Doing Anthropological Research: A Practical Guide

Janet had initially thought she wanted to go to India, but then realized that as she did not speak any of the relevant languages, this would probably not be very sensible. She did, however, speak good Spanish, after studying it at school and spending a year living in Spain as a child. She therefore decided it would make sense to carry out her fieldwork in a Spanish-speaking country. She had been working all year and managed to save some money so she thought she could afford to travel abroad if she wanted to. Janet was not at all sure what she wanted to do when she graduated, and furthermore, one of the reasons she liked anthropology was that it gave her space to explore issues without attaching an instrumental value to them. She therefore decided that she would use her research to help improve her Spanish, but was not going to design it with some future job in mind.

John was much more concerned than Janet about life after university. He had strong interests in the broad area of social policy and was convinced that anthropological insights could be very useful in this field. He only spoke English, so this also limited where he might want to go. John decided to stay in the UK and carry out some research that might make him more employable to social policy-type organizations, through developing both skills and contacts in the sector.

Students often feel that they have to study some far away or exotic place. Indeed this may be in part what first attracted them to study anthropology in the first place. However, you can do just as interesting a project close to 'home'. If you think, for example, that anthropology is about making the mundane peculiar or the peculiar mundane, there are plenty of both peculiar and mundane things to study that do not require travelling to the ends of the earth. The trick is to be imaginative in where you look for them. Football matches, stag weekends, internet dating, science fiction conventions, organic food markets, self-help groups, or for that matter universities, all offer as much potential as an initiation ritual in the Kenyan desert. Indeed, for many people, the distinction between anthropology 'at home' and anthropology 'out there' is no longer valid, if it ever was. On one level, you are likely to find the same institutions, practices and commodities in Peru, as in Papua New Guinea or Belgium. On another level, it is not clear to many people where 'home' exactly is. Students, lecturers and members of the general public move around all the time for work, study or family reasons.

Wherever you end up doing your research it is important that you find ways of preventing yourself from taking what you see or hear for granted. This does not mean thinking that everyone is lying to you. Rather, it means that you need to remember that things can always be otherwise. There is nothing inevitable about the way things are. This is partly why many anthropologists have gone to new places which they know little about. It is easier to keep that sense of bemusement or surprise when things are not so familiar. However, it is still possible, although harder, to do so in contexts within which you are already deeply embedded. You need to find ways to constantly trip yourself up, or to step back and ask questions about what you are finding out. Carrying out research in an area about which you already know a great deal comes with the added benefit that you can hit the ground running.

This is all just to say that there are advantages and disadvantages in carrying out research in contexts with which you are familiar or unfamiliar, and it is not that one is better than the other. You need to think about what sort of context suits your personal situation and interests.

Many anthropology students feel that they should undertake primary fieldwork. Long-term ethnographic immersion has been a rite of passage for professional anthropologists for a long time. Fieldwork can also be an immense amount of fun and profoundly interesting in its own right. However, it may be that some projects are much better thought of as secondary or library-based. Once again, such projects should in no way be thought as second best in comparison to fieldwork-based research, just different. If you want to write about suicide bombers, for example, participant observation is obviously out of the question. Topics that might produce ethical problems for the researcher or the people they are researching are probably best conducted in a library, as are issues around which you might not get access to the key people. Library-based research may include an analysis of what other people have written on a topic. It can also include an examination of primary texts, such as archival material, newspapers and policy documents. In truth, the contrast between library and fieldwork topics is not hard and fast. Even if you do decide to go off to the Amazon jungle you will still need to do background reading. Before deciding on a primarily library-based project, though, it is very important that you make sure that there are enough secondary resources for you to carry out the project. If no one has written about male prostitutes in rural Russia, you should probably think of doing something else. There are also key practical advantages of doing a library-based piece of research. Not only can you stay close to 'home', but, on the whole, your sources are not going to be too busy to talk to you.

Janet did not want to go to Spain and had always wanted to try Latin America. She had friends who lived in Mexico so settled on there.

John strongly believed that you should be able to carry out research in the UK as much as some far-flung place, and so settled on fieldwork in his home town.

Janet was interested in large-scale philosophical questions about life and death. Life seemed to be far too big for her to deal with so she settled on death. At least death was a specific moment, she thought, whereas life stretched on for years. Her family and lecturers were initially worried that this would be too morbid, and tried to persuade her otherwise, but she was convinced it was a good topic. The next step was to think of a place where she could carry out the research. One example she thought of was an old people's home, as people die there all the time. However, she decided that this could be intrusive, as well as upsetting, especially for herself. Being a fan of the TV series Six Feet Under she then settled on an undertakers. She decided that she would try to seek work as an assistant for a Mexican funeral director. That way she would not have to deal with grieving relatives. It would give her a great place to start examining how Mexicans dealt with and prepared for death. However, she was slightly worried about whether she would be able to persuade a Mexican funeral director to allow her to work with them behind the scenes.

John had much more difficulty settling on a topic. Part of the problem was that he was interested in lots of different things. In the end he settled on an issue that would allow him to bring together many of these disparate interests. He had become interested in the notion of luck, how some people explain fortune and misfortune, and what implications this has for the ways they live their lives. One way to narrow this down seemed to be by focusing on the issue of gambling. Gambling was attractive to him because it had social policy implications in terms of gambling addiction. He still had to decide what type of gambling he wanted to focus on, and decided to look at greyhound-racing. He had initially thought about horseracing, but realized that the nearest race

track was miles from his house. There was, however, a greyhound track a short bus-ride away. He would therefore have to try to negotiate access there. John also realized that there were plenty of other places where he could carry out research on the issue. These included greyhound trainers' kennels and bookmakers' shops, as well as organizations concerned with gambling addiction.

You may also find it useful to engage in some visual thinking as a way of quickly gaining a confident sense of what your key research questions are and how they can be communicated. All these approaches, particularly if done collaboratively, offer ways of usefully visualizing your research issue/s, coming up with ideas, and making connections between them. A concept map is a top-down diagram that shows relationships among concepts. Mind maps are

radial, hierarchical diagrams that allow you to chart relations and associations between ideas, concepts and information. Napkin sketching is a way to identify problems and solutions with very simple pictures. Either way, forcing yourself to get things down on paper can be a very useful way of clarifying, sorting and prioritizing your ideas. Some people think visually, others in narrative form. Find the best way for yourself.

Some useful references:

Tony Buzan's mind-mapping website (this also has some good, free introductory videos and tools), www.thinkbuzan.com.

Dan Roam's 'Napkin Academy' website, www.danroam.com.

Eppler, M. J. 2006. 'A Comparison between Concept Maps, Mind Maps, Conceptual Diagrams, and Visual Metaphors as Complementary Tools for Knowledge Construction and Sharing', Information Visualization, 5(3): 202–10.

Janet was interested in why people mark death with specific rituals. However, she had to find a way to make such a broad question relevant to the context of a Mexican funeral parlour. She therefore decided to ask two related questions. The first was: 'what motivated people to become funeral directors?' This was a good question, she thought, as it was one she could collect direct answers to by simply asking people who worked as undertakers. The second was: 'what notions of aesthetic beauty are deployed when preparing a body for burial?' This question would be more difficult to answer, but by working on the preparation of bodies and asking why people did things in specific ways

she hoped she would begin to understand what was going on.

John was interested in the larger question of how people use luck to explain fortune and misfortune and the ways that they try to control this. This was too large and vague, so he had to narrow it down to the context of greyhound-racing. He therefore focused down on a very specific question. This was: 'how do people decide what dogs they are going to place their money on?' This was a very concrete question and was something he could actually ask people during fieldwork.

The primary ethnographic or fieldwork methods you are likely to be most familiar with from your anthropology studies so far are participant observation, informal conversations, one-to-one semi-structured interviews and visual methods.

data via the recording of social events using drawing, photography, film and digital hypermedia. Audio-visual records can be an invaluable source of non-verbal information about your ethnographic setting. Later, you may be able to use your audio-visual material in your project dissemination. Of course, your use of visual research methods will depend upon your own technical abilities, your research contexts and participants. As with all ethnographic fieldwork methods, the appropriate visual techniques, images and technologies may be most easily determined once in the field (see especially Barbash and Taylor 1997; Pink 2007, 2012; Rose 2011).

Primary fieldwork methods are notoriously time-consuming, and in a short project you may want to consider supplementing these ethnographic methods with other social science research methods – such as focus groups, questionnaires and surveys, elicitation or participatory techniques – that might help you to get background and other important information more quickly.

example, Denscombe 2010; Ritchie and Lewis 2003; VanderStoep and Johnston 2009).

A more detailed discussion about using some of these methods in the field, and the types of information they generate, can be found in Chapter 5.

Aside from her research at the funeral parlour, Janet was also interested in how undertakers engage with death in their lives beyond their work, in particular the marking of death with specific rituals. She had no intention of turning up uninvited at funerals, but hoped that after getting to know people she might be invited to participate in Catholic ceremonies celebrating the various stages of life and death – christenings, first communions, weddings, and funerals. She was disappointed that she would miss the annual Day of the Dead, but thought that her interest in the aesthetics of death might benefit from using photographs from previous Day of the Dead festivals. She thought she might use these during interviews to encourage people to tell her about their experiences of previous festivals and their preparations for the next festival.

John's local greyhound track held races three evenings every week

throughout the summer months, so he decided that his fieldwork should encompass one full greyhound-racing season, getting to know the characters of the staff and regular attendees (as well as the dogs themselves). John was interested in the question of how someone decides what dog to bet money on, which he imagined might have a visual aspect. He could envisage standing at the greyhound dog pen and engaging in informal conversations with prospective punters telling him what physical attributes make up a good racing dog. John thought he might ask punters to take photographs to make a visual record of all of the dogs they bet on during one given evening for debrief after the event, when they might reflect differently on their choices depending on the success or failure of their chosen dogs in the races.

While completing the ethical review form for her university department Janet realized that the topic of death and associated funerary activities raised several ethical issues for her research project. Observing activities at a funeral parlour and watching embalmers at work sounded macabre and exciting, but would it be ethical? How could a dead person consent to her presence? On the other hand, perhaps she would find the business of preparing bodies too depressing and stressful. When writing her research proposal and contacting funeral directors in Mexico, Janet explained that she was interested in the work of undertakers and their aesthetic decisions about how to prepare a body for burial. She stated clearly that this would involve talking to the undertakers working at the funeral parlour but that she would not seek to come into contact with the actual dead bodies or with the bereaved families themselves.

John was keen to find out more about gambling addiction and its treatments. He wanted to work with a gambling addiction organization, but after considering the ethical implications he had some concerns about anonymity and informed consent since gambling addiction is a sensitive issue, and people might wish to join treatment programmes anonymously. John's very presence at a private meeting would deny them this right. Instead, John decided that it would be less problematic to join an online gambling addiction discussion and support group, where anonymity could be guaranteed and participation in his project would always be responsive and not imposed upon anyone. He hoped that he might be able to persuade people to meet him in person after they had become familiarized with his project online.

Having studied Spanish at school and spent a year living in Spain as a child, Janet spoke good Spanish, which would stand her in good stead in Mexico. She did not feel the need to take a refresher language course, but – realizing that the Spanish spoken in Mexico differs significantly from that spoken in Spain – she thought she would benefit from conversational practice with a Mexican or other Latin American Spanish speaker. Janet paired up with a Mexican student on a language exchange website and started conversational practice over Skype. She began watching Latin American films online and even found some clips of Mexican funeral customs on YouTube, which she used to prepare a phrasebook of key terms to use once she arrived in Mexico.

John planned to remain in the UK for his fieldwork, and did not envision any language difficulties.

Janet was worried about how she would persuade an undertaker to allow her to work behind the scenes at a funeral parlour, so she was keen to get permission arranged in advance. She had already searched online for a list of funerarias (funeral parlours) in Mexico and emailed the funeral directors, some of whom had written back to enquire about her project.

John knew that he could attend public events – like greyhound races – without requiring permission, but he also wanted to spend time at one of the greyhound training kennels, so he made contacts in advance and applied for a voluntary half-time administrative position at the kennel.

Janet's single largest expense would be her flights to Mexico. She had organized to rent a room cheaply via her friends in Mexico, but once she calculated a daily rate for food and local travel, she realized how quickly her costs would mount up, and she estimated that her savings would be inadequate. She decided to apply to a foundation in her home town for additional funding, and received a small grant that covered her travel costs.

John would be returning home after the end of term, and would be living at home in exchange for small contributions to the household, so his living costs were not high. His research costs would be limited to bus travel to the greyhound track, entrance to greyhound races (he had decided not to give in to temptation to have the odd flutter on the races), and refreshments for research participants. John wanted to apply for work to help make ends meet, but was concerned about managing his time and making sure he was dedicating enough time and

energy to his fieldwork, so he prepared himself a calendar. He marked the days he would be volunteering at the kennels and the evenings he would be at the greyhound race track, and he set aside a couple of hours each day for writing his fieldnotes. This left him with enough time for a part-time summer job, but he realized that he couldn't go back to the pub where he used to work because bartending entails weekend and evening shifts, whereas he would need to be at the greyhound track three evenings a week.

Secondary sources are important not only for the information that

they deliver directly, but also more indirectly for what they reveal about the cultural processes and institutions they are associated with. Anthropologists study in archives for their contents, but they also study archival processes as a way of learning about what people see as important and about how they organize and remember information. Since an archive is never an unproblematic source of information we need to explore the processes of archivization for what they tell us about bureaucracy, governance, salience and deliberate remembering.

In what ways was your gathering, sorting and analysis of secondary information systematic or strategic? What key terms guided your searches? How did these change and why? On what basis did you decide how to prioritize among your various information options? Which sources most influenced your research and how? Have you any advice for future researchers pursuing similar themes?

Are you able to relate some kind of narrative or analytical story line about trends and patterns in the secondary sources you are summarizing, to make it more engaging? If so, can you give a plausible account of how you arrived at this narrative through systematic rather than haphazard enquiry? How did the search of secondary information evolve as the research proceeded? Were there unexpected shifts of attention towards new themes that emerged?

To the extent that there was a system, is it presented with sufficient transparency and detail for readers to get a clear sense of how it was conducted, and draw their own

conclusions as to its scientific rigour and representativeness? Is it clear which databases you consulted, when, and with what search terms and inclusion/exclusion criteria? Is it clear how you prioritized different kinds of information sources and how you selected some sources for more attention than others?

Have you given plausible justifications for adopting a relatively loose, ad hoc approach to some of your secondary sources? What were the main influences on your searching process – your own intuition? Chance findings? Preference for reading academic anthropological texts? Regional preferences? English language publications? What kinds of bias or information shortfall should be acknowledged when drawing general conclusions from your review of secondary information? Could some of these factors have biased your findings?

When you use full quotations rather than paraphrasing, is this justified by the originality, complexity, or intrinsic interest of the quotation? If so, does your commentary on the quotation show adequate engagement and add value to it? When you include references to texts without quoting from them, is it clear why you are referencing and what the text reference has to say on the matter at hand? (n.b. you will NOT improve your mark by listing multiple references without commenting on them, even though this dreadful habit is common in professional academic writing).

When drawing synthetic generalizations from the literature

you have seen, have you clearly discussed the likely biases such as publication bias (e.g. towards 'positive' or remarkable findings), source bias (e.g. more studies from some regions or relating to particular kinds of population), and informant bias (people with particular kinds of opinion tending to volunteer information, or people tending to volunteer some kinds of information but not others)?

A professional information scientist (probably available in your university library) should be able to give you much better guidance on your searching strategies than your supervisor could offer. They can advise you on generic skills such as keyword searches, website evaluation and software for analysis and storage. They will need you to give them a realistic steer regarding your thematic and geographical interests and purposes. Also consult your university’s online guidance on e-research and library research, or look at the Open University SAFARI guide (http://www.open.ac.uk/safari) and at the Virtual Training Suite (http://www.vtstutorials.co.uk).

Draw up a provisional calendar of dissertation project work with a to-do list, thinking about realistic timings and rational sequencing, and leaving ample time for missed interim deadlines and for addressing unanticipated issues – e.g. the goldmines of relevant secondary sources you may chance upon.

Consider whether your information database is going to become sufficiently complex to benefit from the help of bibliographic software such as Endnote, Reference Manager, or Procite. Also consider whether you may want to use online bibliographic and information search aides such as CiteUlike (for website organizing and networking); Delicious (for ‘social bookmarking’, i.e. sharing collections of tagged and annotated website bookmarks); or Google Reader (for RSS newsfeeds). Although early adoption of these could save you a huge amount of time in later writing up stages, do bear in mind that for a short and fairly simple project it may be more efficient just to organize your notes well in a single word-processor file. If you are only going to use 50 references and consult a further 100 or so, you won’t need complex database software.

