1. The document discusses ethnographic fieldnotes, which are the written records an observer makes during participant observation fieldwork. Fieldnotes are the raw data of ethnography and are later expanded upon and analyzed. 2. Examples are provided from the author's fieldwork observing classes in Brazilian capoeira and French savate martial arts. Different types of notebooks are used - reporters' notebooks for initial notes, ringbound notebooks for expanded write-ups, and separate notebooks for reflexive diaries and reference materials. 3. Details are given on the fieldnote writing process - notes are taken by hand for legibility and privacy, then expanded upon later. Guidelines are discussed for what tools are appropriate for different fieldwork contexts.

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File Name: DTP Fieldnotes
Sara Delamont FAcSS, FLSW, DScEcon (Cardiff)
SOCSI, Cardiff University
Materials for the DTP workshop
This is a version of material available in S. Delamont (2016) Fieldwork in Educational
Settings, London: Routledge Chapter 4 and in S. Delamont (2019) Ethnographic Fieldnotes
in Sage Research Methods Foundations an on-line resource edited by P. Atkinson, A. Cernat,
S. Delamont, Joe Sakshaug and R. Williams
N.B. 1 These will make more sense if you look up on Wikipedia or on YouTube ‘Capoeira’
and ‘Savate’.
N.B. 2 The focus here is mainly on traditional hand written fieldnotes. In 2020 many
ethnographers work on their phone or Ipad.
Ethnographic Fieldnotes
The Foundations of Ethnography
Ethnographic fieldnotes are the record, usually written in situ while human action and
interaction takes place, made by the observer who is conducting participant observation,
fieldwork or ethnography. They are the basic data that ethnography produces, which need to
be subsequently expanded, amplified and analysed by the researcher. Fieldnotes are the raw
data of ethnography and they are amplified, transformed and analysed as they are fitted into a
series of contexts that are gradually further from the fieldsite itself. The contexts which come
from the literature, from theory, and from the analysis of the data are incorporated during the
other writing that ethnographers have to do.

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The entry is about fieldnotes in research where the scholar is physically present in an offline
setting and the observer records what is experienced with all five senses. There is also a rich
tradition of ethnography online which is sometimes called netography. Boellstorf is a key
figure in on-line ethnography. This document is very practical consisting mainly of examples
of real fieldnotes, and how they are written. The 2016 book and the 2019 entry in the SAGE
on-line resource, provide more on the literature and on writing. I use concrete examples of
previously unpublished data from my fieldnotes to show what ‘real’ fieldnotes look like to
illustrate the processes and stages of writing, and then using, ethnographic fieldnotes. The
notes are from two ethnographic projects conducted in the UK on classes in which two
martial arts (Brazilian capoeira and French Savate) are taught. The capoeira research can be
found in Delamont, Stephens and Campos 2017 Embodying Brazil and the Savate in
Southwood and Delamont 2018 ‘Tales of a Tireur’ in Martial Arts Studies (an open access
on-line journal) winter 2018. Although there are many qualitative research methods books
available novices usually find that they do not explain clearly enough exactly what to write in
fieldnotes. That issue is explored at some length here. It is an unusual text, because it reveals
what is normally kept private by ethnographers: the ‘rough’ or ‘raw’ data.
Some fieldnotes are recorded by the ethnographer in the fieldsite, if it is a location where they
can be written contemporaneously with the social interaction such as a lecture hall or the
chemistry lab. Some locations and fieldwork roles, for example those where the researcher
may be moving physically, may necessitate the fieldnotes being compiled as soon as possible
after the events, boxing training or a tango class, or department store or during an agricultural
harvest.
Records made as close as possible to the social interaction are often called ‘raw data’ and are
generally regarded as private, and not shared. Researchers rarely show what they write in situ

