- Summary
- Contents
Fieldwork has often been viewed as a great black hole, untaught and unteachable. While recent years have seen an increase in the number of how-to manuals for doing fieldwork, they never fully convey the complexity of the experience–the loneliness, the uncertainty, the moral dilemmas, the ambiguities. In Experiencing Fieldwork, a group of top ethnographers addresses various issues and challenges of the fieldwork experience. How do you gain entree into a setting? What tricks are there to learning the rules of the community without alienating the people you came to study? How are good relations maintained with informants? What happens after you leave the field? Using examples of research from police departments to schools, from nursing homes to motorcycle gangs, the essays in this absorbing volume ...