THE PUBLIC I EYE - CONDUCTING FIELDWORK TO DO HOMEWORK ON HOMELESSNESS AND BEGGING IN 2 US CITIES/

This essay examines the meaning and practice of fieldwork in a situati on in which the primary goal is not to create an ethnographic understa nding of the ''Other'' but to gather information in order to be an inf ormed citizen capable of acting in a morally conscientious manner towa rd a particular category of persons with whom the participant observer shares the identity ''fellow citizen.'' It asks how citizens gather i nformation on the spot to make decisions as to which actions, among a range of possible and culturally feasible ones, are morally acceptable given their understanding of the ideological precepts they deem relev ant to constructions of self and others and the interactions in which they are involved that require an immediate decision and action. It ca lls this information gathering and the decision points that motivate i t doing one's homework-trying to understand what must be done, why it must be done, and what the consequences are of doing it one way and no t another. It contrasts the implications of fieldwork for ethnographic representation with those of fieldwork as an aspect of homework, argu ing that the latter is a self-consciously moral and political act and cannot be presumed consistent with shared identity based on locality, race, gender, or other categoric distinctions.