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to anyone else. ‘Outsiders’, whether the doctoral supervisors, the colleagues or the ‘readers’,
see only extracts from the fieldnotes written up for the purpose of showing progress with the
fieldwork (the supervisors), initial findings (the colleagues) or the results (in the case of the
readers of publications). There are 3 reasons for this, one practical, one ethical and one
emotional. (1) Practicalities: fieldnotes are usually both illegible and incomprehensible;
deliberately written in a form of personal ‘shorthand’ with initials, abbreviations, or in
handwriting intended to be unreadable in case anyone in the field setting tries to glance at
them. (2) Ethically it is not acceptable to share fieldnotes because they have real names and
other identifiers in them as well as confidential, even libellous, conversations and may record
distressing events that will never be shared, reported or written up at all.
(3) There is also an emotional barrier to sharing them, reported by the anthropologists who
were contributors to Roger Sanjek (1990). These established scholars reported that they felt
their fieldnotes were particularly poor compared to some idealised, imagined, perfect
fieldnotes which they assumed were those written by more skilful colleagues. Precisely to
challenge that convention, in this entry the first person is used to show ownership of them.
In the examples given here the ethical objection to sharing fieldnotes have been met by
inserting pseudonyms in all the versions provided and leaving out any other identifiers (such
as ‘the dental student’ or ‘the Spanish exchange student’ or ‘the man who works at the
Brazilian Embassy in Prague’). None of the personal material recorded in the notes, such as
complaints about the cold or the heat, or the author’s self-criticism for poor record keeping or
failures of sociological insight have been reproduced. Generally such recorded feelings are
also left out of the published research results: the account of the setting and activity in it are
often only drawn from the fieldnotes, and if more personal insights, complaints or self-
criticisms appear in public at all it is in more autobiographical, or what are frequently called

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‘confessional’ texts such as those collected by Katherine Bennett de Marrais, (1998) Inside
Stories.
Ethnographers use different tools in the fieldsuch as cameras, audio visual recorders, audio
recorders, their phones and Ipads, but the convention is to call the initial record of what
happens in the fieldsite ‘fieldnotes’ even if they are typed on a laptop or spoken into a sound
recorder or directly into some form of voice recognition software. It might seem obvious that
a camera, a camcorder, a digital recorder and a laptop would be in every ethnographer’s bag
but what equipment can be used depends on what permission (informed consent) has been
given, what tools or equipment will not disrupt the setting, and what can be carried without
putting the observer in danger of theft or physical attack. The old fashioned data collection
method and toolkit described here was ubiquitous from the 1890s, when fieldwork began, for
a century and is still commonly used today.
Every scholar has to decide what works for them in their fieldsite(s). I have described what I
do in detail, and it will be useful even if, perhaps especially if, you decide what I do would
not suit you, or your fieldsite at all. I am not advocating what I do, only displaying it. I use
four different sets of notebooks for fieldnotes which are visible here. One set is for the
capoeira research and one for the Savate study. The first two types of notebook, One and
Two, both contain ‘fieldnotes’ as that term is commonly used by ethnographers. These two
sets are for the data, that is two versions of the fieldnotes. Notebooks Three and Four contain
supplementary materials, closely related to the on-going fieldwork. The third set of notebooks
are used for an ‘out of the field’ reflexive diary hereafter called ‘The Diary’. Notebook Four
is for keeping lists of potential pseudonyms, possible titles for papers, and academic
references to read or reread. For the capoeira study I take notes in reporters’ notebooks
(Type One) in situ and as soon as possible afterwards write up a legible, expanded version in

