Week 3 — Two Columns, One Morning: Recording Fieldwork Fairly — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 3 of the term — record a morning of fieldwork fairly, read it from two points of view, and explain the method to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met participant observation, field notes in two columns, interviews and consent, emic and etic, thick description, and reflexivity. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain the fieldwork method to someone who has it wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market constructed for this course, not a real place. Chapter 3 prints its ten field-note entries from Visit 1, a market morning in October, from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., in two columns: what was observed, and what it might mean. In entry 4, at 8:20 a.m. at the produce stall, a vendor greets a shopper with "The usual?" and bags two pounds of apples before the shopper asks. The vendors speak of their "regulars", while an observer counts repeat buyers. A friend hears you are studying fieldwork and says, "Anthropologists only watch people from a distance and write down their opinions, and names in private notes hurt no one." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers about the visit, the "regulars", and two books.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. At the running fieldwork site, Visit 1 ran from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., which is 2 hours. Using 60 minutes in an hour, how many minutes did the visit last?
2. Visit 1 produced 10 field-note entries over a visit that ran from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. On average, about how many minutes passed between entries?
3. An observer counts repeat buyers as people seen buying at the same stall on at least 3 of 4 weekly visits. What percent of the visits does that rule require?
4. Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific appeared in 1922, and Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures appeared in 1973. How many years after Malinowski's book did Geertz's book appear?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: rewrite entry 8 or entry 10 from the chapter's table of Visit 1 notes in two columns, observed and possible interpretation, with people named only by role, and explain why the interpretation column says "may".
• Problem 2: explain why one two-hour visit, however careful its notes, is a first look rather than participant observation, and name one thing a long stay with taking part would add.
• Problem 3: label the vendors' "regulars" and the observer's repeat buyers as emic or etic, and name one thing each view catches that the other misses, without calling either one wrong.
• Problem 4: write a thin and a thick description of entry 4's "The usual?" greeting, crediting thick description as Ryle's term that Geertz took up, and add one reflexive sentence about how your own position shapes what you notice.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks anthropologists only watch from a distance, write down opinions, and may name anyone in private notes. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains participant observation, says why field notes keep what was observed apart from what it might mean, explains why notes name people by role instead of by name, and names one limit, including that the market is illustrative and that one visit cannot settle what a greeting means. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who says a survey and fieldwork are the same thing. Model answer: "A survey asks people the same questions once, which is useful for comparing answers. Fieldwork means staying with a group for a long time, joining in, and writing down what happens, so you learn things people would never think to put on a form. A fieldworker keeps what they saw apart from what they think it means, because first impressions are often wrong. One visit is only a start, so a careful fieldworker keeps going back before drawing conclusions."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values in the problems without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the friend, explaining participant observation, two-column notes, and roles instead of names, with one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled two-column sketch of one Visit 1 entry with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the market only as the course describes it, name people only by role, and do not borrow a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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