Fieldwork Encounter Research Articles

Tworzenie wspólnego ciała, czyli o przetwarzaniu terenu wśród boliwijskich Moré


 
 
 The aim of this anthropological essay is to present the emotional and intellectual processes accompanying me over the years of field research among the Bolivian Moré, who belong to the Chapacura language family. The narrative structure is twofold: addressing both topics and issues that motivated me intellectually to do the research, and the attitudes of Moré themselves, as well as conceptual categories around which their narratives seem to focus. Some passages of this essay take a more analytical form, as I focus on the impor- tance of unpredictable events, the context, and the transformation of field experience over time during the research process. I conclude that both sides of the fieldwork encounter face the task of getting to know the Other. Each gets to know the Other in a particular way through conceptual categories and ways of acting that result from their current way of being in the world.
 
 

Kapuściński, Ryszard; with an introduction by Neal Ascherson; trans. Antonia Lloyd‐Jones. The other. 100 pp. London: Verso Books, 2018. £8.99 (paper)

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) was an internationally acclaimed Polish journalist and author, whose writings generated some controversy for their apparent blending of reportage and literature. This volume includes four lectures: the ‘Viennese lectures’ which were delivered in Vienna on 1-3 December 2004 at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; ‘My Other’, which was given at the International Writers’ Symposium in Graz on 12 October 1990; ‘The Other in the global village’, which was delivered at the Father Józef Tischner Senior European School in Kraków on 30 September 2003; and ‘Encountering the Other as the challenge of the twenty-first century’, which was delivered on 1 October 2004, when Kapuściński was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The lectures pursue interlinked trajectories of reflection on Europe and its relations with Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the question of the Other and the direction of social and cultural change. Over the course of the lectures, Kapuściński engages substantially with anthropology, particularly through the figure of Bronislaw Malinowski, and continental philosophy, through that of Emmanuel Lévinas. In this brief review, I will address these elements, before concluding with some short remarks about Kapuściński's representation of anthropology and Malinowski. For Kapuściński, Enlightenment humanism – expressed initially through literature and travel writing – opened up new spaces in which the Other emerged not as an object of conquest or conversion, but as a human being. According to Kapuściński, anthropology and the ‘philosophy of dialogue’ (p. 68) as practised by the likes of Lévinas, emerged from this Enlightenment space (p. 27). His summary of the development of anthropology from the debates of evolutionists, diffusionists, and functionalists into a discipline defined by ethnography, with Malinowski as ‘the creator of anthropological reportage’ (p. 32), segues neatly into a discussion of Lévinas, and his foregrounding of the ethics of the encounter with the Other, a move which Kapuściński sees as building upon the fieldwork pioneered by Malinowski. Kapuściński adds that fieldwork ‘is not only recommended for anthropologists, but is also a fundamental condition for the job of a reporter’ (p. 31), a point which highlights potential points of contact between the two professions. Kapuściński provides two perspectives on European history and experience: one, as we have seen, begins with the Enlightenment and moves on via the novel to anthropology and the philosophy of dialogue. The other focuses on social and cultural change, and the transition, as Kapuściński sees it, from mass to global society, a transition precipitated by decolonization and the end of the Cold War, as well as the advance and spread of new communication technologies. According to Kapuściński, mass society, particularly in its totalitarian forms, negated the individual: the subject was a member of a class, a race, or a nation. As such, our new multicultural-global society must embrace the spirit of dialogue found not just in the writings of Lévinas but also in those of the Polish Catholic theologian Józef Tischner, for whom the idea of dialogue was precisely conceived in opposition to mass and totalitarian social forms and in the recognition of the individual human being. Importantly, Kapuściński understands that a defining feature of the new global and multicultural society is its emergence from ‘various contradictory worlds, a composite creature of fluid, impermanent contours and features’ (p. 33), and that it is ‘hybrid and heterogeneous’ (p. 89). This new society will, according to Kapuściński, require something of the spirit of Malinowski, Lévinas, and Tischner if it is not to succumb to the many enmities and challenges that beset it from all sides. One reason to read this beautifully composed book is for its representation of anthropology and one of the discipline's most controversial figures, Malinowski. Kapuściński sees in anthropology, and fieldwork in particular, a deliberative methodology for dialogue and understanding the Other. Perhaps this is a rose-tinted view of the fieldwork encounter that does not adequately grasp its ongoing implication in asymmetries of power, race, and gender, but Kapuściński offers some useful points of departure for pursuing related questions about ethnography and literary craft, and for exploring anthropology and journalism as entangled professions. Finally, given the links made by Robert J. Thornton (‘Imagine yourself set down …’, Anthropology Today 1: 5, 1985) between Malinowski and one of Conrad's more disturbing creations, Kurtz, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that Kapuściński's final lecture closes with a quotation from Joseph Conrad (p. 92) that points to a common humanity binding together the dead, the living, and the unborn.

