Observing and documenting people where they are and doing what they do, one of the
three major modes of acquiring primary information in the social sciences. (The other
two—statistical surveys and decontextualized interviews or performances—are rarely
used in primary folklore studies.) Fieldwork information is gathered with various media:
notebooks, film and video cameras, and audio recorders. Fieldworkers may be after
material in active tradition (things people do now) or material in passive tradition (things
they know and recognize, and may even have an aesthetic for, but wouldn’t, unless
solicited, perform or utter). Fieldworkers may join in the events going on (“participant
observation”), or they may pretend to be totally outside them (but, except for large
community events, like festivals and parades, it is difficult for a fieldworker to be totally
invisible). They may be active in their pursuit of information (interviewing, asking for
items, asking for explanations), or they may be passive (waiting, observing, recording).
Fieldwork is the key research act for most scholarship in folklore, anthropology, and
oral history. More than thirty years ago, Richard M.Dorson wrote, “What the state paper
is to the historian and creative work to the literary scholar, the oral traditional text is—or
should be—to the student of folklore” (Dorson 1964:1). Although few folklorists now
would limit the field-gathered information to “texts,” and many wouldn’t agree on what
the word “text” means any more, Dorson’s observation still holds true.
Some folklore studies use preexisting print or electronic media as the source of
primary information (studies of the apparent scope, character, and function of folklore
materials in commercial advertising or political speeches, say, or folklore in the works of
Homer, Shakespeare, or Mark Twain, or folklore on the Internet), but such studies are
predicated on ideas of folklore derived from fieldwork. The hypothetical and theoretical
work by Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord on the nature of Homeric performance and
composition was extrapolated from their extensive fieldwork among Serbian epic singers.
They were able to assert that certain aspects of classical texts were grounded in folklore
performance and transmission only because their fieldwork let them understand the
character of such performance and transmission.
Even folklore scholars whose work is totally theoretical are dependent for the
substance underlying their generalizations and speculation on the fieldwork of others. It
would be difficult, if not impossible, to theorize cogently and relevantly about the
meaning of folklore in a community unless someone had first gathered information about
what folklore exists in that community and what functions the folklore has. Comparative
folklore studies (texts or behaviors from different places or times compared for
differences in aesthetic or functional aspects) are predicated on the quality and scope of
fieldgathered material.
Folklorists doing fieldwork may be after specific genres or kinds of folk behavior: ballads, recipes, survivals of older traditions in modern
communities, modern folkways in technological communities, the nature of folk
performance. But it is difficult to know the social meaning of an item of performance
without knowing about the conditions of performance. One interprets, for example, the
place and function of ballads in a community differently if there are many people in that
community who sing many long ballads on a regular basis to a wide local audience that
knows and enjoys such ballads, or if the performers sing their songs only when collectors
come in from the outside to solicit them. The words and tunes may be the same, but what
we make of them will vary. One may analyze and value a particular ballad text differently
if it was learned from a book, a recording, a school chum, or a grandparent.
Early folklorists often examined texts alone, much as some literary scholars examine
texts of poems as freestanding items. Examination of folklore texts without consideration
of collateral information now is rare. Only fieldwork can gather the items, provide
information for identifying folk genres, and locate the character of folklore performance
in ordinary life.
It is not just that scholars are more sophisticated now about the questions that might be
asked; it is also that the equipment available now frees the fieldworker to ask more
sophisticated or multidimensional questions. When fieldworkers had to take down all
words by hand, approximations of texts or tunes were sufficient. Now that machines capture the words and music, fieldworkers examine context. They examine not just the
joke, but who tells which jokes to whom and under what circumstances. How are the
jokes interpreted? What part do those jokes play in the social event going on? How does
that redaction of that joke relate to others made of the same words? Is the meaning the
same if the context is different? What is the relation between observer and observed? The
reflexive movement in field sciences in recent years (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986) is
predicated on a technology that could document the observer at the same time it
documented the observed.
Fieldwork has always been a technology-driven endeavor. The kinds of questions one
asks of field-gathered material are predicated on the kinds of information that can be
gathered in or brought home from the field. Fieldworkers approaching complex events
will define their options differendy if diey have at their disposal and know how to use
effectively and efficiently various kinds of image and sound recorders. Fieldworkers
studying material culture have different questions and, therefore, may incorporate
different technologies than fieldworkers interested in narrative tradition or matters of
custom or belief. Fieldworkers trying to document die folklife of a community may need
a wider range of technical expertise than fieldworkers focusing on genres or items.
Nineteenth- and early-20th-century folklorists depended on simple recording devices
and techniques: notebooks, memory, sound cylinders, and disks. They used bulky devices
to record musical performances on cylinders and dien on large flat disks. Such machines
were capable of recording only a few minutes of performance before they had to be
wound up and supplied with a new recording surface. Unless the recordist struck a tuning
fork or other device of known frequency at the beginning or ending of the recording,
there was no way for a listener to know exactly what speed these recordings were to be played. Listeners, therefore, never knew if they were hearing the recording at the right
tempo or pitch. Because the equipment was so bulky, movement was difficult and
performers often had to be brought to where the machine was located. Cameras used
large glass plates and required a great deal of light or a long static time to work.
