in fact, many communities or geographical places have become famous in the discipline because of their association with classic instances of field work. What did the social anthropologist actually do when doing fieldwork? Usually, s/he began by doing a census of the community s/he was studying. This involved making a detailed list of all the people who lived in a community, including information such as their sex, age group and family.
This could be accompanied by an attempt to map the physical layout of the village or settlement, including the location of houses and other socially relevant sites. One of the important techniques anthropologists use, specially in the beginning stages of their field work is to construct a genealogy of the community. This may be based on the information obtained in the census, but extends much further since it involves creating a family tree for individual members, and extending the family tree as far back as possible. For example, the head of a particular household or family would be asked about his relatives — brothers, sisters, cousins — in his or her own generation; Bronislaw Malinowski and the ‘Invention’ of Field Work Although he was not the first to use this method — different versions of it had been tried out all over the world by other scholars — Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist settled in Britain, is widely believed to have established field work as the distinctive method of social anthropology.
In , when the First World War broke out in Europe, Malinowski was visiting Australia, which was a part of the British Empire at that time. Because Poland was annexed by Germany in the war, it was declared an enemy country by Britain, and Malinowski technically became an ‘enemy alien’ because of his Polish nationality. He was, of course, a respected professor at the London School of Economics and was on very good terms with the British and Australian authorities. But since he was technically an enemy alien, the law required that he be “interned” or confined to a specific place.
Malinowski had anyway wanted to visit