Ceding Control, and Gaining Freedom: Anthropological Research in the Real World
Journal Title: Anthropology – Open Journal - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 1
Abstract
I had just sent the final draft of an article titled “The Real World is a Messy Place”,1 which chronicled a 4 year project to assess the effectiveness of various technologies to aid in the delivery of care to individuals with developmental disabilities and severe mental illness, to my co-authors, when I realized that this was the 20th anniversary of deciding to conduct research with non-academics. It was in 1996, when I ignored the advice given by Chef in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now, to “don’t get off the boat” and began to undertake ethnographic research exclusively with non-academics in the real world of care provision. At the time, the decision appeared to make sense since, as an anthropologist, I had conducted fieldwork in a variety of communities around the world, so it was easy for me to rationalize that this first foray into the real world of care provision was just another field site that I would leave at some point. But this didn’t happen as I soon lost sight of the boat, then of the river and eventually got so far into the jungle of the real world that there was no longer a path back to the comfortable and safe world of academic research. I had gone native, it just took 20 years for me to realize it.
Authors and Affiliations
Anthony P. Glascock
Keywords
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- EP ID EP552584
- DOI 10.17140/ANTPOJ-2-107
- Views 156
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