Social networking (e.g. Facebook, academia.edu) and social bookmarking (e.g. www.delicious.com) can quickly allow you to cooperate with other scholars working on related themes. RSS readers and Twitter are other helpful tools for ongoing information-sharing.

This can be quickly gleaned from course lists (search under ‘syllabus’), a supervisor’s suggestions, an anthropology encyclopedia, Wikipedia, or the bibliography at the end of a key text. At first, just compile enough to help you think about which themes and sources are likely to become priorities.

This will give you essential information for your research proposal and/or introductory dissertation chapter, while also helping you identify themes and search terms for more detailed exploration later. As you explore the various organizations and

sites that you have identified as key information sources, note links among these – such as collaborations, citations and disagreements, and note any patterned contrasts between different regions or disciplines in their treatment of the topics you are interested in.

When you come across interesting items, note journal sources, library section codes, websites and key references that you may find time to follow up later.

Janet does some quick web searching under 'funeral AND Mexico' and quickly glances through hundreds of texts (both scholarly and non-scholarly), images, and videos. She deliberately doesn't keep detailed notes at this point, leaving for later the more careful tasks of planning and documenting her searches and building a project archive. But she does note down useful phrases and synonyms for future searches, and jots down ideas that may be worth exploring – including looking at how Mexican funeral customs are adapted in other countries, at visual dimensions of public religious ceremonies, and at the texts of funeral prayers and eulogies. Doing this she quickly becomes aware that to write holistically about funerals she will need to study not only the anthropology of death and dying, but also information on kinship, religion, ritual, cosmology, bereavement, oratory and visual aesthetics. To get a sense of how this diversity of information can be managed, she carefully reads three ethnographic accounts of funerals in different countries.

John searches on '(betting OR gambling) AND greyhound' and finds copious information about how to bet on greyhounds, a smaller amount on the history of greyhound-racing, but little sign of relevant social science. He quickly realizes that he needs to think carefully about whether his main research interest is the gambling or the greyhound-

racing. His core interest is in the gambling, but links from greyhound-racing blogs and websites make him aware that since gambling on non-human animal performance is a distinct subcategory of betting it will be interesting to explore literature on other manifestations of this, such as pigeon-racing, cockfighting and badger-baiting. This leads to further tangential searches on animal symbolism and the use of animals in augury. Turning back to gambling, he explores some blogs and help sites relating to gambling addiction, and begins to piece together a provisional analytical storyline linking uncertainty, addiction, escapism and human–animal relations.

Every researcher recognizes the risks, increasing all the time, of spending too high a proportion of your secondary research time collecting and sorting readings rather than reading, and too much time reading rather than thinking about and responding to the readings. You can increase your chances of avoiding these frustrations and inefficiencies by considering carefully the different levels at which you can engage with secondary sources:

If you proceed too hastily to deep reading and engaged interactions with texts, then unless you've been very clever or lucky at finding the most relevant texts you will spend too long on a few readings and miss a lot of more important potential readings. If you spend too long looking for ideal readings and collecting bibliographic information, you'll be frustrated when you come to write up and see how little time is left to make use of the readings you've identified.

Your academic supervisors, particularly if they are anthropologists, may be far less suitable than librarians as sources of advice on searching and information management. Make an appointment with a librarian or information advisor early on in your research, and check what generic guidance is available to you on library and online resources. Also use your favourite search engine (e.g. Google, AltaVista, Lycos) to consult some simple generic guidance texts on dissertation preparation – e.g. searching 'dissertation writing' or 'dissertation research', or just look at some of the sites in the

further reading list on the companion website.

It is something of a disciplinary truism to describe primary ethnographic field-work as anthropologists' own 'sacred rite of passage'. Peacock, for example, likens the anthropologist's experience of fieldwork to that of Yurri Zhivago (in the famous novel by Boris Pasternak), fleeing the Russian revolution to the 'radically new situation' of the unfamiliar world of rural Siberia, and notes that

fieldwork ‘is said to be radically self-transforming’, ‘like psychoanalysis’ or ‘brainwashing’; an ‘initiation ritual that ... moves the initiate to a new level of maturity’, like ‘one is “born again”’ (Peacock 1986: 49–50 and 55). Unfortunately such sentiments are often a precursor to all sorts of mystifications, which can leave researchers doing fieldwork for the first time at a loss as to what they are actually going to do, what they are committing themselves to, and what the point of it all really is. The purpose of this chapter and the next is to cut through these mystifications and to offer practical guidance without turning the liberating and enriching idiosyncrasies of different fieldwork styles, approaches and experiences into something too formulaic and thereby impoverished.

As anthropology students learn early on, one of the earliest champions of ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology was Bronislaw Malinowski. He famously urged anthropologists ‘off the veranda’ to take part in the lives of people they were studying over sustained periods of time and in far greater depth than before, thereby gaining better understandings of their meaningful lives, societies and culture (Young 2004). Prior to this ethnographic awakening, much, if not most anthropology had been done on a secondary basis, from the reports of travellers, missionaries and colonial officials. Since then, fieldwork has become something of a ‘rite of passage’, often (but falsely) identified exclusively with social or cultural anthropology as a discipline, and frequently taken as marking a young scholar’s ‘coming of age’ as an anthropologist in their own right. Although the classic ‘village ethnography’ has become something of a rarity – as the world has changed and anthropological questions and concepts have moved on – the continuing importance of an anthropologist’s first substantive field project is reflected in the recognition still given to ethnographic monographs in the discipline, and the anecdotal nostalgia with which anthropologists often talk of their first trip into ‘the field’. Indeed, any conversation or written account about ethnographic fieldwork

(including this one) is often awash with amusing anecdotes and interesting but insubstantial titbits.

This anecdotal tendency repeats itself in the kind of advice that established anthropologists claim they were first given before setting out to try to their hand at fieldwork. Evans-Pritchard once reflected on the fieldwork advice he had been given as a novice himself (1983 [1937]: 239–54, cited in Eriksen 2001: 26). This included instructions not to ‘converse with an informant for more than twenty minutes because if you aren’t bored by that time he will be’, which he commented was ‘very good advice if somewhat inadequate’. As field sites have become more diverse and multiple, and informants with ample spare time to converse with researchers much harder to find, this advice probably has stronger resonance today than it did in Evans-Pritchard’s time. He was told by another contemporary ‘that it was really all quite simple; one should always behave as a gentleman’, which today we may interpret in terms of the importance of respect and ethics in ‘the field’. His instructor Charles Seligman told him ‘to take ten grammes of quinine every night and to keep off women’, and Evans-Pritchard advised his own student ‘not to be a bloody fool’. While anthropologists often find themselves in the ‘role of the clown’ and at other times as ‘the expert’ (Eriksen 2001: 24), today we might equally emphasize the importance of looking after oneself physically, but also socially, emotionally and psychologically. Fieldwork can be very arduous in different ways. But as Eriksen helpfully notes (2001: 26), in the same account Evans-Pritchard much more usefully emphasized that ‘facts are themselves fairly meaningless’, that ‘one must know precisely what one wants to know’ and then fashion a suitable methodology from available techniques. This is useful advice and is something we return to later.

Fieldwork is ‘I was there’?

Perhaps more important than the continuing status of the ethnographic monograph in the discipline, or scholars' own nostalgia for their early fieldwork experiences, ethnographic encounters often remain the base line of anthropological authority. Indeed, the nostalgic, anecdotal tendency that anthropologists sometimes indulge in can seem more like instances of self-legitimation or our own kind of 'cultural capital', than useful, practical advice. However, the ethnographic claim that 'I was there' often remains the (unspoken) basis of anthropological authority. A few years ago a colleague was presenting a seminar on their work on death rituals in Indonesia. His account of people conversing with dead relatives, in the belief that they were not dead until they had finished draining them of their fluids, was met with gasps of astonishment. 'Surely this is a metaphor, they did not really believe these corpses were still alive', was the general thrust of the audience members' response. My colleague's final, on the back foot, retort was: 'I was there, for months watching these people talking to corpses as they were drying.' That was the end of the conversation. An anthropological bottom line had been reached.

As we have highlighted in the previous chapter on secondary research, since fieldwork has gained this mysterious and overwhelming status in anthropology the equally important value of secondary research and archival work has often been overlooked, or left unspoken and unconsidered. As with all scholarship, secondary research remains vital to doing anthropological research, and while it is possible to produce brilliant anthropological papers without fieldwork, it is completely impossible to do so without secondary research. As Chapter 1 discussed, some topics are simply better explored through secondary research. Our experience suggests that many students who choose not to do fieldwork benefit hugely from ensuring their studies are feasible

and limited in scope. Conversely, students who do fieldwork sometimes struggle to contain the huge quantities of seemingly disparate and diverse data that they have collected, or match it effectively with equally diverse amounts of secondary information.

As the distinction between fieldwork-based and secondary or library-based research projects increasingly disintegrates (because all anthropological research relies on secondary research, whether or not it is also based on fieldwork), so too does the distinction between primary and secondary data, and between fieldwork and archival or library research. This is because there has been an increasing recognition that an ‘ethnographic perspective’ can be applied to almost any kind of research. So, as the Comaroffs (1992) have championed, anthropologists (and historians and others) are now often doing ‘ethnography in the archives’, just as those ‘in the field’ often spend huge amounts of time collecting, analysing and later writing about, visual and written materials encountered during their fieldwork. Such materials may be anything from newspapers to unpublished reports, letters, notes, official documents, ID forms, licenses and other bureaucratic paperwork, even images and graffiti, through which so much cultural and political life everywhere takes place. Ethnographic fieldwork is perhaps as much an attitude, or way of reading, seeing and being, as it is a bundle of research methods. In this respect, this chapter may be as useful for students not doing ‘fieldwork’ per se, as it is for those going into ‘the field’.

Ethnographic fieldwork can now take so many forms it has become harder than ever to define it. There are some key methods, concepts or distinctions that are of central importance, such as participant observation, interviews, visual techniques, and other social science methods such as survey work. Most people agree that attention to, and

competence in language remains a central concern. Many anthropologists also agree that 'making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar' is key to the ethnographic and anthropological imperative (see Chapter 1). This not only highlights the comparative dimension which remains at the heart of anthropology (however subtle and unacknowledged), but it also dissolves any lingering notion that 'proper anthropology' must be done 'away', in exotic, preferably sun-soaked places.

Despite these shared notions, however, an ethnographer's tool bag is often filled with a diverse but ill-defined array of equipment. Fieldworkers usually pick, mix and refine a variety of research tools to suit their research questions and requirements. Exactly what is participant observation actually? Is it what I am doing just by being there, or do I need to get my hands dirty? How much to observe and how much to participate? Is this conversation included? Or is this an interview? And if so what kind of interview? These are all questions that could preoccupy us for a long time and most ethnographers will face them at some moment during their fieldwork. As with all qualitative kinds of research, spending too much time trying to define what exactly it is that we are doing may be counter-productive. At the same time, however, we should always reflect upon what we are doing and why, because it is in this way that our fieldwork methods, or tools, become sharpened according to the needs of a particular project. This is also one reason why fieldwork takes time and why different projects, and different periods of the same project, often demand different kinds of toolkits.

Surveys and quantitative work are a different kettle of fish in this regard perhaps, and indeed this is why they are often attractive; their systematic nature and that of the data they generate, appears to give them an aura of authority, as stable bases upon which to build our rich, but idiosyncratic and often unrepeatable ethnographic collections of events, actions, utterances and experiences. But, as we warned in

Chapter 3, quantitative data must also be subject to reflection, evaluation and if necessary, critique.

For all these reasons and more, fieldwork remains something of a mystery and any definition seems elusive. Sometimes, anthropological fieldwork is compared, favourably or otherwise, with travel writing (Peacock 1986: 49–54), but although some great anthropological classics, such as Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1976 [1955]), have taken a similar form, the two are fundamentally differentiated by intent and purpose, by the specific questions the anthropological fieldworker is seeking to ask and resolve, and by the importance of thorough, systematic empirical recording of events, experiences and exchanges. One preferred short, if facetious, definition is ‘deep hanging out’, because on the surface of it, this is what it appears anthropologists are doing with so much of their time ‘in the field’. But of course this is itself not particularly useful. Fieldwork can be arduous, exhausting and anxiety-provoking, as well as fun, inspiring and hugely rewarding. It takes time, and while few anthropologists these days spend years in the field as they once did, they are still often doing fieldwork for what seems like unusually long periods of time, particularly when compared to other social scientists doing statistical research or questionnaire surveys, or ‘development’ consultants using rapid or participatory rural appraisal techniques (see Box 5.1 in the next chapter). Of course, anthropology students writing dissertations will usually be doing fieldwork for much shorter periods – only a few weeks or maybe months at the very most – so one of the challenges you will face will be making the most of a limited timeframe. Even if ‘deep hanging out’ is what you are doing most of the time, this will involve other fieldwork methods and many hours of writing notes, meaning that the daily routines of fieldwork can be much more demanding than the notion of

‘deep hanging out’ implies. More importantly, ‘deep hanging out’, while reflecting superficially what we may appear to be doing ‘in the field’, does not effectively capture what we think we are doing, and more importantly, why we are doing it. This brings us back once again to Evans-Pritchard’s point about ‘knowing what one wants to know’ and the question ‘what is anthropology about anyway?’ which we discussed in Chapter 1. If thinking about what anthropology is and how we understand it is crucial for coming up with research projects and specific research questions, it is also by extension key to thinking about and doing fieldwork. We return to this critical point later.

For the moment though, let us satisfy ourselves with a definition of ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ provided by Willis and Trondman (2000: 5). Ethnography, they say:

Is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents, and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms, the irreducibility of human experience. Ethnography is the deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events.

In many respects, this is a useful definition with which to proceed. It acknowledges that a variety of methods are involved in fieldwork, but stresses that they all involve ‘direct and sustained social contact’. This social dimension is key to all fieldwork, even if the ‘agents’ involved, are not necessarily people, as some recent trends in anthropological theory might seek to stress. If, for example, you decide to adopt a ‘follow the object’ approach, perhaps in the style of Appadurai’s the ‘social life of things’ (1986), then you could consider that the key ‘agent’ is the thing, commodity or artifact around which your study is

centred, but the chances are you would still be generating your data through social contact with others around you. This equally applies if you are following an issue, a ‘metaphor’, a ‘ritual’ or whatever. This social dimension illustrates one of the unique aspects of fieldwork, which is the way in which the ethnographer him or herself is the central tool of research. This is also part of what can make fieldwork personally demanding. Willis and Trondman’s definition also gives due recognition to the importance of ethics (the references to ‘respect’ for example), to wholism (‘the irreducibility of human experiences’), and importantly, to writing and recording (‘the deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events’). The reference to ‘richly writing’ can be seen as a nod to Geertz’s (1973) notion of ‘thick description’, and implied here too is the importance of interpretation.

As anthropology students will recognize, Victor Turner was interested in symbols, their meanings, and their role in social processes. In his words:

For symbols are essentially involved in social process. I came to see performances of ritual as distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups became adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment. From this standpoint the ritual symbol becomes a factor in social action, a positive force in an activity-field. The symbol becomes associated with human interests, purposes, ends and means, whether these are explicitly formulated or have to be inferred from the observed behaviour. The structure and purposes of a symbol become those of a dynamic entity, at least within its appropriate context of action.

(Turner 1964: 21)

In his famous 'Symbols in Ndembu Ritual' (1964) he uses an analysis of the Nkang'a, a girls' puberty ritual, of the Ndembu of Zambia, to illustrate how symbols do things, and importantly for our purposes, what the methodological implications are for ethnographers studying 'ritual symbols'. Crucial to Turner's approach was the belief that 'it was methodologically important to keep observational and interpretive

material distinct from one another' (ibid.: 20). More importantly, Turner also emphasized the separation of the 'emic' (although he did not use this phrase) interpretations of informants, from the 'etic' interpretations of the ethnographer. So Turner's approach involved a separation of 'three classes of data' (ibid.: 21):

From a very practical point of view, we can see that each of these 'classes of data' requires different kinds of fieldwork techniques and practices. First, the external form and observable characteristics are best acquired through participant observation in the rituals. Second, 'local' interpretations are best elicited through extensive conversations and interviews with informants. Third, Turner's 'significant contexts' may be worked out through both participant observation in/of, and interviews about, the events themselves, but also before, after and more generally in Ndembu society, as well as much broader data gathering, including 'secondary' research of various kinds.

