Postcards – Learning Activities

Learning by Doing: Four Writing Exercise Prompts

1. Write to your future self in anticipation of doing fieldwork. What is it like, what kind of challenges – personal, intellectual, professional, or logistical – do you foresee?
2. Write about a time when you felt like an imposter, not necessarily conducting any kind of field work, just at a time when you felt out of place, who would you write to and why? What would you say, how would you situate yourself to your reader? Who are you being watched by? Afterwards, reflect on this process. How did your understanding of the context change in your writing it up?
3. Write to an anthropologist you admire with questions specifically about their research process – from fieldwork to interpretation or writing. Take an anecdote or instance from their written ethnography and inquire about things that you imagine to have been omitted in this final report.
4. Pretend you are an anthropologist with a controversial fieldwork experience (this can be a ‘real’ controversy ie. HTS, Chagnon.. or a hypothetical, either way provide description) imagine the doubts, insecurities, mistakes they are contending with and how they might convey those to a loved one.