The History of Fieldwork

Since the history of fieldwork emerged as a self-conscious area of study within the history of science, especially during the last quarter century, it has expanded its focus on place and practice into an ever wider range of disciplines, social and environmental settings, scales, analytical frameworks, and connections with adjacent disciplines and sub-disciplines. After reviewing some of the foundational scholarly works on the history of scientific fieldwork, this essay identifies and discusses some important recent patterns in scholarship. Historians of fieldwork have increasingly attempted to connect their work to other disciplines such as geography, and to other historical subfields such as environmental history, agricultural history, and the history of capitalism, with increasing success at cross-fertilization despite ongoing tensions arising from significant methodological differences. At the same time, scholars have not only linked their work to a wider variety of social and environmental places, including colonial and postcolonial settings, as well as extreme environments, but have also striven more deliberately to understand the emergence of knowledge through fieldwork at larger scales beyond the local, such as regional, continental, oceanic, and global environments. Scholars have also sought to understand more about the intersection of fieldwork with indigenous, folk, vernacular, and experiential knowledge.