FIELDWORK AND THE PERCEPTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

This article examines the claim that fieldwork is an adequate method f or gaining knowledge of everyday life. It points to similarities betwe en the conditions of anthropological knowledge and those of everyday l ife through a discussion of a single ethnographic example, the buying and selling of cattle in south-west France. Four interrelated themes e merge. First, an exploration of the idea of 'acquiring habits for acti on' through fieldwork, or apprenticeship, and its congruence with the practices of everyday life, for this has implications that impinge upo n discussions of ethnographic method, ethnographic writing and the sta tus of anthropological knowledge. Second, attention is drawn to the ef fects introduced into ethnographic descriptions and, more generally, i nto social practice, by the abstracting or 'objectifying' properties o f language, that tend to eliminate any trace of temporality and of the acquisition of habits, of context, and of 'lived life'. The third the me, which is organized around the inescapably temporal nature of the e xperience of everyday life and the potential inadequacy of language to express fully that nature, concerns the complexity of 'social orderin g' and the importance of what has been called 'mutual interpretation' in the creation of 'the social'. Experience is structured by the explo ration of heteroclite realities that are owned by nobody, but which ar e functions of everybody's understandings. Lastly, this location of th e 'objectivity' of the social emphasizes the matter of constraints to be acknowledged and resources to be exploited, and in particular point s to questions of inequality or power, and how these pertain to the fi eld, fieldwork and ethnography.