Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences

Thomas Stodulka
Samia Dinkelaker
Ferdiansyah Thajib Editors

Affective
Dimensions of
Fieldwork and
Ethnography
Theory and History in the Human and Social
Sciences

Series Editor
Jaan Valsiner
Department of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences will fill in the gap in the
existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and
human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for the
interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology,
sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human
sciences of the 21st there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences
and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of the complex social,
psychological, and political processes. This new series has the purpose of (1)
coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences,
(2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical syntheses, (3) bring
into attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have
been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reasons, and (4) provide an arena for
international communication between social and human scientists across the World.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15826

Thomas Stodulka • Samia Dinkelaker
Ferdiansyah Thajib
Editors

Affective Dimensions
of Fieldwork
and Ethnography
Editors
Thomas Stodulka Samia Dinkelaker
Institute of Social and Cultural Institute of Migration Research and
Anthropology Intercultural Studies
Freie Universität Berlin Osnabrück University
Berlin, Germany Osnabrück, Germany

Ferdiansyah Thajib
Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology
Freie Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2523-8663     ISSN 2523-8671 (electronic)

Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences
ISBN 978-3-030-20830-1    ISBN 978-3-030-20831-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8

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Series Foreword

The Real Humanity of Research

From Suffering to Knowledge

This volume is a breakthrough—overcoming the consensual social norm that denies

the affective origins of scientists’ passion for knowledge. Contributions to this
book—coming from the framework of anthropology—prove to all social sciences
that the basis for all new knowledge is the affective goals-oriented subjective striv-
ing by researchers who are dedicated to their fields and are ready to endure various
kinds of hardships in their ways. Whether this entails anthropologists’ frustrations
during their fieldwork or a “number crunching” sociologist who tries to understand
how society works from meta-analyses of “big data,” the human affective relating
with the desire to find out something new is shared across all sciences.
Maintaining the image of rationality of science is possible only through its oppo-
site—that of the deep irrationality of the researchers who take risks of being burned
on a stake or discredited for offering seemingly unrealistic ideas that, decades later,
become recognized as major breakthroughs. Such passion for objectivity in science
is admirable in its persistence. We find ways to experience the curious pleasure of
the pain of our grant applications being turned down, submitted papers only to be
rejected by journal reviewers, and our university administrators forcing upon us
mundane tasks that have no connection with knowledge creation. We feel frus-
trated—yet ready to go on, as our intellectual goals are personally, deeply crucial
for us. Science is a subjective and affective solution for personal life dedication. It
is a kind of liminal plane of existence from which there is no return; we can only
forge ahead towards knowledge. If we are lucky and persistent in suffering through
the hardships of such pilgrimages, these hardships may reach their destination. But
they also can be aborted halfway, as we see promising researchers turning into
administrators or perpetuators of existing knowledge.

v
vi Series Foreword

The process of creating new knowledge is inherently ambiguous—requiring

researchers to accept their role of constantly moving ahead amidst all the uncertain-
ties of their exploration. Scientific discovery:
…reveals new knowledge, but the new vision that accompanies it is not knowledge. It is less
than knowledge, for it is a guess; but it is more than knowledge, for it is a foreknowledge of
things yet unknown and at present perhaps inconceivable. Our vision of the general nature
of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience. Such guidance is indis-
pensable. Theories of the scientific method which try to explain the establishment of scien-
tific truth by any purely objective formal procedure are doomed to failure. Any process of
enquiry unguided by intellectual passions would inevitably spread out into a desert of trivi-
alities. (Polanyi 1962, p. 135)

Tolerating this permanent state of liminality is the life-course adaptation task for
researchers. It is far from being an easy task.
The present volume provides many examples from the field of anthropology,
demonstrating that affect is the center of all of our knowledge creation efforts. Years
ago, George Devereux (1967) pointed to various ways in which researchers adjust
to uncertainties. The new material in this book adds to our basic understanding of
the real world difficulties in the field and of the ways in which ordinary human
beings—with the assumed, created identity of anthropologists—cope with all the
various misperceptions of their roles as outsider-researcher and suspicions about
their magical or administrative impacts onto the lives of the communities they
study. Development of trust in the other is essential for productive fieldwork—yet
it is a fragile interpersonal state that can vanish in an instant.
The trust—or its absence—can be mutual. In order to be let into the affairs of the
ones a social scientist wants to study—anthropologist, sociologist, or psycholo-
gist—a counter-investigation of the researcher takes place1. Who is she (or he) com-
ing here to penetrate into our ordinary, extraordinary, mythological lives? What is
the potential danger of letting the researcher in? There exist regular social norms for
accepting a guest—but not for accepting a visitor who wants to peep into our local
affairs as a kind of spy. Guests are traditionally honored; spies are despised. And
nothing can save the fieldworker from being stigmatized when deviating from the
role of guest. The anthropologist’s home institutions do nothing to protect the rights
of the researchers. They only seem to worry about the people who are being stud-
ied, while the people who do the studying are left to their own resources.
The “seem to” here is accurate. The institutional “protection of human subjects”
as it proliferates across the world is inherently ambiguous. Even as research institu-
tions have developed elaborate rituals for “protection of the research partici-
pants” and are telling us about these, why should we—the objects of their
research—trust them? They say our participation is for science, but what does this
mean? Our ordinary lives are filled with practical needs within which such claims
make no sense. Are there any benefits for us? Here these institutional gatekeepers
would be the strange visitors: do they understand what creates importance for us?

1
See Günther (1998) for a vivid description of such counter-investigation in a US university
context.
Series Foreword vii

The answer here is of course “no.” They cannot; there are very few connections
between their worlds in ivory towers (nowadays perhaps better called data manufac-
turers) and ours in the jungles of everyday life. And we keep living in ours, not
theirs. They may come for short visits, but we remain. What they call “participa-
tion” with “informed consent” while asking us to sign the appropriate forms is a
confusing act. We have agreed to be studied by our word of honor, so why a piece
of paper with our signatures? We may sign these—for us that is an act of generosity
towards the guests and a part of our normative hospitality towards people who visit
us from afar. So the first—and maybe only—benefit we get from participation is
proof of our own hospitality.
What the reflections by the anthropologists tell us about the affective saturation of
the field experience in the social sciences goes far beyond the practical questions about
how to survive the fieldwork and what kind of evidence it might bring. Phenomena
similar to the fieldwork experiences are there in psychologists’ consultation offices,
and in the realities of sociologists trying to solicit a “random sample” from a nonran-
dom social community. It is a version of the general process of human communication
that has been posited by Karl Bühler (1934) under the notion of the organon model. It
antedates the Shannon-Weaver model of technical communication—widely but inad-
equately applied to interhuman communication—by around a decade. A version of the
model for the special case of the research act is given in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 General model of communication in the research process

viii Series Foreword

The original Bühler model involved the object (about what communication was
going on), the sender (who encodes message A—denoted in the figure by a circle—
about the object), and the receiver (who interprets the sender’s message in one’s
own terms—denoted by the triangle). The critical, crucial implication of Bühler’s
model is that interhuman communication is always approximate—we may refer to
the same object but its meanings for the sender and the receiver ordinarily do not fit
one another’s. This has two consequences: the constant need to specify what the
other meant and freedom for possible innovation of the meanings of the object. Our
capacities to leave the immediate objective reality of the object to encode it in
humorous, sarcastic, or moral terms is an indicator of this freedom.
When viewed as an example of research encounters—in the field or in a labora-
tory—Bühler’s scheme includes two further features. First, the goal orientations for
encoding a message by the sender are present. The researcher wants something from
the receiver (the “expression” entails suggestions of how to receive the message), and
the latter—in addition to receiving the message—is involved in the detection of the
meta-communicative agenda involved. (“What does she/he want?”) It is dependent
upon the interpretation of the intention that the receiver responds—with very different
possible tactics ranging from joining in the communicative act to pretending to join in
(“empty talk”), redirecting the conversation, or outright challenging the intentions.
If the communication process continues over time, then the second feature, trust,
may emerge. Trust is a meta-communicative field-like sign (see Valsiner 2014 on
the point-like and field-like signs) that is generalized by the person (in sender and
receiver roles) to mark the messages communicated and their intentions. Statements
like “I do not really understand what the author of this Preface wants to say but I
trust him” is an example of such meta-communicative marking. As can be seen from
Fig. 1, the trust is a catalytic condition that makes substantive communication pos-
sible. It does not cause any of the phenomena discovered in the research process, but
its presence makes it possible to bypass or inhibit the barriers that protect the insid-
ers’ knowledge from outsiders “peeping in.”
The dialogue about affectivity in the research process that is initiated by the pres-
ent volume is a result of an intellectual revival in the social sciences. The new col-
lective interdisciplinary effort—Berlin School of Affective Scholarship—is a good
example not of the return of the center of intellectual gravity of the social sciences
to Berlin but a manifestation of transnational, collaborative efforts floating within
and between globalized academic landscapes. The young, globalized, and cosmo-
politan Berliners of today—a multicultural and transnational group of social scien-
tists—are working in our twenty-first century towards a real synthesis of ideas in the
social sciences. The readers of this volume have the privilege of entering into an
intellectual dialogue with this new wave of scholarship that is likely to lead to
new—affectively completed—understanding of the world.

Jaan Valsiner
Department of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
November 2018
Series Foreword ix

References

Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie. Stuttgart: Klaus Cotta.

Devereux, G. (1967). From anxiety to method in the behavioural sciences. The Hague: Mouton.
Günther, I. (1998). Contacting subjects. Culture and Psychology, 4(1), 65–74.
Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Valsiner, J. (2014). Invitation to cultural psychology. London: Sage.
Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contributions and encourage-
ments of Anna-Lena Wolf, Annika König, Benjamin Hegarty, Bernd Müller,
Bernhard Dinkelaker, Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, Carolin Maevis, Caroline Meier zu
Biesen, Clarissa Beckert, Cordelia Mühlenbeck, David MacDougall, David
Parduhn, Edward Lowe, Eric Heuser, Eva Youkhana, Evi Kostner, Fermin Suter,
Florian Walter, Florin Cristea, Frank André Weigelt, Frank Heidemann, Georg
Winterberger, Ingo Rohrer, Irina Savu-Cristea, Jaan Valsiner, Jack Barbalet, James
Davies, Jochen Bonz, Jörg Lehmann, Johanna Fuchs, Judith Schlehe, Julia Keil,
Justus Weiss, Karin Pfister, Katharina Müller, Katja Liebal, Kelsie Prabawa-Sear,
Laura Raveling, Lea Ulrich, Lena Bünger, Lisa Lindzus, Manon Diederich, Marie
Campigotto, Marie-Aline Römer, Mariella Wyhnalek, Marion Linska, Martin
Rössler, Martin Sökefeld, Matthias Hagen, Michael Toggweiler, Michaela Haug,
Mira Shah, Miriam Badoux, Nasima Selim, Oliver Lubrich, Paul Stoller, Regine
Herbrik, Ronja Eberle, Rosa Castillo, Rosalie Stolz, Sabine Klocke-Daffa, Shahina
Praveen, Sigrid Schiesser, Sina Emde, Sophia Thubauville, Stefanie Kicherer, Sterre
Gilsing, Susann Huschke, Tabea Häberlein, Tamara Turner, Victoria Kumala Sakti,
and many others who have endorsed our collaboration over the years. We want to
particularly thank Forrest Holmes for his patience and his constructive and empa-
thetic language editing of the book.
The editors also want to thank the former Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of
Emotion’, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and the Department of
Education and Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin, the Institute of German
Literature Studies at University of Bern, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced
Studies, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, the EURIAS Junior
Fellowship Program, and the Volkswagen Foundation for their support and generos-
ity. Ultimately, we are most grateful to the authors for their admirable commitment
and their critical and courageous ways of sharing personal and intimate moments
and experiences during their fieldwork.

xi
Contents

Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship����������������������������������������������    1

James Davies and Thomas Stodulka
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography����������    7
Ferdiansyah Thajib, Samia Dinkelaker, and Thomas Stodulka

Part I Role Conflicts and Aftermaths

Role Conflicts and Aftermaths: Introduction������������������������������������������������   23
Giorgio Brocco and Britta Rutert
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography
of Vulnerable Children: The Case of Bangkok Slum Children�������������������   29
Giuseppe Bolotta
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding:
A Collaborative Research Project in a Women’s Shelter ����������������������������   49
Marina Della Rocca
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi ��������������������������������������������   63
Gerda Kuiper

Part II Reciprocity in Research Relationships

Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Introduction����������������������������������   79
Mechthild von Vacano
Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality
in Surrogacy Research������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   87
Veronika Siegl
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research
Relationships When “Studying Up”��������������������������������������������������������������   97
Emilia Perujo

xiii
xiv Contents

Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances���������� 109

Mirjam Lücking
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic
Participation ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 123
Mechthild von Vacano

Part III Intimacy and Care in the Field

Intimacy and Care in the Field: Introduction ���������������������������������������������� 137
Leberecht Funk and Ferdiansyah Thajib
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool
for Insight��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 143
Anna-Maria Walter
Sexuality and Emotions Situated in Time and Space ���������������������������������� 157
Thomas Wimark
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family �������������������������������������������� 167
Janina Dannenberg

Part IV Dealing with Illness and Dying

Dealing With Illness and Dying: Introduction���������������������������������������������� 183
Marcos Andrade Neves and Tereza Baltag
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness
and Death in the Field and Beyond���������������������������������������������������������������� 189
Julia Rehsmann
Standing at the Doorstep: Affective Encounters in Research
on Death and Dying ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 201
Natashe Lemos Dekker
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences
of a Therapist and Anthropologist when Researching Substitutional
Drugs and Their Users������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 213
Tereza Baltag

Part V Failing and Attuning in the Field

Failing and Attuning in the Field: Introduction�������������������������������������������� 227
Dominik Mattes and Samia Dinkelaker
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical
Reflections on Participation and Apprenticeship in Indonesian
Pencak Silat Schools ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 233
Patrick Keilbart
Contents xv

The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection

on Field Encounters at Home�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 251
Paul J. Kellner
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions
of a Failed Collaborative Research Project in Timor-Leste ������������������������ 263
Sara ten Brinke

Part VI Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching and Fieldwork

Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching
and Fieldwork: Introduction�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 281
Kelvin E. Y. Low and Noorman Abdullah
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences,
and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits ������������������������������������������������������ 287
Noorman Abdullah
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by)
Emotional Reflexivity in an Undergraduate Fieldwork Training �������������� 305
Annika Strauss
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared,
Repressed, or Subconscious���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 325
Judith Okely
Afterword: A Return to the Story������������������������������������������������������������������ 347
Paul Stoller

Appendix ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 353

Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 355
About the Editors

Thomas Stodulka is Junior Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural

Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on the interplay between
affect, emotion, mental health, stigmatization, childhood, and critical epistemolo-
gies. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related young men in Yogyakarta,
Indonesia, between 2001 and 2015, and he has directed international research proj-
ects on the role of affect and emotion in fieldwork and ethnography, envy in trans-
cultural perspectives, and critical perspectives on interdisciplinary emotion research
and big data. He is the co-founder and co-convenor of the European Network for
Psychological Anthropology (ENPA) at the European Association of Social
Anthropologists.

Samia Dinkelaker was Volkswagen Stiftung Research Fellow in the project “The
Researchers’ Affects” at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie
Universität Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Migration Research
and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University and studies Indonesian brokerage
of migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong. Currently she is working as a researcher
in the project “Welcome Culture and Democracy in Germany—Supporting refugee
women∗” at the Osnabrück University. Her research interests include global migra-
tion studies, migration, care and violence, feminist and postcolonial perspectives on
subject formation, as well as political affects.

Ferdiansyah Thajib is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Social and Cultural
Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. He is also an Associate Scholar at “The
Researchers’ Affects” working group. Since 2007, Thajib is a member of KUNCI
Cultural Studies Center, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. KUNCI is a research collective
which focuses on critical knowledge production and sharing through cross-­
disciplinary encounter, action research, and vernacular education with and across
community spaces. His life work is situated in the intersections of theory and praxis,
with specific research interests on queer modes of endurance and forms of affective
entanglement in everyday life.

xvii
About the Authors

Noorman Abdullah is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

His core research interests are religion and society, particularly in relation to spirit
possession and everyday religiosity, deviance and social control, and sensory stud-
ies, with a strong empirical component grounded on ethnography, everyday life, and
qualitative fieldwork.

Tereza Baltag is a Czech psychologist and anthropologist. She provided counsel-

ing services and therapy for buprenorphine users. This pharmaceutical opioid
became also her research interest. She focuses particularly on relations between
substitutional drug users and medical staff and on overlapping of medical treatment
and illicit drug use.

Giuseppe Bolotta’s doctoral research was a multi-situated ethnography of reli-

gious, humanitarian, and state institutional policies for poor children living in the
slums of Bangkok (Thailand). Between 2015 and 2017, he was a Postdoctoral
researcher in the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, where
he contributed to the Henry Luce Foundation funded project on “Religious NGOs
in Asia.” His current research project at the University College Dublin, Ireland,
contributes to the Safe Learning Study in Sierra Leone and extends his research
interests and focuses on the interrelationship between development, humanitarian-
ism, and marginalized childhoods from Southeast Asia to West Africa.

Giorgio Brocco is a PhD candidate working on people with albinism in Tanzania.

His doctoral research examines the life situations, everyday experiences, and sub-
jectivities of individuals with albinism in Tanzania. Since the beginning of his doc-
toral studies, Giorgio Brocco has taken part in international conferences
and workshops, and he has published peer-reviewed articles, blog posts, and maga-
zine articles on issues related to individuals with albinism in Tanzania and political/
social issues occurring in East-African countries.

xix
xx About the Authors

Janina Dannenberg researches on societal relations to nature with a special focus

on gender, (re)productivity, and collective landownership in the Philippines.

James Davies is a Reader in Social Anthropology and Mental Health at the

University of Roehampton and a qualified psychotherapist. His books include The
Making of Psychotherapists: An Anthropological Analysis (2009) and the bestseller
Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good (2013). He edited
Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience
(2010) and The Sedated Society: the Causes and Harms of Our Psychiatric Drug
Epidemic (2017). He co-founded the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, which
is now secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug
Dependence.

Natashe Lemos Dekker Through ethnographic fieldwork in nursing homes in the

Netherlands, Natashe Lemos Dekker’s PhD in Medical Anthropology at the
University of Amsterdam research addresses the social processes and the moral val-
ues in death and dying with dementia. She assesses the politics of death and dying
by questioning normative conditions for the production of lives worth living. As a
Research Fellow at the Leiden University Medical Centre, she studies the imple-
mentation of palliative care in nursing homes through a critical evaluation of pallia-
tive care tools for observing and marking the end of life.

Marina Della Rocca is currently a research assistant at the Free University of

Bozen-Bolzano. She does her PhD in General Pedagogy, Social Pedagogy, and
General Education at the same university. She holds a Master’s degree in
Anthropology at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, Italy. She is also an activist
and former social operator at an antiviolence center that supports women who have
suffered domestic violence. Her research focuses on the intersection between
gender-­based violence and migration and on the advocacy of migrant women survi-
vors of domestic violence.

Leberecht Funk is an anthropologist who works in the field of Psychological

Anthropology. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Taiwan. His special inter-
ests are emotions, affects, socialization, childhood, parental belief systems, person-
hood, and animism.

Patrick Keilbart conducted his PhD research on the Indonesian martial arts
Pencak Silat, inherent social education, and mediatization processes, under supervi-
sion of Prof. Dr. Sandra Kurfürst, University of Cologne. Patrick is currently a
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the research project “IndORGANIC The societal
transformation of agriculture into bio-economy. Turning Indonesia organic?”
funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The aim of his postdoc-
toral research is to analyze potential links between existing value and belief systems
in Indonesia and the principles and practices of organic agriculture. Patrick thereby
extends his research interests to embodiment, meaning-making and value systems
About the Authors xxi

in human-environment relations, and to the roles of information and communication

technologies in the mediation of those relations and processes.

Paul J. Kellner is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. His

PhD in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, explores aspira-
tions, belonging, and citizenship among street-associated youth. His postdoctoral
agenda focuses on refugee and migrant belonging, a topic that blends his PhD in
Philosophy thesis with his prior work on forced migration, public health, and child
protection.

Gerda Kuiper The initial fieldwork described in Gerda Kuiper’s chapter was car-
ried out while Gerda Kuiper was an MA student in the Department of Cultural
Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The writing itself was carried out while she was affiliated as a PhD student at the
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany. She
finished and defended her dissertation on the topic of labor relations in the Kenyan
cut flower industry in early 2018.

Kelvin E. Y. Low is Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore.

His research interests include sensory studies, migration and transnationalism,
social memory, and food and foodways. He is presently working on a book manu-
script about the Gurkhas and their migratory experiences in Singapore, the United
Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Nepal.

Mirjam Lücking is an anthropologist working on transnational mobility between

Indonesia and the Middle East. In order to understand the socio-cultural impact of
globalized movement, she looks at examples of religious lifestyles in the context of
migration, tourism, and pilgrimage.

Dominik Mattes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Collaborative Research Center

“Affective Societies” in the project “Embodied Emotions and Religious Belonging
in Migratory Settings: Sufi Centres and (New) Pentecostal Churches in Berlin.” He
has published “Im/mobility and dis/connectivity in medical globalization” (with
Hansjörg Dilger, eds., Global Public Health 13(3), 2018), “‘I am also a human
being!’ Antiretroviral treatment in local moral worlds” (Medical Anthropology in
Europe, Routledge 2015), and various articles in books and journals illustrating his
research interest in medical anthropology and global health politics.

Marcos Andrade Neves’ research is located in Medical Anthropology. His current

research is about transnational mobility in the context of organized assisted suicide,
mainly among Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Judith Okely’s research interests include gypsies/travelers. Professor Okely has

published widely on these issues. Her research interests also include anthropologi-
cal fieldwork methods. Her Anthropological Practice (2012) draws on extended
xxii About the Authors

dialogues with 20 anthropologists (of 16 nationalities), having done individual

fieldwork around the globe. Recent publications also focus on gender issues.
Professor Okely has lectured and taught in more than 20 countries. She has also
given distinguished lectures at the London School of Economics and Helsinki, and
she is Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret
Hall, Oxford University. In 2011, Judith was awarded a medal by the Faculty of
Philosophy, University of West Bohemia, as a “World Scholar” and also received
the Seal of the City of Pilsen, in the Czech Republic.

Emilia Perujo focuses her research on contemporary kinship. She studies adverse
kinship situations such as infertility and separations, from an anthropological per-
spective, and is interested in the fluid substance of relationships.

Julia Rehsmann working on liver transplantation, is exploring “waiting” as a

dynamic and contingent phenomenon in a high-tech medical field. Her interests lie
in the political, moral, technological, spatial, and intimate configurations of “wait-
ing for a liver.”

Britta Rutert currently works as a research associate at the Charité-­

Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where she coordinates and facilitates the project
“Implementing Integrative Care at an Pediatric Oncology Unit.” She is also affili-
ated to the Working Group Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, where she finalized her PhD on
“Bioproespecting in South Africa” in 2016. Britta Rutert has extensive fieldwork
experiences in South Africa and Germany. Before she started her PhD, she had
worked in the development cooperation sector.

Veronika Siegl is a Postdoctoral Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology,

University of Bern, Switzerland. In her dissertation “Fragile Truths. The Ethical
Labour of Doing Trans-/national Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine” (2018) she
explored the role of morality and ethics in making sense of, judging, legitimizing,
and governing the intimate relations produced in the commercial surrogacy. Her
research was part of the research project “Intimate Uncertainties. Precarious Life
and Moral Economy Across European Borders,” headed by Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser
and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University. He has been

conducting anthropological research for more than 30 years. His early work con-
cerned the religion of the Songhay people who live in the Republics of Niger and
Mali in West Africa. Since 1992, Stoller has pursued studies of West African immi-
grants in New York City. Those studies have concerned such topics as the cultural
dynamics of informal market economies and the politics of immigration. This
extensive record of research has led Stoller read and think deeply about the anthro-
pology of religion, visual anthropology, the anthropology of senses, and economic
anthropology. Stoller’s work has resulted in the publication of 15 books, including
About the Authors xxiii

ethnographies, biographies, memoirs, as well as three novels. He has won many

awards, including the Anthropology in Media Award from the American
Anthropological Association in 2015. His most recent book is Adventures in
Blogging: Public Anthropology and Popular Media.

Annika Strauss areas of interest include the social anthropology of psychiatry,

social anthropology of organizations, gender and sexuality studies and methodolog-
ical reflexivity, and self-reflection in the context of social anthropological fieldwork
and teaching.

Sara ten Brinke in her PhD research, focusses on political participation of young
adults in Timor-Leste. Her research revolves around citizenship, inter-generational
contestation of power, democratization, and the hybridization of customary law in
postcolonial state-building.

Mechthild von Vacano’s research interest is driven by the overarching question of

economic subjectivity. Currently she is completing her PhD thesis on the subjective
experience of work, for which she conducted a total of 17 months of fieldwork in a
South Jakarta neighborhood.

Anna-Maria Walter recently completed her PhD thesis on social conceptions of

conjugal emotions and the negotiations of gender relations in the area of Gilgit,
northern Pakistan. Her focus lies on the use of cell phones as facilitators of female-­
male interaction, local as well as Islamic ideas of modesty and honor, and the theo-
retical framework of embodiment. She has taught courses on South Asia, “Muslim
women,” and the anthropology of emotions.

Thomas Wimark is a researcher in the Department of Human Geography,

Stockholm University. His research interests include but are not restricted to resi-
dential mobility, migration, and marginalization of minority populations, especially
queer people.
Foreword: Pathways of Affective
Scholarship

James Davies and Thomas Stodulka

This book is the result of considerable struggle, within the social sciences and
beyond, to both acknowledge and determine the enabling role of affect and emotion
in social science research. Drawing together a group of relatively young scholars in
the realm of affective research, this volume offers powerful examples of how the
affective dimensions of fieldwork have empirical and methodological worth.
For the past 6 years, scholars at the Freie Universität Berlin and beyond have
undertaken a systematic and empirical-rooted analysis of fieldwork experiences,
experimented with alternative fieldwork methodologies, and, in the process, have
generated critically important qualitative and quantitative data that further illumi-
nates how our subjective reactions to the conditions of the field can be epistemologi-
cally informative. The approach adopted in this volume is a relatively young one in
the history of fieldwork methodology, which, at its most basic level, can be broadly
divided into two sub-streams of enquiry—traditional empiricism and radical empir-
icism. As each of these traditions has approached the researcher’s subjectivity in the
field in distinct ways, it is important that we identify where this current volume sits
within these streams of enquiry by way of first providing a brief synopsis of each.

J. Davies
Department of Life Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Stodulka (*)
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_1
2 J. Davies and T. Stodulka

Traditional and Radical Empiricism

Traditional empiricism is generally regarded as a methodological approach more

concerned with studying “things themselves” than the relations between things. As
an approach, traditional empiricism—in both quantitative and qualitative research—
thus considers subjectivity as something to be controlled and restrained, rather than
as phenomena to be considered empirically informative (Davies 2010b). Traditional
empiricism has, therefore, drawn firm lines between the researching subject and the
researched object, carefully defining across the social sciences what attributes of the
researcher can usefully contribute to the activity of knowledge construction—
namely, rationality and the capacity for detachment. This approach therefore implies
that attributes such as encroaching feelings or affects have to be methodologically
removed or subdued, as they invariably introduce irregularities that cloud and bias
research (ibid.). For traditional empiricism, then, the researcher’s emotions or
affects are seen as impediments to understanding, more disabling than enabling of
the work researchers do. Traditional empiricism, if discussing emotions at all, only
does so from the empirical standpoint of offering advice upon how emotions could
be “managed” and “tamed” in ways freeing fieldworkers to undertake more
unclouded research. While this approach has dominated official fieldwork manuals
written not only for ethnologists but also for psychologists, cultural theorists, soci-
ologists, and educationalists, many anthropologists have, however, remained pri-
vately—if not always publicly—committed to taking seriously the value of
fieldwork’s intersubjective and experiential dimensions. Indeed, as we have written
elsewhere:
Many of these anthropologists [who take the intersubjective nature of fieldwork seriously]
share affinity with feminist theorists who have fought to retrieve emotion and subjectivity
from marginal spaces. The abandonment of emotion into zones of pathology, radical and
racial otherness, into the feminine, the outlawed, the exotic, the mad or the bad, is part of a
wider traditional empirical movement where the emotional, as Catherine Lutz has criti-
cised, is “considered as an unfortunate block to rational thought” (Lutz 2001: 104). If emo-
tion is linked with irrationality, and the irrational with a kind of distorted vision, then
emotion is simply grit in the eye of rational inspection. The syllogism misleads (as all syl-
logistic fallacies do) when empirical work produces data that contradict the syllogism’s first
premises. And such data now increases, if only on the margins. (Davies 2010b, p. 12)

The “data” referred to in the above quotation is what radical empiricism

embraces. This is illustrated by first noting that radical empiricism has its roots in
the work of the philosopher and psychologist William James, influenced by a suite
of earlier theorists and philosophers working in phenomenological and interpretivist
traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intellectuals such as
Gottfried Herder, Martin Heidegger, and Wilhelm Dilthey invoked the ideas of
Einfühlung (feeling into the world), Gestimmtheit (attuning to the world), and tonal-
ité (adjusting to the pitch of the world), all urging that participation and detachment
were methodological postures that could each reach distinct species of fact and that
therefore both belonged in social research. This view was also implied in Max
Weber’s insistence that the observer and observed were constituted of the same
Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship 3

human essence—an idea grounding the concept of Verstehen: knowing through

empathic attunement (Davies 2010b). This stream of radical empirical thought has
been taken forward by more recent anthropologists such as Michael Jackson (1989,
p. 3), who “stresses the ethnographer’s interactions with those he or she lives with
and studies, while urging us to clarify the ways in which our knowledge is grounded
in our practical, personal and participatory experience in the field as much as our
detached observations [and] makes the interplay between these domains the focus
of its interest”.
While many social/cultural studies scholars have conceptualized the aforemen-
tioned “interplay” as the site where the “intersubjective” dimension of ethnographic
work resides, what has often been overlooked within paradigmatic debates on ontol-
ogy and epistemology is reflection on the role of the ethnographer’s emotional role
within intersubjectivity and its epistemological relevance. For example, hands-on
methods to aid translating the researchers’ emotions into a valid set of complemen-
tary data have rarely been pursued beyond ethno-psychoanalysis case studies (e.g.,
the use of psychoanalytical concepts such as “transference” and “countertransfer-
ence” to facilitate understanding of emotions in the field (Crapanzano 2010;
Devereux 1967) and ethno-psychoanalytical data interpretation workshops (Bonz
et al. 2017)). However, more recently, Davies (2010a), Spencer (2010), Svašek
(2010), and Burkitt (2012)—by highlighting the methodological significance of
emotions as arising between ethnographers and their interlocutors—have set the
path for an inquiry into the pragmatics of how to practice an emotional reflexivity
that does not begin at the period of writing up or post-fieldwork supervision (hence
“after the fact”) but starts at the very onset of fieldwork itself.
The aforementioned move can be classified as radical empiricism, as it implicitly
questions the traditional empirical advocacy for the researcher’s emotional detach-
ment from his or her data. It requests a research methodology that is pragmatic
insofar as it aims to translate the emotions that arise from and influence field rela-
tions into a complementary set of ethnographic data for further analysis and inter-
pretation. Further questions still remain, however, regarding how best to practice
such emotional reflexivity in the field and how to communicate it via ethnographic
analysis and writing. These problems are methodologically and institutionally chal-
lenging. With few exceptions (Robben and Sluka 2012), method handbooks and
academic emotion regimes still reproduce narratives that fieldwork is a rite de pas-
sage that novices must traverse “no matter what.” Whatever the personal and profes-
sional cost, it is a methodological requirement that anthropologists immerse
themselves and affectively relate to others’ life-worlds as empathetic and compas-
sionate fieldworkers, in order to “blend in” or “grasp” informants’ ways of feeling,
narrating, and navigating through their local worlds. And yet, fieldworkers are also
expected to metamorphose into detached analytical scientists upon return to the
academic site, where their emotions and immersions are transfigured into scientific
disturbances (Davies 2010b; Stodulka 2015). To counter this contradiction, radical
empiricism advocates an epistemological position that places the researcher’s
empathy and emotions at the heart of ethnographic knowledge production, whatever
the site (ethnographic/academic) from which that knowledge is produced.
4 J. Davies and T. Stodulka

A methodology that takes the ethnographer’s affective disposition and position-

ality into account assists in translating affecting and affective field experiences into
language that speaks to those who have not “been there” and so do not share the
ethnographer’s privileged, involved, and long-term fieldwork experience. Radical
empiricism opens up alternative ways of researching and writing about field rela-
tions. It pursues a thorough documentation of emotions related to encounters with
research partners, interlocutors, and informants. By fully acknowledging affects and
emotions’ relational dimension (i.e., the in-between)—as they arise from and influ-
ence the social relationships and encounters with informants, interlocutors, collabo-
rators, research partners, and physical or virtual field sites—radical empiricism
highlights their epistemic dimension.

This Volume

Many of the scholars of this present volume associate with what has been dubbed
the “Berlin School of Affective Scholarship”—a network that has been driving more
recent developments in combining methodological aspects of traditional empiri-
cism with the epistemological tenets of radical empiricism. This volume, as does the
network more broadly, comprises anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, psy-
chologists, and literature scholars (e.g., Dinkelaker 2019; Keil 2019; Liebal et al.
2019; Selim 2018; Shah 2018; Stodulka 2017; Stodulka et al. 2018; Thajib 2019)
who have gone beyond merely theorizing on the epistemological relevance of emo-
tions in the field, venturing into the pragmatics of translating diverse affective expe-
riences into useful anthropological data, by way of developing for fieldworkers a
suite of fieldwork techniques (Lubrich and Stodulka 2019; Lubrich et al. 2017;
Stodulka et al. 2019). This book brings to awareness many ways in which the affec-
tive reactions to the condition of the field enable rather than impede processes of
anthropological and social scientific knowledge construction. It aims to advance
methodological reflections and practices of affective scholarship and invites other
disciplines from the human, cultural, and social sciences to engage in critical and
constructive methodological dialogue. In short, it is a valuable addition to critical
epistemological debates that embrace the body, the personal, and the emotional in
empirical research, and in particular fieldwork and ethnography (Behar 1996;
Briggs 1970; Favret-Saada 2012; Haraway 1988; Koivunen and Paasonen 2001;
Okely 2012; Stoller 1997; Wilce 2004). It attempts to translate the researcher’s sub-
jectivity into empirical and theoretical insights through self-reflexive engagement
with ethnographic methods and fieldwork experiences. Moving beyond the dialec-
tics of scientific objectivism and sentimentalist subjectivity (Cerwonka 2007), tradi-
tional and radical empiricism, this book delineates the researcher’s affects and
emotions as critical processes of anthropological analysis and representation.
Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship 5

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Introduction: Affective Dimensions of
Fieldwork and Ethnography

Ferdiansyah Thajib, Samia Dinkelaker, and Thomas Stodulka

I have the feeling that most of the negative emotions come from either cultural differences
(in which I am confronted with my ethnocentrism and interpretation of justice) or from the
feeling that I am not doing fieldwork well, that I am being too lazy, that I am not getting
enough data, that people don’t have or don’t make time for me and that I have no right to
expect that from them. Positive emotions on the other hand are, I think, intimately related
to feelings of doing my fieldwork successfully (having an interesting interview/FGD, hav-
ing gotten to an important insight, etc.) but actually mostly they are related to having special
interactions with the people around me, being inspired by them, feeling affection for them
and their affection for me, and having a feeling of a real connection and friendship with the
people who my research is about. So I guess, very simply put, it is production and affection
that determine both the positive and negative emotions that I feel during fieldwork.
(Fieldwork reflections by a colleague analyzing her own emotion diary in retrospect, 2015)

This book explores the role of researchers’ emotions and affects in understanding
“the field.” Whichever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however
close they come to be to their informants, and no matter how involved or detached
they feel, fieldwork pushes anthropologists to constantly negotiate and reflect their
scientific subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities,
spaces and phenomena they study with. The quote above exemplifies fieldwork
challenges and gratifications that anthropologists have widely discussed and debated
in terms of fieldwork ethics (Caduff 2011; Caplan 2003; De Laine 2000; Dilger
et al. 2015; Fluehr-Lobban 1991; Scheper-Hughes 1995; Stoczkowski 2008), meth-
odological practices (Amit 2003; Beatty 2010; Okely 2012; Rabinow 1977; Rosaldo
1989; Sanjek 1991; Sluka and Robben 2012; Stoller and Olkes 2012), colonial tradi-
tions inscribed in ethnographic encounters (Asad 1973; Smith 1999), and modes of

F. Thajib · T. Stodulka (*)

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
S. Dinkelaker
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University,
Osnabrück, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 7

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_2
8 F. Thajib et al.

ethnographic representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1990; MacDougall

1998; Tierney and Lincoln 1997). This volume focuses on methodological implica-
tions that bring to awareness the potentials of researchers’ affects and emotions that
enable more than they hinder processes of anthropological and social scientific
knowledge construction. We found this collaborative book project on our own pros-
pects (Davies and Stodulka 2019; Stodulka et al. 2019; Stodulka et al. 2018) that
particularly extend on classic and recent contributions from psychological and femi-
nist anthropology (Behar and Gordon 1995; Crapanzano 2010; Davies and Spencer
2010; Fischer 2018; Hollan 2008; Hollan and Throop 2008; Narayan 1993; Rosaldo
1980; Wolf 1996; Visweswaran 1994). This book is our bid to provide intellectual
space for methodological and epistemological debates, and expound the potentials
and the limits of affectively aware scholarship by means of comprehensive and illus-
trative ethnographic case studies.

Affect, Emotion, Fieldwork, and Ethnography

This book focuses on methodological reflections and ethnographic case studies in

relation to what the authors of this volume experienced as affects, feelings, and
emotions during and after fieldwork. Abstaining from convoluted theorizing, we
discuss them in relation to the practices of fieldwork and ethnography, and define
them loosely as embodied social and relational processes and experiences (Burkitt
2014; Röttger-Rössler and Stodulka 2014; White 2017). As minimal definition, the
authors of this book agree on very basic theoretical assumptions: emotions link
affects (as bodily, sensory, inarticulate, and sometimes nonconscious experience)
with surrounding local worlds by way of shared or recognizable modes of commu-
nication, articulation, and feeling. Emotions are linked to cultural repertoires that
enable persons to express their own and label others’ observable or imagined affects
and feelings. Such expressions can occur through shared and communicable emo-
tion words, through gestures, symbols, or body movement. Emotions can be per-
formed and enacted without significant changes in communicating a person’s
physiological arousal and experience. They motivate action and interaction, and
relate to social, cultural, economic and physiological needs and wants. Their display
and articulation are affected by and affect others. They are critical in relating people
to or disconnecting them from each other (Stodulka 2017a, b, c).
Considering their experiential, psychological, political and social qualities, we
argue that their understanding is vital in navigating and making sense of everyday
lives and environments. In short, everything emotions do (and can do) should be
considered directly relevant to ethnographic fieldwork practice that we understand
as series of encounters with persons, places and objects in complex and diverse con-
stellations of power asymmetries. Affects, feelings, and emotions influence and
manifest the experience of these encounters, and vice versa, encounters influence
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography 9

and shape researchers’ and interlocutors’ emotions, feelings, and affects. Ultimately,
they affect what textbook methods (sampling, surveying, interviews, FGDs, system-
atic observation, participatory, and artistic approaches, or field experiments, and so
forth) researchers apply, and how, when and with whom they engage in them.
As illustrated in the quote that prefaces this introduction, field researchers grap-
ple with a wide range of emotions: the happiness after establishing social relations;
the pride of “belonging” to host communities; the fear and anxiety not to produce
enough data or to do fieldwork “the wrong way”; the disappointment when we feel
that we never really belonged to our host communities; for some, the guilt related to
colonial heritage and/or privileged life compared to many of our research subjects;
the insecurity how to reciprocate hospitality and shared knowledge; or the panic that
sneaks in, when we feel that we are not doing enough, or realize that we have to
“wrap up” and leave soon. They constitute, as we have elaborated elsewhere, as
“field emotions” (Stodulka et al. 2019), or “field affects” (Stodulka et al. 2018), that
are generative in the formation of ethnography, and deeply influence our mode of
knowledge production—and that hence transpire as epistemic.
Emotional experiences during fieldwork do not only prevail within the blurred
boundaries of research. They transgress such idealized work-life dichotomies, and
become part of researchers’ lives, where they stick and resurface. When compared
to other methodologies, the fundament of fieldwork and ethnography is a participant
observation, in which researchers immerse themselves into the lifeworlds of the
persons, objects, and communities they study (with). As an academic endeavor that
is described as the most humanist among the sciences and the most scientific among
the humanities (Sluka and Robben 2012), the anthropological fieldwork persona is
professional researcher and private person at the same time (Leibing and McLean
2007). Similar to “the field,” which is increasingly experienced as unbounded psy-
chological, historical and social relationship between researchers, their tasks, and
experiences vis-à-vis the lifeworlds, the people, spaces, and places they study with
rather than a geographic entity (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1995;
Spencer 2010), ethnographers’ minds and bodies too dissolve into their work—and
their work seeps into their personal lives, loves, terrors, and dreams.
We propose that, if attended to systematically, carefully and reflexively, emo-
tions—as relational phenomena between researcher and the researched—can be
helpful in constructing, unearthing, and representing ethnographic knowledge. The
contributions of this volume convey that attending to researchers’ emotions as epis-
temic, understanding them as relational and complementary data can be scientifi-
cally rewarding. This book is an appeal to highlight their importance in ascribing
meaning to the phenomena ethnographers study. Training fieldworkers’ emotional
literacy (the capacity to discern and name affective experience in relation to some-
one or something), by encouraging techniques to document their emotions system-
atically, promises to enhance researchers’ emotional reflexivity and support affective
ways of researching, reflecting and representing “the field” as ethnographic
knowledge.
10 F. Thajib et al.

Coincidences of Desire: Emerging Affective Scholarship

The groundwork for this book emerges from a transnational and interdisciplinary
research collaboration between anthropology, primatology, and literature studies,
titled “The Researchers’ Affects.”1 After senior colleagues had rejected our ideas at
reviewer panels twice as “unscientific,” we were able to acquire research funding in
a third attempt. When in addition to the three project leaders a team of five doctoral
students had been formed, we went on to explore the roles of affects and emotions
in ethnographic and primatographic knowledge construction, from the choice of
research subjects, to the researcher’s positionality, the generation of knowledge and
data, and their interpretation and public representation. To this aim, we have studied
fieldworkers’ affects and emotions from different disciplinary angles (Keil 2019;
Lehmann and Stodulka 2018; Liebal et al. 2019; Lubrich et al. 2017; Shah 2018;
Stodulka et al. 2016; Suter 2016), as well as refined and developed new methods to
identify and make use of these epistemologically (Lubrich and Stodulka 2019;
Stodulka et al. 2019).
With regards to our own discipline, we devised semi-structured emotion diaries
that could assist fieldworkers in the systematic documentation of affective experi-
ences during fieldwork.2 Systematizing documentation, we assumed, helps foster-
ing “a habitual mode of affectively aware perception and attention to the researched
phenomena” (Stodulka et al. 2019). To gain empirical insights on the affects and
emotions at stake during fieldwork, we collaborated with over 20 early-career eth-
nographers (mainly from the discipline of anthropology) who employed the pro-
vided emotion diaries during their fieldwork, shared emotional episodes during
semi-structured interviews, and participated in word sorting tasks, open and closed
word listings. The majority of the researchers extended their collaboration with the
project by contributing more than half of the case studies compiled in this volume.
This book also owes gratitude to a series of “lunch-break” and other informal
discussions of the “Affective Epistemologies” working group at the Institute of
Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. The group comprised of
fellow junior researchers who all shared concerns regarding the lack of systematic,
rigorous and critical reflection on the roles of emotions and affects before, during,
and after fieldwork. In retrospect, this confluence of interests and needs was not
coincidental given that at this period of time, most of us were either still in the pro-
cess of preparing, taking breaks, or just returning from our respective fieldwork. As
a regular meeting platform for almost 2 years, this working group also functioned as
a peer support group among junior scholars, in which they could engage in struc-
tured discussions and analytical exchanges around the topics of emotions and affects
in the field, independent from the official academic curriculum. The collaboration
with members of the working group translates into this book through the majority

1
The project was directed by Katja Liebal (primatology), Oliver Lubrich (literature), and Thomas
Stodulka (anthropology) and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2013–2018).
2
See Appendix.
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography 11

of the contributions written by some of the group members opening the different
sections.
The stimulating journey of reflecting on the affectivity of fieldwork and ethnog-
raphy culminated in December 2015, when we reached out and invited the collabo-
rating researchers of both groups—participants in “The Researchers’ Affects”
project and members of the “Affective Epistemologies” collective—to join a feed-
back workshop designed to scrutinize the role of emotions in ethnographic knowl-
edge construction. The workshop evaluated the provided formats of documenting
and reflecting on fieldwork emotions, and addressed the challenges of translating
researchers’ affects into ethnographic analysis and writing. As we discussed along
within world café sessions and walking seminars, many different ways of incorpo-
rating fieldworkers’ affects and emotions into anthropological research and writing
have been brought to the table. Encouraged by the fertile discussions during the
workshop, we invited the participants to compile their case studies into a book,
which grew into the volume at hand. Other researchers, who had not participated in
the workshop, but whom we had encountered along our journeys, joined the authors
and added their perspectives on the entanglements of fieldwork, emotions, and
affect. The multiplicity of critical discussions generated throughout these collabora-
tions has demonstrated that new articulations on affective scholarships continue to
emerge in various academic landscapes. This book endeavors to render initially
isolated approaches visible by providing a shared platform, and hopes to encourage
the proliferation of new voices and new narratives around affectively-engaged
research. It particularly addresses (post-)graduate students and early-career
scholars.

 dvancing Affective Scholarship Through Empirical Affect

A
Montage

The authors in this volume pay systematic attention to the complex emotional and
political dynamics that constitute research encounters. Issues surrounding the rela-
tionships between researcher and researched such as shifting positionalities, power
relations, differential demands, and expectations take on special focus in the contri-
butions. To foreground the affectivity of fieldwork positionalities, we invited the
contributors to allude to emotions’ ontological as well as methodological and epis-
temological potentials in encountering, documenting, analyzing, and representing
“Others.” In addition to a creative “kaleidoscope of methods” to approaching affects
and emotions in the field (logging, journaling, therapeutic training, image theater,
tandem research, or collaborative interpretation to name just a few), some authors
demonstrate particular strategies that foreground communication, understanding
and perspective taking as an empathetic endeavor.
In order to integrate both classic theoretical approaches in social and cultural
anthropology’s resourceful history, and yet-to-be-systematized affective e­ xperiences
12 F. Thajib et al.

in the field, we have introduced the concept of the “Empirical Affect Montage” as
an umbrella term that reflects the project’s methodological trajectory. As suggested
by the term, our proposed framework rests on the premise of opening up ways for
fieldworkers to communicate what was “at stake” in their multiple encounters with
the local worlds of their protagonists to readers who have not “been there” (see
Stodulka et al. 2019). We define Empirical Affect Montage as a technique to bring
the researchers’ documented affects and emotions in dialogue with more traditional
accounts of the phenomena they study (e.g., field notes, interviews, memory proto-
cols, transcripts, photographs, video, mental maps, pile sorting, and field experi-
ments), and argue that the montage of different data dimensions “thickens”
ethnographic accounts and increases their methodological transparency. We con-
tend that it is through the technique of montage that fieldworkers can make accounts
of their affective experience epistemologically productive, without falling into the
trap of self-indulgence. We underline that the use of self-reflexive field material in
writing up ethnographies pertains “only to the point that the author shows its rele-
vance to the production of knowledge” (Frank in Leibing and McLean 2007, p. 13).
Understanding Empirical Affect Montage in a narrow sense, we proposed research-
ers to supplement conventional research material with documentations and reflec-
tions of their emotions, or juxtapose these assumedly separate sources of
ethnographic documentation in their analysis and ethnographic representation (for
an exemplification see Stodulka 2014, 2015).
Although we have not explicitly encouraged the authors to follow this one meth-
odological proposition, for us, the diverse approaches that frame the different con-
tributions reveal a number of interrelated key insights and affordances that the
Empirical Affect Montage is compelled to address, and which we frame as multidi-
mensional nexus of affective scholarship.
Dimension 1: Strategic Documentation of Affects, Feelings and Emotions in the
Field The first dimension is indicative of a common tendency in the chapters to
analyze and describe crucial research results through systematically practiced emo-
tional reflexivity. A great number of authors make recourse to documentations of
their emotional experience in emotion diaries, semi-structured feedback interviews,
free listing, card sorting tasks, and questionnaires—tools developed in the context
of The Researchers’ Affects project. The chapters demonstrate diverse ways of doc-
umentation, and the methodological usage of these devices: some authors analyzed
individual passages of their emotion diaries in a hermeneutic-interpretative manner
vis-à-vis their research questions; others subjected them to a qualitative content
analysis. Still others replaced their conventional field diaries with emotion diaries
that they adapted to their own needs and preferences in hybrid terms. We are aware
that the tools we provided for collaborating fieldworkers are only partial in covering
the full spectrum of researchers’ affects. Questions and concerns that were raised by
the authors during the Berlin workshop in December 2015 also addressed the poten-
tial negative bias of documenting emotion, the repetitive structure of the emotion
diaries producing scripted affects, and the strain of engaging in emotional reflexiv-
ity during already exhausting enough fieldwork.
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography 13

Whereas these drawbacks are being addressed in ongoing collaboration and

debate, we want to mention some of the benefits of systematic affective scholarship
as they were articulated and documented during the workshop: “When feeling
alone, or sad, if no one is there to listen to you then it is better to write a diary”; “It
was helpful to write down both negative and positive emotions. Writing negative
emotions helps to feel light and fresh. Writing positive emotions also helps to feel
good”; “It helps to take my emotions more seriously. Otherwise I don’t have time to
listen to my own feelings”; “I have translated the helpful questions from the emo-
tion diary to the structure of my online-field blog and field diary.”3 Most of the
participants stressed how important the emotion diaries and the feedback interviews
that we conducted during fieldwork were to them to better understand, reflect, and
communicate the psychological distress and methodological commotion that they
went through while in the field. As consensus among the participants it was agreed
that systematic affective scholarship also opens doors for sustainable disciplinary,
ethical, and psychological supervision during PhD and doctorate projects.
Dimension 2: Emotional Reflexivity as Epistemic Resource The second dimen-
sion of affective scholarship concerns the multiple levels of insights that critical and
systematic analyses of affective researcher experience are capable of providing. A
number of contributions link affective pathways or particular emotional episodes to
insights related to their respective research topics. Others address how their affec-
tive experience instigated reflections that complexify conventional answers to ques-
tions of research ethics and the inextricability of fieldwork as intersubjective and
representational arenas of dominance, hegemony, and power struggles. In doing so
some authors, importantly, address when to actively manage their emotions for
intellectual or ethical reasons, as they are dealing with the epistemic violence eth-
nographic research can be entangled with. Systematically attending to the affective
dimensions of fieldwork brings other authors to refine conceptual critiques of field-
work, and ethnography and anthropology as a discipline. This is exemplified by
accounts critical of the efficacious guiding principles within academic cultures of
detachment and immunity to unsettling incidents, as well as the obstinate conceptu-
alizations of researchers as atomized individuals free from social and affective rela-
tions with supervisors, academic gatekeepers, and campus regimes. The volume
comprises stimulating suggestions to conceive of fieldwork beyond dichotomizing
concepts of work and leisure, which, for instance, imply an opposition between data
generating fieldwork and “non-productive” care work for children, partners, friends,
parents, siblings and loved ones. With the authors’ plead not to seek immunity from
unsettling experiences both inside and outside the porous boundaries of “the field,”
but to recognize the constitutive role of uncertainty and anxieties in fieldwork
(Jackson 2010) as well as ethnographers’ vulnerabilities (Behar 1996), they point to
the potentials of affectively aware fieldwork by e­ ngaging in the existential question
of what it means to remain humane in the face of existentially transformative
experiences.

3
The quotes were documented during one of the workshop sessions by our colleague Nasima
Selim.
14 F. Thajib et al.

Dimension 3: Spatiotemporal Configurations of Data Analysis and

Interpretation The third dimension of the affective scholarship paradigm assem-
bled in this volume touches upon the temporalities and spatial configurations that
inform ethnographers in addressing the epistemic potentials of researchers’ affects
and emotions. Three methodological configurations permeate the articles of this
volume. Firstly, some authors have interpreted their emotional experiences retro-
spectively. By revisiting central emotional episodes after fieldwork (through taking
cue from diary entries or other forms of documentation, recollecting sensorial and
visceral experiences as well as synthesizing past impressions and present interpreta-
tions of specific moments in the field) they were able to better understand the incho-
ate messiness that comprises field experiences in a different light. Secondly, in
reflecting on the critical role of emotions and affects for their research, some contri-
butions describe moments of insights that we call synchronous. They include
accounts that rely on capturing firsthand emotional and affective responses. They
bring to light how affective experience supports in situ processes of attuning to their
protagonists’ lifeworlds and experiences, and how it fostered their experiential
understanding, sensitized them for attuned analysis, and stipulated ethical practices
of representation. These accounts echo approaches of attending to emotions as
sources of epistemic insights, described as “Key Emotional Episodes” (KEE)
(Berger 2010), “raw moments” (Hastrup 2010) or “emotionally sensed knowledge”
(Hubbard et al. 2001). The third way in which the authors ascribe meaning to their
affective experience and emotions involves a combination of both retrospective and
synchronous reflections4 that emanate the researcher’s personal and professional
transformation (Jackson and Piette 2015; Spencer 2011) and convey its conse-
quences for holistic data construction. The volume includes accounts that highlight
how researchers’ affective encounters remain existentially inscribed into their
embodied realities as persons. They retail how existential emotional experiences
linger on and continue to implicate researchers’ academic practices and everyday
livings.5

Dimension 4: Researcher’s Affective Experiences, Ethnographic Writing and

Representation The fourth dimension of affective scholarship aspired by an
Empirical Affect Montage and exemplified in this book concerns the role of emo-
tions and affectivity in ethnographic representation and styles of writing. Readers

4
In a similar vein, Athena Mc Lean and Annette Leibing highlight in their edited volume The
Shadow Side of Fieldwork, that fieldworkers’ reflections on the blurred borders of their personal
lives and their ethnographic work are, at least implicitly, mostly a processural juxtaposition of
“memoires and past data, present experiences and observations, and vision for future praxis”
(2008, p. 4; emphases are ours). We propose the spatiotemporal distinction of ethnographic insight
into synchronous and retrospective approaches as a bid to theorize on how researchers can inte-
grate various dimensions of affective scholarship into ethnographic knowledge construction
through a systematic lens that speaks to the diversity of research practices.
5
The New Ethnographer movement is highlighting such existential and often harmful experiences
and provides a forum for anthropologists to address these often silenced issues (https://theneweth-
nographer.org).
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography 15

may find that in some of the contributions the writing style and the personal pres-
ence of the authors are jarring at times. This impression may be attributed to the
impetus among many of the authors to address affective challenges in doing field-
work that contributed to what they consider substantial anthropological insights of
their projects. This is not an easy task considering that genres which engage in
affective scholarship when it comes to fieldwork and ethnography have so far posi-
tioned themselves as e.g. “anthro-poetics’ (Behar 1996; Rosaldo 2014) or “auto-­
ethnography” (Ellis 2004), and hence if not at the margins, at least distinctive from
mainstream “academic anthropology.” Contrastingly, the book introduces writings
that exemplify different ways of navigating emotional vulnerabilities that permeate
fieldwork encounters as well as the personal and professional lives of academia. The
authors courageously tread their ways through the risks and leverages of engaging
with vulnerable experiences in written representation. Thus, they illuminate diverg-
ing pathways that are poignantly conceived by Paul Stoller in the Afterword to this
book as future challenges in writing affective fieldwork and ethnography (Stoller,
this volume).
Although we are aware that reflexive ethnographies run the risk of circling
around the anthropologist to an extent that is self-absorbing, this book intends to
illustrate that systematic relational and affectively aware methodology can generate
ethnographies that illuminate others’ experiences transparently and ethically. Taking
into consideration the historical perspective of this volume’s preface, we are inclined
to carefully position our intellectual project at the intersection between the method-
ological rigour of traditional empiricism and the inspirational vigour of radical
empiricism. This book stands on the shoulders of its authors, and the anthropologi-
cal trajectories that perceive of fieldwork and ethnography as complex webs of
anthropological encounters that weave through our critical reasoning, embodied,
and sensorial and affective ways of “learning through the field.” From an ethical and
critical epistemological point of view, we contend that exclusively writing about
others’ suffering, loving, grieving, celebrating, or mourning without making our-
selves vulnerable as ethnographer runs the risk of “pimping out” (Veissière 2009)
friends, interlocutors, informants and research partners. It runs the risk of reproduc-
ing simplifying dichotomies by putting them into emotional “hot seats,” and pre-
senting the anthropological persona as “cool”, and more “reasonable” in abstracting
“thoughts” from “feelings,” or “culture” from “nature” (Rappaport 2008).

