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Field of Dreams; Fields of Reality
a warm greeting and thanks to those who have come and have col-
laborated in gathering the funds you have brought.” But equally im-
portant to all is the memory of laughter and song.
We teach our students that we have an informed responsibility to
other members of our human family. As faculty, part of our respon-
sibility is to use the experience of experience, as outlined below, to
carefully design experiential programs.
- Plan projects well in advance.
- Screen students carefully, but don’t rule out the ones who seem
unlikely.
- Keep talking and reflecting while traveling.
- Be reliable and gain the trust of informed field contacts, but expect
to build trust slowly.
- Be flexible and open to program changes.
- Be aware of power relationships.
- Understand the way your initiative, whether research or service or
both, fits into the political ecology of the area.
- Keep the relationship symmetrical.
Anthropology begins with dreaming and wondering, and then moves
to seeing and trying to make sense of what you have seen. We describe
our fieldwork in many ways: in statistics and comparisons, through
life histories and ethnographies, in stories and in poems. For the most
part, what we do and what we know remains inside the anthropolog-
ical community.
Our students go to the field for numerous reasons. Some go to just
have fun, others for credit, others as a prelude to anthropological ca-
reers, and others as an opportunity to see beyond themselves. Most
could recite a list of what they learned if you asked them at the end of
the trip, but I don’t expect my students to show the results of the ex-
perience while on the road.
The true test of the efficacy of field-based learning is that they are
