What is a Field?
For scholars at Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, the field is a primary epistemological site. Field has multiple references for us. The act of documenting and analyzing the physical environment brings forth a notion of the field that John Habraken describes as “built field,” an underlying fabric on which thematic elements and architectural forms are deployed over time. For the vernacular architecture scholar the field is a work site, and its work protocols are carefully described in Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Cromley’s textbook Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary. Field in this form involves ways of collecting data and organizing empirical information. The field is what a laboratory may be for a scientist.
But a field is also a location where students of buildings and landscapes meet users, stakeholders and authors of that environment. It is here that they confront the many interpretations of the built environment from these individuals who use and occupy these places. It is during these interactions with the users that we find that the field is also politically charged. Works of Setha Low and Dolores Hayden show us how the study of the politics of the built environment can be useful for a public historian (see UWM's program in Public History). The built environment offers us ways to engage the voices and understand the experiences of those whose histories are not written or those who are socially marginalized, just as well the field serves as a document of social power and identity.
The field is also a part of a larger social, cultural, historical and ecological landscape as William Cronon shows us in his work. The Center for Culture History Environment at the University of Wisconsin—Madison states “that nature, in all its myriad forms, is inextricably bound up with every aspect of human culture, economy, and politics.” CHE quotes ecologist Aldo Leopold, “Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.” (See also UW's Nelson Institute)
Anthropologists whose site of research is always the field have written extensively about the field. As Gupta and Fergusson writes, this idea of the field is a relatively unexamined one. Gupta and Fergusson’s reexamination of the field emerges from two imperatives. First, because fieldwork differentiates anthropology’s methods from other disciplines, critically examining the “the field” of anthropology and its relation to “the field” of fieldwork emerges as a necessary critique for the authors. But the second imperative, a problematic that also engages scholars of Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, is that of the meaning of “the field” and fieldwork in a globalized, uber-mobile world where “landscapes of group identity … around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are not tightly territorialized, spatially bounded historically self-conscious, or culturally homogenous…” (Appadurai, 1991: 191, 196 quoted in Gupta and Fergusson).
p. 2-5, Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James. “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, University of California Press, 1997.
But a field is also a location where students of buildings and landscapes meet users, stakeholders and authors of that environment. It is here that they confront the many interpretations of the built environment from these individuals who use and occupy these places. It is during these interactions with the users that we find that the field is also politically charged. Works of Setha Low and Dolores Hayden show us how the study of the politics of the built environment can be useful for a public historian (see UWM's program in Public History). The built environment offers us ways to engage the voices and understand the experiences of those whose histories are not written or those who are socially marginalized, just as well the field serves as a document of social power and identity.
The field is also a part of a larger social, cultural, historical and ecological landscape as William Cronon shows us in his work. The Center for Culture History Environment at the University of Wisconsin—Madison states “that nature, in all its myriad forms, is inextricably bound up with every aspect of human culture, economy, and politics.” CHE quotes ecologist Aldo Leopold, “Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.” (See also UW's Nelson Institute)
Anthropologists whose site of research is always the field have written extensively about the field. As Gupta and Fergusson writes, this idea of the field is a relatively unexamined one. Gupta and Fergusson’s reexamination of the field emerges from two imperatives. First, because fieldwork differentiates anthropology’s methods from other disciplines, critically examining the “the field” of anthropology and its relation to “the field” of fieldwork emerges as a necessary critique for the authors. But the second imperative, a problematic that also engages scholars of Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures, is that of the meaning of “the field” and fieldwork in a globalized, uber-mobile world where “landscapes of group identity … around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are not tightly territorialized, spatially bounded historically self-conscious, or culturally homogenous…” (Appadurai, 1991: 191, 196 quoted in Gupta and Fergusson).
p. 2-5, Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James. “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, University of California Press, 1997.