Published posthumously, this incisive work represents the culmination of a career anthropologist’s passion for teaching and mentoring. With a warm, reassuring writing style, Marti describes fieldwork techniques, some of which distinguish anthropology from the other social sciences and all of which are relevant and extraordinarily useful to young researchers with limited experience. Her narrative adeptly intertwines the experiences of seasoned anthropologists with those of novices in order to illustrate the various methodological techniques. Starting Fieldwork optimizes foundational methods covered in larger works. Further, it exposes readers to additional contours of the fieldwork enterprise, such as participant-observation in virtual places, museums and archives as field sites, the camera as methodology, photographs as evidence, the importance of note taking, and how reflexivity can enhance research. Marti’s approach to and treatment of the complexities involved in doing fieldwork, including discovering the “hidden” in plain sight, will inspire and boost the confidence of prospective fieldworkers.

Following his girlfriend to her new teaching position in Thailand, a young reporter researches the story of American anthropologist Martiya van der Leun, following her suicide in the Thai prison where she was serving a lengthy sentence for murder.

Starting Fieldwork introduces students to the most commonly used techniques of qualitative research - data collection, analysis, and presentation. Aimed at students starting fieldwork for the first time, the book is built around a series of applied research exercises. Part One deals with vitalissues surrounding this type of research; Part Two provides a step-by-step guide to the entire fieldwork process. The book is written in an accessible style and will appeal to students across a broad range of disciplines.

Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture. Contributors: David M. Arase, Theodore C. Bestor, Victoria Lyon Bestor, Mary C. Brinton, John Creighton Campbell, Samuel Coleman, Suzanne Culter, Andrew Gordon, Helen Hardacre, Joy Hendry, David T. Johnson, Ellis S. Krauss, David L. McConnell, Ian Reader, Glenda S. Roberts, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Robert J. Smith, Sheila A. Smith, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Merry Isaacs White, Christine R. Yano.

Discover how to plan, conduct, and interpret field research with this essential new guidebook Good field research is the driving force behind advancement in the agronomic, environmental, and soil sciences. Nevertheless, many undergraduate and graduate scientists have limited opportunity to develop hands-on experience before undertaking projects in the field. With Fieldwork Ready, Dr Sara Vero maps out the fundamental principles, methods, and management techniques that underpin this crucial practice, offering trainee researchers an accessible introduction to the world of on-site investigation. This instructive text includes: Guidance on the essential aspects of environmental monitoring and soil, water, plant, and wildlife research Insights into the methods behind experiment planning and effective fieldwork Tips for team management and safety Explanations of how to select and correctly use soil sampling equipment Offering new researchers a primer that is practical and easy to follow, Fieldwork Ready is the ideal starting point for all those beginning a career in the agricultural sciences.

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts. The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become—and to be—an anthropologist today.