Chapter 6: Cultural Documentation in Service to Community

At the core of our respective disciplines of folklore and anthropology is a fundamental commitment to the notion of the “field.” Essentially, “field” refers to the possibility of understanding others in the context of their own lives—and understanding other cultures “from within” while acknowledging that such a goal is ever problematic. Doing fieldwork means being in situ, participating, observing, and documenting a particular cultural scene through immersion. It is the primary means for obtaining data for ethnographic research—that is, for the descriptive study of human society. We maintain an additional commitment (one not necessarily shared by all of our colleagues) to the possibility of positive change and social justice. By social justice, we mean the fair and equitable distribution of opportunities for happiness, health, and economic welfare. Hence, for us, fieldwork can be a form of applied ethnography. As such, it has the capacity to intensify an understanding of the multiple factors contributing to conditions of poverty, illness, and inequality. The knowledge gained through fieldwork enables individuals and organizations to work more clearly toward ameliorating social ills, at least in some small sense. As pedagogy, applied ethnography mirrors the twin goals of service-learning, to the extent that learning is not an end (as is often the vaunted goal of the academy) but it is instead a means to an end, where the desired end is social change.