What Turner does very convincingly in 'Symbols in Ndembu Ritual' is show how crucial symbols in this ritual – in particular what he calls 'the milk-tree' (the mudyi tree or Diplorrhyncus mossambicensis) – take on a layering of different meanings for different Ndembu informants and the 'outside' ethnographer, which relate at once to its physical characteristics and the internal workings of Ndembu social structure. For example, the 'milky beads' of latex that the tree exudes, link to the tree's role as a symbolic representation of 'human breast milk'; the 'nurturance between mother and child'; the domestic social ties breast feeding implies; and therefore matriliney, 'the principle upon

which the continuity of Ndembu society depends'. Furthermore, Turner shows how 'important symbols may themselves be symbols', and thereby suggests that for ritual specialists in particular, the milk-tree comes to symbolize 'the total system of inter-relations between groups and persons' of Ndembu society, so that 'at its highest level of abstraction ... the milk-tree stands for the unity and continuity of Ndembu society' (1964: 21).

Moving beyond 'emic' interpretations, Turner argues that 'when the third mode of interpretation, contextual analysis, is applied':

The interpretations of informants are contradicted by the way people actually behave with reference to the milk-tree. It becomes clear that the milk-tree represents aspects of social differentiation, and even opposition between the components of a society which ideally it is supposed to symbolize as a harmonious whole.

(Turner 1964: 24)

He then goes on to discuss a series of social distinctions, discriminations and oppositions (between men and women; between the initiate and 'the moral community of adult women'; between the 'matricentric family' and wider society; between virilocality and matriliney; and between matrilineage groups and the totality of society made up of such groups) which the milk-tree, and the Nkang'a ritual in which it has such a key position, represents and reinforces. For Turner then, symbols can operate beyond the awareness of ritual participants. The important theoretical and methodological point here is that the interpretation of the ethnographer cannot simply be acquired by gathering the 'emic' interpretations of different informants. It requires more, and as Turner himself discusses, a crucial question then becomes 'meaning for whom?' (1964: 27).

Turner deliberately positions his perspective against those of other contemporary anthropologists of his time, for example, Nadel, for

whom: uncomprehended symbols have no part in social enquiry; their effectiveness lies in their capacity to indicate, and if they indicate nothing to the actors, they are, from our point of view, irrelevant, and indeed no longer symbols (Nadel 1954: 108, cited in Turner 1964: 27).

He also criticises Monica Wilson's emphasis on Nyakyusa interpretations of their own rituals and denigration of 'anthropologist' 'symbolic guessing' and the ethnographers' interpretations of the rituals of other people (Wilson 1957: 6, cited in Turner 1964: 28), arguing that these investigators go beyond the limits of salutary caution and impose serious, and even arbitrary, limitations upon themselves. Such perspectives or approaches, Turner argues must ignore or regard as irrelevant some of the crucial properties of such symbols (1964: 28). The theoretical substance of this debate is not our primary concern here, rather, the point is that Turner's theoretical perspective and his anthropological positioning on the nature and social efficacy of ritual symbols had important implications for his approach to fieldwork; how he conducted research and interpreted data in the field.

Some years later, following anthropology's crisis of representation during the 1980s and in the face of powerful post-structuralist and postcolonial critique of the status of anthropological knowledge, a new phase in ethnographic field-work emerged. Coming particularly in the wake of Clifford and Marcus's (1986), and growing recognition that anthropology needed to be more reflexive about its own methods, a series of new experimental ethnographies sought to limit the imposition or mediation of the ethnographer's own interpretations in favour of new kinds of cooperative, inter-subjective, deductive accounts of ethnographic encounters, in which anthropologists attempted shared authorship with their informants. You may wish to consult Spencer's (1989) useful discussion and critique of these approaches (see also Beal 1995), but for our purposes here let us consider Kevin Dwyer's (1982), Moroccan Dialogues which in many respects is paradigmatic of this phase in anthropology's relationship to

fieldwork. Again, our principle concern is less the broader anthropological debates themselves than to illustrate how different fieldwork approaches are intimately linked to how we see and understand anthropology, in order to help you think about the kind of fieldwork your project might require, or be enriched by.

Dwyer states that when he went to Morocco to do fieldwork in 1975 he deliberately did so 'with no specific research task planned' (1982: 21). This was against the current of most anthropology at the time, and is to some extent against our advice that you should have a clear idea what you are seeking to do before you begin. Dwyer's approach was driven by his suspicion that:

a clear research project, designed to respond to current theoretical concerns in anthropology, would tend to suppress and severely distort the spontaneity and normal behaviour of people I encountered, forcing them to fit categories, modes and aspects defined by the project.

(Dwyer 1982: 21)

Of course we can see that in fact Dwyer did have a purpose: to explore new forms of ethnographic representation, which might allow his informant's views and understanding of the world to come across more directly, unhindered by the ethnographer's own interpretative intervention. In a sense his ethnographic approach was an explicitly 'collaborative' one, in which the end product is a result of an amalgamation of the different interests of the fieldworker and informant, forged in (more or less) equal, conversational contexts. Of course, in many respects all fieldwork is collaborative in this way, and perhaps what sets Dwyer's work apart is his explicit effort to reduce the weight of the ethnographers imprint. His book amounts to a series

of transcribed (taped) conversations and unstructured interviews with a single informant, Faqir Muhammad, whom he had come to know very well during previous research visits to Morocco. Dwyer states early on that he was trying to explore what was the relationship between the Faqir, a Moroccan villager, and me, a New Yorker built upon? (1982: 22). Furthermore what significance did this relationship have for the practice of anthropology? He felt, perhaps correctly, that although anthropology takes the encounter between individuals of different societies as its primary research tool ... this relationship had had no explicit place in the genres other anthropologists had written in. Finally he states that he was dismayed that, with so much of my relationship with the Faqir expressed verbally, my written notes captured it so inadequately and most of it was quickly lost as my memory of it faded (1982: 21).

The purpose of Dwyer's research was to examine the nature of ethnographic fieldwork, to explore the ethnographers relationships with informants created in the very context of fieldwork, and to experiment with new forms of recording and representation which would allow the inter-subjective nature of these relationships to be better captured and communicated. The extent to which he, or any researcher or writer for that matter, could actually achieve this in research and a book that they have ultimately authored themselves remains debatable, and this is something that Spencer (1989) also comments on.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Dwyer's anthropological quest defined not only his writing but also the manner in which he did his fieldwork. Compared with Turner, for whom the 'emic' interpretations of informants and the 'etic' interpretations of the anthropologist are distinct (and this distinction is of great significance for the anthropological project of understanding what and how symbols do things), for Dwyer this distinction deliberately falls away or is collapsed in the explicit project of trying to avoid what had come to be

seen as the 'violence' of anthropological representation. In this project both 'the external form and observable characteristics' and the 'significant contexts largely worked out by the anthropologist', as Turner put it, are put on the back burner in favour of the 'interpretations' or meanings offered by the informants themselves. And this is clearly reflected in the fieldwork approaches adopted. So for Dwyer's Moroccan Dialogues, it is taped, informal conversations and unstructured interviews that form the key fieldwork method. Participant observation, broader contextual data gathering, and secondary research, are relegated to the backstage, and more formal techniques such as focus group discussions, surveys and questionnaires, do not appear at all. Of course, arguments could be made about the continuing significance of secondary reading, participant observation and broader data gathering in Dwyer's fieldwork for example, in informing the kinds of questions Dwyer asked the Faqir during their interviews and conversations – nevertheless, for our purposes, here is a second clear example of how the anthropological questions a project is concerned with affect the fieldwork methods deployed.

Underpinning Dwyer's 'experimental' fieldwork and ethnography, and others like it which sought to let the 'subaltern speak' (paraphrasing Spivak 1988), is an assumption that the conscious or 'mindful' meaning and knowledge of informants is key to the anthropological project.¹ This assumption and anthropological positioning in part determined the nature of their ethnographic fieldwork. This anthropological assumption came under increasing scrutiny in subsequent years with growing anthropological interest in questions of 'embodiment' and 'practice'. Of course, these new theoretical turns also made their own particular fieldwork demands. To illustrate this lets turn to Thomas Csordas's 1994 chapter in his edited collection Embodiment and experience, and Loïc Wacquant's equally seminal article 'The Pugilistic Point of View' (1995). In both cases we

can see how their anthropological thinking was influenced by phenomenology and particularly by the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

For Csordas, 'embodiment' is 'a methodological standpoint in which bodily experience is understood to be the existential ground of culture and self' (1994: 269). His research explored the 'experiential understanding of being-in-the-world' of a young Navajo man afflicted with brain cancer. Because his 'cultural phenomenology' was determined to understand both biology and culture as 'forms of objectification or representation', one of his crucial goals was 'to show how cultural meaning is intrinsic to embodied experience on the existential level of being-in-the world' (1994: 270). This already implies that the interview- and conversation-heavy process that was a central feature of Dwyer's work would not be sufficient, and indeed, Csordas's fieldwork was based both on conversations and observation over a period of two years. However, Csordas's phenomenological conviction that 'cultural meaning is intrinsic to embodied experience' also denies Turners penchant for 'significant contexts worked out by the anthropologist'. If, as Csordas argues (following Merleau-Ponty 1962), we carry the social 'inseparably with us before any objectification' (1994: 270), then the status of 'social facts' or 'significant contexts' changes profoundly. These do not pre-exist before or external to our embodied experience in the world – ready for the anthropologists – interpretation but are exactly, as he says, 'intrinsic to them'. This has important ramifications for his fieldwork. In recognizing that both 'biology' and 'culture' – neuropathology and religion in this case – are forms of objectifying an experience, Csordas argues that neither alone are sufficient for understanding the cancer patients experience or its meaning for him. Rather, what Csordas does

in his account is to ‘thread the discussion of being-in-the-world between the two poles of objectification’ in order to show how his informant brought to bear the symbolic resources of his culture to create meaning for a life plunged into profound existential crisis, and to formulate a life plan consistent with his experience of chronic neurological disease (1994: 270). On the surface, Csordas employs very similar ethnographic methods or tools as Turner, but the ethnographic approach, attitude or positioning is profoundly different. Consequently, the kind of fieldwork this type of project demands, and the kind of fieldnotes and other ‘raw’ data it produces are likely to be substantially different.

Working within a broadly similar kind of anthropological framework, Loïc Wacquant’s ‘The Pugilistic Point of View’ took the importance of experience, practice, situational being-in-the-world, and therefore of ‘participant observation’ in fieldwork, to a different level. Emphasizing that his approach was ‘emphatically not ... premised simply on an empathetic thick description of the lived experience of prizefighting’ or ‘an interpretive dissection of “the native’s point of view”’ (1995: 490), because it is questionable whether a single ‘native’s point of view’ ever exists, or ‘whether the so-called native may be said to have a “point of view” at all, rather than being one with the universe of which he partakes’ (1995: 490–1), Wacquant spent three years training to be a boxer and (deep) hanging out with boxers in Chicago. In many ways this was ‘observant-participation’ rather than participant observation. It was only in the third year that he carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 50 boxers.

This long immersion enabled Wacquant not only to acquire ‘the half-articulate, quasi organic belief in the value of the game and its stakes, inscribed deep within the body through progressive incorporation of its core tenets’(1995: 492–3) the habitus of boxing we might say – but also to build ‘solid friendships’ of ‘trust and mutual respect’ which enriched his subsequent interviews. It meant, in his

words, that he was able to phrase my questions in a manner congruent with their occupational concerns and thus elicit candid and meaningful answers, which I could also confront with extensive direct observation and check against related accounts by strategically situated informants'(1995: 493). Furthermore, unlike the question mark that Csordas raises about the status of 'social facts' (and in tune with Bourdieu's (1992) own account of the importance of 'reflexivity' as a means of making scholarship more 'objective'), Wacquant also used the time that he was training to conduct more conventional research on 'the social structures of marginality in Chicago's inner city' (1995: 493).

This combination of deep immersion, 'observant participation' and 'learning the craft', alongside substantial interviews and broader research into the 'significant contexts' of boxing in Chicago, enabled Wacquant to produce an unrivalled and much cited ethnographic account. In his view, it was inevitably 'a re(contruction) of the "pugilistic point of view", that is the synthetic view of professional boxing one can gain from the various points that may be occupied within the structure of social and symbolic relations that make up the pugilistic field'(1994: 491). Yet few would contend that Wacquant's article is one of sociology and anthropology's most widely celebrated, recent ethnographic accounts. For our purposes here, it illustrates brilliantly how the nature of any fieldwork experience and approach is determined both by the specific research questions and the broader theoretical frameworks deriving from the anthropological assumptions embedded within the research design, and therefore how the selection of research methods, or tools, is unique for every project. At the same time it shows how any ethnographic fieldwork is necessarily centred on and around the person and body of the researcher themselves. Indeed, in many respects Wacquant is useful here because his fieldwork most clearly shared aspects, techniques and approaches with all three of the other anthropologists that we have discussed, even as it

stands out as markedly different from any one of them.

Of course, many of the aspects of fieldwork deployed by these different authors will be beyond the time limits of your own anthropology project. It is unlikely you will have the opportunity to spend three years learning to box, or to acquire a 'pugilistic habitus' if you prefer. Interviewing and observing cancer patients for almost two years would probably defy not only the time available to you, but also any ethical review board tasked with considering student research proposals. It is also unlikely you will have the time available to transcribe a lengthy series of biographical interviews, even if you found an interesting informant, or rather one interested enough in you, to do the kind of experimental work that Dwyer championed. But our purpose in discussing these examples is less to offer alternatives for fieldwork, than to illustrate how fieldwork techniques and practices, and the nature of the ethnographic data that your fieldwork will generate, is inherently related to both the larger anthropological frameworks within which your project is located, and the specific questions you are seeking to address. You will have to find your own way, and hopefully this will be an enjoyable and enlightening experience. Reading other ethnographic works, scrutinizing the methods they deployed and why, will help in this process and encourage you to be reflexive about your own fieldwork.

anthropology and the fieldwork tools they imply or require.

As Janet is preparing for her research, exploring different methodological approaches other anthropologists have adopted and their relationship to different theoretical concerns, she begins to recognize that her interest in the corporeal aesthetics involved in funerary practices in Mexico might make certain kinds of demands upon her fieldwork. She is particularly interested in phenomenological approaches and begins to think about how she could make use of these in her fieldwork. Inspired by the success of Wacquant's efforts to learn the art of boxing she realizes that she could get a better grasp of the aesthetics involved in undertaking by taking part and learning some of the basic skills involved in embalming processes. She therefore changes her earlier decision not to come in contact with dead bodies and asks her hosts in an email if they would be happy to teach her some of the basics of their trade. In their response her prospective undertaker hosts are very keen to teach her some of the tools and techniques of their trade, and Janet becomes increasingly excited about the rich kind of ethnographic material that could be generated by taking part in her hosts' embalming practices.

As his fieldwork draws near and his reading progresses, John begins to recognize that most previous studies of gambling have a tendency to 'pathologize' gambling from the outset. He feels that this is inadequate, and realizes he needs to formulate his fieldwork approach around a stance that is centred on his informants' understanding of their own gambling habits and enjoyments. He is particularly influenced by Dwyer's determination not to impose meaning upon his Moroccan informant, and to experiment with new forms of biographical ethnography. John decides that this is the approach that best suits his anthropological stance, and determines that he too will focus his fieldwork upon lengthy, in-depth and repeated, informal and open-ended conversations with a small number of key greyhound owners and

gamblers.

This need for an ‘alternative option’, or ‘Plan B’, also applies to your project as a whole. It is not unusual for a carefully refined research plan to suddenly become irrelevant, or un-researchable upon arrival ‘in the field’, or later on during fieldwork. Circumstances can change, assumptions built into a project may be shown to be without basis, or something much more interesting might be going on which you had not previously been aware of. Researchers doing fieldwork should allow for this ‘resistance of the real’, otherwise there would be little point doing fieldwork at all. A good example is Jean Briggs’s classic Inuit ethnography Never in Anger (1970). Briggs set out to study pre-Christian beliefs and practices among the Utku, but then found no one willing to talk about this because they were ashamed of their pre-Christian past. Her rich ethnographic account, describing one of the most arduous kinds of classic fieldwork imaginable, turns on an encounter in which she became very angry with outside traders who damaged an Utku canoe. Her emotional reaction breached a strong social taboo and as a result she was socially ostracized for five months. This is hardly an attractive prospect under any circumstances but certainly not in a severe Arctic context where Briggs was dependent upon her Utku hosts for her every need! Nevertheless, this unfortunate incident revealed a central dynamic of Utku social life to Briggs: the importance of self-restraint and of controlling emotions in one’s dealings with others. She subsequently structured her ethnographic account around this hugely significant aspect of Utku life.

