"I began to realize something fundamental about fieldwork: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one's 'research project'. One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one's eyes and ears, and take notes about everything. This is the great blessing of this kind of work. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses much more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange -- provided you look carefully, ceaselessly compare, and keep your anthropological distance. In my case, I began to get interested in America, everyday America, for the first time." (pp. 101-102)Fieldwork can heighten your sensitivity to differences and make the familiar seem strange!
"It is important to recognize that comparison is not a method or even an academic technique; rather, it is a discursive strategy. There are a few important points to bear in mind when one wants to make a comparison. First of all, one has to decide, in any given work, whether one is mainly after similarities or differences. It is very difficult, for example, to say, let alone prove, that Japan and China or Korea are basically similar or basically different. Either is possible depending on one's angle of vision, one's framework, and the conclusions towards which one intends to move." (p. 130)
"... The fact that young Japanese are learning Burmese, young Thais Vietnamese, young Filipinos Korean, and young Indonesians Thai is a good omen. They are learning to escape from the coconut half-shell, and beginning to see a huge sky above them. Therein lies the possibility of parting with egotism or narcissism. It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them." (p. 195)
"The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do not know the answer. Then you have to decide on the kind of intellectual tools (discourse analysis, theory of nationalism, surveys, etc.) that may or may not be of a help to you. But you have also to seek the help of friends who do not necessarily work in your discipline or program, in order to try to have as broad an intellectual culture as possible. Often you also need luck. Finally, you need time for your ideas to cohere and develop. As an illustration, the research that resulted in Imagined Communities began when I asked myself questions to which I had no answers. When and where did nationalism begin? Why does it have such emotional power? What 'mechanisms' explain its rapid and planetary spread? Why is nationalist historiography so often mythical, even ridiculous? Why are existing books on the subject so unsatisfactory? What should I be reading instead?"(pp. 154-155)I must say my ears pricked up when I read this, I wanted to know his secrets to research. But as you would have figured out from an earlier post, Ben had a very interesting childhood, a very thorough elite gentlemen education, the kind they gave government officials in the past. So he was already starting out at a level beyond many of us. So take what you read with a pinch of salt. Though I really like his idea of always seeking "as broad an intellectual culture as possible" and valuing the comments and views of outsiders. I think this is very important to prevent a very myopic kind of research that has little relevance to anyone besides you.
Reference
Anderson, B. (2016) A life beyond boundaries. London, New York: Verso
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