Doing Fieldwork Together

Avec Shuenn-Der Yu and Valerie Wen, Social Anthropology, Academia Sinica – Taïwan.

Over the last twenty years, I have worked mainly in two fieldwork sites, one was among Tibetans in Yunnan, China, the other was with Taiwan’s tea community in Taipei. This presentation will share with you some of my field experiences and the issues involved when family members, my wife especially, but sometimes my kids also, came to the field with me, as I did anthropological research or was the primary investigator. I will first describe the ways my family’s presence improved my relationship with the Tibetan villagers. That will be followed by an account of an atypical visit to a Korean tea community in Ulsan. At an international conference on East-Asian tea cultures organized by a historic Buddhist temple, with no advance notice we were asked to perform a Taiwanese tea art ritual on stage, instead of making tea for participants in a tea gathering as we expected. This cultural performance and improvised diplomacy helped open the abbot and his followers’ tea room doors for us, ultimately turning a visit into a short but rewarding field experience.