Field Work
Marybeth Hamilton tells the story of the invention of ethnographic fieldwork by Bronislaw Malinowski in the early years of the 20th century.
Marybeth Hamilton tells the story of the invention of ethnographic fieldwork by Bronislaw Malinowski in the early years of the Twentieth Century and how living with the people you are studying became a guiding tenet of all anthropology. Malinowski stumbled into a prolonged stay in the Pacific almost by accident and wrote private diaries that some have thought jeopardised his more scholarly findings but his studies - appearing at the same time as Freud was writing and literary modernism (James Joyce, T.S. Eliot) was changing how the world was perceived - have retained their value and his fieldwork methods have spread into a host of creative and intellectual pursuits.
With Adam Kuper, Liana Chua, Hermione Lee, Helen Macdonald and Lissant Bolton.
Producer: Tim Dee.
Last on
More episodes
Previous
Broadcast
- Sun 28 Feb 2010 21:30³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 3
What was really wrong with Beethoven?
Classical music in a strongman's Russia – has anything changed since Stalin's day?
What composer Gabriel Prokofiev and I found in Putin's Moscow...
Six Secret Smuggled Books
Six classic works of literature we wouldn't have read if they hadn't been smuggled...
Grid
Seven images inspired by the grid
World Music collector, Sir David Attenborough
The field recordings Attenborough of music performances around the world.