Fieldwork and Subjectivity: On the Ritualization of Seeing a Burned Child

Abstract

Field research, an exercise undertaken to generate descriptive and analytic studies of human activity in varying social and cultural contexts, is a complex process of framing and unframing undifferentiated experiences. As such, field studies are conditioned by the immediate play of subjectively arrayed cognitive, emotional, perceptual, and linguistic processes even as they are designed for future objective accounts. This article offers a redescription of an emotionally laden encounter with a burned child. The article presents a phenomenological account of the encounter which, as a highly charged event, focuses attention on reflexive processes related to introspection, intersubjectivity, and sensory perception as ritualized aspects of fieldwork. Finally, the concept of ritual is examined in terms of its rhetorical function as a frame for writing lived experience in the field.