Fieldwork and Research in England:Methodological Difficulties andExistential Gain

摘要

Since studying English literature for my first degree, Britain has always captured my interest although I shifted my field from literature to social science. For my MA, I used an anthropological approach to study tourism in Britain. I traveled within the country, and felt that people adore the English countryside as an ideal place to live, which is different from the Japanese attitude toward our countryside. I wanted to discover how and why English people live in their countryside, which is indeed different from the Japanese one. There were also peculiar difficulties for my fieldwork which I could not imagine when I started my PhD course on anthropology at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Minpaku.