Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Introduction To 'Long-Term Fieldwork' [Special Issue], James Taggart, Alan Sandstrom

Alan R. Sandstrom

This special presents new, original essays by anthropologists who have spent a great deal of time carrying out fieldwork in a variety of ways and under many different conditions. Their ways of doing long-term fieldwork vary from revisiting the same community to doing multisited fieldwork to gain a broader comparative perspective in the discipline of anthropology. The authors wrestle with the meaning of their work after observing the people they befriended and studied undergo sometimesdevastating changes, suffering deep life-changing experiences themselves, and witnessing controversies over the value of doing and writing ethnography.