Field notebook

An anthropologist's approach to writing

Martina Tyrrell
January 20, 2025

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how my anthropological training and experience have informed my approach to writing. The anthropologist’s primary research method is participant observation and their primary method of recording and disseminating that research is ethnography. Let me briefly outline what each of those means before I explain why I think those skills can help everyone in their writing practice.

Participant observation does exactly what it says on the tin. Anthropologists participate while observing, and observe while participating. We are apprentices, we learn by doing, we conduct auto-ethnography. We generally immerse ourselves deeply and for a long time in our chosen research site and this method has been referred to as deep hanging out.1 For instance, for my doctoral research, I spent a year practicing participant observation in order to learn about the role of the sea in the life of a community on Hudson Bay. I went to sea with hunters, who taught me how to drive boats and skidoos, how to hunt and butcher marine animals, how to read the weather and the sea; I hung out in kitchens and living rooms with seamstresses, who taught me how to work with sealskin and transform it into clothing; I went to feasts and dances and community meetings; I drank way too much coffee at kitchen tables, chatting and immersing myself in the family lives of my friend-informants. I learned by doing. That was the participation part. While doing all that, I observed how people taught me and interacted with me, how they engaged with each other, and how I experienced hunting or sewing or driving a skidoo, in my mind and in my body. I immersed myself in that world and acquired embodied knowledge. I participated, observed and experienced.

Ethnography is the transformation of that participant observation into writing. It is sometimes referred to as deep writing or thick description. Often, depending on the situation, it is not possible to take notes while in the midst of an activity. Therefore, making detailed notes as soon as possible after the event is essential. Everyone has their own method but what worked for me was to always have a pocket-sized notebook to hand, into which I would take notes when the chance arose. At the end of the day or activity, I would sit at my desk, recall as much as possible of what had happened, and write brief notes. A typical example might be ‘-21°C–cloudy–Nuvuq with Arden–met Tony A–wind NNW–thin ice–sled dog story–sensing ice thickness through feet–pressure ice–bannock’. Those aides-memoir could go on for three or four pages of a large reporter notebook. I’d then leave those notes aside, sleep on them, and the next morning, before I spoke to anyone or did anything, sit at my desk once more and write up extensive notes based on those brief notes and anything else that had come back to me overnight. During those 12 months of fieldwork, I filled 13 notebooks with extended field notes. The advantage of spending so long in the field was that I learned more and more all the time. And that shows in my fieldnotes. The early notebooks are filled with errors, misunderstanding, lack of understanding and ignorance but, over time, they develop and reveal my deepening knowledge and understanding of the place and the people. When I returned to my university, those extended fieldnotes were the basis for writing my dissertation, as I made sense of them through anthropological theory and used them to challenge those same theories.

Anthropology for writing

Of course, you don’t need long-term immersion somewhere to make use of these tactics. I encouraged my under-grad and post-grad geography students to use these same skills on short field trips to London and New York, to the Jurassic Coast and to the Bog of Allen. In addition, you don’t need to be somewhere new or novel to practice those skills. You can practice them in your everyday life as a way to be open and alert to the world around you and to your experiences, to listen intently to conversations and to the sounds of the world around you, to engage with the world through all your senses, to be aware of your own ignorance and to seek to overcome that.

The thick description of ethnographic writing – practicing the art of building up layers of notes from a simple reminder in a notebook or on your phone to more expansive aides-memoir to extensive and deep notes – can provide the rich detail needed for dialogue, for scene setting, for describing weather or landscapes, for creating characters, for showing rather than telling.

Novice writers, in particular, are often criticized for not being descriptive enough and, in the case of novels or memoir, not including enough dialogue. Participant observation and ethnographic writing of the world, or of that aspect of the world that is of interest to your writing project, can help to transform your creative writing by providing you with a deep well of raw material to draw from. Twenty-two years on from when I filled those original 13 notebooks, I am still returning to them when I want to write about a spring day, or how scared or elated I felt at a given moment, or the words someone used to express their frustration with me.

So why not give deep hanging out and writing thick description a try and see how it transforms your writing raw material?

What I’m working on

I’ve recently edited a delightful and highly experimental 90,000-word PhD dissertation about honeybees and beekeepers. It was such a joy to work on, as the author explored the more-than-human worlds of beekeeping and honey production and wrote the lives of honeybees in intricate and sensitive detail. Each evening, I was very excited to tell my daughters about what I had learned that day. I’m taking this week off, because I’m going to Paris to hang out with some friends.

What I’m reading

Two years ago, a friend gave me Alice Albinia’s Cwen and I only got around to reading it last week. I finished it last night. It’s a story of female empowerment on an archipelago on the east coast English-Scottish border, of the quotidian world of local councils, museums, schools and businesses, and the magical realism of an ancient island of women, presided over by a spiritual being, Cwen. I found it funny and heartbreaking and empowering. But also, I got a bit lost at times, as it had perhaps a few too many characters and the connections between people were not always clear. The absent protagonist is a powerhouse for change, but she always remained a bit vague and misty and never properly came to life for me. (Her sons are devilishly written and could well be portraits of real-life Conservative back benchers.) Despite its few short-comings, I generally enjoyed it and I have a couple of women friends I want to share it with now.

In other news…

As I said, I’m off to Paris in a couple of days. I’ve never been before (not really…a quick drive through on the way to the airport when I was 16 doesn’t count). It’s time for my annual few days away with my two oldest friends, who I’ve known since we were all four years old. They’re flying in from Dublin, I’m flying in from Faro. But I’m going a day earlier than them to spend 24 hours with another friend from my days as an anthropology PhD who now lives in Paris. So, I’m hoping to have lots of local knowledge to share with my friends from Ireland, by the time they arrive, 24 hours after me.

1To give you an idea of the diverse places where anthropologists conduct their research, here are some of the contexts in which my anthropologist friends have practiced participant observation over the years: in Scottish fishing communities, with Sapmi reindeer herders and Tanzanian mental health practitioners, in gay saunas, with Russian migrants to Dublin, with eco-home builders, kidney disease patients, museum visitors, train commuters, in kindergartens, prisons and science laboratories, with oligarchs and homeless people. Wherever there are humans, we want to learn about them.

Photo by Kevin Canlas on Unsplash

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