Having spent several years working in my own clumsily hand-coded format (http://quotha.net/fieldnotes), I've decided to move to a real blog for my fieldnotes and general observations. Writing fieldnotes has traditionally been a very personal, private experience for anthropologists, and there are a number of good reasons for that, primarily the need to protect subjects. I take this issue very seriously, and use the same measures here that I use in my formally published material to protect the vulnerable people I work with, employing pseudonyms and other measures to mask the identities of my friends and informants who do not wish to be exposed- in fact, I take greater care with that here, since it is an ongoing process with the potential to expose my interlocutors to danger.
 
However, there are a number of other reasons for the traditional secrecy surrounding fieldnotes that are suspect to me, including the desire to protect one's own ideas and material for publication, fear or awareness of inaccuracies in judgment, a belief in the need for scientific remove, and so on. I firmly believe that openness makes us better scientists- or more properly, since science is but a muddled category of modernism- better and more honest thinkers. I would rather that my readers help me catch my errors in analysis or fact here, before I put things in official fancy academic publishing form. I am not so invested in an academic (or any) career that it overrides my desire to overthrow the structures of violence in our world right now. My written work would be meaningless to me carried out in isolation; I ask for your questions, insights, and suggestions as you read the entries I post here.