acquire all the explicit and implicit knowledge and skills of the ‘insider’. Although the sociologist or anthropologist usually has specific areas of interest, the overall goal of ‘participant observation’ field work is to learn about the ‘whole way of life’ of a community. Indeed the model is that of the child: sociologists and anthropologists are supposed to learn everything about their adoptive communities in just the holistic way that small children learn about the world. Participant observation is often called ‘field work’.
The term originated in the natural sciences, specially those like botany, zoology, geology etc. In these disciplines, scientists could not only work in the laboratory, they had to go out into ‘the field’ to learn about their subjects (like rocks, insects or plants). III F IELD W ORK IN S OCIAL A NTHROPOLOGY Field work as a rigorous scientific method played a major role in establishing anthropology as a social science. The early anthropologists were amateur enthusiasts interested in exotic primitive cultures.
They were ‘armchair scholars’ who collected and organised information about distant communities (which they had never themselves visited) available from the reports and descriptions written by travellers, missionaries, colonial administrators, soldiers and other ‘men on the spot’. For example, James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough, which inspired many early anthropologists was based entirely on such second hand accounts, as was the work of Emile Durkheim on primitive religion. Towards the end of the 19th and in the first decade of the 20th century many early anthropologists, some of whom were natural scientists by profession, began to carry out systematic surveys and first hand observation of tribal languages, customs, rituals and beliefs. Reliance on second hand accounts began to be thought of as unscholarly, and the good results obtained from first hand work helped cement this growing prejudice (See Box on next page).
Since the 1920s, participant observation or field work has been considered an integral part of social anthropological training and the principal method through which knowledge is produced. Almost all of the influential scholars in the discipline have done such field work —