The Book Sections

This volume is organized along the six core themes of role conflict, reciprocity,
intimacy and care, illness and dying, failure and attunement, and emotion regimes
in teaching and doing fieldwork. These topics reflect the themes that traversed most
prominently during discussions between the Researchers’ Affects-team and the
16 F. Thajib et al.

innumerable interlocutors and colleagues that had shared their insights with us dur-
ing the last 5 years. As editors, we are aware that this remains a selection of thematic
strands as this “meta-field” has presented itself to us, and that they cannot be fully
separated from each other. Yet, in order to apprehend and comprehensively repre-
sent the complex phenomenon of fieldwork affectivity, strategic editorial decisions
needed to be taken. The conceptual background of the respective themes as well as
the productive overlaps and intersections between individual chapters will be
addressed by thematic introductions that precede each section. Consequently, we
will not forestall these detailed lead-ins here, but provide a brief overview of the
entire book.
Section 1 comprises contributions that highlight issues of researchers’ role con-
flicts in the field. Fieldwork encompasses moments when researchers’ institutional,
social, and political (self-) ascriptions shift, and their initially assumed social identi-
ties and subjectivities conflict, collide, or conflate. Shifting positionalities often
point to the need for, or result from, oscillating identifications that compel both
researchers and interlocutors to negotiate existing or emerging power relations in
order to continue the ethnographic endeavor. Each author reflects on the challenges
and contradictions in navigating multiple positionalities in the field and their often
acute emotional implications. The chapters share a common thread of understand-
ing that a sustained self-reflection of changing and conflicting roles as a field
researcher assists ethnographers in coping with different expectations and ascribed
responsibilities, and contributes to nuanced analysis, interpretation, and representa-
tion of the studied phenomena.
The second section on reciprocity discusses the ways of negotiating the asym-
metrical relationships of power and privilege in fieldwork through the acts of “giv-
ing back.” As a practice which has become one of the central tenets in anthropological
tradition, reciprocity is not only tethered to the exchange of material and intellectual
resources and compensations. It also involves the affective dimensions of engage-
ment vis-à-vis unequal social roles and divergent motives. The contributions care-
fully attend to the limits and predicaments of taking reciprocity for granted by
transforming affective, ethical, and material values into concrete and practical
methods for addressing inherently unequal conditions in the field.
The third section presents intimacy and care as a cluster of affective trajectories
that continuously blur the lines separating fieldwork as a personal and a profes-
sional undertaking. Field researchers often carry out the multiple tasks of sharing
intimate information and engaging in caring relationship with those being studied
while balancing their familial, conjugal, sexual, and amical relationships, whether
separated by physical distance or not. The emotional impacts can be remarkably
intricate and ineffable. Moreover, they are often left unexplored or even silenced in
the written representation of research outcomes. In contrast to this “customized”
representational practice, the writers in this section willfully engage with intimate
attachments and caring experiences in fieldwork. In dealing with intimate and car-
ing relationships as affective manifestations of relatedness, the contributors outline
Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography 17

the conditions when intimacy and care can entail both heart-warming moments and
heart-breaking dramas, as well as theoretical insights.
Moments of illness and dying are fieldwork experiences that are difficult to
address. In spite of their increasing salience as a research focus, the chapters in the
fourth section confront the emotional difficulties of dealing with research interlocu-
tors, close friends, and kin who suffer chronic illness or face death. A combination
of compassion and closeness constitute some of the most prominent feeling-states
in studying the role of social dynamics, personal beliefs, and professional invest-
ment. At the same time, as the different chapters in this section poignantly illustrate,
these feelings also open up questions regarding the emotional consequences for
researchers when they become “too close” with the people or situation that they
seek to understand. Overall, these chapters offer a sobering reminder to the affective
stakes when fieldwork unravels as a site of shared existential vulnerabilities.
The fifth section, addressing failing and attuning, brings forth silenced and less
jubilant processes of coping with “failure” before, during, and after doing field-
work. Experiences and feelings of failure may come in varied disguises. They may
relate to the methods used, the relationships established, the ethical challenges
faced, or the way the physicality of doing research is dealt with, to mention just a
few. But as crises can be reappraised as turning points and imply the potential of
new beginnings, the contributions also highlight how respective instances of emo-
tional struggle can be overcome and turned into rewarding anthropological insights.
The last section discusses pathways to disrupt hegemonic practices of the social
and behavioral sciences that naturalize impartial objectivity and ignore the affective
dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography as epistemological project. The authors of
the section unpack emotion regimes in teaching and doing fieldwork and invite read-
ers to take seriously the affective aspects of anthropological research not only in
emotionally responding to environments, places, situations, materialities, and peo-
ple within “fieldwork,” but also extending them to our anthropological training
methods, other forms and arenas of educational practices, as well as our everyday
practices and professional interactions as academics.
The authors’ trajectories of systematically reflecting and constructing anthropo-
logical meaning from their affective experience during fieldwork cover a variety of
thematic strands. Most importantly, they build a methodological cause, and show
that courageous, intellectually and emotionally challenging endeavors can very well
be worth the (sometimes painful and arduous) extra effort. We hope that readers at
different stages of their research and careers will be both challenged and stimulated
by these accounts. We are looking forward to critical perspectives and future col-
laborations that help expanding on what has so far been dubbed as “Berlin School
of Affective Scholarship” (Davies and Stodulka 2019). We encourage readers to
collaborate and integrate relational methodologies into the design of refurbished
research method companions and assert sustainable supervision of PhD, doctorate
and other ethnographic research projects.
18 F. Thajib et al.

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 Part I
Role Conflicts and Aftermaths
Role Conflicts and Aftermaths:
Introduction

Giorgio Brocco and Britta Rutert

Role conflicts and their attendant emotional effects constitute important empirical
and ontological points of reflection deserving of scrutiny in anthropological field-
work. Often, when researchers who are engaged in fieldwork are forced to change
their roles and emotional positions voluntarily, or because of external socioeco-
nomic or political circumstances, conflicts and related uncertainties emerge. One
example is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) employee who decides to con-
duct ethnographic research as an independent scholar financed by a university or
private institution. Another example is a women’s shelter employee who decides to
shift to a role as an “objective ethnographer.” These shifting roles reflect a conflict
surrounding the role of the ethnographer in general, which derives from a continu-
ous oscillation between being a detached observer and being a participant in the
field. This conflict can be particularly acute when ethnographic research is con-
ducted in the same setting in which the ethnographer has been employed or has
volunteered. Role changes, continuous oscillations from one social, political, eco-
nomic or emotional role, or “fixed identity,” to another throughout the course of
fieldwork, may lead the researcher to face personal and collegial emotional con-
flicts. Anthropologists often conceive themselves as having a distant position and
are commonly understood to function in this regard. In this sense, anthropologists
assume an “objective-ized” stance toward the people and places they study. Although
this objective stance has been widely questioned in academic and nonacademic
debate, it remains a prevailing assumption that a researcher will remain “outside”
social networks and relationships while in the field, even though anthropological

G. Brocco
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
B. Rutert (*)
Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 23

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_3
24 G. Brocco and B. Rutert

inquiry demands shifting positions between emic and ethic perspectives (Daston
and Gallison 2007). Others working “in the field,” such as NGOs, company employ-
ees, or interns maintain a position of being fully engaged as part of a team, with the
all attendant obligations and benefits. Even though the emotionally engaged NGO
employee may form part of an idealized narrative when compared to the distanced
anthropologist, NGO workers are understood as subjects actively engaged in and
modifying their field setting. In contrast, the ethnographer is conventionally required
to maintain an observational position without personally engaging with others in the
fieldwork setting. An ethnographer’s shift from active to passive team member,
engaged to dis-engaged colleague, “insider” to “outsider” may cause irritation and
mistrust among former colleagues. Potential future informants and participants may
not want to reveal information to the newly declared anthropologist or ethnographer
who had been a former work colleague or fellow volunteer. As one author has shown
(Bolotta, this volume), it may be easier to convert an ethnographer to an active NGO
member. Mistrust or irritation with the anthropologist who shifts from being a team
member in the research setting may be due to continuous wavering around the prob-
lem of adopting a positivist and distanced position to an emotionally involved posi-
tion. Shifting emotions, oscillating feelings, and fluctuating ethical and moral
viewpoints emerging from multiple role conflicts call into question the anthropolo-
gist’s positionality before, during, and after fieldwork with regard to informants,
participants, and readers. Both emotions and the researcher’s “rational mind” fully
participate in the co-construction of the field (Crapanzano 2010; Davies 2010;
Stodulka 2015). Emotions may function as an important source of information dur-
ing fieldwork and the final data analysis. However, role conflicts and emotional and
social oscillation between multiple positions may also pose a challenge when trying
to bridge the gap between “insider“ and “outsider” for both the researcher and their
colleagues in the fieldwork setting.
A closer look at the positionality requires examining role conflicts in anthropo-
logical analysis to ensure the epistemological quality of the research process. The
researcher must identify, document, and reflect on positionality in their research in
order to allow “the researcher to be more open to challenges to [his/her] theoretical
position that fieldwork almost inevitably raises” (Turner 2010, p. 126). Positionality
became a central theoretical (and practical) concern during the mid-1980s with the
so-called “reflexive turn” (Marcus 2009, p. 1; see also Faubion and Marcus 2009;
Herzfeld 2009; Taggart and Sandstrom 2011). Literature on positionality has
emerged from feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial traditions that sought to
challenge “the methodological hegemony of neo-positivist empiricism,” (England
1994, p. 81; Wolf 1996; Nagar 2002) and question canons of impartiality and objec-
tivist neutrality in research (Lambek 1997). First, a reflection on positionality
emerged from the recognition and subsequent critique of anthropology’s complicity
with structures of inequality wrought by European colonial expansion and its after-
math (Hymes 1999; Asad 1973; Scholte 1999). Moreover, a feminist critique of
anthropology’s androcentric bias, on the one hand, and the subsequent problemati-
zation of the objective neutral observer, on the other hand, constituted significant
redefinitions of what positionality might be (Chiseri-Strater 1996). In particular,
Role Conflicts and Aftermaths: Introduction 25

feminist anthropologists examined and pointed out the ethnographer’s position in

relation to interlocutors. In so doing, the question of objectivity and representation
was further recast by refocusing attention on the form, rather than the content, of
ethnographic writing (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Since
this reflexive turn, debates on positionality have become fundamental to ethno-
graphic writing, with distinct and oftentimes personal decisions being reached about
how to address it. An analysis of researcher positionality through role conflicts leads
to an emphasis on how knowledge is socially constructed, situated, and embedded
in particular (unequal) power relationships and structures. Positionality also opens
methodological and epistemological trajectories to explore how power may be rep-
licated and brought to light in the research process (McDowell 1992; Stanley and
Wise 1993; England 1994; Rose 1997; Mohammad 2001; Chacko 2004).
By reflecting on an anthropologist’s various shifting roles, emotions, and poten-
tial conflicts during fieldwork, a systematic consideration of role conflicts offers
important empirical and theoretical insights related to the research and subsequent
writing process. The chapters in this section reflect on the diversity of research posi-
tions, unsubstantiated mistrust, and even emotional (ab)use that ethnographers may
be exposed to.
Guiseppe Bolotta offers an example of the emerging role conflicts that inevitably
arise in the shifting roles and positionalities that unfold during long-term fieldwork.
Bolotta engages with a critical analysis of his own position as a researcher and
activist in the humanitarian field of child-related NGO work in Bangkok. Assuming
a stance of “emotional reflexivity” (Spencer 2010), Bolotta examines his emotions
while working with dek salam (slum children) in Bangkok. His a priori approach to
his understanding of dek salam is highly influenced by his work as a psychologist
for the NGO Psychologists without Borders years before he started his “anthropo-
logical” fieldwork. During his research, Bolotta realized he was involved in repro-
ducing the victimizing language, a “compassionate ethos” (Fassin 2005), used in
humanitarian language. This became particularly clear to him when he changed his
position from an NGO activist and psychologist to an ethnographer conducting
research with dek salam. By approaching the children as victims, he was soon
“exploited” by one of his interlocutors, a boy who re-invented his history as a griev-
ing child who had lost his family. It took Bolotta some time to understand that
although he had been seeing slum children as victims, he was in fact being steered
by his own exposure to this humanitarian language. Bolotta’s paper shows how the
slum children are aware of the willful naivety of Western NGO members, especially
in their efforts to save children and their unwitting use of “emotional economy”
strategies (Stodulka 2014, 2015). It took many years of living with the slum children
that Bolotta’s “top-down” emotional relationships with the children changed to
friendships and true compassion, resulting in an affective understanding of the pro-
tagonists in his research.
Marina Della Rocca reflects on her journey from working at a shelter for migrant
women in northern Italy to becoming an ethnographer at the same shelter. Her posi-
tional shift entailed emotional challenges and trepidation for her as a researcher, for
her former colleagues, and for the women in the shelter. To engage with the shift of
26 G. Brocco and B. Rutert

her positionality, she emphatically asks herself how the emotional experiences of
attachment or/and detachment concern researchers as persons and anthropologists.
She questions how we, as researchers, can manage emotions and subjective posi-
tions while pursuing our main aim of producing scientific research, and examines
the consequences that entanglements between scientific research and individual
feelings can have on the research during fieldwork. Della Rocca is of the opinion
that all these issues of positionality are relevant for training the consciousness of
anthropologists and ethnographers (Spencer 2010, p. 2–3). She tries to answer these
questions by looking at her engagement with her emotions when she re-entered the
field in a new position as researcher, and the impact this had on her former col-
leagues (now informants) and the women at the shelter with whom she had worked.
Reflecting on her shifting positions, Della Rocca came to the conclusion that emo-
tions are not just subjective experiences, but rather “social facts” (Stodulka 2015,
p. 199) that speak of the various realities lived by the multiply marginalized women
and social workers who participated in her research as well as the realities embodied
by the engaged researcher herself. The perspective of “empirical pragmatism”
(Spencer and Davis 2010), a pragmatic stance toward the empirical value of emo-
tions, allowed Della Rocca to make sense of the multiple roles she embodied in the
shelter during her fieldwork and relate these roles to her research findings.
Gerda Kuiper considers her shifting role in understanding traditional healing or
witchcraft in Lindi, a small village at the south coast of Tanzania. She describes her
emotions and feelings raised by the surreptitious presence of witchcraft/traditional
healing in the field. Initially, Kuiper was interested in researching land tenure rela-
tions in the area. However, soon after her arrival in Lindi, she encountered witch-
craft (uchawi). She explores the notion and impact of witchcraft on her work and the
trajectory of emotional learning…from the unknown to embodied and emotional
experience that she went through over the 3 months during which she worked as an
ethnographer in the area. At first suspicious, Kuiper intuitively adopted a positivistic
approach to witchcraft, which she understood as a characteristic of greed or jeal-
ousy, a position often represented in academic writing (Foster 1972). After her host
mother had a personal encounter with witchcraft, and Kuiper’s sudden putative
involvement in the witchcraft event, the author engaged in a learning process that
made her reflect on witchcraft/traditional healing as an epistemological challenge,
gaining insight beyond her preconceived understanding of witchcraft and traditional
healing. She concludes that the fear of witchcraft she experienced in Lindi was a
barrier in analyzing her data at first, but eventually her fear became valuable tool for
gaining an epistemological understanding of witchcraft/traditional healing in
Tanzania.
The three contributions to this section try to find answers to one or more of the
following six questions: (1) To what extent can information and data be modified by
a researcher simultaneously being employed by an NGO or a governmental organi-
zation during fieldwork? (2) Can both the researcher and interlocutors’ emotions be
viable and valuable for the research and writing process? (3) How does the inter-­
subjective (Coffey 1999) and objective positionality (Fonow and Cook 1991;
Harding 1991) of “academic” scholars differ from that of a social researcher or
Role Conflicts and Aftermaths: Introduction 27

NGO employee? (4) Do individual positions affect all ethnographic data and any
cultural intimacy achieved? (5) How are feelings and emotional connections
between the researcher and the participants modified by shifts and continuous oscil-
lations of positionality? (6) Which writing strategy should an anthropologist adopt
to highlight the multiple role conflicts emerging from their fieldwork?
Anthropology has long proposed splitting the objective stance and the research-
er’s emotions. Anthropologies influenced by empirical pragmatism (James 1912)
and related phenomenologies (Jackson 1989) suggest integrating emotions as
important empirical sources for fieldwork, data analysis, and scrutiny of ethno-
graphic material. The authors show that (post-)colonial, feminist and traditional
perspectives on particular phenomena in the field may shift from the “total convic-
tion” of having the right attitude, e.g. when looking through “humanitarian victim-
ization glasses” or an (implicit) positivistic lens on cultural phenomena such as
traditional healing, to a more reflexive and self-questioning perspective. This new
perspective eventually leads to a deeper and more profound understanding of “the
field” or role conflicts, in the sense that it is not only a “conflict” with the concomi-
tant emotional experiences of anger, vulnerability, fright, estrangement, and embar-
rassment. Instead, role conflict can be an essential analytical tool for self-reflexivity
and data analysis. Role conflict fosters an understanding of interlocutors that might
not be possible without a systematic focus on shifting positionalities. All three chap-
ters show this shift in a remarkable manner as they depict a change in a precon-
ceived attitude toward dek salam, a perspective on feminist views of clients in
women’s shelters, and an attempt to understand the fear of witchcraft, all of which
produce insights that go beyond mere readings of already existing ethnographies.

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Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions
in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children:
The Case of Bangkok Slum Children

Giuseppe Bolotta

Introduction

Self-reflexive cultural critique (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; Geertz
1973) has become a fundamental principle of anthropological investigation. This
principle has long been vitiated by a cognitive emphasis, as if the cultural filters
through which anthropologists understand ethnographic realities were entirely
made up of intellectual thoughts, concepts, and interpretations (Davies 2010). The
volume at hand is an account of the increasing attention paid within anthropological
scholarship to the participation of the ethnographer’s entire cultural subjectivity in
the co-construction of the field, i.e., his/her body and emotions, not only his/her
“rational mind” (see also Davies 2010; Jackson 2010; Crapanzano 2010; Stodulka
2015). The ethnographer’s theoretical and conceptual pre-comprehensions, as well
as his/her lived bodily and emotional experiences, are culturally shaped and thus
need to be made the object of systematic scrutiny and self-examination. Once
treated from a positivistic perspective as objectively non-codifiable interference fac-
tors, the ethnographer’s affects are instead best understood as elements of extraor-
dinary heuristic potential.
I would argue that the need of the researcher to systematically fathom the
uncharted depths of his/her emotional experience in the field applies to an even
greater extent to those contexts where emotions are primary codes of expression,
experience, and meaning. Humanitarian environments of compassion as related to
human suffering are exemplary cases of such contexts.

G. Bolotta (*)
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University’s, Durham, UK

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 29

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_4
30 G. Bolotta

This chapter aims to illustrate the epistemological, methodological, and analyti-

cal importance of the researcher’s “emotional reflexivity” (Davies 2010; Stodulka
2015) in ethnography conducted among vulnerable groups exposed to humanitarian
interventions. I draw upon my research on the everyday experience and identity
processes of children who live in the slums of Bangkok and who are supported, as
disadvantaged “slum children” (dek salam), by several local and international aid
organizations.
When I first got involved with the dek salam almost 10 years ago, I was not yet
an anthropologist but a newly graduated, and quite naïve, psychologist volunteering
for one of these organizations. It was my first time outside Europe. Even before
actually meeting the children, I was emotionally moved by the dramatic image of
the Global South’s childhood suffering as it was portrayed at that time by most
NGOs and media (Mesnard 2004). As a psychologist, moreover, I was prepared to
approach children’s alleged disease through a set of purportedly universally valid
diagnostic and therapeutic tools.
In the first part of this chapter, I will retrospectively analyze my first humanitar-
ian encounter with the dek salam. I will specifically show how reflexively investi-
gating my feelings of a priori pity towards the slum children helped localize these
feelings’ historically and culturally specific origin in a western political frame-
work—a humanitarian “ethos of compassion” (Fassin 2006)—and, ultimately,
helped me avoid an ethnocentric interpretation of these children’s emotional experi-
ences. This emotional self-awareness also marked my decision to distance myself
from my role as a psychologist, to leave the NGO I was working for, and eventually
to adopt an anthropological perspective in exploring these children’s lives. In the
second part of the chapter, I will focus on my experience with the children as a
doctoral student in anthropology. By means of ethnographic case studies, I will
show the role of “humanitarian emotions” in molding specific patterns of inter-­
affective interaction between sympathetic social operators and pity-seeking slum
children. Finally, I will stress the scientific and ethical importance of an ethnogra-
pher scrutinizing his/her affective experience in order to identify the subtle, yet
important, differences among the multiple and interconnected polarities and sources
(socio-cultural, political, individual, inter-personal, private, public, etc.) of both the
researcher’s and local social actors’ emotional lives.1

Compassionate Ethos: Emotions in the Humanitarian Field

In his study of the Naven, Gregory Bateson (1936/Bateson 1958, p. 11) described
ethos as “the expression of a culturally standardized system of organization of the
instincts and emotions of the individuals.” Referring to this notion, anthropologist

1
In this chapter, I look at emotions as a polythetic class of bio-cultural, inter-subjective events,
which vary according to ethnographic contexts, and are co-produced by both the ethnographer and
local social actors. For a conceptual discussion on emotions, see chapter “Introduction: Affective
Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography” to this volume.
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 31

Didier Fassin (2006) argued that contemporary politics are shaped by an “ethos of
compassion”: an extreme attention to human suffering produced by the continuous
staging, production, and circulation of discourses and images concerning grief and
pain.
Suffering is continuously displayed, commented, and exhibited (Boltansky
1993): powerless victims of “terror attacks,” the corpses of migrants in the
Mediterranean Sea, civilians escaping cruel wars, communities affected by natural
disasters—an endless sequence of victims reach our imagination. Television, image-­
media technology, social networks, and the Internet have also given an unprece-
dented aesthetic poignancy to human grief (Mesnard 2004). Suffering is not just a
private feeling but also a fundamental dimension of the public sphere (Fassin 2006).
It demands an answer from us, it demands our listening and compassionate atten-
tion, and it demands humanitarian interventions.
The predominance of the compassionate ethos in contemporary global politics
has clear historical foundations. Humanitarian reasoning has its most obvious roots
in European experience beginning in the eighteenth century, and continuing with
the formation of the Red Cross in 1863, through the efforts of administrators and
missionaries to care for colonial populations, and in relation to larger trajectories of
Enlightenment rationality, secularism, colonialism, and capitalism (Redfield and
Bornstein 2011, p. 13). As a number of scholars have observed (see, e.g., Pandolfi
2011; Fassin 2012), humanitarianism is a secular semantics, genealogically rooted
in Judeo-Christian categories,2 for the moral legitimacy of western nation states’
and development and religious organizations’ post-colonial interventions in (and
beyond) the Global South.
Emotions play a central role in the humanitarian paradigm. In the public sphere,
the legitimacy of international interventions (not only humanitarian but, signifi-
cantly, also military) increasingly depends on the public’s perception of such inter-
ventions as essential forms of universal solidarity for the defense of certain
“victims.” During the last few decades, for example, several countries’ decisions to
enter wars have been officially motivated by the need to provide relief, restore
democracy, or protect human rights (Fassin and Pandolfi 2013). The raising of pub-
lic awareness with regard to the legitimacy and urgency of the intervention is
achieved through de-historicizing the “crisis” and its public moralization and “emo-
tionalization”: essentialized media representations of innocents’ suffering galvanize
an emotional reaction of compassion on the part of the “audience,” which in turn
serves to morally legitimize political actions.
Fassin (2006) invites us to consider how suffering and compassion are used in
public action and policy-making:
As the compassionate ethos implies interventions which are focused on the weakest and
most undesirable segments of society (migrants, urban poor, etc.), there is always an intrin-

2
As Calhoun (2008) notes, the term “humanitarian” was first used in the early nineteenth century
to describe a theological position stressing the humanity of Christ, and subsequently efforts to
alleviate suffering or advance the human race in general.
32 G. Bolotta

sic tension in the public interpretation of their problems that oscillates between compassion
and sanction, suffering and deviance” (ibid., p. 94, translation G.B.).

In this framework, the mobilization of emotions in the public sphere corresponds

to the emergence of a new form of “governmentality” (Foucault 1994), a politics of
compassion that defines who has to be helped and how. A set of institutions in
charge of listening to victims’ suffering and of “normalizing” their condition has
been established. These range from philanthropy and mass education to medicine
and social work. NGOs, in particular, are at the forefront of the West’s “forces of
compassion” (Redfield and Bornstein 2011), especially in post-colonial contexts
where the state is not such a consolidated political reality, and where its weakened
sovereignty leaves space for international actors’ humanitarian, political, and eco-
nomic endeavors.
Victimization processes are an important dimension of this politics of compas-
sion (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Not only does the compassionate ethos establish
hierarchies of victims, but the figure of the victim itself also neutralizes individual
differences as it points to a universal—and ethnocentric—representation of human
suffering. At the same time, and quite paradoxically, the widespread use of psycho-
logical notions within humanitarian and social intervention identifies the causes of
social suffering in the individual rather than in political and economic processes that
produce social inequalities. Through clinical categories such as trauma, and prac-
tices of therapeutic listening, marginalized groups’ “social suffering” (Das et al.
2001) is “psychologized” and individualized, that is to say, depoliticized. Within the
contemporary compassionate ethos, “Psychology became the instrument through
which aid actors think about poverty, violence and marginality” (Fassin 2006,
p. 105, translation G.B.). Indeed, as Nikolas Rose (1989) argued, “Psychotherapeutic
solutions aimed at governing subjectivities are connected to the political reasons at
the basis of the welfare state crisis” (as cited in Fassin, 2006, p. 108, translation
G.B.).
The first time I went to Thailand, I was working for an Italian NGO as a psy-
chologist. At that time, I was not aware that I was a representative of the western
compassionate ethos. Children living in the slums of Bangkok were the “innocent
victims” we were trying to save from an environment we did not really know any-
thing about.

 he Research Context: Moral Economy of Childhood

T
in the Slums of Bangkok

Between 1984 and 1994, Bangkok was the city that registered the most rapid eco-
nomic growth in the world (Unger 1998, p. 1). It was a time of tremendous transfor-
mation, which turned the Thai capital from a canal-based settlement into “a key
industrial city, a city of the poor, a city of the middle classes and a tourist city”
(Askew 2002, p. 49). During this time, Bangkok became, in rough numbers, the city
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 33

with the highest percentage of inhabitants residing in slums in the world. Slums3 are
a side effect of an economic and territorial policy that favored urban elites, and the
products of structural violence that ran along numerous lines and created inequities
in the control of urban space. Most of Bangkok’s slum residents are ex-farmers with
no formal education, originating from every region of Thailand, especially the eth-
nic minority areas of the north and the northeast. For many, migration to the city
was the only chance of survival in a country where the urban–rural gap remains a
major problem, both economically and politically. As the capital breaks the promise
of socioeconomic mobility for ethnic migrants and former peasants, the majority of
slum dwellers end up as peddlers of every kind. An increasingly relevant part of the
informal economy of the slums is also made up of gambling, prostitution, and drug
dealing.
Public authorities describe the slums as a place of degradation, crime, drug traf-
ficking, and threats to urban and national safety. The criminalization of the slums as
spaces invisible to the surveillance of the state—potentially subversive because they
exist outside of the panopticon—represents the main rhetorical strategy used across
numerous regimes in the Global South to justify massive eviction campaigns offi-
cially rationalized as measures to fight criminality and restore the safety and
“beauty” of cities (Davis 2006). Within this discourse, children occupy a special
place: they are depicted as either victims or a social danger. If dek salam are not
protected from negative influences, it follows, they are likely to become immoral,
undisciplined, dangerous subjects, deprived of a “natural childhood.” According to
such analysis, school and a “healthy” (nuclear) family life—in contrast to the slum
and the peer group—emerge as necessary answers to the promotion of happy chil-
dren (Bloch 2003). NGOs, together with (or against) the state, became major actors
in the effort to turn dek salam into healthy and happy children (Bolotta 2017a, b).
Since the 1980s, various childcare international NGOs, state organizations, reli-
gious charities, and development actors began operating in the slums of Bangkok,
with diverging political, economic, and social ends. Many of these organizations
focus on a transnational discourse centered on children’s rights and are specialized
in assisting “disadvantaged” categories of childhood like “street children,” HIV-­
positive children, and specifically dek salam. In many cases, NGO interventions are
based on a conception of “childhood” as a time of innocence, vulnerability, and
enthusiasm (Boyden 1997, p. 190). This western, middle-class cultural representa-
tion contrasts with local conceptions of childhood, despite the emerging legal and
juridical definitions produced by the Thai government in an effort to conform to the
global mainstream (Bolotta 2014).

3
The UN identifies a slum household “as a group of individuals living under the same roof in an
urban area lacking one or more of the following: (1) Durable housing of a permanent nature that
protects against extreme climate conditions. (2) Sufficient living space, which means not more
than three people sharing the same room. (3) Easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an
affordable price. (4) Access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared
by a reasonable amount of people. (5) Security of tenure that prevents forced evictions” (United
Nations 2006).
34 G. Bolotta

The emergence of NGOs has transformed the slums through development sce-
narios centered on childhood care: heterogeneous social arenas characterized by the
proliferation of interactions between different social and institutional actors, each
with differing objectives and resources, to which the protection of children’s rights
is “an opportunity, a profession, a market, a bet, a strategy” (De Sardan 2004, p. 11).
The conception of dek salam as innocent victims, the emotional reaction triggered
by the media staging of their alleged suffering, and the moral imperative of aid
responses, these all constitute the heart of humanitarian activities in the slums. The
economic implications of such activities are also clear.
NGO programs are funded, thanks to donors’ financial support, in the form of
child-sponsorship or long-distance adoptions programs (Bornstein 2001, 2011).
Moral, emotional, and economic domains are interwoven in these programs. The
strategy to mobilize western donors’ support is based on the commodification of the
sponsored children’s dramatic pictures and biographies (Fig. 1).
Mails and letters with the “victimized” children’s pictures, accompanied by sto-
ries that emphasize the dramatic conditions of dek salam, are effective in eliciting
the donor’s compassion and, through this moral and emotional response, the donor’s
economic solidarity. Following Fassin (2013), I call this exchange a “moral econ-
omy of childhood.”
In many cases, the “real” children NGOs deal with suggest a radically different
“childhood” from that proposed to donors. Nevertheless, the image of a joyful
child—smiling, and showing many more “adult traits” than children in Euro-­
American cultural contexts—has little economic value: it is rather the portrait of the
innocents’ suffering that can effectively capitalize on donors’ empathic responses
and promote, accordingly, the best humanitarian profit. Such a portrait, as argued by
Luc Boltansky (1993), is generally hyper-individualized and disqualified at the

Fig. 1 UNICEF Thailand’s “Child Protection.” Image courtesy of UNICEF Thailand/2011/Athit

(retrieved on 24 February 2017 from: https://www.unicef.org/thailand/protection.html)
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 35

same time: while the character’s suffering is represented with details, it could be
anyone. This contradiction between singularity and universality, the “interchange-
ability of victims” (Mesnard 2004, p. 16), reveals the ambiguities of the humanitar-
ian logic at work in NGO operations.
When I first went to Thailand in 2008, I was volunteering for one of these NGOs:
Psychologists without Borders (PSF). PSF supports the work of various local NGOs
dealing with dek salam, sending to the field European psychologists who are called
upon to enrich the NGOs’ childcare assistance programs with psychological exper-
tise. I was specifically asked to volunteer at the Saint Joseph Center, a Catholic
charitable foundation which provides residential care to about ninety dek salam of
the age of five to eighteen (Bolotta 2017a). Let me now step back in time and take a
reflexive look at my (humanitarian) emotions in relation to the beginning of my
volunteering experience in Bangkok as a psychologist.

The Humanitarian Encounter

During a pre-departure training event designed for new volunteers, PSF senior staff
members—mostly psychologists used to dealing with Italian patients—described
the children we were about to meet as neglected, abandoned, traumatized, and suf-
fering. I’d yet to meet them but I already felt deeply touched by these descriptions.
Having never been outside Europe, I was also influenced by the visual representa-
tion of children’s misery in the Global South, continuously displayed on Italian
television screens, to which I had unconsciously attributed a character of trans-­
cultural universality. It was the dek salam that gradually undermined my ideological
and emotional convictions and that moved me to begin a critical self-reflection,
which resulted in my decision to conduct doctoral research in anthropology. Our
first encounter was already quite revealing.
In August 2008, I was at the entrance of the Saint Joseph Center when, along the
pathway leading to the NGO’s huge playground, a hundred children were haphaz-
ardly chasing one another. They seemed imbued with an irrepressible enthusiasm.
Once they realized I was there, they hurried toward me to hugging me, tugging on
my ears, pulling me in all directions, and shouting in a language that was still
obscure to me. They were playfully fighting over my attention. I felt like I was the
target of a hunt. I was very confused and disoriented by the vitality of children who
had been described to me by the Italian psychologists of PSF as suffering and trau-
matized “victims.”
While remaining the center of the children’s interest, I noticed that Chiu, 5 years
old, had moved away from the group. Sitting on the sidewalk with his hands cover-
ing his face, he seemed to cry. I immediately moved towards him. I instinctively
perceived that expression of sadness as the only recognizable element of the whole
situation, something I had been emotionally and professionally trained to handle.
When I got closer, I realized that Chiu, hiding a wry smile behind his hands, was
actually just pretending to cry. Even before I caught him in the act, he had tightly
36 G. Bolotta

clung to my back, writhing and screaming aloud so that his friends would see him
on the shoulders of the farang (white person). The Saint Joseph’s guests were accus-
tomed to visiting European volunteers and seemed able to manipulate them. They
really did not seem the “innocent victims” I was eager to assist.
The chaos unleashed by my presence was suddenly interrupted by the arrival of
Thai educators. The dek salam’s behavioral and affective attitudes abruptly changed.
Quiet, and in perfect order, they quickly settled in parallel rows, with older kids as
head-rows. One by one, they reached their usual positions on the courtyard and
reverentially greeted educators with the wai. The Thai greeting referred to as wai
consists of a slight bow, with the palms pressed together in a prayer-like fashion.4
The wai was part of a culturally shaped repertoire children used to show in presence
of Thai adults, as phu-noi (small people) must do in relation to phu-yai (big people).5
I slowly started to observe significant discrepancies between the image of dek
salam I had in mind and the ethnographic reality. First, the category of dek salam,
like other categories of disadvantaged children, merged extremely different cases
into a single reified conceptual container.6 Some of the children, for example, did
not come from the slums of the capital. Not all of them were orphans or had severed
relationships with their family. On the contrary, some of the kids had an excellent
relationship with both parents or, when parents were absent, they still had strong
bonds with grandmothers, aunties, or other relatives within matrilineal kinship
structures quite dissimilar to the bourgeois standard of the western mononuclear
family (Bolotta 2017a). Chiu’s parents were not languishing in unspeakable poverty
but chose to entrust their son to the NGO in order to grant him a good scholastic
education. Therefore, the category of dek salam, to which all children are invariably
connected once placed in charitable institutions, obscured the children’s biographi-
cal, ethno-linguistic, and class differences, as well as the wider political and eco-
nomic processes in which their marginalization is historically grounded.
Second, the children’s affective, linguistic, and behavioral attitudes towards us,
farang volunteers, were very different from those expressed when they were relat-
ing to Thai adults. Finally, Thai operators, rather than considering the children

4
The wai has its origin in the Indic Anjali Mudra and is present, in similar versions, in several
Asian countries (Anuman 1963).
5
Within the Thai hierarchical social system, social interactions are terminologically mediated by
the use of linguistic markers of status (big/small people, phu-yai/phu-noi; elder brothers/younger
brothers, phi/nong) that refer back to a vocabulary of power. Phu-noi are not only children but also,
more generally, anyone relating to big people (phu-yai). Children in relation to parents, laity to
Buddhist monks, as well as citizens to the state’s representatives, are phu-noi who must demon-
strate obedience, respect, and gratitude to phu-yai (Bolotta 2014, 2016).
6
Several scholars have observed the mystification of reality produced by depreciative categorical
definitions of disadvantaged children. Glauser (1997) and Panter-Brick (2002), for example, have
deconstructed the category of “street children,” explaining how this label tends to flatten a huge
variety of cases into a one-size-fits-all political concept, which tends not only to distort the chil-
dren’s family and social situations, but also to cover up the economic and political roots of their
marginality.
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 37

“innocent victims,” in many cases emphasized their “normality.” Accordingly, they

seemed to show much more emotionally detached behavior towards the children.
During my first stay in Thailand, I came to care deeply for the children. Still
affected by my role as a psychologist and by the representation of dek salam as
“victims to be saved” (Mesnard 2004), I wanted to help them and I was determined
to understand the meaning and the multiplicity of their life experience. Back in
Italy, I abandoned the project of starting a specialization in psychotherapy. I har-
bored a certain dissatisfaction with the profession for which I had been trained with
so much passion. The psychological categories through which I initially tried to
codify the dek salam’s world, such as trauma or attachment, had proved inadequate.
I had begun to sense their socio-cultural specificity and political-moral value as con-
nected to the humanitarian moral economy of childhood and the Western compas-
sionate ethos. In the course of my fieldwork as a doctoral student in anthropology,
and through reflecting my own as well as the research protagonists’ involvement in
this humanitarian moral economy, I would gain a more comprehensive understand-
ing of the effects of this compassionate ethos. Within this ethos, as I discussed pre-
viously, emotions act as public collective phenomena, which are entangled in
specific historical discourses and political-economic practices. Emotions, however,
are also embodied by individual subjectivities as private, relational, and situational
events.
Many of the volunteers I met in Bangkok’s slums seemed to experience their own
emotional reactions towards the “victims” as “authentic,” subjective, and spontane-
ous facts. Moreover, feelings of compassion for the poor children often constituted
NGO workers’ motivation to enlist in the “goodness army” of humanitarian organi-
zations. These consciously expressed and emotionally connoted intentions could
also be associated with unconscious motivational dynamics that are self-rewarding
rather than resulting from an empathic recognition of the children’s supposed suf-
fering: in some cases, for example, solidarity towards victimized individuals pro-
motes in the helper a psychologically rehabilitative, and coveted, self-perception of
moral value (see, e.g., Vaillant 1977). At the same time, the helpers’ need to nail the
image of help receivers—slum children—to the archetype of the victim implies a
cultural and emotional distortion that is realized through a devaluation of the one to
be helped: victims must be vulnerable and dependent individuals incapacitated to
help themselves and, as a result, they are placed in an inferior position vis-à-vis the
helper’s.7
Such complex emotional experiences, as I described in presenting my first
encounter with the children, often precede the first meeting with the “real”

7
This happens even more in the presence of substantial economic and power differences between
the helpers and the helped. Sociologist Richard Sennett’s book Respect: The Formation of
Character in an Age of Inequality is an important contribution on these hierarchies in the context
of US American welfare policy. In describing his upbringing in the Cabrini-Green housing project
in 1940s Chicago, Sennett (2004, p. 13) has pointed out: “The project denied people control over
their own lives. They were rendered spectators to their own needs, mere consumers of care pro-
vided to them. It was here that they experienced that peculiar lack of respect which consists of not
being seen, not being accounted as full human beings”.
38 G. Bolotta

b­ eneficiaries of the humanitarian aid. Indeed, they are rather elaborated in connec-
tion with the media-conveyed and psychological imagery of the “victim” that social
workers came into contact with before actually taking their mission. This “victim-
hood imagery” is subsequently projected on local social actors who are interpreted
in such a way as to confirm both their status of victims and the moral necessity of
the humanitarian intervention. It is essential to emphasize that there are differences
in aid workers’ attitudes towards aid recipients as well as in the media reception of
children’s lives in countries of the Global South. The victimhood imagery is not the
only expressive model that media and NGOs draw on. There is an increasing aware-
ness among European NGO workers of the political impact of the victimization of
marginalized parts of society. Some view aid action as advocating social justice and
solidarity, rather than as benevolent governance and charity. However, as Fassin
(2006, p. 109) emphasizes, “these voices go normally unheard,” especially in domi-
nant public discourse and media representation. The sinister charm of the victim
and the language of suffering remain politically, aesthetically, and emotionally
prevalent. The dominant role of psychology within the humanitarian sector, more-
over, reinforces aid workers’ predisposition towards identifying individual vulner-
ability rather than socio-political potentiality.
When, in 2011, I returned to the Saint Joseph Center and the slums of Bangkok
as a researcher in anthropology, I had the opportunity to live with the children for
longer periods. One of the first issues I decided to think about “anthropologically”
was that of my own emotions—in particular the compassionate ethos marking my
relationship with the children—which I perceived as incongruous with the social
reality I came in touch with and inopportunely boosted by NGOs’ humanitarian
rhetoric. Over time, it became increasingly evident that not only my emotional
experience, but even the children’s, was influenced by the humanitarian compas-
sionate ethos both I and they were reproducing on a micro-social scale through our
inter-affective exchanges. In the next sections, I will present a few ethnographical
examples to show this and, more generally, to discusses how “the subjective and
emotional quality of the relationship established between researcher and partici-
pants, once examined, brings a deeper level of understanding and a greater degree
of objectivity to findings obtained during ethnography” (Kisfalvi 2006).

Little Bon’s Strange Grief

In 2011, Bon was an 8-year-old boy, sweet, and always smiling. He was addressed
by all as Bon lek (little Bon) because he was frail and quite short compared to his
peers. When I first met him, he was walking alone on the dirt road leading to the
Saint Joseph Center. Back from school, he was carrying a backpack that looked
much bigger than him. Father Adriano, the Italian missionary in charge of the
Catholic NGO, told me that Bon had been accepted by his organization only few
months ago after his mother tragically died from AIDS-related illness. According to
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 39

the Italian priest, Bon had always lived with his mother in Tuek Deang, one of
Bangkok’s biggest slums.
I quickly grew fond of the kid. The compassion I felt for him, far from expressing
an exclusively personal set of emotions, represented a shared experience among
volunteers at Saint Joseph’s. It was an emotion inscribed in the political register of
the humanitarian compassionate ethos. Initially, I tended to interpret Bon’s life story
according to moral and psychological schemes that made him the quintessence of
victimhood, the innocent, traumatized child whose parents have died, and whose
seemingly serene and joyful appearance had to conceal a secret suffering. Bon was
quick to notice the cultural prejudices whose trap I had apparently fallen into,
although at this point I was more aware of the discourses that impacted the encoun-
ter between farang fieldworkers and dek salam.
During dinner, he was careful to sit next to me, pour my drink, and to wait until
I swallowed the last bite of meal, getting ready to pounce on my empty plate in
order to free me from having to wash it myself. After dinner, when all the children
usually gathered around the common TV, Bon went to clean up my room and did my
laundry. Before I went to bed, he insisted that I let him massage my back, an art that
all Thais are generally trained in from childhood. His subservient behaviors made
me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. I was supposed to take care of him rather
than the other way around. At that time, I did not yet clearly understand that Bon
was behaving as a proper phu-noi (small person). In Thailand, indeed, to be a good
child (dek de) means to take on the role of phu-noi, which is to act in service of
adults conceived of as phu-yai (big people) (Bolotta 2014, 2016).
During the first weeks of my stay at the Saint Joseph Center, especially in pres-
ence of Thai educators, the dek salam related to me deploying culturally informed
behavioral and affective repertoires that reflected the local role-dynamic between
phu-noi and phu-yai. My answer to the children’s efforts, on the other hand, was
quite dissimilar to that normally provided by Thai phu-yai.
Convinced that Bon was particularly in need of affection due to his mother’s
early death, and moved by Father Adriano’s dramatic description of the child, I told
Bon that I loved him even if he did not wash my clothes every day, and that the role
of caregiver should have been mine. Bon replied to my statement with a chuckle.
Only later I realized that with his chuckle the child had placed me in the same cat-
egory as most of Westerners8 dealings with dek salam in Bangkok, that is farang.
Bon had witnessed the emotional discrepancy between the strange adult I was in his
eyes and local phu-yai, and he began to play with it.

8
The terms Westerners or “Western social workers,” just like dek salam, are problematic because
they could rigidly suggest the existence of something like a homogenous and essentialized cate-
gory of people. In western contexts, instead, ideas such as childhood, giving, and suffering might
vary according to a multiplicity of factors including class, gender, and individual trajectories.
Nevertheless, the majority of the international NGO social operators I came to know in Bangkok
are Caucasian, Euro-American, middle-class professionals for whom the compassionate ethos
constituted a unifying (although individually differently modulated) moral and emotional
framework.
40 G. Bolotta

One evening, while we were sitting on the sidelines in the courtyard of the Saint
Joseph Center, Bon told me about his mother: “Phi (elder brother), do you know
that my mother died?” According to Father Adriano, Bon had never before talked
with any adult about his mother’s death. When I asked why he was reticent to
address the topic with the NGO’s educators, and how he was working out his loss,
he replied: “I talk about these things with friends. Mom left me with Father Adriano.
Then she promised she would come back to get me. But instead, she died.” Why had
he chosen to share this with me? Did he now see me as one of his friends? I sensed
some anger in between his words, but I was still troubled by Bon’s apparent emo-
tional detachment.
The death of a child’s family member was quite a common event at the Saint
Joseph Center. Right after his mother’s death, Bon had shaved his head before wear-
ing the orange robe of novices (samanaen). According to Thai Buddhism, sons tem-
porarily ordain as samanaen at the Buddhist temple where the cremation ritual takes
place in order to pay off their karmic debt to parents (Tambiah 1976). At the temple,
samanaen have the opportunity to understand the natural character of death as well
as the concepts of finitude, transience, and the illusory nature of life. They are also
trained to deal with “the unavoidable” through a religious posture of acceptance,
which must be as serene and emotionally detached as possible. Feelings like despair,
signal attachment, and weakness must be neutralized through Buddhist meditation.
The “cultural constructions of childhood” (James and Prout 1997) that shape
western operators’ care-giving models underlie different interpretations of both the
concepts of “childhood” and “children’s suffering.” The emotional pathos produced
by the portrayal of children as victims, and the reference to a western standard
(thought of as universal) of children as vulnerable yet-to-be individuals, lead the
NGO’s farang to a disproportionate emotional response compared with what chil-
dren like Bon are normally exposed to while interacting with Thai adults. The inter-­
affective dynamic between farang and dek salam might indeed qualify as opposite
and antithetical to that proposed by Thai Buddhism. In describing his mother’s
death, Bon seemed anchored to a culturally normative, Buddhist-informed elabora-
tion of his emotional experience. At the same time, he seemed to understand the
“emotional productivity” of the “drama” if played out with a farang.
After he told me about his mother’s tragic death, and after having gained my
worried solicitude during what I thought would be a challenging emotional transi-
tion for him, Bon started to raise demands. Every evening, after curfew, Bon sneaked
out of the children’s dormitory and stealthily reached my room to ask for the key to
the pantry, that I was responsible for. Showing up with a smile—I could not tell if
this was mocking or tender—he used to timidly ask: “I would like to drink a glass
of Ovaltine with you before going to bed. May I?” I was not even able to say no. In
the deserted and unusually quiet courtyard of the Saint Joseph Center, the secret
night rendezvous with Bon became a sort of ritual. During those nights, while we
shared the transgression of being out after curfew and sipped Ovaltine, Bon used to
tell me in even greater detail how difficult his life had been. Without realizing it, I
soon began to favor Bon among the children. He began to ask me for additional tips,
or to accompany him to the market, certain as he was that I would pay for him. An
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 41

oft-requested demand was to use my cell phone to call his aunt. When I finally had
the chance to talk directly with the woman, I discovered that Bon—contrary to what
I had been told by Father Adriano—always lived with her and that he never really
knew his mother. I felt like I was the little kid, not Bon.
Like many other dek salam whose parents come from the North or North-East
rural areas of Thailand, Bon was not placed in a mononuclear family structure, but
was raised by his maternal uncle’s extended family after his mother entrusted him
to his grandmother because of her illness. In the case of Bon, child–mother attach-
ment relationship, theorized by western psychology as the cornerstone of child
development (Bowlby 1988), was not at all the child’s main emotional framework
(Bolotta 2017a). Over time, I understood that, because of our “special” relationship,
Bon had sidestepped a number of rules to be observed by dek salam at the Saint
Joseph Center. I also realized that the other children came to know about it and that,
somehow, Bon’s reputation and social position within the peer group had benefited
from this.

 hildren’s Discomfort? The Emotional Manipulation

C
of Humanitarian Operators

My readiness in reacting to the children’s expression of apparent emotional distress

led me to face a complicated and emotionally challenging situation. Not only Bon,
but also the other Saint Joseph’s guests started to ask for my mediation so that they
could be allowed to circumvent some of the rules prescribed by the Catholic
NGO. They sought my intercession for them to get an extra hour to play football on
Sundays, watch more movies, return to the slums more often to visit their relatives
(if any), and the like. Rather than directly advancing their requests to Thai educa-
tors—the phu-yai (big people)—children had identified me as a farang sensitive to
their needs, emotionally maneuverable, with the ability to influence the Thai staff. I
eventually became a point of contention: children seemed to compete for an exclu-
sive relationship with me. The latter was used to achieve various kinds of social,
economic, and affective objectives.
One afternoon, while playing football in the yard, Bon spectacularly fell to the
ground, scraping his knee. I waited in vain for any educator to intervene. Except in
the case of real emergencies, indeed, male children over 8 years of age were encour-
aged to be autonomous, including self-medication. The infirmary was open and
freely accessible. Instinctively, however, I rushed to his aid. I picked him up and got
him to the infirmary, where I took gauze, ice, and disinfectant to dress the wound.
The other children—who, in the meantime, had also come—were looking at us,
incredulous that a phu-yai could take care of them that way.
Over the next few days, on their way back from school, the Saint Joseph’s dek
salam began to show me the wounds, sometimes very minor, they got due to their
reckless, daring, and fun adventures: “Look phi (elder brother), I got hurt!” They
42 G. Bolotta

knew that I would immediately go to the infirmary, medicate them, and that I would
devote all my time to them. They quickly turned me into a kind of nurse. They inter-
cepted my apprehension and began not only to ridicule my clumsy actions but also
to manipulate my emotional responsiveness as a “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu
1986). This progressively applied to other behavioral categories that the children
understood would elicit my emotional response. For example, while I was present
and Thai educators were not, some children began to simulate fights. Thai educators
normally left the kids to resolve their conflicts by themselves. Not me, still affected
by an unwitting interventionist instance. Ton, a 16-year-old boy, began to stage the
following script: he called me while laughing at me, and then he pounced with kicks
and punches on a younger child. Both knew that I would get upset and stop them.
As soon as this happened, the boy and his alleged victims, cracked up in seeing how
the maneuver had succeeded in dragging me into their field of action.
While children relate to Thai phu-yai, the expression of negative emotions and
content is normally considered unbecoming. In today’s militarized Thailand, dem-
onstrations of emotional vulnerability are also discouraged by a dominant construc-
tion of male identity that promotes in boys the assumption of warrior-like and
soldierly gendered traits (Bolotta 2016). In spite of this, still convinced that it was
essential to enable traumatized children the opportunity to express negative emo-
tions in the context of a positive relationship with an adult, I was treating every sign
of discomfort with the utmost seriousness. Especially at the beginning of my experi-
ence at the Saint Joseph Center, I used to call aside the seemingly sad children,
trying to get them to talk. In response to this, the children were often simulating
crying, reminding me of their status as poor dek salam in need of help.
Also in terms of body language, while in the relationship between children and
Thai educators, respect and mutual affection were expressed through relational
emotional codes that did not involve physical contact (at least at the Saint Joseph
Center, where the boys’ starting age is 8 years), western volunteers used to fondly
hug and touch dek salam, even though they were 17-year-old boys. Bon and the oth-
ers seemed to understand how effective it was to accompany various requests with
emotional attitudes of this type in their interactions with me and the other farang.
Aware of my influence on the directors of the NGO, the children turned me into
their mediator, a spokesperson of their concerns and desires.
Although in the slums—as I had the opportunity to learn later, when I carried out
my fieldwork in the shantytown from which the majority of Saint Joseph’s guests
were coming—the children appeared to be everything but “children” or “victims”
(in the standard sense of the terms), in relationships with the representatives of
humanitarian reasoning, the dek salam seemed to articulate their agency through the
strategic adherence to the emotional characterization of themselves as “vulnerable
children” or “victims.”9 The adoption of these images was realized through the

9
The political value of western discourses on ‘victimized’ children have been recently documented
by several anthropologists in different contexts of the Global South: see, for example, the works by
Vignato (2012) in Indonesia, Cheney (2013) in Uganda, and myself (2017a, b) in Thailand. These
studies show how such discourses, and the correlated image of children as “victims,” could be
strategically used and appropriated by the subjects of humanitarian policies.
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 43

deployment of a “language of suffering” which was made up of emotionally

connoted body and narrative performances and aimed at the emotional manipula-
tion of farang humanitarian operators.

 eyond Moral and Emotional Economies of Victimized

B
Children

Emotional narratives do not simply reveal an alleged sentiment but have a pragmatic
effect: they produce a reaction (Beatty 2005, p. 25, as cited in Stodulka 2015, p. 87).
This is exactly what happened during my ethnographic encounters with the dek
salam of Bangkok.
I would like to highlight a few important points in this regard. In order to produce
specific emotional experiences in humanitarian operators, the Saint Joseph’s chil-
dren must have preliminarily identified a number of things: first, the NGOs social
workers’ emotional categories (which refer to different cultural norms than those
prevailing locally); second, the inter-subjective, situational, and pragmatic character
of these emotions (they must, for example, have realized that if Italians meet crying
kids, they will be normally induced to offer some kind of solidarity); and third, the
relationship between the humanitarian conceptions of dek salam, victim, and the
farang’s care-giving models. This is an emotional and cultural learning process
children go through due to the continuous interactions with the many social workers
who frequent the slums as actors on the humanitarian cosmopolitan stage. The com-
plexity of these children’s emotional understanding evidently destabilizes NGOs
workers’ normative representation of “the child” as a vulnerable, passive, and
socially low-skilled subject.
Children must also have embodied these culturally shaped inter-affective sche-
mas in order to be able to “performatively” (Butler 1990) reproduce a certain emo-
tional experience, say sadness, in a culturally convincing way. In other words, if
they want to provoke the empathic response a desperate kid is able to stimulate in
farang, they must be able to mimic the bodily and verbal expression of childhood
desperation farang are averagely used to in their own cultural contexts. Very often,
the children’s performance is intentional and designed to produce the appropriate
and complementary emotional response: NGOs social workers’ compassion and
willingness to intercede on specific requests.
Thomas Stodulka (2015) analyzed researcher–children inter-affective interac-
tions similar to those just described. In relationships with the actors of Java’s
humanitarian landscape (activists, researchers, NGOs workers, etc.), “street chil-
dren” used to tell morally and emotionally overloaded dramatic stories like those
related, for example, to a parent’s death or serious illness. Making strategic use of
these accounts, the youth of his study hopelessly begged for money only to then
prove to be anything but desperate in vernacular social contexts. Stodulka described
his research’s protagonists’ ability to turn their marginality into emotional and
44 G. Bolotta

economic ties with humanitarian operators as an “emotional economy” (Stodulka

2014, 2015). Indeed, by linking their emotional expressions to the ideological con-
text of the meeting, the young men were able to expand their social networks and
convert them into “social and economic capital” (Bourdieu 1986). This is similar to
what I observed in the slums of Bangkok where, in many cases, dek salam could
access NGOs’ resources, also thanks to their ability to produce emotionally well-­
orchestrated performances. As Stodulka explained, the young men’s strategies to
present themselves according to the image of victim, and to focus on the expression
of emotions related to suffering, did not merely represent the outcome of individual
subjective choices. On the contrary, the fact that many dek salam selectively exhib-
ited certain emotional patterns in their interactions with farang shows that such
strategies constituted a collectively learned survival strategy and embodied socio-­
cultural fact. At the same time, if for children, farang working in aid institutions
such as the Saint Joseph Center represent an affective and relational reservoir that
can be turned into social and economic capital, dek salam constitute a humanitarian
capital for farang, too. In this regard, I believe it is important to complement
Stodulka’s fine analysis of marginalized children’s and NGOs workers’ interrelated
emotional economies, making clear that these are both connected and informed by
a political transnational superstructure, namely the humanitarian moral economy of
childhood.
Humanitarian discourses and practices provide a propitious framework with
which to examine how the entire transnational “industrial chains of charity” list
categories of “disadvantaged children” to direct global resource flows. NGOs, in
particular, continue to reify and commodify images of “children in need” in order
to stage “a spectacle of suffering” (Boltansky 1993) that is essential for raising
funds and donations. The depiction of children as victims to be saved is thus at the
center of a “moral economy” (Fassin 2013) which is one of the main contemporary
vectors for post-colonial compassionate governmentality to penetrate the cracks of
the world’s internal and external peripheries. By sticking to the humanitarian cat-
egories they are exposed to, victimized children, for their part, unconsciously per-
petuate the need for humanitarian interventions, thus revealing the complementary
nature of the relationship between local emotional economies and transnational
moral economies.
In many cases, while aid workers experience their compassionate emotions as
“internal” and “natural” subjective facts, there is no awareness of the historical,
cultural, political, and economic characterization of the humanitarian scaffolding on
which these emotions are structurally embedded. An ethnographic approach, which
seriously considers the researcher’s affects as epistemic data, is the prerequisite for
the emergence of such an awareness and for avoiding ethnocentric distortions of
subjects categorized as victims in humanitarian contexts.
Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children… 45

Conclusions

In this chapter, I discussed the role of emotions as a valuable source of insight dur-
ing ethnography. I argued that an ethnographical approach grounded on the anthro-
pologist’s “emotional reflexivity” (Davies 2010; Stodulka 2015) is especially
necessary in contexts of humanitarian action, where the languages of suffering and
compassion constitute a dominant ethos, emotions are public vectors of post-­
colonial geo-politics, and where victimization processes produce psychologized
and depoliticized portraits of local social actors.
In my research with children living in the slums of Bangkok, I demonstrated the
role of “humanitarian emotions” in shaping affective interactions between compas-
sionate social workers and victimized slum children. I showed that this emotional
exchange responds to a broader set of cultural values, political-economic practices,
and scientific discourses, including psychology. Using emotions as a lens to reflect
upon my positionality, I gradually realized that my behavior towards the children,
like that of the other volunteers, was similarly molded by the humanitarian compas-
sionate ethos. This emotional self-understanding lays at the origin of my decision to
remove the vestments of an NGO psychologist and to wear those of an anthropolo-
gist no longer interested in saving slum children but strongly motivated to share
their socio-cultural experiences.
One final point should be made about my affective relationship with the children.
After 8 years of knowing each other, our emotional interactions are not interpretable
anymore only as the top-down effects of humanitarianism. Over the years, the chil-
dren and I co-created idiosyncratic relational patterns of interaction. Indeed, emo-
tions are central in determining an intrinsic (but often neglected) dimension of the
ethnographical experience: the construction of intimate, close, sometimes even life-
long relationships with local social actors, too often erroneously intellectually
packed into emotionally neutral classical constructs (informants, natives, etc.).
Today, the children do not relate to me in the same manner as the first time we met.
They now know their emotional strategies will not work on me. Of course, I have
not achieved the anthropological utopia of becoming “one of them” but, certainly, I
am no longer a farang psychologist looking at dek salam as though they were trau-
matized Italian kids. Conversely, the children do not see me as a Thai adult, nor do
they think of me anymore as a farang of the humanitarian arena. Our relationship
today is a singularity, a breakthrough, a discontinuity, something that was previ-
ously missing and is hardly definable. Our affective bond might be seen as an
“event,” in the Foucauldian meaning of the term, namely “the collapse of a specific
power (…) the refunctionalization of a language and its use against previous speak-
ers” (Caruso 1969). The power of the compassionate ethos and the language of
suffering have lost their strength, and are not anymore the main codes of organiza-
tion of our affective interactions.
The collapse of a specific power, at the same time, inevitably favors the emer-
gence of new power configurations. The ethnographer and local social actors con-
tinue to struggle to impose social roles and cultural categories on each other. As
46 G. Bolotta

Jackson (1998, p. 8) reminds us, “intersubjectivity is stepped in paradox and ambi-

guity (…) a site of constructive, destructive and reconstructive interaction.”
“Compassion and conflict are complementary poles of intersubjectivity, the first
affirming identity, the second confirming difference” (ibid., p. 4). I am not anymore
the “average farang,” but—in the eyes of local social actors—I am still a white
European man, representative of a richer world, holder of vastly greater cultural,
economic, and political resources and capital compared to poor children living in a
Thai shantytown. Yet, the prolonged sharing of experience, thoughts, and emotions
with children created slowly, but progressively, a strange and intense relationship
which transcended the initial reciprocal enactment of “humanitarian emotional
behaviors,” and turned into a new emotional pattern, a “third inter-subjective space,”
from which both myself and the children have the opportunity to observe compara-
tively, and reformulate critically, the cultural specificity of ourselves.

