An individual goes into a coffee shop, sits down at a table near the door, puts their bag on the chair next to them, looks around multiple times and then orders. It might feel tempting to record that the individual appears anxious, wary or waiting for someone. These may become productive questions but they are not observations. What is observable is where the individual sits, where the bag goes, how many times they look around and how long it takes for them to place an order. Anthropologists begin by separating observable actions from explanations.
Fieldnotes become problematic when description and interpretation are combined in a single statement. For example, stating that the customer was avoiding others sounds objective but actually assumes motivation. A more objective description might be that the customer sat at a table with unoccupied chairs and did not engage with other customers beyond asking the staff a question. This is not free of interpretation, but it allows the evidence to stand on its own before a conclusion is reached.
One way of structuring fieldnotes is to consider each entry as having three components. One is the objective data: the things that could be seen or heard, behaviour, speech, duration, objects, locations, changes. Then come the questions raised by the data. Finally comes the interpretation written with careful phrasing. Consider, for example, the progression of these three notes: ‘Three people placed their phones on the middle of the table’, ‘Is this a shared norm?’ and ‘Perhaps putting their phones there helped minimise distractions during their discussion’. Note that the final statement connects back to the initial data and leaves open the possibility of an alternative interpretation.
Careful word choice aids this effort. Words like rude, odd, polite, traditional or contemporary can express the observer’s perspective rather than describing the situation. Rather than using these, describe the behaviours that suggest the judgement. So instead of writing that a greeting seemed unusually formal, write what the people said, how far apart they stood, the order of their conversation, any accompanying body language. Later, you might discuss status, gender, age, professional culture, social norms, and so on.
Rather than applying this exercise to a community unfamiliar to you, try it with a scene that is familiar to you. Observe how people enter a lecture hall, queue in a shop, share space on public transit, organise themselves for dinner. Spend a short time watching without noting names or other identifiers. Write down some sentences that consist only of behaviour and speech. Then circle all those that imply motivation, emotion, personality or culture. Place those in a second section. Turn each one into a question or tentative interpretation.
Reflect on the exercise. What did you expect to see? What caught your eye first? If you are attentive to punctuality, you might notice who arrived late. If you are sensitive to hierarchy, you might notice who sat where. Or you might notice language use. None of this invalidates your observations. It merely shows how your perspective influences what you notice.
When someone else reads your fieldnotes, they should be able to identify the data that led to your interpretations. Go back through one page and ask: would my description still be accurate if I disagreed with the interpretation? Are the actions, timing, context and interactions clear enough to allow you to formulate a different interpretation? If so, your fieldnote is ready for thoughtful anthropological thinking, not a casual snap judgement.