Up in Nipigon Country: Anthropology as a Personal Experience

Christine Hughes is A/Manager, Developmental Services Branch, Ontario
Ministry of Community, Family and Children’s Services.

One of the methodological cornerstones in the discipline of anthropology
is the use of ethnographic fieldwork. In this book, Edward Hedican
provides some personal reflections on his fieldwork experiences among
the Ojibwa people in Northern Ontario when he was a Ph.D. student at
McGill University more than 20 years ago.

Hedican argues that despite the importance of personal experience in
fieldwork, most anthropologists tend to describe their fieldwork from an
anecdotal rather than analytical point of view. Hedican draws on his own
fieldwork to illustrate that an anthropologist’s personal experiences
play a crucial role in what happens in the field and in the wider
contribution of the discipline’s qualitative methods to social
science. For example, the author looks at the relationship between
memory and fieldwork and the fragmentary nature of experience and how
these factors come together in the anthropologist’s mind. As such, the
book fills an important gap in the anthropological literature but will
also be of interest to scholars in other social sciences.

The introductory and concluding chapters set out the author’s
theoretical framework and analysis for his argument that anthropological
fieldwork is primarily about the ethnographer’s personal experiences.
In the remaining six chapters, Hedican uses examples to offer readers a
glimpse into the fieldwork he conducted in a small First Nations
community in Northwestern Ontario (“Nipigon Country”). The episodes
cited from the people and situations he encountered show what it is like
to conduct fieldwork in that particular part of Canada and also how an
anthropologist knits these experiences together to fashion a social and
cultural analysis known as an ethnography. These middle chapters are
recounted in an easy-to-read narrative style with both humor and
tragedy. Each chapter ends with some of the author’s personal
observations or reflections to place the anecdotes in a wider context.
References provide a number of excellent sources for further reading on
this subject.