Acknowledgments I owe special thanks to the protagonists of this chapter, the children I’ve been
doing research with in the slums of Bangkok. Being a (participant) witness to their life trajectories
is a tremendous privilege. I would like to thank the section editors of this volume for their thought-
ful suggestions and comments during the composition and revision of this chapter. Finally, I would
like to thank the editors of this volume Thomas Stodulka, Ferdi Thajib, and Samia Dinkelaker for
their invaluable insights and editorial dedication to the project.

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Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic
Understanding: A Collaborative Research
Project in a Women’s Shelter

Marina Della Rocca

Fieldwork remains at the heart of anthropological research. (Spencer 2010, p. 1)

Introduction

In 2014, I commenced an ethnographic research project as part of the PhD program

in Social Pedagogy at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. The research
concerns the analysis of advocacy practices employed by a shelter for women who
have suffered domestic violence, a shelter where I worked from 2010 to 2014, and
where I am still an active member and volunteer. The shelter, operated by a wom-
en’s association, is located in northern Italy, and offers counseling, legal advocacy
and a secure safe house for victims and their children. The shelter collaborates with
the local social services, the police and the court to ensure the protection of women
clients and their children.
During an early phase of the research process, I was overwhelmed by a range of
emotions, and soon came to recognize “how certain emotions evoked during field-
work can be used to inform how we understand the situations, people, communities,
and interactions comprising the life-worlds we enter” (Davies 2010, p. 9). In ques-
tioning these personal emotional experiences, I will focus on the shift in my role as
a women’s shelter operator to that of an anthropologist researcher, and thereby
reveal two aspects of the research process. The first concerns my relationship with
my former colleagues, an aspect dealt with primarily in the first part of the research
process. The second concerns my relationship with the eight migrant women who I
interviewed, all of whom had previously sought support from the women’s shelter.
With this objective in mind, I will try to answer the five questions formulated by
anthropologists Dimitrina Spencer, who aims to highlight the relevance of emotions

M. Della Rocca (*)

Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 49

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_5
50 M. Della Rocca

as a way of knowing: “How do our emotional experiences, attachments and detach-

ments affect the anthropologist as both person and researcher?—How do we cope
with them, integrate them, and employ them as methods for deeper ­understanding?—
How do emotions influence our participant observation, and our wider interpretative
and explanatory enterprise?—How do we reconcile the emotional and the subjec-
tive with our scientific goals, and what are the consequences of such integrations of
anthropology?—Are all of the above issues relevant to the training of anthropolo-
gists?” (Spencer 2010, p. 2–3).

Research Topic and Methodology

During my work experience as a women’s shelter operator, I had observed a set of

structural obstacles hindering the empowerment of women with a migration back-
ground. Many studies reveal the specific vulnerability of migrant women suffering
domestic violence, referring specifically to the intersection between gender, race,
and class (Crenshaw 1991; Farmer 2009). Referring to the analysis of the Italian
situation, where migrant women frequently face a set of linguistic, legal, institu-
tional, and economic barriers (Creazzo et al. 2011), I was able to identify a range of
specific structural difficulties. Firstly, the impact of Italian migration laws on family
reunification and residence permits, whereby women who have obtained a brief-­
term permit for family reunification risk being classified as illegal immigrants while
seeking legal separation from their husbands, a situation often leading them to
return to their violent partners due to a fear of deportation. Other serious and fre-
quent problems relate to the economic marginality of migrant women, due in part to
their isolation (caused by their domestic violence situations), the linguistic barriers
they experience when separated from their families and communities, and the inevi-
table and often unrelenting racism they confront when searching for a job or an
apartment. My research critically investigated the shelter’s advocacy work in order
to identify the extent to which the shelter operators’ practices reproduced these
examples of structural violence. The research developed within three specific ways.
The first concerned the involvement of five shelter operators who participated in a
series of meetings where they reflected on support practices. The second focused on
my immersion in the field as a volunteer in the safe house, where I undertook my
participant observations. The final phase of research concerned the collection of 14
interviews undertaken with eight migrant women who lived in the safe house, and
which gathered their points of view about the support they received. The ethno-
graphic analysis of my research was based on the triangulation of these different
perspectives. In order to ensure that the research process was collaborative, the shel-
ter operators were involved at each stage of the project. The inclusion of the opera-
tors provided an opportunity to obtain a shared perspective on the nature of the
power dynamics inherent in the shelter’s advocacy practices, and then to review
both the power dynamics and the shelter’s political agenda in the context of struc-
tural violence affecting migrant women. This transformative goal responds to the
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 51

feminist activist approach of the research project in its aim to analyze power dynam-
ics within social structures and to foster social justice (Kirby et al. 2006). The inclu-
sion of the shelter operators also addressed my commitment to them by ensuring
they were provided with opportunities to review the findings, give feedback (Snyder
2002, p. 78), and discuss the potential risks related to the dissemination of my criti-
cal analysis (Madison 2012, p. 132).1

 hifting Positionalities: Emotions that Affect

S
the Anthropologist

As mentioned above, the coexistence of my different roles as a former operator and

as a current researcher contributed to a plethora of emotional experiences, begin-
ning at the time I returned as a volunteer to the shelter (and its annexed safe house)
to commence my participant observations.
From the time I asked my former colleagues if it was possible for me to return as
a volunteer in the night-service, it was apparent that my positionality in that space
had changed, a space that must be understood in both physical and relational terms.
As a shelter operator, I had previously moved within the safe house with an air of
familiarity, and had shared common practices and struggles with the operators who
became my research partners. Having failed to reflect in advance on the conse-
quences of this role shift in my relationships with former colleagues, I took for
granted the fact that they would agree to my returning as a volunteer. In my field
diary, I noted my disappointment that the opposite had in fact happened, and that
they had been required to evaluate my request according to formal shelter
procedures.
She [an operator] told me that she had to talk with those responsible for planning the vol-
unteer night-service. Firstly, she would report my request at the operators’ meeting, and
then, I would be informed of their response. After our phone conversation, I felt a certain
degree of distance between us, and a sense of being excluded. (Field notes, 20 January
2015)

At that moment I realized, with astonishment, that I was being addressed not as a
shelter colleague, but as an ordinary member of the public. I was extremely upset,
and shocked. The following day, one of the operators called me to respond to my
request. I recognized her awkwardness, and asked myself whether my former col-
leagues had perceived me as a threat. I was immediately aware that my role had
changed. Part of my identity had been compromised, and with that came feelings of
doubt and uncertainty. I felt “I was moving within myself (…) from a known

1
Other ethical aspects concerned the ways in which the research could affect the women interview-
ees. Through a process of informed consent, I guaranteed anonymity and confidentiality, and
thanks to my professional expertise as a shelter operator, I paid particular attention to the emo-
tional risks to women who had lived through a traumatic experience such as domestic violence
(Ellsberg and Heise, 2005, p. 38–40).
52 M. Della Rocca

cultural space (home) into this unfamiliar terrain” (Davies 2010, p. 74), and I no
longer knew how to interact within that space, a space that had previously shaped
my professional identity and a space that was now redefining it.
The operators finally accepted my request, but a number of issues were of out-
standing concern to them. How would I deal with my role as researcher while
obtaining data during my volunteer service, and in which ways would my research
role potentially compromise my role as a volunteer? How would I manage delicate
information concerning the safety of the women and the operators? Should formal
procedures be followed as to how specific information would be managed, given the
potential conflict between my roles as researcher and as a shelter member? In my
field diary, I reported my surprise at the operators’ concerns. I thought it was obvi-
ous that, as a former operator, I would be capable of managing those issues properly
while being “inside” as a researcher. Nevertheless, what did my personal under-
standing of “properly” actually mean to my former colleagues?

 motions as a Method for Deeper Ethnographic

E
Understanding

Recognizing that I had been disorientated by their response, one of the operators
pointed out that their questioning was not a personal matter. When I subsequently
reflected on her statement, I realized that my feelings of exclusion were naive. By
re-entering the research field as an anthropologist, and not as a shelter colleague, the
dynamics of our interactions would necessarily change. The shelter operators were
obliged to consider that in accepting me into the safe house as a researcher, they
were responsible for the women they were supporting, as well as guaranteeing trust
and transparency about their supportive roles. At the same time, it was essential to
me that I continued to highlight critical concerns about the shelter’s practices with-
out betraying the trust of my former colleagues. These reflections led me to under-
stand why it was essential that my position as researcher be clarified in ways that
emphasized my ethical commitment to the shelter, the operators and the women
seeking their support. I then proposed that we should jointly define both the terms
of my access to the shelter, and possible ways to manage the ethical issues that
might emerge due to the coexistence of my different roles as former operator,
researcher, and volunteer. We then committed to being transparent with each other
about any other unforeseen issues that might be associated with my ethnographic
investigation. This specific field experience made clear to me the extent to which
this immersion concerned my pre-existent professional relationships, and how “the
field comprises past and future affective relations which become alive and coalesce
in the present” (Spencer 2010, p. 28). Negotiating our roles and tasks within the
research field, and engaging ourselves in building a trusting relationship between
each other, all of us (the operators and I) had to deal with the difficult task of render-
ing unfamiliar that which in our former professional relationship had been familiar
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 53

(Crapanzano 2010, p. 65). This awareness made it essential for us to engage in a

collaborative research process, and to recognize the genuine commitment required
in this process.
Taking seriously the human relationships that give rise to collaborative processes means
that we also take seriously the ethical and moral commitments we make to ourselves and
others as our ethnographic projects unfold. (Campbell and Lassiter 2015, p. 5–6)

Positionality Attunements, and Analytical Awareness

Taking seriously the uncertainty and disorientation that had resulted from my inter-
actions and engagement in the field, I was able to comprehend the methodological
and ethical dimensions required to deal with the multiple positionalities at stake in
that research. The operators’ response to my request for access to the shelter dem-
onstrated the extent of the professional and political commitment of its operators to
ensure safety and anonymity for the women they support, and thereby upholding
one of the most important political principles underpinning their advocacy work.
When a woman turns to the women’s shelter, the operators immediately attempt to
build a trusting relationship with her to ensure that the woman feels that she is in a
safe space, can be understood without feeling threatened, and where she can finally
give voice to the oppression she experienced at the hand of her abuser. This repre-
sents the basis of the advocacy work of the shelter and is where I had grounded the
expertise to enter my specific ethnographic field. Nevertheless, the unexpected
nature of the relational process (mediated by emotions) of re-entering the field
(Spencer 2010, p. 2) had forced me to expose the implicit assumption of the women
shelter’s support activities, and accentuate the taken for granted in my embedded
practices. Referring to the first question raised by Spencer, my emotional experi-
ences in the field affected me as both person and anthropologist, because those
experiences were the result of the indissoluble tie between me as person and me as
researcher. By engaging myself in the process of re-entering the field, trying to
define my own roles and unveiling my embedded practices, it was clear that I had
experienced what anthropologist Mascarenhas-Keyes defines as “schizophrenia
between the ‘native self’ and the ‘professional self’” (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1987,
p. 180).
Although I am researching at home and not in an-other space, in an-other country, I feel that
my immersion in the field became invasive. I am elsewhere at my home, experiencing the
tension between being inside and outside together. But, being at home, this elsewhere
doesn’t allow me to define its boundaries, and requires time and energy from my daily life,
making me feel in a condition of apnea, which challenges me personally, the ways I per-
ceive myself and in my everyday life. (Field notes, 24. March 2016)

In terms of a response to the second question proposed by Spencer and Davies con-
cerning the ways that emotional experiences can lead to a deeper field understand-
ing, I am convinced that my re-entry into the field as an anthropological
researcher—and the immediate impact of this on the perspectives of both the
54 M. Della Rocca

operators and myself—provided fresh insights and new motivation to challenge the
taken for granted. This included a deeper understanding of the collaborative method
and the relational engagement that is required to enable people not only to work
together, but to generate a process that enables different points of view to emerge,
and in doing so, “strengthen[s] the project rather than weaken[ing] it” (Campbell
and Lassiter 2015, p. 21–23). This awareness was confirmed during another point of
collaboration with the operators. After 12 months of research, I shared with them
the contents of an article I had intended to submit to an academic journal. The arti-
cle focused on specific and critical aspects of the shelter’s practices. The operators
immediately expressed fears about its potential publication, pointing out:
(…) Reading what you wrote, these few lines where you put the focus on the critical
aspects… (…) I personally think that I was aware about them, and I tried to act against
those aspects, but then you can’t do it, (…) You know, to read these few phrases on the
critiques, without speaking about all the discomforts that I felt… (Meeting of 03 February
2016).

The operators claimed that I did not adequately describe the complexity of the situ-
ational context, nor the social and institutional dynamics in which they are embed-
ded. This, in their view, would have led to misinterpretations about their advocacy
practices. After a challenging discussion, I decided not to submit the paper. Some
operators were surprised by this decision. They were sorry, and feared that I had
taken this decision in order to protect my personal relationship with them. They
were afraid that this decision would damage my research outcomes, and myself, and
that this would also compromise our friendship. This, in effect, had forced them to
reflect on their own power in influencing my activities as a researcher, and as one of
them had pointed out:
Who of us [the operators] has the right to say which critiques will be acceptable, and which
not? Who decides it? Isn’t she, as researcher, the one who should have this authority?
(Meeting of 01 March 2016).

These episodes made us all aware of the difficulties related to the overlap of differ-
ent kinds of relationships, many of which had been mirrored by emotions surfacing
during my research process. This led us to engage into constant dialogue, with the
operators realizing subsequently that exposure of the critical analysis to the public
was not a disadvantage, but instead a potential stimulus for other women shelters to
reflect on their own practices.

Affective Encounters with Migrant Women

During the development of my process to collaborate with the shelter operators, I

contacted a number of migrant women who had lived in the safe house for three to
9 months and asked them to participate in this research project. Eight of the women
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 55

accepted. With the exception of one woman,2 I decided to involve only those who I
had not personally supported in my previous role as a shelter operator so as to make
it easier for them to express their criticisms about shelter practices.
The trusting relationship built between shelter operators and women suffering
domestic violence is based on specific feminist principles. Of most importance is
the principle relationship among women, which focuses on gender solidarity and is
similar to that found within a “mother/daughter’ relationship where “one woman
gives her trust or entrusts herself symbolically to another woman, who thus becomes
her guide, mentor or point of reference” (Plesset 2006, p. 100). This concept implies
that the operator comes to understand the woman’s point of view in order to support
her according to the woman’s own wishes and needs, a process that requires active
listening and reciprocity within the relationship. I had started working at the shelter
after I had completed my Master’s degree in anthropology, and I soon became aware
that my previous fieldwork experiences had instilled in me an ability to listen
empathically, and to understand women’s perspectives on their own experiences.
However, the relationship between an operator and a woman assumes its sense
within the framed space of the shelter, which in itself provides specific professional
coordinates through the support provided, eventually leading to various interven-
tions in a woman’s situation. Supporting women who have experienced violence
produces a high degree of emotional distress. However, shelter operators have the
opportunity to share their distress with their colleagues, and to draw on specific
professional instruments, such as psychological supervision, to help manage that
pressure. When I decided to re-contact some migrant women, I relied on the know
how formed during my previous work experience, which allowed me to talk openly
about the women’s experiences of violence, and which included specific knowledge
about the dynamics of domestic violence, the shelter’s practices, and the difficulties
that migrant women frequently face when they escape from their abusers. In my
meetings with them, I became conscious of their ongoing legal, linguistic and eco-
nomic difficulties. The fear of being deported from Italy and the difficulty in obtain-
ing work remained the greatest concern for many of them. In particular, the women
facing legal barriers constantly expressed feelings of dire uncertainty about their
situation. They claimed that they did not receive clear responses concerning these
issues, and felt that they were living in a legal limbo, making it impossible for them
to plan for their lives and those of their children.
I feel this situation like a torture…the situation is not clear. The last time I was in the police
station, in the city where I lived before, they [the officers] told me that I would not obtain a
residence permit—There are a lot of problems—“You don’t have work, you won’t pay the
taxes, so it will be very hard for you”—After that I thought I go back to my land, or to my
husband (…) Here, they told me that they will find any solution. But, I don’t know if I will
obtain a permit for 6 months, for 1 year (…) (Interview with a shelter tenant, 2015).

When I asked one of the women why she did not explain to the social assistant the
legal problems she was encountering with her residence permit, she replied that she

2
I supported this woman during my work experience at the women shelter and afterwards she
expressed her willingness to participate in the research.
56 M. Della Rocca

was afraid that her legal difficulties would compromise her right to retain the finan-
cial support that she was already receiving from the social services.
Another issue affecting the women is the precariousness of their economic situ-
ations. Some of them are unemployed, and others must rely on limited incomes that
are insufficient for them and their children.
I didn’t find, really, I didn’t find (…).because I don’t know people, and places, to which I
can ask for work (…) I had a lot of difficulties. A lot! A lot! Furthermore, to get work I need
experience, but how can I get experience if no one gives me a work? (Interview with a
shelter tenant, 2015).

In my field diary, I reported the emotional distress I had experienced when witness-
ing the woman’s desperation:
I feel sad witnessing how much most of the women who I have contacted for the interview
are upset, tired, overcome, lonely, exhausted. (…) How much force must they still demon-
strate? How much force will they need again? Am I angry? Yes, I am! How could I not
become angry against the world and the reality that oppresses them? They can never count
on a life full of positive things! Haven’t they suffered too much pain? (Field notes, 15 June
2016)

All the women interviewed reported that in the shelter they had received specific
and relevant resources for their empowerment. They were often led to believe that
their lives might finally change for the better, and were hopeful that they would be
able to provide futures for themselves and their children. However, the structural
violence that had made them vulnerable to domestic violence in the first place still
existed, and sometimes those barriers became even harder to negotiate and
manage.

(An Attempt at) Making Sense of Affective Encounters

As well as my anger about the consequences of structural violence for these women,
my engagement in an informal relationship with them (in the sense of not being
shaped by the shelter’s practices framework) generated many doubts as to how, in
this new role as anthropologist, I should manage and process the information gath-
ered from them. As a researcher, I needed to obtain ethnographic data, but at the
same time, I needed to respect the confidentiality of that information. As a former
operator, I recognized the risks that some of these women were still facing, includ-
ing, in some cases, the continuing abuse and threats of the abuser, or, as mentioned
above, the ongoing difficulties associated with the consequences of domestic and
structural violence. I then asked myself how I should deal with this information in
an ethical sense. What do these women now expect from me? How should I deal
with my role as researcher, which requires me to not intervene in these situations, or
my embedded experience as a women’s shelter operator where, on the contrary, I
would usually be prompted to intervene on their behalf? This set of questions led me
to an emotional crisis:
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 57

Last night I did not sleep well. I was nervous. I feel overwhelmed by the problems of the
women I interviewed, because I would like to do something for each of them. However, I
ask myself if I am managing the task of building reciprocity between us. Not only with
respect to my ethical principles as a researcher, but also with respect to my principles as an
activist, which don’t let me stay still and just listen to them, but, on the contrary, push me to
consider any possible solutions to their difficulties. Sometimes, to manage the extent of the
problems which oppress these women (and these seem to be a huge tangle of difficulties
and problems), and the obligation which lead me to give them at least a possible response
(even a little one to each of them) are impeding my ability to research in a calm way, and
with peace of mind. Furthermore, I cannot talk with anybody about that. Much less with my
former colleagues, because of the anonymity of the women. However, they are actually the
ones who could better understand my worries. Am I able to manage all this? Am I exceed-
ing my limits, risking giving too much and finally dropping my commitment to them, disap-
pointing the women and leaving them alone again? Is it ethical, this approach? (Field notes,
21 July 2016).

In my previous work as a shelter operator, I had been immersed in the traumatic

experiences of women victims on a daily basis, but was also supported profession-
ally and emotionally by my colleagues and supervisors. The shift in my role from
the formal and professional context to a more informal one, where as an anthropolo-
gist I attempted to be a close as possible to the interlocutors’ world, was associated
with new feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty. In this new role, I was exposed
directly to the women’s suffering and trauma without the professional and emo-
tional support that had previously been available, and I felt overwhelmed. I asked
myself how I should deal with this, and after analyzing my field notes and intersect-
ing those with narratives of the women who had been interviewed, I recognized the
ethnographic content of these emotions. This content related to women’s need to
talk to someone who would actively listen to them, and be capable of understanding
their troubles and needs. During this research process, it became increasingly evi-
dent that the women were not able to rely on the social and institutional network that
was meant to support them, and oftentimes this network only added to their feelings
of loneliness and disorientation. “I’m sorry, I know that I am stressing you, but I
vent my problems with you because I need someone that can understand me and
who I can trust”, became a constant outpouring from one of the women interviewed.
Notwithstanding the variety of strategies adopted by migrant women to overcome
the violence they have experienced, it is their “immigration status, or lack of citizen-
ship, (that) continue(s) to be a major cause of unequal access to justice and protec-
tion” (Humphreys et al. 2006 as cited in Thiara et al. 2011, p. 21):
I was at the office where legal information is provided to migrants, but I didn’t get any
response, and I said to the social assistant that I don’t know where I should turn. And she
told me I have to go to the Chief of Police Office and that she would call me back in 2 days.
But now a month has passed, and she still hasn’t called. (Interview with a shelter tenant,
2016).

Yes, I know, you can get a little support here, but for me the situation is not good, because
nobody helps me. If my friend hadn’t helped me with my children, what would I have done?
Would I have worked? No! It wouldn’t have been possible! (Interview with a shelter tenant,
2016).
58 M. Della Rocca

Analyzing his emotional experiences in the field following his interactions with
street-related adolescents in Indonesia, anthropologist Thomas Stodulka underlines
how his “unprofessional, emotional dilettantism in the field brought [him] to unex-
pected knowledge” (Stodulka 2014, p. 198), and made him reflect on his positional-
ity. Through the analysis of his affective relationships with interlocutors, he
recognized the opportunistic stance in the ways in which they related themselves to
him, realizing that, in fact, this was unavoidably linked to his own activist commit-
ment in the field (ibid.). As evidenced by the experience of Stodulka, my feeling of
being overwhelmed by the women’s narratives and their articulated needs was
strictly related to my positionality. It was related to the shift in my role as a shelter
operator to that of an anthropologist, and also to my stance as an activist working to
remove the structural barriers that affect women. This is a personal commitment
that I made clear to the women from the outset of the research. As Spencer high-
lights, referring to anthropologist Svašek’s reflections about fieldwork:
(…) seeing emotions as discourses, practices and embodied experiences (…) uncovers the
intersubjectivity of field relations as a complex intermingling of past, present and future
desires, memories, imagination and expectations.(…) our filed emotions may be the result
of clinging to particular ideas, habitus, or preferences predating fieldwork, but stirred by it.
(Spencer 2010, p. 28)

In addition, the ethnographic relevance of this emotional experience lies in the simi-
larity of my feelings with those of the shelter’s operators. When I was working at the
shelter, my colleagues and I frequently experienced the ambiguities and contradic-
tions of the local supportive systems. This experience produced feelings of frustra-
tion and helplessness for the workers, and for me often resulted in anger, as
documented in my field notes concerning the specific situation of a woman whom I
had supported in the last months I worked at the shelter:
I feel repeatedly frustrated. My feelings (…) come from my anger towards a racist, unjust,
sexist world. (…) And you are looking at all these, and you have to do something, and you
do it, but sometimes you fail, because you feel helpless and you feel that there is nothing to
do. (…) As if the problems concerning the women’s residency permit, language difficulties
and unemployment were not enough! (Field notes, 01 April 2015)

In fact, frustration, fear, impotence, indignation, tiredness, anxiety, and pain com-
prise the set of feelings that the operators expressed during a joint supervision when
they reflected on my research issue. The shift in my positionality had brought me
closer to daily life of these women, and the ongoing structural oppression that they
must deal with daily. It also highlighted the loneliness and isolation experienced by
women victims of violence, all of which highlight the contradictions of the support
system’s goals.
It became clear to me that the analysis of this specific experience highlights that
emotions cannot be considered as a mere subjective experience but must be treated
as social facts (Stodulka 2014, p. 199) that speak about the interlocutors’ reality.
Reflecting systematically on the lived experience of fieldwork relations may
play an important role in understanding the dynamics of power in the field and,
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 59

in particular, the living embodiment of local and global power hierarchies

(Spencer 2010, p. 17).
The ethnographic understanding that I obtained from this specific experience
responds to Spencer’s third question concerning the influence of emotions on partici-
pant observation, and the wider interpretative enterprise of the fieldwork. Firstly, my
emotional experiences highlight how positionality represents a red thread between the
implications of my research encounters with the women and with those of my former
colleagues. Secondly, by treating these experiences as social facts, I was able to obtain
a wider understanding of the structural difficulties affecting the migrant women whom
I interviewed, even after they had left the safe house. I have now recognized that my
multiple identities and related affective dispositions and involvements in the field
were simultaneously subjective and scientifically relevant (Stodulka 2014).

Emotion, Self-Reflexivity, and Theory

The experiences described above address the issue posed by Spencer and Davies
concerning the relationship between emotions, subjectivity and scientific goals. The
subjective dimension of the research process emerged from my relationships in the
field, and constantly molded, reinforced and subverted my emotional experiences
that in turn became scientifically relevant in shaping the methodology of my ethno-
graphic inquiry. These experiences led me to commit myself to an ongoing reflec-
tive process concerning my relationships with the operators who made me challenge
my taken for granted, engaging in a collaborative process, and with the interviewed
women, who made me aware of their ongoing structural difficulties.
Emotions, (…) are ways in which we engage actively and even construct the world. They
have both “mental’ and “physical’ aspects, each of which conditions the other; in some
respects they are chosen but in others they are involuntary; they presuppose language and a
social order. Thus, they can be attributed only to what are sometimes called “whole per-
sons’, engaged in the on-going activity of social life. (Jaggar 1989, p. 159)

During her research project in Vietnam, the Vietnamese anthropologist Nguyen

(2007) analyzed her relationship with Phurong, a Vietnamese female interlocutor.
Starting from her position as a native anthropologist, Nguyen Thu Huong pointed
out that while conducting research in domestic settings can provide a sense of famil-
iarity and comfort, it is also imbued with its own set of challenging experiences,
which, in her case, was a range of unexpected emotions generated through her rela-
tionship with Phurong. Analyzing those feelings, Nguyen Thu Huong became aware
of the ambiguity of her positionality, whereby the cultural proximity with her inter-
locutor had led her to develop personal prejudices concerning Phurong’s attitudes,
and on the opposite spectrum had fuelled a sense of responsibility aligned with the
feeling that “there was more than just an encounter between a researcher and her
informant. It seemed as if there was a sisterly bond between Phurong and me” (ibid.,
p. 34). This highlighted the relevance of reflecting on the anthropologist’s own
60 M. Della Rocca

biography and subjectivity, and as an ethical act generated by a sense of responsibil-

ity for the other’s life because “it is important to explore how this subjectivity comes
into play in the dialogical relationship between the researcher and the people being
studied” (ibid., p. 31). Nguyen Thu Huong’s experience leads again to Stodulka’s
perspective, as mentioned above, which concerns the scientific relevance of the
emotions in the field as social facts. This is a perspective that mirrors my own expe-
riences with interlocutors, and also answers Spencer’s fifth question by confirming
that the ethnographic analysis of emotions is in fact relevant to the training of an
anthropologist. And this is due precisely to the ethnographer’s emotional vulnera-
bility, which enables “compelling analyses of particular local worlds” (Smith and
Kleinman 2010, p. 185).

Conclusion

In the evolution of my research, the consideration of emotional experiences as being

ethnographically relevant does, as Spencer and Davies suggest, respond to empiri-
cal affect montage generated by the practice-oriented self-reflexive approach
(Stodulka et al. 2019) adopted in my research. This perspective is mirrored by the
ongoing documentation of my early interactions in the field, where my feelings and
reactions became a relevant part of my field notes. This ongoing documentation and
analysis allowed me to reflect systematically about my emotional experiences, lend-
ing them empirical robustness while at the same time generating a complementary
set of ethnographic data (ibid, p. 10). Furthermore, focusing part of my reflections
on my emotions highlighted my ethical commitment as a researcher, and provided
greater transparency about my research intentions in view of my research partners.
In reflecting on my positionality, I analyzed my interactions in the field, unveiling
the taken for granted of embedded practices and making explicit my perspective,
which subsequently became one of the perspectives that the research process had
aimed to recognize; that is, the point of view of all the research partners. This pro-
cess also mirrors the reflective stance of the shelter’s practices that are based on
feminist principles, and most importantly the principle to “begin from oneself”.
This is itself rooted in the Italian feminist principle that promotes engagement in
rethinking woman’s subjectivity, taking herself (a woman and her gendered experi-
ences) as a starting point for building an empathic and trusting relationship with
other women (Plesset 2006, p. 60). This specific background has shaped the habitus
of my embedded practices as a shelter operator. As a researcher, I shifted this back-
ground to the research process itself, not only in imbuing it with a specific feminist
perspective for social justice, but also in shaping the approach, which allowed me to
“begin from myself,” and to reflect on my own positionality in respect to my rela-
tionships in the field and the ethnographic data resulting from it.

Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Thomas Stodulka for his suggestions
throughout the writing of this chapter. I also owe a great debt to Ruth Dewar for the language
Emotional Vulnerability and Ethnographic Understanding: A Collaborative Research… 61

r­ evision. Finally, I am grateful to the association that runs the women’s shelter where I worked for
its ongoing support in my PhD research project, and the women, whom I have interviewed for
offering me their trust and their experiences.

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Conflicted Emotions: Learning About
Uchawi

Gerda Kuiper

Introduction

This contribution discusses my conflicted feelings as an early-stage researcher

when I discovered that the emotional process through which I learned about uchawi
(usually translated as “witchcraft”) did not resonate with mainstream anthropologi-
cal understandings of this phenomenon. The context was as follows: in January
2010, I travelled to Lindi, a town on the South Coast of Tanzania, with the aim of
doing research on land tenure relations. I flew to the country together with a fellow
student who set out to do research on traditional healing (uganga) in another region.
I did not suspect that I, too, would learn a lot about these practices and about their
relations to suspicions of uchawi. Only later did I read the work of authors who
noted that uchawi1 is a part of everyday life on the Tanzanian coast and in Northern
Mozambique. It is considered a type of knowledge or a skill that is used to inflict
harm on others. It is usually attributed to greed or jealousy on the part of the mchawi
(“witch”), or the person who enlisted his or her help (Becker 2008, p. 164; Green
2015, p. 327; Larsen 2015, p. 223; Mesaki 2009, p. 132; West 2005, p. 238).
Importantly, Becker (2008, p. 160), in her study of the spread of Islam in Lindi and
its rural environs, mentioned that “human agency [is] intrinsic to the notion of
witchcraft.”
Although I had not expected it, I also encountered uchawi in Lindi. I learned
about it unintentionally, through my experiences of living with a host family in
Lindi. Not only did I, over time, come to see the everyday importance of suspicions

1
Uchawi is a Swahili term. In the Mozambican context described by West (2005), the Makonde
term used is uwavi. Many residents of the present-day Lindi have ancestors who originated from
this Mozambican region. There is thus a close connection, despite the national boundary dividing
the two areas.

G. Kuiper (*)
Global South Studies Centre, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 63

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_6
64 G. Kuiper

of uchawi and of the search for healing and protection, but it also became a lived
reality for me. It was a factor with which I had to reckon in my relationships in
Lindi, but which at the same time I understood little about. It therefore triggered
emotions such as fear, irritation, and doubt. Reflecting on these emotional experi-
ences enhanced my understanding of the role of suspicions and acts of uchawi in
land tenure and other relations in Lindi. Furthermore, this reflection not only helped
me in thinking about “the field,” but also about anthropology as a discipline. I will
elaborate on this learning process in this chapter. After a description of the research
context, I will briefly introduce scholarly discussions surrounding the topics of
witchcraft and “emotional learning.” A discussion of several of my own emotions
and affects in relation to uchawi forms the core of the chapter. I will conclude with
some methodological, epistemological, and ethical considerations.

Arriving in Lindi: What Did I Know?

Although Lindi’s sisal plantations in former times attracted labor migrants from as
far as present-day Northern Mozambique, the region has been economically mar-
ginalized since the time of British rule (Becker 2008, p. 95; West 2005, p. 104). The
peripheral status of the region was for a long time epitomized by the deplorable
condition of the 500-kilometer road from Lindi to the economic center of Tanzania,
Dar es Salaam. Plans to tarmac this road never seemed to materialize (Seppälä
1998). However, when I first arrived in 2010, most of the road had been tarred and
it was possible to travel to Lindi by bus within 1 day. The last stretch of the road was
only finished in 2015, just shortly after the discovery of gas in the region. Despite
this recent opening up of the area, feelings of isolation remain. Inhabitants of Lindi
complained that the new job opportunities that arose with the discovery of gas were
filled by people from other parts of Tanzania. I also experienced an enduring preju-
dice against the region when talking to people in Dar es Salaam, who pitied me for
staying in such a “backward” area. Inhabitants of Lindi are perceived, both by them-
selves and others, as ignorant, “unmodern,” and captured in poverty.
I set out to study land tenure relations in this rural region for a period of 3 months,
as part of my master’s degree in cultural anthropology. I stayed in Lindi and con-
ducted unstructured interviews there; I also visited surrounding villages, and I inter-
viewed a handful of government and NGO officials. I already had a good proficiency
in Swahili, and I therefore was able to follow everyday conversations and execute
my interviews in this language. I stayed with a host family, at that time consisting
of a widow in her late 40s, one of her adult daughters and two of her grandchildren.
I soon was considered, and considered myself, to be part of their family. This not
only was based on feelings of mutual care, but also was a consequence of, unarticu-
lated, strategic considerations: I felt safer staying with a family, and my host family
could make more financial demands on me as a family member than if I had
remained a guest. This was significant, as they had no permanent source of income
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi 65

and relied on family members and temporary jobs for their everyday subsistence.
My ­contributions to the family as a “working child” were thus welcomed. Taking
part in the daily life of this family turned out to be overwhelming to my senses as
well as to my intellect. After returning home, I realized I had learned more through
this “participant observation” than through methods which were more conscien-
tiously applied. I decided to write my thesis about the one plot of land that I had
learned about most: the plot I had stayed on with my host family. Through describ-
ing this case and contextualizing it with information gathered during interviews, I
showed some of the complexities of land tenure practices vis-à-vis legal regulations
in Tanzania.
But not only did my host family play a crucial role in my thesis, my involve-
ment with this family also turned out to be more enduring than I had initially
foreseen. I came back to Lindi several times in subsequent years to work as a
volunteer and I stayed with the same family. Although I had finished my research
on land tenure relations, my learning process continued. Specifically, I learned
much more about uchawi, although I had not prepared myself for this. Witchcraft
is a classic topic in anthropology, and I had some familiarity with this literature
before embarking on fieldwork, but this did not prepare me for the possibility that
I would encounter this phenomenon myself. For one, anthropologists working on
witchcraft or “evil” in other regions have mostly focused on reactions to evil,
implicitly and sometimes explicitly denying that witchcraft itself is real (Van
Beek and Olsen 2015).2 Second, most of the authors, as reviewed in Rutherford
(1999), followed the functionalist approach of Evans-Pritchard (1976) in his clas-
sic monograph on the Azande. These authors provided an etic explanation of the
internal rationality behind accusations of witchcraft. More recently, anthropolo-
gists have aimed to show that the occult can be an integral, constitutive part of
“modernity.” These authors focused on narratives and stories and thus drew atten-
tion to the discursive (not the immediate) power of witchcraft. These authors, in
their writing, did not take into account that the research subjects themselves do
not understand witchcraft as an idiom but as something very real and immediate
(Ashforth 2005, p. xiv; Rutherford 1999, p. 97). Significantly, the anthropologist
in these cases mostly remained an outsider, not directly implicated in relations
which included witchcraft and threats thereof. More personal implications and
experiences were merely mentioned in a footnote or in the form of an anecdote.3
The only exception I was familiar with at the time was Ashforth’s book on his
bewitched friend Madumo (2000). He vividly described not only the experiences

2
Van Beek and Olsen stated that the real problem “for anthropologists” is not evil itself but indi-
vidual suffering because of reactions to evil (2015, p. 10). Ferguson (1999, p. 120) explained that
this has been a common approach among anthropologists, partly because accusations of witchcraft
in themselves can be violent acts. Nevertheless, I feel that such an approach sidelines the suffering
of those who feel they fell victim to evil acts.
3
Only long after my initial fieldwork did I read ethnographies which included the anthropologists’
own experiences in the analysis of witchcraft. I will refer to these studies in the discussion.
66 G. Kuiper

of his friend, but also his own involvement—for instance, through financing his
friend’s treatment—and his own doubts, anger, and concerns. Impressive as this
book is, however, it is an anonymized and even partly fictionalized account which
makes no reference to academic theory. I thus did not relate Ashforth’s experi-
ences to my own position as a “researcher.” At this point in time, what I gathered
from these texts was that one could choose to study reactions to and narratives on
witchcraft, and one could likewise choose not to. As I simply was not interested in
the topic, I (perhaps naively) did not consider the possibility beforehand that I
would encounter these discourses frequently in my own field site. I was even less
prepared for the possibility that I, myself, would become implicated in relations in
which (suspicions of) witchcraft played a role. But through the formation of inti-
mate and long-lasting relationships, I became a “participating observer” (Hume
and Mulcock 2004, p. xii) in everyday life in Lindi, including in matters of uchawi.
This was an informative as well as an emotional process.

Emotions and Empiricism: How Did I Learn?

In conventional empirical approaches, it is assumed that emotions distort scientific

understanding. This approach forces the anthropologist, who is supposed to gain
inside knowledge while remaining a detached outsider, to perform a complicated
balancing act (Davies 2010; Hume and Mulcock 2004). Okely (2012, p. 9) pointed
out that the “total” experience of anthropological fieldwork makes it virtually
impossible for the researcher to separate the emotional self from the intellectual
self. Moreover, perhaps this separation is also not desirable. Davies (2010, p. 1),
following a “radical empirical” approach, stated that much can be learned from a
vigorous analysis of emotions evoked during research. Green’s work (1999) on wid-
ows in Guatemala living under violent conditions exemplifies well how reflecting
on their own emotions can help ethnographers gain a better understanding of the
object of their research. Green’s own fear helped her to understand how fear suf-
fused the daily life of these women. She came to understand how ambiguous acts of
intimidation became effective in creating terror. Green at the same time acknowl-
edged that, even though she also experienced fear, her position was different from
the position of the widows; she had the option of leaving. This inequality created
feelings of discomfort. “Fear joined me to the people and yet separated me from
them as well” (ibid., p. 20). The need to balance intimacy and distance, and the
impossibility of overcoming differences in power, can put the researcher in emo-
tional and “awkward” social spaces. According to Hume and Mulcock, these spaces
themselves can be productive:
By rigorously analyzing our own emotional responses to particular field encounters (…) we
can usually learn something about the values of those around us and the social processes we
have become part of during the research process. (2004, p. xxv)
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi 67

This process is complicated further, and therefore also becomes more enriching, by
the fact that the anthropologist does not only position him- or herself, but is also
ascribed a certain position by the people he or she works with (see, for an example,
Hume and Mulcock 2004, p. xvi). Merely by staying in my host family’s home, I
obtained a certain position within existing family and neighbor relations. I soon
perceived there were certain tensions in these relations, but it took me longer to real-
ize that uchawi, and suspicions thereof, formed an integral part of these relations.
Unlike most authors writing on the topic of witchcraft, I did not primarily learn
about the phenomenon through interviews and conversations or even through gossip
(Ashforth 2005; Ferguson 1999; West 2005), neither did I learn about the topic
intentionally, as for instance Stoller (1984) did by becoming a healer’s apprentice. I
learned about uchawi inadvertently, even unwillingly by times, through becoming
part of existing relationships surrounding my host family in Lindi. This learning
was not mediated through any kind of formal method but rather through my cogni-
tive as well as emotional struggle to cope with unplanned and by times overwhelm-
ing experiences. The “awkward” spaces I found myself in were initially confusing
and frightening, and made me feel I had failed as a researcher. Yet, they were even-
tually also enlightening, and shaped my interpretation of both everyday life in Lindi
and existing anthropological theory on the topic of witchcraft (Hume and Mulcock
2004, p. xviii).

Fascination

This learning process already started on my second day in Lindi. A relation from
Dar es Salaam had accompanied me to Lindi.4 After arriving, she got a terrible head-
ache and decided to visit an mganga, a healer, to find a cure. He told her the illness
was caused by a man she knew, who had put something in her body. I observed
some of the treatments. For instance, the mganga wrote her name and the name of
her father on a plate with a special type of red ink and prayed over it. He then
washed off the text with water, and the patient drank the mixture of water and ink.5
While I was observing this procedure, I wondered whether I should not advise her
to go to the hospital, but I felt it was not my place. I considered myself to be a mere
observer, not implicated in the illness or the treatment. I simply took the practices
of healing, and the suspicions of malevolent intent behind the illness, as some of the
many interesting aspects of this new, fascinating environment that I was being
exposed to.

4
In order to protect the anonymity of the persons mentioned, I do not use names and have omitted
certain personal details.
5
This ritual was also mentioned by Becker (2008, p. 302) as kunywa kombe, although she stated
they are verses of the Quran which are written with this ink.
68 G. Kuiper

Feeling Irritated

I started to hear frequent stories about uchawi. Witchcraft featured prominently in

the Nigerian and Tanzanian movies aired on television. Furthermore, I heard a lot of
local gossip about it. These stories sometimes told of violent excesses, similar to
those that I was familiar with from global media reports, for instance, the killing of
albinos. However, I more frequently encountered less dramatic, everyday, but per-
vasive experiences of the occult in Lindi. One night, I was kept awake because of
the drums of a spirit exorcism ritual at a neighboring house. Another day, while on
my way to Dar es Salaam, my bus passed by streams of people who were walking
to the next village, where a travelling mganga was practicing that day.6 The omni-
presence of the occult—about which I understood so little—started to irritate me.
Although witchcraft can be a topic surrounded by secrecy or silence,7 suspicions of
uchawi were quite openly discussed in Lindi, at least when the cases did not in any
immediate way involve the person who was talking. And so I listened to numerous
stories about politicians, Europeans, landowners, and business people, who were
suspected of having grown successful or rich through certain magical practices,
usually at the cost of others. These stories seemed irrational to me. I interpreted
them in a functionalist manner: I saw witchcraft accusations as a way of preventing
people from prospering. West called this the “anti-developmental dynamics of sor-
cery” (2005, p. 192). Nevertheless, on some occasions I was unable to find “ratio-
nal” explanations for what was going on. One morning I was woken up by the
excited voices of the children in our house, who had just heard that there was a
“witch”—an unknown naked old woman—who had gotten stuck to a neighboring
house due to protective dawa (medicine) used by the owner of the house. The
woman had to be rescued by the police from the gaze of the crowd.8 I was annoyed
by the whole situation and the excitement around it. It simply did not make sense to
me. I grew weary of hearing about uchawi and everything related to it. But the fre-
quency with which the topic came up made me realize that it was not possible to
consider uchawi or accusations of it unimportant or irrelevant, an awareness which
irritated me even more.

6
This mganga, originating from another region in Tanzania, was touring Lindi and the surrounding
villages and moved from house to house in an attempt to “cleanse” the area of witches. His practice
attracted many spectators. It showed similarities to the collective cleansing rituals, sometimes turn-
ing into popular movements, as described in the historical work of Becker (2008) and Green
(2015). But unlike in the rituals described by these authors, this mganga exposed those who he
suspected of uchawi. I disapproved of this, and I never went to witness his practice. The authorities
in Lindi eventually prohibited him from continuing with his tour.
7
Especially in cases where words themselves are considered to have power (Favret-Saada 1979;
Larsen 2015).
8
A South African friend of Ashforth described something similar: “There was a woman who was
found naked early in the morning. She was just standing there in somebody’s yard. You know we
have this thing here that if someone has protected their house with strong muthi, and then a witch
comes in the night to do whatever it is she wants to do, she will be trapped” (Ashforth 2000, p. 81).
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi 69

Shock

However, despite this irritation, I did yet not feel that these suspicions or practices
affected me personally in any way. Fears of uchawi and of its impact on my rela-
tions in Lindi only got me in their grip 2 weeks after returning home. I was informed
that my host mother, with whom I had established close bonds in the 3 months that
I had stayed with her, had suffered from a stroke. She was severely ill and it was
feared that she would die. The doctors told her family that they could do nothing for
her. The family then decided to bring her to an mganga, an old lady living in a vil-
lage some distance from Lindi, under whose care my host mother slowly started to
recover. When I found out about her illness over the phone, I was shocked and con-
cerned not only about her health, but also about my relation with her and her family.
I feared that perhaps her illness would be indirectly blamed on me, that is, on jeal-
ousy because of her relationship with me, but no one said a word about this.

Confusion, Doubt, and Feelings of Guilt

A long period of rehabilitation began for my host mother. I was in doubt: Where
should she look for a cure? Other authors have described how people they studied
had their doubts about, for example, the trustworthiness of healers (see, for instance,
Evans-Pritchard 1976, p. 107). But I had these doubts myself: Should I advise my
host mother to return to the hospital? Or could she really be treated more adequately
by an mganga? I also was unsure about my own role: I knew my host family did not
have the means to finance extensive treatment, but was I willing to pay for it? And
how would my decision to either pay or not impact on our relationship? Finally, I
decided to send part of the money needed—partly not only out of feelings of care
but also out of a feeling of guilt. I felt that this misfortune had happened because of
my stay with my host family, though I did not have any logical reason to assume so.
My host mother stayed with the mganga for several months. Part of the treatment
consisted of praying and other ritual acts, but the most extensive part was simply
physical exercise. After several weeks, my host mother started to be able to talk
again, and after several months, she got back up on her feet. I only later realized how
fortunate she had been to find someone who was able to treat her. It is very difficult
to assess what one should do in case of illness. A patient can go from hospital to
healer and back without finding any relief. We ourselves also had an encounter with
a dubious mganga during my next stay in Lindi, 6 months later. My host mother
called this man to provide kinga (protection) for the house we lived in and for its
residents. The mganga—who did not take off his tinted glasses during the entire
visit—put together some dawa for the high blood pressure of my host mother. He
also put other dawa in a bottle, which was buried in the mud floor behind the front
door, so that only the opening of the bottle was still visible. Most of the other acts
he performed, for example, sitting down at one corner of the house and rubbing over
70 G. Kuiper

the soil with his bottom, made less sense to me. I became especially suspicious
about his sincerity when he raised his price considerably after seeing me. I later
found out that my host family also had their doubts about his qualities. We even
laughed together about some of his practices. Ensuing discussions about how one
could find a trustworthy mganga showed once more how difficult it is to assess what
one needs to do when looking for treatment and protection.

Fear

Only years later was I told explicitly that the family, while acknowledging that my
host mother had suffered from a stroke, indeed suspected that this stroke had been
caused by someone who was envious of her, partly (but not only) because of my
presence. My host mother claimed she had found a small marble under her tongue
when she woke up on the day she got the stroke, which she took as a sign of bewitch-
ment. But my fears of being cast away by the family because of this had proved to
be unfounded, although I am not sure what would have happened had I declined to
contribute to the payment of the treatment. However, not only did I at some point
experience fear for the consequences of suspicions of witchcraft, at a later stage I
also started to become more worried about practices of witchcraft. This fear was
triggered by an event which took place just a few days after the visit of the dubious
mganga. When I woke up that morning and opened our front door, I saw a small
hole in the ground with a diameter of approximately half a centimeter. I called my
host sister, who looked at it briefly, took a small stick, and started to lay bare the
small tunnel. It ran up to the mud wall, passed a small hole, which had not been
there previously, in the wall next to the front door, and then ended exactly where the
bottle with kinga was positioned. I was shocked because I could not think of a
“rational” explanation of how anyone could have made such a perfect little tunnel,
leading precisely to the bottle. I took it as a sign of someone trying to harm us, even
if, only by scaring us and nothing else. We did not discuss the little tunnel further,
although it was clear we all had the same—uncomfortable—thoughts. The next day
I told my host sister that I had not slept well that night. She admitted she was also
worried, though, even then, we did not explicitly discuss our fears. Likewise,
Ashforth (2000, p. 140) described how one morning something occurred for which
he had no logical explanation (in that case finding a strange brown smear on the wall
of the house). Some of his host family members suspected an attempt to bewitch,
but Ashforth was reluctant to follow that line of thought: “Knowing not to believe in
witches, and preferring not to believe in malice, I knew not how to read the signs”
(ibid.). During the day, I was as reluctant as Ashforth to believe that witchcraft actu-
ally existed. But during the night I was not so sure anymore. The idea that an inex-
plicable someone or something had been, and perhaps still was, wandering around
our house at night terrified me.
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi 71

Feelings of Estrangement

My fears were a strong emotion which I could not share with my family and friends
“back home.” I tried on a few occasions, but they simply would start to look for
“rational” explanations. I also was reluctant to discuss it because I did not want to
reinforce the picture of Lindi as a backward region or invoke Orientalizing images
of Africa, in general. This inability to share, which ran deeper than merely my expe-
riences with uchawi, created feelings of alienation even after returning home. I felt
awkward (see also Hume and Mulcock 2004), especially as I also always, to a cer-
tain degree, have remained an outsider in Lindi, not least because I always had the
option to leave (as also pointed out by Green 1999, p. 20). At the same time, I real-
ized these feelings of estrangement were productive: they helped to unpack what I
had learned. However, I also started to feel estranged from my discipline, which was
a less productive emotion. My inability to make sense of my experiences of witch-
craft in a way that was acceptable for an anthropologist made me feel at a loss. The
“untroubled authority” (Rutherford 1999, p. 93) which other authors (who had
come to very different conclusions than I) had assumed on this topic made me feel
like a failure. I felt I had crossed a line and feared I had “gone native.” I had perhaps
even done something immoral by accepting the possibility that acts of witchcraft
might actually take place. Only after rereading some of the earlier works on witch-
craft, and ones I had not been familiar with before, I realized that many anthropolo-
gists must have gone through similar experiences. They just, mostly, did not write
about it.

Abating Fears

After this frightening episode, I continued to spend longer periods of time in Lindi
and my fears abated. Not only because nothing “remarkable” happened for some
time afterward, but also because I saw the reaction of my host family to events like
this and to cases of illness. They look for protection and cures, which shows their
concerns. At the same time, they are determined not to let uchawi determine their
lives. After all, the possibility that someone falls ill or suffers a misfortune because
of the ill will of another person can be very disturbing—but it is also part of every-
day life in Lindi, and one can anticipate it. It had initially been a shock to me when
I discovered that my host family was implicated in uchawi. But this gradually
became a fact of everyday life to me—just as it was to my host family. Once that
happened, I was able reflect on how uchawi had shaped my, as well as others’, emo-
tions, relations, and decisions in Lindi.
72 G. Kuiper

Discussion and Conclusion: What Did I Learn?

My first aim in this chapter has been to show that a reflection on one’s emotions can
provide insights into “the field,” in my case into everyday life in Lindi. For me,
uchawi was not the topic of my research, nor has it been subsequently. It was also
not of particular interest to me, and I sometimes felt uncomfortable with the subject.
Despite my own reluctance, I gained intimate, though partial, knowledge of the
topic through my engagement with people for whom the possibility of bewitchment
is a reality. I would not be able to give a taxonomy or classification of witchcraft and
magic, such as Evans-Pritchard (1976) did. I would also be unable to provide a
detailed analysis of how “modernization” in the form of new economic opportuni-
ties through the discovery of gas has impacted occult relations and practices. But
through my engagement with the social environment I encountered, and my emo-
tions throughout this process, I gained insights into the emotional, psychological,
and social impacts of uchawi, and on its influence on individual decision making in
Lindi. Anthropologists often have edited themselves out of their ethnographies,
especially when working on the topic of witchcraft. However, as shown by Favret-­
Saada (1979, p. 17), in her book on the topic of witchcraft and the power of words
in France, it is in certain contexts not possible to be a mere observer without becom-
ing a participant. Perhaps it is also not desirable. Tourigny stated:
When, and to the extent that we silence our receptivity out of fear (…), we filter our percep-
tions and therefore mute our understanding. Imposing a distance between our participants
and ourselves, and again between what we see and what we choose to feel, may reduce fear
( ) we filter our perceptions and therefore mute our understanding. (2004, p. 124)

Admitting to the fear I experienced in Lindi allowed me to arrive at very different

conclusions than Seppälä did. He stated that witchcraft in Lindi was a “myth” (1998,
pp. 30–31) created by people from other regions to reinforce the peripheral status of
the region. Although it is possible that references to witchcraft have been used in
portraying the region as backward, my emotional experiences showed me that
uchawi in Lindi was much more than a discourse. I learned that the possibility of
falling ill or suffering misfortune due to the malevolent acts of other human beings
is omnipresent. On the other hand, I also learned that there is a lot of ambiguity and
uncertainty attached to the process of looking for causes, culprits, and cures in case
of illness or misfortune. Furthermore, I eventually came to realize that this threat is
nothing extraordinary but a part of everyday life. At the time I wrote my thesis, I had
already come to realize that suspicions of witchcraft had repercussions on relations
in Lindi, including relations of land tenure. I mentioned in my thesis that my host
mother had once decided not to go to court when someone tried to occupy her land,
partly because she was afraid that the thief would retaliate with the help of an
mganga. I therefore made the general statement that witchcraft was a pervasive fac-
tor in power struggles. Yet, as many authors did before me, I focused on witchcraft
accusations and on fears of witchcraft, and not on acts of uchawi and their effects. I
was too confused about my host mother’s illness to include it in my analysis and
writing. I had not yet started to grasp how the land my host mother lived on was
Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi 73

involved, or was suspected to be involved, in her illness, and thus did not reflect the
full complexity of the case in my thesis. Only a reflection on my emotional experi-
ences during prolonged “participant observation” provided me with more coherent
insights into the place of uchawi in this specific case and in everyday life in Lindi,
in general.
A second aim of the chapter has been to show how my feelings of having failed
as a researcher shaped my interpretation of many of the influential ethnographies on
the topic of witchcraft. Most authors have put much effort in making the belief in
witchcraft appear less “exotic.” Evans-Pritchard (1976) pointed out time and again
that the Azande were not unaware of empirical causes of death or illness, and that
there was a certain rationality behind their beliefs. Other writers followed this
approach of explaining the occult and making it understandable. However, as
pointed out by Rutherford (1999, p. 98), such an approach reasserted the colonial
distinction between Africans and Europeans. More recent works have tried to over-
come this by showing that witchcraft can also be “modern,” yet in this pursuit the
authors still attempted to apply a Western rationality and did not reflect on their own
position in wider political projects. Despite their efforts to take the “other” seri-
ously, most authors have been reluctant to accept the possibility that actual acts of
witchcraft take place.9 They sometimes described how they themselves started to
use the idiom of witchcraft, and even acted accordingly, but they usually empha-
sized that they did not “really” believe in it. “I, too, used to react to misfortunes in
the idiom of witchcraft, and it was often an effort to check this lapse into unreason”
(Evans-Pritchard 1976, p. 45). Ferguson (1999, pp. 118–122) proposed understand-
ing fears of witchcraft not as “unreason” but as fear of immediate acts of violence.
However, he attempted to make this “reasonable,” for example, by including acts of
poisoning in his definition of witchcraft. I agree with his understanding of witch-
craft as a form of violence, yet I found that poisoning in Lindi does not count as
uchawi. Although bewitchment can cause death, the ultimate goal is not to kill but
to make someone suffer. I feel that such “rational” explanations of witchcraft might
make sense to a scientific audience but do not reach the essence of the matter. They
seem to be the cases of the “domestication” of occult practices “to the analysts’ own
sensibilities” (Kapferer, 2002, p. 20). Furthermore, apart from only allowing for
limited understanding, these authors also neglected, “their own positioning within
the anthropological project of proving the ultimate rationality of non-Western prac-
tices and beliefs” (Rutherford 1999, p. 92). By providing an explanation from their
own point of view, which established their authority as anthropologists, the authors
still distanced themselves from “the other” and did not question their own position
in wider “webs of power” (ibid., p. 93).

9
Anthropologists shared this reluctance with colonial and postcolonial legislators. They, too, have
struggled to define witchcraft, and struggled with the question what are acts of witchcraft, or rather
accusations of witchcraft which should be punished (Rutherford 1999, pp. 98–100). Mesaki (2009)
described how Tanzanian legislators have followed an eighteenth century English law which sanc-
tioned “pretended” acts of witchcraft.
74 G. Kuiper

To conclude, I feel that anthropologists need to have the audacity to be vulnera-

ble, in the field as well as in writing (Behar 1996), especially with regard to the topic
of witchcraft. I was thankful to, at a later stage, read the more distinctive and critical
works of, for instance, Favret-Saada (1979), Stoller (1984), Rutherford (1999), and
Kapferer (2002), which helped me to come to terms with my “awkward” feelings.
Had I read more of these writings early on, this could have better prepared me,
insofar as such preparation is even possible, for encountering uchawi in the field. At
least it would have made me feel less of a failure as an anthropologist. Moreover, I
argue that a more vulnerable and self-reflexive approach can do more justice to the
fears and suffering of those who consider themselves to be victims of witchcraft,
and can bring their epistemologies to the foreground instead of obscuring them.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to my host mother for allowing and encouraging me to write

about her illness. I thank Elsemi Olwage, Seif Chinowa, the Cologne “Ethnodocs,” and the two
reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this chapter.

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 Part II
Reciprocity in Research Relationships
Reciprocity in Research Relationships:
Introduction

Mechthild von Vacano

For fieldwork relationships to be reciprocal is an ideal most anthropologists would

likely subscribe to. But beyond the rather general notion of mutual exchange, the
conceptual as well as practical details of reciprocity in research relationships remain
mostly vague. It seems to be as much a political and ethical as an epistemological
issue, which somehow addresses the question of im/balance between researcher and
interlocutor. As such, most ethnographers experience reciprocity in fieldwork rela-
tionships as a challenging and emotionally charged topic. One of the most promi-
nent feelings in this context is certainly guilt (see Gable 2014). But beyond that, it
remains a topic with which ethnographers associate a whole range of contradictory
feelings. During the workshop that preceded this book, a working group on “taking
and giving” in research relationships compiled the following list of such feelings:
Exhaustion, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, sadness, inaptitude, inner conflict, insecu-
rity, pressure, constraint, inadequacy, shame, discomfort, guilt, compassion, loyalty, soli-
darity, mutuality, reciprocity, dependency, responsibility, obligation, friendship, belonging,
acceptance, affection, comfort, connectedness, joy, appreciation, gratitude.1

Oscillating between gratitude and guilt, these feelings indicate a fundamental ten-
sion characteristic of anthropological research relationships.2 This tension arises
from the conflict of (anthropological) research ideals with multifarious—and to
some degree constitutive—inequalities in field relationships. Since reciprocity

1
This list was presented at the workshop “The Researchers’ Affects,” December 3–4, 2015, in
Berlin. As former moderator of the working group, I owe thanks to the participants Patrick Keilbart,
Mirjam Lücking, and Veronika Siegl for our joint discussions, which inspired the editing of this
section and the writing of this introduction.
2
By research relationship, I refer to relationships between the researcher and other people, while
disregarding other forms of relating that constitute the anthropological field (Spencer 2010).

