FIELD WORK

Hello everybody, today I'm mean to talk about the field work I’ve realized during my career. 

But first, I'm going to explain a little what a field work is for an anthropologist. 

A field work is when you go where you are going to work, because anthropologist study different cultures and you cannot do that by sitting on a chair. You must go and live the experience of that culture to understand the group.

And here goes a little of history of Anthropology: there was a time in which people wrote a lot of books about exotic groups. They made different theories of them, etc. But there was a problem, they never even visit them! They didn’t know these groups until Malinowski – a famous anthropologist- inaugurated the field work.

In my experience, field work is the most exciting part of the job. I haven’t had too much yet, but I have made short field works in Santiago.

The best part of it is the moment you are there and you see a different world, and people living in it. That is fantastic.

But of course, there are always good things and bad things. I could say that there is something I don’t like too much and is the officiousness; I feel it is like invading people’s life.

 Maybe that’s the biggest difficult that I see.

For example, I remember once I had to observe people in the fair and they looked me back very angry or wondering about my behavior. That’s normal; I was in the fair and wasn’t buying or having lunch. I was walking and looking people. That’s rare.