“But You Are Also Ghanaian, You Should Know”: Negotiating the Insider–Outsider Research Positionality in the Fieldwork Encounter

The reflexive turn in sociology and across much of the social sciences has brought a central focus on the “self” within research encounters. Within this context, qualitative researchers are required to highlight how their positionality shapes their research experience. In this article, we interrogate how our own personal experiences as native Ghanaians conducting research at home and away from home in two different African countries—Ghana and Malawi—shaped our research positionality. We use the framework of credibility and approachability and develop new categories such as the eager learner. We show how our performed behaviors and perceived characteristics enabled and constrained our access to research participants and information. The analysis contributes to the research methods literature by highlighting the fieldwork encounter as a site of shifting, negotiated, and fluid positionalities for both fully insiders and fully outsiders.

Surrender, Catch, and the Imp of Fieldwork

We build on the work of Kurt Wolff to capture some distinctive aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and phenomenology, Wolff introduced and developed the idea of surrender-and-catch to encapsulate the twin processes of engagement and reflection. Although Wolff’s ideas were not developed exclusively in relation to ethnography, he grounded them in his own community study. But he extended the general idea to encompass virtually any aspect of sociological or phenomenological analysis. We extend the idea to incorporate what we call the “imps” of ethnographic fieldwork. For neither surrender nor catch are themselves predictable or perfectly under the ethnographer’s control. Although fieldwork is itself unpredictable, there may be many unanticipated “catches.” Moreover, there is often an ethnographic “imp” that intrudes itself, questioning the very desirability or good sense of the fieldwork itself. The imps arise unbidden but can pose searching, sometimes unwelcome though ultimately productive questions. We illustrate the article from a brief fieldwork encounter with the world of studio photography.

A life course approach to the field and fieldwork

Life course scholars have theorised the relationship between individual life trajectories and geographic phenomena such as migration, partnering, reproduction and locational choice. They have engaged less frequently with the politics of fieldwork or the interrelationship of the life course and the field. Feminist geographers, in contrast, have made significant interventions into the social dynamics of fieldwork (e.g. relationships between researchers and participants), but less so on the life trajectories that precede and follow the fieldwork encounter. This special section thus contributes to both life course geographies and ongoing feminist interventions into the fieldwork process. In understanding fieldwork experiences through a life course approach, the contributors to this special section simultaneously deepen and systematise much of feminist geographic research on fieldwork. Their work highlights how life events and turning points, including those before, during and beyond fieldwork, can profoundly change – or be changed by – research experiences and outcomes. They also reveal how the trajectories of researchers, participants and the field itself become interconnected within specific historical times and contexts.

Diabetes and an inescapable (auto)ethnography

This paper reports on personal reflections from a recent research project on the geographies of living with diabetes. Drawing from research participants’ written and oral accounts alongside the researcher's own everyday experiences, this project aimed to provide a detailed account of life with diabetes. However, issues of the researcher's own diagnosis with diabetes confounded the project so that completing the research soon became a potentially overwhelming task. The paper questions to what extent an autoethnographical approach can be mediated in a project in which the researcher's own involvement is complex. Three different types of fieldwork encounter are discussed in the paper: an anxiety‐inducing encounter; supportive encounters; and disciplinary encounters. Each of these encounters involved a different form of personal engagement and degree of vulnerability on the part of the researcher in order to complete the research. Autoethnography was inescapable in this research project, hence the bracketing of the ‘auto’ to indicate the researcher's desire for less personal involvement but still acknowledging that this aim can be difficult to achieve. This paper offers a personal account of how autoethnography can be managed in the interests of the researcher's preferred approach, and for the completion of the research.

The Fieldwork Encounter and the Colonized Voice of Indigeneity

This essay follows the indexical (context-indicating) clues of linguistic form in spoken Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram Chinookan) and reconstructs the emerging poetic or metrical structures of a long-ago Kiksht-mediated encounter during anthropological linguistic fieldwork, memorialized in a published text. In this way we can hear something of the voice of a Native American speaker coming to grips with the impact of social and cultural change in the American settler state of the turn of the twentieth century.

