Samoa; Clifford Geertz on Bali etc. Locate these places on a map of the world. What do these places have in common? What would it have been like for an anthropologist to live in these places in a ‘strange’ culture?
What could be some of the difficulties they faced? IV F IELD W ORK IN S OCIOLOGY More or less the same techniques are used by sociologists when they do field work. Sociological field work differs not so much in its content — what is done during field-work — but in its context — where it is done — and in the distribution of emphasis across different areas or topics of research. Thus, a sociologist would also live among a community and attempt to become an ‘insider’.
However, unlike the anthropologist who typically went to a remote tribal community to do field work, sociologists did their field work among all sorts of communities. Moreover, sociological field work did not necessarily involve ‘living in’, although it did involve spending most of one’s time with the members of the community. For example, William Foote Whyte, an American sociologist, did his field work among members of a street ‘gang’ in an Italian-American slum in a large city and wrote a famous book Street Corner Society. He lived in the area for three and half years ‘hanging out’ — just spending time together — with members of the gang or group, who were mostly poor unemployed youth, the first American-born generation in a community of immigrants.
While this example of sociological field work is very close to anthropological field work, there are important differences (See Box). But sociological field work need not only be this kind — it can take different forms, as in the work of Michael Burawoy, for example, another Field Work in Sociology – Some Difficulties Compared to the anthropologist who studies a primitive tribe in a remote part of the world, the student of a modern American community faces distinctly different problems. In the first place, he is dealing with a literate people. It is certain that some of