M. von Vacano (*)

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 79

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_7
80 M. von Vacano

stands for the effort to overcome or mend these inequalities, I suggest taking them
as an analytical starting point to identify different strategies of creating reciprocal
research relationships.
For one thing, research relationships are constituted by an inequality of roles and
motives: one party engages in fieldwork with the intent of obtaining data from the
other. While the first is dubbed “researcher,” the terminology for the latter has
changed over time and still varies according to different epistemological–method-
ological premises. While some ethnographers choose to stick with the term “infor-
mant,” others prefer to use terms like “interlocutor,” “protagonist,” “participant,” or
“collaborator.” These terminological shifts and turns indicate how uneasy anthro-
pologists feel in describing their positionalities vis-a-vis the people they study
(with). This discomfort stems from the fact that the inherent inequality of research
relationships is at odds with a certain power-critical commitment and the value of
mutuality (Sanjek 2015) broadly shared among anthropological scholars.
Inherent to the design of the ethnographic method is a blurring of the lines
between personal and professional communication: as ethnographers, we adapt our
personalities to create rapport, mobilize our social skills to gain trust, and use our
empathic competencies as epistemological tools (e.g., Spencer 2010; Svasek 2010),
while shifting between immersion and detachment (Davies 2010). Even if personal
relationships, like friendship or kinship relations, may develop over the course of
fieldwork, the actual research relationship is constituted by the transaction of infor-
mation in which the researcher is on the receiving end of insights provided by the
research participant. Even if anthropologists engage in open and personal forms of
dialogue, ultimately, they engage in these relationships with the specific purpose of
knowledge construction. Their motives lay beyond the social relationship as an end
in itself; instead, the relationship primarily serves as a means of attaining others’
self-reflective accounts of their lifeworld (van der Geest 2015, p. 4). Ethnographers’
motives are guided by a scholarly interest in the research issue, perhaps accompa-
nied by an agenda to foster some form of socio-political change. Whatever ethno-
graphic style or format anthropologists may choose, with its publication (at the
latest), the ethnographic material they gathered will be transformed into academic
currency and will serve to advance their professional careers (Stodulka 2014,
pp. 123–124).
In addition to this inherent inequality, other power asymmetries shape research
relationships, depending on the respective positionalities of the individuals and collec-
tives involved. Owing to the historic genesis of anthropology as a scientific discipline
and the continuing hegemony of “Western” academia, much of the anthropological
knowledge perceived is still produced by members of former colonizing societies
conducting fieldwork in formerly colonized settings—even though the exclusivity of
this model has been dismantled and its dominance continues to be challenged. Driven
by a certain disciplinary ethos, anthropologists continue to display a preference for
studying marginalized groups or communities. Postcolonial power constellations and
the general inclination to “study down,” often correlate with significant prosperity
gaps, in which even student ethnographers with limited financial resources appear
as “representatives of relative wealth” (Kingston et al. 1997, p. 27). Yet even anthro-
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Introduction 81

pologists conducting their fieldwork at their “doorsteps” often find themselves in a

position of relative privilege with regard to class and educational background, or as
urbanities studying rural conditions.
Anthropology, just as other social sciences, owes much of its power-critical self-­
awareness to the strenuous criticism of postcolonial and feminist scholars, who have
raised awareness of structural power relations and their multifarious effects on
research.3 As a political-ethical, and often epistemological, consequence of these
criticisms, it has become a regular demand to call for reciprocal research relation-
ships. The notion of reciprocity, however, can refer to a whole range of approaches,
which I suggest categorizing into three basic strategies. The first set of approaches
addresses the inherent inequality of the research relationship itself by redefining the
researcher–researched relation in an effort to reduce (or overcome) its inherent
power gap: the paradigm of intersubjectivity or radical empiricism (Jackson 1989),
for instance, challenges the opposition of the knower and the known, by its episte-
mological premise of mutual discovery. While participatory or collaborative
research methods open up the position of the researcher to include (a least some)
research counterparts as research partners or co-researchers (e.g., Fluehr-Lobban
2008), other approaches focus on representation and question the researcher’s
exclusive position of authorship (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Tedlock and
Mannheim 1995). The second strategy addresses those other power asymmetries
which potentially add to the inherent inequality of fieldwork relationships. These
approaches challenge the positional constellations of who conducts research about/
among/with whom. On an individual level, this strategy can lead to the decision to
“study up” instead of “studying down” (see Gable 2014), to conduct anthropology
“at home,” or to base one’s study on shared positionalities, such as women studying
women. On a structural level, such changes require diversifying the positionalities
of anthropologists and decentering the role of “Western” academia (e.g., Escobar
and Ribeiro 2006). As yet a third strategy, anthropologists adopt compensatory
approaches to balance the inequality between researcher and researched. This strat-
egy corresponds most closely with the economic anthropological notion of reci-
procity in its narrow sense, because it is based on the principle of giving, receiving,
and giving back (Mauss 1990). Ways of “giving back” can vary from small personal
gestures to advocacy work committed to macro-political change. Apart from the
scope and scale of giving, researchers also must determine to whom exactly they
want to “give back,” on the basis of what principles, within what time frame, and in
what form (Gupta and Kelly 2014, p. 8). Should they compensate individuals or
whole communities? Should they allocate resources according to the level of contri-
bution to the research, based on the relative effort undertaken by the respective
interlocutor, or simply according to need? Researchers can opt for instantaneous
ways of “giving back,” or reciprocate at a certain temporal distance that might
extend beyond the fieldwork period and may even lead to the developing of

3
Asad (1973) and Said (1978) have provided seminal contributions to the postcolonial critiques of
the anthropological discipline; on decolonizing methodologies, see Smith (1999); for discussions
on feminist ethnography, see Visweswaran (1994) or Skeggs (2001).
82 M. von Vacano

l­ong-­term exchanges. “Giving back” can manifest itself in material and non-mate-
rial form, as emotional or practical support, as recognition, information, interces-
sion, advocacy, labor, money, or goods.
The authors in this section were invited to take their emotional experience as an
analytical starting point for reflecting on the practical implementation of different
forms of reciprocity in research relationships. The examples presented in the fol-
lowing contributions range from stationary community-based fieldwork (von
Vacano) to transnational multi-sited ethnography (Siegl). They further include
approaches of “studying up” (Perujo) and collaborative research (Lücking).
The chapters highlight different forms of “giving back.” Veronica Siegl and
Emilia Perujo reflect on various immaterial ways to reciprocate the time, effort, and
openness of their interlocutors. Both argue that ethnographic conversation itself can
be mutually beneficial, because interview partners can find comfort in sharing their
feelings and intimate experience with a patient, non-judgmental, and empathic lis-
tener. Ethnographers can further provide interlocutors with valuable technical infor-
mation or convey the experiences of other interlocutors facing similar problems. On
a representational level, research can raise public awareness and (de)legitimate cer-
tain issues and positions, because ethnographic writing can make the voices of those
affected heard and communicate their experience in relatable terms. Mirjam Lücking
highlights that research relationships can also include mutually beneficial forms of
intellectual exchange, especially if collaborating with local research partners
equally trained in anthropology. Complementing these immaterial forms, Mirjam
Lücking and Mechthild von Vacano discuss tangible, material ways of “giving
back.” Their contributions include a re-evaluation of their live-in arrangements dur-
ing fieldwork, yet exemplify two fundamentally different fieldwork trajectories.
While Lücking moved multiple times, staying at each household for shorter periods
of time, her live-in arrangements were mostly based on a non-monetary principle of
hospitality. Von Vacano, on the other hand, details the explicit financial agreements
she had reached with the family that hosted her for the entire year of her fieldwork.
Having conducted their fieldwork in a research constellation of (stark) economic
disparity, both underscore the importance of the material dimension of reciprocity.
Instead of suggesting one particular formula, they encourage researchers to be
active and creative, when searching for context-sensitive material ways to give back
or to share resources. This implies that it is not the monetary form per se that renders
a gift impersonal or inappropriate; much depends on the content, form, and timing
of these contributions, in terms of whether they can be accepted without straining
the relationship.
Reassessing distinct features of their fieldwork experience, each author scruti-
nizes specific facets of establishing reciprocal research relationships: Veronica
Siegl’s contribution focuses on mismatched expectations. She reconstructs the
dynamics of a research relationship that culminated in an emotional accusation of
betrayal, and retraces how her well-intended actions could have evoked such a deep
feeling of disappointment in one of her research participants. Based on her multi-­
sited ethnography on surrogacy between Switzerland and Russia, Siegel’s contribu-
tion alludes to the challenge of equally including multiple stakeholders with
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Introduction 83

diverging interests into an ethnographic study. While trying to establish rapport with
all sides involved, researchers walk the fine line between empathic listening (some-
times performed), sympathy, and (un)intended gestures of partiality. Siegl con-
cludes that some conflicts might be inevitable, because researchers can neither fully
control the course of fieldwork, nor regulate the expectations interlocutors project
into them. Researchers can, however, minimize the risk of mismatched expectations
by being clear and transparent about their own motives. This may require the eth-
nographer to accept that his/her own partiality might enhance the potential for rap-
port with some interlocutors, while limiting it with others.
Looking retrospectively at four different, but thematically close research proj-
ects, Emilia Perujo pursues the question of why any stranger would agree to partici-
pate in ethnographic research on taboo topics like (male) infertility, sperm donations,
or custody for divorced fathers. What did her interview partners gain from the
research relationship in return for the time and effort they took to meet, share inti-
mate narratives, and expose their emotional vulnerability? Perujo conducted her
studies in Mexico City as “anthropology at home,” where she found herself socio-­
economically in a research situation of “studying up,” leading her to preclude mate-
rial forms of compensation and focus on the exchange of intangible gifts instead.
Her contribution highlights the paradoxical effects taboo-afflicted research topics
may have on research relationships. Once the researcher has succeeded in gaining
access, conversations on taboo topics can create particular social and affective
bonds. Once her interview partners had overcome internalized feeling of shame and
taken the emotional risk of sharing, they felt relieved to finally have someone to talk
to and who would listen with empathy and free of judgment, even if—or because—
this person was a random outsider. Perujo herself became an important confidant for
many of her interlocutors and began carrying the weight of their silent suffering.
Mirjam Lücking’s chapter reflects on her multi-sited ethnographic research, a
study of the images of the “Arab World” as perceived by Indonesian pilgrims and
labor migrants. Distinguishing between the material, emotional, and intellectual
dimensions of reciprocity, she discusses the emotional quality of material gifts.
Monetary gifts can either appear as a pay-off, or a symbol of sympathy for the inter-
locutor’s specific living conditions. She illustrates that they can either close off or
enhance the personal character of ethnographic research relationship. Like Siegl,
Lücking raises the issue of rather unpleasant interaction partners. She describes how
some encounters with ultra-conservative Muslim leaders left her with a complicated
mixture of feelings including insult, annoyance, and gratitude. Such unpleasant
interactions indicate the limits of reciprocity, while obstructing the potential for
emotional and intellectual exchange. Concluding her paper, Lücking advocates for
intellectual exchange with “local” academic peers as an epistemological strategy to
diversify perspectives and decolonize processes of knowledge production, while
simultaneously acknowledging these relationships for their practical and emotional
support.
Mechthild von Vacano’s contribution reflects on her fieldwork in a lower to
lower-middle class neighborhood in Jakarta, Indonesia, for a study on the subjective
experience of work. Noting the fact that most anthropologists work in research
84 M. von Vacano

c­ onstellations of significant economic inequality, she criticizes the lack of ethical

and methodological frameworks to account for this inequality, and for the economic
dimension of fieldwork more broadly. By revisiting the economic anthropological
discussions of reciprocity, von Vacano shows how ethical notions of reciprocity still
carry an idealistic, anti-market bias which feeds into the de-economization of
research relationships. As a principle of exchange, reciprocity further presupposes
equality by implying a logic of equivalence and balance, while failing to address the
uneven distribution of resources. As an alternative, von Vacano develops a research
ethic of “economic participation” which is based on the active and conscious inte-
gration of the fieldworker into the social context she studies. Underscoring the
embedded nature of fieldwork, this framework requires anthropologists to acknowl-
edge economic inequality and challenges them to negotiate the different abilities
and needs among everyone involved. The chapter concludes with several practical
suggestions on how such a process of negotiation could be realized, ranging from
budgeting to expectation management and an anthropological perspective on solic-
iting strategies.
The contributions in this section emphasize the social, economic, and affective
dynamics of research relationships, and how they are negotiated—despite and under
the condition of the inherent researcher–researched inequality and other macro-­
structural power asymmetries. As with reflection on structural privilege in general,
well-intended self-criticism can, however, run the danger of absolutizing the very
power relation it intends to challenge. Reducing research identities to one dominant
dimension (e.g., the researcher as a “Westerner”) is one common pitfall. In contrast
to such an oversimplification of positionalities, an intersectional perspective is
required to account for multiple and contradictory power positions (see chapter
“Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy
Research”). Furthermore, moralized feelings of guilt often find their expression in
fieldworkers’ ambitions to performatively eradicate structural inequalities on an
individual level instead of negotiating them self-consciously. When ethnographers
absolutize the inherent inequality of research relationships, this can result in an
overemphasis of their actual power, agency, and significance to host communities.
After all, ethnographers depend on their counterparts in the research relationship to
grant them access to their social worlds, and to share their insight and experience; if
the researcher’s power position is misconstrued as absolute, their interlocutors are
denied the agency to shape their interaction with the researcher. Only because eth-
nographers engage in research relationships with a particular intention and the over-
arching objective to pursue the “academic-career values” (Sanjek 2015), this does
not preclude their interlocutors from pursuing their own agendas—potentially
instrumentalizing the researcher for their own purposes. Negotiating research rela-
tionships includes the acknowledgment of interlocutors’ expectations. Some inter-
locutors may utter specific requests, while others might only hint implicitly at their
expectations. Sometimes these expectations exceed the researcher’s possibilities. To
handle such instances responsibly, ethnographers must be self-aware and transpar-
ent regarding their own limits, just as they should about their intentions. By being
transparent, anticipating, and accepting potential sources of disappointment,
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Introduction 85

researchers can prevent some conflicts from emerging. At the same time, it is ­helpful
to regard conflicts as a “normal” feature of research relationships, just as they are of
any other dynamic relationship. According to this understanding, interlocutors voic-
ing their disagreement or discomfort indicate that the research relationship is being
negotiated on open terms. Instead of obviating any sign of disharmony, ethnogra-
phers might give their interlocutors space to—implicitly or explicitly—express
unease or disappointment. With regard to managing their own expectations, ethnog-
raphers might also find it helpful to accept temporary avoidance or refusal as poten-
tial trajectories in any research relationship. For ethical responsibility can be
measured not only by the outcome, but also by the process of negotiating reciprocity
in research relationships.

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Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma
of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy
Research

Veronika Siegl

Veronika, I have been reading what you wrote about surrogacy.

I must say I am really disappointed.
Your interpretation of the facts is very very very biased and it does not correspond to
reality.
I wasted my time with you.
You were very unfair in your comments, and I am really hurt.
I hope you never have fertility issues, so you don’t need to use commoditized eggs,
sperms, embryos or anything.

I was sitting in my Moscow apartment, writing down field notes late in the eve-
ning, when these words suddenly appeared in the Skype window of my computer. It
was Alex, one of the intended fathers I had interviewed in the course of my research
on transnational surrogacy. My heart began to race. I stared at the screen. What had
I done? “You don’t understand why I am mad? Are you F∗∗∗ serious?” were the
next lines on my computer screen. No, I did not understand, at least not fully.
Alex and I had met on an internet platform for intended parents and surrogates,
where he had stated that he was in a gay relationship, looking for a woman in Europe
who would carry his children. He immediately agreed to share his experiences of
surrogacy with me. But it was not until a few months after our interview that Alex
must have Googled me and consequently came across a description of my PhD
project. The short abstract stated that the “Intimate encounters of prospective par-
ents and donors/surrogates are not only marked by unequal power structures but
also by a state of precariousness. Both parties walk a fine line between coercion and
free choice in following their desires and needs. (…) The frequency of the gift-­
metaphor—often contrasted with issues of commercialization and commodifica-
tion—and the humanitarian call for (global) female solidarity hint at the necessity

V. Siegl (*)
Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 87

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_8
88 V. Siegl

of moral justification for engaging in assisted reproductive technologies.” It was this

text that made Alex contact me again that night.
With our interview in mind, I realize that terms such as “commercialization” and
“commodification” could be provocative to someone who strongly wishes to find an
altruistic surrogate and make the process of surrogacy as “beautiful” as possible, as Alex
had told me. And yet I was struggling to comprehend how the wording of my abstract
could lead to such an aggressive outburst. I had chosen my words carefully, so that the
text would reflect my research interest: to include perspectives from different actors and
to complicate the dualistic picture of rich, consumerist intended parents and the poor,
defenseless surrogates, by taking vulnerabilities on both sides as a starting point. When
I explained this aim to Alex in my response, he answered that my endeavor had failed.
Rather, my text was “simply insulting” and made him feel “terribly sad.” In addition to
the short project description, he had also found the abstract to my first and, at the time,
only article on surrogacy (Siegl 2015). Alex copy-pasted one of its sentences into the
chat window: “Surrogacy has often been discussed as the ultimate form of commodifi-
cation processes, that position surrogate mothers as the weakest links in global repro-
duction chains.” Followed by his words: “Do you know who feels like the weakest link?
(…) I feel like trash (…) I feel like nobody fucking cares about us [i.e., gay men who
want to become fathers] (…) And I feel like I wasted my time and efforts.”
Alex’s words hit me hard, for it felt like I had disappointed someone who had put
trust in me. I could not give back what he had obviously been anticipating in return
for sharing his story with me. In this chapter, I want to explore the affective dimen-
sions of fieldwork by reflecting on the conflict between us. I will engage with the
question of how we, as researchers, can attend to expectations of reciprocity, some
of which might be unspoken and possibly unconscious, and some of which might
not be in line with our own plans, wishes, or convictions. Furthermore, I seek to
understand how these expectations are nurtured and shaped by the complex power
relations inherent in our fields of study and in what ways this influences how we
approach or present ourselves to (potential) research participants.

Being Biased

Gay men encounter a wide range of legal, social, and biological restrictions when
trying to achieve parenthood. Alex had experienced these restrictions when con-
fronted with the difficulties of adoption for homosexual couples and the prohibition
on surrogacy in his home country. “If you have a uterus, you can do whatever you
want,” he observed gloomily. And while any heterosexual man could be “a father for
free” (i.e., without having to pay for reproductive procedures), he was denied the
right to fatherhood. “We do not have access to the same reproductive rights as the
rest of the citizens,” he wrote to me that evening. “We are constantly subject to dis-
crimination. Write something about that.”
Up to now, I have not written anything about “that.” Alex’s perspectives will
form part of my thesis but they will not—as he had hoped—become the central
Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy Research 89

strand of concern, and I will not become a mouthpiece for his agenda. This is for a
number of reasons, connected to issues of situatedness and partiality as well as sim-
ply to the (pragmatic) prioritizing of some aspects over others. Even though it is my
aim to capture diverse positions on surrogacy and to understand how the different
people involved made sense of their thinking and acting, I was always aware that I
could not play the “God-trick” (Haraway 1988): neither could I capture all aspects
or represent all perspectives, nor could I pretend to look at the world from an ele-
vated perspective in order to produce what some would call “objective” knowledge.
Within many of the social sciences and humanities, recent decades have witnessed
the deconstruction of the “objective researcher” and the notion of an objective and
singular truth. Feminist and postcolonial interventions, post-structural theories, the
crisis of representation and many other critiques have contributed to an understand-
ing of knowledge as “situated,” to use another of Donna Haraway’s (ibid.) well-­
known expressions. The “situatedness” of knowledge is related to the situatedness—or
“positionality”—of the researcher. It shapes her understanding of particular events
and phenomena as well as the aspects that are important to her within a specific
research area. The fact that I was a female, young, white, upper-middle-class PhD
student from Austria, participating in a well-funded Swiss research project, shaped
my research in more ways than I could possibly list here, let alone fully grasp
myself. And so did the circumstance that I have no children and that I have not
(yet?) been affected by fertility problems. In addition, my politicization and involve-
ment in (queer-)feminist contexts directed the choices I made along the way—
choices about methods, approaches, and theories, but also, most importantly, about
whose perspectives I was most interested in in my research. It is here that situated-
ness and partiality meet. While the former is seldom something we can choose, the
latter refers to a stand we actively take. Nevertheless both are tightly interwoven, for
our situatedness unarguably influences our partiality. While there is a tension
between partiality and the aim of taking seriously and giving space to different per-
spectives on a specific topic, there is no contradiction. For, as Armbruster (2008)
points out, our knowledge is always partial in a double sense—in that, it can never
be complete and we can never be equally balanced on all sides.
I felt more partial toward the women who worked as surrogates, in the sense that
it was primarily an interest in their experiences and lifeworlds that had initially
drawn me to the topic of surrogacy. Consequently, my first article—the one Alex
referred to—was mainly concerned with their perspectives on the surrogacy pro-
cess. The choice of my research locations further led to unintended consequences
concerning the diversity of my interview partners. Due to the legal frameworks in
Russia and Ukraine1 (the second “country of destination” I researched), almost all

1
In Russia, only heterosexual couples (regardless of marital status) and single women have the
right to surrogacy, and in Ukraine only married heterosexual couples. Additionally, a so-called
medical indication is required, meaning that women need to provide proof of their infertility or of
prior miscarriages. As such, it is argued that men have no right to surrogacy because they suffer
from so-called social, not physical, infertility. Nevertheless, there are cases of single men and gay
couples using surrogacy in Russia, but the great majority of cases involve heterosexual couples.
90 V. Siegl

of the intended parents I spoke with were in heterosexual relationships. Not surpris-
ingly, Alex had “searched the entire website” of the research project, without seeing
anything written about “the discrimination we [i.e., gay men] are suffering because
we are denied access to public health.” If this is what Alex meant by saying I was
“biased,” then, yes, he was right. But what exactly was it that had made Alex assume
I would prioritize his suffering?

The Benefits and Burdens of Reciprocity

As researchers—but also as human beings per se—we are not only situated but
also relational. We are never just ourselves—we come into being through our
interactions with others and these others perceive us from their own positions and
belongings, projecting their wishes, desires, and expectations onto us, each hav-
ing their own (sometimes hidden) agendas. In ethnographic research, the dynam-
ics between researcher and researched are particularly fragile because we seek an
understanding that can only be achieved by forging bonds and building relation-
ships of trust. A process that takes not only time and patience but that might also
entail having to leave the position of a researcher and to share information about
our own lives. And yet, at some point, we have to withdraw, regain distance, and
critically evaluate what we have experienced—leading to an analysis that might
not be in line with what our research participants hoped for or expected us to con-
clude. Contact with Alex ended before it had the chance to develop into such a
long-term relationship, but similar dynamics were nonetheless at stake, for the
field of surrogacy is an especially delicate research site. The particular entangle-
ment of intimacy, secrecy, and power that it entails triggers heated debates in
society about commercialization, exploitation, and moral decay. These factors
make questions of access and power challenging, demanding a constant balancing
of interests and expectations.
Accounts of fieldwork and self-reflective writing in the field of qualitative
research are full of discussions surrounding the problematic of power and the con-
nected issue of reciprocity (Duncombe and Jessop 2012; Luff 1999). As anthropolo-
gists, we collect local and personal knowledge in order to then take it back into
academia, build our careers, and become experts in these fields of knowledge. Many
have criticized the often “extractive” nature of doing research (Smith 2012) and
have called for practices of reciprocity (Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey 2009). However,
it is never just the power axis of researcher–researched that is relevant. Being situ-
ated means that power relations are not static. Considering the intersection of differ-
ent positions and belongings in a specific context (gender, class, race, nationality,
age, dis/ability, and many others) reveals that there are always aspects and experi-
ences that connect us to and others that differentiate us from our research partici-
pants—we are insiders and outsiders at the same time (Hsiung 1996; Narayan 1993;
Riley et al. 2003; Thapar-Björkert and Henry 2004; Wolf 1993). As such, it might
not always be helpful to seek out “hierarchies of oppression.” What makes the
Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy Research 91

power situation even messier is that, as researchers, we are highly dependent on our
research participants. We have to appear likable and trustworthy, in order to get oth-
ers interested in what we are doing and to convey what they can gain through par-
ticipation in our study. After all, most people do not take part in our research merely
out of benevolence or friendliness. They are not necessarily strategically calculating
individuals, but their stories and their time are nonetheless “gifts” that come with
expectations of reciprocity (Mauss 1966). Some of these are explicit, others subtle;
some we will perceive as alleviating and enabling, while others might feel cumber-
some and restraining. At least these were my experiences during fieldwork.
I found myself in many situations in which I latched onto any possibility of “giv-
ing back.” This was often the case in my interactions with surrogates. Many were
interested in receiving information from my side about the surrogacy process or
about different clinics and agencies. For other surrogates, it was more the psycho-
logical need of having someone listen to their daily struggles, while yet others were
merely curious about talking to a foreigner and learning about my personal life. I
felt more at ease with my role as researcher when being able to give something
back. There were other situations, however, in which I perceived expectations of
reciprocity as a burden or obstacle. This feeling was particularly prominent in my
interactions with staff in private fertility clinics and agencies. The question “What’s
in it [sic] for us?” often turned out to be a central condition for participating in my
research, as these actors were interested in building up a reputation and making
Russia and Ukraine a better-known destination for surrogacy. Some of the intended
parents, again, were hoping that my work would contribute to the social acceptance
of surrogacy.
When I reread the initial e-mail I had sent to Alex and other intended parents I
was hoping to interview, I realized the misunderstandings my words could and obvi-
ously did entail. Given the sensitivity of the topic, I had worried about not finding
enough interview partners. My e-mails therefore left out certain pieces of informa-
tion, while remaining vague about others. I was reluctant to openly position my
thesis at the intersection of social anthropology and gender/feminist studies; I feared
that this intersection could automatically be read as an anti-surrogacy stance and,
therefore, as a threat. I was also hesitant to mention my interest in morality and eth-
ics; I was afraid that interlocutors could ask me about my own moral stance toward
surrogacy, expecting me to have a clear opinion and write my thesis around it. But I
did not have a clear standpoint and I was not interested in writing a manifesto, nei-
ther for nor against surrogacy. For these reasons I decided to keep my questions as
open as possible, particularly at the beginning of my fieldwork. This practice was
also a matter of methodology, for while it is important to have a theoretically
informed research question, I wanted to create space for my interlocutors to formu-
late aspects that were relevant to them. In my e-mails to potential interview partners
I merely stated that “I would like to know more about how people [in this case
intended parents] make their decisions in an area that is marked by seemingly end-
less options and possibilities on the one hand, and constraints and boundaries on the
other.” I also stressed their potential benefit from my research, as I was hoping to
“contribute to a better understanding” of surrogacy by “capturing diverse experi-
92 V. Siegl

ences and perspectives on the topic,” hopefully making the debate less heated and
more informed. Both these things were true, but the way I formulated my phrases
might have suggested that I was interested in actively supporting surrogacy and its
legalization. I suppose it is here that I have to seek the roots of Alex’s pain and
disappointment.

Rapport and the Drawbacks of Empathic Listening

The simultaneousness of power and powerlessness we experience as researchers is

unsettling and confusing and can make us act in ways we find problematic and
unethical. Fieldwork accounts are full of confessions about not being “yourself.”
Diane Wolf (1993), who composed one of the early anthologies on feminist field-
work, wrote about her inner struggles when doing research on the intimate lives of
women, while feeling compelled to lie about her religious orientation and marital
status in order to gain access to the research site: “I lied about the same topics about
which I hoped for honesty from my respondents. This particular representation of
myself made me feel dishonest and uncomfortable, but I did not see another way
out” (ibid., p. 2). Psychologist Sarah Riley (Riley et al. 2003) experienced similar
discomfort when working on gender relations from the perspective of “professional
men.” She recounts interview situations in which she was confronted with opinions
that she not only not shared but that also went against her own. Riley silenced her-
self, as she puts it, because she knew she needed these interviews but simultane-
ously she experienced an internal struggle because “In not arguing back, I was
producing a false self. (…) In being false, I was now also manipulative” (ibid.).
My own experiences resonated with these accounts. I often felt the need to dis-
play a “me” that was dressed in a fairly discreet and unobtrusive way—sometimes
in a more “adult” way, in order to be taken seriously, at other times in a “youthful”
way, in order to appear less threatening, depending on the kind of agency people
attributed to me. Similarly, I would sometimes display a “me” that was knowing and
informed, while at other times I was a naïve “me” (see also Thapar-Björkert and
Henry 2004). And frequently, I was a “me” that did not challenge an opinion but
merely nodded and listened. After all, as social scientists, we are often taught to
influence the interview situation as little as possible with our own way of being or
our own opinions. Adopting this role troubled me less when doing interviews with
professionals (doctors, agents, lawyers, etc.), but it became more problematic when
I engaged with my research participants in more intimate ways, asking them to
share their personal stories with me. I wanted to provide a safe space in the inter-
view, a space in which they did not experience judgment. Given the sensitivity of
the topic, I would have felt like I was betraying their trust had I interfered or com-
mented on their stories and decisions in a critical manner. I saw my role as one of an
empathic listener, putting aside my own viewpoints and feelings, in order to see and
feel from the perspective of my interlocutors. These are ways of “doing rapport,” as
anthropologists often phrase it, ways of establishing relationships. Some of these
Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy Research 93

are conscious, deliberate, and strategic; others are unconscious and unintentional.
Through doing rapport, we engage in what Hochschild (2012; see also Duncombe
and Jessop 2012) has termed “emotion work” and “emotional labor.” The former
refers to how we manage emotions within ourselves in order to align them with the
“feeling rules” of doing research, of conducting interviews. The latter concerns the
way we do or do not display our emotions and how this might affect our research.
It is exactly this kind of emotion work and emotional labor I experienced in the
interview with Alex, during which issues of power and empathy merged into a feel-
ing of being trapped. While there were several factors that made me, at least from
his perspective, more “powerful” (me being the researcher, having a uterus, not
having fertility problems, not being gay), Alex was clearly addressing me from a
superior place. He adopted an educative tone with me, the young woman who
wanted to learn from him. I felt cornered by the way he positioned me as an ally and
by the way he was constantly seeking my approval by putting a “Right?” or a “You
know what I mean?” at the end of a sentence. I got angry about his derisive remarks
about “the feminists”—meaning those who were not on his side, who “still didn’t
understand” that surrogacy was something “very beautiful.” I often felt the urge to
interfere, to complicate the picture of the feminist. But in the way Alex was speak-
ing there seemed to be no space for ambivalence and contradiction. Being an active
supporter of the legalization of surrogacy, he seemed to perceive others as either for
or against his cause. Some of his arguments were convincing, but I certainly did not
agree with all of his opinions, let alone the way he phrased them. I felt the urge to
free myself from this verbal corset as quickly as possible, and yet I could not help
but stay in the role of the empathic listener, encouraging him to keep talking, and
laughing at his sarcasm. This was not because I saw this perseverance as my profes-
sional obligation but rather because—despite my unease—I liked him and I appreci-
ated his making time for me, even answering further questions via e-mail in the days
following our interview. Did my way of interacting foster his assumption that I
would be on his side? There is a fine line between empathy and sympathy or sup-
port. Can we and others always tell the difference? I never got to ask Alex these
questions. As he did not want to give me any further explanations that night on
Skype, I suggested we talk again at another time. “Now I feel like saying no but I
know myself and I know I will,” he answered, but neither of us made the first step
for over a year. It was only when I came across the story of a woman who had faked
an entire pregnancy to trick the intended parents that I wrote to Alex. The personal
background information of the surrogate matched with what he had told me about a
woman he had been discussing an arrangement with. I was ambivalent about what
to do. I was worried about reigniting our dispute while simultaneously feeling
obliged to pass this information on to him. I followed my sense of responsibility
and, as it turned out, it was indeed the very same woman. However, Alex and his
partner had themselves stumbled upon reports of the scam on the internet and had
broken off relations with the potential surrogate. On receiving this answer, I could
not help noticing that I felt a bit disappointed. I must have hoped that I could bring
peace to our relationship by “rescuing” him from a potentially traumatic experience.
But even though he did not need rescuing, contacting him again alleviated the
94 V. Siegl

p­ aralyzing feeling of uneasy thankfulness I had felt for so long. The situation made
me realize that, in addition to reflecting on the topic of reciprocity as an issue of
ethical and political importance, it would be fruitful to include in the analysis the
psychological or emotional importance reciprocity can have for the researcher.
Reciprocating, for the researcher, can often function to relieve the researcher—in
positive as well as in potentially problematic ways—with regard to the extractive
nature of research, on the one hand, and of thankfulness or indebtedness on the
other.

A Call for Transparency and Confrontation

Reading and listening to post-fieldwork accounts as those produced by Diane Wolf

(Wolf 1993) or Sarah Riley (Riley et al. 2003), I wonder whether the people con-
fessing their “mistakes” would really act differently if they could relive the particu-
lar situations they describe. It is so much easier to say what we would change in our
next project than to actually do it. Many dilemmas result from the special kinds of
relationships ethnographic research enables and are to a certain degree insoluble
(Stacey 1988). Fieldwork is such a challenging endeavor precisely because it has so
much to do with who we are and who we become in the very specific interactions
with our research participants. What are the chances that I might once more find
myself in a similar conflict as the one with Alex? I do not know, and it would be
presumptuous to deny the possibility of such a situation repeating itself. Nevertheless,
my experiences with Alex certainly left their mark and have affected the way I have
approached research participants ever since. Realizing that my partiality could lead
to unintended problems, my reaction has been to be much more transparent about
my research goals and to refrain from seeking close relations with intended parents.
I gave up on my wish to accompany them in their transnational endeavors and
decided to stick to interviews instead. This change of mind was challenged when I
was contacted by a couple that wanted to start a surrogacy program in Ukraine. I
was hesitant about getting involved with them, so I was happy for our interaction to
have a contractual character. We had an unspoken and yet fairly clear deal that left
little room for further expectations or claims. I provided them with information, and
they provided me with their story. I explained to them in detail how I approach
anthropological research and writing and which research questions guided my
study. Over the course of our many months of intensive communication, more per-
sonal bonds developed, and a year after we met, I accompanied them to Ukraine to
pick up their new-born twins. Despite our close relationship, they never seem to
forget that I am a researcher, and I consciously remind them of this now and again.
There are obviously no universal rules for “correct” conduct during fieldwork,
but nevertheless I would like to make an argument for paying closer attention to our
own feelings as researchers. If we feel uneasy, there is a reason for this, and rather
than ignoring or suppressing the feeling, we should confront it. We must seek out
the root cause of our unease and query why it appears at certain moments and not
Uneasy Thankfulness and the Dilemma of Balancing Partiality in Surrogacy Research 95

others. Being attentive to the intersection of different experiences and belongings

can help us understand how these factors can lead to “misunderstanding, disap-
pointment, and broken trust” (Kirsch 2005, p. 2170) on both sides. Such attentive-
ness includes being self-reflexive and self-critical as a researcher, while also
acknowledging that this stance should not end in a diligent search of who did what
wrong. Conflicts are part of every ethnographic undertaking. They arise from an
interaction between two or more people, who perceive each other from their own
perspectives, shaped by situatedness and partiality, be it as researcher or researched.
All of these aspects could help form a solid basis for making deliberate choices
about the relationship between the duty of transparency and the need for material—
in the interests of our research partners but also in our own interests, because field-
work encounters can be intense and last for a long time. We must not grab hold of
any opportunity that arises but should select who we want to work with and, hence,
toward whom we want to feel indebted and thankful. An important aspect of my
contact with the couple mentioned above is the fact that they are open to critical
questions and comments from my side. In many regards their worldview is different
from mine, but there is a mutual space of encounter that Alex never allowed for in
our interaction. Alex was merely concerned with getting his message across. I
sensed that there might be a misunderstanding between us and yet I did not address
this issue during our interview. However, rather than shying away from potential
conflict we must risk confrontation. This can entail being as transparent as possible
about our research interest and our way of working, or even asking directly about
the expectations our interlocutors have when they agree to an interview. We need to
be careful with the pressures of academic knowledge production and maintain a
dialog with our own feelings. They can tell us much about our own and other peo-
ple’s unspoken assumptions and implicit promises, and they can help us avoid at
least some of the pitfalls of ethnographic research.

Acknowledgments My warmest thanks to the “Intimate Uncertainties” research team (Sabine

Strasser, Gerhild Perl, Julia Rehsmann, Luisa Piart) and the members of the Graduate School of the
Interdisciplinary Center of Gender Studies (University of Bern) for critical comments on prior ver-
sions of this chapter as well as for many stimulating debates over the years, parts of which have
surely made their way into this text. I am also greatly indebted to the editors of this volume, par-
ticularly to section editor Mechthild von Vacano, who compelled me to “dig deeper” and tie up the
loose ends. Last but not least, I would like to extend my gratitude to copy-editor Julene Knox for
helping me find the right words.

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Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections
on Research Relationships When
“Studying Up”

Emilia Perujo

A PhD dissertation on acrimonious divorces was just one of several studies I con-
ducted around the topic of adverse kinship situations in Mexico City. Doing research
on such intimate issues challenged me to thoroughly reflect on research ethics: on
issues of legitimacy, anonymity, and responsibility. Therefore, I thought I had
already learned a lot about research interactions. But just a few months after my
PhD defense I had a unique chance to switch places and become an object of inquiry
myself. This experience made me think about the feelings, possible motives, and
social position of subjects as they engage in the research process.
At that time, I had volunteered to participate in a documentary film, which was
inspired by a reality TV format: For two days, a camera and two set directors fol-
lowed three people in their daily routines. The team filmed me brushing my teeth,
getting ready, typing, making music, meeting with my friends, and having formal
conversations on the phone. Intermittently, during the shooting, the director would
insert a few interview questions about my day-to-day activities, my favorite music,
and my friendships. To me as a researcher, this was an eye-opening experience: I
found it extremely uncomfortable to be watched by strangers while performing my
routine activities, and I did not like to be interviewed about any aspect of my life,
even the most superficial. After years of studying other people’s lives, their intimate
kinship practices and relations, I found myself to be on the other side of interviews
and the observing gaze. This gave me an insight into an issue I had not explored
earlier, but which altered my future anthropological inquiries.
I found it difficult to understand why anyone would agree to participate in an
anthropological research project. I became uncomfortable with the idea that those
participating in my research were not being explicitly compensated for their time
and the life stories they shared, for being observed and questioned, and for the

E. Perujo (*)
Departamento de Antropología Social, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa,
Mexico City, Mexico

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 97

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_9
98 E. Perujo

i­ ntrusion into their private spheres. I decided to take a step back and analyze why—
in my previous research projects—people had volunteered to share their personal
accounts. If not for financial compensation, why would anyone want to talk to me
about their menstrual cycles, feelings of loneliness and sadness, or their hopes,
fears, and plans for the future? Why would they let me into their lives, even if I did
not contact them to offer help—regardless of whether I would turn out to be help-
ful? What do research participants who engage in our studies possibly gain from our
interactions?
In order to examine forms of mutual exchange in research relationships, it might
be helpful to refer to one of anthropology’s key concepts: reciprocity, that is, the
principle of mutual exchange, an act of giving, receiving, and again giving back the
same amount of something received. Reciprocity is involved in almost every social
interaction. Anthropologists have observed and discussed reciprocity as a core prin-
ciple of the communities and social relations we study (Malinowski 1922/1978;
Mauss 1925/2002), but the question of reciprocity in research relations, the social
relations between the researcher and her interlocutors, has long been overlooked or
ignored (Spencer 2010). This void is remarkable since, after all, anthropology is a
deeply relational science: We study relations—between people and things, people
and institutions, ideas or places, and people and other people. And we study these
by relating: We immerse ourselves in various social contexts by relating to things,
institutions, ideas, rituals, places, and, above all, people.
I understand research relationships as a particular type of social relation based on
exchange. The act of giving establishes a social relationship, because it requires that
the gift (what is given) be received and reciprocated. Marcel Mauss (1925/2002)
highlighted the fact that the gift is always more than an object being transacted;
rather, the act of giving establishes “complex social relations” (Tober 2001). For an
exchange relation to be reciprocal, both participants have to give and receive some-
thing of equal value. However, the gifts exchanged do not have to be material
objects: rituals, festivals, or respect, can all be considered gifts (Mauss 1925/2002).
The value of the gift has no “objective” measure; it is the imagined value (Tober
2001) that those involved in the exchange have to consider equal. Based on this
evaluation, they decide to give a gift or accept it, to enter into a complex social rela-
tionship, to remain party to it, or to end it.
But how does this principle apply to research relationships? Researchers pursue
a clear goal when entering a research relationship. We know why we want to contact
certain people, and we seek to benefit from their knowledge, their experience, opin-
ions, and beliefs. We garner information or data, but this presupposes that our
research counterparts would spend or invest their time to speak to us, share their
contacts, or mobilize the energy to talk about potentially difficult topics. Our poten-
tial gains and motives are clear, but what about the other side of this research rela-
tionship? Usually, we do not pay for our interviews, and the research relationship
seldom involves any other material form of exchange, for example, useful or infor-
mative material from our side, or our help in a concrete task. Usually, our research
relationships are based in immaterial forms of exchange, and are therefore difficult
to grasp; the gifts we give and receive are intangible. For reciprocity to exist, both
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research Relationships When “Studying Up” 99

sides of the interaction consensually enter into and remain within a complex rela-
tionship, one based on mutual obligation. To be able to create reciprocal research
relationships, it is important to understand why people agree to participate in our
research, and what kind of gifts we can offer in return. This chapter is the result of
my reflexive process of reevaluating the (possible) motives research participants
have, and the transactional dynamics between the researcher and her counterparts/
partners/interlocutors. It is based not only on rereading and reanalyzing my own
field notes and interview transcripts, but also on the direct answers provided by
participants in my most recent fieldwork.
In the following sections, I will begin by briefly characterizing the four fieldwork
experiences on which my reflections here are based. I will then trace the different
phases of fieldwork and illustrate how research relationships begin, unfold, and end,
while questions of giving and receiving are being constantly negotiated. I will show
how the content and context of these gifts affect field interactions, and how they
relate to our emotional understandings of topics and situations.

Introduction to the Fieldwork Contexts

Between 2008 and 2016, my research interests have moved around contemporary
kinship situations in my hometown, Mexico City—infertile couples availing them-
selves of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) to become parents; male infer-
tility and its treatment; fatherhood after divorce; sperm donations mediated by
Internet platforms. Each of these research topics were motivated by futuristic ideas
and questions about kinship; actors immersed on these specific topics were key to
understanding legal reforms, reproduction without sex, advanced technology, the
existence or impossibilities of “new” masculinities, and choice. People who decided
to take part in research were people with access to innovative technologies or legal
mechanisms surrounding kinship relations.
With the exception of my last research project on sperm donation, all research
was conducted among people of a higher class, age, and in most cases, with partici-
pants of the opposite gender (see Arendell 1997). All fieldwork experiences began
with me meeting people who were older, well educated, wealthy, and had successful
careers; most of the men and working women I met were directors, heads of depart-
ments or business owners. Almost every aspect of social privilege that could impact
research regarding power imbalances was in their favor. Compared to my own posi-
tioning, these research participants were situated on the favored side of the power
balance, a rather atypical constellation in anthropological research for many decades
(see Nader 1972). My research projects entailed the challenge of “studying up” and
therefore provided me with a particular setting which enabled me to reflect on
research ethics and reciprocity in research relationships (see Cassells and Jacobs
1987). But while my research counterparts were “up” in socioeconomic terms and
had access to the technology or lawyers, only a small minority of the general
Mexican population could even imagine that their situation was characterized by
100 E. Perujo

some sort of suffering and experience of failure. They were people who used ART
and who had lost pregnancies, babies, fortunes, and marital statuses trying to repro-
duce; they were divorced fathers impeded from seeing or talking to their children,
who had lost all the custody battles; they were donors unable to find receivers they
would like to give their semen to. These research topics were characterized by sad-
ness, anger, secrecy, and personal tragedy.

Entering the Field: Initiating Contacts

During the study on infertility and ART, one particular medical doctor served as
gatekeeper and was determinant for the success of my research. A gynecologist, he
put me in touch with different couples facing difficulties conceiving. Only later,
when I discussed the patient–doctor relationship with my interviewees, did I realize
how much our initial contact had depended on the close relationship they had with
their doctor and their high degree of satisfaction with his work. Thankfully praising
her doctor, M. described her trust in him and its importance in achieving her life
project: “I only feel comfortable with him, I think I never would have become preg-
nant in Puerto Rico, because I didn’t like my gynecologist there, we were not
close.” Because his patients trusted him, the doctor’s recommendation helped me
establish research relationships (see Hammersley and Atkinson 1993). He intro-
duced me as a friend doing academic research and asked his patients if I could
contact them. After this introduction, my research faced no major obstacles in gain-
ing access to information or interview partners. I was soon visiting mothers, preg-
nant women, or women receiving fertility treatment at their homes. I entered a field
where a trustful relationship was already established between the medical doctor
and his patients, and through this recommendation this rapport extended to my
fieldwork relationships.
The initial situation for my second research, which focused exclusively on male
infertility, was similar. I never could have established such close contact to male
infertility patients and the topic per se if not for the help of the same medical gate-
keeper. This time, I was searching for couples who were facing a male infertility
diagnosis. I wanted to interview both partners together and separately, but as it
turned out I could only interview men after I had sat down with their wives several
times, and at the end I could only interview one man alone. In all these conversa-
tions, my interview partners never themselves mentioned male infertility as a reason
for their difficulties in conceiving (see Becker 1994). This led me to reflect on mat-
ters of secrecy and on the limits of access to certain firsthand experiences. Measured
by my initial intent—to meet these couples and talk about their experience of cop-
ing with a male infertility diagnosis—these meetings did not provide me with the
information I was looking for. In this instance, the transference of trust did not suf-
fice to create a situation in which the taboo topic of male infertility could be dis-
cussed. But there was also an important external factor that impeded the development
of continuous and close research relationships: because of academic time constrains,
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research Relationships When “Studying Up” 101

the duration of this research project was rather short, much more so than other field
experiences.
Matters of secrecy and the ways men relate to reproduction grew on me, and I
decided to dedicate my doctoral research to the topic of conscious and committed
fatherhood. This meant investigating divorced fathers who were impeded from see-
ing their children after divorce and who were legally battling for their right to do so.
As in my prior research projects, my field access was established by a professional,
a family lawyer in this case. Again, I was introduced to these fathers by the one
person who was helping them solve their cases: a lawyer they trusted with their
futures, just as the couples accessing ARTs had trusted their doctor. Because of this
trust they agreed to participate in my research. In this case, it was the beginning of
a 1-year period of fieldwork and interview sessions.
Right after defending my PhD thesis, I was invited to join a research project
where I could either continue and further the topic of fatherhood in the absence of
children or elaborate a new proposal. My immediate response was a long academic
justification for my refusal to continue working on the same issue. In reality, I
wanted to take some time off, time to sleep, regain weight, stop problematizing
gender, relationships, marriage, birth, friendships, and anthropology. But I did not
want to forgo the opportunity, and therefore, decided to rediscover my curiosity for
sperm donation. So I designed concrete, delineated “happy fieldwork.” This new
research project focused on the transactions between sperm donors and receivers
who were setup without the mediation of a fertility clinic. However, from the onset,
my research simultaneously—and at the same level of importance—focused on
fieldwork transactions as well. For the first time, I did not know anyone who could
introduce me to the new field, any gatekeeper, or key informant to rely upon. I began
researching online and found specific discussion forums on the topic. I registered
with a transparent profile introducing myself as a researcher and openly searched
for people willing to participate in interviews. Upon their declaration of interest, I
sent all the potential participants a detailed description of the project and informed
consent forms. This experience proved to me that people were willing to participate
in my research project as long as I could explain everything beforehand. Interestingly,
the people who agreed to take part did research on me first. Just as the Internet gives
us a chance to find research subjects (actors), it gives them a chance to “research
you back.” Depending on the personal Internet presence of the researcher, this can
entail a lot. One potential participant even called the anthropology department and
asked me to e-mail a copy of my degree so he could check my credentials; he further
requested a personal confidentiality promise before telling me anything. I found this
a fair way to start a research relationship. Especially after my own experience with
the documentary film project had led me to doubt our disciplinary research tech-
niques as a whole, I felt relieved that they could ask something from me since the
beginning.
In many ways, direct online recruiting is different from being introduced by a
gatekeeper. Perhaps the most significant difference lies in the establishment of trust.
Meeting participants via a third person is very helpful, because we can build upon a
preexisting sense of trust and commitment, which we then have to extend and
102 E. Perujo

t­ransform into our own. When we approach research participants online, on the
other hand, they either trust us blindly or we slowly have to develop a relationship
of trust. The information we retrieve in our first conversation may be less dense, but
once trust is established, the relationship may even be considered more honest,
since it actually evolved between the researcher and the research participant and
was not transferred from another social relationship. Trust and reciprocity are built
as fieldwork develops.

Starting a Research Relationship: First Personal Encounters

In my opinion, the most exciting moment of fieldwork is meeting potential research

participants for the first time. As researchers, we prepare for these moments: we
adjust our outer appearance and think about how to word our first questions. These
initial encounters have a great impact on the dynamic of a research relationship and
can be surprisingly overwhelming. I experienced such a memorable and defining
moment when I first met A.C., a successful doctor and recently divorced father. I
documented this meeting in my field notes as follows:
He told me he and his ex-wife gave birth to their first son, who died of cancer a few months
later. Then he stared at the wall, remained silent for a couple of minutes and cried. He had
not even begun to tell me the story about the children he could not see since August and I
did not know what to do. Should I hand him a Kleenex, leave our table at the crowded caf-
eteria, say something, change the topic, finish the interview? (personal field notes, October
2012, translation E.P.).

We are never fully prepared to handle the emotions of research participants, even if
we were used to people tearing up and crying in an interview situation. People cry
for different reasons, in different settings and ways. Never had I expected a man like
A.C. to cry in front of me, especially within the first few minutes of our conversa-
tion. I was unsure how to respond, nor did I feel worthy as someone to whom he
could express his emotions in this manner or of the trust he seemed to place in me.
After all, I did not say anything or try to finish our conversation. I just let him speak.
As I learnt over the course of my fieldwork with divorced fathers, remaining silent
while people cried turned out to be the most helpful and appreciative response I
could give. For my silence allowed the participants to express their feelings in non-
verbal terms, and my witnessing their expression legitimated their sadness without
questioning it. Silence was my way to respect their pain. And looking back, this was
something I was able to “give back” as a researcher: to lend the research participants
my undivided attention, to sit down with them, and take the time to listen and wait.
In anthropological research, intimacy is a crucial currency, because it determines
the degree of access we obtain to the experiences of the people we study. The ways
to establish such intimacy depend greatly on the specific context, namely the spe-
cific topic of the inquiry as well as the personal situation of our collaborators. My
first anthropological research relationship began as another extreme encounter. As a
principle, I always let interviewees choose the time and place for our meetings. Ines
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research Relationships When “Studying Up” 103

had chosen the hospital. At that time, Ines was about to give birth, but she was con-
sidered at risk for preeclampsia, a dangerous rise in blood pressure. She wanted me
to visit her before her delivery. At first, I was doubtful about the proper way to
approach the situation, but when I met Ines, she seemed scared and strangely lonely
in this moment on the cusp of becoming a mother. So my presence, even as a
stranger and a researcher, provided her with some calming company.
As I experienced with A.H., another divorced father, as researchers we might not
be the only ones asking for something. A.H. had agreed to a first meeting, for which
he suggested that we meet before a TV show on which he was going to appear.
Outside the studio he told me that he had arranged for both of us to speak in front of
the camera as experts on problems divorced parents face when introducing new
partners to children. It was our first meeting ever, and I was quite surprised by this
setup. Without much time, I decided to refuse his plan, but we still entered the studio
together and he arranged for me to sit in the audience. His contribution during the
TV show was short, but emotive, and we discussed it afterward in the parking lot.
All of these situations are examples of rather intense first encounters with
research participants. In their intensity, their dynamics might be considered specific
to a research situation, where the contact with these research participants was estab-
lished through a highly trusted mediating person—a doctor or a lawyer, as explained
above. But these examples show how the question of mutual benefit, of reciprocity,
is negotiated from the onset of a research relationship.

Developing the Research Relationship: Going Deep

If the initial encounter between the researcher and the potential research participant
succeeds, their interactions will become more frequent over the course of the field-
work. By agreeing to meet, both partners agree to develop a research relationship.
As fieldwork progresses, the researcher will seek to explore deeper concerns than
those explored in the initial acclimation phase, and she might apply methodological
tools that suit a more advanced stage in the relationship. In my experience, it is help-
ful to start with noninvasive and informal research methods before progressing to
techniques like life-history interviews or in-depth questions.
By the time interactions have gained a certain level of depth, when questions
become more profound and intimate, the researcher already knows a lot about her
research counterpart. However, at this stage, the research participant has also gotten
to know the researcher. They know us through the research project, by the way we
handle certain issues and respond to particular topics; they can asses our personali-
ties by the way we conduct the conversation itself; and they know about any per-
sonal details the researcher had decided to share at a particular point in the
interaction. Because of the highly intersubjective nature of their fieldwork, anthro-
pologists “know with the price of being known” (Cornejo et al. 2008, p. 31, transla-
tion E.P.).
104 E. Perujo

At this advanced stage of the research relationship, I experienced how the “gifts”
I reciprocated became tangible in a strange physical way. In return for the wealth of
data my informants provided, I offered them supportive listening, empathy, and
comforting company. Sharing in their often painful experiences provided crucial
insight into the research topic for me, and at the same time, provided a valuable
opportunity for them to release these negative emotions and rely on my supportive
presence. I was there for them and I felt with them. Bound to keep my professional
promise of anonymity and confidentiality, I became a container for all the negative
emotions and the general atmosphere of the field. I was constantly immersed in
issues of absence, anger, clinical depression, failure, and loneliness. My intense
emotional involvement had real physical effects on me. I began to somatize the
emotional burden as back pain and headaches; I developed insomnia and lost focus
in other spheres on my life—outside of fieldwork, my social skills seemed to
devolve. I found it hard to find suitable mechanisms to release this emotional burden
without failing the trust of my research participants.
Another challenge I faced at this stage was that my research counterparts by this
point had become aware of the existence of other research participants, and they
began inquiring about the knowledge and experience I had gained from them. Such
a cross transfer of experience can generate tension. I felt an obligation to share the
experience I had gathered through the other participants’ accounts, but while leav-
ing out all details and guaranteeing anonymity. However, even if I granted their
explicit wish in telling them about other research participant’s experiences, I could
not ignore the potentially negative effect this information had: It can be devastating
for someone struggling to achieve a pregnancy, or be granted the right of access to
their children, to hear other people’s stories who were sharing the same fate, who
were also failing and suffering.
Even if the experience you share does not represent bad news, it may still cause
distress, as the example of R. shows. R. was a young married woman who, when I
met her, was trying to get pregnant with donor semen in a clinic. At one of our later
meetings she asked me if I knew of any case in which a woman had become preg-
nant by having sexual intercourse with a donor. I honestly told her that I did,
because I could not see any harm this information or my sharing it could cause. But
later she declared to me via a text message that she was going to have sex with a
donor, too, “because I told her it worked.” The seemingly innocent information I
provided put me in an awkward position of authority, given responsibilities I never
intended to carry.
This leads to another example, which shows the boundaries of what we can “give
back,” even if our research counterparts explicitly request us to. During my research
with divorced fathers, one night an enthusiastic G.V. called me asking if I could be
his legal witness. As it turned out he was about to meet his ex-wife and daughter
after one year of searching and trying to establish contact. The meeting was to take
place in a public space, and G.V. wanted to have someone accompanying him, who
later could testify to the fact that his ex-wife impeded him from being a father by
“poisoning” his daughter’s feelings toward him. I refused, because neither did I feel
prepared to observe children in such a conflict situation nor did I think it was an
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research Relationships When “Studying Up” 105

ethical role to take for me as a researcher. After this call, G.V. did not answer my
calls for two months; later he asked me to meet, but did not show up. I felt disap-
pointed, but somehow relieved at the same time, because I remembered how angry
he had been on the phone. With some distance, I interpreted G.V.’s behavior as a
passive form of revenge, and a way to express his disappointment in my contribu-
tion to our research relationship. As such I could empathize and understand that his
reaction was necessary for him to deal with the situation. I therefore never asked
him about the incident, even after we later reestablished contact. Refusal and avoid-
ance belong to the repertoire of research relationship dynamics; they are important
features of how these relationships are negotiated by both sides involved.

Ending the Research Relationship: Leaving the Field

Ending fieldwork involves much more than simply no longer meeting those with
whom we have established research relationships. The way to end the research rela-
tionship may be negotiated between the researcher and the research participant.
Once an intimate/close research relationship has been established, and research
partners have gotten used to talking to and sharing with the researcher, ending the
relationship may be problematic. Ines, for example, the same woman that had asked
me to meet her at the hospital, found it hard to terminate our relationship. Even after
we had had our closing session, she contacted me and requested to meet again,
because she just wanted to talk. I agreed, feeling somehow satisfied that I could be
there for her and return the gift she had given me as a researcher. So I gave her my
time and attention. A.H., the father I had accompanied into the TV studio, also
wanted to have one more meeting, so we had breakfast. In our previous meetings he
had refused to speak about his personal experience as a divorced father but only
wanted to address the topic at a general level. I respected this decision. But for this
last breakfast meeting, he had asked me to bring my voice recorder along. At the
meeting, he told me his personal biography in a 2-hour interview. He apparently felt
comfortable enough to share his story and did not want our research relationship to
end before he could. Unexpectedly, A.H. gave me an “extra gift” in terms of data,
while I lent him my ear, willing to represent his experience to my best capabilities.
Another example was M.R., who made it difficult for me to terminate our
research relationship. For the last meeting, M.R. had decided to invite me to his
home for dinner. He had been living with his 8-year-old son for a few months at that
time. In addition to a sophisticated meal, this invitation entailed the special oppor-
tunity to meet his son—and being able to observe father and son interact. To me this
invitation was a generous gift which I felt unable to return: I had come empty
handed, with no more time or information to share. Looking back, I interpret M.R.’s
generous invitation as motivated by his wish to proudly show off his newly estab-
lished family life, to present the relationship he had finally been able to build with
his son, and the home he had made. Through my research, he wanted his happy
ending to become public. But maybe it was an incitement for me to continue my
106 E. Perujo

research—and the research relationship with him. That evening, our conversation
went as if we were going to see each other again. I actually found it hard to end my
inquiry here, when he had just opened the next door to his personal experience of
divorced fatherhood. But sometimes—or probably quite often—fieldwork has to
end, even before all data are saturated and before the research participants are ready
to let us go.
One of the most obvious ways to give back is sharing our results with the former
research participants. Since this form of sharing presupposes some degree of data
processing, it usually happens at a later stage in the research process, after we have
left the field. In the aftermath of my first fieldwork, I edited a brief informal report
anonymously summarizing the accounts of ART patients’ experiences at different
points of their fertility treatment. When I handed each a copy, many expressed their
gratitude. They found it consoling to have their collective experience documented;
I felt relieved that I was finally able to reciprocate.
Over the course of time, I learned that my presence in these women’s lives had
made a difference. My conversations with L., for example, had supported her deci-
sion to begin psychological therapy; other interlocutors highlighted the emotional
relief they gained by having someone to talk to during this emotionally challenging
period. Most of my research topics were burdensome, taboo topics, which made it
hard to find people who were willing and able to open up about their experiences
and share them with me. But at the same time, research conversations became a rare
opportunity for the research participants to talk about these issues (Stodulka 2015).
What I offered in return was empathic listening and a nonjudgmental ear; some-
times giving and taking is not so much about materiality but more a critical reflec-
tion of one’s own and others’ compassion.

