In her classic text The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Emily Martin notes that “until recently, many anthropologists looked with suspicion on the task of trying to understand one’s own society.”
The traditional understanding of doing “fieldwork” was to undertake a study of an unfamiliar culture in a foreign, exotic society far from one’s home. Indeed, the entire disciplinary division between anthropology and sociology can be explained by the mental separation between the study of one’s own (Western/“ordinary”/“normal”) society and other (foreign/“extraordinary”/“alien”) societies.
There is much to be said about the merits of ethnographic methods, whereby a participant observer spends many months submerged in an unfamiliar environment, learning to speak a new language, adopting the ways of a foreign culture, and then narrating the experience in a comprehensible way to audiences outside the studied community. Unfamiliarity or “estrangement” is an important source of insight: the entire notion of practicing sociological imagination is to render the familiar strange. People often fail to notice contradictions in their own societies, so it follows logically that outsiders have certain advantages when it comes to uncovering the less obvious features and processes in a society.