It is unlikely that you will be doing fieldwork in quite so arduous or remote a context, nor are you necessarily going to find your research agenda so profoundly challenged. Nevertheless, you should be alert to changing circumstances and factors beyond your own knowledge and control. Allow for contingencies, be prepared to change direction if necessary, and to some extent plan ahead for this. This is not necessarily something to be resisted, but rather welcomed. Sometimes,

planning for such contingencies is possible and useful, but not always. It is obviously preferable for any profound changes to take place early on during fieldwork when there is enough time to change direction, focus and methods. This is particularly important if you have committed time and resources into going abroad. You should have a 'Plan B' ready, that you can switch to in the same country or location where you have developed your initial project.

Given the inevitable time constraints of doing ethnographic research, particularly for student researchers, it is advisable to think ahead about possible alternatives, and to spend the first few days or weeks of fieldwork reassessing the feasibility of your project while there is still time to make any changes that realities on the ground require. These kinds of issues may also re-emerge in surprising ways much further into your fieldwork. Be ready to expect, deal with and perhaps embrace, the unexpected.

When Janet arrives in the Mexican town where her undertaking hosts

run their small family business, she is alarmed to discover that the situation is not at all what she had imagined, and that there have been some sudden changes in circumstances. The chief undertaker has died suddenly, leaving his sons in charge of the faltering business. Furthermore, in the context of wider social unrest and proliferating drug-related gang violence, a new Pentecostal movement has spread like wildfire across the town. One very significant off-shoot of this social turbulence has been the emergence of new vernacular embalming entrepreneurs, offering new, much more invasive kinds of embalming practices in line with the corporeal demands and religious beliefs of the spreading Pentecostal movement. These have resulted in a dramatic drop in business for Janet's undertaking hosts. The late chief undertaker's son agrees that Janet can still take part in what funerary business they still have coming their way, but this has been drastically reduced to only one or two days of work a week. Janet has to make some quick decisions. She agrees she will attend the funeral parlour to learn embalming techniques for one day a week, but also realizes that she is in a unique position to do research on the rising popularity of the new vernacular embalming entrepreneurs. Keeping one foot lodged in her earlier plan to explore the aesthetics of funerary embalming practices through learning to embalm, she decides to spend the rest of her time seeking out, interviewing and perhaps working with some of these new entrepreneurs. She begins to try to find these vernacular embalming entrepreneurs she has been hearing so much about.

John has been doing fieldwork at the greyhound-racing track for a couple of weeks, in between his part-time job and living at home. He is worried his visits are too brief to build up good rapport with a group of greyhound kennel owners and gamblers who seem to dominate the scene. One day he has a breakthrough. One particularly (if perhaps overly) friendly kennel owner offers him the opportunity of a part-time job at his kennels and a rent-free place to stay at the site. John jumps at this opportunity, and readily gives up his boring part-time job to work four days a week at the kennels, where he has been given a small flat to live in. John is particularly excited because now that he is 'in the field' all the time, he is beginning to collect huge amounts of rich data, and he regularly spends four or five hours an evening writing fieldnotes, between slightly irritating visits to his flat from his new 'landlord/employer/ informant'. He is able to gather more detailed material relating to the human- animal relations of kennel owners, gamblers and greyhounds, and this helps him to build a much thicker understanding of how notions of luck are intertwined in these emergent

relationships.

Participant observation is the quintessential ethnographic fieldwork method championed by Malinowski's call for anthropologists to get 'off the veranda' (or the less comfortable notion of 'going native'). It is a qualitative research method through which the fieldworker takes part in, and so observes, what is going on around them, learning through doing and experiencing as much as through watching and listening. It involves, as Goffman put it, 'subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation' (1989: 125, cited in Emerson et al. 1995: 2). Furthermore, 'it involves being with people to see how they respond to events as they happen and experiencing for oneself these events and the circumstances that give rise to them' (Emerson et al. 1995: 2). Although much participant observation does rely upon visual and verbal data, the emphasis on participation and experience also allows for eliciting other kinds of perceptual and embodied knowledge, as Wacquant's extreme example – to embody the bodily dispositions or 'habitus' of boxers – exemplifies.

There is a central and productive tension contained in the very notion of participant observation (or observant participation in Wacquant's case). One participates in order to observe, so one is never either simply a participant nor simply an observer. In this sense, a fieldworker never really 'goes native'. It is questionable, for example, whether the participant observation that Csordas did ever really meant he was able to gauge his Navajo informant's experience of living with cancer. The imperative of observing means that the participation itself is objectified by the fieldwork, and indeed, this is why reflexivity is an essential component of any fieldwork. In practice, many fieldworkers probably observe more than they participate. Indeed, effective and

productive participant observation requires a good level of language skills and comprehension, deep social immersion, and a great deal of time, in equal measure.

One of the oft-cited strengths of this relatively unsystematic fieldwork method is its ability to help the fieldworker ‘see the world through another culture’ and understand ‘what goes without saying’. Certainly, participant observation helps bring out the kinds of non-verbal clues that are often central to social processes and cultural dynamics, and which other methods might not reveal. In this sense, doing participant observation in familiar situations can be as, if not more, productive as that done in unfamiliar settings. This is because participating in order to observe in situations we are familiar with may help make those situations ‘strange’, and therefore reveal hidden assumptions, behaviours and habits normally taken for granted. By the same token, participant observation in unfamiliar contexts helps us become familiar with and internalize the assumptions, behaviours and habits that at first glance might appear very strange.

Although few anthropologists might admit to this, it is often through making mistakes, whether accidentally or more mischievously on purpose – i.e. in participating badly – that such unspoken (familiar or strange) assumptions, habits and behaviours become observable in the first place. Eriksen calls this playing ‘the role of the clown’ (2001: 24) and fieldworkers often find themselves in this position, involuntarily or otherwise. The ‘mistake’ that Briggs made was clearly hugely significant for her research.

It is also through participant observation that questions for subsequent interviews are generated. This is very important. Turner’s observations about the importance of the milk-tree in the Nkang’a ritual, its physical characteristics, as well as the behaviour of his informants during the rituals, enabled him to formulate the questions he then asked initiates and ritual specialists, even as they also influenced his own ‘etic’ interpretations of the significance of this

ritual for Ndembu society. In the examples we discussed in the previous chapter, it was only Dwyer who seems not to have done participant observation for his Moroccan Dialogues, but even then it seems clear that previous participant observation informed the questions he asked the Faqir during their lengthy interviews. However, while participant observation was central to the other ethnographies discussed, it was also not enough on its own. Turner, Csordas and Wacquant all also used interviews of various kinds. In fact, it is hard to imagine a successful ethnography based solely on participant observation, because not all the information that a research project requires is accessible through these kinds of immersive methods. Participant observation alone is not necessarily a very useful tool for understanding what people think or feel about a particular issue. This relates in part to why, as the ‘violence’ of anthropological representations came under critical scrutiny in the 1980s, new experimental ethnographies seemed to move away from doing participant observation in favour of talking directly with informants.

Participant observation will form part of your repertoire, but it is instructive to consider whether, and how, this method is appropriate for your study. Will your informants want to spend time with you? They may be busy or find you annoying, or it may be that your limited technical skills will actually impede the progress of what they are trying to achieve. One fieldworker researching performances of authority by rural chiefs in Zimbabwe thought that he should ‘be a proper anthropologist’ and help plough fields at the homestead where he was staying. The dry, hard soil was being turned over using hand-held hoes in anticipation of rains likely to fall that afternoon. Against the humoured protests of his hosts he persisted until, before long, his hands were bleeding. Looking up he realized he was not only delaying progress in a field that really needed to be ploughed before lunch time, he was also embarrassing his hosts in front of curious neighbours who were wondering why this foreigner was being made to plough a field!

Clearly, participant observation can be a rich source of information, but there are theoretical, ethical and practical limits to ‘going native’. In this case, it is hard to see what data could be gained about rural, chiefly authority through delaying and embarrassing your hosts, but if the research sought to explore how means of production produce particular kinds of bodies, attitudes and dispositions, then ploughing a field may have been a central aspect of fieldwork. Participant observation might also offer opportunities to catch utterances and opinions not expressed in other contexts. In some situations, demonstrating your willingness to work hard and show your inadequacies might be an important way of generating questions for later interviews, but also of ‘breaking the ice’, lowering social barriers, and opening up access to new informants, encounters and events; just as Wacquant’s boxing training gave him access to informants he might otherwise never have interviewed.

If participant observation alone is not enough you will probably spend much time doing interviews. Interviews come in all shapes and sizes – from highly formalized, structured and strictly time-limited interviews with individual people, to very casual, unstructured conversations with several people, to the kinds of focus group discussions that development researchers tend to adopt. In practice, there are many shades of grey between these poles. In general, informal interviews will be relatively free-flowing whereas structured interviews will involve specific questions prepared in advance. Our purpose here is not to go through the many techniques a researcher can use, but we do encourage you to consult further reference books as you develop your own repertoire (see Chapter 2 and the companion website for examples).

At its most informal, an interview can appear much like a normal

conversation. Often the boundary between interviews and the kind of casual conversations common to participant observation is blurred. Sometimes a chance conversation can turn into something akin to an interview, and as long as everyone involved is aware of what is going on, these kinds of encounters-cum-interviews are to be encouraged (see discussion of informed consent in Chapter 6). Many ethnographers admit that much of their ethnographic data emerges from these kinds of conversations, and they are what ‘deep hanging out’ is often all about. As a rule of thumb, one way of differentiating between a very informal interview and such chance encounters is that an interview is pre-arranged, whether five minutes or five days beforehand. This highlights one central advantage of interviews over participant observation: because they are pre-arranged, interviews offer the fieldworker much more of an opportunity to direct conversation toward the issues, themes and concerns that are of interest to them. By agreeing to be interviewed or to have a conversation, an interviewee has in effect given a green light to the researcher to steer a conversation towards the kinds of data that they are interested in, and they have agreed to devote a certain amount of time to answering your questions. This does not in any way absolve a fieldworker from the normal ethical requirements of research, or the social niceties of conversation. We should always respect an informant’s wishes regarding confidentiality and their right not to speak on particular subjects. The onus remains on the researcher to generate a situation whereby informants feel free to communicate freely, on their own terms and to their own limits. Yet because an interview is rarely a chance encounter, it allows researchers to come prepared, whether with a vague notion of what he or she wants to cover, or carrying a highly structured list of questions.

Interviews are a good method for gathering verbal data quickly and field-workers will use interviews for different purposes at different moments in their research. Early on, interviews with key informants

may be directed to obtaining very basic general information. Later on, interviews can become more focused upon particular questions raised by the research (and by other methods), and may be much more formalized. Later interviews can also be much less formalized, if, for example, once basic social or historical information has been acquired, a researcher is looking for richer, evocative ethnographic material about how informants experience or find meaning in particular social situations. Informal, free-flowing interviews can be very useful for gaining deep information on people's life histories, but are likely to be different from an interview with an official about government policy.

The nature of an interview may also depend upon the accessibility of a particular informant, their social status, and your relationship with them. If, like Dwyer, Csordas or Wacquant, your informant is someone you have known well over a long period, you may be able to hold a series of informal interviews. If you are interviewing someone you will be unlikely to talk to again, a busy civil servant or politician, for example, then that interview is likely to be more structured and involve much more pointed questions. How you organize your interviews and whether you ask very open-ended questions or more directed ones, will depend upon what you are trying to achieve, and the context of your relationship with the interviewee. It is often said that an interviewer should try to avoid asking 'leading questions' – questions that prescribe a particular type of answer, or provoke simple yes/no responses. This is good advice for many situations, but like all good advice it should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. It is more important to know what you are looking for. If you want rich meaningful data about how an informant understands, thinks about, is motivated by, or experiences something, it is much better to ask open-ended questions that encourage your informant to say as much as they want, in the way that they want. But if you need to know a specific detail, like who said or did what to whom, when and why, then a more pointed, or leading question might be required.

Much depends upon your informant's specific situation, the broader social, cultural, political and historical context of the interview, and the material being discussed. Sometimes this context will be (and will remain) not only beyond your control, but also beyond your knowledge and awareness. There are many 'unknown unknowns' in fieldwork. There are usually many factors which you may never be aware of, and which will determine how 'good' the interview is, how responsive your interviewee, and the kinds of answers you elicit. Be sensitive to the possibility that your informant is under pressures that you might not be aware of, and avoid putting them in uncomfortable or unretreivable positions with your questions. The formality of some kinds of interviews can often hamper natural conversation, however, sometimes informants themselves insist upon a level of formality that the interviewer might find surprising or difficult. Much also depends on your informant's personality traits, mood and motivations. 'Perfect informants', interviewed in 'perfect settings' and with 'perfect' techniques (if such a possibility even exists!) can still lead to poor, uncommunicative interviews. All researchers will be familiar with the frustration of interviews that just 'did not really work'. They are part of the process, and fieldworkers are advised to reflect upon the manner, form and progress of particular interviews not only because it will help you to refine your techniques, but also for the valuable contextual data that they may reveal.

As with surveys and questionnaires, there is a sense that the strength of more structured interviews is the authoritative stability implied by their apparently systematic nature. This is debatable, nevertheless it is clear that in some contexts, very structured interviews with set questions may be appropriate. For instance, when interviewing possessed spirit mediums in northern Zimbabwe, David Lan found it necessary to:

Establish the degree to which the answers given to questions (mine and

others) by the spirits were conventionalized, the degree to which the answers would be different depending on which mhondoro/medium was questioned and on the circumstances in which the questioning took place. The partial solution I found to this attempt to estimate the individual creativity of the mediums was the simple expedient of asking all mhondoro/ mediums the same set of questions irrespective of which tradition of mhondoro they belonged to, as well as to put the same questions to numbers of other people whether or not they were reputed to have particular knowledge of the past of the ways of mediums, women as well as men, children as well as adults.

(Lan 1985: 232)

David Lan's reasons for taking this structured approach may well relate to the unusual nature of his informants – ancestral spirits possessing mediums – and the very unclear 'agencies' that involves. His was an attempt to stabilize and bring order to a complex social/cultural situation where it was not at all clear which or whose voice was speaking. Although Lan's was a fairly unique research situation (but not hugely, for anthropology), and a fairly unusual approach (only partially successful), this example highlights an important point about interviews: not only can they be difficult to control, it can also be difficult to be clear about the nature of the material being elicited. This returns us to Turner's point about separating participants' interpretations from those of the anthropologist, and again emphasizes the importance of taking into account 'significant contexts'. Interviews rarely provide 'thick description', and working out the 'significant contexts' of an interview – the matters being discussed, the manner of conversation, the manner of the informant/s and the interviewer, and the assumptions embedded in his or her questions/research agenda – is vital to the interpretation of the material being generated. This returns us to a) the importance of combining research methods; and b) the importance of reflexivity about the methods and techniques you use, and the cultural, social and

political assumptions embedded within your research project. As a fieldworker you should reflect upon who you are choosing to interview and why, where and how you choose to do this, and what you tell an informant about the kind of information you are looking for. This is not only about refining your techniques in the field, although that is very important; it is also about the status of the knowledge that is generated.

The strengths of ethnographic research lie in the fact that it is socially embedded and interactive rather than detached and extractive. Since different people interact, learn and express themselves in different ways, to ensure that a variety of people have a voice in your research you may need to facilitate this using a variety of participatory methods. Whereas some people will gladly tell you their autobiographies or respond eloquently to your direct questions, most will not. You may, however, learn a lot by walking with them through a village or across a landscape; constructing a model with them to depict a remembered or anticipated scenario; playing a group audio-visual activity with them (such as putting together a video or photography show) that may lead to an informal focus group discussion; or getting them to show you their pictures or possessions. ‘Participatory’ means involving others collaboratively in generating knowledge. ‘Multimodal’ means using a variety of methods and sensory channels to do this. Inspired in part by anthropology’s mix of methods and by the idea of non-extractive, collaborative learning, from the 1970s development planners developed a raft of methods for facilitating participatory learning and planning, under such labels as ‘Rapid Rural Appraisal’ and

Research in the social sciences is often differentiated by method, and the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods is often assumed to be one of almost disciplinary significance. Although ethnographic fieldwork is known for its predominant emphasis on qualitative methods, quantitative approaches do often form part of an ethnographer's toolkit, and not only in 'applied research' contexts (see also Box 5.1 for information about participatory research techniques which have been a particular feature of applied/development anthropology). As we have suggested, surveys and questionnaires are sometimes attractive to fieldworkers because of the aura of 'systematic' authority and stability that they appear to offer. Like very structured interviews, these methods do not produce 'thick description' or 'deep' cultural data. They do offer other, broader (if shallower) kinds of material which may be useful as part of a toolkit of research techniques, particularly for making meaningful the kinds of data that the more qualitative research approaches discussed earlier generate. Again, there are many useful reference books available that provide good ideas about effectively using these kinds of research tools (see Chapter 2 for examples).

