The initiation of fieldwork in anthropology marks a decisive methodological shift from speculative and armchair approaches to direct, immersive engagement with living communities. In the nineteenth century, early anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer largely depended on travelers’ accounts, missionaries’ reports, and colonial administrators’ records. Their work laid theoretical foundations but lacked sustained personal interaction with the people they studied. The need for systematic, first-hand observation gradually became apparent, leading to the development of fieldwork as the hallmark of anthropological inquiry. The formal initiation of intensive fieldwork is closely associated with Bronisław Malinowski, whose research among the Trobriand Islanders during the early twentieth century transformed the discipline. Stranded in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War, Malinowski conducted long-term