The Experience of First Fieldwork in Israel

Abstract

This article is a personal account of the author's first major piece of fieldwork which he conducted in Israel between July 1966 and May 1968. For him anthropology is the comparative study of society and culture. At a lower level of abstraction society is conceptualised as sets of social relationships, and culture as sets of norms and customs pertaining to those relationships. Anthropologists study social relationships by establishing them in the field. Their ability to establish such relationships depends on the culture and on the structure of the society that is the subject of their research but also on the social position and the personality of the researcher and on his or her anthropological interests both theoretical and ethnographic.