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When I go in fieldwork, I have a very specific project I want to do,
but unlike a traditional fieldwork situation I will take on many other
projects while I'm there, and some of them I prepare way in advance, but some of them
actually happen while you're there.
So, for instance, I went to Sudan a couple of times, where I joined an archaeological
mission and while we were on the mission I
found other interesting topics to look at.
So, when I come back, I have not only participated in the archaeology in this case,
but I've also done some linguistic fieldwork, or I've done some
DNA collecting of the population there, or I looked at the games
they play. The the thing is, if you do the type of research that I'm doing
in the end you would like
it to have something
in common. So,
you'd explore all these topics that you find, but the purpose is to actually find
something that connects many things
that will now lead to something more.
So, if i explain to my colleagues what the common thread is, I will always explain
the research questions that these things may have in common. The main one
would probably be cultural transmission, so how does one element of a culture get to another?
And that goes with writing systems, it goes with games they travel across
linguistic borders, across cultural borders. That it's a very powerful
theoretical theme
that seems to thread
through all the things that I'm doing.
when I'm looking at games that are playing today,
I'm also looking at games that are played in antiquity
and
I try to make the connections, see if there are similar process going on. I don't make a
distinction between doing
research on the modern people or research on the people living in antiquity.
When I look at games that people play today, many of the games they play today
have a long history and sometimes have been played exactly the same for hundreds of years.
That creates questions, how can that stay the same for such a long time?
And that's what you can
study then.
Sometimes you go somewhere, you see people doing things and you want to
document it and there are
several ways, so in
cultural anthropology it's usually interviews that you do. It's asking particular kinds of
questions or having people talk to you, making notes of that.
You can use film,
I use photography quite a bit so I get a setting in which people are
playing, for instance, or the architecture can be documented that way.
But I also like to do experiments
and I like to do questionaires and all of those give a different
perspective on what you're looking at in the field. So I like being in very many
different disciplines so I can use all those if I need to
to figure out what's going. As soon as you do that, you find that it is
extremely productive, that this is actually interesting and that it leads
to interesting elements
next to the thing that you were going there for in the first place.
You cannot get a sense of Sudan all by yourself, you need many other people,
but if you only go there for the one thing that you know, you left a lot
of opportunities out, both for yourself and for other people to build on.