Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Authorship
- Acknowledgements
- Finding and using the pioneers’ interviews
- Chapter 1 Introduction: the pioneers of social research study
- Voices 1 Moments of discovery
- Chapter 2 Life stories: biography and creativity
- Voices 2 Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Contexts: Empire, politics and culture
- Voices 3 Old boundaries, new thoughts
- Chapter 4 Organising: creating research worlds
- Voices 4 Old and new trends
- Chapter 5 Fighting or mixing: quantitative and qualitative research
- Voices 5 Into the field
- Chapter 6 Fieldwork: making methods
- Voices 6 On the margins
- Chapter 7 Social divisions: class, gender, ethnicity and more
- Voices 7 Reflections for the future
- Chapter 8 Conclusion: what can we learn?
- Chapter 9 Epilogue
- Notes
- Further reading
- Biographical summaries
- Index
Voices 5 - Into the field
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Authorship
- Acknowledgements
- Finding and using the pioneers’ interviews
- Chapter 1 Introduction: the pioneers of social research study
- Voices 1 Moments of discovery
- Chapter 2 Life stories: biography and creativity
- Voices 2 Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Contexts: Empire, politics and culture
- Voices 3 Old boundaries, new thoughts
- Chapter 4 Organising: creating research worlds
- Voices 4 Old and new trends
- Chapter 5 Fighting or mixing: quantitative and qualitative research
- Voices 5 Into the field
- Chapter 6 Fieldwork: making methods
- Voices 6 On the margins
- Chapter 7 Social divisions: class, gender, ethnicity and more
- Voices 7 Reflections for the future
- Chapter 8 Conclusion: what can we learn?
- Chapter 9 Epilogue
- Notes
- Further reading
- Biographical summaries
- Index
Summary
Let us listen to how two of our earliest Pioneers set about their fieldwork – neither with much formal guidance.
Raymond Firth's voyage to Tikopia
In 1928, the anthropologist Raymond Firth – the oldest of our Pioneers, whom we have already encountered earlier – set out to spend a year on the Pacific island of Tikopia, which was to be the prime focus of his life's research. He was to be a lone researcher there, out of even radio contact with the wider world. It would be virtually impossible to organise a journey to such a destination in today's interconnected globalised world: a measure of how the experience of anthropology has changed.
Having studied the Maori, I thought it would be interesting to see a Polynesian community at a much earlier phase of development… Tikopia was a second choice, because Durrard, the missionary, had done a little on its language… I went to see him, actually, in New Zealand, and got from him some photographs and so on… I gathered information about it from the Mission vessel, which used to call there about once a year, or every two years, and I discovered that it was obviously a very simple community, technologically, with very little, very isolated, very little contact with the outside world, and so I thought, ‘This is an opportunity to see what, really, Polynesian life was like’, away from contact. (p 57)
So with no more than this scanty information, he packed his food stores, clothing and some equipment and presents, and launched himself into the unknown:
I set out for Tikopia from Sydney. I first of all took the Matalum, which is an ordinary passenger vessel, going once a month to the Solomons, and to Tulaghi, which was then the headquarters of the Solomons. And from there, I took the Mission vessel. And it carried me right the way round through the Solomons, the whole Eastern Solomons, on their regular tours which they did once or twice a year. Tikopia was very rarely visited. It's about five or six hundred miles from Tulagi. In the end, after quite some weeks, seven weeks, or something of the kind, we got to Tikopia…
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- Pioneering Social ResearchLife Stories of a Generation, pp. 129 - 134Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021