My Fieldwork

 Field Experiences:

1.Guatemala & Yucatan
2.Belize
3.Beach Channel (LI) & New Orleans
4.USA Communities
-Working in familiar and unfamiliar environments
-Working as an outsider/insider
-establishing rapport
-sticky situations
·     Ethics

  • informants
  • academic community
  • funders
·     The problem with power and the researcher’s “gaze”
·     Protecting your informants: remembering who you work for
·     Jealousies and disturbances
-Combatting “Observer’s Bias” (GUMPERZ)
·     Group interviewing
·     The “aside”
·     Creating relationships of trust
-Recording and writing up

Experiences in the field—
·     Keeping the peace
·     Catch 22s
·     The epiphany of the “other”
·     Between Class clown to town idiot
Emic perspective—getting at voice/person/identity
·     Using  personal narrative
·     Biography and life history
·     Validating memory
·     Validating the individual experience
Choosing a focused theme from the journals/notes etc
·     Keeping it “small”
·     Topics are discovered through the process of interaction with the community being studied
·     Topics should have ethnographic examples available and are important to the cultural group being studied
·     Topics should include data that can be collected (principle informants should be identified)
·     Topics should attempt to shed light on a research question

(1) What is the temperature matrix of Mayan medicinal plants and how are these indicated in Yucatec & Cakchiquel Maya according to traditional healers



(2) Is there a dialectal difference between Belizean Creole speakers in the North American diaspora? Do these differ from the Creole spoken in belize? What are the proceses that create and maintain these differences?





(4) How do the Garifuna of Honduras remember their pilgrimage from St. Vincent to Coastal Honduras: an ethnohistory through memory. 



(3) Student’s Experiences with embodied practice as mediated by culture: How does culture create self perception of one’s body and how is one’s body a reflection of the culture?

What the hell do I do?


  • I talk to people and directly elicit information. These questions are open ended and interviews can be hours long. This all has to be transcribed and analyzed.















  • I go to performances and take fieldnotes, not just about the performance, but about the cultural scene in which the performance is enacted. This all must be transcribed. and analyzed.
































  • I note every aspect of a culture and what these objects and beliefs and behaviors are, and try to discern the MEANING and RULES behind them 


















  • I scour historical sources and interview people about culture history to try to contextualize a culture and look at their historical importance and evolution. (this has to be transcribed, interviews, sources, etc. and analyzed!)









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