes