That’s a hard question, Amateur Barbarian. Shouldn’t be, should it? I hope that you didn’t want a brief answer. My full CV is on my website, but here is an attempt to explain what my supervisor says was creating my own field. I am still not sure what it is.
http://www.lynnekelly.com.au/curriculum-vitae/
Technically my PhD was in the English Program at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. My previous degrees are in Engineering, Education and IT. I was offered a PhD scholarship in creative writing as a science writer to complete a lovely idea for my publisher, Allen & Unwin who had published three popular science books of mine to date. The book was to be about animal behaviour and whether I would see more in the behaviour of the animals I was watching having read the stories of indigenous people - Australian, Native American and Pacific in particular.
It was going wonderfully well until I derailed it. I started realising just how many animals these cultures were classifying. There is a study on the Navajo, for example, which shows they classify over 700 insects to three levels, along with behaviour, habitat and (in a few cases) controlling them as pests, and eating only one. Add in the mammals, birds, amphibians, fish … how do they do that without writing? Then, I started looking further, especially with Australian Aboriginal cultures and added in memorising all plants (a thousand or so, you can’t afford to retest every generation), navigation, genealogies, astronomy, legal system, land management … the list goes on and on. I derailed my lovely straightforward PhD by asking: How the hell do they do it?
That led the to “primary orality”, which I guess is my field, although this is really an information systems theory. Orality is what you have when you don’t have literacy. That is a branch of sociology (in which I had no background) about the memory methods used by cultures which have absolutely no contact with writing: song, dance, story, mythology, epithets, conceptual metaphors … lots of stuff to make information more memorable. But that led me to the way oral cultures use physical memory aids as well - the landscape, skyscape, art and handheld objects - something not in the body of research on primary orality.
Objects such as the African lukasa (Lukasa (Luba) - Wikipedia) - I held one for the first time a few weeks ago at the Brooklyn Museum - there are none in Australia. Amazing feeling! I started finding memory devices everywhere, but the big stumble was on the way Aboriginal songlines (sung tracts of landscape) acted as more than navigation aids, they also acted as a set of subheadings to the knowledge system. I then started finding them everywhere as well - Native American pilgrimage trails, Inca ceques, Pacific Island ceremonial roads and so on.
By this time I had derailed my thesis fairly massively. But it got worse. My husband had just qualified in archaeology. We both went back to university as mature age students. I was in England researching various cultural objects at museums when he insisted we visit Stonehenge. I had no background in archaeology either. I immediately imagined how it was set up and constantly changed as a memory palace, adapted over 1500 years or so exactly as I would have predicted in the transition from mobile hunter-gatherer culture to a sedentary farming society.
Long story short - I was wildly excited for about 10 minutes, then self-doubt set in - how could I possibly have a new theory for Stonehenge? Years of self-doubt, checking, expanding, a PhD thesis, a Cambridge University Press book from the thesis and I was ready to write the book for Allen & Unwin which had only a germ of the original proposal. That is The Memory Code.
I have just got back from the US and UK including meetings with Neolithic archaeologists. No-one has yet faulted the theory - it goes into all the details of the archaeology including ditch profiles and pottery distributions - lots of things that no previous theory can explain. All terribly pragmatic. But as it was a general theory about non-literate cultures and the transition to farming, it had to work for all monuments in that phase - so I had to look at monuments across the world and non-literate cultures world wide. Ten years of my life in obsessive research!
So now I go public and I already have lots of emails from readers seeing the ideas work for sites I haven’t considered and implications for a range of fields including education (back to my home territory), memory in literate cultures, architecture … fun times ahead!
Sorry for such a long answer. I don’t know what field I am in. I am just going to keep working in it, whatever it is.