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A4 ringbound notebooks. (Type Two). Away from the fieldsite, I combine analytic memos
and reflexive material in separate A5 ringbound books (Type Three) the reflexive diary, and
only occasionally make notes in the fourth type. For the Savate research I have a different
style of Notebooks One and Two: a distinctive style of reporter’s notebook and I write up in
A5 notebooks. However I keep only one Out of the Field Diary for the 2 projects, and one
set of the Type 4 books as the projects are both on martial arts and are intended to be parallel
and comparative.
In the fieldsites (dance studio, gym, church hall or community centre) I record, with a ball
point pen (carrying several spares) in a reporter’s notebook. The individual pages in the
reporter’s note book are small, so each page is quickly full and can be turned over and thus
what I have recently written is rapidly hidden. In my fieldwork bag are paper tissues, key
documents (so if in a school the timetable, staff list, class lists), a bus or train timetable and a
street map. A bottle of water, in a plastic bag in case of leaks, is normal when the research is
going on in gyms or sports halls. The other three types of notebook are not taken into the
field unless I expect long gaps between ‘observable’ action, such as a class at 10.00 a.m. and
then a gap until a second one at 4.00 p.m. when the plan is to write up what has occurred
from the reporter’s notebook into the A4 book in that otherwise ‘dead’ time. The diary and
the book(s) of pseudonyms and possible titles stay, generally on my desk at my home, with
the A4 books. Of course if staying away from home for several days – at a capoeira festival
or savate competition – I take all four with me (carrying two or even three blank copies of the
reporters’ notebooks and at least one spare A4 book) but those stay where I am sleeping. For
the fieldwork on capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, I usually carry a CD of capoeira music
(in case there is a CD player in the hall and the teacher has not brought any of his or her own

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CDs) and a small Portuguese and English dictionary. For Savate, French kick boxing, I might
include a list of the French terms for all the moves.
In the following long section three texts about capoeira and three about Savate are presented.
In each case the reader can ‘see’ the ‘evolution’ of the final text ready for publication, as it
develops through the written-up fieldnotes from the original notes taken in situ. The three
capoeira extracts are provided first and are deliberately in reverse order: that is a piece of
publishable text first, then the underlying written up notes and finally the ‘originals’. I have
started with a publishable text, of the kind everyone is familiar with, and gone ‘backwards’ so
you can see where it came from. Then the Savate work is presented in the way it actually
develops: rough fieldnotes, a written up version and finally some text of the kind that appears
in publications.
Ethnographers use all five senses to get to know their fieldsites. I always draw quick maps of
every location and record where I stood or sat as well as the positions of other actors to help
my memory and understanding. The smell, taste, sounds and touch of people and things are
typically recorded. There are two reasons for recording the physical location, the smells, the
sounds, the tastes, and the feel of everything. First that helps the researcher recall what went
on in a particular place at a specific time. Second, when writing for readers who were not
present, it is necessary to be vivid, and evoke the fieldsite as a multi-sensory experience. If a
workplace smells of fast food and reverberates with loud rap music, the reader needs to know
that, in order to envisage that place and time.
Fieldnotes quickly build up into a very large body of data, as the four respondents
interviewed by Geoffrey Walford (2009) in Ethnography and Education reported. One hour

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of observation can easily generate 8,000 words or more when written up. It is not possible to
reproduce the fieldnotes on an hour of a martial arts class here. The notes presented focus on
how the teachers instruct the students in the physical movements that they need to master to
progress in capoeira and Savate. That is the main focus of the two studies, and fieldnotes
should always record data relevant to the foreshadowed problems (the ethnographic
equivalent of hypotheses). These sets of notes contain very little on the students, and I have
not reproduced here what was written about what the settings and actors smelt like, what the
observer listened to, what objects felt like when touched, what the food tasted like. Nor are
any drawings or sketch maps. The notes reproduced here are mainly about changing bodies,
and mostly record movements and speech. If the studies had been about race and ethnicity, or
gender, or social class in capoeira and Savate, the focus of the observations and the notes
would be different. Your notes, based on your observations, should address your
foreshadowed problems, unless you can see that those foreshadowed problems are clearly
‘wrong’.
The Real Examples
Capoeira Texts: From publishable text back to the fieldnotes.
Capoeira is the African-Brazilian martial art and dance which is always done to music.
Regular practitioners have Portuguese language nicknames, such as ‘Mermaid’ or ‘Viking’.
The notes reproduced here are from research focused on how capoeira is taught and learnt in
the UK (Sara Delamont, Neil Stephens and Claudio Campos, 2017 Embodying Brazil) and
has been on-going since 2003. A typical bit of text from a publication is as follows. Most of
the names of people and places in Version 1 are pseudonyms and the author appears as Bruxa
(witch). There is no need for readers to understand the technical capoeira terms, which are all
in Portuguese in order to see how ethnographic texts are built on ethnographic fieldnotes.

