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Five Emporia State graduate students, one Ball State undergraduate, two anthropologists (Nyce and Bader) and a photographer (French) spent two weeks May 2004 in Lunca Ilvei, a village in Transylvania. This visit, which for students seemed to be one to a largely forgotten way of life, one lifted straight from the pictures of Brueghel, raised a series of challenging questions for them. First, we had to address the "practical" questions related to field research (access to informants, good will, use of translators). While these are important parts of any field research, we also had to deal with more fundamental analytical problems. Among these were "Did we all see the same thing?" and then "If we did, can we all agree on what it meant?" What students learned from this is that common sense is often little help in helping us understand what we saw around us in Romania and in arriving at explanations that make sense of what we observed.
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Students and faculty from ESU's SLIM and Ball State's Department of Anthropology interview the doctor in the village's medical clinic. Medical care is low cost or free but is limited with little of the high technology we have come to expect. | |
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Students soon discovered what they had believed to be self evident and universally "true" seldom is. While they were willing to acknowledge that people can live "differently", they did not seem initially to be prepared to grant that things like "information", "library" and even "number" could take on meanings in Lunca Ilvei that made little or no sense to them. What they went on to discover however is what seemed contrafactual to them could be quite reasonable when the village's history and context are taken into account.
What students brought home from Lunca Ilvei is competence and confidence in field research, community analysis and qualitative research. They also learned that data collection and analysis (science in fact) is not an occult art but something they could do themselves. They also learned that categories and meanings they had taken for granted or assumed to be universal like information or technology are constructed, subject to negotiation, and can be defined quite differently, place to place, situation to situation. They also learned that social analysis, when done well, can help us understand and account for these differences.
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