We all practice casual forms of fieldwork just to stay alive and to navigate different situations (settings) that characterize the world in which we live. We do this by looking more or less closely (observations) at where we’re going, have been or hope to go; by asking people questions (interviews) about what goes on in places we’re trying to get a fix on, by collecting odds and ends (artifacts) that we can study to figure out what to do next–moving around, getting something done, or avoiding trouble. Along the way, we also develop and use our wits, skills and handy tools to represent what we’ve observed, heard, and collected in conversation with ourselves or others (depictions).

These same  features–settings, observations, interviews, artifacts and depictions–also form the basis of the more ambitious, systematic and formal forms of fieldwork practiced by sociologists and anthropologists. But important differences do exist between the kind of fieldwork that everyone does to navigate daily life and the fieldwork social researchers practice to understand people, culture and social life.

One way of thinking about these differences, is that social researchers conduct fieldwork by getting engaged with a distinctive constellation of ideas and things. The ideas include professional perspectives that researchers bring to their fieldwork, theories about what’s going on within and across different kinds of settings, and concepts or arguments that others scholars have made about similar or related phenomena. The things include specialized fieldwork materials and data sources, techniques for organizing those materials, and an assortment of recording, analysis and presentation tools.

Taken together, the confluence of these ideas and things constitutes the material culture of professional fieldwork. As examined in the post and pages of this website, that kind of fieldwork is a distinctive domain within the material culture of social research–which is itself a specialized strand of empirical inquiry. Throughout it all, the idea is to use empirical evidence to test ideas and use ideas to organize and analyze empirical evidence. The kind of fieldwork practiced by social researchers has no monopoly on that process, but it does have an interesting history.

Among people who have a professional interest in understanding culture and social life, fieldwork stands in pretty good stead. Some exemplary practitioners have also found fieldwork a compelling complement to everyday life and celebrate its potential to fuel personal or social transformation. Others have found it somewhat stimulating and kind of fun. Perhaps you will as well.