Fieldwork in Social and Cultural Anthropology

The article presents the origins of the method of fieldwork in European and American anthropology. It introduces the practice of fieldwork " "participant observation" " as developed in the study of small, remote societies, during the era of colonialism. The article proceeds to discuss later transformations in ethnographic research: moving away from the colonial territories to fieldwork sites in Western industrial societies. The choice of new types of communal and institutional settings in urban and globalized spaces of social life also instigated major changes of methodology and theory in ethnographic projects. These include also a growing awareness of the impact of the researcher's presence during fieldwork, his/her identity, as well as the expansion of the variety of the types of data considered in ethnographic projects.