PÅ FELTARBEJDE BLANDT FOLK

Resumé

Lisanne Wilken: Fieldwork among People

Personal relationships between the anthropologist

and the informants in a given field

plays a crucial role for anthropological fieldwork

and for the information the anthropologist

gets. With reference to personal experiences

from fieldwork in Northern and Central

Italy, the author argues that methods of

establishing and maintaining personal field

relations ought to play a much more prominent

role in the discussions of anthropological

field methods than is usually the case. In

today’s discussions of anthropological

methodology one can easily get the impression

that field relations are coincidentially

automatically, established, or that anthropologists

have an innate capacity for the

creation of social relationships in a variety of

social and cultural contexts. The article discusses

how dependence on a few close informants

may block the collection of data and

suggests ways to establish a broad range of

informants. One solution is to establish field

relations prior to the commencement of

fieldwork. This method not only ensures that

informants are available when fieldwork is

started but also facilitates the cross-cutting

of social boundaries which may otherwise be

difficult to crosscut.The article also suggests

that questionnaires may be used as a method

to attract attention to the research project in

the field and to broaden the circle of informants.

The focus of the article is not the nature

of the data collected during fieldwork,

but rather the circumstances for the collection

of data.