Quotes About Fieldwork

I speak often about my personal experiences with malaria in the field as a young public health officer because it had such a profound impact on my life and my work.

Years ago when I was still in the field we ad this technique for dealing with problems we weren't exactly sure how to solve. We called it S-W-A-G." "What's that stand for?" "Scientific-Wild-Ass-Guess..

field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones)

Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips...

The peculiar situation of the anthropological fieldworker, participating simultaneously in two distinct worlds of meaning and action, requires that he relate to his research subjects as an "outsider," trying to "learn" and penetrate their way of life, while relating to his own culture as a kind of metaphorical "native." To both groups he is a professional stranger, a person who holds himself aloof from their lives in order to gain perspective.

The photographers I worked alongside loved the news cycle and the hustle and getting that front page of the newspaper. But I wanted to be out in the field in conflict areas, documenting real life rather than political theater.

This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the fields of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement.

I can report from the field with a tiny camera and a laptop.

I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.

Instead of doing emotion work, we suggest that fieldworkers become more aware of their feelings and use them as data. As Arlie Hochschild (1983) argued, we can use feelings as clues [...]

Fieldworkers must build a community of sentiment, with local and long-distance members, that opposes the competitive individualism of academia. The lone scholar is a sociological impossibility. Our "individual" works rely on language, literatures, and feedback from colleagues (Becker, 1986).

One of the many pieces of advice his father had given him—besides the importance of antivenom and the need for a good, sturdy blade—was that field anthropology was ninety percent preparation, and ten percent trying desperately to recover when you didn't prepare properly.

ethnographic

It was Broom's habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later.

The word freedom lost much of its strength when one's back was weighted down with fieldwork.

Fieldwork is probably always more likely to be holistic than lab work or mathematical modeling because in the field you can't get away from the whole when a research project starts.

How many people would even try to be Jane Goodall today? Jane Goodall was a superb fieldworker who lived with animals, observed them closely, and understood them. She did her work in the field, not behind a computer making mathematical models of chimpanzee population.

Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections.

Im studying jerkoffs in the wild," Ben answered dryly. "This seemed like a good chance to view one up close.

The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.

When I'm anchoring, I miss chasing stories in the field.

When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.