After Fieldwork and Final Remarks

As mentioned in the opening of this chapter, my last fieldwork encounter began with
the question, “Why did you agree to take part on the study?” Answers circled around
the interlocutors’ felt need to open up about a taboo, and the aspiration to contribute
to a more adequate public understanding of what it means to donate sperm as an
altruistic activity. Some of the gifts studying up can offer to social actors is to make
their knowledge available for a broader audience (Nader 1972). After my research
on divorce was published on a radio university station, many other divorcing men
contacted me asking for “expert” information.
Fieldwork—within a broad range of forms, degrees of involvement, and immer-
sion—means interaction, and produces emotions that are present throughout the
whole process of knowledge construction. Even when emotions and affects are fore-
grounded, they arise from the earliest stages of our research processes—in the way
we choose our topics, how we approach them, and more intensely, as we relate to
others during and after fieldwork. They shape our findings, especially in the case of
sentimentally charged topics and interviews. They have an impact on our field
Exchange of Intangible Gifts? Reflections on Research Relationships When “Studying Up” 107

r­elationships and on how researched phenomena can be approached, studied, and

reported. Many of the ethical decisions I have made during interviews and other
fieldwork encounters have depended on my own emotions and feelings toward a
topic or situation, and to reciprocate does not always come without a risk. Emotions
can also set limits or alter the dynamic of give and take between researcher and
informant. If not reflected upon, emotions can stand in the way of research and our
relationships with informants and interlocutors. As Spencer (2010) argues, the emo-
tional dimension could be integrated into to research, “liberating [it] from the
extraordinary, the feminine and the apolitical” as a vehicle of knowing, opening new
areas for research, and establishing dialogues between anthropology and other aca-
demic disciplines.
Over the years, I have encountered many colleagues and fellow students who had
a difficult time achieving what they wanted in research terms, or who were con-
stantly feeling that they had failed and suffered during fieldwork when studying up.
Yet sometimes working their way through conceit, skepticism, and suspicion,
socially and economically better-off research participants who are caught in dilem-
mas arising from cultural taboos, mostly accept anthropologists’ implicit contribu-
tions: participating in the research gives them the chance to be listened to, to feel
legitimate, to learn about the experiences of people in similar situations, and to talk
about their conflicts with someone who shares their vocabulary. It also gives them
space to cry, regardless of their status, or to terminate the relationship with no social
consequences. Through empathetically listening and providing a discursive arena of
mutual exchange, the researcher can become a “familiar stranger” (Simmel 1921).
Reflections of ethics in anthropological fieldwork often refer to research constella-
tions where the power asymmetries between researcher and researched lie clearly in
favor of the anthropologist; the literature therefore focuses on research constella-
tions where the researcher finds herself in a privileged position and has to reflect
upon ethical ways of dealing with this position of being “powerful.” But both differ-
ent and similar predicaments can manifest themselves when the people we inter-
view and study (with) are more resourceful and privileged than the anthropologist.

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Reciprocity in Research Relationships:
Learning from Imbalances

Mirjam Lücking

Introduction: Dimensions of Reciprocity

“It’s sad that a nice person like you will burn in hell.” This is what one of my
research participants from Madura Island, Indonesia, said when I told him that I
am not a Muslim. My research concerned Muslim lifestyles in Indonesia, and most
of my research participants were open and welcoming toward other religions and
cultures. However, in this case, as in some others, I was confronted with harsh
attempts to convert me to Islam. When this particular interlocutor, a traditionalist
religious leader in rural Madura, expressed his discontent with “Western infidel-
ity,” it was the climax of a research situation in which I mostly played the role of
the empathetic listener, while some of my interlocutors showed little or no accep-
tance of my cultural background. Nevertheless, I also felt indebted to many of my
interlocutors and informants because they were making time to talk to me and
showed great hospitality—despite our disparate worldviews. The combination of
feelings of annoyance and indebtedness ultimately culminated in a sense of guilt
that gave rise to my awareness of persistent imbalances and inequalities, which in
some regards made the establishment of reciprocity a challenging and limited
undertaking.
“Giving and taking” is deeply ingrained in ethnographic research life—practices
that bring about emotional experiences and intercultural learning in our host com-
munities. Conducting in-depth, qualitative ethnographic research, anthropologists

M. Lücking (*)
Department of Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben Gurion University of
the Negev, Beersheba, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 109

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_10
110 M. Lücking

engage in peoples’ everyday lifeworlds, often living among our research partici-
pants and taking part in their daily activities. Mutuality is a natural element of any
relationship. It is expected and it makes personal encounters meaningful (see
Sanjek 2015). As a research methodology, participant observation requires that we
reflect on the mechanisms of mutuality. Concerning the example of research par-
ticipants’ attempts to convert me to Islam, I found it crucial to establish an emo-
tional distance in order to analyze their reactions to me—a non-Muslim, unmarried,
female, white, Western researcher—as interesting data rather than personal attacks.
Handling distance and proximity with research participants can be a contradictory
endeavor. For me, the exchange of material, emotional, and intellectual values
established understanding, but it was also characterized by imbalances and inequal-
ity. Thus, the reflection in this chapter focuses on imbalanced reciprocity in
researchers’ affects.
When I speak of “imbalanced reciprocity,” I refer (1) to one-sidedness in the
dynamics of giving and taking in emotional, intellectual, and material terms and (2)
to structural inequalities. Marshall Sahlins differentiates between “generalized reci-
procity,” “balanced reciprocity,” and “negative reciprocity” (Sahlins 1972, p. 193–
194). My use of the term “imbalanced reciprocity” is not meant as the opposite of
Sahlins’ concept of “balanced reciprocity,” which he sees as the direct exchange of
material goods or money. The notion of “imbalance” to which I refer occurs in set-
tings that—according to Sahlin’s typology—are characterized by “generalized reci-
procity,” in which there is no expectation of a direct return but an indirect commitment
to reciprocate gifts.
In order to unravel these dynamics, I provide reflexive descriptions of dilemmas
that I encountered during research stays in Indonesia.1 My analysis of selected
cases (1) highlights the interrelatedness of the material, emotional, and intellectual
dimensions of reciprocity in fieldwork relationships, outlining different modes of
“giving and taking,” and (2) provides practical suggestions of how to deal with the
ambivalent emotions that result from imbalances in this “giving and taking.” As a
strategy for dealing with researchers’ affects in situations of imbalanced reciproc-
ity, I introduce collaborative tandem- and team-research models that have been
established by German and Indonesian anthropologists, as an example of how to
create epistemological surplus from the juxtaposition of different positionalities. I
argue that a self-­reflective and systematic focus on exchange of material, emo-
tional, and intellectual values between researchers and their informants enhances
intersubjective understanding and helps us come to terms with pleasant and
unpleasant affective experiences in fieldwork encounters even if the reciprocity
remains imbalanced.

1
Throughout this chapter, I refer to experiences from a research on “Indonesia and the Arab
World,” that I conducted in Madura and Central Java in 2013 and 2014 (see Lücking 2014, 2016,
2017). The project was funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research through the
program “Grounding Area Studies in Social Practice” at the University of Freiburg with the grant
no. 01UC1307.
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances 111

Material Reciprocity

Much of our everyday morality is concerned with the question of obligation and spontane-
ity in the gift. It is our good fortune that all is not couched in terms of purchase and sale.
Things have values which are emotional as well as material; in deed in some cases the val-
ues are entirely emotional. (Mauss 1966, p. 63)

With reference to Mauss’ idea of the gift, I discuss instances of material exchange
that did not occur as official transactions but as “gifts,” including monetary gifts, in
a context of “generalized reciprocity” (Sahlins 1972, p. 193). As the statement by
Mauss suggests, material gifts become meaningful when they are related to exchang-
ing parties’ emotions. Thus, differentiating between materiality and emotionality is
somewhat artificial, as the two dimensions are significantly intertwined. Yet, this
differentiation also helps reveal where imbalances and inequality may complicate
research relationships.
The very fact that material and emotional values are intertwined in “gift
exchanges” highlights that culturally specific peculiarities are at stake. Engaging in
“giving and taking” demands an understanding of the relevant “culture of reciproc-
ity.” Establishing material reciprocity is part of the famous “second socialization” of
an anthropologist (see Spittler 2001, p. 12; Förster 2001, p. 461). If we neglect or
misunderstand the effects of well-intentioned attempts of establishing reciprocity,
research relationships can go awry.
A culture of great hospitality, for example, does not mean that there are no expec-
tations of material returns. Accepting hospitality without attempting to give some-
thing in return means living at the expenses of people who often have very little to
give. While living with research participants in Madura, I realized that because of
my presence my hosts cooked special and potentially more expensive food. I calcu-
lated that, relative to the average income in the region, the act of showing great
hospitality to me as their guest meant an economic burden for some of my hosts. Yet
the possibility of offering direct payment—as a form of “balanced reciprocity”
(Sahlins 1972, p. 193)—risked depersonalizing the relationship and reinforcing
power relations. However, to accept this hospitality without appropriately recipro-
cating would also risk manifesting unequal power relations. Moreover, there are
culturally specific ways to give money. In Indonesia, this would rarely happen
openly. Rupiah notes are hidden in envelopes and exchanged via a handshake,
known as salam tempel, literally meaning a “pasted greeting.”
Similarly, the geographer Farhana Sultana shows, with reference to her fieldwork
experiences in Bangladesh, that to accept certain offers and gestures of hospitality
puts the receiver of these “gifts” in a superior position. When she realized that the
acceptance of generous hospitality could reinforce hierarchies between her as a
superior researcher and her hosts, she carefully negotiated her positionality, not by
bluntly refusing hospitality nor by paying for it, but through conscious choices
regarding what to eat, where and how to sit, how to dress, and how to address people
(Sultana 2007, p. 379). Finding the right ways to receive and give back is part of the
process of establishing rapport. In many contexts, accepting hospitality without
112 M. Lücking

g­ iving anything in return or, conversely, paying for accommodation, food, time, and
information can manifest and entrench the power relations between the researcher
and the researched and influence the ways in which stories are told and information
is revealed. Direct payment brings a market logic into the research and induces what
Graeber (2001, p. 221) calls “closed reciprocity.” In “open reciprocity,” by contrast,
counterparts establish emotional and social bonds of continuous commitment, while
“closed reciprocity” can cause the termination of a social relationship through
meticulously calculated monetary forms of compensation (ibid., p. 220). Graeber’s
argument scrutinizes the challenge of “giving and taking.” How can we establish
research relationships that neither involve the material exploitation of our hosts and
research participants, nor create “a kind of fragile, competitive equality” within the
hierarchies of the host society (ibid., p. 221)? This means that a researcher’s engage-
ment impacts on local hierarchies and can add value to, devalue, or complicate
peoples’ social status.
Western ethical standards are rarely helpful in resolving the challenge of finding
ways to “give back” (Dubinsky 2016; Sultana 2007). Ultimately, the negotiation of
“giving and taking” remains a continuous process that constantly needs to be
adjusted (Sultana 2007, p. 379). Based on his research with children in football
academies in Ghana, Itamar Dubinsky states:
My experiences taught me that an unyielding embrace of Western perspectives on ethics can
blind us to the local research participants’ views regarding reciprocity. Rather than coming
to the field with a fixed agenda on reciprocity, it is essential to allow our engagement with
the field to reshape our ethical and methodological positions. (Dubinsky 2016, p. 393)

In Madura, the situation was resolved by observing local conventions and consult-
ing friends on how to “give back.” I understood how relatives exchange material
goods and money and realized that wealthier family members are expected to show
their care for disadvantaged relatives by supporting them financially. Monetary gifts
are often given for a clear purpose, like renovating the kitchen or buying land. This
means that those who give are aware of the receivers’ needs, sincerely caring for
them. Giving adequately in material terms demands personal involvement with oth-
ers’ living situations. I began to join my hosts as they shopped for groceries; we
discussed monthly expenses and school fees and I eventually found ways to contrib-
ute to meeting these costs. Providing financial support for children’s education or
buying a new dress for a friend on a special occasion communicated compassion for
others, and hence was appreciated. Moreover, I was reminded of the Indonesian
concept of rejeki, which, literally translated, means “fortune” and refers to sudden
material gain that does not have a clear source, often considered a “blessing” or a
“gift from heaven,” and which does not demand reciprocation. Labeling monetary
gifts rejeki provides a safe space for receiving financial support. Apart from rejeki
gifts and contributions to groceries, I made small presents to express my gratitude,
which did not have a material value as much as a symbolic one. I brought souvenirs
(oleh-oleh) from Germany, including, among other things, collectible cards auto-
graphed by the German-Turkish and Muslim soccer player Mesut Özil, which
evoked considerable excitement among my research participants and often prompted
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances 113

conversations about Muslim cultures and identities in Indonesia and Germany.

Thus, if considered carefully, gifts can build bridges between different cultural and
religious positionalities.
Obviously, material gifts are often linked to emotional relatedness. In the semis-
tructured emotion diaries designed by The Researchers’ Affects project, one ques-
tion that triggered my reflection in this regard was “Who are you in the field?”2
While living with my research participants, I became a friend, a sister, and a daugh-
ter. However, although I supported my status as an adopted family member by find-
ing ways to contribute to living expenses, in many cases, the temporality of my
presence was clear. Other possible answers to the question “Who are you in the
field?” included guest, Westerner, and outsider. Moreover, sharing in living expenses
did not involve the same financial burden for me as it did for local people. Compared
to most of my research participants, I was rich. The imbalances between my mate-
rial contributions and those of my research participants, and my corresponding feel-
ings of indebtedness, indicate structural socioeconomic inequalities and
asymmetrical power relations on a broader scale. Learning about the conventions of
“giving and returning” cannot deconstruct differences in access to privileges. These
structural inequalities and the awareness of persistent imbalances evoked feelings of
guilt and frustration, which were part of the process of learning and caring about the
living situation of my research participants.

Emotional Reciprocity

Looking more closely at the emotional dimension of reciprocity, we find that emo-
tionality is not simply a matter of establishing rapport. Participant observation is a
method that involves all the senses, and any related emotions are not only personal
byproducts but connect anthropologists to the lifeworlds they study and can hence
be understood as ethnographic data. In his plea for “thick participation” as a radical
form of participant observation, Gerd Spittler (2001) argues that participant obser-
vation is especially effective in gaining access to the field and a more general under-
standing of a society or topic. Similarly, Förster argues that it is misleading to
consider language as the essence of culture, and therefore, participation and every-
day seeing/observing are crucial elements in ethnographic fieldwork (2001, p. 474).
Researchers tend to prioritize verbal data, which can be misleading, as there is often
a discrepancy between words and deeds (ibid., p. 474), and situations often arise in
which the actual meanings of words are not as important as the emotional subtexts
of conversations (Wikan 1992, p. 470). Wikan argues that empathy or “resonance”
is a form of communication and understanding that is not language based (ibid.,
p. 466, 470). Comprehending a person’s situation entails emotional reactions, grasp-
ing their fears, hopes, needs, and desires. Emotions are both method and data.

2
See Stodulka et al. (2019) and Appendix.
114 M. Lücking

With many of my research participants, the emotional relatedness felt like a natu-
ral process and research relationships became friendships. In these friendly research
relationships, I found it easy to reciprocate emotionally and to understand subtle
notions and emotional communication. Asking out of sincere curiosity and recipro-
cating because of sympathy and care made fieldwork life very enjoyable. Here,
research was not a one-way activity. I took time to answer my research participants’
enquiries into my personal and cultural background, becoming a “resource person”
for some questions, for example, concerning information about scholarships and
higher education abroad.
Apart from gaining an understanding of the research context, growing accus-
tomed to social conventions and emotions was especially crucial when it came to
the question of consent. In Indonesia, it is considered impolite to openly reject a
request or to bluntly say no. In order to determine research participants’ feelings
about their willingness to take part in my research, it was necessary to recognize
indirect messages and emotional subtexts. This also meant that I would give inter-
locutors the opportunity to reject my enquiries by presenting excuses to them like,
“These are busy times; maybe if you have time to talk to me, give me a call.” By
verbally postponing potential involvement in the research or suggesting that I could
be contacted at another time, I avoided putting my research participants in a situa-
tion where they had to make a statement of consent on the spot. Moreover, I sought
reconfirmation of their consent in the course of the research.
While this strategy mostly worked well, establishing resonance and rapport with
research participants whose perspectives I found at times hard to comprehend, who
were openly hostile, or whom I simply didn’t like was difficult and sometimes
impossible. I found myself very consciously in this mode when I talked to persons
who denounced worldviews other than their own as sinful mistakes. I became impa-
tient when I had the feeling that there was no acceptance on their part of, or interest
in, my lifeworld and cultural background. Research can be an emotional and intel-
lectual one-way effort in such circumstances. The researcher is the one who learns;
makes an effort to master a foreign language; studies historical, religious, cultural,
and political contexts different from her own; and undergoes sometimes physically
and emotionally arduous fieldwork. This one-sidedness can be frustrating. For
example, the religious leader whom I quoted in the beginning of this chapter further
questioned my legitimacy as a non-Muslim in studying a topic concerning Islam,
suggesting that I wanted to do “harm” to Islam. I felt attacked, rejected, and misun-
derstood. Had I not gone to every length to conduct sensible research, to understand
emic interpretations and expectations, and to foster mutual understanding, while
opposing Islamophobia? “And all that I get in return is rejection,” I wrote in my field
notes. At the same time, I reflected that it had been my decision to do this research.
Why did I expect to be welcomed, as I was by the vast majority of research partici-
pants? In order to understand where my interlocutors’ reactions came from, it was
helpful to distance myself emotionally and to understand that this was not a per-
sonal attack against me but against the things that I represent in the eyes of my
interlocutors.
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances 115

The traditionalist Muslim leader in Madura did not want to hear what I had to
say, he did not want to listen or to establish rapport. He wanted to express his senti-
ments, and I obviously represented an enemy to whom he felt he could address his
grievances. Ironically, for my interlocutor, I represented the “Western infidel,” the
“Orientalist” who studies Islam in order to harm the Muslim world, whereas in
Germany and other Western societies, I have been attacked by xenophobic people
for “defending” Islam. Thus, despite all efforts at establishing reciprocity, the imbal-
ances and confrontation that arise in research encounters reveal broader frictions
within and between societies. Ethnographic research enables researchers to describe
these frictions and may contribute to challenging or even resolving them.
To treat hostile reactions as research data was a learning process for me. I felt
personally insulted and was struggling to find a professional stance as a researcher.
Here, instead of empathy, emotional detachment helped me deal with frustration
and feelings of deficiency. I found this particularly challenging when the people
who I felt insulted me also offered me material resources like food and transporta-
tion or even accommodation. Could I accept sleeping in the Qur’anic school of the
Muslim leader? Could I stand dealing with his grudge every day? Could I still treat
this situation as an interesting research opportunity, taking the chance to get
behind the scenes at his Qur’anic school? Would I end up in a situation where I
would have to thank him for letting me stay and explore, a situation which would
establish a hierarchical imbalance between an indebted researcher and a seem-
ingly generous religious leader, who seeks to buy my loyalty? In the end, I didn’t
stay at his house/school and did not follow up his story. I felt that the material
imbalances would complicate the distance that I needed to maintain in order to
analyze the situation. Consequently, I cannot report much about the inner work-
ings of his school. My own limitations mark the limits of my research capacities
in this case.
In most other cases, differences in worldviews, values, and convictions were
more subtle. Even though some other research participants might have similarly
disapproved of what they perceived to be my “irreligiousness,” the encounters did
not have the same harsh aspect. Moreover, I had found ways to reciprocate in mate-
rial terms and did not feel that I would be indebted if I accepted the material offers
of accommodation, food, and transportation made by my research participants.
Nevertheless, underlying material imbalances, in combination with differing values
and convictions, evoked ambivalent feelings about the research relationship. This
was particularly difficult when I received actual “gifts.” For example, the wealthy
leader of another Qur’anic school in Madura gave me perfume and jewelry that she
had brought back from her pilgrimage to Mecca. On the one hand, I did not feel
comfortable receiving these gifts, while on the other hand, I felt honored that a
research participant would give to me something special and dear to them. Now,
these gifts remain as physical proof of the ambivalences that exist in research rela-
tionships. They represent the imbalances and complexities of engaging in material
reciprocal exchange. They are a reminder of the co-existence of mutual sympathy
and contrasting values and convictions.
116 M. Lücking

The uneasiness I felt about such acts of receiving, rejecting, reciprocating, or

compensating expanded from the field to my desk, where I realized that my
­interpretation and representation of data was affected. The emotions provoked by
the imbalances, inequalities, dissonances, but also the joys of “giving and taking” in
the field affect data analysis and the representation of research results. While writ-
ing, I began to wonder how I could reciprocate with the results of my research.

Intellectual Reciprocity

The social geographer Tatek Abebe sees material exchange as short-term reciproc-
ity, while he considers the communication of research findings to participants and
policy makers as long-term reciprocity that can help improve the lives of research
participants (2009, p. 461). In the field, acts of reciprocity—material and nonmate-
rial ones—are often affective and spontaneous. At the desk, the question of what we
can give back in the long run may cause more a serious headache. Moreover, this
“long-term reciprocity” may in fact have no effect on research participants’ imme-
diate living situations, whereas a material gift—like supporting education or land
ownership—can have a sustainable impact for research participants. Thus, the ques-
tion of what we can return through research results is a rather hypothetical one,
especially in the case of basic research. In the following, I describe “intellectual
reciprocity,” as being relevant in (1) the representation of research results and (2) the
intellectual exchange with research partners. In line with the examples of my
research on Islam in Indonesia, I reflect on how intellectual reciprocity might look
in situations that essentially challenge our normative and ethical standpoints.
Ethnographic data are intellectually and affectively precious to the researcher.
But to whom does this data belong? Analogous to the copyrights held on photos, the
stories told by research participants remain their own. In this regard, “giving back”
the documentation of research data is a good way to acknowledge that the data in
fact can be a treasure to our research participants.3
Yet, research data are no “raw material.” In the end, we shape and filter research
results. What we can offer is an outside viewpoint on the phenomena we investigate:
an informed perspective that may not always represent what research participants
might hope for. Even though anthropologists use inductive approaches and aim to
represent emic perspectives, the theoretical lens through which we look, listen, and
feel cannot be underestimated. Henrietta Moore has described this as a “pre-­
theoretical commitment” of subconscious, theoretical preconceptions, or a Zeitgeist

3
An example of this is the compilation of historical accounts in local language as it has been
achieved by Judith Beyer for her research location in Kyrgyzstan (see Beyer and Inogamova 2010).
Another example is the project behind this book: Among other things, Thomas Stodulka shared the
transcript of our interview with me, which I highly appreciated and fostered my realization that
data are not only precious to the researcher. Furthermore, giving back the data can be a trigger for
further inquiries. In ethnographic filming, this method is well known as “elicitation.”
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances 117

that we do not question but take for granted (2003, p. 18).4 In other words, my
uneasiness about “taking” also concerned the practice of taking information or
“data,” which I would analyze and interpret with the aim of producing authoritative
scientific knowledge. This knowledge is represented in the conventions of Western
academia. The feeling that I could not adequately return something substantial to
my research participants lingered, spread across my writing desk, and permeated
my academic presentations at workshops and conferences.
For example, I frequently discussed ways to challenge Western Islamophobia
with my research participants in Indonesia. While more theoretical explanations of
my academic interest in the intertwinement of sociocultural and religious change
appeared confusing for research participants, the idea of contradicting Islamophobia
was something that they could relate to more easily. Indeed, some research partici-
pants linked these explanations to their own interests and soon spread the word that
I was conducting research in order to fight Islamophobia. In principle, this was true,
as I wanted to show that Islamic traditions were multifarious and that Islamic life-
styles were linked to social structures and traditions, which rendered Islamophobia
irrational. Nevertheless, I knew that I could not fulfill some research participants’
expectations that I would become an “ambassador” in the name of Islam, which was
often linked to their hopes of seeing me embrace Islam. Yet, as this example shows,
discussions about the impact of research in the long run triggered intellectual reci-
procity. It also helped me understand the potential harm and beneficial effects of
research. After all, our own interpretation of what is “beneficial” might differ from
research participants’ ideas in this regard, and in some circumstances, “giving back”
intellectually remains an unattainable goal.
In this sense, cooperative research with colleagues in Indonesia essentially con-
tributed to my learning process. Here, my approach was very much inspired by the
Freiburg-Yogyakarta model of tandem and team research that was invented by
Judith Schlehe and successfully implemented in the framework of a now 16 years
partnership between the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the
University of Freiburg and the Department for Anthropology of Gadjah Mada
University in Yogyakarta (Schlehe and Hidayah 2014). Schlehe (2013) describes the
tandem model, which fruitfully combines different perspectives in research prac-
tice, as “wechselseitige Übersetzungen” (“mutual translations”). This means that
research partners systematically “translate” their different positionalities and use
them consciously in research encounters and data analysis.
In Madura, I experienced this kind of cooperation with the anthropologist Khotim
Ubaidillah, or Ubed, who significantly supported my research through his expertise
on social theory, local language, and culture, and through our joint reflection on our
differing perspectives. His reaction to my description of the encounter with the reli-
gious leader in Madura illustrates how our cooperation opened up ways for further
interpretation, while my personal emotions had limited them. After Ubed read a
thesis chapter in which I reflected about being confronted with missionary activi-
ties, he commented:

4
For discussions about the relativity an inductive approach in ethnographic research see: Bernhard
(2006), Davies (1999), Förster (2001), Gobo (2008), and Moore (2003).
118 M. Lücking

I found it funny to read this. This represents a funny and ironic reflection about your
research participants. (…) I remember the interview with the old Kyai5 who spoke harshly
and urged you to become Muslim. (…) Didn’t this incident become a trigger for our discus-
sion about the [inter-religious] tolerance of Madurese people? About these provocative
efforts [to proselytize]—from the softest way to the more straightforward ones—I only
keep them as comical stories. (…) I remember an anecdote that reflects the exorbitance of
orthodox NU6 people in Madura, which says: “My child, you have to marry a fellow
Muslim. If you can’t, then go and marry an adherent of Muhammadiyah.7 (E-mail corre-
spondence, Khotim Ubaidillah 24.11.2016, translation M.L.)

This anecdote refers to Muslims in Madura who belong to the Indonesian Muslim
association Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and who do not approve of any other Muslim
branch. By reminding me of the fact that NU Muslims in Madura are intolerant
toward any other religious or ideological orientation—including other Muslim ori-
entations—Ubed resolved my feeling of being personally attacked, shifting my
interest to tensions between Muslims, the reasons for the exclusivist NU mentality,
and the multilayered meanings of this Kyai’s harsh words. Moreover, he reminded
me of the fruitful discussions that ensued from my frustration and the fact that our
experiences of the situation were remarkably different. Ubed’s ability to look at the
situation with a sense of humor was enormously helpful in enabling me to reflect on
my emotions and render them productive for further inquiries.
Juxtaposing our different feelings and perspectives during research allowed us to
engage in fruitful data analysis. Taking different positionalities into account, identi-
fying different perspectives, contextualizing, and representing them, corresponds
with the demands of the Writing Culture debate of the 1980s. James Clifford
famously argued that truth(s) are only partial (2010, p. 1–26), and different perspec-
tives complement one another. Rabinow (2010) suggests pluralizing and diversify-
ing research approaches to avoid hegemony in knowledge production. In order to
use different approaches and engage in different perspectives in dialog, an aware-
ness of one’s own perspective is presupposed (ibid., p. 244), but at times only pain-
fully achieved. The cooperative research and friendship with Ubed was essential in
allowing me to practice reflexivity and juxtapose different perspectives. My gaze
was limited because of the ambivalent feelings that very complex field situations
had caused. Ubed’s humor and his perspective opened my eyes to the reasons for
and the complexities of the Kyai’s statement. Representing a variety of perspectives
and making clear our research positionalities and related ways of feeling, under-
standing, and writing contributed to a more holistic understanding of research data.
And yet, no collaboration is flawless. Even though this model has achieved a
high degree of fruitful research cooperation, it too has its limits; intellectual reci-
procity does not flatten power imbalances that have material and structural implica-
tions between research partners. Conventions in international academia privilege

5
Religious leader.
6
NU is the largest mainstream Muslim association in Indonesia, known for its orthodoxy but also
mystic traditions in Islam. NU has its strongholds in rural areas.
7
Muyammadiyah is the second-largest mainstream Muslim association in Indonesia. It is associ-
ated with reformism and urban Muslim lifestyles.
Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Learning from Imbalances 119

researchers who work at Western research institutions. In international “competi-

tion,” the hegemony of Western academic traditions remains decisive. Nevertheless,
creating intellectual reciprocity is a first and essential step in decolonizing knowl-
edge production and can contribute to the uncovering of global and local inequali-
ties as well as strategies for overcoming them.

Outlook: Limits of Reciprocity

The examples at hand show that the establishment of reciprocity is in many ways
imbalanced and limited. The spheres of materiality, emotionality, and intellectuality
are intertwined. Differentiating them analytically allows one to understand the con-
text in which imbalances occur: (1) imbalances in material exchange that occur
through the culturally specific meanings of exchanging material/monetary gifts, the
structural inequalities prevailing between the researcher and research participants,
and hierarchies within the host community. (2) imbalances on the emotional level,
within the methodological contradiction of establishing proximity and empathy on
the one hand and professional distance on the other. And (3) imbalances in the
attempt to establish intellectual reciprocity, when hopes about the possible impact
of a research differ and when structural inequalities impact on researchers’ different
access to resources and privileges.
As the example of cooperative research indicates, accepting limitations and
establishing an awareness of one’s own positionality can expand our interpretative
capacities and help researchers come to terms with the affective dimensions of field-
work. My struggle with affects in the course of imbalanced reciprocity came with
the idea that balance, equality, and mutuality constitute the desirable fieldwork
mode, while imbalances and one-sidedness are negative and destructive. Even
though I maintain that a critical reflection about imbalances is crucial—especially
power imbalances and structural inequalities—it turns out that in many cases, there
are intractable limits to the establishment of balance, equality, and mutuality. Being
aware of the reasons for imbalance can contribute to an understanding of the situa-
tion and may enable a contribution to structural changes. After all, to reciprocate
does not automatically mean to establish equality. Finding a solution to this is not
easy. Considering material reciprocity, the immediate “return” of a material gift, a
payment or compensation, can even “close” research relationships (see Graeber
2001, p. 221). This short-term reciprocity (see Abebe 2009, p. 461) may only gloss
over structural imbalances and inequalities rather than changing structures.
Therefore, attempts at “giving back”’ are a continuous process that does not end
with the conclusion of a research project. The sense of guilt that resulted from my
reflection on persistent imbalances was important in order to come to the realization
of unattainable reciprocity. Here, the question of what researchers can return
expands beyond the field and becomes political.
To come to terms with researchers’ affects does not mean to flatten emotions and
gloss over imbalances but to make sense of them. Feelings of guilt, for instance,
120 M. Lücking

although painful, can trigger reflections about research ethics, power relations, and
the political implications of research endeavors. In this regard, I consider coopera-
tive research approaches not only a fruitful methodological model but also as an
essential step in the decolonization of knowledge production. Even though there are
limits to establishing equal conditions for tandem researchers, the continuous striv-
ing for material, emotional, and intellectual reciprocity marks the cooperation as a
promising long-term commitment.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Nuki Mayasari, Khotim Ubaidillah, and Kamalatul

Khorriyah for our research cooperation and for valuable discussions on the ideas presented in this
chapter. Moreover, I thank the participants and supervisors of the Freiburg-Yogyakarta Tandem
Research Project, especially its initiator Judith Schlehe. For the insights that I gained from The
Researchers’ Affects project and for the constructive feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, I
sincerely thank Mechthild von Vacano and Thomas Stodulka.

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Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward
a Research Ethic of Economic
Participation

Mechthild von Vacano

Considering how many anthropologists conduct their fieldwork in research constel-

lations of stark economic asymmetry, I find it remarkable how little is written about
the ethical and practical implications of this fact. The self-reflexive turn in ethno-
graphic writing has made it rather popular to reflect upon the social and emotional
qualities of research relationships, though we usually learn little about the economic
dimension of these encounters.1 Even when addressing reciprocity in field relation-
ships, most anthropologists tend to focus on immaterial aspects of exchange (e.g.,
Wax 1952) rather than getting into “the nitty-gritty on-the-ground negotiations”
(Wesner et al. 2014, p. 8) of material inequality.
The economic dimension of research relationships seems to be treated as a nui-
sance, rather than an ethical or epistemological issue, while economic inequality is
treated as a challenge to be handled in private. By this omission, novices are left
without much guidance as to how to negotiate economic expectations in the field or
how to act in a position of relative wealth, vis-à-vis interlocutors struggling with
poverty. Many struggle with situations and personal encounters in which structural
global inequalities become tangible. Because of the lack of conceptual tools and
practical advice, (novice) ethnographers are often overwhelmed by these confronta-
tions and are burdened with feelings of guilt as a result (e.g., Baker-Médard 2014,
p. 2). In helpless attempts to compensate for this guilt, some overexert themselves
and their resources (Rudge 1998, p. 20). Others are weighed down by profound
disappointment when close interlocutors repeatedly solicit material assistance from

1
In 1997, the editors of Anthropological Theory published a call for contributions on the “gift
relationships between ethnographers and their hosts” (Kingston et al. 1997); the response seems
illustrative: only two brief commentaries by de Waal (1998) and Rudge (1998) were published.

M. von Vacano (*)

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 123

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_11
124 M. von Vacano

them: “I simply felt hurt and exploited over and over again …. It felt painful to be
reduced to a ‘walking cash machine’” (Stodulka 2014, p. 7).
For decades, the anthropological practice of fieldwork has been criticized for its
proclivity to reproduce (post)colonial power relations. Yet despite—and potentially
even enhanced by—this critique, anthropological research relationships are sur-
rounded by an aura of idealism. It is a common theme for fieldworkers to emphasize
the close and equitable relationships they had with their key interlocutors, a rela-
tionship often represented in terms of friendship (Driessen 1998, p. 53–54). But as
well-intended as this framing may be, these relationships ultimately remain research
relationships: they are characterized by multiplex power asymmetries and an inher-
ent instrumentality, at least on the researcher’s part. As an ethical guideline for
overcoming these inequalities, ethnographers commonly invoke the principle of
reciprocity (see chapter “Reciprocity in Research Relationships: Introduction”).
Like the notion of friendship, however, reciprocity offers a rather idealistic framing
for research relationships. This idealism stands in the way of acknowledging the
economic dimension of fieldwork.
In this chapter, I argue that the only productive way of dealing with the over-
whelming feelings of guilt and disappointment associated with economic expecta-
tions and inequality in the field is through systematic reflection of the economic
relations which shape our research encounters. I hope to advance this reflection by
a critical reevaluation of the—ethical and economic-anthropological—reciprocity
paradigm and by developing an alternative ethical-methodological framework of
“economic participation.”

Revisiting the Reciprocity Paradigm

The notion of reciprocity is rooted in the foundational debates of economic anthro-

pology and has since gained status as one of its key concepts. Parallel to this devel-
opment, the idea of reciprocity has also entered anthropological ethics debates,
while bearing only traces of its economic-anthropological origin. In the following
section, I will revisit the economic concept of reciprocity in order to discuss its
implications for the research ethic of reciprocity.

Reciprocity as an Anti-Market Principle

Through Karl Polanyi’s reception of Marcell Mauss, the concept of reciprocity has
been closely intertwined with notions of “the gift” (Gregory 1994, p. 922). Thus,
reciprocity came to characterize all forms of mutual give-and-take based on the
practice of gift exchange. Absorbing Chris Gregory’s distinction between gift
exchange and commodity exchange, reciprocity came to be associated with the
moneyless and socially meaningful characteristics of gift relations, in contrast with
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic Participation 125

the monetarized, and hence impersonal, properties of commodity exchange (ibid.,

p. 911). In continuance of this binary, reciprocity was construed as the principle of
nonmarket exchange as opposed to market exchange: reciprocal, that is, nonmarket,
relations were supposed to be directed toward fostering social bonds (of obligation)
and driven by social motives, whereas market relations were associated with mate-
rialistic values and individual motives of profit-making. As these binaries express,
reciprocity has come to symbolize a principle “other” to capitalist market econo-
mies and has been charged with a moral, anti-market sentiment.
According to yet another binary, the paradigm of reciprocity offers an embedded
view on the economy, as opposed to the presumed “disembeddedness” of market
economies (Polanyi 1944/2001, further developed by Granovetter 1985). In empha-
sizing the social qualities of economic relationships—and, conversely, the economic
qualities of social relations—the perspective of embeddedness offers a valuable
contribution to anthropological ethics debates. It could help to reconcile the social
with the economic dimensions of research relationships. Unfortunately, this critical
potential seems to be mostly lost. Only the anti-market attributions and their
(implicit) moral evaluations seem to have found their way into discussions on eth-
ics. Reciprocity then, paradoxically, serves to de-economize the research relation-
ship, because it prioritizes the “good” social over the “corrupt” economic. In
consequence, anthropological fieldwork is idealized as an economically disinter-
ested activity, threatened with corruption if interlocutors should declare material
interests.
This seems particularly pertinent if money is involved. Most anthropologists
emphatically reject the idea of paying interlocutors,2 reserving the option of mone-
tary compensation exclusively for translators and research assistants. Money seems
to threaten the trusting relationship between researcher and interlocutor, turning the
“friendship” into a business relationship (Driessen 1998). Payment is also suspected
to spoil the credibility of an interlocutor’s account (Das and Parry 1983; Moore
1998, p. 57). Data are attributed a higher epistemological status when provided as a
gift—as opposed to data sold as a commodity. To economic anthropologists, this
image of money as a corruptive and socially disruptive force is as familiar as it is
outdated, because the underlying idea of money possessing an “intrinsic power” to
transform people—and whole societies—has been thoroughly debunked (Bloch and
Parry 1989). If fieldworkers decide to compensate their interlocutors for their con-
tributions, they certainly need to consider the potential social dynamics; but this
holds true for any kind of reward, whether made in the form of money, in kind, or as
an immaterial return.
Even if it is not about money, most ethnographers react rather reluctantly when
interlocutors insert their own material interests into the research relationship. Their
reservations mostly resemble those methodological or epistemological concerns
associated with monetary compensation. But their skepticism toward material

2
According to Driessen (1998, p. 58), this has always been the case for Great Britain, whereas in
the United States, the practice of paying informants became only discredited in the second half of
the twentieth century.
126 M. von Vacano

i­nterests also speaks to a personal fear, widely spread among fieldworkers, to be

“taken for a naive fool, whose ignorance could be used to advantage” (Wax 1952,
p. 36). For others, it is more of a personal disillusionment, as Rabinow (1977/2007)
describes, reflecting on the relationship with his Arabic teacher Ibrahim: “Basically,
I had been conceiving of him as a friend because of the seeming personal relation-
ship we had established. But Ibrahim, a lot less confusedly, had basically conceptu-
alized me as a resource” (p. 29). In retrospect, Rabinow concedes that Ibrahim had
“not unjustly” situated him “with other Europeans;” at that time, however, it was
exactly his being treated as just another European that had devastated Rabinow’s
romantic—and culturally biased—imaginary of friendship.

Thinking Beyond the Moral Grounds of Exchange

As an ethical framework for research relationships, the concept of reciprocity has yet
another limitation: it is restricted to the moral grounds of exchange. In this respect,
as Graeber (2014) argues, reciprocity essentially operates according to the same
principle as market exchange: both imply an exchange of equivalent values and a
morality of balance. In a market transaction, a good is purchased by paying an equiv-
alent amount of money; in a reciprocal transaction, a gift is received, but the receiver
is expected to give something of the approximate same value in return. The timing of
the return may be delayed, and equivalence may only be achieved over a continuous
process of give and take; but the exchange is expected to be balanced in the end. But
balance and equivalence presuppose equality (ibid., p. 72). As a result, reciprocity
can only sustain equality among equals, while inevitably reproducing inequality
among unequal partners. An ethic of reciprocity, thus, seems inherently inapt for
addressing economic or other power asymmetries in research relationships. But on
what other moral grounds could we deal with inequality?
Graeber offers two alternative principles: “hierarchy” and “communism.”
According to this distinction, a transaction is based on the moral grounds of hierar-
chy if the transfer between the transactional partners is one-sided, and if the social
relationship between these partners does not (significantly) extend beyond the trans-
action. This principle of hierarchy is most prevalent between people of different
classes and social status. Hierarchical transfers can either manifest themselves in
one-sided taking or one-sided giving; they can range “from the most exploitative to
the most benevolent,” and can include such practices as charity and almsgiving
(ibid., p. 73). Hierarchy inevitably reproduces inequality; hence, it seems irreconcil-
able with the ethical values of anthropology, even in its benevolent form. De facto,
however, some of our research engagements might well be governed by a logic of
hierarchy, even if it is often wrapped in a “rhetoric of reciprocity” (ibid., p. 74) to
gloss over the actual imbalance.
The principle Graeber (2014) provocatively labels “communism” is stated in the
simple formula: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their
needs” (p. 67). Instead of equivalence, this principle is oriented toward the relative
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic Participation 127

possibilities and needs of the transactional partners involved; it accounts for the
unequal distribution of wealth, rather than presupposing equality. The moral prin-
ciple of communism can even operate within commercial transactions. This is the
case if sellers adjust their prices according to the (presumed) wealth of a buyer.
These adjustments can work both ways, from the economically privileged toward
the underprivileged or from the poor toward the rich. As an example for the latter,
Graeber recounts the story of a colleague—I presume a white anthropologist from
the USA or Europe—who had conducted fieldwork in rural Java. Shopping at the
local market, she was determined to improve her bargaining skills. But over the
time, the anthropologist became frustrated “that she could never get prices as low as
local people” (ibid., p. 70), until a Javanese friend made her aware that it was not a
matter of skill, but a matter of economic distribution: market vendors would charge
higher prices of anyone whom they categorized as rich. This episode shows how our
moral grounds shape our expectations toward economic transaction. While the
anthropologist expected to be treated as an equal (once she mastered the cultural
forms of bargaining), the market vendors addressed her as economically privileged
and felt entitled to benefit from her wealth.
The anti-market sentiments of “reciprocity” as an economic concept feed into a
disciplinary skepticism toward material interests, leading to a neglect of the eco-
nomic dimension of fieldwork. Rooted in the moral grounds of exchange, the ethical
principle of reciprocity further implies a relationship among equals, while failing to
offer a framework for confronting (economic) inequality.

Moving Toward an Ethic of Economic Participation

As an invitation to think beyond reciprocity, I want to sketch out an alternative ethi-

cal framework of economic participation. It is based on years of academic and non-
academic engagement in Indonesia3 and a critical review of ethnographic
methodology, while the detailed development of the framework reflects my experi-
ence of conducting fieldwork in a Jakarta neighborhood. For orientation, let me
briefly outline the context of my study.
From October 2014 to September 2015, I conducted classical stationary field-
work in a neighborhood community in Jakarta, Indonesia. My research project
focused on the subjective experience of different forms of work and was driven by
an underlying interest in the plurality of economic subjectivities. I had chosen the
kampung-type neighborhood of Gang Buah as my research site. In the urban context
of Indonesia, kampung refers to densely populated neighborhoods of a lower to
lower-middle class milieu. These are characterized by complex entanglements of
social and economic relations among neighbors (Wilson 2015, p. 25) and an ethos
of mutual responsibility. Situating my research in such a context allowed me to

3
Since 2004, I have learned from relationships with people in Jakarta and Yogyakarta which shifted
between friendship, political solidarity, and academic collaboration.
128 M. von Vacano

study a diverse mix of income-generating activities across the spheres of formal and
informal economy (see Newberry 2006), while grasping the social embeddedness of
work.
To immerse myself into the neighborhood, I had rented a room in the private
home of Bu Nani, an elderly widow and mother of four adult children. For Bu Nani,
such a commercial live-in arrangement was not a strange thing to do, since she had
rented out to students before to earn some additional income. Conveniently for both
my research and my sustenance, Bu Nani operated a food stall (warung nasi) on the
front porch of her house where she served a variety of home-cooked dishes to the
neighbors and passersby. On the other side of the front porch, her daughter Dinda
offered fresh juice and a changing selection of snacks for sale. I spent long hours on
this veranda, talking to neighbors stopping by and learning about Dinda’s and Bu
Nani’s business routines. In the mornings, I watched Bu Nani prepare the meals for
the day, while we chatted about her life, family, or the neighborhood. Over the
course of time, Bu Nani and Dinda became key protagonists of my fieldwork, just
as I became a member of their family. I turned from a boarder—the Indonesian term
anak kos literally translates as “boarding child”—into one of her children (anak), as
Bu Nani would proudly introduce me to her guests. I was not the first anak kos to
become family. Bu Nani loved to tell me stories of other former anak kos, who years
after leaving Gang Buah still would come back to visit her and to inquire about her
health while slipping her some money; what made them family was a mutual rela-
tionship of care. By recounting these stories, Bu Nani offered a model for our rela-
tionship—and I took the cue regarding how I was expected to express my caring in
the future.

Acknowledging the Embeddedness of Economic Transactions

My relationship with Bu Nani is just one brief example of how complex our social
and economic entanglements with key interlocutors can be. It further shows that the
economic dimension of a research relationship often cannot be separated from any
other dimension. An ethic and methodology of “economic participation,” as I pro-
pose, would take these complex entanglements as a starting point. By expanding the
notion of “embedded economies” to our anthropological research relationships,
economic participation rests upon two basic assumptions: that social relationships,
including field relationships, are permeated by economic relations; and that eco-
nomic transactions have the potential to (re)produce sociality. In practice, economic
participation can include a wide range of transactions, which I suggest clustering
into the following four categories:
1. In classic stationary fieldwork settings, economic participation starts with seem-
ingly mundane matters, like accommodation arrangements and everyday acts of
consumption. The daily interactions of the ethnographer are shaped by simple
routines, such as sharing meals, buying refreshments, or dropping off laundry.
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic Participation 129

These routines can be rather consequential for developing research relationships,

because they allow for an ordinary form of contact, the ordinariness of which can
foster a distinct quality of rapport and trust. In return, these choices of everyday
consumption may cause disappointment with those whose offers of goods or
services are foregone.
2. On a collective level, the field might provide opportunities to engage in commu-
nal forms of gift-giving or sharing, which often function as practices of relating.
In my Jakarta fieldwork, for example, I experienced the communal feasting prac-
tice of slametan as a simple though effective way to perform neighborliness. Not
only did I contribute fruit or cake to my next neighbors’ slametan, but I also
came to host my own farewell slametan. I could not have done so without the
social and culinary skills of Bu Nani, who relieved me of most preparatory work.
But in spite of this experienced support, I still was stressed by the delicate diplo-
macy of hosting such a symbolic event.
3. Economic participation can, furthermore, include various forms of practical
assistance, from small gestures of attentiveness to substantial inputs of labor
power. Some of these practical contributions may require the specific skills or
resources of the researcher, while others might be of a rather general character.
During the long and regular sessions of participant observation at Bang Akri’s
screen-printing workshop, I tried to make myself useful whenever possible. I
managed to gradually refine my skills in assisting the manual printing process,
while Bang Akri and his wife Lela came to play central roles in my
ethnography.
4. Last but not least, anthropologists can engage in (dyadic) practices of giving. As
I have discussed with regard to the reciprocity paradigm, these transfers can take
such various forms as remuneration, gifts, donations, or sharing and may involve
money or be made in kind.
Within these categories, transactions can operate on one of the three moral grounds
identified by Graeber: exchange, hierarchy, and communism. To practice economic
participation appropriately, anthropologists need to learn to read the (implicit)
moral expectations of their interlocutors.

Negotiating Abilities and Needs

As a holistic approach to fieldwork, economic participation is based on the anthro-

pologist’s active and conscious integration into the socioeconomic fabric of the con-
text under study. For this active integration to succeed, anthropologists need to
identify or create social roles which allow them to openly conduct their research
and, simultaneously, account for their relative positionings within (global) power
structures. These roles can be multiple and change over time, depending on personal
constellations and situational context. To negotiate these roles in the field, economic
participation requires anthropologists to reflect upon their own economic
130 M. von Vacano

positionality vis-à-vis their interlocutors and within the broader socioeconomic

structures of their fields; it challenges them to acknowledge their tangible privileges
and account for the material inequalities that shape their research encounters.
In my example, I was unambiguously rich relative to my social surroundings in
Gang Buah. My fieldwork was funded by a doctoral research grant from the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) which, while just sufficient by German stan-
dards, amounted to six times the local monthly minimum wage. Many residents of
Gang Buah struggled to even attain that formal minimum.4 But in absolute numbers,
my budget was still limited, and I was wary about the sum and scope of spiraling
expectations that interlocutors could project into my presence, because as a white
anthropologist from Germany I represented a considerable degree of privilege.
From the onset of my fieldwork, I was careful to manage my economic appearance.
I wanted to avoid raising false hopes, while at the same time protecting myself from
the pressure of unrealistic expectations. I tried to walk the fine line between
acknowledging my resources and not inviting excessive expectations. In Graeber’s
terms, I was faced with the challenge of negotiating the different “abilities” and
“needs” that existed between me and my interlocutors. Abstracting from my experi-
ence, I would break this challenge down into three essential steps: determining my
own abilities, managing expectations, and dealing with demands and expectations.
1. To establish my financial abilities, I developed a simple budgeting strategy.
Guided by the basic principle that I neither wanted to enrich nor indebt myself
by doing fieldwork, I decided to divide my monthly scholarship into three bud-
getary categories: The first covered personal expenses, such as rent, food, and
transportation, but also 2 weeks of holiday and ongoing payment obligations
from Germany. As a second category, I had allocated a research budget to cover
all professional expenses from administrative costs to book purchases and tran-
scription fees. All my remaining funds went into the third budget category, des-
ignated for all kinds of social purposes, including individual requests for financial
assistance or neighborly gifts and donations. Toward the end of my stay, I used
the remaining funds to donate to the administrative unit of the neighborhood and
to make monetary gifts to the three families that had become central to my
fieldwork.
On an emotional level, this budgeting strategy worked as a coping mecha-
nism, because it depersonalized the negotiation of abilities and needs. I did not
have to weigh my interlocutors’ interests against my own needs, because they
concerned separate budgetary categories. Consciously determining a financial
framework for my own needs relieved me of having a bad conscience whenever
I treated myself with something beyond minimal needs. Most importantly, know-
ing that I would donate all remaining funds at the end of my stay gave me some
emotional relief whenever I was overwhelmed by feelings of gratitude and guilt
in the process of doing fieldwork.

4
Large parts of the working population are not affected by minimum wage regulations, because
they only pertain to workers in formal employment or employed by formal enterprises.
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic Participation 131

2. Managing expectations was as much about managing my economic appearance

as it was about being transparent about my abilities. In initial encounters, I tried
to downplay my economic options, while staying within the limits of truth. For
example, I would highlight my position as a PhD student, while rarely citing my
(casual and part-time) employment with a German university which had actually
been on hold for the duration of my fieldwork. I furthermore avoided publicly
appearing as a donor, because I was determined to avoid unleashing a spiral of
expectations. Therefore, I waited until the last months of my fieldwork to make
any substantial contribution to the neighborhood association; I then explicitly
wanted people to know about my donations, as a gesture of compensation for
having supported my fieldwork.
But, on the other hand, I never sought to hide my economic privilege. Within
my routine transactions of everyday consumption, I tried to find arrangements
which accounted for my economic status. Negotiating the conditions for my live-
­in arrangement with Bu Nani, for example, I encouraged her to consider my
economic background when naming her price—consciously referring to the
morality of adapted pricing. I did not want to pretend to be an anak kos living off
an Indonesian student budget. For this reason, I found it only appropriate to pay
Bu Nani a monthly rent of about 30% over the usual fee. In my daily business
dealings with Dinda, on the other hand, I insisted on paying the regular (market)
price for my daily mango-orange juice, when she wanted to offer me a family
discount. I explained to her that I wanted to support her business—despite being
family. In these simple moments, I tried to be upfront and proactive about my
relative wealth.
When I was approached with expectations that clearly exceeded my abilities,
I tried to make clear my real limits, while at the same time underscoring my com-
mitment to assisting in other ways. After I had attended my first neighborhood
assembly, one of the representatives, Pak Gunawan, enquired about my ability to
finance improvements to the local drainage system. For a moment, I felt put in a
spot, because neither did I want to make a rash and polite promise which I later
could not keep, nor did I want to reject his request too categorically, especially
this early in my fieldwork. We eventually had a long and open conversation about
my realistic options and limitations in supporting community projects. In the
long run, this talk laid the groundwork for a trusting relationship between me and
Pak Gunawan as well as the entire administrative neighborhood leadership. This
experience taught me to appreciate any opportunity to explicitly negotiate the
expectations toward me, and it encouraged me to communicate my limits with
polite clarity.
3. In dealing with material demands and expectations, I found it helpful to de-­
personalize the situation and consider the wider context: form a perspective of
structural inequality, it seemed reasonable to me that interlocutors would
approach me for my resources. I tried to acknowledge this fact, no matter how I
felt in this moment about being called out for my privilege. As a general stance,
I did not take the expectation personally. I also took the personal liberty of
132 M. von Vacano

detaching myself from the situation and, rather technically, referring such
requests to my budget.
Complementarily, I tried to reflect on the situation from an anthropological
perspective. I began to interpret my own experience against the ways in which
economic inequality was generally negotiated among neighbors; this turned my
attention to the cultural repertoire of soliciting strategies. One strategy I experi-
enced resembled what Stodulka (2014) describes as “emotional economy”5; it is
characterized by a strategic, though highly emotionalized, style of communicat-
ing needs, which draw their legitimacy from a dramatic urgency. These kinds of
requests were almost impossible to decline. They usually would begin with an
elaborate narrative of a heart-breaking story, interjected with (anticipated) praise
for my generosity and kindness; toward the end they would culminate in a des-
perate appeal for “borrowing” money, to cover critical medical costs or avert
eviction.
On the other end of the spectrum, I identified the much subtler, but neverthe-
less effective strategy of casual remarks. On several occasions, I had been
explained the moral difference of asking for (meminta) or being given (dikasih)
something. According to this differentiation, it is generally perceived as shame-
ful to ask for any kind of material aid; though it is viewed positively to receive
such assistance without having asked for it, because the receiver would feel rec-
ognized as a person in need (see also von Vacano 2014, p. 198). But, there are
many ways not to ask for something, while still making the other person aware
of one’s specific needs. Whenever an interlocutor went into details about a bro-
ken fridge, or, without context, started to lament upcoming school fee payments,
I could not help but wonder whether this was an indirect pitch for my
assistance.

Conclusion

Reviewing the economic-anthropological concept of reciprocity, I have demon-

strated the conceptual limitations and ethical implications of a research ethic of
reciprocity: imbued with the anti-market sentiments of gift exchange, the ethical
framework of reciprocity implicitly prioritizes social over economic motives; con-
stricted to a morality of equivalence and balance, it fails to address economic asym-
metry. Both shortcomings perpetuate an idealized view of research relationships
and, hence, tend to reinforce fieldworkers’ feelings of disappointment and guilt,
rather than offering a practical framework for dealing with economic expectations
and inequalities. Economic participation, in contrast, emphasizes the embedded
nature of economic relations. Advocating for the active and conscious economic

5
Writing on street-related young men in Yogyakarta, Stodulka (2014) describes the social tech-
nique of “relating to, emotionally bonding with, and ultimately coercing” (p. 8) people like him to
provide them with essential items, money, or other forms of assistance.
Reciprocity Reconsidered: Toward a Research Ethic of Economic Participation 133

integration of anthropologists into their field, it draws attention to the multiple prac-
tices of economic transaction which shape and produce our research relationships.
These micropractices of economic participation can include the whole range of eco-
nomic transactions that the local context provides; essentially, participation can
operate on different moral grounds, from “exchange” to “hierarchy” or “commu-
nism,” as long as the moral expectations of researchers and interlocutors align. Yet,
as a holistic approach, economic participation requires anthropologists to acknowl-
edge the macro-structural context of their fieldwork. Given that most anthropolo-
gists conduct their fieldwork in research constellations of (stark) economic
asymmetry, economic participation challenges researchers to deal with economic
inequality. Referencing Graeber’s notion of “communism,” I have framed this chal-
lenge as a process of negotiating abilities and needs. Translating this ethical per-
spective into practical advice, I have introduced several strategies for depersonalizing
this negotiation, from budgeting to an anthropological perspective on soliciting
techniques.
Economic participation is a countermechanism to avoid moralizing when nego-
tiating inequality. It does not necessarily imply personal detachment. As an encour-
agement to embrace the economic dimension of research relationships, economic
participation recognizes the potential of economic transactions to create and sustain
social bonds, friendships, and fieldwork rapport.

