Barbados

2 Pages 493 Words

Ethnographic Fieldwork in Barbados

In Gmelch’s article “Lessons from the Field” he writes of his students’ adventure into Barbados to do some Ethnographic fieldwork. This article is about how the experiences his students had affected them as people. Throughout the article it explains how the students’ perceptions of their own lives were changed by living inside this other culture as anthropologists doing fieldwork. Gmelch studied their journals they kept to show these changes of perception.
To understand what kind of changes these students went through you have to understand that they are the average middle class suburbanite or city kid. They are all privileged college students much like my peers in this class. So it was quite interesting to see how differently they felt after being injected in to a new environment.
One of the first changes in perception that I read was one of a female students. Her housemother needed a lime and realized she didn’t have any in the kitchen. At this the mother went out in the yard and just pulled one off of a tree. When the student explains the situation she seems to respect the simpler life. She comments that she was amazed thinking if she were at home she would have had to jump in a car and head to the market. Tying in with the idea of a simpler life it explains how the students have to learn to associate with the villagers. They didn’t like it at first but by the end they became more resourceful in entertaining themselves.
I think it seems that the students’ biggest change in perception may have been becoming less materialistic as a result of their fieldwork. They see how all these people live with so much less then what we are accustomed to. The amazing part about the villagers and what changes the students’ values of materialistic things is the fact that the villagers don’t have a lot, and at the same time they are content. The students actually returned to school the n...