Trouble in Para-sites: Deference and Influence in the Ethnography of Epistemic Elites

Through his enduring efforts to interrogate the regulative ideals of fieldwork, George Marcus has empowered doctoral students in anthropology to rethink their ethnographic encounters in terms that reflect novel objects and contexts of inquiry. Marcus' work has culminated in a charter for ethnographic research among ‘epistemic communities' that requires ‘deferral' to these elite modes of knowing. For adherents to this programme of methodological reform, the deliberately staged ‘para-site' - an opportunity for ethnographers and their ‘epistemic partners' to reflect upon a shared intellectual purpose - is the signature fieldwork encounter. This paper draws on doctoral research carried out among the overlapping epistemic communities that comprise London's market for mining finance, and reviews an attempt to carve out a para-site of my own. Troubled by this experience, and by the ascendant style of deferent anthropology, I think through possibilities for more critical ethnographic research among epistemic elites.

The anthropology of guilt and rapport

In this article I use Clifford Geertz’s backhanded defense of Malinowski’s seeming emotional hypocrisy—his dislike of the natives whose point of view he wished to understand—to argue that while empathy or at least sympathy are integral components of the intimacies of fieldwork, they are also the catalyst for the darker and usually far less openly discussed emotions that are associated with these feelings—guilt, anger, and disgust—that are also at play in the fieldwork encounter. Indeed these sentiments, inevitably intersubjective in origin and expression, are intrinsic to the kind of knowledge we produce as ethnographers. I explore how these emotions emerge from or shape conversation in the field and then inflect subsequent analyses. I review encounters I have had with Lauje of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau, and museum professionals at Monticello where my interlocutors attempted to guide my research by enlisting my sympathy for their condition, and how such attempts to create fields of moral mutuality inflect in often unpredictable ways my understandings of social life in those places. My focus will be on how the fraught emotion of guilt emerges from and shapes the experience of moral mutuality in ethnographic encounters.

Doing Fieldwork and Writing Anthropology

Doing Fieldwork and Writing Anthropology

Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. JohnBorneman and AbdellahHammoudi, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009. i+280 pp.

EthosVolume 40, Issue 1 p. 1-3 Book Review Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009. i+ 280 pp. Edward D. Lowe, Edward D. Lowe Associate Professor of AnthropologySearch for more papers by this author Edward D. Lowe, Edward D. Lowe Associate Professor of AnthropologySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 February 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01240.xAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume40, Issue1Special Issue: Horizons of Experience: Reinvigorating Dialogue between Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic AnthropologiesMarch 2012Pages 1-3 RelatedInformation

Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth - Edited by John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi

Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth - Edited by John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi

Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention

This essay suggests affinities between contemporary changes in classic research practices of anthropological ethnography and forms of research built into projects of conceptual, performance and installation art. The scene of fieldwork encounter is transformed by the challenges of new objects and conditions of research in anthropology. These challenges are thought through the description of an exemplary conceptual art project produced at the Tate Modern Museum, while allowing for the differences between the aims and ethics of anthropology and those of art.

Being there: the fieldwork encounter and the making of truth - Edited by John Borneman & Abdellah Hammoudi

Being there: the fieldwork encounter and the making of truth - Edited by John Borneman & Abdellah Hammoudi

Between love and culture: Misunderstanding, textuality and the dialectics of ethnographic knowledge

This paper will explore the intertextual dialectics of understanding and misunderstanding in the negotiation of relations between consultants and the ethnographic fieldworker. The material for this essay draws on conversations with consultants from the Fort Apache Reservation. I will argue that the textual constructions of otherness through which consultants apprehend the social presence of the fieldworker are transformed in the fieldwork encounter. These transformations allow consultants to author relations with the ethnographer. I will also explore attempts by field consultants to understand the objective and limits of the ethnographic project by framing it in terms of locally constituted idioms of relationship. I will conclude by suggesting that the entextualizing practices of ethnography threaten to obscure the authority asserted by consultants in fieldwork conversations.

Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter

Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter

A Brazzaville Friendship

This article tells a story of a friendship between an American ethnographer and a young man of Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, at a time of economic crisis and factional warfare. Over time, our mutual misreadings of our relationship led to conflict, undermining the shifting narratives through which we understood and represented our actions. Feelings and gestures of good will, generosity and loyalty were made ambiguous in light of accompanying tactics of domination and expropriation. Perceived betrayals revealed and mobilized institutions - church, state, militia - which each of us believed could protect his interests. Our friendship became something more difficult, and thereby illuminated configurations of power both in this fieldwork encounter and in larger Congolese society.

Field School in Chiapas

At times, the expression of a fieldwork encounter can be encapsulated and told effectively in verse, especially when it has been an emotional experience. This poem is an outgrowth of a service learning field program in Chiapas, Mexico, and part of a longer collection concerning the ethics of doing anthropological research in a conflict zone. In this offering, the participants begin to contemplate the fact that their presence in the area might easily be misinterpreted and could be a liability for those they have come to “serve.”

The Challenges of Conducting an Ethnographic Case Study of a United Kingdom Teacher Education Institution

Qualitative researchers engaging in systematic fieldwork encounter dilemmas that may illuminate cultural assumptions and enhance understanding of the contexts of studies. This article is based on a study of the extent to which the concept of competence in the everyday life of a teacher education institution in the United Kingdom (UK) showed sensitivity to the need to prepare future teachers as critical, autonomous professionals. I conducted ethnographic research in this institution and wrote a case study about the experience. The study was particularly imbued with a transformative approach to competence, the need to prepare teachers as agents of change of educational inequality in which certain groups whose cultural patterns differ from those in the school systems are systematically kept off the main tracks of the educational system. Transformative educational practices in teacher education involve teaching technical skills and competencies and encourage future teachers to reflect critically on the impact of their actions and perceptions on the achievement of pupils from different cultural backgrounds. I (Canen, 1984) undertook a similar study in Brazil in which I pinpointed practices contradictory to transformative approaches in teacher education in two teacher education institutions I used as case studies. The multicultural nature of the UK and Brazil (Canen, 1995) was a framework for reflection on preparing teachers to deal with cultural diversity. In this article, I focus on the ethical dilemma I encountered during an ethnographic study in the UK. I first deal with issues related to ethnographic studies and then describe the negotiations in the fieldwork and the constraints imposed on it. The relevance of these matters in qualitative research in teacher education is twofold: They show the contradictions and difficulties qualitative researchers likely encounter conducting research in a teacher education institution. In this study, they illustrate cultural assumptions informing the concept of competence itself, which might be detrimental to the enhancement of critical thought in a teacher education institution. Ethnographic Case Studies: Some Considerations in the Literature Denzin and Lincoln (1994) define case study as the study of things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (p. 2). ... coupled with the presence of a gendered, multiculturally situated researcher (p. 11) throughout the process of research, from adoption of the theoretical framework and formulation of questions to the strategies of inquiry and interpretation of data. Fieldwork procedures and theoretical ideas are two sides of the same coin (Wolcott, 1992, p. 6). Fieldwork procedures are paradigms of interpretation [put] into motion (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 14). Case study is a choice of object to be studied (Stake, 1994, pp. 236-237). Ludke and Andre (1986) point out that a case is a unity inside a wider system, an instance such as an event, a person, a group, a school, an institution, or a program to be intensely and systematically studied. Case researchers seek out both what is common and what is particular about the case, the end results being generally something unique (Stake, 1994, p. 238). An ethnographic case study uses techniques such as observation, interviews, analysis of documents, and others to discover the cultural knowledge that people hold in their minds, how it is employed in social interaction and the consequences of its employment (Spindler & Spindler, 1992, p. 70). Even though some scholars recommend the description of conflicts of values and ethical challenges in ethnographic studies, others point out its low frequency. Punch (1994) notes that it would be inappropriate for the `scientist' to abandon objectivity and detachment in recounting descriptions of personal involvement and political battles in the field setting (p. …

Reflexivity in Fieldwork: Toward a Ferninist Epistemology

This discussion draws upon research conducted with women with diabetes. Issues pertaining to responding to the requests of informants for information about illness and balancing "taking action" with the researcher role are addressed. It is argued that while intervention by the researcher/clinician may be seen as a dilemma in fieldwork and as a threat to obtaining valid and reliable data, we need to take another tack--a feminist perspective--in examining this aspect of the fieldwork encounter. The dialogue between researcher and informant should be recognized as a resource available to informants and as one means of empowering the disadvantaged and oppressed.