![]() | First Fieldwork: Pacific Anthropology, 1960–1985 First Fieldwork: Pacific Anthropology, 1960-1985 explores what a generation of anthropologists experienced during their first visits to the field at a time of momentous political changes in Pacific island countries and societies and in anthropology itself. Answering some of the same how and why questions found in Terence E. Hays' Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (1993), First Fieldwork begins where that collection left off in the 1950s and covers a broader selection of Pacific Islands societies and topics. Chapters range from candid reflections on working with little-known peoples to reflexive analyses of adapting research projects and field sites, in order to better fit local politics and concerns. Included in these accounts are the often harsh emotional and logistical demands placed on fieldworkers and interlocutors as they attempt the work of connecting and achieving mutual understandings. Evident throughout is the conviction that fieldwork and what we learn from and write about it are necessary to a robust anthropology. By demystifying a phase begun in the mid-1980s when critics considered attempts to describe fieldwork and its relation to ethnography as inevitably biased representations of the unknowable truth, First Fieldwork contributes to a renewed interest in experiential and theoretical nuances of fieldwork. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi is retired associate professor of anthropology, Truman State University. |
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