Where is my grid?

During the anthropology MA I haven’t had the chance to do much fieldwork. This was my first time doing it at graduate school level, and only because of an assignment. In the second school term, under the course Problems of Anthropology, an ethnographic observation was required. Everything about the assignment was open, including the methodologies to be used.

When I was in high school, I remember having the same feeling of looseness. Once my portuguese teacher assigned an essay without a theme. I think that’s one of the biggest changes when growing from elementary to high school. Your imagination is curtailed and you now have structures and “serious” topics to think about. But after a year, maybe, the frustration of having to conform to the norms becomes your comfort zone. Then when the teacher asks for an open themed-essay, you feel insecure. Who took my limits away? But that’s how life goes.

In the openness of the ethnographic assignment, I couldn’t find my methods of research. Maybe the famous ‘go and explore’ is like throwing a kid in the water to teach her how to swim. You just learn it when you’re drowning.

The next week there was an assignment from the design studio class asking us to go to the field to do a “Vox Pop”, record everything and later produce a short documentary with the findings. We had instructions and they were in the shared Google drive folder: resources -> design research/ethnography. Four documents were available and they had guidelines to successfully conduct an ethnography. I could learn how to introduce myself in the field, how to hear, to observe, to take notes, and synthesize the ideas collected.