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 Part III
Intimacy and Care in the Field
Intimacy and Care in the Field:
Introduction

Leberecht Funk and Ferdiansyah Thajib

Intimate and caring relations are crucial to ethnographic fieldwork. Ethnographers

engage in intimate and caring relations with their partners and families either when
following them to the field or when left behind “at home.” Those being “researched”
also care for their families, neighbors, colleagues, possessions, and landscapes. And
more often than not, hosts care for ethnographers, and vice versa. Fieldwork entails
the sharing of intimate information, built upon trust and rapport as foundational
values of mutual respect. However, ethnographic fieldwork is not limited to positive
feelings of intimacy and caring. It is also rife with affective and emotional dilem-
mas, when feelings of despair, disappointment, and frustration arise between
researcher and research participants, as their intimate and caring relationships are
intercepted by conflictual dynamics of power and status (Stodulka 2015). This
introduction attends to the questions how affects and emotions related to intimacy
and care influence ethnographic research, and how they shape ethnographers’ moti-
vations, insights, and analysis.
Before drawing on the significance of intimacy and care through the lens of field-
work experience, we first want to discuss some commonalities and differences
between the two concepts. Both have been taken up by various disciplines, ranging
from social anthropology to science and technology studies, as a topic of investiga-
tion (Haraway 1991; Probyn and Evers 2010; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004). This
focus brings to the table a very broad outlook across different domains of life, espe-
cially those that are tightly bound to notions of relationality, family, sexuality, gen-
der, and embodiment. While the concepts of intimacy and care are sometimes
interchangeably used, in other contexts, there are small but significant differences in
their respective reference. During the last two decades, care has become a key con-
cept that draws attention to many fields of activity, among them issues of class, race,

L. Funk · F. Thajib (*)

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 137

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_12
138 L. Funk and F. Thajib

the life course, aging, work, kinship, education, and medication. The same holds
true for the concept of intimacy, which operates in complex ways through ethnicity,
identity, age, life course, spatial environments, and technological devices, as anthro-
pologists and other social researchers (Giddens 1992; Jankowiak 2008; Stoler 2002)
have been able to demonstrate.
The profusion of contexts concerning care and intimacy continues to pose ana-
lytical challenges: there are no overall definitions or ways of understanding these
complex and fuzzy terms. Drothbohm and Alber (2015), for example, try to limit the
scope of care by examining its interrelations with work, kinship, and the life course,
while Nguyen et al. (2017, p. 202) define care as “processes of creating, sustaining
and reproducing bodies, selves and social relationships.” Neither of these formula-
tions is fit for our purposes, as we want to integrate “doing fieldwork” and “emo-
tions” into our specific understanding of care. While we are not able to come up
with more precise definitions of care and intimacy (nor are we convinced of the
advantages of having them), we believe that a crucial aspect of both concepts con-
sists in their reference to certain feelings of emotional attachment between the
researcher and significant others within the affective settings of fieldwork.
To paraphrase Besnier (2015), who argues that the multiple meanings of inti-
macy signify both a conceptual weakness and strength due to the lack of agreement
in the ways this category is used, we concur that the fuzziness of intimacy as a
concept is a strength rather than weakness: it opens up opportunities for further
methodological reflections on emotional aspects of fieldwork. This creative ambiva-
lence is also a quality of the care concept that refrains from predefining the exact
status of caregiver and care receiver. Within this process, it remains open whether
the caring relationship is between parents and children, partners, lovers, friends,
siblings, or co-workers. Indeed, one could even have intimate and caring relation-
ships with animals, plants, things, and landscapes (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). It
thus seems apt to view intimate and caring relationships as affective manifestations
of relatedness. People we feel related to comprise (biological) kin as well as nonkin
with whom we have entered into intimate and caring relationships through field-
work as an ongoing process of exchanging emotional warmth and supporting each
other.
As a source of well-being, care is emotionally scripted by a feeling of responsi-
bility performed by the caregiver toward those being cared for. Caring implies a
relationship of hierarchy. This is especially true when the interactions between care-
giver and care receiver are compounded with relations of power and domination. In
parallel fashion, while intimacy is commonly understood as emerging from a more
equal standing, it is important to note that this is by no means an absolute given.
There may be intimacy between a caring parent and his/her child even though the
generational difference between them points toward a hierarchical relationship.
Since intimacy and care are embedded in larger social, political, and economic
structures, they cannot be solely reflected on the level of interpersonal relationships.
Normative and hegemonic disciplinary discourses about cultural ideas of intimacy
and care, often camouflaged as ethical guidelines, strongly influence their meaning
and related affective practices. When doing fieldwork and establishing rapport it is
Intimacy and Care in the Field: Introduction 139

thus necessary to reflect on research ethics as well as to analyze the power structures
within intimate and caring relations. These political aspects call for a broader under-
standing on the ethical in research, especially where relationships between the
researcher and research participants are constructed as mutually entangled vulner-
abilities (Behar 1996; Detamore 2010).
Such notions bear particular methodological implications if we take them seri-
ously as constitutive aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. In anthropological tradi-
tion, scholars have highlighted ethnographers’ engagements through the
establishment of intimacy with research interlocutors and informants (Smith and
Kleiman 2010). The developments of close connections continue to be laudable
goals for anthropological fieldworkers to such an extent that some anthropologists
have coined the term “intimate ethnography” (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2006) to
stress their methodological importance. Framing intimacy as both an intra-psychic
and intersubjective process (Sehlikoglu and Zengin 2015), this perspective is inher-
ently linked with debates on methods and knowledge in feminist and queer scholar-
ships (Browne and Nash 2010; Moss and Donovan 2017).
As a focal point for discussion, intimacy in the field has stimulated a spectrum of
ideas. Sexual relationships and erotic experiences in the field remain salient refer-
ence points of debate due to the systematic erasure of these topics in academic writ-
ing (Kulick 1995; Lewin and Leap 1996). Various accounts also look at how
emotional bonds of friendship are negotiated during fieldwork and stretch beyond
this spatiotemporal setting (Pitt-Rivers 2016; Taylor 2011; van der Geest 2015).
Establishing intimate connections in fieldwork does not only mean gathering per-
sonal stories from research participants but also paying attention to the relational
unfolding of affective atmospheres in research encounters and how fieldworkers
make sense of them. Building upon the argument that intimacy is a relational pro-
cess that unfolds across a range of emotions and spatiotemporal contexts, we see the
potential to broaden the production of intimate knowledge. The analytical scope of
these insights not only pertains to an experiential understanding of how the “self”
manifests through one’s intersubjective relationships with others in the field, but
may also extend to the very structures that influence these interactions (Davies and
Spencer 2010).
Talking about caring relationships while doing fieldwork puts forward a moral
and sociopolitical dilemma that is widely ignored by academia. According to politi-
cal theorist Tronto (1993), the fact that caring relationships are deemed to be a
solely private matter can be questioned by an ethics of care approach. In her analy-
sis, she casts a critical light on a complex value system that shapes public imagin-
ings in many Western societies. She demonstrates that, within contemporary US
society, care is mostly associated with women, whose place is supposed to be the
private domain and who are thought to be more emotional than men (and thus closer
to nature). Like Tronto, we believe that one of the reasons why the researcher’s
affects have, until our present time, only marginally been discussed within aca-
demia can be found in an underlying binary structure of values that ultimately rests
in the dualisms of culture::nature, male::female, mind::body, private::public,
rationality::emotionality, and so forth. The reproduction of these binary oppositions
140 L. Funk and F. Thajib

remains a challenge to the subsequent developments within feminist and Marxist

critiques.
By acknowledging the existence of caring relationships in the lives of field
researchers, we cross the line between official academic work and private care
work. Working for weeks, months, or sometimes even a year and longer on remote
and potentially dangerous field sites, almost all of us face difficulties organizing our
private lives. We leave people behind whom we should care for but are less able to
do so, particularly when doing fieldwork abroad. Choosing to bring those we care
for to our field sites causes new problems because of potentially burdensome pro-
cesses of adapting to local environments and disparate infrastructural conditions. As
field workers, we are not locked up in an office but physically, sexually, and emo-
tionally present in the field (for better or worse). The messy materiality we come to
deal with in caring and intimate processes—breastfeeding an accompanying child
(Drozdzewski and Robinson 2015), crying after splitting up with a partner, or
moments when sweat and scent circulate (Stoler 2002)—tend to be excluded from
our trajectories of data analysis, scientific fieldwork reflections, and ethnographic
writings.
The three authors in this section, each representing different disciplinary back-
grounds—geography, anthropology, and sustainability research—share a genuine
interest in the incorporation of intimacy and care as analytical rubrics of fieldwork.
Anthropologist Anna-Maria Walter examines her positionality and empathic partici-
pation during fieldwork in northern Pakistan through the local concept of sharm,
which she translates as “female modesty.” She elaborates on the importance of intu-
ition and embodied engagement. She highlights the advantages of having shared
physical attributes with her local hosts and taking up a habitus of gender segregation
and “female modesty” in her attempts to understand what others around her feel. At
the same time, she understands that this process is not unilateral but always entan-
gled with negotiation and interpretive authority. The development of intimate and
caring relations in the field not only allows for her deep immersion in local life-
worlds but also impacts her personal life “back home,” to an extent that it even
jeopardizes her marriage in Germany. Walter tackles the emotional complexity of
fieldwork in her paper by laying open her struggle between the professional and
personal dimensions of anthropological fieldwork. Indeed, as she argues, “No
anthropologist stays unaffected when exposing oneself to new experiences” (this
volume, p.147). In turn, her creative attempt to deal with her own changing subjec-
tivities has enabled her to gain further insights into the lifeworlds of the people
whom she spent time with during her field research.
Thomas Wimark, a social geographer, reflects on how sexuality is presented in
different contexts of fieldworks (namely in Tanzania, Turkey, and Sweden) and
interlinked with various emotions and spatial arrangements. In order to locate the
intersection of bodily proximity, sexuality, and emotions, Wimark proposes a life-­
course perspective on emotions, which describes the different qualities between
“feeling position” and “feeling experiences,” or in his own (Swedish) terms, kän-
sloläge and känsloupplevelse. Through these two categories of affective positional-
ity and experience, he illustrates how conceptions of sexuality are constantly
Intimacy and Care in the Field: Introduction 141

negotiated in research settings as they traverse along embodied dispositions, social

contexts, and positionings, as well as personal biographies.
Last but not least, Janina Dannenberg, who has a background in sustainability
research, conducted fieldwork in the rural Philippines. She explores her feelings of
ambivalence toward the dominant understanding of ethnographic practice as an
individualized endeavor which gives priority to professional engagement over
domestic lives. As a wife and mother to three children, Dannenberg juxtaposes two
stages of experience in the field: one when she was accompanied by family mem-
bers and one without. Attaching the actual as well as the virtual presence of her
family in the field to the notion of “normality,” she traces how multiple subject posi-
tions and emotional constellations are entangled in the way she engages in field
research and makes meaning out of it. She points to the varying conditions where
care work in family settings influences her relations with friends, informants, and
interlocutors. By doing so, she rediscovers an intimate dimension of knowledge
which had been mostly suppressed in normative structures of academia, highlight-
ing the methodological bias of singling out the “lonesome ethnographer.”
As this overview demonstrates, intimacy and care in the field involve multiple
nuances and operate across various relational contexts. The authors address impor-
tant methodological issues related to intimacy and care in fieldwork that call for a
dialog with departments and institutions catering for courses in ethnography and
fieldwork training.

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Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic
Intimacy as Tool for Insight

Anna-Maria Walter

Introduction

In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly emphasized the importance of the

physical body, affects, and emotions (Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth
2010; Howes 2005; Knudsen and Stage 2015). It is not only our interlocutors in the
field who “feel” but also the researchers. At the height of the writing culture debate
and postmodern critique, many anthropologists shifted focus from data analysis to
testimonial accounts of their personal involvement (Kulick and Willson 1995; Okely
1996). Although this trend threatened to lose sight of the “researched other,” reflect-
ing on the fieldworker’s role and positionality was established as an integral part of
anthropological research (Barnard 2000, pp. 164–165). As knowledge is always
situated (Haraway 1988), it is generally agreed that an account of the researcher’s
subjectivity assists the reader in contextualizing the researcher’s involvement in the
process of knowledge production (Pink 2009, p. 8) to create a—paradoxically—
more “objective” argument.
Although most ethnographies are based on conversations, observations, and tac-
tile aspects of participation that stimulate the researcher’s emotions, only a few
academics disclose and dissect the sources of epistemological insights gained
through the affective dimensions of fieldwork (Castillo 2015; Rytter 2015; Varley
2008). But what can we as participant observers learn from our emotions in the
field? And in what way might reflections on empathic encounters open up new pos-
sibilities for enriching our understanding of ineffable local concepts? With the idea
of ineffability, I aim at notions that are difficult to rationalize and articulate, such as
emotionally charged, highly subjective ideas about love or decency. They lie beyond

A.-M. Walter (*)

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University,
Munich, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 143

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_13
144 A.-M. Walter

words, not because it is necessarily taboo to talk about them, but rather because they
are difficult to articulate in linguistic terms (though this itself might to some extent
reflect a certain level of taboo). Just as there is more to perceive than the visible, the
focus on spoken words risks obstructing the view of more entangled and compound
notions of emotions.
Anthro­pologists regularly struggle with semantic barriers and the variety of lan-
guages spoken in their field sites, which might result in multiple, difficult-to-discern
epistemologies. Additionally, socially “correct” behavior is often embodied, tacit
knowledge; thus, it is unconsciously enacted and eludes verbal description. Only
major transgressions of decency are the subject of gossip. People do not need a
guidebook for every possible situation to know intuitively what to do; instead, they
are able to draw on a wide range of embodied behavior or habitus (Bourdieu 1977;
Csordas 1990). Although the habitus concept explains why people act in certain
ways on the basis of historic structures, it does not explain what they really think
and feel, or how their behavior feeds back on them. Drawing on experiences from
the researcher’s involvement with interlocutors enables an additional mode of com-
munication (Howes 2005, p. 1).
My fieldwork in northern Pakistan was oriented towards the omnipresent—but
never directly articulated—local concept of sharm, which can be translated as
female modesty (Walter 2016). Based on examples of my own positionality and
empathic participation, I argue that we can only apprehend our protagonists’ per-
ceptions and emotional cognition when we dare to make use of our own embodi-
ments of local culture and the feelings that arise from them. Many anthropologists
who work on topics requiring supposedly less intimate involvement, such as devel-
opment schemes or infrastructure projects, omit ethnographic reflexivity in a show
of artificial professionalism, which Varley refers to as “quiet political correctness”
(Varley 2008, p. 134). The contrasting approach taken in this chapter should not be
viewed as simply a confessional account of my experiences in the field; instead, it
is the exposition of a strategy in which the researcher herself is an intersubjective
methodological tool for empathic communication.

Researching Emotions

Who’s the girl with you?

Oh, she’s one of Rubina’s relatives from the village.

Curious eyes turned towards me, parents of young adults of marriageable age
assessing my exemplary shy posture sitting at the back of the group of women that
I was accompanying. As the whole room’s attention was on me, I fastened the veil
even tighter around my face and kept my head tilted down. My Gilgiti friends
proudly presented me to their neighbors and enjoyed their inquiries about my fam-
ily. “Yeah, yeah, from the very last village in the valley,” they added to explain the
fact that no one recognized me. When I answered in a local Shina dialect, my friends
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight 145

burst out laughing and had to confess their joke. Astonishment usually followed:
“No, that’s unbelievable. She looks even more shermātī (shy, modest) than our
girls.”
Much of what I did during my fieldwork—investigating the appropriation of cell
phones in the area of Gilgit—I did intuitively, without having much time to contem-
plate how to react in certain situations. Living with local families and the unease I
felt as a foreigner in public demanded a quick enculturation into daily life, which
meant abiding by strictly defined gender roles and blending in as thoroughly as pos-
sible. I tried to avoid posing a threat to my hosts’ reputation through any kind of
misbehavior, whether in their social circles or in public where I feared attracting the
attention of Pakistan’s unpredictable secret services (see Grieser 2016).
Starting my fieldwork, I soon realized that Gilgiti women are reluctant to discuss
research questions in a formal setting. Especially when I met a girl for the first time,
conversation stayed on a very normative, impersonal level. However, for the pur-
poses of my research, I needed to establish a genuine and intense involvement with
my interlocutors. When working on sensitive topics, long-term and collaborative
aspects of participant observation are especially suitable for slowly building trust
and rapport (DeWalt and DeWalt 2002, pp. 40–41). Anthropologists depend on their
interlocutors’ willingness to disclose, to allow the researcher to “sense” something.
From a plain and interchangeable façade, no one can read or learn anything. But
empathy is not a one-way sentiment. I therefore argue that empathy should be
regarded as a form of communication. By being open and attentive, and willing to
adapt to local conventions, I was quickly accepted, taught, and integrated into the
daily lives of my Gilgiti “sisters” and “aunties.” For me this meant taking up a pas-
sive female role in public as well as sharing very private details in women’s circles.
In other cultural contexts, the practice of empathy might take on different shapes.
Empathic encounters depend on the researcher’s willingness and ability to expose
herself to other ways of life, engage with normative behavior, and let herself be
“impressed.” That my physical looks coincide with local girls’ complexions had the
advantage that I did not disrupt people’s manner through my presence; tall, blond
women are immediately identified as outsiders no matter how well adapted they are
(Fig. 1).
In participant observation, anthropologists—often unconsciously—utilize a
model of empathic embodiment: we are influenced by our material surroundings;
we “sense” the social setting, adapt to daily life, practice different movements; we
are affected by others’ actions and emotions; and we “feel” our field (Ingold 2011;
Pink 2009; Stoller 1997). Csordas’ axiom of “being in the world” (Csordas 1994),
deriving from Heidegger’s Dasein (being there), perfectly captures the “organic”
character of our engagement with our environments. Against the conception of a
private, closed-in subject confronting the external, public world, I argue that our
personalities neither plainly exist within our inner selves, nor are solely created
through public interaction, but rather develop within the net (Latour 2005), mesh-
work (Ingold 2011), or grid of life.
146 A.-M. Walter

Fig. 1 The author among interlocutors/friends/“sisters” in Gilgit-Baltistan; photo: Anna-Maria

Walter

Following Ingold (2006), I argue for the perception of human beings as continu-
ously produced through the combination of all their—conscious as well as uncon-
scious—experiences, the embodiment of discursive representations, and the
interpretations of their engagements with others:
Like organisms, selves become, and they do so within a matrix of relations with others. The
unfolding of these relations in the process of social life is also their enfolding within the
selves that are constituted within this process, in their specific structures of awareness and
response—structures which are, at the same time, embodiments of personal identity. Thus,
personhood is no more inscribed upon the self than it is upon the organism; rather, the per-
son is the self, not however in the Western sense of the private, closed-in subject confront-
ing the external, public world of society and its relationships, but in the sense of its
positioning as a focus of agency and experience within a social relational field. (p. 187;
emphasis in the original)

This holistic view discards strict separations between notions of social identity, bio-
logical organism, and a more psychological conception of the self, and questions the
more conventional understanding of personality or character as the combination of
the mental and moral qualities of a person that makes up her distinctive and consis-
tent character (Oxford 2017). Instead of blindly believing in a “naturally” given
entity, I stress a person’s incessant remaking, based on the entanglement of her in
social and material environments and the interaction with organic preconditions and
influences. Examples of my own journey through fieldwork will underline a
person(ality)’s constitutive enmeshment in life.
As people always have to relate to each other, they do so through empathic emo-
tions, which can be any kind of emotion, even of the “negative” kind. What Engelen
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight 147

and Röttger-Rössler (2012, p. 4) call “grasping” describes the process through

which people read what the other is thinking, comprehending what she is feeling,
and then relate to it. Halpern (2001), a psychiatrist, recognized that insight into oth-
ers does not derive from distant, supposedly objective third-person observation
but from first-person experiential perceptions that allow one to imagine how one
would feel in the other’s position. Here methodological objections arise: how do we
know what others feel or think? I am sure no one ever fully knows how another
person feels; we are not even certain of our own sensual, emotional, and cognitive
processes. Nevertheless, there is much anthropologists can contribute to the discus-
sion on empathy: cultural background knowledge gives us the ability to contextual-
ize why a person is, for example, angry. Understanding why someone is feeling or
behaving in a particular way certainly facilitates the recognition of the other’s affect
(Hollan 2012, p. 71). Another critique of empathy’s credibility might be a lack of
mutuality; research situations are always loci of asymmetry, involving an educated
outsider studying people who are different and “exotic.” It is not my aim to dismiss
any such concerns, but rather to acknowledge an always present, immanent negotia-
tion of power and interpretive authority.
Female modesty, for example, became clearest to me through corporeal experi-
ences. Out of respect, women and minors never stretch out their legs in the presence
of male elders. Consequently, whenever the head of the household or other men
were present at home and sat in the same room with me, I kept my legs folded,
which occasionally resulted in knee pains, an ailment that especially older women
in Gilgit-Baltistan frequently suffer from: patriarchy physically tangible. Habit(u)s
and behavioral norms might easily be replicated, but their emotional implications,
the underlying ineffable concepts, are more complicated to access and comprehend.
To achieve this, I had to let myself get “affected.” Cultural categories and ideas are
manifested through performances and the discourses surrounding them, while at the
same time feeding back on the protagonists. Embodiment goes beyond mere simu-
lation; performance stimulates bodily sensation and imprints itself on the mind. This
way local norms gradually become incorporated and part of oneself (Butler 1997,
2015; Walter 2016). Similarly, emotions are triggered through empathic expression:
When someone is sad, we mirror her sadness with similar facial expressions and
bodily postures; through this adjustment, we also become sad (Niedenthal et al.
2005, p. 32). By taking up Gilgiti women’s sharm habitus, I experienced the cogni-
tive effects of bodily conduct and feelings firsthand. Once, when I walked into a
room where a newlywed couple exchanged looks of affection and sat a little too
close together for a public space, I caught myself feeling embarrassed and blushed
instantly, although I would never have felt uncomfortable in a similar situation in
Germany. Empathic embodiment, thus, has the power to collapse the dichotomy
between an expression of interior motives and the incorporation of an observable
behavior; subject and object or body and mind thereby become indistinguishably
intertwined.
Of course, we cannot, nor do we wish to, completely discard our own personali-
ties. An anthropologist’s perception is shaped by her upbringing, education, and
social background, but it nevertheless is deeply affected through her immersion
148 A.-M. Walter

(Davies 2010, p. 80). Having performed for more than a year the passive, downcast
posture with spiritlessly dropping shoulders that is typical of local young women, I
noticed how my attitude changed. Even now that I am back home, it still comes back
to me when I put on Pakistani-style clothing. Rytter describes a very similar process
of embodying his research topic: after engaging with followers of a Pakistani Sufi
master over a long span of time, he could no longer differentiate a dream from a
vision. Thus, in the ontological framework of his interlocutors, their Sufi has
reflected God’s light on him (Rytter 2015). The notion of reflection beautifully
emphasizes the relational character of ethnographic engagement, capturing the idea
of learning from others on a much deeper cognitive level than by simply copying
their behavior. By recognizing shared feelings, the social, personal, and epistemo-
logical distance between the anthropologist and her interlocutors breaks down
(Castillo 2015).
Often, empathically experienced emotions are left out of ethnographic accounts,
as they seemingly cannot be validated, fall prey to scruples about “going native”
(Geertz 1984, p. 124), or are regarded as too personal. However, as we researchers
endeavor to convince our interlocutors to disclose their life trajectories, opinions,
and feelings, it is only fair for us to lay bare our own entanglements as well. Instead
of striving to shed an inevitable dimension of emotional subjectivity from our work,
we should use these insights to contextualize ineffable moral concepts. A good
example is Varley’s very private and open account of her marriage into a Gilgiti
family, which she uses to demonstrate how she evaluated protagonists through
biased local prisms and personal (dis)regard (Varley 2008, pp. 142–145).
I argue for a holistic approach in which we use our whole selves, our bodily
perceptions, feelings, and embodiments as instruments that facilitate insight into
others’ perspectives. Local knowledge and cultural meanings transpire through
openness, sensibility, and intimate involvement, and thus gradually influence one’s
own emotions and perceptions. We can purposely direct our attention to sensations,
“as part of a broader cultivation of capacities for relational attunement and nonlin-
guistic, somatic modes of communication” (Chari 2016, p. 228; see also Csordas
1993). Reflecting upon local concepts of shame and modesty, the following section
will examine the complex interdependencies between empathic experiences and
one’s self in the process of knowledge production.

Intimate Connections in the Field

When my good friend Ali confessed his love to me, I realized that something had
gone very wrong. “She [his fiancée] is my obligation, you are my love.” I was
dumbstruck by the words appearing on the screen of my mobile phone. What have
I done that could be so misunderstood? When I was in Pakistan for a preliminary
excursion for my PhD project in 2011, I traveled around and interacted with people
in an ill-prepared and naïve manner, treating local men as I would do at home.
Going on sightseeing trips and drinking alcohol together clearly sent the wrong
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight 149

messages—messages that Ali interpreted as indication that the “easy,” “western”

girl had singled him out. The lack of adaptation to local moral concepts obviously
gives rise to misunderstandings and prevents deeper insights.
I took a different approach when I returned to Gilgit-Baltistan for my actual field-
work, which was conducted between 2013 and 2015. Being more conscious of local
norms and values, even thoug many of them are rarely directly articulated, taking up
the habitus of gender segregation and female modesty happened rather quickly.
Being married myself had many positive implications for my fieldwork. It cer-
tainly strengthened my role in Gilgiti households: as a married woman, I was not a
threat to the good reputation of the local families with which I stayed or was associ-
ated. After my wedding and for the period that I remained married, no man took the
liberty of transgressing any boundaries; they did not see me as a potential mate and
treated me with respect. And most importantly, I was a full member of adult wom-
en’s circles, privy to the gossip and intimate talk surrounding their relationships
with their in-laws and husbands. When executing their daily chores in the household
together, females exchange news, gossip, and talk about their lives. Only at first
sight does it seem that all women behave with exemplary modesty; when suffi-
ciently adapted to the local setting, I noticed many little acts of everyday resistance
against established authorities that stretched normative boundaries (Scott 1985).
Deliberately impudent or pert behavior is instantly apologized for through overt
giggling and hiding behind each other’s backs or underneath the veil; by masking it
as an accident and expressing regret, girls are able to prevent elders from scolding
them for such behavior. Young women take advantage of the absence of their par-
ents to go to the market, though never alone; they always travel in a group of girls,
but without a proper chaperone.
The ways in which individuals implement established social norms also depend
to a large extent on their individual personalities. One woman may be more daring
and forward, while another may be reserved and more prone to shame when com-
mitting social mistakes. Sharm is often connected to a woman’s confidence: when
she is settled in life, married with children, and comfortable in her personality, she
will be less likely to feel threatened by exposure. Although Shia and Sunni women
avoid music and dancing in public, many dance in private, playing local or
Bollywood songs on their cell phones. Watching Indian soap operas and movies is
also a popular activity. A warm, caring atmosphere exists among women: they enjoy
physical closeness in acts of personal hygiene, massaging their heads, and looking
for lice. Additionally, they exchange dirty jokes, and some women enjoyed teaching
me the filthiest words in the local language, Shina. When things get lively, they
romp around or put on “western” style clothing to highlight their bodies. Of course,
these gatherings also provide room to discuss questions about sexual matters, such
as the frequency of intercourse with spouses and how to increase or decrease it, or
about experiences with controversial practices and whether these are allowed in
Islam.
As unmarried women are not conceded much sexual knowledge, this intimate
form of participation would never have been possible had I not been officially mar-
ried. Local friends often curiously asked me about the nature of my conjugal rela-
150 A.-M. Walter

tionship and commented upon the cultural differences: how do your parents-in-law
treat you? When you go home, will you kiss him at the airport? What kind of ablu-
tions do Christian women have to perform when they have their period? And most
importantly, was it a love or arranged marriage? Many questions forced me along a
tightrope walk, as I wanted to be honest to them but not shock or offend anyone with
answers that were too blunt. I thus continuously had to culturally “translate” reli-
gious, moral, and other concepts and contextualize German ways of life, such as
living with boyfriends and separately from in-laws. These interactions were
extremely interesting and most valuable for my research. Due to this excellent
access, I allowed the topic of my research to slightly shift its focus from mobile
telephony’s impact on gender relations to recent discourses on conjugal relation-
ships and love concepts, which often circle around the use of cell phones.
Being so deeply involved in Gilgiti family life left a mark on me. The accumula-
tion of embodied knowledge of local cultural meanings gradually influenced my
own emotions and perceptions. This also had an effect on the relationship with my
husband at home in Germany, with our role allocation becoming more conservative.
I wanted him to be more romantic and to take care of me, whereas he missed my
former independence and self-confidence. Davies notices a sense of loss in anthro-
pologists, the loss of one’s taken-for-granted interpretations of life, or as Sax (2014,
p. 15) more positively puts it, the “intuitive somatic and moral universes had not
been replaced; rather, they had been expanded”. Many fieldworkers describe feel-
ings of dissonance after returning home; their thoughts are confused, and they real-
ize that they might not fit into the “mold” that they originally left (Davies 2010,
pp. 88–89). Unfortunately, being separated for about a year proliferated differences
between my husband and me and drove us further apart. He could not reconcile
himself to my altered personality, and I felt unable to bridge the widening gap, to
successfully communicate and accept the way we had both changed in each other’s
absence as a result of our different experiences. Thus, when I returned to Pakistan
after a 6-month break, I had to communicate that I was getting divorced.
As divorce is a legal option in Islam and most Gilgitis proudly portray them-
selves as strictly following Islamic principles, my interlocutors reacted less disap-
provingly than I had expected. Young girls were the sharpest at investigating my
motives, repeatedly questioning me and having trouble accepting that their romantic
illusion of a love marriage is able to fail. Older generations had their own answers
more readily available: no husband would allow his wife to leave him and stay faith-
ful for so many months; it did not occur to them that the separation might have been
induced by the wife as well. Although I always tried to describe the development of
our relationship correctly and take the blame on myself, their own logic made more
sense to them. Some pitied me, and some admonished me to try to win him back for
the sake of my social respect.
In Gilgit-Baltistan, marriage is not necessarily the site of romance; a secure
and comfortable life is more important. Thus, it is advisable to guard one’s heart
against the emotional vulnerability that can come either from falling in love with an
unattainable person or from having a partner whom one dislikes. Women intention-
ally downplay their own empathic abilities with regard to men, and often also in
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight 151

relation to women who threaten to allow their feelings to become too intense and
over which they risk losing control. I was often surprised by the lack of comfort
women gave to each other, even to little girls, until I realized its connection to emo-
tional discipline. De Waal (2009) talks of a “turn-off switch” for regulating one’s
empathic connection and response to others. This precautionary mechanism makes
perfect sense when the fulfillment of one’s dreams is neither possible nor
desirable.
My position as both insider and outsider in the families certainly aided the accep-
tance of my new marital status. Had they fully associated me with their families,
they might have felt embarrassed by the scandal of a divorce. However, as I was a
foreigner with a parallel, distant life, my separation provoked curiosity, needed to be
accepted and made the best of. While many of the women of the local families were
worried about getting me married again so I could have babies before I got too old,
one or two men decided to try their luck with me. Although nothing happened, their
verbal infringements were unexpected, as I felt I was one of their “sisters” (a term
that also applies to distant “cousins”) who was well adapted to local customs, dress,
and modesty. Despite widespread accounts of Pakistani men’s imaginations of
the sexually easily available “western” women, I had so far only been confronted
with the dubious chat-up lines of strange men on rare occasions when traveling
alone. The approaches made by men from my host families felt completely differ-
ent, and I experienced them as very uncomfortable betrayals of my trust. The worst
aspect of it was that I understood how vulnerable women might actually feel in situ-
ations of harassment within patriarchal structures: in order not to destroy peace in
the extended family and to avoid hurting the feelings of other women and creating
distrust, they cannot tell anyone, and have to hope that their defenses are sufficient
to keep them safe from men’s transgressions. Most importantly, they will intuitively
search for the mistake they made that encouraged the men and will fear criticism by
others for having done so. If men cross a line, women feel partly responsible, just
like I did, for not having fended them off strongly enough; being too polite and fail-
ing to be more determined in warding off an approach is readily interpreted as giv-
ing men the wrong signals. As I could not persuade one particular man of his
wrongdoing, I had to swallow my embarrassment, accept prevailing power struc-
tures, and convince myself that these were opportunities for insight that should not
put at risk, but rather increase my empathy for my friends in Gilgit-Baltistan.
As described earlier, the relationships with my female interlocutors were charac-
terized by their warm-hearted manners and the openness with which they repeatedly
received me; the intimacy between us included sensuous experiences and private
conversations. Many times, my sleep in Gilgit was interrupted by something light-
ing up and vibrating on our thin mattresses on the cold floors. The continuous “beep,
beep” did not seem to wake up any of the other girls in the room, but somehow my
young friend Noshīn recognized the sound of her mobile phone and excitedly dived
for it from among her cousin’s bedding. The message caused a smile to spread over
her pretty face. As she noticed me watching her, Noshīn crawled closer to me and
pulled the blanket over our heads to share more details. “I swear I miss you, dar-
152 A.-M. Walter

ling,” she translated for me, but it soon got too hot and suffocating under the heavy,
synthetic blanket and she promised to show me more messages in the morning.
Ultimately, the boundaries between my private and professional self dissolved
entirely: I found myself so involved in my fieldwork that I myself fell in love via the
mobile phone. Being entangled with my local friends’ lives, as well as delving into
theoretical considerations of shame, honor, love, and other emotions in South Asia,
I became a subject of my own research. Although I met my boyfriend through
mutual friends in Islamabad, we really got to know each other across vast dis-
tances—I was first in Gilgit and later in Germany—using SMS, WhatsApp, and
Skype. After only a few weeks, we were madly in love. I am not sure whether these
feelings would have developed over such a restricted communication channel in a
different setting.
I had wondered for many months how so many of my local friends fell in love
with their arranged fiancé(e)s over their phone; now, I was experiencing a very simi-
lar process, with the only difference being that our relationship was not predestined
to lead to marriage. Disclosing one’s thoughts without anyone knowing and sharing
intimate matters creates a secret bond, trust, and loving affection. When writing
about my own emotions now, it seems my words do not live up to the actual experi-
ences. Something gets lost when putting feelings into words. Comprehension is
more than verbal articulation. The skill of the anthropologist is to metaphorically
translate these embodiments and explain their value; a task I struggle to live up to in
the analysis of women's emotional perception of marital relationships and changing
love concepts in Gilgit-Baltistan (Walter 2018).
Secretly having a love affair—even if it was only a virtual one in the beginning—
took me to the limits of my cultural adaptation. I was caught between two stools,
craving to text my boyfriend continuously while retaining a sense of guilt because
exchanging phrases of intimacy and virtual caresses was highly indecent by Gilgiti
standards. So, I did what women who chatted with their fiancés or husbands did: I
instantly erased our messages and maneuvered my way out of situations when
friends were asking me about my future plans or when I felt I had been distracted by
my phone for too long.
In retrospect, I can discern strategies of “withdrawal” (Davies 2010, p. 84–85) in
this period of my fieldwork. In my extensive use of the phone to connect to a differ-
ent place and to someone else, I forced the device and the connection it stands for
between me and the field, bringing the influence of my immersion in Gilgitis’ life-
style to a relative halt. In these last months of my fieldwork, the phone returned a
sense of agency to me; I rediscovered the traits of my older self and wanted to pur-
sue my own interests—interests that were not fully compatible with my role in local
families. We combine multiple identities within ourselves; they can coexist, over-
lap, and partly contradict each other at the same time (Sökefeld 1999). Although I
was bending the rules by secretly being in touch with an unrelated man, the cell
phone offered a channel of communication that felt acceptable to me in the local
framework.
However, my refusal to share who and what was making me smile when reading
these messages already felt like a betrayal to my gracious hosts. The code of hon-
Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight 153

esty is different in Gilgit-Baltistan though. One of my best friends, Aliya, had

always stressed to me that her parents do not have to set strict rules for their children
because they can “trust” them. As she resorted to the English term, I understood that
this was a new concept for her. The absence of privacy traditionally served as a form
of social control but now the virtual space of mobile phone connections delivered an
invisible meeting place that cannot easily be monitored by others. Interestingly,
Aliya emphasized trust, although she herself had developed a love relationship. It
shows how confident she is in the decency of her behavior—she had never polluted
herself with any physical intimacies and managed to convert her romance into an
honorable relationship. By choosing a desired spouse from the circle of potential
candidates within the extended family network and maintaining more or less “inno-
cent” communication with him of a type that she could have had with any cousin,
she perfectly aligned new ideas of romantic love and intimacy with kinship solidar-
ity, Islamic teachings, and her own interests. Nonetheless, she would never have told
her parents about the pre-wedding existence of emotional attachment. She knew
they would consider it highly indecent, and keeping it concealed allowed her to
push the boundaries of the acceptable framework a little further. Preventing expo-
sure might not necessarily protect one from gossip, but it helps to keep one’s con-
science clean. Although I cheerfully collected stories like hers, which taught me
how different epistemologies are enacted and how a certain line of truth is estab-
lished through performance, I could never quite feel content with this kind of
maneuvering myself. Despite all my empathic openness, I might not have been
enculturated enough after all.

Conclusion

With this very private account of some aspects of my fieldwork entanglements,

I hope I have been able to demonstrate how personality and biography of the
researcher influence a study’s direction, while at the same time being influenced by
the social environment and encounters in the field. No anthropologist stays unaf-
fected when exposing oneself to new experiences, the methodological reference to
empathy identifies this adjustment and alteration of the self in favor of the ‘other’.
Indeed, we want to be “contaminated by our encounters” (Tsing 2015, p. 27),1 and
I argue that by creatively using these changes in ourselves, our thoughts and emo-
tions, we can gain further insights into other people’s social and cultural concepts.
Through our body we can overcome ineffability; therefore, we should learn to be
attentive to these experiences and reflect upon them. I am conscious of the fact that
I am laying open intimate details of my own life, and I am confident in doing so,
because that is exactly what we anthropologists expect of our interlocutors when we

1
[Encounters] change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-
making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of
contamination; purity is not an option.” (Tsing 2015, p. 27)
154 A.-M. Walter

use their most private thoughts on ethnicity, identity, gender, and emotions to
acquire and extend anthropological knowledge and our understanding of the social
world. With openness, sensibility, and empathy in participant observation, we are
able to sense many aspects of our fieldwork’s social environment and gradually
embody local concepts, values, and morals.
This expertise developes especially around our research interest and question. I
was, for example, hardly ever confronted with the electoral politics of Gilgit-­
Baltistan nor did I have to position myself in that regard, so current governmental
discourses did not leave a lasting mark on me. Researchers who work on political
parties might, correspondingly, be less influenced by matters concerning the social
politics of modesty and marriage, whereas I was constantly confronted with practi-
cal, normative ideas of modesty as well as moral, Islamic, and academic reflections
on them. The continuous performance of modest behavior quickly affected my inner
sense of decency and my expectations of appropriate behavior, with the result that I
unconsciously aligned my subsequent behavior accordingly. The embodiment pro-
cess reinforces itself (see Walter 2016) and transcends long-standing dichotomies,
such as nature and culture or private and public, offering an inclusive perception of
individuals’ agency which is neither determined by, nor free of, either of these mul-
tiple aspects; rather, they mutually inform each other. Life’s entanglements are not
unilineal, and we are always confronted with stimuli from various directions; at the
same time, we take an active part in this process of becoming. We can only compre-
hend these complexities through genuine reflection on our own personal involve-
ment and emotions that derive from interactions in the process of fieldwork; this
goes hand in hand with and informs any other data analysis. Through affective
involvement and empathic participation, researchers have the chance to use their
own embodiment of local culture to perceive and gain insight into others’ worlds.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for gen-
erously funding my dissertation project on the appropriation of cell phones and gender relations in
Gilgit-Baltistan as well as Professor Martin Sökefeld from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in
Munich, who gave me plenty of rope to follow my interests in the field and discover the importance
of emotions and love concepts. I also owe thanks to my colleagues and friends from the “Italian
Writing Retreat” who provided rich feedback and helped me sharpen the argument. The biggest
credit, however, goes to my hosts and interlocutors in Pakistan who received me with exceptional
sincerity and the warmest affection.

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Sexuality and Emotions Situated in Time
and Space

Thomas Wimark

Fig. 1 Walking hand-in-hand in Dar es Salaam. Photo: Mari Thorildsson

I was deeply ashamed and felt how the blood rushed to my face. He held my hand so tightly
that I could not get loose. I panicked and tried to shake my hand to get loose without making
a scene, but he did not respond in the way I hoped. Instead, he held my hand tighter. (…)
(Field diary)

The picture above depicts John and me as we walked down the street, seeking
shade under the trees in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. To John, who was assisting me

T. Wimark (*)
Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 157

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_14
158 T. Wimark

during fieldwork and has no reason to define himself as anything other than hetero-
sexual, this situation represented nothing out of the ordinary: just two friends walk-
ing hand-in-hand to their destination.1 For me, a privileged cis-gendered white
gay-identified man conducting research in geography; however, the same situation
was an excruciating experience during which I feared being exposed as gay in a
country that criminalizes homosexual acts. Approximately a year later, I was in the
field once again for a different project, but this time I was in Istanbul, Turkey, where
homosexuality is not criminalized, although it is socially stigmatized. In Istanbul, I
met a man, Ramazon, who also assisted me during my fieldwork and defined him-
self as gay. When he was guiding me through the city, he brought me to Taksim
Square, a known location for gay hook-ups. On the way there, he took my hand, and
we walked hand-in-hand along the street. This time, I wrote the following:
Since the Istiklal [street] was packed, and we did not want to lose each other, we walked
near each other. In this confusion, he reached for my hand, and we continued hand-in-hand
along the street. I had a bit of a flashback to Dar es Salaam, but it felt different this time. I
don’t stick out here, and I can blend in with other people. At the same time, it felt a bit
uncomfortable, since I didn’t know how it would be interpreted by others on the street. Do
I really blend in, or does something reveal me? (Field diary)

Back home in Stockholm, Sweden, where homosexuality is neither criminalized nor

especially stigmatized, I was out one night with my then Latin American partner,
Oskar. On the subway on the way home, I tried to take his hand but he pulled away,
making me feel annoyed and irritated when he said, “Not here.” These vignettes
highlight the situatedness of sexuality and illustrate that sexuality and emotions are
both contextual and spatial.2 All three situations reflect how my conception of sexu-
ality conflicted with the conceptions of others. In the Swedish context, I have learned
to connect adult men holding hands with emotions pertaining to sexuality. Young
boys can hold hands, but as soon as they reach their teenage years, holding hands
becomes increasingly connected with sexuality, and by young adulthood, it is gener-
ally associated with sexuality. Holding hands between men in Tanzania is conceived
differently, and affection among men without sexual connotation is common. Young
adults and adult men holding hands in Tanzania can be a simple gesture of friend-
ship. In preparation for conducting fieldwork in Tanzania, I had read and heard of
men expressing friendship by holding hands, but once in the field, I realized that this
is something that they do and not an activity in which I could participate. At the time
of the incident described above, I connected holding hands to sexuality, which led to
my fear of being exposed, while John connected holding hands to emotions of

1
All names in this paper were changed to ensure some degree of anonymity.
2
Throughout the text, I use the term context to denote the hegemonic social and cultural conditions
that apply in a certain space and time. As many before me have noted (e.g., see Duncan and Ley
1993), a single culture cannot easily be fixed to a certain space and time, and several different
cultures can exist at the same time, albeit in a hierarchical power system. Cultures are also not
simply internalized by all individuals in a certain space and time but are contested, negotiated, and
discontinuously adopted.
Sexuality and Emotions Situated in Time and Space 159

friendship. In Turkey, affection between men is likewise common, and holding

hands does not necessarily have any sexual connotation. However, depending on the
situation and where one holds hands, the interpretation can vary. In some areas in
the larger cities, for example, holding hands can be interpreted as sexual, while the
same act in other areas might presumably be an act of friendship. The situation in
Turkey was thus confusing for me, because the emotions of both friendship and
sexuality could be felt, especially as I knew that Ramazon also desired men. In the
third example, my learned way of connecting emotions with sexuality conflicted
with Oskar’s experience, who had learned to associate acts such as holding hands
with danger. In Ecuador, holding hands in public is generally considered an act of
intimacy, and adult men do not generally hold hands unless showing sexual affec-
tion. Although homosexuality is becoming increasingly accepted, the society is still
permeated by homophobia and violence towards LGBTQ individuals. Holding
hands is therefore connected to the risk of being a victim of violence.
In this chapter, I reflect on the way we display sexuality in different contexts and
how emotions are connected to that concept. In the first section, I draw on previous
work from geographical scholars discussing the importance of space for sexuality.
In this section, I argue that the previous research has generated important insights
into how space matters for sexuality, while simultaneously failing to discuss sexual
emotions in the field. In the subsequent section, I discuss recent research from emo-
tion scholars in geography and offer an approach for analyzing emotions in field-
work. Next, I draw on my fieldwork experiences to illustrate how this concept can
be employed to include structure and context without losing the subject in the analy-
ses. Finally, I discuss how this approach can contribute to current research on sexu-
ality and fieldwork.

Sexuality and Emotions in Space

It is now widely recognized that space matters when researching sexuality.

Geographical scholars have produced considerable research discussing the relation-
ship between different spaces and sexuality. Key thinkers, such as Bech (1998,
p. 219–221) and Hubbard (2013, p. xii–xiii), have made compelling arguments that
sexuality and cities are inseparable. Cities “are known as sites of sexual experimen-
tation, radicalism and freedom, as places where individuals can pursue or purchase
a rich diversity of sexual pleasures” (ibid., p. xiii). Thus, it is not surprising to dis-
cover that urban spaces are also equated with non-heterosexual identities and prac-
tices (Knopp 1995). A rich literature exists illustrating non-heterosexual identities
and practices in cities (e.g., see Bell and Valentine 1995; Browne et al. 2007; Ingram
et al. 1997). More importantly, specific neighborhoods within cities have been high-
lighted and often referred to as gay enclaves (Reed 2003; Sibalis 2004). However,
the relationship between other types of spaces and sexuality has also been scruti-
nized and highlighted by scholars (e.g., Shuttleton et al. 2000). Eroticized rural
spaces may not be the norm, but they exist (Bell 2000), and non-heterosexuals can
160 T. Wimark

also be represented in such spaces (Kramer 1995). Migration waves of non-­

heterosexuals from small towns and the countryside to larger cities occur (e.g.,
Weston 1995; Wimark and Östh 2014), but such waves do not represent the only
form of queer migration (Gorman-Murray 2007, 2009).
Much previous research has focused on sexual identities and practices in the
West. Consequently, sexuality has become associated with Western identities and
practices. Critics have argued that this diffusion of Western identities and practices
obscures the vast number of ways that sexualities are played out and experienced in
other parts of the world (Altman 2000; Oswin 2006). To a certain extent, this bias
has been rectified by later studies that have explored sexualities outside the West
(see Oswin 2005, 2010; Wimark 2016a). However, there is a lack of stories from
non-Western contexts, and the association between sexuality and sexual i­dentity/
practice appears to persist within the field. Such gaps do not aid researchers endeav-
oring to conduct fieldwork in different parts of the world, if these researchers, in
planning their fieldwork, wish to determine what relationships they should expect
between space and sexuality. Furthermore, even less research has been conducted
on the relationship between the emotions of sexuality and space in fieldwork, which
makes it more difficult for researchers to establish expectations and design a research
process. To some extent, this uncertainty is desirable within qualitative research
design; however, for less senior researchers, it can result in a difficult process and
can, for example, lead such researchers to abandon their field plans.
Although sexual emotions have not been explored to any great extent, there has
recently been an increasing number of geographical analyses of emotions, as noted
in the next section.

Emotions in the Field

Within the geographical field, an increasing number of studies have been conducted
on emotions and affect. As several scholars have noted (Pile 2010), there has been a
key debate between scholars of affect and scholars of emotions. The main difference
between the two groups lies in how they conceptualize subjects in relation to affect.
Non-representational theory perceives the subject, or the body, as a mere object for
affect that is flowing through different bodies, rendering affect non-cognitive and
unattainable (see Anderson 2006, p. 735). For emotion scholars, however, affect is
attainable by the subject through expressed emotions (Bondi 2007). Furthermore,
for emotion scholars, affect or emotions should be understood as the lived experi-
ence of interactions between individuals, rather than as something internal to sub-
jects (Bondi et al. 2007, p. 3).
A common trait of both sets of theories is to deny the existence of any biological
determinant of affect and emotions. Instead, emotions and affect should simply be
understood as memories or histories of encounters between subjects (see Bondi
2003, 2005, 2014; Cupples 2002; Widdowfield 2000; Laliberté and Schurr 2015).
Sexuality and Emotions Situated in Time and Space 161

In my recent work, I have criticized this perspective for ignoring the differences
that exist between subjects (Wimark 2016a). In this work, I draw on life course
theory and propose conceptualizing emotions through the Swedish word pair kän-
sloläge and känsloupplevelse, thus distinguishing between “feeling positions” and
“feeling experiences.” In this vein, känsloläge denotes a unique cognitive capacity
that enables and disables känsloupplevelse. Subjects’ känsloläge develops over time
in various directions and depends on both the situations they experience in life and
the biology of their bodies. This implies that a child has an entirely different set of
känsloläge than an older person, in addition to the different attributes these two
people possess. As a subject matures and experiences the world, his or her kän-
sloläge changes, for example, some place-specific norms and regulations are over-
come as new norms are simultaneously added. As an individual’s känsloläge
changes, new sets of emotional experiences unfold, while others are kept, devel-
oped, or closed. This perspective enables the inclusion of bodily differences in a
productive manner. Thus, subjects are situated in their own specific time and space.
Känsloupplevelse represents the feelings that we perceive in a specific moment
in time and space. In these situations, structural constraints and enablers, for exam-
ple, from groups or networks, compel subjects to express their emotions within the
limits of emotional regulations. However, a subject’s känsloupplevelse is not entirely
determined by the rules and regulations of a specific social system; it is also deter-
mined by the distinctive känsloläge the subject has developed. This combination
results in an understanding that embraces both the bodily subject and the social
structure, and which centers the subject without making it the sole owner of the
emotion. In the following, I use this concept to make sense of the fieldwork vignettes
described earlier.

Fieldwork Through Känsloläge and Känsloupplevelse

How then should sexuality and emotions be understood in fieldwork according to

this perspective? The first vignette illustrates that sexuality is conceptualized differ-
ently in various parts of the world. We may speak of a “global gay” identity, as
discussed in the previous sections, but this identity has not replaced other concep-
tions of sexuality. As noted by several other scholars (Cardoso 2009), the concept of
sexual identity has neither diffused to all contexts in the world nor become widely
accepted. A common means of conceptualizing sexuality is through strong gender
roles with a dominant male role. A man is expected to take the active role in sexual
encounters and to penetrate a woman. He can also choose to penetrate a man with-
out losing his manhood as long as he is the penetrating subject. However, the man
who is penetrated loses his manhood and is considered a woman. In Tanzania, there
are similar ways of conceptualizing sexuality (see Moen et al. 2014), which render
same-sex affection between men, such as holding hands, perfectly acceptable with-
out any sexual connotation as long as neither of them acts as a woman. This finding
signifies that a connection between same-sex desire and holding hands would be
162 T. Wimark

unthinkable for John. For me, however, the acts of holding hands with a man and
having sex with a man are connected through the concept of sexual identities, in
which same-sex affection connotes homosexuality. My memories of walking hand-­
in-­hand with previous sexual partners while in love influenced my känsloläge such
that this connection was undeniable, which caused me to panic and blush. However,
this situation was further complicated by structure and race. Because I was aware of
the laws in Tanzania, I had taken precautions to avoid becoming vulnerable. I did
not, for example, disclose my marital status to other men, and I evaded questions
about women and partners. In this situation, my race made it impossible for me pass
as a local, someone who conceptualized sexuality differently from sexual identity.
Although another conceptualization of sexuality exists in this part of the world, I
could never have participated in it because my race undeniably connected me to the
West and thus to Western identities. The same situation but between two white men
in the same context would, for example, be unthinkable, as they most likely would
be interpreted as gay men. Thus, the fear I experienced during this incident was
justified.
The second vignette further illustrates structure and race. Because I knew that
homosexuality is not criminalized in Turkey (although it is stigmatized), I was more
relaxed during my experience in Istanbul and did not internally panic while on the
street. Instead, I spoke of passing, which in this situation was connected to me pass-
ing as a Turk. Even though I am dark blond, I have a reddish beard, which is very
common in Turkey. I have passed as a Turk many times in my fieldwork, and it was
likely that I could do so again. Although a similar conception of sexuality exists in
both Tanzania and Turkey (Wimark 2016b), my race did not cause me to stand out,
which otherwise would have disclosed me as a gay man in Turkey. Moreover, as
previous research has discussed, specific places in cities are known to have gay
populations, i.e., gay neighborhoods. In this situation, we were walking on Istiklal
Street on our way to Taksim Square. This street and square represent places within
Istanbul where Western sexual identities have been most embraced and where gay
and lesbian bars and clubs are located. Walking hand-in-hand in that location is
certainly less dangerous than doing so in any other part of Istanbul if the two people
involved are perceived as gay. Two privileged white men, tourists for example,
could walk some, but certainly not all, streets hand-in-hand, displaying sexual emo-
tions and being interpreted as homosexual without being harassed. Thus, my feeling
of unease was less intense, and my lack of panic is thus understandable.
The last vignette describes both Oskar’s experience and my own. Oskar grew up
in Ecuador, and he has comprehended the concept of sexual identities since he was
very young. Displaying emotions by holding hands was always possible in Ecuador
as an act of intimacy, but it was also associated with danger. The memory of danger
is cemented in an individual’s känsloläge, and it does not disappear simply because
the individual leaves the context in which related acts are heavily punished. Holding
hands was still associated with the danger of repercussions in Oskar’s känsloläge.
Further, Oskar does not belong to the white majority in Sweden, and not belonging
is likely to have made him feel less safe, seeing as public transport is used by the
majority of the population. This is not to say that Stockholm is completely safe or
Sexuality and Emotions Situated in Time and Space 163

that no homophobic harassment or violence occurs there. In fact, before and after
this episode, my previous partners and I had experienced several incidents. However,
I have learned to associate certain places in the city with danger and others with
safety. The subway did not represent a dangerous place for me. Oskar had warned
me previously about looking other people in the eye on public transportation, signi-
fying his association of danger and public transport. In my memories, however, the
subway represents a place of pride after attending many yearly pride festivals during
which the subway was filled with thousands of happy LGBTQ people. Although my
spark of anger was exasperating, it signifies memories of working for LGBTQ
rights and the fight to be able to show love on the streets without punishment. Thus,
even though Oskar and I were in a context in which legal rights and protections have
been established, we connected public transport to sexuality differently through our
emotions. In the final section, I summarize these experiences and highlight how my
proposed approach is essential for research involving fieldwork.

Conclusions

In this chapter, I used my fieldwork experiences to develop a framework for analyz-

ing sexuality and emotions that recognizes the individual, the structure, and the
context. In the first section, I drew from previous research by geographical scholars
and discussed how sexuality and space are connected. Next, based on studies by
scholars of affect and emotion in the field of geography, I proposed using the con-
cepts of känsloläge and känsloupplevelse and suggested that all subjects have devel-
oped a specific känsloläge that is derived from the body and from the situations the
body has experienced. This känsloläge affects how individuals express emotions in
a given situation: the känsloupplevelse.
Thus, to conceptualize sexuality and emotions as situational, bodies, space, and
structure are considered. Given that one context is different from another in time
and space, sexuality and emotions will be conceived differently. Living in and trav-
eling through various contexts and structures does not imply that you can avoid the
context in which you are born or that you can alter learned behaviors, as your emo-
tions will betray you. This property has several implications. First, any given con-
text has a specific time and structure in which emotions are experienced. These
structures merge and change over time, as does the känsloläge of subjects. People
who travel to another context in which sexuality is conceived differently are exposed
to individuals with a different känsloläge, while also bringing their own känsloläge
with them. Simultaneously, biology and power dynamics cannot be avoided at any
given situation. Racial hierarchies, for example, persist and affect each individual’s
känsloläge and are highlighted when exploring other contexts. Thus, time should be
considered to be both situational and biological. Second, the connection between
certain sexualities or sexual behaviors and space is not equally distributed in space.
Contexts differ in terms of both the time–space in which they exist and how physical
spaces are conceived. In some specific historical eras, some locations within cities
164 T. Wimark

have been marked by sexuality, for example, in the form of “gay neighborhoods.”
Simultaneously, the same or other spaces can be known as safe or dangerous places
in which to display sexuality. Transitioning from one context to another does not
mean that memories disappear; instead, they linger and affect us in our daily life. By
considering sexuality and emotions as situational, this analytical approach incorpo-
rates the complexity of both time and space.
This analysis should be understood in the light of recent research on sexuality
and fieldwork in geography. Previous studies have progressed from discussing chal-
lenges related to sexual identities and disclosure (e.g., Burkhart 1996), to how the
field and fieldwork can be places of desire (Cupples 2002; Diprose et al. 2013), and
how desire is actively played out during fieldwork (Kaspar and Landolt 2016). The
present study has sought to further elucidate this field of research by highlighting
the fact that structure and context are important issues to consider when analyzing
power and positionalities. However, it should be noted that the present analysis is
not entirely complete. The analysis is conducted from the perspective of a privi-
leged, cis-gendered white man, and the emotions of the individuals in the vignettes
are absent. As Gillian Rose (1997, p. 311) noted, “The search for positionality
through transparent reflexivity is bound to fail.” Thus, a possible future avenue for
researchers is to allow the analysis to expand to all the participants in the research
process. Through such an analytical approach, the situatedness of sexuality and
emotions in time and space could be further explored.

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“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork
and Family

Janina Dannenberg

Even though it is increasingly common for ethnographic researchers to reflect on

their own emotional and relational positions in the field, the assumed “normality” of
a researcher’s life is still that of a person doing field research alone. When I write
about “normality,” I neither think that there is any such thing as “objective normal-
ity” nor that there should or even could be. I use the term based on two different but
intertwined aspects. First, “normality” is what people assume, or what I assume
they assume, unless told differently, that is, the being alone of a researcher. Second,
since being recognized is a very basic need, “normality” is a relational reference
that can influence one’s feelings. In this chapter, I analyze the situations in which I
wanted to feel “normal” or I wanted to be perceived as being “normal” versus when
I preferred, due to a sense of individuality, to be recognized as somehow special.
This, in my case, is connected to the question of having my family1 with me in the
field or not. The notion of “normality” therefore serves as a vehicle for discovering
emotions in the field. Merely writing about bringing the family along would prob-
ably perpetuate the notion of unaccompanied researchers being “normal.”2
Therefore, this chapter not only focuses on how it felt to bring my family along with
me into the field, but also how it felt to not have them there.
I will start this chapter by providing a brief literature-based overview on the issue
of the (in)visibility of spouses in the academic outcome of ethnographic fieldwork
and link this to an introduction of my own research project. Following this, I provide

1
“Family” here refers to my partner and our three children.
2
I assume that this notion is held by at least the general public in my country, by academia, and by
many local communities in the Philippines that have experiences with researchers.

J. Dannenberg (*)
Institute of Sustainability Governance, Leuphana University of Lueneburg,
Lueneburg, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 167

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_15
168 J. Dannenberg

insights into my own family situation while being in the field. The first situation I
discuss is doing field research without my family, its “(un)normality” with respect
to different actors, my corresponding emotions, and how this situation influenced
the research design, process, and results. I then reflect similarly on a field research
situation where I was joined by my family.

