Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have...

James D. Faubion is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and the author of books including The Shadows and Lights of Waco. George E. Marcus is Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine; coauthor with Fernando Mascarenhas of Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, a Collaboration; and the author of books including Ethnography through Thick and Thin.

This is an extended, provocative reflection on the nature of anthropological fieldwork under the crowded, mobile, cyber-speed, science-dominated, neoliberal conditions of twenty-first-century modernity. At once pedagogical and epistemological, it reconfigures new researchers' bafflement before the weighty traditions of the Malinowskian hermeneutic as, instead, a creative adaptation. These authors present something vitally new while managing to remain respectful of approaches to field research that must now be radically reordered or recontextualized. Representing the liveliness and fecundity of 'Rice anthropology' during at least the past two decades, they venture beyond necessary but by now almost hackneyed forms of critique to show what kinds of originality the new contexts of research may now be expected to demand.

Annelise Riles, Cornell University:

Fieldwork is Not What It Used to Be is an indispensable text for students, teachers, and for ethnographers of all stripes. Passionate, personal, and yet highly sophisticated, the volume shares with the wider intellectual community the methodological and theoretical orientation that has long defined the 'Rice School' of the ethnography of the contemporary. For many years the editors and contributors have been at the forefront of reimagining the methods and promise of ethnographic research in a postsocial world. Here they share their insights with characteristic candor. The result is a surprisingly synthetic view of the way forward.