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The teacher Mestre Claudio Campos has his real name here because he chooses to, all other
names are pseudonyms.
Capoeira Novices: Version I for Publication
Capoeira classes in the UK regularly have novices turning up to try the martial art.
Large groups in big cities schedule and publicise beginners’ classes separate from the
advanced ones, but even those teachers find novices arriving at advanced lessons
where they are in a tiny minority. Beginners are never turned away. The instructors
need the money, and hope that the novices will become regulars. They also want to
make capoeira more welcoming, better fun, and showcase its potential as a way of
getting fit compared to other dance, exercise and martial arts available in the vicinity.
So in any capoeira class the teacher and the more advanced students have to
accommodate the newcomers in a positive way. We have written elsewhere
(Delamont, Stephens and Campos, 2017 p32-35) about how complete beginners are
highly visible in classes because of their clothes and inability to do the basic
movement (the ginga). Here we focus on how teachers use regular class members to
help ‘manage’ the novices’ experience in the hope it will be positive.
In the Tolnbridge class on January 15th
2020 there were three novices, two men and a
woman. One man had taken a few classes with Mestre Claudio Campos in 2003 but
none since. The other man and the women had come with friends but had never done
any capoeira before. No one present – not the teacher, the other 15 people training,
nor the ethnographer found that at all unusual. Neither Mestre Campos, and the only
student present (Jagai) who had been training since 2003 remembered the ‘returner’.
Mestre Claudio Campos’s Cloisterham classes are the same. On October 19th 2019,
at the Saturday class there were two young women from Korea who had decided to
turn up and start lessons. As the Cloisterham classes are mainly in university
buildings, and it was near the start of a new academic year, there were ten other
learners who had taken only one or two previous classes alongside students who had
been training for many years. In the London classes of Mestre Hermes, who
advertises separate beginners’ lessons, it is still common to find one or two novices in
the general or even the advanced sessions.
The composition of the class in Tolnbridge fluctuates, and new people arrive who
have done capoeira before as well as novices, but our focus here is on how beginners
are handled in the lessons. Sometimes these people introduce themselves to the
teacher on the night, and some have phoned or emailed to announce themselves, but
equally they may just arrive and try to join the activity. Teachers have three main
strategies once they spot newcomers or beginners. If there are several beginners,
teachers will divide the class, and alternate between teaching one sub group while the
others practice movements or sequences. A version of this is less formal: the teacher
demonstrates and drills something, tells the students (discipulos) to practice it in pairs,
and then goes to the novices to teach them the core element of what the rest are
practising. So if the drill is a sequence of a kick, an escape, and an acrobatic move,
the teacher may focus on the kick and escape with the novices, leaving the acrobatic
moves for the advanced only.

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It is also common for the teacher to request regulars to partner newcomers saying
things like ‘Play with the beginners’, ‘Play with someone you do not know yet’, with
the unspoken assumption that the regulars will teach the novices and help them with
basics. The teacher may allocate advanced students who are good teachers to each
novice, and even tell them ‘focus on the meia lua and esquiva’, or ‘work on the
ginga’, or ‘don’t do the second kick, just do the queixada’ so the experience of
regular students includes being expected to instruct beginners, and fulfilling that
expectation is a way that establishes their credibility as reliable core class members.
This is the type of text that could be found in qualitative research journals such as Qualitative
Inquiry, Ethnography, Qualitative Studies in Education, or the
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography or a journal about sport, leisure studies, bodies or in
Martial Arts Studies, and in an ethnographic monograph. In the following paragraphs a small
amount of the data from which such text is derived is presented. The data that are analysed to
generate such text are recorded in the ‘written up’ version of the fieldnotes, the transcripts of
interviews, and, if such data were collected, in films, still photographs, and documents as
well. Written up fieldnotes are represented next, with pseudonyms replacing real names and
identifiable material removed. The notes made in which the novices were mentioned are
reproduced. Line numbers have been added for this document so that Version 2 and Version
3 can be compared.
Capoeira Novices: Version 2 ‘Written up’ Fieldnotes
Wednesday Jan 15th 2020 Tolnbridge
1 I got there at 7.50 and sat in a
2 corner. A man arrived and
3 asked if it was the capoeira class.
4 I said it was and that Mestre Claudio
5 Campos would soon be here to teach
6 The man (Franҫois) said he had done