The Historical Invisibility of Researchers’ Families

Based on numbers, it might appear that in the past most ethnographers did their field
research on their own. In many cases, however, they did not. Spouses, usually wives,
and sometimes children joined researchers and contributed to the success of their
fieldwork. For example, it was common for wives to type up their husbands’ field
notes (Cassell, 1987a, p. 259). Describing her routine in a joint research venture with
her husband (with him as the principal researcher) on devitalization and revitalization
in rural Asturias, Spain, in the late 1960s, Fernandez describes her experience as fol-
lows: “My activity differed from that of local women in one notable way (…). Their
sedentary activity was needlework, mine was typing” (1987, p. 213). Social anthro-
pologists’ wives also fulfilled one of the functions of housewives in capitalism by
providing emotional care to their husbands (see Weeks, 2007, pp. 236–237):
There was another need [to join husbands’ fieldwork] (…)—the need to have, among
strangers, loved ones of your own. It was important to John that someone else cared whether
a village headman would talk or not, that someone got as excited as he did when progress
was made—or listened with understanding when the week seemed lost in unfulfilled hopes.
(Hitchcock, 1987, p. 175)

Scheper-Hughes (1987, pp. 217–218) goes further and proclaims that “a teamwork
model in which spouses and children of all ages accompany the ethnographer” has
replaced the “model of the solitary fieldworker.”3
To some extent, accompanying and supporting wives (not the children) were
recognized as coauthors, but in many cases, they remained invisible. Okely (2009)
even reports on a case where her former partner published on a joint fieldwork in
Ireland without even mentioning her. Her assessment of the data gathered in the
field, which she published decades later as a reaction to that invisibility, was consid-
erably different to that of her former partner.
Historically, anthropologists rarely wrote about their family in the field.4
According to Butler and Michalski Turner, they were “unwilling to see the field
mystique perforated” (1987, p. 15). The “sacredness” of their professional public

3
She also points out that “these family members may or may not share the anthropologist’s affinity
or enthusiasm for ‘basic strangeness’” and that children’s involvement may rarely be voluntary
(Scheper-Hughes, 1987, p. 218).
4
To complete the picture, it should be stated that, regarding research content, female lifeworlds
prior to the women’s movement of the 1970s were rarely studied. The same is true for children who
were not perceived as independent actors up to the 1980s.
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 169

lives was not to be mixed with the “profaneness” of their domestic lives (ibid.).
Women anthropologists were warned by colleagues that they would lose their scien-
tific reputation if they were to reflect on their experiences of fieldwork as mothers
(ibid.). This gendered division between the private and the professional (and the
many other divisions that go along with it) is not limited to anthropology alone but
is also evident in the entire Western scientific and economic systems (e.g., Butler
and Turner Michalski 1987, p. 16; Biesecker and Hofmeister 2010).
I am not an anthropologist. In the discipline I am trained in, sustainability sci-
ence, the deconstruction of such hierarchical boundaries is an important issue.
Hybrids of nature and culture, of social and natural science, and of scientific and
societal knowledge are constantly being (re)discovered. Sustainability science aims
to be recursive and reflexive. In this normative science, subject–object dichotomies
are therefore challenged. Nevertheless, the absence or presence of the researcher’s
family in the field shapes results and therefore deserves reflection. In particular, the
“normal” case of an individual researcher has, however, not received critical
attention.
In my dissertation project, for which I conducted the fieldwork I am reflecting on
here, I examined boundaries between and hybrid zones of, on the one hand, paid
work and commodified nature that markets recognize as productive, and on the
other hand, unpaid work and processes in nature that are given the status of the
“reproductive” in the rural Philippines. The framework involved recognizing the
productivity of the (excluded) reproductive and to discover forms of productivity
that included the aspect of regeneration. Thus, examining binary structures such as
private and professional is not just a matter of reflection for general epistemological
reasons, but connects directly to the content of research.
This contribution is based on my experience of conducting fieldwork in the rural
Philippines in 2013 and 2014/2015. For most of my stay, I kept a diary on my emo-
tions.5 In 2013, I stayed for 6 weeks and left my children Mila (7), Sven (4), and
Ligaya (1) together with my partner (Chris) in Hamburg.6 The second trip was a
6-month stay starting 1 year later. Chris and the kids joined me for 4 months during
the middle part of the field research. I was on my own for the first and the last
month.
Chris and I had our first extended stay in the Philippines during my time there as
an exchange student back in 2005. It was during that time, through exposures to and
with local NGOs, that we—flexible, nosy, and full of energy—got to know two of
the three communities where I would be doing my doctoral research 10 years later.

5
This was done in cooperation with the research project “The Researcher’s Affects,” based at the
Free University of Berlin. In the diary the project provided were questions about the days feelings
and desires and a check box questionnaire with different emotion words (see Appendix). To answer
this, I used my everyday concept of emotions as feelings that I was able to identify in the moment
of writing. My own agency in these feelings, the involvement of my body in these feelings, my
consciousness of my feelings in these situations, and other criteria that do specify emotions, dif-
fered in their degree.
6
These names have been slightly modified. Chris gave his consent on publishing, the children I did
not consult.
170 J. Dannenberg

Research Without Family

Leaving Home

My emotions toward the “normality” of going abroad as an individual researcher

were ambivalent. I am a German doctoral student who grew up in German middle-­
class surroundings, family-oriented but open-minded. At first, leaving my family
behind made me feel strong. I enjoyed that I was able to pretend that I was as inde-
pendent as I had been years before. I felt admired by other mothers’7 being stuck at
their part time jobs leaving neither enough time for their children nor for occupa-
tional fulfillment.8 Additionally, due to the fact that in our community the everyday
small talk among parents is dominated by women, it was me, and not my partner,
who won recognition for “having such a good husband who would take care of the
kids seriously.” My relatives’ responses were a bit different: they were more worried
about the children’s well-being and how to support their self-sacrificing father.
However, in my situation, both bringing the children and not bringing the children
to the Philippines was somehow special. I was fine with that. Living in a society that
demands individual lifestyles while the reality of life can easily end up dominated
by daily routine, I enjoyed the celebration of being different. In academia, on the
other hand, going abroad without family is considered “normal.” The emotional and
logistical effort of leaving a family behind is usually not considered. Being part of
that “normality” for me meant keeping quiet about the limitations of these “private”
circumstances. I felt that doing so had a negative effect on my personal integrity.

Research Design

Being on my own influenced my choice of research area as well as the content of my

research. In 2013, my fieldwork took place in a village in the mountains of central
Mindanao. Chris and I knew the place already; I conducted research there when
Mila was 1-year-old. From the beginning Chris made clear that if I were to bring
him and the children to the Philippines, he would not be willing to live in that vil-
lage again. He felt we would not be able to run a, what he considered, independent
life as a family there. We were also concerned about security issues. Therefore, hav-
ing children influenced, not only the decision where I conducted research with my
family (as in Fernandez, 1987, pp. 188–192), but also the decision where research
without my family would be conducted: of the three areas examined in my research
project, the most remote area was the one where I worked as an individual researcher.

7
Neighbors in Hamburg, friends, and mothers from my children’s kindergarten and school.
8
The style how I differentiate myself here from homogenized “other mothers” is symptomatic of
my emotions at that time. In fact, of course I have the same conflict (such as many working par-
ents) to an individual degree.
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 171

As mentioned above, my research question is very broad, and I followed the

approach of being led by the field. Being on my own influenced what I actually
worked on, and thus finally what would be published. As I was independent, I did
not need a space where family issues could be handled. For this reason, I took up the
offer to live directly in the office of a regional management organization. When
there were meetings, I willingly consigned the last hints of my domestic life—my
mat, mosquito net, and sleeping bag—into invisibility. I was awoken in the morn-
ings by meetings of male indigenous leaders, and the issues they discussed were the
leads I followed. Leaving my family in Germany, and thus having no domestic
duties,9 influenced the content of my research. It led to my research being done in
the public sphere. I believe the effect this had on me must be similar to other indi-
vidual researchers following an open approach. Not to overlook domestic issues,
but rather to take notice of work that is done beneath the surface, is something one
must actively force oneself to do if alone. In my field notes I wrote down things such
as, “It’s so incredible how much work had to be done just to serve us lunch,” partly
driven by empathy, partly due to a sense of duty. Every now and then I helped out,
but I also felt glad they did not really accept my help, so that I could strive for more
exciting experiences in the other parts of the organization. Whatever I did, I would
be fed anyway. My evenings were taken up by writing.

Staying Abroad

My emotions toward the “normality” of staying in the field as an individual

researcher were ambivalent. In my opinion, during solitary fieldwork many research-
ers consider it “normal” that the fieldwork itself, or at least the community studied,
be at the center of one’s concern. The life you leave behind is expected to be more
of a side issue. As a form of “social fiction”10 this works out. In the field you are just
there. You do not have much outside of the field to care about. Your whole personal-
ity is there, not only is your analytical brain engaged, but your body and emotions
are as well. When I was researching on my own, it felt as if I took a break from
having a family. I wrote very few e-mails to my partner, and for the children, I taped
an audio message every other week but did not contact them via Skype. In a certain
sense I practiced a professional life completely distinct and removed from my per-
sonal life. As people in the area were very used to dealing with researchers coming
alone, I think we had a mutual understanding of perceiving what I did as “normal”;
it was simply “how researchers tend to show up in the area.” Occasionally

9
If I had time, I bought food at the market and handed it over to a young mother who usually
cooked for the office staff with whom I took my meals. If not, I simply gave money.
10
I borrow the term “social fiction” from Scheper-Hughes. She describes it as an “‘as if’ phenom-
enon” in which both sides, anthropologist and local people behave ‘as if’ the anthropologist were
a normal part of local life, while knowing better” (1987, p. 219, citing Pelto and Pelto 1973).
Acting “as if” there were no family at home for me was an additional “social fiction.”
172 J. Dannenberg

mentioning my family felt like telling stories of another world and did not involve
considerable emotional aspects.
This was different during the time when I was preparing for my family’s stay in
the Philippines and during the time after my family had just departed. Something
from my life back home scratched on the perfection of the field. My family, my
“private” life back in Germany, gained a stronger presence in the field during these
times. The “social fiction” of being a “normal” individual researcher was still stable
with regard to interactions but had been affected by emotions.
When I visited a family that I had known for 10 years, my favorite “sisters” from
that time had children now. They were hardworking and exhausted. Little seemed to
be left of the energy and youthful creativity I had noticed years ago. But for me it
was different. My role in that family appeared to be the same as it was in 2005. I was
still hanging around independently, still ready for a joke, representing a glance of
carefree youth. I felt displaced, uncomfortable. Driven by feelings of solidarity and
a sense of pride at the same time, I wanted to make the community see that my role
had also changed and that I, too, was exhausted, that little of my energy was left, and
that I knew how to run a household. However, my status as a guest did not allow for
that. I felt that I was more similar to my “sisters” than what I was able to show them
without having my children close by. While I did not experience general insecurities
about feeling accepted as a researcher without children (Nichter and Nichter 1987,
p. 66; Fluehr-Lobban and Lobban 1987, p. 238), when I was alone I still did not
accept myself as authentic, something I consider important. My feelings were simi-
lar to Dreher’s, who felt guilty that her informants were not able to see her in her
own social context when she was without family (1987, p. 167).11 My assessment
and perception of the place where I was about to do research was framed by the
question of how it would be there with my family. Deep inside I started to take over
the role of the lonely mother. When I met another doctoral researcher from Europe,
for example, I could not help but recognize how much time he seemed to have for
his research and how little he seemed to be aware of that fact. Based on these kinds
of experiences in my academic environment and the way I was perceived by wider
family and friends, I felt my situation was somewhat special.
Not so among urban professionals in the Philippines. I started realizing that
many people I met and perceived as independent individuals had children in their
provinces.12 Suddenly I felt very ordinary and I did not want to share many emo-
tions. Nobody else shared theirs. My family and I were only apart for a few weeks.
I was not going to ask for compassion from parents who experience this for years.
Although I had no idea how they felt about being apart from their families, I felt
slightly ashamed that I was doing this for a mixture of adventure, social change, and
career, but not for survival.

11
The transparency of your own life, as Cassell points out, gives way to a more dialogic research
relation because people can study how you deal with family issues (1987a, p. 258–250). This is
true for my case also, but of course there remains a power relation.
12
Rural areas from which people in metropolitan Manila had migrated.
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 173

Increasing Emotional Involvement

Being an individual researcher may increase the role of emotions in the field. In my
case, my degree of emotional involvement13 was considerably higher when I was
alone in the field. It was during my time without my family that I started to really
love some people I was researching with and started to feel deep empathy for them.
This strong emotional sensitivity enriched my perception in the field. Led by emo-
tions I was able to identify very small details and, on the other side of the coin, I was
also more prone to construct fitting details.
Many of my emotional notes, from my stay without my family, circled around
interpersonal relations: Did I act the right way? Did the other person consider me
arrogant in that situation? Why was he so brusque toward me? Should I have been
visiting them earlier? These reflections are very detailed and go hand in hand with
very detailed observations that contribute to the quality of research. Everything that
others did seemed so important. What I often did not consider was that, in many
cases, it was probably just me who put importance into a certain interaction or rela-
tion. When emotions occurred, I never thought to myself: “Anyway, this is just an
issue at work. Soon it will be the weekend,” or “Anyway, this is just this person’s
private opinion; it’s not related to my research.” On the other hand, the person my
thoughts were concerned with might have done exactly that. They might have had
something emotionally and practically more important to do than reflecting on their
relation to a researcher. As an ethnographer without genuine care relations in the
field, I think I somehow tended to overestimate my relations to others.
Interestingly, many of my strong feelings were connected to something that was
missing in my life in the field: children and a loving family.14 Probably, my strongest
emotional experience was when I felt that children I knew well were being treated
unfairly by a teacher at their school. Also, I developed a strong emotional attach-
ment to certain elderly women. As is customary in the Philippines, I called them
nanay, meaning “mother,” and I conceptualized them as strong, politically active,
full of love, organized, and socially and technically skilled. In short, I saw them as
mothers and enjoyed being temporarily attached to them as a daughter would have
been.

13
This refers to a rough combination: number of emotions, frequency of being emotionally
affected, intensity of emotions, instability of emotions, willingness to surrender to emotions, the
capacity to allow for emotions.
14
I was conscious about missing my family especially when I prepared their stay and after they had
left. But even when I was not so conscious about missing them, I think it still played a role.
174 J. Dannenberg

Research with Family

It was indeed much easier for me to capture analytically how bringing my children15
to the field influenced my emotions and research. In many instances, I had the same
experiences as others before me. As “there is nothing so soothing as throwing your-
self into some practical activity” (Hugh-Jones, 1987, p. 40), prior to bringing my
children to the field, I distracted myself from the feeling of fear by focusing on
preparations for my trip (Cassell, 1987b, p. 5).16 As is customary, I did not set aside
any additional time to emotionally and practically prepare for the fieldwork with the
children in my official research timetable. This is an example of how the everyday
structure of academia promotes the invisibility of researchers’ care obligations.
Similar to Hugh-Jones, who did joint research with her husband in the Amazon
region and found it “an enormous pleasure (…) to have integrated the two great
experiences of our adult lives: life with Indians and life with children” (1987, p. 62),
I also felt that the whole idea of bringing Chris and the children would integrate the
different aspects of our lives: as a family, as human rights advocates, and for me, as
a researcher.
When we were there, the logistics of everyday life and the feeling of being
responsible for almost everything were heavy to carry.17 Additionally, our inconve-
nient living conditions—no running water, no bathroom, a long distance from gro-
cery stores—made it necessary that I physically help Chris in running the household
and taking care of the children, including tutoring Mila.18 We did not hire a nanny
for several reasons, one of which was to come closer to the “normality” of a family
in that community.19

15
Due to space limitations, I will focus on the role of the children. Surely, Chris also influenced
how I felt in the field. His motivation for joining was low, that’s why he was moody most of the
time. I felt obliged to compensate for that, meaning that I felt I had to ensure a positive atmosphere
in the family, fix most logistics, and care for our relations to the neighbors. This situation was
stressful to me and led to some tension between us.
16
Upon my arrival in the field, similar to Cassell, the obligation to care for somebody other than
myself provided me with security (1987b, p. 8).
17
Dreher also describes this feeling of being occupied by childcare, even when you are rarely
involved in the practical aspects of it (1987, p. 168–169).
18
The writers in Cassell’s volume who tutored their own children did not mention that it was stress-
ful, while for me, it was.
19
The difficulties and ethics of paid support for anthropologist’s families are discussed by, for
example, Cassell (1987b, pp. 6–7, 10), Fluehr-Lobban and Lobban (1987, pp. 246–248), and
Nichter and Nichter (1987, pp. 68–70).
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 175

Participation Through Domestic Work

On the one hand, being caught up in domestic work was very unsatisfactory to me.
But, on the other, doing domestic work made me a participant and invited the “nor-
mality” of the field into my house. In the beginning, my assessment was similar to
that of Dreher (1987): “It took me twice the time to accomplish half the work that I
would have normally [i.e. without children] accomplished” (p. 165). I did not yet
question the “normality” of what Dreher calls “normally” and was not fully aware
of how leaving my family at home influenced the research. I only knew that bring-
ing my family would influence my research. After a while, however, I learned that
what I did was a variation of participant observation and that it was deepening my
understanding of life in that village. Until that time, my experience of participant
observation had been that I always offered my help, be it in the kitchen or in the
field, but never really helped. I was just not capable of doing so. In fact, people even
stopped doing their work in order to explain things to me or to answer my questions.
Indeed, I perceived these on-the-spot moments to be the most fruitful for data col-
lection. Now, running my own family, what I did with my hands really made a dif-
ference; I really did what other parents did—be it fetching water or picking lice
from my children’s heads. While my family was with me, I did not stroll to a house
and ask somebody, “What are you doing?” and listen to the answer, “I was just
doing the laundry,” and think to myself that I know what that means, finding the
answers somewhat boring, and moving on to the next. Instead, on days when I
worked a lot in the house or did the laundry, I did not talk much at all. I therefore
learned to accept this experience as participant observation.
Accordingly, the field did not end outside my house but somehow creeped inside
it. During my fieldwork on my own, I wrote a note in my diary:
When I lay down inside my mosquito net I feel completely exhausted. Being alone in a
room, surrounded by the net, so comforting. (…) I am overwhelmed. It poses such a pres-
sure that my research is outside waiting for me. That, by just leaving the room I will be fully
into it again.

The field was outside. I had, even though it was small in a physical sense, a space
without research. With my family there, however, the field entered my home under
the camouflage of housework. Coming to terms with this was a step toward chal-
lenging the power of the “professional” over the “private.”

Insights Through Children

Similarly, of course, my family life never ended at the front door of the house.
Having my children around widened my epistemological horizon. Like others (e.g.,
Nichter and Nichter 1987, p. 76; Cassell, 1987b, p. 9), I experienced that my chil-
dren were door openers. Especially the youngest, Ligaya, seemed to open every-
body’s heart when she joined me during the interviews. The English meaning of her
176 J. Dannenberg

Filipino name is Joy and this is what seemed to be her program. People enjoyed
talking to me when I brought Ligaya, whom they referred to as manika (doll),20 and
that made me happy. With my son, Sven, it was a bit different. He was a late talker
and had developed a repertoire of nonverbal ways of enforcing attention that he
rediscovered when he was thrown back into speechlessness abroad. Interactions he
had with local kids or adults sometimes ended in conflict. More often they did not,
but we were still stressed out by this. When people were patient with him, I felt
ashamed to bother them21; when they were impatient, I felt sympathy for my son.
However, it was he who “helped” in the rice field. While I was worried about the
mess he caused on the field, his activities opened up the opportunity for me to ask a
sensitive question about ownership. I had been waiting for that moment for many
days. As I was staying close to the rice field, watching my child, I had the chance to
informally begin a conversation in situ. I could walk along the field boundaries
while we were talking about them, which was helpful since my Tagalog is limited.
Of course, this might have also been possible without a child, but the way it worked
out was much more “normal” to everybody involved. Moreover, at the store it was
Sven who used with ease a Tagalog phrase that I had not noticed at the time. Indeed,
children “will be living the culture that you are only studying” (Dreher, 1987,
p. 171).
In my research I avoided judging the lifestyles of the protagonists of my research.
I perceived the research situation, as described above, as a kind of “social fiction,”
where everybody pretended that everything was normal and where cultural differ-
ences were accepted. Children were also forced into this “contract,” which they
(still not settled in their own identity) could barely understand (Scheper-Hughes,
1987, p. 219). In our case, we neither interacted with the children the way we would
have done on vacation, nor as we would have at home. We were not on vacation and
I would have considered it disrespectful to the local community to present the whole
project to the children as a big adventure trip. They simply were supposed to adjust
to a life in fictional “normality.” This was easier for the younger children, but for
Mila, who was 8, it was more difficult.22 Like Scheper-Hughes’ daughter (1987,
p. 229), she found us guilty of depriving her of everything she had at home, for
example, friends, school, a bed for herself, and the ability to lead complex conversa-
tions with people other than her parents. She also recognized that our reaction to
behavior such as excessive consumption of superficial television and violent movies
or questions of diet and the behavior of and toward other children were different in
the Philippines. As Nichter and Nichter point out, children make the cultural

20
Bringing my own child made this objectification of children more visible to me. Fernandez even
gained insights through an offensive situation experienced by her child (1987, pp. 200–203).
21
The whole issue of reciprocity is affected by family constellations. With a family of five, I felt
even more helpless in expressing my gratitude when people were trying to make life more comfort-
able for us than I did when I was on my own. On the other hand, people might actually have
enjoyed being with us even more.
22
That it is harder to adjust for older children is an observation others also made (Dreher 1987,
p. 156, 170; Fluehr-Lobban and Lobban 1987, p. 239).
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 177

e­ mbeddedness of the researchers visible (1987, p. 77). I agree, but Mila also helped
me to be more concerned about certain issues, that is, not to see them as “that’s just
how it is here” and not to rely on cultural differences as an easy explanation. In
order to help our children adjust, our style of education, that of others, as well as the
similarities and differences in ways of life, became subjects to reflect on in a manner
that I think is unique to family research, especially because emotions were so
intensely involved. “Normality,” even for my daughter, turned out to be a process of
negotiation.

Conclusion

In my fieldwork, I had the chance to discover and reflect on the effects of different
family constellations on my work. Each of these constellations felt “normal” in rela-
tion to some groups of actors in my fieldwork surroundings as well as academic and
private surroundings and their respective expectations, but strange in relation to
others. “Normality” in research, if this involves research without ones’ family, reaf-
firms the powerful traditional perspective of alleged pure professional academe.
The question how the private (be it your private life in the field or your private
life abroad) and the professional life are integrated or separated is something to be
constantly negotiated in fieldwork—whether your family is there or not. However,
with your family in the field, choices are limited and the boundary of private and
professional life will be dissolved. Even though the research situation with a family
is still a “social fiction,” I experienced it as a deeper form of holism in research than
simply acting as if there was no connection to the world I come from. As an indi-
vidual researcher, it is much easier to actively be in control of the extent to which
people know about and share in your family life.
Similar to the issue of integrating your private life in the field, other common
organizational and emotional challenges in research, such as reciprocity, health, or
foreignness, take different shapes in different research constellations. It is not the
family on its own that constitutes something special in the field, but its intersection
with the abovementioned challenges that would also appear in research situations
without the family present. When you bring your family, decisions such as “where
to sleep?” are very prominent. But as I have shown, when you do not bring your
family, these issues nevertheless subtly influence your fieldwork and are themselves
influenced by what you chose to keep out of the field.
In my case, emotions toward research-related situations or people turned out to
be more intense whenever I had no family life that kept me emotionally engaged.
Therefore, my emotions were not just influenced by who was there, but also by who
was not there. Additionally, even during the time my family was not there, my emo-
tional experiences differed considerably depending on the level of contact we had.23

With “level of contact” I refer not only to the aspect of communication, but also to the presence
23

my family somehow had in my life when I was preparing for their stay.
178 J. Dannenberg

General experiences of having one’s own children in the field have been elabo-
rated in the past, and I rediscovered many aspects of my experiences in the litera-
ture.24 The focal point seems to be that children change your status in relation to
specific social groups and therefore influence your insights. Local life is also
affected differently.
Another important point is that doing domestic, reproductive work for and with
your loved ones may increase its visibility in the outcome of the work. Research in
my discipline (sustainability science) which, as a “post-normal-science” (e.g.,
Funtowitcz and Ravetz 2008), claims to include different forms of knowledge,
could gain from making reproductive work during processes of knowledge produc-
tion visible. Furthermore, the reflection on emotions during fieldwork may also help
scientists in my discipline to overcome the often criticized limitations of “normal-
ity” in science.

Acknowledgements I thank all the people who worked with me during “my” fieldwork, my fam-
ily for allowing me to publish parts of our relationship, and the German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD) and the Leuphana University of Lueneburg for their financial support. I also
thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback and for encouraging me to write an
emotion diary.

References

Biesecker, A., & Hofmeister, S. (2010). Focus: (Re)productivity. Ecological Economics, 69(8),
1703–1711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.03.025
Butler, B., & Turner Michalski, D. (1987). Children and anthropological research. An overview.
In B. Butler & D. Turner Michalski (Eds.), Children and anthropological research (pp. 3–30).
New York: Plenum Press.
Cassell, J. (1987a). Conclusion. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological experi-
ences (pp. 257–270). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Cassell, J. (1987b). “Oh no, they’re not my shoes!” fieldwork in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological experiences (pp. 1–26). Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Dreher, M. (1987). Three children in rural Jamaica. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field:
Anthropological experiences (pp. 149–171). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Fernandez, R. (1987). Children and parents in the field. Reciprocal impacts. In J. Cassell (Ed.),
Children in the field: Anthropological experiences (pp. 185–215). Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Fluehr-Lobban, C., & Lobban, R. (1987). “Drink from the Nile and you shall return”. Children and
fieldwork in Egypt and the Sudan. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological
experiences (pp. 237–255). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

24
It is important to mention that I do not see myself in the same cultural position as American
anthropologists during research in the 1960s–1980s. Especially their conception of childhood and
methods of child-rearing were in many cases different from mine. But overall, there are many simi-
larities in how fieldwork with children is perceived, and thus I could easily connect to what they
wrote.
“Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family 179

Funtowitcz, S., & Ravetz, J. (2008). Values and uncertainties. In G. Hirsch Hadorn, G. Hoffmann-­
Riem, H. Biber-Klemm, S. Grossenbacher-Mansuy, W. Joye, D. Pohl, C. Wiesmann, &
U. Zemp (Eds.), Handbook of transdisciplinary research (pp. 361–368). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hitchcock, P. (1987). Our Ulleri child. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological
experiences (pp. 173–183). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hugh-Jones, C. (1987). Children in the Amazon. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field:
Anthropological experiences (pp. 27–63). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Nichter, M., & Nichter, M. (1987). A tale of Simeon. Reflections on raising a child while conduct-
ing fieldwork in rural South India. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological
experiences (pp. 65–89). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Okely, J. (2009). Written out and written in: Inishkillane remembered. Irish Journal of
Anthropology, 12(2), 50–55.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1987). A children’s diary in the strict sense of the term. Managing culture-­
shocked children in the field. In J. Cassell (Ed.), Children in the field: Anthropological experi-
ences (pp. 217–236). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Weeks, K. (2007). Life within and against work: Affective labor, feminist critique, and post-Fordist
politics. Ephemera, 7(1), 233–249.
 Part IV
Dealing with Illness and Dying
Dealing With Illness and Dying:
Introduction

Marcos Andrade Neves and Tereza Baltag

We work under an illusion of detachment, an illusion that the subject of our research
is elsewhere, safe within the limits of a field we have conveniently designed to come
from and go to as needed and while we move ourselves in and out of that field, those
we research with remain. This—expected—ability to approach and to distance our-
selves from the field of our work is the basis of our research routine: it gives us the
proximity we need to get in contact with our subject as well as the distance needed
to reflect and write. This ability to detach is, however, an illusion. It fails to acknowl-
edge not only the many ways through which the field makes itself present when we
are away from it, but also the different ways we make ourselves present when we
are in it. Nevertheless, this illusion can be useful. It gives us the perception of a
comfort zone, a mapped out escape route we can resort to if necessary. But it also
leaves us vulnerable to the moments when we realize that our research subject, its
participants, and our personal lives overlap—moments when, suddenly, our research
topic becomes a personal journey that stretches out to our family and friends, when
we find ourselves in the field, but end up facing our own fears, doubts, and ability to
stay open-minded. Moments when we confront ourselves with our own affects,
turning the expectation of a detached field into a reality of constant immersion, a
reality that touches us emotionally and that we cannot hide from.
The confrontation with such moments can take various shapes, triggering differ-
ent experiences of the fading of this illusion. It can give way to uncertainty and fear,
to discomfort and vulnerability, and to rethinking one’s own positionality. When the

M. A. Neves (*)
Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
(PPGAS/UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Baltag
Charles University Prague, Faculty of Humanities, Prague, Czech Republic

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 183

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_16
184 M. A. Neves and T. Baltag

illusion of detachment fades away, suddenly one’s affects, personal issues, and tra-
jectory become intertwined with the research, with its subject, questions, and par-
ticipants. The chapters in this section present some of the shapes this intertwining
assumes while researching health and illness—from the uncertainties of fieldwork
to the impact it exerts on the researcher’s affects—and the other way around.
Anthropologists often find themselves at hospitals, clinics, health institutions, and
general settings where health, illness, and dying are experienced and are subjects in
everyday life. These are settings where we can feel intense grief, joy, sadness, and
compassion, observable emotions that help us understand how important these
moments are for individual persons, families, and communities. Emotions that not
only give us an insight on what is going on, but also make us realize how vulnerable
our positionality as researchers is.
Anthropologists have occupied themselves with the cultural dimension of emo-
tional experiences for a long time (Douglas 1969; Geertz 1973). In the 1980s, for
instance, several medical anthropologists focused on the effects of emotions in rela-
tion to experiences of illness, pain, madness, and dying (Kleinman 1982, 1986;
Kleinman and Good 1985; Levy and Rosaldo 1983; Lutz 1985; Rosaldo 1984).
However, the development of new medical technologies has led to new situations
and challenges for the researcher. One such case can be found in the context of tis-
sue economies, where anthropologists have questioned the emotional challenges of
those who are involved in this process (Lambert and McDonald 2009; Mcdonald
2011; Waldby and Mitchell 2006). However, little has been written about how these
emotions and affects exert an impact on anthropologists in the field, and on the
research process itself.
Does this absence imply that the researcher is not affected while in the field?
That a researcher’s affects and emotions have no impact on the ways they approach
their research participants or pose questions to them? By making ourselves oblivi-
ous to our own affective experiences, we end up ignoring a substantial part of our
own work; more importantly, we remain under the illusion of detachment. The three
chapters in this section on health and illness are self-reflexive pieces, written by
researchers from different professional backgrounds, who carried out fieldwork in
different places and on different topics, but who are bound together by a common
interest: rethinking their fieldwork experience from the standpoint of their affects.
They open up about their emotions and affects, their worries and difficulties when
dealing with a field that can no longer be dissociated from their personal lives. And
by reflecting on their research from this angle, they offer us not only interesting
takes on the intricacies of doing fieldwork, but also tools for acknowledging it as a
research space able to affect and be affected by our personal lives.
Julia Rehsmann provides an account of doing fieldwork in-between her profes-
sional and private lives, describing how her research on transplant medicine and her
personal life became interlaced from the moment she received an e-mail from a
close friend telling her he had been diagnosed with cancer. The friend, Philipp, had
first informed her about the diagnosis when she was just beginning fieldwork in
Germany, and kept sending her frequent updates on the condition of his health.
While she tried to balance her fieldwork in Germany with visits to Philipp in Austria,
Dealing With Illness and Dying: Introduction 185

it soon became clear to her that she was not coming and going from the field, but
rather entangling both facets in one single relational dynamic.
By exploring her affects in the course of her fieldwork, Rehsmann noticed that
doing fieldwork creates relational spaces that are hybrid ventures between profes-
sional and private lives. If our research space is a hybrid, she argues, it is necessary
to be aware of our own positionality and reflect on our emotions in order to inhabit
it—thus turning this self-reflexivity into an epistemological and methodological
tool. This unsettling situation of accompanying Philipp while, at the same time,
engaging with people awaiting or undergoing transplant procedures has affected her
even after the completion of the fieldwork. She left the field, but kept living in this
hybrid space through different ways and experiences. Once back at her desk, this
hybrid space lived on through fears and dreams. She feared dying of cancer, often-
times dreaming of herself being diagnosed with it.
Rehsmann concluded that her experiences while inhabiting this hybrid space had
an impact on her research, on her “being-in-the-field.” Her experiences with life-­
threatening diseases position her in close dialogue with Natashe Lemos Dekker’s
take on her fieldwork in three nursing homes in the Netherlands, where she had
encountered people with dementia. Death, as Lemos Dekker puts it, is a process that
is experienced not only by the dying person, but also by the ones around them—by
family and friends and by the researcher who is there. In the nursing homes where
she carried out her fieldwork, “being there” (Hollan 2008) meant quite a lot of wait-
ing: waiting in the common areas, silently sitting or staring out of the window, or
waiting by bedsides. How to negotiate her space in the nursing homes? Where to
stand when death is occurring, and how to approach the person dying or the family
members who are by their side? How not to appear, as she phrases it, voyeuristic in
her interactions with death and dying?
To illustrate some of the concerns surrounding being present in such intimate
moments among close relatives, or even with the nursing home personnel, Lemos
Dekker employs the metaphor of the doorstep. As she writes, the doorstep material-
izes through “engagement with sensitivity, proximity and distance, and being respect-
ful” (this volume, pp. 195–205). This is a space from which her positionality in the
field could be negotiated and her intimacy mediated. Just as the doorstep provides a
means of illustrating her worries regarding being there, the role played by materiality
in reconciling her affects with the intimacy of death and dying goes beyond it, as can
be seen her discomfort led her to open a notebook during a family meeting, a note-
book that would somehow reposition her role in that gathering, in an attempt to
become “transparent” (pp. 195–205).
For Lemos Dekker, self-reflection on her positionality throughout fieldwork was
essential to acknowledge the limits of her being there. This is an aspect that becomes
evident when she describes how uncomfortable she felt by taking part in family
discussions, somehow trying to reconcile her role as researcher with the uncomfort-
able feeling of being there during very personal moments. There were moments
where she needed to avoid crying, where she questioned her own “right” to feel a
sorrow that was perhaps not hers to feel. If opening the notebook was a way of
establishing a specific role for her during that family meeting, what role would tears
grant her?
186 M. A. Neves and T. Baltag

As in Lemos Dekker’s piece, the question of how to reconcile positionality with

affects is central to Tereza Baltag’s account of her research on substitutional drug
therapies and its users in Prague, Czech Republic. However, in Baltag’s case, she
had to transition from her background as a therapist at the Healthcare Centre Gestalt
to her new role as an anthropologist. This was a professional transition that encom-
passed the transformation of patients into interlocutors and move from making
observations inside healthcare facilities to fieldwork in the so-called open drug
scene. In this way, Baltag follows people addicted to buprenorphine who, upon
being removed from a substitution program that takes place in a clinical setting,
seek this substitution drug outside of the healthcare system—places where heroin
and methamphetamine are also sold. Just as Rehsmann’s questions started after
Philipp’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent death and Lemos Dekker’s account is
based on the proximity to death and dying, it was no different for Baltag. Her transi-
tion occurred 1 year after one of her patients, Sarah, died following a lifetime strug-
gle with drug addiction, from methamphetamine as a child to opiates later in life.
Baltag asks herself how the changing of roles over the course of her professional
trajectory, from psychotherapist to anthropologist, changed her perspective on the
topic of drug addiction and shaped her research. If, within the organization where
she previously worked, she had a close relationship with her “clients,” once out of
it, she felt more distant from her research participants to the point of them appearing
to be without history, as decontextualized people. She felt distant and somehow
shielded from them. However, as she writes, this distance was reduced over time,
triggering different emotional reactions from her according to which role she was
performing at the time and according to her positionality.
Nevertheless, her attention remained focused on her experience and reflections.
She highlights how psychology deals with the therapist’s emotional experiences,
and how this approach contrasts with the figure of the lonely anthropologist left to
deal with their emotions on their own. The move from a small therapist’s room full
of intimate relationships to the so-called open drug scene changed her experiences
and brought up emotions she would not have been able to experience in a clinical
setting. By reflecting on the anger and frustration she felt while researching the
open drug scene, she began to bear witness to the injustice of the healthcare system,
a system that is barely available to those who need it the most. This experience
constantly brings Sarah’s story back to mind, and raises questions such as how her
death could have been prevented.
Despite dealing with different health issues—that is, cancer and transplant thera-
pies, dementia, and drug addiction—all of the cases presented in this section revolve
around death and dying. To Rehsmann, it was Philipp’s dying that made her aware
of the relational hybrid space in her work. In Lemos Dekker’s experience in the
nursing home, dementia, death, and dying walked hand in hand with each other. To
Baltag, it was Sarah’s death that preceded her own transition from therapist to
anthropologist and prompted her to begin earnestly reflecting on her feelings. In this
manner, if health and illness offer a general context to the three pieces in this s­ ection,
underlining all of them is death. A death that triggers reflections and emotions shifts
our positionality and makes us realize that personal and professional lives are not
Dealing With Illness and Dying: Introduction 187

two separate spheres, but rather a relational hybrid space, where affects should play
a prominent role. Despite this broader context and its underlining subject, it is pre-
cisely to this prominent role that the focus should be directed. Only then the illusion
of detachment can be lifted and our research brought out of this comfort zone and
into our lives.
Each of the pieces in this section have contributed to highlighting how the sys-
tematic attention to the researcher’s own affects and emotions can foster anthropo-
logical insight. For instance, Rehsmann’s permanent sensitivity to her own feelings
and dreams had an impact on the way her research came to be, as did Lemos
Dekker’s in realizing how this constant awareness played a key role in an ethically
delicate research environment. In turn, by paying attention to her own anger and
frustration, Baltag helped draw attention to social injustices in relation to drug
users, and the sadness that remained after Sarah’s death was the driving force of an
engaged anthropological research. The epistemological relevance of constantly
being aware of our own emotions and affects during fieldwork goes beyond just
acknowledging our own positionality. It generates new ethnographic data and
insights, shifting our perception of the research topic and making us experience the
field in a different manner. It makes us aware of this illusion of detachment and, by
doing so, offers a way out.

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Dancing Through the Perfect Storm:
Encountering Illness and Death
in the Field and Beyond

Julia Rehsmann

Just as human existence is never simply an unfolding from within but rather an outcome of
a situation, of a relationship with others, so human understanding is never born of contem-
plating the world from afar; it is an emergent and perpetually renegotiated outcome of
social interaction, dialogue, and engagement. And though something of one’s own experi-
ence—of hope or despair, affinity or estrangement, well-being or illness—is always one’s
point of departure, this experience continually undergoes a sea change in the course of one’s
encounters and conversations with others. Life transpires in the subjective in-between, in a
space that remains indeterminate despite our attempts to fix our position within it—a bor-
derlands, as it were, a third world. For these reasons, intersubjectivity is not only what an
ethnographer studies; it is the matrix, method, and means whereby an understanding is
reached, albeit provisionally, of the other and of oneself. (Jackson 2011, p. xiii)

This chapter is about uncertainties. The uncertainties of life and death, crystallizing
in the face of a life-threatening disease. The uncertainties of diagnosis, prognosis,
and treatment. The uncertainties of “doing fieldwork” on life-threatening diseases,
while one’s loved ones face illness and death. This chapter is about the unsettling
aspect of these unknowns and the impossibility of preparing for them. But, more-
over, it is also about their affirming aspects, in order to understand and accept these
uncertainties as a central part of the anthropological endeavor and human existence
in general (Strasser and Piart 2018). Just as pointed out in the passage cited above,
understanding is the outcome of encounters, interactions, relations. Anyone who
has experienced these moments of realization, of grasping a thought, knows about
their emotionality. Understanding itself is a highly emotional process. Moreover, I
argue, recognizing one’s own emotions in the field is important for anthropological
knowledge production. I consider emotional reflexivity to be a meaningful way to
gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the topics anthropologists
investigate.
The topic I was keen to explore for my doctoral research project was liver trans-
plantation in Germany. Conducting fieldwork included ethnographic work in trans-
plant clinics and at hospital bedsides, talking to people suffering from cancer and

J. Rehsmann (*)
Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 189

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_17
190 J. Rehsmann

other life-threatening diseases. A challenging topic in itself, my research coincided

with a close friend’s cancer diagnosis, treatment and finally death. In this chapter, I
want to approach the question of how my personal experiences of illness and death
during fieldwork affected my ethnographic research and analysis. I weave this very
personal account together with a discussion of anthropological fieldwork, empha-
sizing the relational spaces that open up through this form of inquiry. The anthropo-
logical mode of research, with its emphasis on long-term, in-depth qualitative data
collection, entails that the actual “doing” of anthropology very often turns into a
hybrid venture between professional and personal lives. I argue that due to this
hybridity, emotional reflexivity is of crucial importance for the self-critical approach
anthropology requires of its scholars—especially in clinical contexts when explor-
ing, and encountering, illness and death.

Questions to Live With

For me, it all began with an e-mail. It was on September 15, 2014, and I had just
started to settle in to the place I would call home over the course of the following
months of fieldwork, when a close friend of mine sent me a message.
Subject: Necessary note1
Dear Resi,
Please don’t be shocked, but I have to tell you something very concerning.
I’ve been in the hospital since Friday with a suspected malignant tumor, a sarcoma. (…)
I’ll keep you up to date and hope that you have more enjoyable news, which I would
love to read. I’ll let you know as soon as I know more and hope that life is better at your
new place, which I’d love to read about. I love you very much and send you many kisses
(the children and Maria would too, if they were here now).With all my love,
Philipp

I had arrived at my new field site, a German city, just 2 weeks before receiving this
e-mail. I was about to start my fieldwork on transplant medicine in Germany, on
how people get access to this life-saving, high-tech, high-end medical procedure
and the ethical dimensions it entails. As I made my way into the medical world of
transplant medicine, a seemingly mundane issue began to intrigue me. What had
caught my attention was how important the waiting time had turned out to be in
patients’ lives: how their past experiences of waiting for a transplant had a tremen-
dous effect on their lives in the present, in terms of the quality of that time, but also
with regard to being able to prepare for the life-changing event to come (Rehsmann
2017). I began to explore the morally configured time before transplantation (ibid.,
2018), when people seem to be waiting between life and death—waiting for one, or
both, of these things to occur.
The only certainty we face in our lives is death; it is the one thing that we share
with all fellow human beings alike. But the certainty of death brings with it the

1
I translated Philipp’s e-mail and text messages freely from German into English.
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field… 191

uncertainty of when and how, and it seems that this uncertainty is the source of our
fear of death (Bauman 1992).
Death and I had rarely crossed paths, in real life as well as in my thoughts and
imagination. When I left Vienna and moved to Switzerland for my doctoral studies,
it started to lurk from behind my books, from between the sheets of paper on my
desk, from between the notes about my fieldwork preparations. I decided to ignore
its presence and focus on other aspects of my upcoming research, notwithstanding
the fact that death will inevitably play a certain role in research on life-threatening
diseases. From time to time, it came to mind, and as the months of preparations
came to an end, I posed in doctoral seminar the uncomfortable question of how to
prepare for the possibility of encountering death. I raised it at the very end of the
session, barely giving any time for an answer, and stated in the next breath: “I know
it is an impossible question, we all have to figure those things out for ourselves.”
Back then, I could not have imagined how true this statement would turn out to be.
Sherine Hamdy, an anthropologist working on organ transplantation and dona-
tion in Egypt, faced similar issues when her father suffered from a fatal brain tumor
while she was in the field. She wrote in the preface of her book that the “[Q]uestions
that had formed the bulk of my research about how people come to difficult bioethi-
cal decisions when faced with tremendous pain and the imminence of death were
now questions that I was living with” (2012, p. xxiii). In a similar vein, the questions
I had thought I would have to deal with in the field suddenly confronted me from
another, mercilessly personal, angle. They became questions I was living with.

A Perfect Storm

Liver transplant medicine as an anthropological research topic tends to be a frag-

mented and intangible field. As I had decided to try and enter “the field” through
patient associations, I was really excited (and quite nervous) when given the oppor-
tunity to participate in a meeting of a local patient support group—my first field-
work encounter for my new project. After months of reading and preparing, I was
finally “entering the field.” What could I expect from people who were either wait-
ing for a life-saving liver transplant or who had already received one? I tried to play
it cool, but my heart was racing on the train ride to the medieval town where the
meeting was about to take place at a local monastery. As I had no real-life experi-
ence with organ transplantation before that day in September, I did not know what I
had gotten myself into. People in pain? People suspicious of some young researcher
who was interested in their stories?
The minute before I entered the seminar room, where a group of local patients
and relatives regularly come together and share information and support each other,
I got another text message from Philipp:
Dear Resi!
Thing are so-so. I’m relieved they haven’t found any metastases, but it’s going to be a
major surgery and they can’t keep my leg. The tumor I have doesn’t react to any other kind
192 J. Rehsmann

of therapy; it’s really, really aggressive. That’s why everything has to happen super-fast
right now—which means the 8th of October. It sucks.
Lots of love,
Philipp.

My head was spinning, my heart pounding, my hands shaking, no longer just out of
nerves, but now shock. He was about to lose his leg. I had no time to process, I just
entered the room, sat there at the table, introducing myself, answering questions and
listening to the conversations taking place. My mind drifted. I tried to concentrate,
but it came popping back into my thoughts: Philipp. His cancer. His leg. What to
do?
I made it through the meeting and I said my goodbyes to the group. But as soon
as I left the seminar room, the consternation and helplessness overcame me.
Although I had seceded from the Catholic Church years ago, I went into the monas-
tery’s church. I sat down and appreciating its quietness and emptiness, I tried to
process what was going on. I remember that I lit a candle and read some of the
prayers, which were written down on paper and pinned on a corkboard. What I can-
not recall is whether or not I wrote down any words myself. But I definitely sent a
quick prayer out into the universe. And thus, it happened that on the same day that I
was first becoming acquainted with illness and organ transplantation, a deeply
unsettling process began.
What might seem too obvious to be overlooked—the first fieldwork encounter
coinciding with unsettling news from home—became apparent to me only months
later, when I traced back my messages and matched them up with my diary. I was
struck by the synchronicity of those events and the fact that I had not noticed it
before. Then again, it seemed quite reasonable to me that this had been overlooked:
the emotional shock I experienced that day blurred my recollections, and I had other
things to think about than the unfolding synchronicity.
At the beginning of October, a week after his text message, I went to Vienna to
see Philipp before and after surgery, the first of many trips that followed over the
course of the next 6 months. I recall my anxiousness on the way to the hospital and
intense feelings of insecurity about what and whom I was about to encounter. I still
remember the tension in my body, and how I overcame the urge to turn around and
not face him and his family—the minor accomplishment of staying put and keeping
going. I can still feel the weight in my legs as I put one foot in front of the other,
making my way through the clinic’s corridors. I realized afterwards that the pictures
in my mind, my imagination “running wild,” had been more unsettling than actually
being there—seeing, touching, and talking face to face with Philipp and his family.
I met Philipp in the hospital’s cafeteria, and he showed me the huge bump the
tumor had formed close to his spine, on his lower back, bigger than my fist. During
our conversation, Philipp asked, “Why me,” adding in the next breath, “But why
shouldn’t it be me?” Talking about the unfairness of the situation, we realized that
notions of fairness did not help in grasping what was going on. Suffering from a
life-threatening disease, like cancer, is never fair, to anyone, at any time. Philipp
told me that he was afraid to die, to not make it through the complicated and highly
invasive surgery. Nonetheless, he was also optimistic and hoped the amputation of
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field… 193

his leg would be a big enough sacrifice for the cancer—a sacrifice that this destruc-
tive force in his body had asked of him.
After surgery, I visited him again. I saw his damaged body, the emptiness beneath
the blanket where his right leg used to be, the cotton sheet lying flat on the bed, the
haunting absence. He explained to me how during surgery his doctors cut off his leg
and removed the right section of his pelvis, but left parts of the muscle of his upper
leg to “build” the pile of flesh he was now supposed to learn to sit on.
Philipp was in pain and all I could do was to be there with him, to be present. I
told him about my life in Germany, the beginnings of fieldwork, trying to entertain
him with sweet banalities from my everyday life in a situation that was far from
banal. Philipp laughed in spite of the pain about life’s ironies and cynicism. As far
as possible, he tried to maintain a positive outlook on the future, made plans and
refused to allow his life to be defined by his reconfigured body and illness. Philipp
was hospitalized for months, and repeatedly developed a fever, the cause of which
nobody seemed able to detect. He needed surgery again, suffered from fever again.
It seemed like an endless cycle.
He was discharged in December, having been hospitalized for almost 2 months.
I tried my best to support him and his family from afar as they suffered because of
his amputation and the therapeutic regimen that came along with his cancer diagno-
sis. During one of our rare Skype conversations, he proudly showed me his Mohawk,
pointing out his resemblance to Robert de Niro in the movie Taxi Driver. He had
shaved off his curls before starting chemotherapy, in an attempt to decrease the vis-
ibility of the toxic treatment and regain some autonomy in a situation beyond his
control. From time to time as we talked, he would convulse and groan in pain, but
he pleaded with me to take no notice of it and carry on talking. When I visited him
and his family over the Christmas holidays, it was striking how eager he seemed to
get used to his transformed body. Philipp craved a sense of normalcy in circum-
stances that were anything but ordinary.
In February, he found out that he had developed metastases in his lungs, some-
thing that had been indicated in his clinical report back in December, but which he
claimed no one had communicated to him. His cancer had spread. He had become
metastatic. Philipp’s leg and pelvis had not been sacrificed enough. It did not take
long for his tumor to return right where it had started, gradually making its way up
his spine, vertebra by vertebra—causing pain beyond imagination.
In her powerful book Malignant, Lochlann S. Jain explores the paradoxes of
cancer and points out how the disease constitutes “a perfect storm” (2013, p. 5), and
how each instance of it “comes with its own unique way of torturing people” (ibid.,
38). Philipp’s cancerous body was his perfect storm; it became his very personal
torture device. As uncomfortable as it may seem, we are cancer—or at least, as the
subtitle of Jain’s book points out, “Cancer becomes us.” “My flesh had become the
pathology report” (ibid., p. 3), she described her thoughts while receiving her test
results. Cancer is many things, as Jain’s book has shown. The metaphors used to
describe cancer refer predominantly to battlefield scenarios, to scenes of fighting or
being strong survivors. These metaphors obscure an uncomfortable truth about
194 J. Rehsmann

c­ ancer: it is not an intruding virus that is making us sick, but it is our own cells turn-
ing cancerous, growing rampantly, and destroying the body they are part of.
Philipp’s cancerous body had decided to do exactly that, with no regard for his
life. He wanted to know how he should prepare for death, as it became clear that this
really was about to happen, that it had become inevitable. Philipp was skeptical
about the idea of being transferred from the hospital to a hospice, reluctant to accept
what it implied: leaving a space in which people could be cured, and moving to one
beyond the possibility of cure, healing and survival. Philipp told me about the help-
lessness he detected in doctors’ eyes, how they seemed unable to communicate the
approaching inevitability in a clear manner.
It seems that these kind of conversations—breaking bad news and dealing with
patients who face death—are not among the core competencies of Western biomedi-
cine. Jain describes “my doctor’s uncomfortable avoidance of the Bad News
Experience” (ibid., p. 216). The uncertainties in medicine, the often very individual
trajectories illnesses trace, and the recognition of our mortality tend to be issues
pushed to the margins of medical training in Western biomedicine (Fox 2000).
Death has to be deferred with almost all means possible, and the realization that at
some point there is nothing more one can do is also painful for many physicians—
something they have to learn along the way with experience. It seems learning to
support patients in dying and the importance of palliative care are kept separate
from the more dominant conceptualization of what medical practice is supposed to
be.
This may have to some extent been the source of the feeling of helplessness that
Philipp thought he detected in the eyes of most medical professionals taking care of
him. Eager for some clear, straightforward words, he asked me about books, arti-
cles, as I surely must have read something about death and dying. He still had this
curiosity, his academic mind trying to make sense of the things happening to him. I
tried to be there for him and his family, but I had no answers.
Philipp’s cancer was indeed a perfect storm, which finally calmed with his death
at the end of April. We had talked on the phone a couple of days before, and he
seemed weak and disorientated as large amounts of morphine were running through
his system to alleviate his pain. When his wife, Maria, called on a Sunday evening
to tell me that she was unsure what was happening but that it seemed as if he was
“preparing” himself, I immediately cancelled all my appointments for the week and
booked a ticket home. Prepare? How? What? It was just at the beginning of the day-­
long train ride when my phone rang again, and Maria told me that Philipp had died
that night, and that she and her baby daughter had been with him when it had
happened.
It was early evening when I finally arrived at the hospice where Philipp had spent
the last weeks of his life. I remember I was looking for a toilet after I had arrived,
and I followed Philipp’s mother, who wanted to show me to the bathroom. I recall
taking a small step into a room—realizing it was his room—the room where his
dead body was lying in bed. I forced myself to look straight ahead when I passed by
his bed, seeing him out of the corner of my eye, but feeling not yet ready. I felt so
unprepared for what I was about to encounter. But after a couple of moments, I
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field… 195

stepped beside his bed and took a look at him, lying there with his hands crossed in
front of his chest. I remember how, when I touched him, his hands were already cold
and felt stiff, but close to his heart Philipp’s chest was still warm. I spent hours next
to his deathbed, and late evening I fell asleep in the bed next to him exhausted and
overwhelmed, waiting for his mother to return. Candles were lit and scented oils
from a lamp covered the slowly spreading smell of death.
I spent the following days at his family’s home, preparing the funeral together
with his wife and sister. We cried and laughed, listened to songs we wanted to play
at the service and danced to the music of Philipp’s favorite band, Queen. Amid the
tears, laughter and dancing, we organized a colorful and very personal service.
Thankful, we said no when some guests asked us whether we had considered doing
this kind of work professionally, as they had never experienced a service so beauti-
fully special.
During this week of funeral preparations, I read some of Philipp’s diaries, which
he had written over the course of the preceding months. In one of his first entries, he
referred to his cancer diagnosis as “infantile nightmare.” As a child, he believed that
because his star sign was cancer, he would sooner or later get the disease with the
same name. As it had turned out, his infantile nightmare became reality. For his
youngest daughter, who was 4 months old when he died in April 2015, “cancer’ has
remained an enigma. It still seems highly confusing to her how people could pos-
sibly suffer and die from cancer—a crab, a sea animal.

The Space In-Between

The months that elapsed between my receiving Philipp’s first cancer-related mes-
sage and sitting by his deathbed and leading his funeral service were filled with
experiences and encounters I had never had before. It was the first time I experi-
enced someone close to me going through a life-threatening illness, and the first
time I had painfully honest conversations about the possibility of death and the
helpless wish to survive. For the first time, I saw a dead body close up, right next to
me lying in a bed, only hours after death. It was the first time I touched a dead body,
felt the fading warmth, the stiffness in his fingers—even smelled death’s presence.
Over these months, I realized that I could bear more than I had imagined. While
I kept getting closer to my perceived limits, those limits expanded, extending my
conception of what I was able to cope with. Understanding, as pointed out in the
passage quoted at the very beginning of this chapter, “is never born of contemplat-
ing the world from afar” (Jackson 2011, p. xiii). It happens in the “subjective in-­
between” (ibid.), and through my personal experiences I became more aware of how
to apprehend illness, death, hospital life, myself and my emotions in the future. This
more nuanced understanding has benefited me personally but also professionally, as
an anthropologist in the field, encountering exactly these topics.
Philipp’s illness and death did not complicate the research process for me, as one
might expect in a society where death is considered a disturbance of normalcy; they
196 J. Rehsmann

had quite the opposite effect. Although my time in the field was “disturbed” and
interrupted by my visits to Austria, my overall research process and analysis bene-
fited from these experiences “back home.” These helped me to more fully compre-
hend the experiences of those affected by a life-threatening illness as well as the
experiences of their relatives, and enhanced my understanding of their narratives.
The insecurities I had at the beginning of fieldwork about what to expect and how
to encounter those affected by life-threatening illnesses became more nuanced, as I
was indeed able to relate to some of my interlocutors’ experiences. The confidence
I gained by being able to “manage” the events surrounding Philipp’s illness, surgery,
and death—although “managing” seems an insufficient term to describe the emo-
tional processes it entailed—helped me to be more focused in conversations, espe-
cially during interviews with patients and their relatives.
I spent most of my time during this year of fieldwork—in the field as well as back
home—at university hospitals, in the waiting rooms of clinics and at hospital bed-
sides. Gitte Wind (2008, p. 87) argues that we should be more specific in the way we
describe ethnographic fieldwork as it “has become a cliché we often use without
much reflection.” Wind points out that in many ethnographies the broad term par-
ticipant observation lacks a detailed description of what it actually entails in spe-
cific circumstances. Participant observation in a Swiss mountain village means
something different than participant observation in a hospital setting. In the latter
case, for example, the term often seems inadequate in capturing the limits and
potentials of ethnographic fieldwork.
The limits of participant observation become especially evident in settings where
conducting research requires permits and informed consent forms (Hoeyer and
Hogle 2014), like clinical settings often do. Informed consent also became an issue
in my research, which meant that before conducting an interview I needed my inter-
locutors’ signature as proof of their consent, confirming that they had received all
the necessary information about the research project in which they were going to
participate. I had to draft forms, adhering to the ethical guidelines for research with
humans, which were drafted for medical or quantitative research, and which were
far removed from reflecting the priorities of anthropological inquiry.
The process of explaining and answering questions before talking about personal
experiences and creating “critical dialogical relations” (Wind 2008, p. 87), was for
the most part aimed at legally protecting all parties involved, but was furthermore a
way to create a feeling of trust and safety. From time to time, during interviews but
also informal conversations, I shared parts of my experience with Philipp’s cancer,
a sharing of personal information that helped to build a bridge to their experiences,
connecting my interlocutors’ experiences to mine.
A physician at the clinic asked me once how I protected myself emotionally, as
he himself had to learn to distance himself from his patients’ stories, as they became
too much of a burden to him. I replied that I had not been “protecting” myself, that
I had allowed these stories to come close. I refused to maintain an emotional dis-
tance for my own protection, because I wanted people to tell me about their personal
experiences with illness. With some, I talked about death, what to expect after
dying, hopes, and dreams of the future. Keeping a distance while they opened up did
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field… 197

not seem fair and feasible to me. My understanding of “doing” anthropology is

inspired by Jackson’s (2011) intersubjective approach, emphasizing the importance
of the relational space opening up between the researcher and the world. I follow his
argument that it is through this in-between space that we are able to comprehend the
people we encounter, and ourselves, with the necessary complexity, and by doing
so, gain a temporary understanding of the other and of oneself in the world.

Feeling It

The discipline of anthropology in itself is characterized by a high level of self-­

reflexivity, but Spencer (2010) goes one step further by including the researcher’s
emotional life in this reflective approach. I agree with her statement that “self-­
reflexivity is incomplete if it does not include emotional reflexivity” (ibid., p. 32).
Asking myself, “How does that situation make me feel?” and more importantly,
“Why do I feel the way I feel?” became a way to better understand my encounters
and experiences in the field and beyond.
For me, discomfort became the most interesting emotion at work in the process
of emotional reflexivity. Following an uncomfortable feeling and trying to trace its
source became an insightful tool for reflecting upon and questioning the things I
was used to. Uncomfortable confusion diminishes or even vanishes with routine,
with the recurrence of situations, pointing to the importance of temporality in this
regard. Discomfort, or the lack thereof, in situations which had elicited it in the past,
points to the impermanence of our reactions to certain unfamiliar situations. It
points not only to an increase in the knowledge, but also to the process of becoming
accustomed to circumstances—a process at the very core of the anthropological
endeavor.
At the beginning of fieldwork, hospital settings were not familiar to me. I was not
used to people’s scars, their afflicted bodies, tubes and drains piercing them, liquids
flowing in and out of artificial openings. While hearing about these things was chal-
lenging to me, seeing them was even more so. Similar to the anxiety I had felt before
meeting Philipp at the hospital, meeting some of my interlocutors for the first time
involved considerable discomfort on my part: sitting next to hospital beds whose
occupants’ bellies were punctured, with liters of liquid flowing out of their abdo-
mens via tubes into bulging bags on the floor. I recall touching those bags, as I was
asked to move them a little to the side as the flow of the fluid seemed somehow
blocked. It also made me uncomfortable when people pulled up their hospital gowns
to show me their scars from surgery. But nonetheless, I also remember how these
moments of discomfort reduced over time.
While at the very beginning of fieldwork, hospitals seemed like very strange
places—places one usually avoids—those strange places and their atmosphere soon
became familiar. While at the beginning I was hesitant and insecure during my
encounters with patients and relatives, questioning myself about how I could relate
to their experiences of pain and suffering, of dealing with a life-threatening illness,
198 J. Rehsmann

this hesitation gave way to a confidence that I could in fact relate to some aspects of
their experiences.
The continuous process of reflecting on my emotional responses and remaining
attentive to feelings of discomfort was not only a useful guide to becoming aware of
and protecting my personal limits. More importantly, it served as a meaningful
“tool” of ethnographic fieldwork for gaining a better understanding of the human
condition. Because of my experiences with Philipp, I felt more comfortable talking
with people about bodily limitations, their fear of surgery, the possibility of death,
the haunting questions of what to expect when life ends. Topics I had brushed aside
before fieldwork suddenly occupied considerable space in professional and private
conversations. And the discomfort that the lurking presence of death had caused me
before fieldwork was replaced by the deep conviction that by delving into these very
existential questions, by facing one’s temporal limitedness and bodily fragility, a
deeper understanding of life and one’s place in the world is possible.
I understand the emotional reflexivity as a meaningful “tool” of the intersubjec-
tive approach (Jackson 2011). Intersubjectivity urges us to be attentive to the space
in-between subjects, in order to gain a deeper, if temporary, understanding of the
other and oneself. It highlights the importance of the relational space that opens up
between the researcher and the world. Just as private encounters are enmeshed with
our emotional inner lives, so too are professional ones. This is especially the case in
research contexts where the boundaries between professional and private lives tend
to blur and dissolve, as they so often do in ethnographic fieldwork. Because of these
relational characteristics of ethnographic inquiries, I consider emotional reflexivity
a meaningful methodological and analytical tool for the practice of social anthro-
pology—especially when working with people who face life-threatening illnesses.

