The intertwined legacies at the heart of ethnographic field schools: A case from the NC State University Guatemala field school

Ethnographic field schools provide students a real-world experience in data gathering, analysis, and report writing. The field sites themselves become a key element in the learning process as students move out into the field with increasing confidence through the weeks of the program. The people and communities they encounter are both affected by and affect this interchange of local knowledge and cultures with students whose backgrounds are usually quite different. Veteran program leaders bring their own knowledge of the student learning process to the field site where they have made connections with community members to facilitate the entire process. Their role makes it more likely that successful outcomes will last well beyond the season's fieldwork. This issue of Annals of Anthropological Practice features several examples of the long-term benefits, that is, the legacy, of ethnographic field schools. They illustrate different field school models, all with positive, long-term legacies, often with applied and praxis components. In this paper, I discuss the outcomes of my field school programs and why the ethnographic field school is, or should be, a vital component of not only graduate, but also undergraduate programs. My immediate frame of reference for this paper is the 17 years of programming in Guatemala, but I have done 10 more seasons in other places (Hungary, Costa Rica, and Colombia). My path to lead these programs was heavily influenced by the legacies of other colleagues, both before me and those whom I met while doing my own program, including some of the authors in this issue.