If, in the style of Wacquant, you wish to explore the life experiences of professional boxers, doing survey research (perhaps including some statistics) to generate data about the economic lives of the socially marginalized classes from which most professional boxers emerge, would provide some of the crucial 'significant contexts' with which we can make sense of the more qualitative data that interviewing boxers might generate. So, ethnographic fieldwork might involve quantitative research methods, and certainly anthropologists do often refer to such research done by others. Similarly, questionnaire surveys are often used in fieldwork to provide an overview of, say, a particular group's attitude to boxing or to a ritual, which may help to make sense of more particular in-depth material generated by interviews or focus group

discussions. Many fieldworkers do use small-scale surveys, often early on in their fieldwork, in order to grasp an overview of their field site, and for such limited purposes they can be very useful. Some surveys are good for generating basic census-type information, the population size of an area or neighbourhood, for example, or the household composition of a particular village, and so on. Surveys are also particularly useful for comparing two or more definable variables, such as leisure activities and political membership. The same kinds of questions of feasibility apply to this kind of research (perhaps more so) as for participant observation and interviews. Surveys can be very expensive, laborious and time-consuming, and of course for many kinds of anthropology projects they will simply not produce the kind of data required.

Researchers using such quantitative techniques should be careful about the issue of statistical significance. Be aware that unless you possess good quantitative data analysis skills, uneven returns from a questionnaire or survey may be problematic for doing useful statistics. Similar kinds of practical questions apply for doing fieldwork surveys just as they do for more qualitative fieldwork methods. It is important to consider why people might be willing to participate in a survey. What kinds of questionnaire questions will elicit the kinds of answers you want? At the same time how can you avoid 'leading questions'? Asking short and clear questions is usually preferred in surveys and questionnaires, although questions that provide yes/no answers are only going to be useful in specific contexts, and are not going to provide data that may be more broadly useful. Given the inflexibility of questionnaires and surveys, it is absolutely vital that you pre-test them before you actually do them 'for real'.

On a slightly different note, in many social contexts, people are used to seeing researchers with clipboards doing surveys, or handing out questionnaires. This is often a familiar stereotype of what a social scientist does 'in the field'. In circumstances where doing some ill-

defined, ‘deep hanging out’ might provoke unsettling questions about your presence and intentions, doing a small survey or handing out questionnaires might be a useful way of locating and identifying yourself and your research in the field. On the other hand, in contexts where ‘chuggers’ (charity muggers) hustle people on every street corner, this ‘clipboard’ identity might be best avoided!

Janet has little difficulty in finding some of the new vernacular embalming entrepreneurs and they seem very keen to talk to her. But the particular ritual requirements of their new Pentecostal practices mean that she will not be allowed to take part in or learn their techniques. As there seems to be a different kind of aesthetic process involved in these emergent practices, Janet is keen to get close to the bodies as they are being embalmed, even though she has heard it is a very invasive and quite disgusting process, especially for the uninitiated. Proud of their work, however, her new informants agree that she can photograph the products of their work – the embalmed corpses

– and Janet agrees to do this, thinking she may in time be able to use these photographs as part of her research, although she is not yet sure quite how. She also realizes that to understand these new kinds of funerary practices and the particular aesthetics involved, she will need to understand the social and historical contexts in which the new Pentecostal movement has arisen. So, she resolves to spend a day or two a week seeking and talking to town elders and church people to try to understand how these sudden social changes have come about.

His new living and working arrangements mean that John is now very busy doing participant observation. But he is also growing a little concerned that this new wealth of data is too minute, and too focused on a particular kennel, rather than greyhound-racing and its relationship to gambling more generally. He resolves that on his day off he will conduct a small questionnaire survey amongst other kennels in the area who frequent the same race course. Later on he will try to follow this up with some focus group discussions with gamblers and kennel owners in order to relate the minutia of the particular to broader social processes.

Janet is now spending a third of her time with new vernacular embalming entrepreneurs. They are very busy as more customers turn away from older funerary businesses, and as more people are killed in the deepening gang violence. This means that her interviews with them tend to be brief, and to ensure that she captures as much detail as possible, she decides to record them using her voice recorder, as well as taking photos of the embalmed corpses. She is spending quite some time transcribing the interviews, to avoid having a backlog after fieldwork, but she is also spending a lot of time writing fieldnotes about her less formal encounters with the embalmers. She is also carefully recording her experiences of learning the embalming practices and techniques that her initial hosts are teaching her during weekly sessions at their funeral parlour. She is pleased that she decided to continue working there because she has developed a good rapport with the funerary directors and their clients, and is able to converse informally with them about the broader social changes sweeping the small town. Janet has become much more disciplined in managing her own time than she ever is at home, and is surprised at how much of the day's events she can remember when she sits down to write her daily notes.

John too is finding that his fieldwork is becoming all-consuming. Living at the kennels has given him unique insights into the murky world of greyhound-racing and gambling. He is becoming increasingly aware of what appear to be legal or semi-legal gambling activities taking place at the kennels and elsewhere. He is beginning to realize that taking fieldnotes, talking to people and taking photographs are much more sensitive issues than first appeared to be the case. In order to encourage people to talk to him he has decided not to record his interviews nor to photograph his informants. With ongoing criminal investigations in and around the greyhound track, he is becoming aware that more and more people are showing an interest in his fieldnotes, despite his assurances that he has anonymized everyone. John decides to store his notes securely and regularly at his parents' home, and only keeps one day's worth of notes on his laptop at any time. Having pre-tested his questionnaire and changed some of the questions, his survey was successful. He is confident that he now has a better understanding of the complex kin and business relationships between people and dogs across different kennels frequenting the racecourse.

During the development of their research projects and proposals all the

students bounced ideas around and off each other. In this year, Janet was not the only one who came up with the idea of researching into death – one of the lecturers has a very popular course on death, and this stimulated a lot of interest. However, another of the students is upset and feels that her ideas have been ‘borrowed’ in the development of Janet’s proposal. Although this other student is planning to look at the disposal of bodies in India, she accuses Janet of plagiarism of ideas, and complains to her supervisor.

John's first dilemma comes on gaining entry into the field. He is the son of a local General Practitioner, and as such his mother is very well known in the area where he is researching. He approaches the local dog-racing track owner, and asks if he can do research. This being a small town in the rural heartland of England, he is recognized as being the 'the doctor's boy' and is granted access. He can't help but feel a little uncomfortable, as he has a suspicion that the access he is being granted is because of the standing that his mother has in the local community and that they do not want to offend her.

Janet has realized that the necessary formal processes required for

getting research permission are long, tedious and seemingly endless. She has looked at the visa application forms, and been advised that she will need to affiliate with a research institution (no foreigner is allowed to do research without this) and that this might take four months. Friends in Mexico are suggesting that she just apply for a tourist visa and do the research without letting anyone know. After all, they argue, its only a dissertation for her degree, so who would really care?

John befriends one of the regular punters at the races. He is an acquaintance (John is doing fieldwork near his home town where he was brought up), and he notices that he is looking increasingly stressed and tired. He asks if he is OK, and the man tells John that he has gambling problems, and that they seem to be out of control. He has pawned off some of his partner's jewellery – after which she moved out of the house, although no one locally knows this yet – and is heavily in debt. He has not been sleeping and continually thinks about the possibilities that with the next win he will be able to solve all his problems. It is also starting to affect his work. At this point he breaks down in tears and asks John for help.

Janet has been working in the funeral parlour for four weeks and she is finding it very difficult. She feels she hasn't yet got much good data, and is struggling with the colloquial Spanish in the area that she has ended up in. In addition, she was not really prepared for all the suffering that she is witnessing and that so many of the visitors are in states of extreme distress over the loss of their friends and family. She is feeling socially isolated and not going out much. The people who she is working with are not at all interested in the aesthetics of the beauty of death, as she had articulated in her proposal, and she feels that she is gathering little data. She dreads going into the parlour to research. What she would really like to do is travel, go on holiday, and then go home, but she feels obligated to stay on and gather more data. Increasingly low, she finds herself crying a lot for no apparent reason and has problems sleeping.

During the course of his fieldwork, John starts to hear rumours that one of the trainers is involved in doping and feeds cocaine to some of the dogs before races. He knows this man, and he has become a key informant, telling John much of the issues and difficulties of dog training. John finds this hard to believe, but the rumours continue to circulate. In addition he realizes after a while that there is a whole economy of illegal betting going on, informally brokered and managed and that this same man is running this as a side project. One morning, there is a knock at the door of the flat and two police detectives ask if they can talk to him. They are investigating allegations into doping at the races and have been informed that he is researching into this area, and ask if he has any information which can help them with their case. In particular they would very much like to have a look at John's fieldnotes and ask if this is possible.

Towards the end of her fieldwork, the area where Janet is researching erupts into social unrest. This part of Mexico has long been embroiled in a low-grade conflict between the state and drug lords. The violence increases dramatically over the period of a week, with a number of gun battles and deaths – both of police and drug peddlers. In one skirmish, several bystanders are shot and killed. A state of emergency is declared and civil liberties suspended by the state. Locally it is announced that it is best to stay indoors, and to not travel after dark or to go to areas where crowds are gathered. Janet is confused as to what to do, and wonders if it is best to leave or stay put.

John is writing up his dissertation and is concerned with the anonymity of his subjects. Some of the activities he has come to find out about, even if they are not illegal, could be perceived as being somewhat 'grey'. He knows that the senior managers of the racecourse have asked to see the dissertation, and have made this a condition of the research. He is worried, however, that once they see it some of the employees might get into trouble. He is having difficulty thinking how he might create enough anonymity.

Janet had been well aware that her position as a middle-class, educated Briton had eased her access to the Mexican funeral parlours. During her fieldwork she had often felt uncomfortable when she was allowed to take photographs of the corpses. She instinctively felt that others would not have been given this intimate privilege but that she had been made an exception of on the basis of her outsider status. Back from the field and at her desk, she now wondered whether the pictures she had taken so reluctantly would be admissible as fieldwork data. She felt strangely guilty about the photographs and started to consider them tainted by the evident inequalities of power that had called them into being.

However, as she sat down with all her notes, Janet realized that the photographs spoke most eloquently about the perceptions of aesthetic beauty that she had set out to study. She would lose a very important part of her data if she left the photographs out. Eventually, she decided she could only include the photographs if she gave an account of the ways in which the photographs had come into being, describing both her perception of the power imbalance that had given her access as well as details about the photographic process. Janet concluded that as long as she clearly articulated the position from which she had taken the photographs, they could be admitted as data.

John had had a productive fieldwork period and had diligently collected a vast array of primary and secondary data. But as he now surveyed his rich takings, he was beset by a feeling of futility. He wondered whether any of it was meaningful at all, rather than just a morass of constructions upon constructions. How to say anything meaningful about his data when the data itself was a construction, which referred to another construction, that he now was going to make yet another construction of? It seemed a pointlessly circuitous exercise.

While it was largely the need to complete his degree that motivated John to continue with his project, as he started to sort through his data and put it in order, he regained a sense of pleasure in the work. Even if the data was all a series of constructions, it was his construction to produce. The analysis he would create would be his story, his account of the way gamblers understood and expressed their ideas about luck. And in that partial manner, it would contribute to the understanding of gambling addiction from a very particular point of view which, even if

constructed, was deeply meaningful to those people John had worked with and, by now, to John as well.

The main container of your data will probably be your fieldnotes. These describe in meticulous, and often suffocating, detail the time spent on the research. It isn't necessarily a fun task but it is important that you read your own fieldnotes. Do so with concentration and take enough time to do the task thoroughly. It is tempting to briefly scan your notes, you are the author after all, what revelations can they possibly hold? But you'd be surprised at how much you will already have forgotten or simply hadn't realized the import of. Even when your research period is short, perhaps only six weeks in the field or library, but especially if you are doing a long stretch of research, such as for a

Ph.D. thesis, it is worthwhile to set aside time while in the process of research and afterwards to read your notes through. Giving you time to reflect on the data already collected, its relevance and its gaps, reading through your field-notes at intervals will give you a good sense of your data and its general trends, as well as pointing to new directions for data collection. In the literature on ‘grounded theory’, this is called ‘constant comparison’, drawing attention to the simultaneous nature of data collection and analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967). It might also give you a break from the demands of fieldwork, and an escape from the library or archive, to a nearby oasis of some sort.

While reading your notes, you’ll notice the recurrence of particular persons, notions, Gods, dates or events. There might also be singular events or anecdotes that stand out, perhaps with little relation to the other events and conversations written down in your notes. To be able to track where these occur it can be helpful to produce an index for your notes. Very much like the index at the back of a scholarly book, an index makes your notes searchable and gives you an immediate overview of the mention of persons, organizations, concepts or places. This does require your fieldnotes to have page numbers and perhaps volume numbers, so you can refer to concrete places in your notes (for example, ‘notebook 3, page 76’ or ‘Word document “Fieldnotes May 2012”, page 4’). While you are reading through your fieldnotes, keep a separate notebook at hand where you can jot down the places in which terms appear that seem relevant to you. You can sort these into an alphabetic index that you can add to as you continue to read. The entries you deem significant will undoubtedly shift over the course of the project and keeping your index updated will reflect this. Having a well-organized index unlocks your fieldnotes for analysis and writing up.

If there is one form of data management that is almost universally considered a pain in the backside, it is the transcription of recorded interviews. What took only ten minutes to discuss, will take you at least an hour to transcribe. It is a laborious and often tedious process. Nonetheless, accurately transcribed interviews to read through and to quote in your writing are among the best resources for any research project in anthropology. It is therefore important to transcribe recorded interviews in a timely, judicious and faithful manner. Don't underestimate the amount of time it will cost to transcribe your recordings and factor this into your timetable.

When starting on the transcription of an interview, especially if some time has elapsed since you made the recording, it is worthwhile to listen through the entire interview first. Roughly note what themes are discussed and give time codes for where these themes occur. It is unlikely that everything in the interview is of equal relevance and you may choose to only transcribe in detail those points at which the most relevant themes occur. Once you have transcribed the interviews to your satisfaction, the written documents can be indexed.

You will encounter plenty of problems in transcription. Whose voice are you hearing? What is being said when two or more people speak all at once? Besides patience as you rewind again and again, until an unclear statement becomes meaningless sound, you might ask someone else to listen to particularly obstinate bits of recording. You might also find it useful to use digital audio editing software such as Audacity (available for free online), to slow down the speed of your digital recordings. Reconcile yourself to the fact that some bits of audio will inevitably sink into total opacity as you fail to make meaning of it. This is inevitable and a reminder that recording interviews is no guarantee of concrete and reproducible data.

During your fieldwork you may have gathered a significant body of secondary data. Newspaper and magazine clippings, documents from organizations or institutions, reports and statutes, flyers and advertisements, the list is endless. You can sort your collection of documents according to type. Then lay them out chronologically or any other sequential or hierarchical ranking you find meaningful. You will need to devise a system to refer to these various documents if you want to use them in your written dissertation and organizing them will help you do so, as well as producing clarity in the collections. As with the fieldnotes and transcribed interviews, you can index the documents you have gathered.

You might have done fieldwork in a place where people speak and write a language you are not completely in control of. In that case, it is helpful to mark up each of the documents in a language you are comfortable with, noting briefly what the content of the document is, perhaps underscoring a particular segment, and noting its author, publisher, place and date of publication, if applicable. Once you come to doing an analysis, you will be able to quickly flip through the documents without having to painstakingly translate each sentence.

As advanced photography and video applications are now embedded in mobile phones, and freeware editing programs widely available, more and more anthropologists are starting to use (audio-) visual technologies as part of their data collection. Photographing people and places, videoing events, scanning pictures, you will have a stash of images on your hard drive. Edit the photographs to a manageable set consisting of those which you might reasonably be able to, or want to, use in your research. To organize digital images, date their extensions when you save them and make sure you know when, where and of what and whom the images are.

Your wealth of visual material should not only be considered a series of illustrations. Video and still images are sources of data in their own right. To unlock this data, you might want to code your videos and images. Like indexing written text, coding imagery consists of attributing certain values to the image surface. You might mark the appearance of people, symbols, or colours in an image. You might also code the aesthetic properties of the content of the image or the image itself. The aim is to explicate the properties of particular images and videos. There are many layers of coding you can attribute to images, and it is important you do so judiciously, keeping in mind your research question. It is also important to think about questions of consent from those in visual material when you use images in your analysis and outputs.

