Participant observation

Participant observation means the researcher lives with the community being studied for a long period, usually about a year or more, taking part in its everyday life. The aim is to learn a whole way of life, much as a child learns it, including the knowledge that insiders take for granted.

In social anthropology this kind of long immersion is called field work.

• Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist settled in Britain, is widely believed to have established field work as the distinctive method of social anthropology. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he was visiting Australia. As technically an 'enemy alien' he had to be interned, and he asked to serve his internment in the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific. He spent about a year and a half there, living in a tent in the villages, learning the language and recording everything in detail.
• Other famous field workers: Radcliffe-Brown in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer of Sudan, Margaret Mead in Samoa, Clifford Geertz in Bali.

Tools of field work:

• a census of the community (counting every person and household);
• a map of the settlement;
• a genealogy: an extended family tree of members, as far back as possible, which shows kinship links;
• informants (key informants): one or two people who give most of the information and act as the anthropologist's teachers;
• field notes written up daily, and often a personal diary of the researcher's own reactions.

In sociology, participant observation is used in complex societies too.

• William Foote Whyte, an American sociologist, spent three and a half years 'hanging out' with a street gang in an Italian-American slum and wrote *Street Corner Society*.
• In India, the 1950s saw many village studies: M.N. Srinivas's *The Remembered Village* (on Rampura near Mysore; his field notes were destroyed in a fire, so he wrote from memory); S.C. Dube's *Indian Village* (on Shamirpet near Secunderabad, by a multi-disciplinary team from Osmania University); the Cornell Village Study Project (several villages in eastern Uttar Pradesh); and William and Charlotte Wiser's *Behind Mud Walls*.

Strengths and limits:

• Strengths: a rich, detailed picture from the inside; first impressions get corrected over time as the researcher learns more.
• Limits: it covers only a small area (one village or group), so findings cannot easily be generalised; the account is in the researcher's voice, and she might present only what she chose to see; and it is a one-sided relationship: the researcher asks the questions and speaks for 'the people'. Some scholars suggest dialogic formats, in which the people studied can also comment and be heard directly.