Another piece about doing ethnographic research during the global pandemic crisis
Source: Teaching Anthropology
by: Jolynna Sinanan, University of Sydney
We all agree that participant observation, ‘hanging out’, ‘being there’ and ‘being in the field’ is essential to conducting fieldwork, so as fieldwork plans have been dashed during this global pandemic, it is understandable to feel deflated. There has been renewed interest in digital methods and digital ethnography to collect qualitative data about cultures and societies. However there have been fewer discussions about other ways of gaining anthropological knowledge. During these unique circumstances, I have been reflecting on other ways to know my field site, beyond the interviews and participant observation. My emerging research on mobile media and mobile livelihoods in the Everest tourism industry illustrate three points. Firstly, while methods in digital ethnography and digital anthropology are incredibly useful during social isolation, there are other ways for understanding how the digital is imbricated in daily life (see Lupton, 2020). Secondly, ethnographic research is important, but it is only one piece for generating knowledge in an anthropological project and thirdly, as a related point, there are ways we can build on anthropological ways of knowing our field sites when we can’t conduct ethnographic fieldwork.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Bloomsbury Sigma, August (U.K.) & October (U.S.) 2020.
Archaeology and genomics keep enriching and complicating the story of human lineage. Homo sapiens had more (and closer) company than we once suspected, including relatives such as the Denisovans, the hobbit-like Homo floresiensis, and Homo luzonensis, from the Philippines. New research also has upended our views of Neanderthals.
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