There are many software programs available that can help you with the process of analyzing your qualitative data. Known as Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis or CAQDAS, programs such as Atlas.ti, NVivo, Nudist or Ethnographer are used to manage and code data. It does require all your data to be available in a digital format and in particular languages for it to function. The advantage of using software like this is that it allows you to do complex and rapid searches across your material while archiving your data in a central system. You can also count incidences of particular terms, map these and move through your data from one incidence to another.

The collective name for this sort of software is, however, misleading. While they are known as programs for 'analysis', they help you with analysis only to the extent that the practice of coding

is a first step in the process of analysis. But attributing codes and making sense of them later is something you ultimately have to do yourself.

Having decided her photographs could be included as data, Janet wondered what to do with them. They could nicely, if lugubriously, illustrate her dissertation. But Janet felt they could be put to better use and be integrated into her actual argument. To start with she had to somehow organize the photographs to decide which were the most helpful. To do this, she decided to code the photographs and see what emerged. Taking the pictures as faithful documents of the aesthetic values placed on the appearance of corpses, she started to make notes of the specificities of the make-up that had been applied. Listing the different parts of the body and making a note of colours, densities and positions, she systematically mapped the photos. She found the practical task a justifiable form of procrastination from the dreary work of transcription, which was taking her hours. However, as she coded more and more photographs, she started to see patterns appear. If she could illustrate those patterns by providing a sample of photographs in which those patterns appeared most clearly, she would have a visual line of argumentation to support her written text. She was glad she hadn't dismissed her photographs.

John had returned with reams and reams of documents about gambling. With gambling addiction on the rise in the region, he had found a series of research papers and policy plans at the local council. While these papers addressed directly the ostensible topic of his research, as he ploughed through the drearily written documentation, he felt they said less and less of direct relevance. While he was

studying gambling, it was the question of luck that he was really interested in. And on this topic the papers were entirely silent. As he marked the documents, the term 'luck' didn't appear once, and in his index the term appeared only to refer to his interviews and fieldnotes. He concluded that the question of luck, so important to his informants and intriguing to himself, was of no interest to the concerned council representatives and policy makers. John felt this might in itself be meaningful.

Much of the specificity of anthropological modes of analysis comes from their embeddedness within a particular body of literature. This provides an analytical vocabulary and a series of concepts that you should be able to put to use in your own understanding of your data. Most likely, you will have made this anthropological vocabulary your own as you completed your coursework and prepared a literature review for your research proposal. Part of analysis is phrasing your own concerns within these vocabularies and conceptual structures. This means raising your empirical material to a level of abstraction so that the prayer service you observed in a Catholic church in your fieldwork area comes to be rephrased as 'devotional practice' or the elegant manner in which the women at the organization you worked with dressed can be understood as the 'materialization of a professional habitus'. While this rephrasing seems to simultaneously add nothing to what you could describe much more plainly, and to draw highly specific practices and objects onto a plane of generalization that erases their distinctiveness, this is part of the analytical procedure by which anthropological meaning is made. It is a legacy of anthropology's early comparative method, by which practices and ideas far dispersed could be brought into meaningful conversation. This is what you try to do as you proceed to analyzing your material. Indexing your notes, interviews and documents is part of this process as you assign more general values, very often concepts, to particular bits of data.

What the relevant terms and concepts are for your project, will emerge from the secondary literature you position your work in. The

concepts and terminology you will gradually start using are most likely part of more or less clearly articulated theoretical frameworks. These theoretical perspectives set the parameters for analysis, and will already have had a part to play in how you conducted your fieldwork and research (see Chapter 4). Most anthropologists assemble an analysis from a range of perspectives, combined according to their own needs and interests. However, it is important to understand that particular bits of literature fall roughly within broad theoretical fields or schools that are based around certain assumptions and questions.

Of course, it is entirely possible to reject or tweak the terms you receive from your anthropological interlocutors. As long as you do so explicitly, explaining why you do not find particular concepts helpful, you are contributing to the lively debates in anthropology. It is these debates that you are getting into as you review your literature and start to frame your data within its concepts and categories.

Even if you do have a sense of the main bodies of literature that speak to your project and you have a good overview of your various bits of data, analyzing this data so that it speaks to the literature can be difficult. Keeping engaged with the data, indexing and coding your material and asking yourself how it relates to the literature is a good way to keep the process of analysis going. Beyond this, there are a number of practical steps you can take to push your analytical process.

If you have gathered census data, counted incidences or collected other quantitative data in your project, you need to be sure that you are able to read and compute these numbers effectively. It is crucial that you are familiar with basics of statistical analysis and conventions. You can use software programs such as SPSS to help you compute your own statistics. There are plenty of useful guides to help you with this (see further readings for this chapter). As with CAQDAS programs, the usefulness of the software will always depend on how you analyze and make sense of your material, not a machine.

As part of her literature review, Janet had thoroughly studied the literature on the anthropology of death. As she worked through her data, and condensed it into significant episodes and vignettes, she

realized that her data spoke much more to questions of aesthetics than to the sort of questions dealt with in the anthropology of death. Should she just drop that body of literature? Her advisor suggested she try to understand why the literature on death didn't match her data. If she could find this out, she could make an argument about that literature on the basis of her own data.

John had started out his research wondering how gamblers could possibly hold on to notions of good luck when in fact they were mostly confronted with bad luck as they kept losing their bets. While this was an obvious contradiction to John, after collecting his data and sitting down to look at the recurrent use of the notion of luck in his fieldnotes, he realized that it had only seemed like a contradiction to him from the outside. From his conversations with the gamblers at the dog races, it now appeared that the notion of good luck was in fact predicated on the incidence of bad luck. His gamblers could only really win if they experienced loss. Rather than a contradiction, it was a paradox that told John a lot about how his gamblers understood good luck and persisted in their gambling. Setting out why there was no contradiction in holding on to notions of good luck in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary became central to John's analysis.

We will discuss how you compose a plausible and credible argument a bit later on. For the moment let us say this: at the heart of your dissertation will be a series of claims about the nature of reality. These will be grounded in the lives of a real and specific group of people, but they will also aspire to speak to broader issues that exceed the peculiarities of these lives. These claims should be supported by evidence; whether that is the evidence of your own ethnographic fieldwork, or evidence gathered otherwise (through secondary reading, or archival research, etc.), or evidence that you assume supports the claims made by other credible academic authors.

This seems an unhelpful thing to say; however, let us work from the following assumption: as a discipline anthropology is constituted by a heterogeneous set of concerns. These concerns do not exist out there in the anthropological atmosphere. They exist in books, chapters and articles written by anthropologists. So the question ‘how is the argument you are presenting relevant to anthropology?’ may be translated as ‘in what ways does the argument you are presenting relate to stuff that has already been written by anthropologists?’ In other words, your dissertation becomes relevant by integrating the writings of other anthropologists into your writing and situating your arguments in relation to these writings. Of course, you may well incorporate the writings of nonanthropologists into your dissertation. They may indeed play an important role, especially, though not exclusively, when it comes to theorizing positions that are under-theorized within the anthropological literature. If you are writing as an anthropologist for anthropologists you must, however, account for the relevance of your argument for and within existing discussions within the

anthropological literature.

The important thing to realize is that your argument is only communicated in writing. The plausibility, credibility and relevance of your argument are constituted throughout the course of the research process that has been described in previous chapters. A good argument does not just spring into being as the words emerge from the blank white page. A good argument is the culmination of all the work that came before.

So how do you go about doing such a thing? It is hard to say. There is no paint-by-numbers guide to the composition of a good, dissertation-length, anthropological argument. What we can do is make a few suggestions and provide a few hints, many of which have been drawn from our own experience of the joys and difficulties of saying something about something to someone else in anthropology.

The idea of writing a dissertation filled Janet with dread. She had found it difficult enough writing essays of only a few thousand words and with a set topic. Now she had to set the topic herself, and from all her notes and reading, her analysis of photographs and her time spent in the field she had to say something about death, the body, aesthetics and what went on in Mexican funeral parlours. It seemed impossible. More than anything she felt she did not know enough. When she read the works of

other anthropologists she was impressed by how well they seemed to know the people about whom they wrote. In comparison it seemed she had done almost nothing. Sure, she had a lot of photographs and some notebooks filled with descriptions of what went on during her months in Mexico. She had spent some days and weeks in funeral parlours and attended a few funerals, but really she felt she knew almost nothing of the thoughts, feelings and lives of the people about whom she was to write. How could she turn her pile of photographs and fieldnotes, now analyzed and coded, into a dissertation?

John felt ready. From his analysis he had the basic point of his dissertation clear in his mind. This was a dissertation about luck and, as luck would have it, this was a topic that was largely ignored in much of the writing about gambling. So not only did he have a focus, but his focus seemed to address a gap in the literature, which he had been told was exactly what original research should do. Usually, he was very organized when it came to writing his essays, starting in good time, working to an outline and finishing with a minimum of fuss. This time, however, he was having trouble. He had so much material and so much of it was about luck. The idea of luck seemed pervasive. It ran through everything. How was he to sort this tangle of associations into a nice, neat argument that flowed from one point to another point and finally said something complex and interesting about luck, gambling and greyhound-racing?

Everyone likes a plan but a plan does not make for a good dissertation; a plan enables you to write. It enables you to move forward in an orderly fashion: to know where to start, to know where to end, to have some idea of what goes where and what follows on from what. The point is not to get too hung-up about plans. Writing is, after all, a creative process. However, you do need to have some idea where you are going and how you will know when you have reached your destination.

It goes without saying, there is no single technique for planning a dissertation. One way to think about this is to return to the problem of how to render the ‘messy and multi-dimensional’ nature of reality into an orderly linear narrative that works from specific situations and events to speak to issues of more general concern. The trick is that in doing this you want the narrative to somehow emerge from all that you have done, read and written so far. So let us try some practical steps:

We use the phrase 'mind map' with trepidation. Like 'free-writing', the exponents of mind mapping make extravagant claims for this technique. If you wish to explore mind mapping to the limits of its potential we suggest you read one of the several books introducing the technique and extolling the virtues of 'radiant thinking' (cf. Buzan 2006). The main benefit of 'mind mapping' is that it is closer to the messy nature of your project at this stage. It is a way of taking all the written and audio-visual stuff you have, all the ideas, quotes, images, incidents, bits of experience, research questions and so on, and beginning to make hierarchies and chart relationships.

Start by taking your newly rephrased research topic, boiling it down to one, two or three words and putting those words in a circle in the middle of a blank page. Now think about the main themes and issues that relate to your research question. Take five or ten minutes to do some free-writing to create a sentence or short paragraph describing these issues. Boil these related issues down to a few words, put these

words in circles and place them on the page with a thick line to your main topic or question. You may find that these main themes and issues engender yet other lesser themes and issues which relate to them and so back to the main research question. So, again, do a bit of free-writing about these lesser themes and issues, make them into a few words in circles and place them on the page with lines connecting to other themes and issues. You may wish to begin charting various bits of evidence – incidents from your fieldnotes, images or bits of film, quotes by your informants, archival material or descriptions in published accounts by other scholars. Finally, you may wish to chart which secondary readings may specifically relate to a discussion of a given issue.

You cannot and should not be exhaustive here. Think of this as an organic entity, which will develop as you write. It is meant to be rough, unfinished and open to further transformation. The idea is to get you thinking about the shape of your dissertation: what relates to what, and what goes where.

Finally, you should transform this multidimensional, radiant mind-map into an outline for the dissertation as it will be written from beginning to end. If you have done some mind mapping beforehand then composing an outline should be straightforward. The description of the research topic and the formulation of the main research questions is the ‘introduction’. Each of the main themes or issues you identified could become chapters, with the lesser themes and issues becoming sections within a chapter. In the conclusion you return to the research topic and the main research question and develop some kind of answer to that question drawing on the accumulation of claims and evidence that have been presented in the body of the dissertation.

Whether you are working from a mind map, or have engaged in

what George Watson calls a ‘stock-taking’ process (1987: 34), you should wind up with a sequential list of chapter headings. Rowena Murray suggests you then write a couple of ‘sentences on the contents of each chapter’ (2006: 125). You may then wish to list the headings for each section of the chapter and write a couple of sentences describing what you will discuss under each of the headings. Finally, you should ‘write an introductory paragraph for each chapter’ (ibid.: 125). It is also important that you give a rough estimate for the word count of each chapter.

This outline will guide the writing of your dissertation. The degree to which it will do so is a matter of your own way of working, and finding a balance between spontaneous writing and having enough structure to ensure that your efforts are guided by some sense of how the various parts fit together as a whole.

Janet fashioned an outline. At first it looked a bit of a mess with lines and circles and more lines, but from this mess a story started to emerge. Right at the centre of her mind map she had the dead body made up to look whole and lifelike. Various questions came to her and she put them onto the mind map: ‘why make the dead body lifelike?’, ‘what are the bodily aesthetics that inform the preparation of the corpse

for viewing?' and 'how does the fact that the corpse is made beautiful inform or trouble anthropological understandings of the work of mourning?' She started to attach bits of her data and some of her reading to these questions. The anthropology of death seemed to come into the discussion of mourning as did the various conversations she had overheard at funerals. Her analysis of photographs would be at the centre of her discussion of the aesthetics of the corpse. The big question was the simplest one: 'why make the body lifelike and put it on display?' She would start with that. That could be described as emerging straight from her fieldwork. She could write it as a riddle of a sort: all this work behind the scenes to make the body appear as alive for a few hours or days and then have it buried. The answer? She was not sure yet but she figured her big point was that to understand death and mourning one needed to understand that deathliness or liveliness were aesthetic categories having to do with notions of the integrity of the body. So her introduction would pose the basic question in relation to her ethnography. Then she would have a chapter on the aesthetics of the corpse. Then she would have a chapter on mourning and memory. Then she would finish by making some kind of conclusion about the importance of understanding bodily aesthetics within our theorizations of mourning. Now she just had to write the darn thing.

Luck was everywhere for John, everywhere except in the academic writing on gambling. From his analysis his main question was already forming in his mind: 'why would gamblers hold to notions of good luck in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?' He put this in the centre of his mind map. He had also decided that it would be a good move to frame this question by discussing the lack of writing about luck in much of the academic and policy literature concerning gambling in Britain. So he attached this discussion to his main question. Then what? Well, from his analysis he realized there was a lot of talk about luck. There was also a lot of talk about the 'science' of greyhound-racing. All the punters had elaborate systems for deciding which dog was most likely to win. The condition of the track, pedigree, the look of the dog before the race, all these came into consideration when choosing a winner. So he added 'science' and 'luck' as two separate categories related to his main question. During his reading he had come across the notion of 'magical thinking' in the social psychology literature, so maybe this could be a way to understand luck. But this seemed to assume it was something other than rational, when his analysis suggested luck and a rational appreciation of the odds and the likelihood of losing went hand-in-hand. So maybe this was his

conclusion: 'that not only is luck important, but that luck cannot be understood as something opposite to, and defined by the absence of, rational thought'. A story was beginning to form. Finally, he decided that in his introduction he would address the literature on gambling and note the general absence of a discussion of luck. He would tell a few stories from his fieldwork to illustrate that luck is important to punters. On that basis he would state his main problematic. Then he would have a chapter exploring luck in detail. This would be richly ethnographic but would also relate to the literature on magical thinking. Then he would have a chapter on the 'science of greyhound-racing'. Then as a conclusion he would make the point that luck is not simply a delusional belief that sustains the gambling habit but works at the limits of a calculus of likelihood. Now he just had to write the darn thing.

This is the most straightforward bit of writing you will do. In introducing your argument you will be describing the central question your dissertation will be addressing, accounting for the significance of this question in reference to the existing literature pertaining to the issues you wish to address and giving some account for the methods by which you gained your understanding of the lives of others.

You will note that we have lumped together three things that are often treated separately: 'The Introduction', 'The Literature Review' and a discussion of methods and methodology. Whether you wish to present these as a part of your introduction or prefer them to be separated into two or three chapters is up to you. The tendency in social and cultural anthropology seems to be to enfold the review of the literature and a discussion of your research into the introduction, but there may be times when a more extended literature review and/or discussion of your research experience is warranted. In this case you should consider presenting these discussions as separate chapters.

What does an introduction do? It introduces. To introduce someone or something is to provide orientation. Without a proper introduction your reader can become lost and confused. To orient themselves your reader needs some basic information.