Concluding Remarks: On Hubris and Hybridity

I came so close to illness and death during these months of fieldwork that I reasoned
I had to prepare myself emotionally for instances of sudden death among the people
I loved. At some point, I thought I had accepted mortality—mine and that of others.
I remember sitting on the train, thinking, “Okay, that is how it is, death is part of
life,” while in the next moment being shocked at the pragmatism of my thinking.
What hubris! The fear of cancer and dying came crawling back, haunting me in my
dreams when I was back from the field, back in academia, back at the university
preparing papers and panels.
Stressed and questioning everything I was doing, I woke up again and again from
nightmarish dreams. Once I was diagnosed with cancer and had only a few days left
but nobody seemed to care. Once a tumor in my mother’s throat had returned, taking
over her body, threatening her life. Was that how I wanted to spend my time, my
life? Being a stressed academic trying to make sense of such an existential topic?
What if I really was about to die? What if my mother was about to die? Or my sister?
What would I be doing? And on the other side of these haunting questions, the
Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field… 199

intangible understanding that all these people so dear to me and I, all of us, are
sooner or later going to die, that there was no way around that, no escape. Not once
over the course of my fieldwork, when illness and especially cancer were so close
to me, did I have nightmares like these, and although they disappeared after a couple
of months, they made me aware that my hubris was fallacious. I realized that
although I had thought, read, and talked so much about death and dying, the issue
was not resolved and probably never would be.
If I were to keep the experience of Philipp’s cancer and death apart from research,
my being-in-the-field and the analysis of my material would be unreflective and
insincere. The synchronicity of my personal and professional engagement with ill-
ness and death seems too substantial to be overlooked and ignored. I am convinced
that doing fieldwork and working as an anthropologist are often a hybrid venture of
the professional and the personal, that the line between private and work life often
becomes blurred. Consequently, our experiences in either of those spheres affect
and influence each other.
Because of this interrelatedness, I am convinced that my experiences back home
in Austria influenced my research. Although they were intensely challenging, I feel
confident in saying that they enriched my fieldwork, my empathy, my being-in-the-­
field, my understanding and analysis; they enabled me to more fully comprehend
the experiences of people affected by a life-threatening disease. The confrontation
with Philipp’s illness and death affected my views on living and dying and my emo-
tional capacity to grasp patients’ experiences; conversely, my interlocutors’ stories
also helped me in my conversations and encounters with Philipp and his family.
This interrelatedness is not only a characteristic of anthropological fieldwork; it is
an essential part of the intersubjective approach. It points to the junctures where the
subjective lives of the researcher and those being studied fold in and out of each
other.
What I took with me from those encounters with death was an awareness of
being alive. As pretentious as it may sound, being aware of one’s mortality helps to
put things into perspective. I decided I would not put death into a hidden corner of
my mind, ignoring it so it could hit me even harder when it inevitably appeared, but
would instead try to accept the uncertainties that come with being alive. Bauman
(1992) argues that mortality is such an essential part of our existence and our imagi-
nations that the overcoming of it serves as the driving force of human culture. We
create to transcend our temporal actualities. What I aim to do by writing this chapter
is not only to create a text to transcend my own temporal situatedness and bounded-
ness, but by including Philipp’s story, I aspire to take him along with me.

Acknowledgements Very special gratitude goes to my dear friend Maria, Philipp’s wife, mother
of three, emergency surgeon, who has never forgotten how to dance and laugh during the craziness
called life. Her feedback on this chapter was crucial and her caring, beautiful words reflected how
amazing a person she is. I am also deeply grateful to my supervisor, Sabine Strasser, for her
encouraging support during my fieldwork and beyond. She trusted me to make the right call—a
trust not taken for granted. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation
[project number 149368 and 175223].
200 J. Rehsmann

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cal research ethics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 347–362. https://doi.org/10.1146/
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Standing at the Doorstep: Affective
Encounters in Research on Death
and Dying

Natashe Lemos Dekker

Anthropological writing about death has to be, if not an ice-axe to break the sea frozen
inside us, at least an ice pick to chip at the conventional forms of representing and narrating
the encounter of the anthropologist with death. (Behar 1996, p. 86)

Introduction

Ethnographic fieldwork, it could be argued, is always an emotional endeavor

(Davies 2010) replete with unsettling encounters, and moments when anxiety and
joy coincide. While the reflexive turn in anthropology sparked lively debates on
fieldwork ethics and the positionality of the ethnographer, these topics should be
further considered from perspectives that take the emotional aspects of ethnography
seriously. This chapter addresses how emotions feature in the ways we, as ethnog-
raphers, position ourselves as moral actors in the field. It does so by taking the val-
ues ascribed to emotions and the emotional components of moral value seriously
(Lutz 1998) and by taking a close look at the researcher’s attunement to interlocu-
tors and situations during ethnographic fieldwork.
I address these specificities in the context of ethnographic research on death and
dying, though the discussion is also pertinent to ethnographers working in other set-
tings that are, to a greater or lesser extent, emotionally charged. Researching death
and dying has been characterized as a sensitive endeavor (Borgstrom and Ellis 2017;
Woodthorpe 2011), yet few authors have addressed their own emotions while doing
research (e.g., Pool 2000; Visser 2017; Woodthorpe 2011). “Emotion and the per-
sonal involvement of the researcher are undervalued in social scientific studies of
death,” Pool (2000, p. 16) writes, underlining that emotions play an essential part in
the research process as the researcher interacts with their interlocutors. This also
became apparent to me during 18 months of fieldwork—in three different nursing

N. Lemos Dekker (*)

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 201

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_18
202 N. Lemos Dekker

homes as well as during individual interviews in the private sphere of the home in
the Netherlands—where I focused on the moral constructions surrounding the end
of life with dementia, by scrutinizing ideas of a “good” death, dignity, and suffering.
Sensitivity, awkwardness, intense intersubjective bonds, and ontological questions
of human existence were at the core of this ethnographic endeavor.
With this chapter, I will not attempt to answer the question of how to do research
on death and dying, but rather aim to demonstrate the need to come to a better
understanding of the affective states that come with ethnographic encounters.
Thinking of ethnography and ethnographic writing in Karen Brodkin’s words, as a
way of “linking our stories to larger stories” (2011, p. 21), my aim in describing
some of my own experiences is to relate to ethnography as a practice, tradition, and
personal passion. I would like to underline the importance of writing about and
through emotions, in line with Robert Bellah’s statement that “knowing in the
human studies is always emotional and moral as well as intellectual” (1977/ 2007,
p. xxxi). Negotiating, for example, the insider–outsider position that is inherent to
participant observation and through which my positioning in the field with regard to
the people I am with is formed, cannot be seen as a purely intellectual process. This
is to say, that deliberating over the extent to which ethnographers can engage in
certain topics, with certain people, and in certain situations is not only a matter of
moral considerations which have been debated extensively in anthropology, it is
indeed also a deeply emotional matter.
Emotions are intrinsically related to value and morality. On the one hand, moral
judgment is often expressed in words which describe emotions, pointing to the
importance of emotions in how moral claims are communicated and negotiated. On
the other hand, morality and emotions are intertwined in the sense that “morality
requires emotion because affect provides the motivation for taking particular moral
positions towards events” (Lutz 1998, p. 76–77). Here, I build on Lutz’s approach
to explore and reflect on the intertwinement of emotions and morality in how we
navigate and position ourselves in fieldwork. How, then, do the emotions we experi-
ence motivate moral considerations in the field, and how can the researcher’s moral
positioning become emotionally expressed?
Writing about the emotional layers of ethnography, I find, requires the ways in
which ethnography moves us to be taken seriously. In The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, Sara Ahmed writes that “emotions involve (…) affective forms of reorien-
tation” (2004, p. 8, emphasis added). “Being moved” through the emotional force
of an ethnographic encounter also means moving toward or away from people and
situations, and can become a sign to do things in a different way or even withdraw.
Emotions, then, are central to ethnographic encounters and the negotiated position-
ality of the researcher.
In the following text, by reflecting on my ethnographic fieldwork in nursing
homes in the Netherlands, I will demonstrate some of the emotional and moral
entanglements that came with researching death and dying. I go on to show how my
own movement through fieldwork—my own attunement to situations—has been
formed via emotional encounters. As Jason Throop writes, “the ethnographic
encounter is an encounter that is often defined by the recurrent frustration of the
Standing at the Doorstep: Affective Encounters in Research on Death and Dying 203

anthropologist’s attempts at achieving an intersubjective attunement with particular

interlocutors” (2012, p. 85). I understand attunement here as informed by emotions
and morality, and as referring to the way I, as a researcher, relate—emotionally,
morally, physically—to my interlocutors and fieldwork itself.
I found attuning especially important due to the levels of intimacy, taboo, and the
sensitive nature that the topic of death and dying is often charged with. Being there
with bereaved family members saying goodbye to a loved one, I took part in what I
considered to be intimate moments. The rawness of the confrontation with death,
and the profound absence of presence visible in the inactive body of the deceased,
was sometimes also accompanied by uneasy relief to suffering (Lemos Dekker
2018). The confrontation with death and loss oftentimes triggered grief and sorrow
related to previous experiences of loss, finding family members and professional
caregivers grieving past and present losses in a moment of emotional entanglement.
Moreover, it also stimulated the realization of finitude, both in interlocutors and
myself, and with it the anticipation of losses to come. While witnessing the end of
people’s lives during fieldwork, I realized it was always the end of a life; that the
dying person in front of me had unique meaningful relations, personal habits, and
ideologies. I reflected on and fantasized about how their life used to be, a life filled
with dreams, emotions, and perhaps secret desires, and was struck by the complexi-
ties of a being coming to its end. This rawness, our responses to loss, to be left in
nothingness, and “the sense of death as no longer abstract possibility but present
actuality” (Fairfield 2015, p. 14) provided the context and matter of my research, as
well as the lens to think through the emotions that accompanied it.
While a part of what happens in death will remain incomprehensible, as ethnog-
raphers we look at and explore death through its manifestations and affects—we
study the social and cultural structures surrounding death, its rituals, the experi-
ences of grief, anticipation and loss, and how relationships are made and unmade. I
will elaborate on this by reflecting on the emotional and moral entanglements in my
own navigation through the ends of residents’ lives in Dutch nursing homes. By
using the plural form “we,” here I position myself in a larger community of ethnog-
raphers. This is not so as to generalize my experiences, but to serve as a reminder
that the experiences I share may speak to others’ concerns and can be seen in line
with central methodological debates within anthropology, of proximity and dis-
tance, the limits of empathetic understanding, and moral considerations in doing
fieldwork.

Participating in the End of Lives

“Being there” in a nursing home meant spending hours sitting in the living room,
drinking coffee, or staring out of the window with residents. Marveling at the color
of the leaves and life outside alternated with moments of shared boredom. I took
part in meetings between the general practitioner and family members wherein the
well-being and treatment options of residents were discussed. From time to time,
204 N. Lemos Dekker

care workers would ask me if I could lend a hand by, for example, taking a resident
to the hairdresser, which was located on the ground floor of the building. In the
afternoons, I often walked through the nursing home hallways with residents, pass-
ing the coffee corner with the birdcage, the photographs of the market, the antique
clothes dryer, and again the coffee corner with the birdcage—over and over again.
During these walks, residents would recount parts of their lives and talk about their
work, their families, and memories. Sometimes, these were entire stories, some-
times fragments, and sometimes sounds that made no sense to me mixed with words
that encouraged me to interpret and read between the lines.
When the end of a resident’s life drew nearer, I spent most of my time sitting at
their bedside, sometimes with family members and sometimes by myself. At the
bedside, family members shared with me stories about the dying relative, who she
was and the life she had lived. While I could not engage in dialog with the person
with dementia herself, I could listen to the stories told by family members and the
professional caregivers caring for her. Often, the dementia had advanced to such a
level that verbal communication was challenging or in some cases impossible, espe-
cially when morphine (administered to manage pain) had reduced consciousness
even further. Thus, I wasn’t able to know how the person with dementia experienced
the process of dying, how she was facing the end of her life, if she was afraid or not,
and which values mattered most to her. As such, I tried to get to know the residents
of the nursing home and their family members and to establish a connection as
much as possible, before the process of dying started—so I would be a familiar
presence for them and they for me at the end of their lives.
Once, after spending a couple of hours with Anna1 in her mother’s room, she
took a book from the shelf and sat down beside me at the coffee table. It was a
printed photo album that showed pictures of her mother, both from the past and
from the present in the nursing home. Together, we browsed through the pages and
talked about her mother’s life. She characterized her mother as a proud woman who
cared about her appearance. The next morning, Anna changed her mother’s ear-
rings, applied eye-shadow, and dressed her in a pink shawl. Her mother, who was in
her final days, was bedridden and her eyes were already closed. Anna mentioned
that pink was her mother’s favorite color. Gaining insight into the lives being lived
in the nursing home and the histories that went with them helped me to understand
what mattered to the person with dementia and their family at the end of life.
Participating in the end of people’s lives also came with specific complexities. I
learned that the specific context of the end of life of people with dementia requires
a thoughtful approach to establishing contact. The researcher must take a careful
step closer and rely on nonverbal communication, such as physical contact, body
language, and facial expressions. Often, when I visited a dying resident, the ques-
tion of whether it was appropriate, emotionally and morally, at that time to enter the
room arose. As a result, in an unexpected way, the doorstep became a metaphor for
my engagement with sensitivity, proximity, and distance, and being respectful.
Although a physical doorstep is often absent in nursing homes to allow for wheel-

1
I have anonymized interlocutors’ names for reasons of confidentiality.
Standing at the Doorstep: Affective Encounters in Research on Death and Dying 205

chairs and beds to make their way through the building, there is a clear, symbolic
border—a door, a line between different colors on the floor—between the s­ emipublic
space of the nursing home hallway and the semiprivate space of the resident’s room.
The doorstep came to symbolize the emotional and methodological negotiations of
involvement and detachment. How close are you allowed, how close do you dare to
go, and how close is close enough to be empathetic? And what distance is enough
to be respectful?
One occasion in which these questions arose was 3 days before Mrs. Van Doorn
passed away. I was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the doctor to arrive when
her son Henk entered the unit. He sat down next to me and said to me, “This is not
what one wants.” Upon which I asked, “What would you want?” He answered,
“That it would be over soon.” He told me about the death of his father years ago, but
then added, “This is completely different, she is screaming from pain and suffering.”
We looked at each other without saying anything more. When the doctor arrived, the
three of us walked to the room where Mrs. Van Doorn was lying in bed. I waited at
the doorstep as they entered the room. The doctor lifted the blanket and uncovered
Mrs. Van Doorn’s left shoulder to check if the morphine needle was still in place. It
was a small needle with plastic tabs on either side—I now understood the name
“butterfly needle.” Henk asked the doctor, “How long?” And the doctor replied,
“Before she dies? That is difficult to say. I do see that her functions have decreased
and she could die of that, but still it is hard to predict.” In the meantime, Henk’s
sister Marta who I had briefly spoken with that morning arrived. While greeting
everyone with a smile, she entered the room and took a chair to sit by her mother’s
bedside. Just before he left, the doctor told them this was all he could do for now,
and that he would be back to check up on Mrs. Van Doorn later in the day. Then,
Marta looked at me and said, “Come in, take a chair,” and pointed to a chair by a
small table in the corner of the room. I took the chair and placed it at the end of the
bed.
When Marta asked me to come sit with her by the bedside, she accepted my pres-
ence and involvement. I had waited at the doorstep, because I considered this a
deeply personal experience. I was anxious about imposing in such a personal
moment. Waiting for interlocutors to invite me in became one of the ways I was able
to negotiate my position as outsider and insider. I also hoped that my reserved atti-
tude would demonstrate respect.
I constantly negotiated how to approach moments that might be experienced as
private or sensitive. I find it hard to describe what sensitivity precisely entailed or
what it meant to have a sensitive approach. For me, it was about being attuned to the
emotions of the other and myself in the moment, being able to sense the emotional
interactions and what matters most in that specific situation. It was about seeing and
listening, as much as about voicing the things I was not sure about.
One afternoon, after Anna and I had spent several hours talking by her mother’s
bed, I was just about to go home when the general practitioner informed me that
there would be an unexpected family meeting with Anna’s brothers and sisters. We
walked back upstairs to the unit where the family was waiting and the general prac-
titioner asked them if it was all right if I was present during the meeting, to which
206 N. Lemos Dekker

they agreed. After looking for a place to sit down in the living room, which was too
crowded with residents, we moved to a table in the hallway. At first, I decided not to
take place at the table but sat down on a chair by the wall to seem less obtrusive,
upon which Anna said, “No, come and join us, you are also a part of this.” While
taking a seat at the table, I experienced an increased self-awareness—as if my
expressions, how I moved, and my presence all mattered at that moment. As I took
my notebook from my bag I felt the need to place it open in front of me, an attempt
at being transparent toward the family, making visible what I was writing and what
I wasn’t. I could see that Anna and her family were somewhat agitated and restless,
as well as very serious in that moment, and being there as a researcher I did not want
to cause more harm. In this way, attuning to my interlocutors and the situation was
both a moral consideration and about the emotions I experienced and those that I
perceived in others. My response—taking out the notebook and placing it in front of
me—was a form of self-discipline borne out of a deep concern for transparency,
which resonated with Paul Rabinow’s remark that the anthropologist is required to
be aware of the codes of conduct and should control herself, adapting to the situa-
tion, accordingly (1977/ 2007, p. 47). In this way, attunement was also expressed by
holding back, standing waiting, and not wanting to impose my own presence. Being
moved, emotionally, was closely related to bodily movement in deciding how, and
to what extent, to engage in interactions. There is no blueprint for encounters like
these, but I tried to conform to the setting and the person in front of me.
At the doorstep, a range of emotions and deliberations came together. Respecting
this cultural boundary between outside and inside, or as was my intention, also
meant respecting the private sphere of the family witnessing the final moments of
the life of their mother or father, husband, wife, or sibling. Also when there was no
actual doorstep, there could be “doorstep situations” that entailed emotional and
moral thresholds, such as in the meeting described above where I considered
whether, and how, to sit with Anna and her family at the table. It was a point at
which I considered my own invasiveness in the moment, and whether my presence
was accepted and appropriate. It was a threshold, perhaps more for myself than for
the people I was with, which highlighted my own discomfort. Would I dare to step
over my own worry of being invasive? This deliberation, however, could not take
too long, or it would acquire a voyeuristic character. In this sense, the doorstep pre-
sented a clear choice: step inside and fully engage, or walk away. Doing otherwise,
standing outside while peering in, was not an option. And thus, I entered.
We are sitting all around her while she is lying in bed. She, Mrs. Van Doorn, is dying. On
her nightstand an old photograph, of her first husband I am told. Mrs. van Doorn was born
on the 3rd of September, 1919 in a rural area in the south of the Netherlands. She was the
oldest of fourteen children. She started working at the age of fourteen and met her first
husband at nineteen. They married and had seven children, of which two passed away at a
young age. Mrs. van Doorn knew many losses in her life, she lost her husband in 1982, and
later another son and two grandchildren. After many years she met Martin, with whom she
enjoyed traveling and with whom she lived together before moving to the nursing home.
Next to the photograph, a plastic cup with water, with a small stick with a green sponge on
the end, to keep her mouth moisturized. She gasps for breath, while we, her daughter,
granddaughter, son, the spiritual counselor and I fix our eyes on her. We look at her and at
Standing at the Doorstep: Affective Encounters in Research on Death and Dying 207

each other, but not for too long. It is as if we fear we might miss something, her final breath,
or whatever comes. No sounds are entering the space except for Mrs. Van Doorn’s b­ reathing.
We talk in a low tone of voice, almost as if speaking under our breath. The daughter Marta,
who is sitting next to the bedside and has her eyes still fixed on her mother starts moving on
her chair and clamping her hands together, while she says “no not yet.” She seems to panic,
while the pace and rhythm of Mrs. Van Doorn’s breathing becomes slow. Then, a long
pause, we hold our own breath and wait. Will this be her last one? No—a new burst fills the
air and her daughter startles. Then, once more, a deep breath and Mrs. Van Doorn has
passed away. Marta holds her mother and presses her lips on her forehead while her sobbing
becomes louder. While at first we were all sitting and the room was filled with tension, now
there is movement, we are holding each other, shedding tears and saying our condolences.
Besides the sadness, tension has given way to a kind of relief. (field diary, author)

Awkwardness, Sensitivity, and Intense Bonds

While sensitively balancing distance and proximity often resulted in in-depth con-
nections, it was at times also paired with awkwardness, and sometimes also reso-
nated with humor. One Monday morning, I entered the nurse’s office and asked
cautiously if any of the residents’ condition had worsened or if anyone was dying.
I was aware of my own discomfort in posing this question, and I tried to convey this
consciousness in the manner of asking. Perhaps, reflecting on this now, what I was
trying to do was to soften the question for both the nurses and myself. Although it
was not as if I wished anyone would die, I feared my asking would give that impres-
sion. Still, I had to ask, first because I could not visit every individual room (the
nursing home consisted of 14 units with six residents each), second because I did
not have the knowledge to assess someone’s condition—perhaps the person was just
staying in bed for a day—and third because knowing someone’s condition had
worsened or if the person was dying required a different, more modest and sensitive
approach while entering their unit. In her response, the nurse joked: “Well, that’s a
nice question to begin with on Monday morning!” Both my own discomfort in ask-
ing and the nurse’s response, although with humor, implied that death should not be
asked for. Even though death and dying are part of everyday life in the context of the
nursing home, it remained a topic of conversation that could evoke discomfort or
giggly responses. This resonates with Glennys Howarth’s observation that in mod-
ern societies, “death is confined to medical or scientific discourses; anything outside
of that is taboo or viewed as “pornographic.” [Death] has been removed from the
public realm and placed firmly within the private sphere of the family and individ-
ual” (2007, p. 16).
As such, I feared the people I met would perceive my interest in death and dying
as voyeuristic, as if I was looking at something one is not supposed to look at, invad-
ing another’s intimate and personal sphere, and thus feeling inappropriate (e.g.,
Visser 2017). For example, after spending a month or two in the nursing home,
professional caregivers started associating me with the topic of death and dying.
This was valuable since it often created a space wherein professional caregivers
208 N. Lemos Dekker

would start talking about the subject themselves, reflecting on past experiences and
current situations, or at times would approach me to tell me when a resident’s
­condition had worsened. But being related to the topic of death and dying could also
feel troublesome given the morbid nature of it, even if it was packaged with humor.
Once, upon arriving at a unit, one of the professional caregivers who saw me enter-
ing exclaimed, “Uh oh, who’s dying?” and we both laughed at it.
I have also removed myself from encounters with family members, sometimes
because I sensed they were unable or unwilling and at other times due to my own
discomfort. During one cold morning in December 2015, I arrived at the nursing
home, finding team manager Isabelle in an afflicted state behind her desk. In a high
trembling voice that was unusual for her, she told me Mr. Langedijk had fallen in the
bathroom only a few minutes before and had died. She looked at me in panic and
continued in a rushed tone, “They [the care workers] found him in the bathroom, but
we don’t know what happened. If he died and then fell, or if he died because of the
fall. They are so confused and upset.” Together we walked toward the unit. Upon
arriving, the care workers were busy attending to the needs of the other seven resi-
dents for whom they had to care. Nicole, one of the care workers, told me she had
already notified the family; they were on their way. Her face was red and I could see
that she had been crying. About an hour later, Mr. Langedijk’s daughter and her
husband arrived. Isabelle briefly introduced me. We shook hands and I expressed
my condolences. Isabelle continued talking with the daughter about what happened.
Without being able to pinpoint exactly why, I felt slightly uncomfortable in the situ-
ation. When Isabelle had finished, she returned to the nurses’ office.
Mr. Langedijk’s daughter, her husband, and I stood in the empty corridor just
outside Mr. Langedijk’s room. On their faces, disbelief and shock, but also some-
thing which I cannot quite describe, it was not quite anger, but a certain stern-
ness. As the conversation progressed, my initial feeling of discomfort increased.
Both my questions and their answers became shorter. I wanted to end the conversa-
tion and leave the couple to themselves. I thanked them for their time and expressed
my condolences once more.
Reflecting on this encounter, I have tried to dismantle what it was that made me
stop: Was it the look on their faces? Their manner of talking and interacting with
me? Or was it my own discomfort in asking questions at a moment where I assumed
they could be out of place or inappropriate? The moral and the affective were inex-
tricably interwoven in this situation. While it was difficult in these instances to
pinpoint the specific reason, it became clear to me that, as Thomas Stodulka writes,
“as embodied products of researcher-researched interactions, emotions may either
motivate or discourage further engagement” (2015, p. 86). Considering that emo-
tions move us (Lutz 1998; Ahmed 2004), they move us toward actions and toward
others, but they can also move us away from a specific person or setting. Whether to
withdraw or engage is a moral consideration as much as it is driven by emotional
experience, and whether and how we attune and make sense of them as affectively
aware anthropologists.
Standing at the Doorstep: Affective Encounters in Research on Death and Dying 209

At other times, as was the case with Mrs. Van Doorn’s family, intense bonds
emerged, perhaps precisely because I was not part of the family or a member of
staff, and because I had the time to be present and listen. My position as a familiar
stranger at times facilitated discussions about sensitive topics which might have
been harder to talk about with family members or others who had a personal stake
in the process. Many interlocutors explicitly told me they appreciated my presence
and our conversations. Some expressed their gratitude for me being there while I
expressed I was the one who should be thankful. One evening, I was preparing to go
home to have dinner when Marta asked, “But you are coming back, aren’t you?”
That evening I had dinner in the nursing home’s cafeteria and quickly returned to
the unit, not wanting to disappoint her. Creating a space to discuss death openly was
oftentimes valued and experienced positively by interlocutors.
Hence, researching death did not only bring awkwardness and discomfort.
Engaging in conversations about death and dying, going beyond discursive taboos,
also enabled in-depth connections, even if doing so required working through the
discomfort. Having such encounters that allow for vulnerability and trust fostered
meaningful relationships. In some cases where I did not know the family before we
spent time at the bedside, the relationship was forged in that moment. Being present
at such a defining moment in one’s life strengthens a relationship precisely because
this moment is shared.
However, I also noticed there were limits to how vulnerable I could be, and how
much emotion could be shared. Several times I felt the need to suppress my own
tears while standing at the bedside with grieving family members. Why did I do
this? Did I not want to appear vulnerable? Or did I feel it was not my sorrow to
express? Reflecting upon this now, from behind my desk, I feel the loss belonged to
the family, as if there was a certain legitimacy to feeling it. They were the ones los-
ing a loved one. Can we then, even if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, under-
stand the grief and pain of others? While I could understand their suffering because
they were losing a loved one, and could also feel sad because I was witnessing a
person dying, at the same time there was a distance, as it was not me who was losing
someone. I understood the pain but did not experience the loss (e.g., Pool 2000).
Such limitations in understanding interlocutors’ emotions have been discussed by
Renato Rosaldo (1989/ 2004, 2014) who describes in his classic essay “Grief and a
Headhunter’s Rage” how he only learned to understand “rage” among the Ilongot
after experiencing the loss of his wife in an accident during fieldwork. He writes
that only after experiencing a loss of his own could he appreciate the “powerful rage
Ilongots claimed to find in bereavement” (1989/ 2004, p. 168). Helpful in engaging
such limitations is Ahmed’s (2004) point that feeling sad about another’s pain is a
form of alignment with the other, but a form that works by differentiating between
the other and the self. This is about recognizing my own emotions instead of equat-
ing them with those of interlocutors. My emotion emerged from seeing someone
dying and was mediated by witnessing the family’s sorrow and my own ability to
empathize with what it means to lose a loved one. But, obviously, I did not feel the
same loss.
210 N. Lemos Dekker

A Final Note on Writing About Death

I had to figure out how to observe and participate in the process of dying, to learn at
which moments I could be present and when it was time to withdraw. However, the
preoccupation with sensitivity does not end with fieldwork. For me, ethnographic
research is as much about writing as it is about the encounters I experienced. Doing
this, however, requires a return to emotions, picking up the ice-axe Ruth Behar
called upon. In writing about death and dying I have sought to transfer the charged
nature of loss into words that do justice to the complexity of encounters and emo-
tions. I have tried to convey the difficulties and strong connections I encountered, as
well as the discomfort and gratitude I felt during my research, to explore how emo-
tions feature in the ways we, as ethnographers, position ourselves as moral actors in
the field. This brings to the fore a togetherness of contradictory emotions, impo-
tence, awkwardness, and humor that enabled connections while researching the end
of life.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to all residents, family members, and professional care work-
ers who shared their experiences with me and allowed me to be present in the day-to-day life of the
nursing home and at the end of various residents’ lives. I am thankful to Kristine Krause for her
great support and critical reading of the text. I also want to thank Kathrine van den Bogert for
providing feedback on an earlier version of the text. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the sup-
port of Thomas Stodulka, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib and their efforts in bringing
this edited volume together.

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From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting
the Experiences of a Therapist
and Anthropologist when Researching
Substitutional Drugs and Their Users

Tereza Baltag

Introduction

Did Sarah have to die?1 This question crossed my mind many times during my field-
work research on Subutex pills and their users in the capital city of Prague, Czech
Republic.2 Subutex was developed with the intention of substituting heroin. Its users
are clients at healthcare facilities, but also junkies on the open drug scene (ODS)—
sites that are known for their high incidence of drugs, drug users, and more obvious
drug use. While a patient at the Healthcare Center Gestalt on the Subutex
Maintenance Treatment (SMT) program provided to opioid addicts, Sarah fre-
quently visited these places, often having consumed other addictive substances. I
met her at the healthcare center in 2012, when I became her therapist. In 2015,
1 year after Sarah’s death, I left the comfort of my counseling office and set out onto
the ODS as an anthropologist, motivated by many unanswered questions pertaining
to the field of substitutional therapy and its benefits for addicts. In the midst of the
ODS, I realized that my relationship with Sarah was still not resolved. I had to face
the same kinds of questions and feelings that I was forced to face immediately after
her death: is such a destiny unavoidable?
On the ODS, there was one thing in particular that I had to struggle with. I did
not have a team to share my thoughts with, to make jokes with, or to ask for help
from. I did not have colleagues with whom I could immediately discuss what was
on my mind. So I began to wonder, how do anthropologists work with the emotional
challenges they face in the field? Can the reflection of emotionally challenging
moments tell us something important about the issues we are studying? I attempt to

1
I have anonymized personal names and the names of healthcare institutions.
2
This is the commercial name of the preparation carrying the active substance of buprenorphine.

T. Baltag (*)
Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities, Prague, Czech Republic

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 213

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_19
214 T. Baltag

answer these questions by reflecting on my own experience of my emotional trajec-

tory from the therapy room to the ODS. The reflection of my feelings throughout
this trajectory helped me to better understand not only some of the aspects of Sarah’s
life, but also opened up new perspectives on SMT and the limits of healthcare in
Prague, as it excludes some of the people who are supposed to benefit from it. The
disciplines of anthropology and psychotherapy have something to offer to each
other not only in terms of their theories but in practice as well. I argue that anthro-
pologists can learn from psychotherapists in acquiring a sensitivity toward their
own emotions and toward the motives underlying their work. This can enrich the
research process, its outputs, and the ways in which researchers handle the countless
challenges they encounter during this process.

Some Similarities Between Psychotherapy and Ethnography

Medicine is not solely a technical activity based on biological and biochemical knowledge;
it implies also a moral intervention grounded on values and expressing sensibilities, with
claims of altruism by professionals and expectations about the role the sick should play in
the management of their illness (…). (Fassin 2012, p. 16)

Suffering, hardship, illness, and people who find themselves in difficult life situa-
tions are often the focus of both psychological or medical anthropologists and psy-
chotherapists. The situations in which one finds oneself when practicing these
professions can challenge one’s emotions and relationships; these challenges are
often intensely discussed in the psychotherapy profession, but less so when one is
preparing for anthropological fieldwork.
During psychotherapeutic training and in various courses taken by future thera-
pists, one is prepared for emotional and other challenges.3 The study, over several
years, required for working with people and among people should prepare future
therapists not only to handle and recognize the emotionally trying relationships and
moments that arise in this profession, but should also inform the therapist about the
support system that they can rely on, and should rely on in practice. Support can
come from meeting with colleagues, continuous education, or the supervision of the
therapist’s work. Such systematic support in working with people should not only
serve the therapist as a buttress in their profession, but should also protect those
whom the therapist works with. If, during the course of their work with a client, the
therapist consults on the therapy process, there is a much smaller risk of various
types of omission or error. Such omissions or errors do not necessarily have to be
the result of the therapist willingly wanting to hurt the client, but may simply result

3
These courses focus on mental hygiene, stress management, how to work with various types of
difficult clients (e.g., how to recognize who is a difficult client and why), and working in environ-
ments that are considered especially mentally challenging (and understanding why a person would
want to work there).
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences of a Therapist… 215

from human nature, replete with nonreflected wishes, motives, and tendencies, to
which therapists themselves are susceptible.
Many anthropologists whom I have met deal with issues that psychotherapists
also often confront in their work: how to enforce the boundaries of a relationship
(What are the limits of our cooperation with our interlocutors?); how to separate
one’s professional life from one’s personal life; and how to cope with unpleasant
moments in the field, such as the sorrow and the injustice we may witness?4 In her
study of postdoctoral anthropology students, Reis points out that most anthropolo-
gists mention mental problems related to field research and the lack of opportunities
for them to share or discuss this distress (R. Reis, personal communication, June 11,
2015, Medical Anthropology Young Scholars Conference, Amsterdam).
While psychotherapists enter the workplace armed with self-knowledge (acquired
in their training and gleaned from the studies they have read) and with support in the
form of systematic supervision and continuous education, anthropologists embark
on their fieldwork equipped with a sensitivity toward social relationships, a respect
for cultural difference, and an openness toward the relativity of predominant social
concepts. This, at least, was my impression of these disciplines after finishing my
master studies of in both subjects and completing my psychotherapy training.
The anthropological perspective on (for example) social relations underlying the
development, prescription, or use of medicine is a perspective that is not so pro-
nounced in psychotherapy, but which therapists working with SMT patients could
profit from. This divergence, as well as the wish to see something of the lived reality
of those I spoke to in the comfort of the therapy room, stood at the root of my deci-
sion to examine substitution drugs and their users from a different perspective: I
decided to go back to my anthropology studies as a postgraduate student. As a psy-
chotherapist, there was a certain dimension of the Subutex lifestyle and of its users
that I could never get to know as closely as I wished. Persistent questions surround-
ing the practice of substitution treatment in Prague, and answers that never came to
light in the therapy room, eventually led me to return to anthropology, which I had
studied before studying psychology and undergoing psychotherapeutic training.
On another note, the similarities in working in both these professions with peo-
ple who confront difficult life conditions have led me to start reflecting more on how
I feel as an anthropologist in the field, and what I have dealt with since I found
myself alone on the ODS in the role of the anthropologist. Furthermore, I have won-
dered if reflecting on emotions in the field can be as beneficial as the reflection of
emotions in therapy.

4
There are also many positive aspects of both professions—meaningful moments, funny situa-
tions, nice relationships, new experiences, adventure, and the feeling of empowerment that one can
change something or help somebody who is in need, etc. But these moments are not the focus of
this chapter.
216 T. Baltag

Sarah

“There was some sort of fire last night at the homeless shelter,” said one of my col-
leagues during my first days working as a psychotherapist with SMT. “Several peo-
ple died, and I think Sarah could be one of them.” I had been at my office for only a
few days and was not used to these kinds of statements. I never had been in contact
with homeless people, and I had never thought that doing psychotherapy also
entailed dimensions such as homeless shelters and fires. A few days after this con-
versation, Sarah was in the waiting room of our office. “You have a client in the
waiting room,” my colleague said, “This is the girl we were worried about during
that fire at the shelter.” As an inexperienced psychotherapist, I was anxious before
each consultation, but this one was already marked by a specific air of death, home-
lessness, and fire. I welcomed Sarah to the office. She came because she wanted to
be readmitted to SMT, to get a prescription of Subutex that she could later pick up
at the pharmacy. Therapy was one of the conditions for entrance into SMT, and I
was to be her new therapist.
Sarah was open and talkative, very warm, and polite. She was 32 years old when
I met her. She had been a drug user since the age of 12, and had been using drugs
intravenously since she was 13. She had started with methamphetamine, but from
the age of 14, she combined speed with opiates—heroin. She was without a stable
income or home. Her three children were in the custody of her parents. She had no
contact with them. She evoked my sympathy, but also caused concern—she had
many health problems, her living conditions were bad, and she did not have anyone
who could protect her on the streets. We met once a week for 3 years. We talked
about her social situation, drug use, her feelings, her worries, her relations, her fam-
ily issues, or the difficulties related to living on the street, always at my office.

Subutex

Sarah had come primarily to get a prescription for the substitution drug Subutex.
Due to the relatively small amount of substitution centers in Prague, Sarah could not
really determine the conditions of her Subutex distribution, and so the threshold to
her treatment was high, full of rules and conditions that had necessarily to be met in
order for the substitutional drug to be administered.5
Subutex is a substitution opioid distributed in pill form. In the Czech Republic,
Subutex began to be distributed in healthcare facilities and medical and psychiatric
practices in 2001. Substitution should, at the right dose, reduce the desire to use
heroin and substitute for its use (Lintzeris et al. 2006). Subutex should thus help

5
The various institutions in Prague differ in their treatment regulations, which are, to a certain
extent, determined by the institution itself and/or by its employees. Legislation sets limits for the
treatment, as well as the licensing of institutions in a given area, as do various political aspects
(e.g., the willingness to finance certain treatments, while not providing funds to others).
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences of a Therapist… 217

prevent withdrawal symptoms caused by discontinuing the use of other opioids, for
the purpose of detoxification or as a long-term substitution for opioid addicts. Its
qualities are similar to heroin, just milder (pain relief, euphoria, sense of calm,
lower stress). Many users complain that they do not feel a high comparable to the
one delivered by heroin; they describe heroin as a substance that provides them with
the needed high, a feeling of complete relaxation that Subutex is unable to provide.
Among long-term users, intoxication is practically not observable at all. Subutex
has long-lasting effects, and hence, it can be taken just once a day. The popularity
of Subutex has increased in situations when the supply of heroin is very unstable, its
price is high, and its quality is less predictable. The logic is: better Subutex than
nothing. Sarah and many others argued that these were the main reasons to exchange
heroin for Subutex. In 2001, when Subutex entered the Czech market, it was pre-
scribed by regular doctors or by specialists in substitution centers. These prescrip-
tions then had to be picked up at a pharmacy. Soon, news surfaced about the first
Subutex available on the black market, as well as reports of its intravenous use.
Subutex is not fully covered by health insurance and is still difficult for many
opioid addicts to afford (about 50 Euro/prescription for 1 week6), especially for long-
term users without regular income, formal education, or work experience, or who are
homeless. Some opportunists, who “help” those who do not have enough money
purchase their pills, lie in wait in front of pharmacies: the price for such help is usu-
ally five tablets out of seven. The person who was prescribed the medicine, but does
not have the money to pick up the prescription, is thus left with only two tablets.
Within a few years, Subutex gained a bad reputation among public and health-
care professionals working with the general population (not only with drug addicts),
and became known as the “legal heroin” traded on the ODS, usually injected and
used by junkies. Therefore, regular physicians stopped prescribing it in order to
avoid a problematic clientele. Today, Subutex is available in specialized centers for
addicts, such as Gestalt. In these institutions, it is usually issued only under specific
conditions. Many clients have problems with the rules of the high-threshold treat-
ment that prevail in Prague. The SMT at Gestalt contains a pharmaceutical and a
psychosocial component, namely, counseling sessions with a psychologist, urine
tests, and meetings with other healthcare specialists (hepatologists, etc.). If clients
regularly breach the rules of the treatment, they can be expelled. It is not uncommon
that some clients move from one treatment center to another, until they eventually
end up at the ODS.
Sarah also had many difficulties remaining on the program at Gestalt. She often
missed her consultations or was evidently under the influence of some other drugs.
From time to time, she had no stable or safe place to sleep, and coming on time to
the scheduled consultation was an unachievable task for her. It was also obvious that
her limited income could not cover a sufficient dosage of Subutex. When she did not
have enough money for Subutex, she usually increased her dosage of benzodiaze-
pine or reached for alcohol.

6
One prescription contains seven tablets. This was the most common official dosage in Gestalt,
8 mg of buprenorphine/day. Therefore, clients usually came once a week for their prescription and
used the pills on a daily basis.
218 T. Baltag

Mutual Expectations at the Counseling Office

As a therapist of the SMT treatment, I often found myself in a difficult position,

stuck between a concern for the well-being of the client, and the need to both respect
the client’s free will and the stringent conditions of treatment. The rules are meant
to help prevent the distribution of the substance on the ODS and to expel clients who
take advantage of the treatment, using it only as a way to acquire Subutex for its
further paid distribution (although this is very hard to determine, since many users
participate in the ODS in various ways). In a sense, the rules should also serve as
motivation and contribute to the social, financial, and physical stabilization of the
client. The tension between enforcing the rules and respecting the individual needs
of a client brings about emotionally and ethically difficult situations, in which the
therapist, often supported by discussions with the whole team, must choose how
strictly they wish to enforce a given rule with a given client—a certain amount of
flexibility with the rules, especially in Gestalt, was expected. This negotiation of
rules also affected my relationship with Sarah.
It was not difficult for me to establish a relationship with Sarah. She was very
pleasant and communicative. She readily listened to what I had to say to her, and she
made plans for the following days and communicated the dreams and desires of
what she wanted to achieve in the future. Her main motivation for making changes
in her life was re-establishing contacts with her children and parents. I had sympa-
thy for her, and I think she knew it. My office served as a place where she did not
have to conceal her weaknesses or her sadness. During our cooperation, she renewed
contact with her parents, and for many weeks, she was on an upswing. She tried to
stabilize her dosage, did not use other addictive drugs, visited doctors to treat vari-
ous infections, and took action to find better accommodation. She was happy. I felt
happy with her. But these ups were soon followed by downs. Sarah got robbed, she
did not have enough money to purchase her medication (and was therefore using
other drugs), she was kicked out from a squat, and eventually she lost all of her
documents when she got drunk. During these times, she did not show up at our
appointments at all, and when she did, she looked troubled. She repetitively apolo-
gized and she cried a lot during these weeks.
Often when Sarah did not come, I was not only worried about her, but I was also
concerned about her future in the treatment. I had to issue her warnings that informed
her that she had breached the rules and was at risk of being expelled from the treat-
ment. These episodes continued to occur, and I felt that it was increasingly difficult
for me to deal with them and to accept them. Sarah probably felt the same way, since
she commented on this difficulty several times. Once, when I was waiting for her
and she, as she had many times before, did not appear, I realized that I was not only
worried, but I felt that I was beginning to get angry with her and to lose patience.
Sarah evoked many emotions not only in me but also in the rest of the Gestalt
team. The team was small, and everybody knew each other’s clients. The team
members shared their opinions weekly at meetings, and when a client’s situation
was becoming too complicated or confusing, time for supervision was arranged.
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences of a Therapist… 219

This gave us the opportunity to discuss the client with colleagues outside of our
institution.
Supervision is intended to protect the clients and help the counsellors reflect their
own feelings, thoughts, behavior, and general approach to the client. These oppor-
tunities to reflect more deeply on how one relates to a client, as well as to receive
insight from the perspective of another therapist, should help the therapist increase
the value they provide to their clients. Supervision often reveals unspoken inten-
tions or uncovers sources of emotions that may be the cause of feelings uncon-
sciously harbored toward the client. If such feelings are not reflected upon, they can
negatively affect the cooperation.
Supervisions helped me take the imaginary step outside of the therapist–patient
relationship, to calm my emotions, and reflect on my feelings from a professional-
ized distance. Through this process, I realized that my worry about Sarah was pro-
voked by a tendency to protect her. I had to remind myself that Sarah had her own
intentions that did not have to overlap with my wishes and expectations for her. My
unfulfilled desire to help her caused frustration every time she “failed” in my eyes.
Due to these unfulfilled wishes, I also had the tendency to be angry with her, which
was surely not the emotion that I consciously wanted to feel toward her. During my
supervision sessions, we also toyed with the hypothesis that Sarah probably under-
stood my ambitions and wishes and did not want to disappoint me, and so could be
trying to fulfill them. Until I addressed these affective dynamics in our sessions, the
situation could allow Sara to feel guilt or discomfort, which would be counterpro-
ductive to our cooperation.
Supervision always brought me relief. It explored the themes and emotions that
were already present in the relationship, but were hidden from me. These could
often unconsciously influence the relationship and turn it into unwelcome or unin-
tended directions. I gained the courage to reflect on our relationship more openly,
and my unspoken ideas were adjusted in later meetings with her. I utilized much of
what I discovered during my supervision sessions in my consultations with Sarah,
which advanced our cooperation—a fact that even she positively evaluated many
times.
Although Sarah had difficulties adhering to some of the rules of the treatment,
we never expelled her from it, since there was no other institution that could provide
her the medicine she needed, and we believed that our work was still beneficial for
her. After 3 years of cooperation and our mutual efforts, Sarah died a sudden death
from multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (total organ failure).

From the Therapy Room to the Open Drug Scene

During my last year in Gestalt and more than 1 year after Sarah’s death, I decided
to look at Subutex and its users from an ethnographic perspective. One of the many
reasons for this decision was my increasing interest in the position in which drug
addicts in Prague find themselves in, located somewhere between the healthcare
220 T. Baltag

system and the ODS. Another reason was the ever-present question of whether peo-
ple undergoing Subutex treatments still gained more than they lost.
Moving to another site of research was not logistically complicated. I merely
needed to quit my job, and to take the metro just a few stations further. Then, just as
many of the clients and Subutex products did, I ventured out beyond the confines of
institutions, onto the ODS, to the places where Subutex is distributed and is used
alongside methamphetamine or heroin.
I already knew about these locations through stories I had heard from my clients,
from colleagues at other institutions, and from newspaper articles. On the ODS,
there are usually long-term users who inject the drugs and have to deal with com-
plex webs of social, health, and financial problems and challenges. The Prague drug
scene is not a ghettoized jungle on the outskirts of town; rather, it encompasses
locations primarily in the center of town, where users conglomerate to a greater
degree. They do not stay for long periods of time, but flow through numerous sites
in great numbers throughout the day. Addictive substances are used more openly,
and they are also sold and purchased there. This is all accompanied by the needle
exchange service and its social workers.

From Remorse to Anger: The Anthropologist’s Emotions

Although I had no one in this field with whom I could regularly discuss my emo-
tions, I tried to continue the practice of doing so while researching on the ODS, just
as I did in the previous years as a therapist, when I had the advantage of undergoing
supervision if needed. From the onset of fieldwork, I felt a great deal of freedom,
probably resulting from the fact that I was free from the active and direct interven-
tion and from the rules of the medical system, which often created ethical dilem-
mas.7 But I was also slightly shocked by the roughness of this place, by the
concentration of physically afflicted people, or by the high number of drug addicted
persons in one place. It is one thing to see a client in the waiting room, and quite
another to see, all at once, dozens of users marred by 30 years of drug use, exchang-
ing needles near the dirty bushes of an unattractive nook in the public spaces of
Prague.
In the beginning, I felt a certain distance from the people that were flitting about,
shouting, and communicating in ways I was not accustomed to. Neither did I know
their intimate life stories, or what lay behind their suffering. This initial distance
helped me to remove myself from the emotionally challenging stories of the Subutex
users, from their personal dispositions and indispositions. Social relationships and
structural variables (such as a lack of Subutex and its high price) had come to the
fore. I was observing the sphere of their day-to-day lives, their behavior, and its

7
I wondered whether those patients expelled from the SMT treatment, and who thus find them-
selves on the ODS once again, felt the same way.
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences of a Therapist… 221

structural causes. There was no time to discuss the nuances of subjective experi-
ences or to plan, paper and pencil in hand, the lowering of their Subutex dosage,
milligram by milligram. This was a world that was rough and hectic, yet which, just
as in any other setting, still offered room for humor, love, and gossip.
Witnessing people desperately looking for some Subutex, seeing others stalk-
ing a tough guy carrying a box of Subutex, or people rushing to inject the drug in
the dirtiness and stench of the place, all made an impression on me. An image of
a 22-year-old girl named Helena stood out. I met Helena during the summer at one
of the most frequented places on the ODS. I was introduced to her by one of the
needle exchange workers. She was talkative and open. She used Subutex along
with methamphetamine, which is one of the most common combinations. During
our first meeting, she described how she had been raped some days earlier during
her long quest to find some Subutex: “On the last day, I still could not find any-
body who would sell me some Subutex. Later at night, I met some boys that told
me they have some Subutex. I was already desperate and the withdrawal symp-
toms were coming on, so I followed them to the car. There, it happened…” Then,
she rolled up her pants and showed me her bloody legs, a sight from which I had
to divert my eyes.
What I saw had left a strong emotional impact on me. Since that time, and more
often than I would expect, Sarah came to mind. Not only was I recalling her repeat-
edly, I was also thinking about the inevitability of her death. This time, however, not
so much by questioning my possible failure as a therapist, but from the perspective
of the circumstances under which substance users search for their medicine. This
was the main issue that I encountered on the ODS—subjecting all of one’s time to
chasing a medicine that there is constantly too little of, and whose price is extremely
high for most users. Suddenly, I stopped asking myself “why did Sarah miss so
many of her consultations?” Rather, I wondered, “how is it possible that Sarah was
able under such conditions to come to our appointments so many times, and usually
on time at that?”
What was new for me on site in the ODS was the intense and relentless feelings
of frustration and injustice. This sense of injustice emerged from the (un)availability
of treatment and medication. Not everybody on the ODS wanted to be a client of an
institution such as Gestalt, or to get the medicine from a medical institution, but
there were many Subutex users for whom this possibility was excluded because they
were not able to manage it due to structural and institutional obstructions, even if
they wanted to. They included especially those with mental-health problems, those
who were not able to stop using other addictive substances, or those without valid
documents (an ID or an insurance card). Reflecting on my own experiences of anger
and injustice led me to critically question a healthcare system that excludes p­ recisely
those persons who are supposed to benefit from it. I often contemplated the fact that
almost no one on the ODS would pass the initial screening for most of the substitu-
tion treatments in Prague, coercing them to wander through the whole city for hours
on end or to steal in order to find and pay for their medicine.
222 T. Baltag

Medical Addiction and Addiction on the Streets

Sarah’s and many other opioid addicts’ problem was not the Subutex itself, but its
unavailability—the unavailability for those who are not able to fit into the narrow
category of “eligible” patients, or for those who are not able to follow the stringent
rules of a substitution treatment. The official healthcare concept (World Health
Organization 2016) of medical addiction is based on a logic that is far from able to
provide appropriate interventions for the reality that I encountered on the so-called
open drug scene. The official definition of addiction tells us that an addicted indi-
vidual gives a higher priority to drug use than to other activities and obligations
(ibid.). However, I witnessed something else. Subutex users did not put themselves
at high health risks, in the sense of the official concept, as the result of substance
abuse. On the contrary, their risky behavior was often caused by the unavailability
of the substance, by a lack of finances for its procurement, or by circumstances that
prevented regular intake and risk-free application (using a clean needle or dissolv-
ing it under the tongue). These circumstances exposed them to higher risk and deep-
ened their health deficiencies. The lack of the medicine caused a situation in which
users had no time to do anything but to search for it, left no time for them to take
care of other significant issues in their life. Let me put this into comparative per-
spective: who would let a diabetic take their insulin using a needle found on the
ground in the bushes near the main train station? How many diabetics would accept
being sent to compulsory consultations with a psychologist? And mainly—what
would diabetics undertake to get their dose of acutely needed medicine? Perhaps, in
such extreme situations, their behavior could be similar to the behavior of someone
on Subutex.
“Addiction” is a concept that provides a medical explanation for repeated and
long-term abuse that has a detrimental effect on the health of a person. The illness
caused by addiction has cognitive, moral, and institutional aspects (Conrad and
Schneider 1992). Historically, branding addicts as ill changes their moral status as
social pariahs. Instead of stigmatizing their behavior, their illness should legitimize
their access to medicine, whether or not the medicine carries a bad reputation. Yet,
those who are in need of Subutex must play by different rules than most other
patients, even within the healthcare system, where viewing a person through the
prism of illness should guarantee their access to medicine according to humanistic
ethical codes.

Conclusion

Did Sarah have to die? I tried to explore this question by reflecting on my unre-
solved relationship with her, full of emotionally challenging moments and situa-
tions. As a psychotherapist, examining my relationship with her was part of my
professional curriculum. By reflecting on my feelings with my working team, I
From Therapy to Fieldwork: Reflecting the Experiences of a Therapist… 223

could better understand why I felt what I felt toward her, and what was going on in
our relationship in the therapeutic setting. As an effect of this reflection, I tried to
ease off from my own demands and ambitions and to better respect Sarah’s abilities
and limits. I tried to manage my tendency to feel frustrated, and thus also angry, at
her when she did not fulfill my unacknowledged wishes.
This reflection among the working team cultivated a sensitivity to my feelings
that brought many new aspects to our cooperation and opened up many topics that I
would have otherwise overlooked or that I was afraid to confront. Regular supervi-
sion sessions were also a form of support for my work as a psychotherapist. The
purpose of supervision and reflection among team members was to be aware of our
own projections and to thus create a more productive relationship between the thera-
pist and the client. However, despite this effort to improve my understanding, a
fundamental part of Sarah’s everyday life, as well as of the everyday lives of other
Subutex users outside of the walls of institutions, still escaped me. This was one of
the many reasons why I ventured onto the ODS as an anthropologist to find answers
to some of my unanswered questions, still greatly affected by Sarah’s death after
3 years of mutual work.
Being familiar with this kind of self-reflection proved to be beneficial for my
ethnographic fieldwork. As an anthropologist, free from having to maintain my
focus on the dynamics of our relationship, on the inner dynamics of a client, and
within the confines of the therapy room, I could witness opioid addiction from a
different perspective. Yet, it was the examination of emotions that helped me under-
stand, as an anthropologist, what was going on on the ODS. Reflecting upon my
anger and feelings of injustice led me to critically evaluate the care provided to
Subutex users, and also changed the perspective from which I viewed my relation-
ship with Sarah. Since experiencing the ODS, I no longer asked myself why she had
“failed” so many times; on the contrary, I asked myself how it was even possible
that she could cooperate so well for a period of 3 years when considering the
extremely difficult conditions of life on the ODS.
Throughout my entire period of fieldwork on the ODS, I had to deal with the
strong feelings that not only accompanied my data but which also had an impact on
any attempt to get closer to the field. The events that I could observe there again
revived my memories of Sarah, and after reflecting on these feelings, I now saw her
story from a broader angle. There were many other Sarahs that revealed their fates
to me. I experienced the anger that was caused by a sense of injustice observable on
the ODS, an injustice deriving from the unavailability of medicine for these sick
people. I witnessed the vulnerability of those who are on Subutex, but do not have
direct access to this medicine. I witnessed their despair and the real price of Subutex
in the form of amputated limbs, violence, or prostitution. I was most intensely frus-
trated at the moment I realized that, from a medical perspective, the persons I had
encountered should in fact have free access to their medicine.
The work of a therapist is generally considered to be emotionally taxing. This is
one of the reasons why the experiences of a therapist are subject to greater attention.
The greater discussion of such issues forces us to deal to a greater degree with how
we feel after work or what we experience while working. A therapist’s education
224 T. Baltag

forces them to reflect why they pose the questions they are posing and allows them
to venture into the difficult places and relationships that other people try to avoid.
Similar discussions might also be beneficial for anthropologists, whose work is
often just as emotionally taxing as a psychotherapist’s.
The disciplines of anthropology and psychotherapy have something to offer to
one another in theory and in practice. I argue that not only can anthropologists learn
from psychotherapists when preparing for fieldwork, but also in acquiring a sensi-
tivity toward their own emotions and motives. Without the assistance and support of
someone outside of the situation, such reflection might be much more difficult,
because fieldwork and ethnography are characterized by the oscillation between
immersion into the field and a critical distance to “the data” at the same time.

References

Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. (1992). Deviance and medicalization: From badness to sickness.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Fassin, D. (2012). Moral anthropology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lintzeris, N., et al. (2006). Methodology for the randomized injecting opioid treatment trial
(RIOTT): Evaluating injectable methadone and injectable heroin treatment versus optimized
oral methadone treatment in the UK. Harm Reduction Journal, 3(1), 28. https://doi.org/10.
1186/1477-7517-3-28
World Health Organization. (2016). International classification of diseases 10. Retrieved
September 11, 2017, from http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/
 Part V
Failing and Attuning in the Field
Failing and Attuning in the Field:
Introduction

Dominik Mattes and Samia Dinkelaker

We can only fail if we strive to do. (Takaragawa and Howe 2017)

Perhaps, more than any other method in social science, conducting fieldwork in
social anthropology is prone to failure. Throughout the entire process of producing
anthropological “knowledge,” it seems, failure lurks just around the corner. Ethical
clearance may be hard to obtain. The research topic and locality may reveal them-
selves to be unproductive. Establishing access, trust, and rapport may pose unfore-
seen challenges (Coffey 1999). Carefully designed research methods may be
difficult to implement and might not yield the desired results (O’Brien 2010). The
physical, mental, and emotional demands placed on the ethnographer may be unset-
tling, if not overwhelming (Stodulka et al. 2018). Ethical questions of equality, fair-
ness, and reciprocity may be left without satisfactory answers. The amount of data
acquired may not suffice or may surpass any manageable measure. Interpreting and
lending relevance to ethnographic data may turn out to be a tedious task unrewarded
by success. The vividness of the ethnographic experience may be lost when writing
up (see Hovland 2007; