What did you notice in your observations that you didn’t notice before in your own regular, day-to-day interactions with the space?

Often one of the first steps an anthropologist takes upon entering a new community is to map the surroundings. Mapping takes many forms and produces many different products. While walking the streets of a field site, the ethnographer develops a spatial awareness of where people live, work, worship, play and eat, and of the space through which they move. After all, human culture exists in real physical space. And culture shapes the way space is constructed and used. Likewise, physical surroundings influence human culture, shaping the boundaries of behavior and imagination.Careful observation and description, recorded in maps and field notes, provide the material for deeper analysis of these community dynamics.

Develop your ethnographic skills of observation and description by drawing a map of a block or public space in your community and writing a narrative of what you find.

Select an interesting location for your mapping project. You may choose to map a block defined as an era bounded on four sides by streets, as both sides of a single street (including the corners), or as the four corners of an intersection. Alternatively, you may choose to map an outdoor public space, such as a park or campus quadrangle, or an indoor space, such as a shopping mall or your college’s student center. In these cases, focus on what is inside the space-that is, inside the building’s four walls.

1. What location did you choose? What drew you to it? Describe what you found:
2. What did you notice in your observations that you didn’t notice before in your own regular, day-to-day interactions with the space?
3. What is absent that you might have expected to find?
4. Visit the same block or space at a different time of day or different day of the week (This can be hypothetical). How do your observations vary over multiple visits?

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