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7 ‘a couple’ of Claudio’s classes in 2003.
8 I asked if they were held in the
9 kickboxing gym in Heston Lane
10 Franҫois said they were
The notes from 7.52 – 8.10 omitted here
11 Rhys arrives (at 8.10) with two friends
12 a man and a woman. They are
13 complete beginners. They and Rhys
14 join the class who are doing seated stretches
15 8.16 Claudio begins to teach capoeira moves
16 The 3 novices are the only beginners here
17 everyone else has a blue belt or more
Again details are omitted here
18 8.27 Claudio calls up Jagai to
19 demonstrate short sequence
20 A (Claudio) does false R de A L to R
21 and then armada R to L
22 B (Jagai) has to react very fast to
23 escape the real armada
24 A does au
25 They demonstrate the sequence 5 times
26 That is enough for the regulars to
27 ‘get it’. Claudio is A three
28 times, and Jagai twice.
29 Claudio say ‘Grab a partner’. 2 by 2!!

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30 Claudio sends Jagai, Heidi and
31 Ieuan to partner the 3 novices
32 Each regular ‘teaches’ their novice partner
33 the basis of the sequence
These are the only mentions made of the three new people, except for recording that what
they wore which was leisure wear not capoeira kit. My ‘mentions’ of them in the first half
were the ones marked in the relevant notebook to be extracted from the full account of the
two hour class to write about novices. Obviously if a paper were being planned on gender, or
on Claudio’s ‘New Year’ message or anything else, other items would be marked for
analysis.
While some knowledge of capoeira would make these notes more comprehensible, it is
possible to see how they relate to the first version, the ‘published’ text about capoeira
novices.
The third version of the text which is presented next, the ‘original’, is derived from the notes
taken in situ, and these are deliberately and inevitably incomprehensible to anyone but the
ethnographer who wrote them. The notes reproduced below are those which, when expanded,
appear as Version 2.
Capoeira Novices: Version 3 ‘Raw’ Fieldnotes
Selected ‘raw’ notes from Jan 15th 2020 with the same line numbers as Version Two added
for clarity.
8.27 18 C + J dem X 5
19 C fls R de A lr
20 arm rl
21 J dodge
22 fast

12. 12
23 C au
24 5x
25 A ‘GP’, ‘2 by 2’
26 A sends H, I and J to……..
If notes such as these are not expanded, that is written up into a text such as Version 2, the
events recorded are lost for ever. Because they are so cryptic, some further ‘unpacking’ and
explanation follow. The extract from the raw notes starts at 8.27. Line 1 ‘C + J de’ is the
abbreviation for ‘Claudio and Jagai demonstrate’. In the written up version this was amplified
with ‘a paired sequence’ because while that is what ‘demonstrate’ means in practice I, as the
experienced ethnographer of capoeira classes, know that a reader could not be expected to
have that information. Thus it needs to be more explicit in the written up version so if a direct
quote from the fieldnotes is eventually included in a text for publication it is relatively clear. I
often record a paired sequence as between A and B, with A the player who attacks first. Here
in Line 8 Claudio is C and Jagai J. Line 19 is a good example of the necessity of writing up
the notes as soon as possible. In line 19 C fls R de A lr has been, and has to be, expanded
into a false rabo de arraia left to right: the rabo de arraia is a fierce attacking kick – It
means stingray’s tail – delivered with the player bent double with her back to the opponent.
Line 20 reports an upright spinning kick (armada) facing the opponent, done right to left.
Line 21 only records Jagai escaping – but for any reader that needs to be expanded to
‘explain’ that it is easy to be fooled by the false kick and ‘escape’ it, which places the player
in danger from the kick coming in the opposite direction. Jagai is so experienced that he
barely moves to escape the false kick because he spots it is a fake quickly, and goes down the
other way because he is expecting an attack from the other side. This is helped by the drill

