Abstract
This opinion article reviews aspects of four decades of fieldwork with the Javaé and the Karaja peoples of Central Brazil in order to offer methodological and epistemological reflections on the relatively new endeavour which has been termed as experimental fieldwork. It is our objective to call the attention of present and future practioners of experimental fieldwork in non-W.E.I.R.D. populations (not Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) to the importance of making epistemological and methodological adjustments to face the challenges involved in “taking the lab to the field” (cf. Whalen and McDonough, Annual Review of Linguistics 1:395–415, 2015). Notions such as bricolage (cf. Levi-Strauss, The savage mind, University of Chicago Press, 1966), exaptation (cf. Gould and Vrba, Paleobiology 8:4–15, 1982) and anthropological blues (Da Matta, (1978). O oficio de etnólogo ou como ter anthropological blues. In: E. O. de NUNES (Eds.), A aventura sociológica. (pp. 23–35) Zahar) are briefly reviewed and taken as part of the theoretical framework of reference in the article.
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Notes
A reviewer of this article suggested that further thought should be given about the reasons why fieldworkers and experimentalists do not cooperate so much. A short answer could be that they have usually received training from different traditions, namely Anthropology for field workers and Psychology for experimentalists. A longer answer attempt should try to explore the reasons why, despite the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950’s, interdisciplinary endeavours are still scarce in the triple frontier between Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology. An interesting line of speculation might be related to the field of Cognitive Anthropology having been less occupied than the field of Cognitive Psychology in the exploration of how mental processes relate to symbols and ideas, what might be related in its turn to difficulties concerning the recognition of anthropologists as cognitive scientists (cf. Astuti & Bloch, 2012).
Maia, Franchetto, Sandalo, Storto (2002) discuss their attempts to train indigenous teachers as researchers when they were consultants and teachers in the first program of higher education of indigenous teachers in Brazil (MEC/UNESCO).
20 native speakers of Karaja, 11 men and 9 women, averaging 24 years of age, currently coursing High school or having finished it participated of the experiment as volunteers.
A reviewer correctly pointed out that Oliveira & Maia (2011) was published in Portuguese and might not be so accessible because it was not published in English. We acknowledge this fact and have made clarification reviews in the description of the main experiment in the article.
A reviewer indicated that he/she does not consider the article an outright exercise in bricolage. I would like, though, to maintain the term, but I would like to acknowledge that the reviewer´s remark primed still further bricoleur thinking—the awareness that the article seems actually to be a metacognitive reflection, a self-case type of memorial or inventory in a career which, in my case, has spanned four decades.
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The author has received research grants from CNPq (the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) for the field trips reported in this article.
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Maia, M. Non-WEIRD experimental field work as bricolage: a discourse on methods in the investigation of deixis and coreference in the Karajá language of Central Brazil. J Cult Cogn Sci 5, 101–112 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-021-00083-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-021-00083-8