I was watching this video as part of a seminar on ethnography at the Comillas Institute at Columbia University, and while taking notes I began to organize its insights around what can be understood as the different stages of fieldwork. What follows is not a rigid model, but a way of presenting the process more clearly: from preparation and arrival to participation, observation, reciprocity, departure, and writing up. Fieldwork is never just a matter of entering a place and collecting data. It is a long, demanding, emotional, and deeply relational process. Also, I reutilized this to write a more comprehensive article on ethnography, so you can use it and reference it: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/B9780443266294000757
The Stages of Fieldwork
1. Preparing for fieldwork
Fieldwork begins long before the journey itself. Preparation can take many months, sometimes up to nine. This stage is not only logistical but also intellectual and emotional. One must think about where one is going, what sort of environment one will encounter, and what kinds of ideas, emotions, misunderstandings, and surprises may arise when entering another culture. In this sense, fieldwork starts before arrival: it begins in anticipation.
2. The journey and arrival
Then comes the trip and the arrival in the field. Once there, very basic questions become immediately important: where will one live, in what kind of house, and with whom? These are not trivial details but fundamental conditions shaping the entire fieldwork experience. Life in the field is also often physically demanding. Anthropologists frequently become sick because of pollution, different water, unfamiliar food habits, tiredness, or the strain of adapting to a new setting.
3. Communication
Good ethnography depends on good communication. Communication is not just about language, but also about gesture, expression, posture, and bodily presence. Often, communication with children is the easiest place to begin. They tend to be more accustomed to difficulties in communication, more patient, and they often have more time than adults. Learning a few words of the local language can also be an important starting point, both practically and symbolically.
4. Participation
Participation is at the heart of anthropology. Fieldwork is not only about watching but about taking part. This may mean participating in agricultural work, domestic routines, or other everyday activities. Through participation, one begins to understand bodily what life is like: how difficult work can be, what it means to bend one’s back in the fields, and why people may seek opportunities elsewhere.
Participation also helps establish a more balanced relationship. Often, the anthropologist is imagined as the one who looks at the community member from above, in the sense of producing knowledge about them. But in practice, fieldwork often reverses that hierarchy. The people in the community become the teachers, and the anthropologist becomes the learner. They teach the anthropologist practices, techniques, values, and culture in a much broader sense. This transformation—becoming the learner—is one of the defining moments of anthropology.
5. Rituals and religion
Ritual and religion are often among the most exciting and revealing aspects of fieldwork. Here one must be especially careful, for example by asking permission before taking photographs. Rituals are often social gatherings in which the ritual itself forms part of a larger process of sharing. At times they may seem repetitive or even boring, but through patient attention and by asking what is happening, one slowly begins to understand them.
Ritual dances, for example, can reveal how people use their bodies, what kinds of emotions are being expressed, and how collective feelings are organized. There are also family rituals, more private and intimate, which require even greater sensitivity.
6. Observation
The other side of anthropology is observation. If participation is immersion, observation is careful attention. Anthropologists must learn to notice gestures, silences, repeated behaviors, routines, tensions, and forms of interaction. Observation is not passive. It is an active and disciplined attempt to understand what is happening, often by watching closely and asking people for clarification.
7. Formal interviews
Then there are formal interviews. These may last twenty minutes or more and often involve talking frankly and openly about many aspects of a person’s life: private, personal, and public. At their best, they can become intimate and direct, almost like a conversation between siblings. In some cases, people may be more comfortable if the camera is turned off or if the situation is made less formal. Interviews matter, but they are only one element of fieldwork and should never be confused with the whole of it.
8. Recording and analysing
Observation leads to recording, and recording leads to analysis. Everything should be written down, often first in small notebooks. These are useful because they are unobtrusive and, if lost, the damage is limited. The anthropologist may jot down keywords, short phrases, headings, and fragmentary observations from conversations with individuals or groups, to be expanded later.
The point is to observe, listen, and understand, while also asking people what is happening. These first notes are provisional, but they are essential.