First, they need to know what the dissertation is about. Before too many pages you should provide a clear statement of the topic of your dissertation and, not too long after that, present one, two, maybe three, basic research questions that pertain to this topic. If you have done as we have suggested and revised your proposal, done a bit of mind mapping and composed an outline then this should be straightforward. The main thing is to be precise in how you describe your topic. Remember that your reader is evaluating your dissertation. If it is evaluated properly then it will be evaluated within the terms you set yourself. You set these terms by stating your topic and research questions.

Second, they will need enough background information so they have some idea what you are talking about. In all likelihood your readers will not be so familiar with the peculiarities of the place(s) and people(s) you are writing about. So some basic orientation is required. We stress this is basic orientation. Much of the rich ethnographic detail concerning the place and people you have studied will be provided during the course of your discussion. Your introduction needs to provide just enough information so that they have some idea where they are and who they have found themselves amongst. Really what they need is facts. It may seem a bit old-fashioned, but a map never goes amiss. Some idea of the number and nature of the population is helpful. If it is pertinent to your discussion, some basic information concerning how people go about their everyday lives is also useful. A bit of scene-setting is a nice way to provide this orientation. Paint your reader a picture, whether this is a picture of a Bedouin village or a Brazilian institution for the ill and abandoned. This is why stories of arrival are so popular. It is not only the author who is arriving but

through the author's account the reader also arrives and begins to find their way, as the author settles in, finds a place to stay and begins research.

Finally, your introduction should provide a basic outline of the chapters that constitute the body of the dissertation. These descriptions will likely be no more than a sentence or three and should come towards the close of your introduction. The main thing to remember is that this organization must make sense. There must be a reason for ordering the body of your dissertation in the way that you describe. You should communicate this sense to your reader in such a way that your approach to organizing your discussion seems a logical way of exploring a given topic and working your way towards an answer to the main question or problematic of your dissertation.

In introducing your study you not only need to describe the topic of your dissertation and formulate some basic research questions; you also need to embed these research questions in a discussion of the literature pertinent to the topic. As with the review you produced for your research proposal, this is a matter of accounting for the relevance of your dissertation to broader traditions of anthropological scholarship, ethnographic study and philosophical speculation. What marks your dissertation as academic work is not only the quality of your research, analysis and argument; it is also the quality of your understanding of the traditions of scholarship within your discipline. These traditions of scholarship should be shown to clearly inform your own thinking concerning Balinese cockfights, Bedouin poetry, or whatever subject you have chosen to write about. Keep in mind that this is the introduction; you will continue to engage with and discuss the literature throughout your dissertation.

The question always is: how many books, chapters and articles do I

need to discuss when writing a review of ‘the literature’? There is, once again, no good answer. It is a particularly difficult question because for any anthropological topic the relevant literature is almost limitless; however, if you have followed the advice in the chapter on secondary research you will have cut this vast literary terrain down to size by adopting a systematic and structured approach to your reading. So to some extent you have already answered this question. That being said, writing is not the same as reading and note-taking. When writing a literature review there are a couple of points to keep in mind.

First, you are writing to secure the credibility of your dissertation as an academic piece of work. So your review should demonstrate you have engaged in a thoughtful and detailed manner with the literature relevant to your topic. What constitutes ‘relevance’ has been discussed in the chapter on secondary research in which we have emphasized the importance of constituting clear evaluative criteria for your literature searches that enable them to be at once comprehensive yet specialized. Your literature review does, however, need to be ‘substantial’, by which we mean that your engagement with the literature should evince some depth and breadth of reading.

Second, you need to remember that the point of discussing literature in an introduction is to formulate and refine your research questions. The purpose of this review is to critically evaluate what has been written on a subject in such a way that you can position your own study in relation to that body of writing. One way to think about it is as a process akin to drawing a map. What you want to do in writing a review of the literature is to sketch the scholarly terrain upon which you will be situating your own study. Like any good map that presages an adventure, there should be some blanks, or at least some areas which are poorly known or, to extend the metaphor, insufficiently charted. You then, in describing your topic, set yourself the mission of exploring this previously uncharted domain and so adding to our understanding of the human condition.

These blanks may be theoretically constituted. You may wish to demonstrate that a given phenomenon has been amply studied, but these studies have been of a particular theoretical disposition and therefore have ignored key issues or questions. Alternatively, these blanks may be ethnographically constituted, in that a given set of theoretical propositions has been well-developed in reference to one kind of situation, but have rarely been applied to the situation you are proposing to describe and understand.

Rarely are these gaps constituted by refuting the claims of other scholars. In general, social and cultural anthropology does not advance claims by overturning previous truths and replacing them with newer, better truths. It works by enriching our previous accounts, by rendering them fuller and more nuanced. You should be wary of stating that the views of another academic are wrong or foolish. Such a statement will invariably read as simplistic, even presumptuous. It is more appropriate to provide a careful account of the significance of another's work in reference to your research topic, before suggesting some of the limitations of this work and how these limitations or contradictions have been addressed in other writings and potentially your own. This does not mean you cannot be critical, but this critique should proceed from a position of sympathetic and detailed understanding and then move to an account of some of the shortcomings of a given study or theoretical approach.

Janet had written her introduction. She had eased into things by writing of her fieldwork, describing how she had come to work in the funeral parlour, the escalating drug- and gang-related violence, the new vernacular embalmers, and how she got on with the staff and followed them as they attended funerals. She described how the embalmers worked to make the corpse of a roadtraffic victim into someone his family would want to see. At the end they looked at their handiwork, 'beautiful,' they said, 'what a handsome man.' After a couple of pages she moved from this anecdote to her main question: 'why make a corpse beautiful?' With the basic problem clearly stated she elaborated this question with reference to the literature. She brought in some writing about the work of undertakers elsewhere and noted that making the body beautiful and lifelike was a recurrent feature of this work. She addressed the literature on funerary customs and noted that, although there was a lot of discussion of the preparation of the corpse, there was no discussion of aesthetics. This allowed her to write a more refined and theoretically articulate version of her main research question: 'how could an appreciation of ideas of beauty and the beautiful body inform our understanding of funerary rituals and the work of mourning?' She then wrote that her discussion of this problem would be in two parts, the first about the aesthetics of the dead body and the second about mourning and the lifelike corpse. Her argument had begun.

John began his introduction by addressing the literature on 'problem' gambling. He very briefly reviewed this literature and suggested that if luck was discussed at all it was described as a delusional belief that was a feature of the 'psychopathology of problem gambling'. Perhaps because of this assumption, John argued, there had been very few studies of gambling which focused on luck and on that basis truly understood how gamblers thought of and experienced 'luck'. With this brief literature review in place John was ready to define the topic of his

dissertation. His dissertation was about luck and gambling. 'In exploring the topic of luck and gambling' he declared that he was 'going to explore the rationality of luck'. 'I will argue,' he wrote, 'that luck is not a delusional belief but a feature of a rational calculus of probability that nonetheless leads punters to keep betting even in the knowledge they are more likely to lose than win.' With his main topic defined John moved on to describe his case study. He explained why he chose to study greyhound-racing, how he became familiar with the subtleties of betting and befriended some of the regulars at the track. In so doing he not only gave an account of his fieldwork, but made sure his reader knew enough about greyhound-racing to make sense of the rest of his argument. Now to write the rest.

Despite these differences, there are some broad similarities in the ways in which anthropologists write their arguments. Fundamentally, anthropologists, as social scientists, advance various claims concerning the whys and wherefores of human existence, claims which are at once specific to the circumstances of the study and yet aspire to speak to issues that are greater than these circumstances. These claims are all supported by evidence. This evidence is, directly or indirectly, evidence concerning the lives of real people. A good piece of anthropological writing is, as we suggested earlier, one that advances claims that are credible and plausible, in that they are sustained by the evidence of your own research or by the published work of others whose findings are deemed credible and plausible by the academic community.

Of course, these observations are hardly novel. In particular, our focus on the claims and evidence, and the plausibility and relevance of ethnographic accounts is borrowed from Martin Hammersley's Reading Ethnographic Research (1998) and Kate Turabian's Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertation (2007). For Turabian, a claim is your thesis. It is 'the centre of your argument' and 'the point of your report' (2007: 51). Such claims, by their very nature, require evidence to render them plausible. Hammersely makes a similar point. In so doing he makes a distinction that is useful when thinking about writing ethnographic research. This is a distinction

between ‘main claims’ and ‘evidentiary claims’.

Main claims are the basic propositions and central points that constitute the fundamental findings of your research. Evidentiary claims are the evidence that the writer uses to support the main claims and, by so doing, render them plausible. It is worth noting that Hammersley writes of ‘evidentiary claims’, rather than evidence. The difference is subtle yet important. We commonly think of ourselves as presenting evidence, which is the irreducible stuff of reality which constitutes the material from which we fashion our main claims. When writing up, however, what we present is rarely the irreducible stuff of reality; it is, rather, a representation of that reality that claims to be true and faithful to that reality. As such, as Hammersley makes clear, these claims can be judged according to their plausibility and, in particular, their credibility in much the same way as one would judge the plausibility and credibility of bigger, wider, more abstract claims.

So we fashion our argument of main claims, whose plausibility is secured by evidentiary claims, which in turn may require some more evidence to secure their plausibility and credibility. This relationship between main claims and evidentiary claims is fundamental to the fashioning of an anthropological argument, as is securing the credibility of evidentiary claims with a clear account of their provenance. This seems sensible in theory. When it comes to practicalities of writing a dissertation, however, there are two bothersome questions concerning the relationship between claims and evidence.

The first question is: how much evidence do you need to present in support of your main claims? The answer is ‘enough’ that your main claims will be read as plausible. This does not mean that you will have ‘proved’ your main claim to be true beyond any shadow of doubt. Anthropology is, at best, an inexact science and does not really deal in absolute truth. It does, however, deal in provisional, plausible truths which are secured by the quality of the argument and the evidence

presented in support of your proposition.

Moreover, the nature of your evidence should be roughly proportionate to the nature of your claim. What do we mean by this? Well think of it from the point of view of a reader of academic work. Say you pick up a paper about the Balinese Cockfight written by Clifford Geertz. In it he makes a whole bunch of claims. One of them is that there exists a 'deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks' (1973: 60). Now, if you are reading critically you will think to yourself: 'Really? How do you know this to be so?' So he tells you how he knows. His Balinese landlord once said to Geertz 'I'm cock crazy'. Is this enough? It may be enough to support the claim that Geertz's landlord is into cockfighting, but Geertz is not saying this. He is saying Balinese men in general closely identify with fighting cocks. So we need more evidentiary claims. And we get them. We are told in some detail about how Balinese men attend to their birds with lavish care and affection (ibid.: 61). We are told that in everyday talk and poetry men are often likened to cocks, in their pride, their heroism, or even in their failings, as a pompous man is likened 'to a tailless cock who struts about as though he had a large, spectacular one', or a stingy man is 'compared to a cock which, held by the tail, leaps at another without in fact engaging him' (ibid.: 60). All of this does not mean you, the reader, have to agree with Geertz's main claim, but you will likely concede that it is a plausible assertion given the evidence he presents.

This brings us to the second question: if we talk of 'evidentiary claims' rather than 'evidence' then when can we decide that the claims we are making can be considered self-evident and we can stop providing more evidence to support our evidentiary claims? Again, this is a tricky question. Basically, it is a matter of provenance. If an evidentiary claim is to be read as credible the reader must feel confident that it comes from a credible source.

Generally speaking, there are two types of credible source. The first

is your own field research. Your own empirical ethnographic data gives a lot of licence to you as the anthropologist to write authoritatively of the lives of others. For example, in 'Notes on the Balinese Cockfight' Geertz makes the following evidentiary claim:

Whenever you see a group of Balinese men squatting idly in the council shed or along the road in their hips down, shoulders forward, knees up fashion, half or more of them will have a rooster in his hands, holding it between his thighs, bouncing it gently up and down to strengthen its legs, ruffling its feathers with abstract sensuality, pushing it out against a neighbour's rooster to rouse its spirit, withdrawing it toward his loins to calm it again.

(Geertz 1973: 459)

Geertz, as he assures us in the preamble of his article, lived in a Balinese village. He went to cockfights and attended closely to talk of fighting cocks. So when he presents evidence such as this we find it credible because we believe that he has actually witnessed Balinese men crouching with their roosters held lovingly between their knees.

The other source of credible evidence is the published works of reputable scholars. Why? The simple answer is because we can trust them and trust that the evidentiary claims they make are credible. The more complex answer is that works published by the academic community have been subjected to rigorous scrutiny by specialists in the field (Hammersely 1998: 68–70). This is why evidentiary claims made in books and journal articles written by professional academics and published by academic publishers are much more likely to be regarded as plausible and credible than material published on Wikipedia. Of course, the reality of academic work does not always live up to these ideals of rigour and scrutiny, but nonetheless evidentiary claims are more likely to be regarded as credible if they are taken from credible sources.

This is why properly citing your sources of information is so crucial. If the credibility of evidentiary claims rest on their provenance then your reader must know where this information is coming from. The conventions of citation and referencing are not just a matter of adhering to the 'rules' of academic writing; the proper attribution of sources is critical to establishing the credibility of your claims. There is much guidance as to various approaches to citing sources and listing those references. Your first stop should, again, be any specific directions published by your institution. Some universities have a preferred format or style when it comes to citing sources and composing bibliographies and reference lists. Others are happy with any approach, so long as it adheres to proper academic conventions and is consistent. In the latter case, it is a good idea to consult one of several good style manuals available.

The first step to writing an argument is, therefore, to link your main claim to evidentiary claims and to ensure that these evidentiary claims are credible by reference to your own research or the work of others. Now, how do we weave this all together into some kind of argument?

We would argue that, by and large, anthropologists weave together their arguments by shifting perspectives. Sometimes we write of things up close. We describe, as well as words will allow, some real event. We speak of real, specific people, doing and saying real and specific things. At other times we write of things from a distance, speaking of what people do in general, even theoretical, terms. The trick is how we accomplish this shift of perspective in writing.

A lovely example is Keith Basso's famous essay 'Stalking with Stories' (1996), in which he follows the words of his Apache informants to suggest an interpretation of the historical tales they tell. A few pages in and we are driving in the company of Basso. He stops

his jeep at the camp of an old Apache man named Nick Thompson. Nick is smoking a mentholated cigarette and relaxing in his chair outside his cabin, with a mug of coffee and a copy of the National Enquire in easy reach (1996: 24). After a minute or two of amiable silence Nick enquires as to the purpose of Basso's visit. Basso tells him that he is 'puzzled by certain statements the Apache have made about the country' and 'anxious to know how to interpret them' (ibid.: 24). 'Learn the names', says Nick, 'start with the names' (ibid.). For ten weeks Nick teaches the anthropologist place names and the anthropologist, true to his trade, writes them onto a map. Shortly before Basso is set to leave at the close of the summer, Nick asks to see these maps. 'He,' writes Basso, 'is not impressed. "White men need paper maps", he observes, "we have maps in our minds"' (ibid.: 25).

This is not a description of Apache culture or society. This is a description of Keith Basso meeting Nick Thompson and learning about place names. Nick Thompson is not a common denominator person (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 32–33), or what Jonathan Spencer caustically labelled homo ethnographicus (1989: 153). He is Nick Thompson, who cuts his white hair short, smokes menthol cigarettes and reads the National Enquirer. When he tells us that we must understand place names to understand Apache stories he is not speaking as a typical Apache, he is speaking as himself, in his own words (or so it seems), although these words do indeed lead us to more general and profound insights into Apache culture.

Your dissertation, however, cannot be composed simply of a series of descriptions of incidents and quotes from various informants. You also need to take a step back and write accounts of what people tend to do, say, think and feel as a group. Basso does just that. He tells the story of Nick Thompson and the mapping of place names, then a few pages later he takes a step back and suggests that it is not just Nick Thompson who is interested in place names, it is Apaches in general. 'Apaches,' he asserts, 'enjoy using them' (the 'them' being place

names). Then he moves back in close and writes of a time he was stringing barbed wire with a couple of Apache cowboys, one of whom takes to muttering place names softly under his breath as he works. When the anthropologist asks him why he is doing this, the cowboy replies that he likes to, and that he rides 'that way in my mind' (1996: 27). Then Basso takes a step back again and tell us that 'on dozens of other occasions when I have been working or travelling with Apaches, they have taken satisfaction in pointing out particular locations and pronouncing their names' (ibid.).

