Redefining the field: auto-ethnographic notes

Abstract

The geographers’ field has in the past two decades been redefined both through a series of theoretical innovations and the encounter of a series of new situations in the field. The latter can still be today the bounded place of traditional ethnography but also a more complex multi-sited, virtual space of investigation peopled by non-human and human entities, and approached through polysensorial, mobile or emotional forms of analysis. How do new theorizations in geography and the immersion in new field situations redefine the field and thus the categories and practice of fieldwork? This is the question addressed by the authors of the two pieces put in dialogue in this section. The first text, by Augustin Berque, apparently deals with a traditional situation: a researcher approaching a society quite different from the one in which he has been socialized. Yet, his encounter with Japanese ways of thinking the societynature relation led him to an epistemological conversion. Lin Weiqiang’s and Brenda Yeoh’s text regards transnational (im)mobilities of Singaporean migrants and thus phenomena that radically challenge canonical ways of defining the field and doing fieldwork in geography. They discuss the personal and methodological implications stemming from actually experiencing transnationality in the field. In this brief introduction, I will first situate these two contributions in the discussion about the ‘ontologies’ of the field and the practice of fieldwork in geography and, second, comment on how each of these short and incisive contributions redefine the field within geographical research.