9. Key informants
If one is lucky, one encounters key informants: individuals who carry an extraordinary amount of knowledge about the community. A key informant may hold in memory the whole social, economic, and genealogical structure of the village. He or she may provide a comprehensive inventory of households, possessions, wealth, status, kinship, and local history. Through such people, the anthropologist can begin to build a much more complete picture of the community.
10. Transcription and long-term reconstruction
Hour after hour, notes must be transcribed and later put into a computer. This is slow, grounded work, but it is what makes the difference between superficial and in-depth fieldwork. In long-term research, this can become an attempt to reconstruct the life of a village over decades.
A census, for example, may be built gradually by returning year after year and noting what has changed: new babies, deaths, marriages, migration abroad, or changing possessions and status. This information must then be collated, interrelated, and checked, often again with key informants. Sometimes those who now live abroad, perhaps younger members of the community who speak good English, can help explain details and fill gaps. It is long work, but essential for classical community studies and historical fieldwork.
11. Using photographs
Photographs are another way of gathering information. One can show photographs to people and ask: who is this, where are they now, did they marry, what happened to them? In this way, photographs become prompts for memory, narration, and social reconstruction.
At the same time, photography also slightly distorts life. People often like to dress up when being photographed. They may not want to be seen in ordinary daily clothes, so the image does not simply capture reality; it also reshapes it. Sometimes people continue with their activities naturally, but at other times the camera changes the scene. This too is part of ethnographic awareness.
12. The fieldwork diary
The most important device of all is the fieldwork diary. This should be written up every day, often for one or two hours, taking the raw material from the small notebooks and expanding it into fuller reflections. It is in the diary that notes begin to become interpretation.
The diary should be written as soon as possible after the events described, ideally within a few hours, while memory is still fresh. Unlike the small notebook, it should not be carried around. It must be kept carefully in the house, so it is not lost. It is the key document of fieldwork, and later it can be transferred to the computer. Without it, much of the texture and depth of field experience would disappear.
13. Reciprocity
One of the most difficult arts in fieldwork is reciprocity. Anthropologists receive a great deal from the people they live with, and they need to think carefully about how to give something back. Reciprocity can take many forms. It may be something small, such as giving sweets to children. It may involve providing people with photographs of themselves, something they may rarely have. It can include gifts, clothes, or useful items.
Money may also be given, but only with caution, since it can provoke jealousy if directed at a particular family. It is often better to give to the community as a whole. One might, for example, help buy a pressure lamp for a women’s dance group raising money for charity, or help stock a village shop with rice and other necessities. People may want to learn English, and teaching English can become another form of reciprocity. Medicine may be another. Organizing picnics, sharing meat with those who rarely eat it, gathering people together for speeches or celebrations—these too can matter.
Reciprocity can also be cultural and political. An anthropologist may encourage a community to value and preserve its traditions. Such encouragement can sometimes have real effects, inspiring the creation of a museum, a study center, or the revitalization of ritual life.
14. Leaving the field
Then comes the reverse journey: leaving the field. This is often one of the most emotionally difficult moments of all. The packing up, the goodbyes, the final gestures—these can be deeply disturbing. A host who never openly showed much emotion may suddenly weep at the moment of departure. There may be a ritual blessing for the journey. People may say, “Don’t forget us.”
And one does not forget. If fieldwork has gone well, the relationships formed can be as deep as any in life. The anthropologist depends on these people profoundly. They give an enormous amount of themselves. The quality of fieldwork often depends on that emotional bond, especially when it is formed with people of warmth, courage, and honesty.
15. Writing up
Finally comes the writing up. One returns to Europe, or to the place one calls home, but the field remains very much alive in memory. Writing up may take another year or more. It involves reconstructing the fieldwork in one’s mind, organizing notes, diaries, interviews, photographs, and memories, and trying to make sense of the whole experience.
Writing up is not simply the final administrative stage. It is where fieldwork becomes thought, argument, and narrative. It is where experience is transformed into understanding.
Pérez-Sindín, X. S. (2025). Ethnography and the depth of analysis: The true value of qualitative research.
