ABSTRACT
Modern social and cultural anthropology – hereafter simply anthropology – developed in the historical context of colonialism as a study of non-Western people. Participant observation became the essential fieldwork technique, in large part due to the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski. He worked on the Trobriand Islands during the First World War and published many works that are still read and appreciated. To immerse oneself in the lives of people in a – for the anthropologist – strange place for a long period of time became the ideal guiding research. Fieldwork that extended over a long period of time was conducive to a holistic understanding of the society under scrutiny. What was, for example, conventionally classified as economy and politics or religion, kinship and rituals, should not be studied in isolation, but instead as interconnected and forming a social and cultural whole. By immersing oneself – by observing and participating – in the daily lives of the people, the researcher aims to understand the natives’ point of view. This, so called, emic perspective (Malinowski 1922: 1–25) is in contrast to an etic, or outsider’s perspective. Early anthropologists underlined that it was important to study what people said they were doing, and at the same time study what they actually were doing. Often there was a gap between the two, pointing to particularly interesting areas to understand and analyse. From the beginning, anthropologists also emphasised that nothing human is strange, and that all phenomena, all beliefs and all relations are interesting, and worthy of research and analysis.
