The second semester of the first year colloquium is dedicated to two interrelated tasks:

  1. the presentation and discussion of research projects conducted by second year students during their earlier summer fieldwork
  2. the presentation and discussion of research proposals to be conducted by first year students during their forthcoming summer fieldwork

There are two requirements for first year students

  1. Read the second year students' reports andparticipating in the discussion of these reports
  2. Prepare, present and discuss the proposal for summer fieldwork

SOME GENERAL SUGGESTIONS

  1. If you have not taken, or are not taking, any of the research techniques and planning courses offered by the faculty, you should still look at their syllabi or web sites (Comitas, Harrington, Varenne);
  2. You must start immediately building up a bibliography and reading about your field site and its general area. Start with the most obvious ethnographies but also explore work from other social scientists as it is likely to be useful in unpredictable ways. This is essential whatever research questions or techniques you end up with.
  3. You must seek advice in the first half of the semester. Understand that the advice you will receive will often be heterogeneous if not contradictory. It is your responsibility to take this advice, make your own decisions about the route you will take--and be prepared to answer questions about the routes not taken.

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR BACKGROUND READING

There are no required readings about research methods for the colloqium. You should however begin to familiarize yourself with the ongoing debates about the nature of anthropological research as an embodied practice, starting with textbook like introductions.

  1. General introductions that are often used as textbooks:
    1. LeCompte, Margaret and and Judith Preissle Ethnography and qualitative design in educational research Second Ed.. New York: Academic Press 1993
    2. Bernard, H. Russell Research methods in cultural anthropology Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. 1988
  2. Other works that remains influential
    1. Glaser, Barney & Anselm Strauss The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine, 1967.
    2. Briggs, Charles Learning how to ask. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1986
  3. The classic statements and the critique
    1. Malinowski, Bronislaw "Introduction." Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pp. 1-25. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1961 [1922]
    2. Notes and Queries
    3. Geertz, Clifford.  The Interpretation of Culture.  New York: Basic Books. 1973. (particularly the Introduction)
    4. Marcus
    5. R. Sanjek (ed.) Fieldnotes: The makings of anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1990

Ethnography, of course, is a personal practice. Autobiographies can be useful, for example

  1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude Tristes Tropiques
  2. Bowen, Elenore Return to laughter. New York: Doubleday. 1964 [1954]

While the scientific nature of anthropology remains a matter of profound debate, the argument for the scientificity of most of its techniques (ethnography, broadly defined), is best made in terms of the pragmatic epistemology as it argues, and demonstrates, that all science is the product of a polity ("community" as it is generally phrased in the literature) of practitioners facing the world that is their concern and, most importantly, each other. Two important statements:

  1. Khuhn, Thomas The structure of scientific revolutions
  2. Kaplan, A. The conduct of inquiry. Scranton, Penn.: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964 (particularly the first two chapters on the independence of science from logic, but not from the peers)

The past fifty years has seen a major development of the sociological investigation of science as an ongoing activity by those acknowledged as the proper practitioners. Notable:

  1. Latour, Bruno