Field Work

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.