One way of thinking about this shifting of perspectives is in terms of 'zooming in' and 'zooming out'. In other words you 'zoom in' on specific events or specific things people did and said and 'zoom out' to more generalized descriptions of relationships and regularities and, on that basis, to more theoretical and even philosophical discussions. What you are doing is forging associations. This is in part a matter of forging associations between things at the same level, as Keith Basso does when relating Nick Thompson's enigmatic talk about the importance of place names to a cowboy mumbling names under his breath as he strings barbed wire. More importantly, this is a matter of forging associations between the various levels of your discussion. You need to account for how the stringing of barbed wire indicates something more general about the significance of place names amongst the Apache which in turn indicates something even more general about the relationship of indigenous peoples to the land.

In 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' you are constituting the significance of the specific doings and sayings that you are describing by situating them within broader and more theoretically constituted discussions. As with everything we have said in this chapter, it is important to remember that this process of 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' is not just a way of imagining research or analyzing your findings. It is a way of composing your argument in such a way that your main claims will be read as emerging from and supported by your evidence.

The key to this composition is the way you forge associations in writing. You do this by referring back and forward. You refer back to explain how what you are about to write leads on from what you have already written. Alternatively, you refer forward from what you have just written to suggest how you will proceed.

It is in this process of 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' that you relate your main claims to your evidentiary claims and compose an argument that weaves together rich and detailed descriptions of everyday life, as it was revealed to you in your fieldwork and as you have learned of it through written sources, more general accounts of culture and society, and theoretical arguments concerning the nature of human relationships. In this composition you constitute rich and detailed descriptions, more general accounts and theoretical arguments. More importantly, you constitute the associations between these various elements. By constituting these webs of associations you move the argument forward towards its conclusion by introducing problems and questions and working through the dense detail of lived existence towards some resolution of these problems or answers to these questions.

For more detail about 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' as well as how anthropologists compose relationships between various claims and bits of evidence (from your fieldwork, archival or secondary research), take a look at my discussion of Keith Basso's 'Stalking with Stories' (1996) and Matei Candea's (2010) article about falling in love with Carlos the meerkat on the companion website.

‘zooming in’ on small details and then ‘zooming out’ to more general statements that describe the significance of these small details in theoretical terms.

It had all started so well for Janet. Her introduction was so clearly imagined and well outlined that she wrote it in a few days. The chapter on the aesthetics of the body proved almost a pleasure to write as well. She worked through her analysis of her photographs, 'zooming in' on specific details, contextualizing these within narratives rewritten from her fieldnotes, and then 'zooming out' through more theoretical works to develop her argument concerning the curious beauty of the corpse. Through this time she met with her supervisor, who glanced over what she had written so far and seemed content with her progress. Then she came to the chapter on mourning and memory. She started writing and then got lost. It seemed too complex. She had plenty of material from her research. She also had plenty of notes from her reading. She had a rough outline as well, but when she started writing, the argument just seemed to go nowhere. She started to dread writing. She stopped for some days citing the pressures of other academic work. It proved hard to start again. Days passed and her anxiety built. Curiously, the more anxious she became the harder it seemed to concentrate on writing. She had a meeting with her supervisor. Before the meeting he had read through her chapter, a bit more carefully this time. He seemed remarkably positive about what she had written. It seemed to him that she had been suggesting that the final viewing of the corpse was to create a final 'image' of the person to be remembered. It was not unlike her photographs. He pointed her to a few articles on photography and memory. He also told her he wanted a finished draft of the chapter in a

week. She had a quick look at the articles and things seemed to connect. She started writing. The draft took ten days but she emailed it to her supervisor. Then the conclusion. Then two weeks of proof-reading and making changes and finally she was done.

John was progressing nicely. The introduction was done. He had written his chapter on luck, working mostly through his own research material and using his critical engagement with the notion of magical thinking as a way of 'zooming out' to constitute the theoretical significance of his findings. He met regularly with his supervisor. She suggested that he look to the anthropological literature on magic, particularly in Africa, as a possible area in which 'magical thinking' was treated as a rational system. Everything was going fine until his older brother was in a biking accident. It was serious, very serious. John's family was thrown into turmoil. John couldn't think straight. He went home to be with his family for a week and then came back, but he was not the same. If he sat down to work he felt he was ignoring his brother. How could he work at a time like this? He went to see his supervisor. She suggested that, given the circumstances, an extension was possible. John's brother remained in hospital, still in a critical condition for two weeks. John finally asked for a month's extension. His friends were great too. Several offered to help in any way they could. One was known to be scrupulous when it came to grammar, spelling and punctuation. With two weeks to go, John gave her a copy of his complete draft and a week later it came back electronically with all errors and changes marked in red. His brother improved and John submitted his dissertation the day before his extended deadline.

Finishing a substantial piece of writing is tough. It is not tough all the time. Sometimes the words will be flowing, your argument will be clear in your mind and you will be feeling good and happy with the dissertation writing. At other times, however, the words will not come, your thoughts will be confused and jumbled and you may well feel despondent, if not downright despairing of ever finishing anything like an adequate piece of writing. So how do you get through this?

There is, as with all of this, no magical piece of advice that will make everything easy and ok. Everyone is different and everyone deals with the pressures of delivering a substantial piece of academic writing to a deadline in different ways. Here, however, are a few suggestions.

This is an undergraduate dissertation to be submitted in the fulfillment of the requirements of your degree. You need to present an argument that is focused on a clearly defined topic. The main claims of this argument need to be made plausible and credible by reference to the evidence and be relevant to some key issues and questions that are embedded within anthropological traditions of scholarship. This argument needs to be presented clearly and pleasingly so that your reader can appreciate the points you are making. You need to do this within a set word limit and deliver this document by a set deadline. That is it. Your dissertation is unlikely to set the academic world alight. You do not need to be better than any of your peers. You have a job to do and that job is to write a good dissertation with only as much pain and fuss as is required of such an endeavour.

When the words come slowly it is easy to become despondent and drift away from the work of writing. Do not do this. By all means take a break. Go for a walk. Have a coffee with friends. But then get back at it. If you keep working away the words will come. You may not feel happy with them. You may think you are writing nonsense, but keep writing. Do not second-guess yourself after every sentence and paragraph. Resist the temptation to delete everything and start again. You can only judge the quality of your writing from a slight distance. You will need to read and revise, but other than minor revisions and corrections do not do so 'on the fly'. Finish a section or a chapter, then take a break, then read it through and make some revisions to improve the flow and clarity of your argument. Similarly, if you think you have lost the thread of your argument or have gone off on some crazy tangent do not panic. Finish your section or chapter. Stop, re-read it. Chances are a little tweaking and cutting and pasting may sort things

out.

In general do what you can to make writing a dissertation a social process. Talk about your work with others. Seek sympathy, care and support from those in your life who will offer you sympathy, care and support. The important thing is not to hide away with your work and your anxieties about your work. This is particularly true if, for whatever reason, you find you are truly struggling with writing a dissertation. This may be because you are experiencing personal difficulties which distract you from this work. This may also be because you are finding writing a clear and coherent anthropological argument peculiarly difficult and anxiety provoking. Whatever the situation, however, the main thing is not to suffer in silence. If you are in difficulty speak to people about your difficulties and seek their help, support and guidance. There is no shame in struggling. We have all struggled. If you are in difficulties, and it seems like these difficulties threaten to compromise the successful and timely completion of your dissertation, then you must tell your supervisor and any who are involved with directing or overseeing your studies. This is set in bold because it is very important. It may not always seem like it, but your lecturers, tutors and supervisor all want you to do well. If you are in difficulties and they can help, then they will. But you must speak to them about your situation and do so as soon as you become aware that you are in difficulty. If you wait to the last days and hours before submission then the help they can offer is much more limited.

Almost all universities will assign you a supervisor who will help to guide you through the process of researching and writing a

dissertation. What do supervisors do? Well, they supervise. This usually consists of semi-regular meetings. During these meetings you will likely discuss your progress, what you have written so far and where your writing is going, and on that basis agree to some timetables for your work. Your supervisor may request that you send them chapters as they are completed and may provide feedback concerning what you have written. Your supervisor may well help with readings and, being an academic anthropologist, should be able to help suggest how best to situate your argument within broader traditions of anthropological writing. It is possible that your supervisor may read through an entire draft of your dissertation and provide detailed corrections. But this does not happen with all supervisors at all institutions. More than anything else your supervisor is there as someone with whom you can talk through ideas, lines of argument, difficulties, points of confusion and so on. They will not have all the answers but they should be able to help you think and write.

You have every right to expect good and helpful supervision. There must, however, be limits to these expectations. Your supervisor is not there to help you with every sentence and paragraph. This is your dissertation, your research, your analysis, and your argument which will be made in your words and for the most you will need to get on with it. Nor is the supervisor there as a counsellor or confessor. You must go to your supervisor if you are experiencing difficulties that may inhibit you from writing a good dissertation in good time. They are there to support you with the academic aspects of these difficulties and it is crucial that you seek their support in this capacity. They are not necessarily there to support you with the emotional, psychological or social aspects of these difficulties. They should be sympathetic and human, but if you find yourself in real distress then, as well as working with your supervisor to keep your work on track, you should also seek help and support elsewhere.

Your university will likely have guidance as to what constitutes the

minimum responsibilities of a supervisor. You would do well to familiarize yourself with this guidance. If it seems that you are not receiving adequate supervision as it is defined by this guidance then you would do well to raise this issue with the director of your programme and perhaps seek an alternate supervisor. Otherwise, you should make use of your supervisor in whatever way suits you best and best supports the successful completion of your dissertation.

The best thing is to reach clear agreements with your supervisor about what they will do for you (and in turn what you will do for them). Then you should both, as much as possible, stick to these agreements. If you agree to get a chapter to them by Friday next week then you should send them a chapter by Friday next week. If you cannot do so then get in touch to tell them why and when they can expect the chapter. If, in turn, they agree that they will have the chapter returned to you with comments a few days after they receive it then you should expect this to be done or, if it is not done, then at least to hear something from them. If you agree to a meeting you should show up on time and so, for that matter, should your supervisor. Of course, we all fail to meet our agreements sometimes, supervisors and students alike. The main thing is to keep communicating, try one's best to stick to what has been agreed, and if things go wrong and your plans go awry then be open and honest and make some revised plans. Finally, you should be polite and considerate and you should have every expectation to be treated with politeness and consideration.

Your supervisor cannot and should not be your only source of help and support through the process of writing your dissertation. There are plenty of ways other people can help.

It may be that you would wish to talk over your ideas with other lecturers or tutors who have some expertise peculiar to your area of

research. They are not your supervisor and have no requirement to agree to take the time to meet and talk over ideas, but most academics are intellectually generous and if approached are happy to talk things over. The main thing to remember is to tell your supervisor if you are seeking some advice and inspiration from other scholars. It can be a frustrating experience for both you and your supervisor if you are given conflicting advice on how to develop your ideas and write your dissertation.

When it comes to proof-reading for spelling and grammar, friends and family can be a great help. Be sure to give whoever is proof-reading your work (and this includes yourself) enough time to do it. If you are in dire straights, or you have particular problems with your prose and writing proper, grammatically correct English, then there are professional proof-reading services available. Some may be offered for free through your university. Otherwise it is easy to find someone who will do it for money (many provide their services over the internet). If you do go down that route then shop around, and make sure they are a credible and well-reviewed service.

Finally, if you find yourself getting particularly distressed during the process of writing your dissertation or are coping with other situations in your life that are causing you considerable worry and anxiety, you may wish to seek the support of counselling services. These likely will be available through your university. The main thing, as we stressed earlier, is not to suffer in silence. Academic staff should be sympathetic and helpful when it comes to academic matters, but they are not best placed and also not qualified to deal with emotional distress. Again, there is no shame in needing help of all kinds through this process and in the unlikely event that you feel yourself unable to cope then you should not hesitate to get the right kind of help from the

right kind of people.

Keep things in proportion. A dissertation is a dissertation. It is important, but it is not everything and the whole world. Writing up your research can be intellectually absorbing and exciting. There is real satisfaction to be found in composing your own ideas from research that you have done. Writing a dissertation can also be hard and stressful. That is ok. A bit of hardship and stress is to be expected. It may even be a good thing (if we ran away from stress and hardship we would never do anything). But it is a good thing only if you are coping with it and not neglecting yourself and others. So above all else attend to your well-being. Attend to the well-being of those close to you. And enjoy life!

You may wish, or have already committed, to provide feedback to your research participants. Particularly if you conducted research or fieldwork in organizational or institutional settings, this can be a good way to thank the people who contributed to your work. If this is the case you may want to revise your dissertation into a short report describing your main analysis and conclusions. It is worth bearing in mind that participants may be interested, disinterested and even uninterested in the final written product. While few people are likely to want to read the entire dissertation, many will be interested in the parts that relate to them, or their organization, and any major analytical arguments you have made. A research report gives interlocutors or participants a chance to engage with and critique your academic work, and can provide you with additional insights and opinions on your material.

If your research has original or practical social policy implications to do with health, education or migration, for example, you could tailor a policy brief for the relevant local government department or independent interest group. If you have not already made contact with a suitable person or organization during the research process, it could be useful to do so. For example, you could email a communications officer or researcher at a local or national government department to discuss your research with them ahead of time, find out what issues they are interested in hearing more about, and tailor your report accordingly.

If you conducted research with members of a particular community, club, social or political group of some sort, you may want to give a report in the form of a short presentation. If you do give a presentation, consider your audience and be aware that you may be stepping into sensitive territory (Walliman 2005: 261). As Nicholas Walliman suggests, it may be worth making sure the members or leaders of the group know about the content of your talk and are cognizant of your

main arguments beforehand (ibid.).

If you decide to share your research, and however you choose to do so, remember that the dissertation and any report based on it are a product of your own research experience, interpretation and analysis; your participants will form their own opinions and perspectives on your work.

Writing an academic conference paper based on particular themes or chapters from your dissertation and giving a short presentation on this can be an excellent way to share your research with your peers and the wider academic community. The same applies if your research outputs are predominantly visual, such as anthropological film and photography. Your university department should have information about student-specific conferences or the student sections of academic conferences. Equally, you may wish to submit a paper to an interdisciplinary conference or one based on a geographic or academic area related to your particular project. If you have produced a film as part of your research outputs you could take a look at the student sections of any ethnographic film festivals or conferences. Many conferences also have space for student photo essays or student posters on which you present information about your research project. It is worth trying to imagine how an academic audience unfamiliar, or less familiar, with the subject than you are will understand it and what they will find stimulating.

If your research outputs include significant visual products, a photography exhibition or film screening, for example, may be a good way to provide feedback to research participants or to reach a broader public audience. Your university may have a suitable space for this, or

you might want to check out the gallery or art spaces in your town, city or local community.

There are an increasing number of exciting outlets for undergraduate and M.Sc. level students in student-run journals and e-journals. Writing an academic article will enable you to enter dialogue with fellow students and faculty, experience the peer review process and receive critical feedback on your work. Journals provide a medium for the exchange of ideas and knowledge and also offer the opportunity to establish new connections with people whose research interests match your own. It will also make an impressive addition to your CV, particularly if you wish to pursue a postgraduate degree or Ph.D. You will probably need to tackle the transition from dissertation to academic publication on your own, however. A supervisor's job does not extend beyond the dissertation, although she or he may be willing to read a draft and offer initial comments to help you on your way.

Some useful resources:

The Council on Undergraduate Research (US) lists a number of undergraduate research journals at http://www.cur.org/resources/students/undergraduate_journals

Hartley, James. 2008. Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Handbook. London and New York: Routledge.

Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research is produced and edited by students and academic staff at the University of Warwick (UK) and Monash University (Australia). The journal is available to read online and offers useful tips for first-time article writers: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/ejournal

(selected extracts from Social Anthropology Honours Programme Handbook 2012–13)

Take a look at your university's resources to do with graduate attributes for additional information. There are plenty of useful resources available in which you can find out more about the recent focus on student skills and 'graduate attributes', keep up with developments in higher education, and get some useful tips for reflecting on your own capabilities and qualities.

Some useful resources:

The student experience section of The Guardian Higher Education Network (UK): http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/student-experience. See Mick Healey's article 'Rethinking the undergraduate dissertation' for an example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/jun/28/flexible-dissertations-for-undergraduates?INTCMP=SRCH

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Scotland (UK), Enhancement Themes website contains a series of resources and

briefing papers. These are primarily aimed at academics and higher education professionals. See, for example: Gun, Vicky et al. 2008. 'Enhancing Graduate Attributes: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences',

http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/publications/enhancing-graduate-attributes-arts-humanities-and-social-sciences.pdf?sfvrsn=14

The Times Higher Education (UK),
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

The Chronicle of Higher Education (USA), http://chronicle.com