There has long been a need for a book on fieldnotes, which is where anthropologists engaged in fieldwork record their observations, insights, and analysis while still in the field. Fieldnotes, edited by Roger Sanjek, fills this need. Virtually every anthropologist (and I am one) uses fieldnotes, yet, as various contributors to the volume under review point out, these are usually never read by anyone other than the person who writes them. Not only do we not share them, but we usually don't even talk about them in publis, even to our students. In fact, we don't normally teach fledgling anthropologists how to write fieldnotes! We expect every novice fieldworker to figure this out for themselves.
Thus the process of fieldnote writing becomes part of the secretive rite of passage through which a graduate student must pass before being recognized as a real anthropologist.
As I reach retirement age, I wonder what will become of my many hundreds of pages of fieldnotes from the Amazon forest and from Africa and elsewhere. Will they be thrown away? According to contributors to Fieldnotes, most of the raw data of future ethnographies will in fact be incinerated or otherwise destroyed. This, in spite of the fact that no anthropologist ever publishes more than a fraction of their fieldnotes; the rest is raw data that ends up being lost forever. Most of my colleagues have no plans for archiving their fieldnotes or otherwise disposing of them after they die. What a loss to science!
I was wondering if I might be the only anthropologist who would like to find ways to retrieve precious fieldnotes from incinerators, and make them available at least to serious scholars, perhaps in museum archives. Now that we live in the computer age, any number of notes can be stored easily in a database, taking up a very few megabytes of space (assuming they are typed and already in a computer, the way mine are). And information in these notes can be retrieved in a nanosecond.
The book under review does give some examples of anthropologists gaining access to the field notes of famous anthropologists like Margaret Mead, and then publishing devastating critiques of the anthropologist. Most of us now wonder, how could Margaret Mead have been so naïve as to believe the wild stories her Samoan teen-aged girl informants obviously made up, just to have fun with the inquisitive White woman who was asking all those embarrassing questions about sexual behavior? It is precisely fear of being trashed by our colleagues that most of us do not want other anthropologists reading our field notes. After all, most of our fieldnotes are written when we are novices, when we are young, naïve, impressionable, insecure, lost, lonely, and in the throes of culture shock. Just as Mead was when she first went to Samoa. When we look back over our own notes in later years, we often blush at some of the things we wrote. So we don't want anyone else seeing these notes and then attacking us in print.
Of course, the reasons we give for jealously guarding our notes, if anyone asks (which they rarly do) are more likely to sound noble, such as "protecting the rights and anonymity of our informants."
My graduate school advisor impressed upon me the value of disciplining myself to write regular field notes during my dissertation fieldwork in the Amazon (Suriname), making me produce a minimal number of notes every single day, Sundays included. He promised me that if I kept regular fieldnotes, they would increase not just in quantity but also in quality. To better ensure this, I was obliged to sent copies of my notes to my advisor every 3 months, and he would write comments/raise questions, and sent them back to me. My advisor-edited notes would arrive by periodic missionary flights from the capital city every few months, along with goodies from my mother (brewer's years and wheat germ to keep my 2 year old son healthy and full of B vitamins! Hard Candy. And copies of National Geographic, because "my natives" loved looking at pictures of half naked tribal folks from other parts of the world).
My mentor promised me that my dissertation would practically write itself as long as I kept good and regular field notes. And he was right! I had never written anything longer than a 25-page term paper before I went to Suriname. My abundance of fieldnotes allowed me to write a 335 page dissertation in record time. And it was almost fun.
And then when I went to Swaziland for 4 years, and later made many return trips there, I kept on producing fieldnotes. So today I have nearly 1,000 typed pages of fieldnotes from Suriname and Swaziland combined (and from over 20 other countries). Regular note taking was a good habit to get into. My fieldnotes form the basis of the articles and books I have ever written.
Every anthropologist should read this nook, as well as others interested in how our discipline differs from sociology or other behavioral sciences.
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