Fieldwork Trilogy: One Year, One Village, One Anthropologist

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For decades, anthropology followed the "fieldwork trilogy": one fieldworker, one village, one year. This model produced powerful ethnographies but also created blind spots - missing migrants, history, gender perspectives, and global connections. Understanding what the trilogy revealed and what it obscured shows how anthropology has evolved.
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*What You'll Learn*
• The fieldwork trilogy model: why one fieldworker, one village, one year made sense
• What solo immersion forces: dependency, humility, becoming like a child in a new place
• What the trilogy misses: migrants who left, gendered access, historical archives, global flows
• The Nacirema danger: freezing people in time as if "locked in customs"
• How anthropology evolved: Eric Wolf's global turn, Annette Weiner's feminist return to Trobriands, Barbara Myerhoff's turn to home
• Where fieldwork happens now: Facebook, TikTok, bureaucracies - following people where they actually are

*Why One Year in One Village?*
A village of 300-400 people is manageable - you can know everyone in depth. One year covers seasonal cycles: planting, harvest, festivals, births, deaths. Being alone forces immersion - you can't retreat into your own group's bubble. You become dependent on others for survival, shaking assumptions about superiority. These rationales shaped generations of anthropologists.

*The Systematic Blind Spots*
But what does the trilogy miss? People who left their hometowns to migrate elsewhere. Historical context locked in archives (sometimes in languages anthropologists don't speak). Gendered areas of life - male anthropologists never talked to the women cooking, or vice versa. Global interconnections - tomatoes in Italy, horses among Indigenous peoples, corn in Africa all arrived recently but seem eternal.

*The Biggest Danger*
Assuming one year with a dozen key informants tells you everything. Writing ethnographies as if people are "locked in time." The Nacirema article satirizes this - imagine if that became a book claiming to explain all Americans. Yet many classic ethnographies did exactly that, describing societies as timeless rather than dynamic, contested, changing.

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💭 Your Turn: If you could only study your hometown for one year, what would you miss about how it's changing and connected to the wider world?

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