What the great folklorists of the 19th and early 20th centuries provided us were not so
much records of performances, but rather interpretations or versions of performances:
They were not only editors of what they found, but also participants in the line of
performers they documented. When, say, Vance Randolph spent an evening listening to
stories or songs and then went home and wrote up the stories he had heard or sat at the piano and worked out tunes of songs he had heard, he was doing exactly what many folk
performers do.
Fieldworkers in the 1990s can gather more complex field documents because they
have at their disposal instruments that provide a record of transient detail impossible a
half-century ago:
Small automated 35mm cameras weighing less than a pound zoom from wide-angle to
telephoto, focus and set apertures automatically, using film capable of making images in
moonlight.
Video cameras easily held in one hand record high-quality images in low light with
high-fidelity stereo sound on tapes and rechargeable batteries each lasting two hours.
Some of these cameras have stabilization electronics that compensate for horizontal and
vertical shake, which means deep zoom shots that only a few years ago were impossible
without a tripod can now be done on the fly.
Audio recorders controlled by crystals, the tapes from which are therefore replicable
on any crystal-controlled machine anywhere, and, for the really sophisticated, Digital
Audio Tape (DAT) machines with real-time coding, produce recordings of great accuracy
and dynamic range.
A fieldworker can go out with a full complement of this new equipment—video
camera, still camera, crystal-controlled audio recorder, enough tape for a dozen hours of
video and sound recording, and enough film for hundreds of separate images—in a
shoulder bag.
The effects of all of this technology are multifold. First, the fieldworker is capable of
acquiring enormously more information than was ever possible previously Before
mechanical means of reproduction were available, every documentation of even the
simplest text was at best an approximation, what someone could write down about an
event that could never be redone exactly. With early means of reproduction, it was
possible to get crude audio recordings and photographic images made in a narrow range
of situations. With modern equipment, it is possible to get extremely accurate sounds and
images in a wide range of situations.
Second, the fieldworker has been freed of the need to concentrate on the capture of
items (the machines do that very well) and thus allowed to consider more complex
questions, such as the way various parts of performance or enactment interrelate or
minute complexities of performance itself. The performance analyses of DennisTedlock
(1983), for example, are impossible without accurate recordings that can be listened to
again and again on equipment that lets the analyst find exact moments in performance.
Third, the problem of how to get information has been replaced by what is to be done
with the great mass of information so easily acquired. A 19th-century collector of ballads
or narratives had no difficulty managing information back home: It was easy enough
organizing the songs and stories and providing simple annotations giving the specifics of
performance. A 20th-century fieldworker coming home with videotapes, audiotapes, and
photographs of a complex event has a far more difficult job of documentation, storage,
and analysis. Those machines that are so good at getting information weigh us down with
the information they provide.
In the field, the researcher looks at a world of nearly infinite possibility: so many
songs, dances, stories, images, recipes, redactions, processes, interactions, moments,
movements, facial expressions, and body postures. Once home, the researcher deals with a world of specific and limited possibility: the kind, quality, and range of information
brought home, no more, no less. What isn’t in the notes, on the film or tapes, or in
memory is gone. Subsequent analysis will be predicated not on what existed out there in
real life, but on what made it back. Since field documents may be used in studies never
envisioned by the fieldworker at the time of the fieldwork, and since analysis may occur
long after memory has had time to impose its con fusions, proper documentation is of key
importance in all fieldwork projects. Without notes on who was doing what and under
what conditions the documentation and event occurred, sound recordings, videotapes, and
photographs may in time be virtually useless.
Fieldworkers also deal with the problem of preservation. A large portion of the audio
cylinders made early in the 20th century have turned to carbon dust. No one knows how
long information on audiotapes and videotapes will last. Audiotapes made in the 1960s
often have problems in the 1990s of the recording material pulling away from the
backing. Notes made with felt-tip pens fade. The most lasting form of documentation is
graphite pencil on acid-free paper. Such paper is enormously resistant to decay (left
alone, it lasts centuries), and the graphite particles are imbedded in the paper fiber and are
not subject to fading or oxidation.
The immediate result of fieldwork is the acquisition of various kinds of documentary
materials. A long-term result is involvement in a range of ethical questions and
responsibilities. To whom does the material one brings home from the field belong? What
obligations are there to privacy and ownership? Who is owed what if material is used in a
book, or a recording, or documentary film? What obligations obtain toward other
collectors working in the same area or on the same materials? Fieldwork is only one part
of a complex series of personal, intellectual, and ethical acts and decisions.
Bruce Jackson
References
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dorson, Richard M. 1964. Collecting Oral Folklore in the United States. In Buying the Wind:
Regional Folklore in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–20.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1992. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practicea,
London and New York: Routledge.
Georges, Robert A, and Michael O.Jones. 1980. Peop U Studying People: The Human Element in
Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstein, Kenneth S. 1964. A Guidefor Field Workers in Folklore. Hatboro, PA: Folklore
Associates.
Ives, Edward E. 1964. The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and
Oral History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Jackson, Bruce. 1987. Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jackson, Bruce, and Edward D.Ives, eds. 1996. The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork
Process. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.