Retrospective Reading of Fieldnotes. Living on Gypsy Camps

Abstract

Decades after embarking on research among Gypsies, I examine that earlier context when there was little published discussion of participant observation practice. Snatched advice and rare texts suggested an open-ended approach rather than limited hypothesis. The anthropologist's first weeks of chronological narrative without selection of relevance, vindicate a holistic perspective. Details reveal themes prophetically to emerge as central. There are glimpses of individuals who were to play continuing or passing, dramatic roles in the years to come. Fieldnotes both reveal and conceal. Entwined with experience and analysis, they are later transformed as texts. Fieldwork reveals embedded systems inaccessible through the quantifiable. The ‘merely anecdotal’, so maligned by positivism, has the grounded potential, as explored here, for theoretical and ethnographic overviews, beyond place and time, in this case, residence on one Gypsy encampment during the first few weeks.