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they have done in lines when the whole class did a false rabo de arraia one way and a real
armada the other.
That can be, and was, made explicit in the full version of the notes because I still had the
precise sequence clear in my head when I wrote up the expanded version early the following
morning. The deliberate deception (malicia in Portuguese) which fools the partner into
expecting a kick from that side, so they begin to escape from it. In the expanded version Line
24 is spelled out as five demonstrations, and so on. Later lines recorded that Ieuan was
concentrating on teaching the basic triangular step (the ginga) and Heidi helping the second
man who was struggling with the esquiva (escape) written as ‘strg esq’ meaning ‘struggle’
and ‘esquiva’.
Three things are clear from this: first is that the ‘leap’ from the original notes to the written
up notes, which is not normally seen by anyone else, can only be made if the writing up is
done with careful thought given to the addition of a good deal of extra detail and some
explanations and clarifications not present in the original notes, and recognition that what is
not added at the time when the first version is written up into the more formal account is
‘lost’. Second the critical abbreviation and the subsequent expansion were done by an
observer who had accumulated a great deal of knowledge about capoeira classes. I had seen
1072 classes over 16 years before this one. Notes from an initial encounter would display
more incomprehension and probably surprise. The Savate notes which follow entry, written
after only observing 35 previous classes are less assured. Third the expanded
version will not be very useful until it has been coded, analysed, and embedded in an
academic argument. Coding is a common step between collecting fieldnotes (and
transcribing interview talk) and analysing those texts. Essentially coding makes means

14. 14
marking electronically or by hand incidences of phenomena related to the research questions.
Coding these notes (Version Two) when the focus is on novices, would consist of labelling
lines 4, 6-7, 9-11, 17-19, 26-27 with a tag such as “novices”. Then all those segments can be
extracted from the many (25 or so) pages of notes from that two hour class and coded more
densely, by, for example, gender, dress, apparent fitness, and intervention by the teacher.
Thus coding brings together chunks of fieldnotes across many classes, to enable the
researcher to focus on novices. When the move is made to Version 1 more clarification and
information is added for social science readers who know nothing and care little about
capoeira, but want to read about the classroom interaction, or embodiment, or globalisation
or whatever the sociological point of the article or book chapter may be. These three pieces
of writing illustrate how a polished, publishable text is derived from the definitive ‘written
up’ fieldnotes, which are themselves based on the scribbled record of the events recorded as
they occurred. To reiterate these points, the entry now demonstrates the same process in the
chronological order in which it actually takes place: from notes to publishable text. This time
the focus is a Savate (French kick boxing) class taught by James Southwood in Heston.
Savate Texts: From Fieldnotes to Publishable Text
It is March 2019, and I am in Heston where James Southwood teaches Savate. This was the
45th
routine lesson observed my knowledge and understanding is far slighter than it is of
capoeira. I have added line numbers, to help the reader relate these notes to the next version.
The reader must not expect to be able to make any sense of Version One.
Late arrivals: Version One: Raw Data
This is the real-time version from Notebook 18. This was the 45th
routine class I had
observed.
Savate Version 1
Cabot Community Centre, Heston

