Field Method Toolkit
Working with people's words
Getting clearer on people's understanding of terms and concepts they use
Ask for clarity about the meaning of words that people use throughout the exercises: "When you say.... what do you mean? Can you explain to us what you mean by ...?" What does ... mean to you? Check with other people whether they understand terms in the same way. This helps to understand what certain things mean to people and is therefore a way into understanding how they think.
Listen for local words that describe aspects of land rights administration practice or the way people think about tenure, and ask people to explain them. Some of these need a full explanation before they can be translated, because the practice or the idea doesn't exist in Western land rights administration. Some of them are locally invented to describe a particular situation. Some of them acquire a particular "technical" meaning when people start to make rules about land rights administration.
Listen also for words which you might translate as "owner", "member", "resident", "household", "household head", "rights", "register", "being on the register" and more, and ask people to explain how they understand the word.
Examples:
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