Claire Sterk Summary

This reading is based on field-work in the United States on the streets in New York City as well as Atlanta. Claire Sterk is an anthropologist who works in a school of public health and is primarily interested in issues of women's health, it relates to sexual behavior and to prevent sexual transmitted diseases. She describes the basic fieldwork methods she used to study these women and their communities. Like most cultural anthropologists, Sterk's primary goal was to describe the life of prostitution from the women's own point of view. To do this, she had to be patient, brave, sympathetic, trustworthy, curious, and non-judgmental. Fieldwork is a slow process, because it takes time to win people's confidence and to learn their language and way