15. 15
5/3/19 Class began at 7.30. This extract begins after the warm up
8.00
1 J dem R
2 A hds up hds
3 B 2 fs and jb rh
4 cross 1h
5 2 X 2
6 2 A-C f arrive (f1)
7 J v late: shoes
8 F arrive (reg) wsf up
9 Feet WU
10 J and V next seq
11 A 1 kick (f) B 2 k (f)
12 1 pt 2pt
13 2 Acf rp 1 add
14 No recog
This is, again, meant to be incomprehensible to anyone but me. Savate is French kick boxing
so all the kicks have French names and the key calls to start contests ‘en garde’ and ‘allez’
are in French. This class took place in new venue for James Southwood, my key informant
and co-author. The main training room he had been using for nine years had been closed for
a huge refurbishment and he had lost about 25 students who had not (yet?) appeared for a
class at his new place.
Savate Version 2: written up late arrivals
8.10 1R James circles the class and gets Rachel Verinder to demonstrate with him
2R A (Rachel) holds up both her gloved hands to protect her face and head

16. 16
3R (James) does two fouettés and one left handed jab
4R and another punch with the right-hand ‘across’ his body
5R James and Rachel demonstrate this three times, and then the class go into pairs to
train it. James is about to begin to walk around watching and coaching the pairs.
6R Two African-Caribbean women in street clothes arrive: they tell James they have
come for their free trial lesson
7RJames says gently that the class began at 7.30, and so they are very late. One is in
leather boots, and has no other shoes with her. James says that the website does make
it clear that trainers are essential: sends them to change.
8R While he is with the 2 new women a regular woman student appears from the
changing rooms in her training clothes, and goes to warm herself up in a corner.
9R The two new women reappear in their sports clothes, and James decides the one in
her tights had better put her street boots on again. He sets them to skip in a space near
the door.
10R James whistles, stops the paired training and recircles the whole class except to
the new women.
11R A 1 kick, B 2 kicks
12R James says that ‘kicks must be visible to the judges’. ‘You’ve got to ensure your
kicks will be seen’. He stresses A would score one point but B would score 2 points.
Pairs set to train.
13R James gets out a rope ladder and lays it on the floor, gets the 2 new women to
stand with their left foot in one square, and then he teaches them 3 basic moves and
sets them to practice basic moves not taking that foot out of that square of rope ladder.
14R Not one of the people I know as James’s regular is here tonight, but it is Monday
and there was a grading event yesterday.

17. 17
This written up version shows how much can, and should, be added while it is still fresh in
the observer’s mind’s eye. This short extract from a two hour class could be built into
publishable text on several themes. It could be used to illustrate an argument about how hard
it is to find suitable, affordable, teaching spaces, on the high turnover of students, the needs to
be flexible enough to cope with potentially serious recruits whose initial contact is
problematic (lateness, wrong kit), as well as texts about the actual teaching of Savate. Here I
have pretended to be writing something on teaching how to impress the judges in
competitions.
Savate Version 3: Being Visible
Savate can be done as a way to get and keep fit, by people who do not want to get
graded or compete in fights at the national or international level. James Southwood
has once been the world champion in his weight category, and has regularly won
bronze and silver medals since 2010. His regular class teaching is suffused with
advice on how to make sure that, if a student is competing, or being judged for a new
grading, their attacks will be seen and will score points.
In March 2019, for example, during only the second demonstration of a simple
sequence, James said ‘kicks must be visible to the judges’ (when they touch the
opponent in a scoring zone of the body), and ‘You’ve got to ensure your kicks will be
seen’. In the particular sequence James was teaching one kick from A was answered
by two kicks, each of which, if the opponent did not evade, deflect or block them,
would score a point for B. Some other instructors in the UK especially the two who
were his own teachers, argue that this focus on being competitive is misplaced
because few learners have any ambition to compete. The tension between Savate as a
‘pure’ leisure activity and Savate for those who wish to improve and see gradings and

18. 18
competitions as benchmarks to motivate them to progress, and those, like James
himself who works hard to compete and win have been apparent in the fieldwork
since it began in 2009.
However, all the written up notes are read, and re-read many times, coded and analysed, and
from the basis of all the generalisations and other statements about Savate made in
publications. So the fieldnotes are the foundation of all publications. They are the word
hoard, the accumulated wealth of the ethnographer.