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I was really interested in languages in high school I specialized languages and
that led me to an interest in cultural difference and cultural differences that
were encoded in languages as opposed to just going straight through
college and then straight through graduate school
I took time off, I took a couple of years off
in the UK I worked
in positions which
brought me into content a lot of people
but from a fairly sort of
low position on the totem pole, I was a milkman
for about
four or five months, I was a van driver for a year. I think it taught me
to listen,
to listen to people's perspectives
and not to
impose my own perspective. I think that's perhaps the most critical thing
to being ethnographer.
I had traveled all around North America before I went to
college
and became very interested in the persistence of local Native
American cultures.
I fell in love with the southwest especially.
My principal concentration is the present
and I work as a field worker especially at Hopi
in Arizona. I interview people about their society about their history,
about their conceptions of the landscape. I'm interested in a whole variety of things about
contemporary Hopi culture,
but I'm also interested in how that has come to be and what the particular
recent history is that has produced what's happening in the present.
Much of my earliest work was focused on the history of one village which grew up
in 1909
after the split of its mother village Oraibi
in 1906. Oraibi is the oldest continuously inhabited village in North
America
half the population left
and eventually formed two new villages altogether.
Bacavi was the one where I've spent most of my time.
I was very interested and remain so in
who those people were who founded Bacavi. I got some very interesting
narratives. Doing ethnographic fieldwork with pueblo people is
very difficult
and I was very privileged to be permitted to do it. As far as I can
determine, I probably have conducted more ethnographic fieldwork than
anybody since the late nineteenth century when they pretty much
said no we don't want any more this. I think for, you know, an ethnogropher the primary
sort of methodological approach is participant observation
and that means you have to learn what the mores of communication up you can't
just show up
with a questionnaire and expect to get good answers to your questions. You need
to learn the the processes and the interests the people have in
communicating with each other.
I think learning those local
mores of communication and interest are critical to any
good work
in ethnography.