Far Away, So Close: Some Notes on Participant Observation During Fieldwork in Nepal and England

Abstract

Participant observation has been the subject of intense debate amongst anthropologists in recent years, but it continues to be the methodological foundation of research within our discipline. Little thought has been given, however, to the extent to which a researcher’s participation in a social milieu can be properly assessed. I examine this issue in the light of two periods of participatory research in contrasting social environments, that of academic archaeology in the UK and a rapidly modernising, urban community in Nepal. I argue that participation is not simply a matter of ‘acting like’ or ‘doing things like’ people of another society. Instead, a researcher’s participation is a concomitant of his or her own changing socio-political position, and must be compared with the diversity of subject positions within the host society if the character of this participation is to be properly understood.