The Revenge of Fieldnotes

 

© Gary Larson (1985)

Fieldnotes refer to qualitative notes recorded by scientists or researchers while conducting research “out there” in the field, during or after their observation of a specific organism and its activities, or any other phenomenon they are studying. Such notes are intended to be aids to memory and as documentary evidence that supports the understandings researchers come up with about the object of their study.

I have written informally in my journal and more formally in ethnographic fieldnotes for decades. After completing my anthropological training in the 1970s, I thereafter regarded everyday living among my fellow humans as an opportunity to learn something about being human, and to learn something about how to be a better human myself.

Writing in a journal and recording fieldnotes helps me remember and aids my ability to study and benefit from my professional and personal experiences. I hope to benefit or gain something from doing this in terms of cultivating and becoming more consistent in displaying personal virtue, and in terms of understanding human thinking and behavior.

I sometimes fail in terms of behaving virtuously and misunderstand the ideas and actions of my fellows. Nevertheless, I think my anthropological understandings would have been far less accurate and the development of my personal virtues more stunted had I not recorded and reflected on my experiences in writing.

The ancient Stoics tell us there are some things in life that are within our control - our granting or not granting assent to emotions as they arise in us; and our ability to choose to use or not use deliberative reasoning in response to our emotional states as they ebb and flow in various modes and shades of intensity. Our emotions arise constantly during our life experiences. Our reasoned responses to them over which we have control can sometimes become beyond our control. That is, we can fail to exercise reason in responding to arising emotions and surrender behaviorally, partially or totally, to the emotion of the moment – happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, anger, contempt, passion, pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, or excitement.

In the above comic, Gary Larson shows what might lie in store for an anthropologist, in this case a primatologist, who underestimates the literacy and symbolic understandings gorillas have of humans, and who fails to protect from prying eyes the reasoned evidence and subjective impressions dutifully entered in her fieldnotes.

One must wonder if the gorillas depicted practiced Stoicism in some rudimentary form, and if they did how consistent they were in this instance in responding reasonably to their emotions of surprise and anger. After all, they had graciously allowed the anthropologist to live peacefully within their midst for months only to have her abuse one of their own in her fieldnotes.

Hmm, let’s see, where did I store my old fieldnotes and journals….