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Ethnographic Fieldwork
Ethnographic fieldwork is the study of people and their cultures. To me, it’s being able
to see the world in someone else’s shoes and see how they live for the day. Many people
criticize and stereotype certain types of people but by doing fieldwork you may get a completely
different view. While taking Urban Anthropology this term, I watched a video relating to the
stigma that workers of the department of sanitation face in their everyday lives. This video is the
reason why I chose this topic for my paper, and it really changed my point of view and how I
think about people. I have come to recognize that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge certain
aspects of life especially when living in a city. Since I felt really strongly about it, I wanted to
learn more about these types of stories and I want to go in a little deeper to better understand a
researcher’s motives, how they conducted their fieldwork, as well as the outcomes of their work.
Also, I would like to discuss the difficulties that come with fieldwork and the process.
There are many strategies for doing fieldwork that ethnographers can choose from when
beginning their research. Some decide to live on the site while some decide not to. They conduct
research by doing interviews or content analysis and many different techniques. I was surprised
to learn that a lot of ethnographers chose not to live on the sites. Living there with the people
they are observing really will benefit them in learning the culture versus if they were not there at
all times and it gives them a, “unique angle for collecting original data” (Ocejo). Living at the
sites is not a requirement but will, “be more clearly, to blend into the environment more easily,
and to experience life in the place.” I think this is really important when trying to fully
understand a culture or a group of people unless it is not required for the type of research.
During this term of Urban Anthropology, we were assigned a discussion board that really
changed my outlook on certain aspects of life. This video was Robin Nagle’s: “What I
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Discovered in New York City Trash”. The reason that this video altered my views was the way
that Robin conducted her fieldwork and decided to live as a sanitation worker in New York City
for the day. Nagle’s motive for her fieldwork started when she was only ten years old and was on
a camping trip with her father when she discovered a dump on the camping site. It enraged her,
“I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. The campers who were too lazy
to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them?” (Nagle).
Her main question throughout life was “Who cleans up after us?” and she wanted to know
everything about the people who did. It inspired me that she actually took a job as a sanitation
worker and drove the trucks and felt exactly what it felt like to be one of these workers. There
were four main parts of her research and questions that she was asked and that was about the
smell that she says she got used to quickly and actually wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be.
With this job comes a lot of hazards and a sanitation worker is actually in the top ten dangerous
jobs in the United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The relentlessness of trash
and never stopping flow of it and for Nagle working this position she saw trash from a different
view and if it weren’t for these workers there would be no trash cycle. Lastly, there is the stigma
of this job and this part if probably the most essential part of fieldwork that a person should
overcome, “You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you
for whatever reason like you’ve blocked traffic with your truck, or you’re taking a break too close
to their home, or you’re drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell
you that they don’t want you anywhere near them,” (Nagle). She concluded that there are three
reasons that she thinks sanitation workers are the most important workers on the streets of any
city and that’s because they are helping to contain public health because without them who else
would clean up after us? The economy needs them because we throw away old stuff to buy new
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stuff that keeps the economy going. And lastly, the point of “quotidian velocity” meaning how
fast we are moving daily and that we don’t realize how we don’t pay attention to what we are
throwing away, where its going, and who’s taking care of it its just something that we do daily
and then sanitation workers are the ones taking care of it. Nagle concluded her video by saying,
“Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of
the nation’s waste stream. It’s a remarkable statistic. So in the flow of your days, in the flow of
your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to
acknowledge them. Take a moment to say thank you.” (Nagle). This is the perfect example of
ethnographic fieldwork in an urban area and exactly why it motivated me to research similar
stories as well as the background of it all.
So what do they not tell us about ethnographic fieldwork? “I wish someone had told me
