Fieldwork and Psychosocial Dynamics of Personhood

Abstract

Western psychological theory, clinical practice, education, and much of popular culture have idealized the production of selves that are bounded, separate, and autonomous. In much of Western scientific and popular thinking, the individual has passed from being a historical construct to a naturally existing entity whose inexorable development into adult autonomy can be interrupted only by dysfunctional childhood experiences of which there are many. Western feminist psychodynamic theorists, decrying the masculinization of individuation, often have embraced separative notions of self as liberatory for women. The cultural and historical specificity of these notions of the self, as well as their social, political, and psychodynamic underpinnings, while recognized for some time, now is being theorized in new ways, particularly in response to post-modern critiques.' Scientists are considering how gender and personhood affect scientific outcomes.2 And cultural theorists are evaluating the impact of the ethnographer's sense of self on social theories, methods, and data.3 In this paper, I argue that the fieldworker's construct of herself is a multi-angled lens through which theories, methods, and data are filtered. Ethnographers' notions of self intersect with those of the people studied in multiple ways, affecting the formulation of knowledges. We need to review much of earlier ethnographic work as refracted through the lens of personhood of both ethnographers and the