Intimacy through Time and Space in Fieldwork Interviews

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 continues to engage with theory, meta-methodology, and methodology through a novel synthesis of work on scalarity, intimacy, stancetaking, chronotopicity, kinship, and narrative. After defining intimacy as “. . . an emergent feeling of closeness in combination with significant levels of vulnerability, trust, and/or shared identities that can very across time and space” (Perrino & Pritzker, 2019), it goes on to provide the reader with a discursive and procedural view of what intimacy, vulnerability, and trust look like. In doing so, this chapter provides a discursive picture to terms that have often been associated with the notion of rapport while demonstrating that close attention to the discursive features of anthropological interviews not only provides unique insights into the co-construction of different types of rapport but also offers further evidence that challenges the notion that one needs to establish rapport before engaging in interviews. More specifically, Perrino explores how the co-construction of intimacy becomes a central aspect of researcher/collaborator’s rapport in anthropological fieldwork settings. She shows how intimate relations are processual phenomena of interaction in speech participants’ oral narratives as they unfold in interview settings in two field sites: Senegal (West Africa) and Northern Italy. In doing so, she highlights how kinship chronotopes are also discursively appropriated and co-constructed as part of both her and her consultants’ ongoing efforts to inhabit particular participant roles (i.e., to engage in role alignment).