Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Portrayal of the Pedagogy and Practice of Field Schools in American Anthropology as Anthropological Laboratories

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This award is a doctoral dissertation improvement grant. It supports historical research of six field schools in anthropology that have trained generations of anthropologists in multiple geographical locations including Mexico, Peru, and the US. The investigator will study how anthropologists carry out fieldwork by analyzing field notes, informal newsletters, pedagogical materials, lesson plans, correspondence, diaries, and reports from six thoroughly documented field schools. The investigator will reconstruct for each case the field relations and techniques used in course of fieldwork, along with the anthropologist's analysis of the impact of those techniques on the content of knowledge. It is likely that the results of this examination of six field schools in historical context will substantially revise the history of anthropological practice. They will be valuable to practicing anthropologists and sociologists, historians of science, and scholars of Native American studies and Latin American studies. In addition, the research will contribute to discussions of the ethics of research on vulnerable populations. Moreover, the sources used have the potential to recover contributions of indigenous North and South American informants, local assistants, and cultural brokers who were crucial to the production of anthropological knowledge; to date, their efforts have not been historically acknowledged in published accounts of fieldwork. Technical Summary This dissertation responds to prevalent generalizations in the history of anthropology and the anthropological discipline that assume the typical fieldworker ventured into the field alone because fieldwork method could not be taught but only experienced. This lone fieldworker myth has exempted anthropological pedagogy from critical STS analysis. Presenting the rich history of formal instruction in field schools and their collaborative approach to knowledge production provides material for rethinking the role of practices, places, pedagogy, and institutional cultures in the formation of expertise. The way field schools devised techniques for tempering or accommodating the influence of the fieldworker on her subject matter reveal that the "crisis of representation" that emerged from postmodern anthropology's uncertainty over whether anthropological techniques could capture social reality was not a unique historical critique, but a long-standing tension in the anthropological discipline which anthropologists dealt with by devising new tools, practices, and institutions, like the field school.