I learned a lot from Mac over the years. He had an absolute love for Guyanese “culchuh” as he put it–and an infinite interest in every variant of every tradition (queh queh, obeah, cumfa), song, story, game, way of cooking, eating, celebrating, and so on that Guyanese and West Indian peoples of every ethnic group had inherited and transformed. I learned a lot from him about how to do fieldwork well. For instance, if someone said they played a game called “Airy Dory,” and asked if he’d ever heard of it, he’d either say “No,” (although I knew he had heard several accounts of it already) or otherwise indicate that he wanted to hear this particular person’s version. Invariably, some new detail, some local variant would emerge in the course of the narration, and his understanding of the full range and complexity (and perhaps history) of that cultural institution would be enriched in the process.

I also learned, from observation and practice, the importance of lavishing time and attention to people in the course of fieldwork–taking time not only to ask them about the particular things you were interested in, but just to “lime” with them, take a drink and eat some food with them, show them that you cared about them as human beings. I contrast this, when I teach my own fieldwork course, with the experience the author Studs Terkel reports in one of his books in which an interviewee asked him to stay and shoot the breeze after he’d conducted an interview.

Source: Signifyin’ Guyana