Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on the reflection and experience about facing challenges obtained from a cooperative fieldwork in a village in the West of China. One major theme of the project was how the lives of Chinese peasants have changed during the last 100 years. It has recently be published in a book named after the village Golden Goose.

Paper long abstract:

This paper results from the research conducted in a village in the south of Sichuan Province conducted by two researchers, one Chinese and the other English. The researchers explored different aspects of the local culture including government, education, marriage, gender, business, migration, medicine and agriculture. One major theme was how the lives of Chinese peasants have changed during the last 100 years and how this was understood by the people themselves. The oldest members of the community were illiterate and spoke a distinct dialect of Chinese, which required that interviews be translated from the dialect to Mandarin and then to English. This was possible because the Chinese researcher spoke the dialect and was known to the community. As researchers we entered a community with some unforeseen issues as both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ and sometimes ‘together’.

In order to reduce and avoid some issues which might happen during the field work, we tried our best to plan the field work. The narrative of the various individuals were written in a manner that sought to capture the perspective and feelings of each person. It has recently be published in a book named after the village Golden Goose (Liu and Burnett 2019). Throughout the project, questions about prevention and treatment for unforeseen circumstances, ethical clearance for both fieldworkers and research participants, and new challenges and opportunities in anthropological research arose. The paper is based on the reflection and experience obtained from the project.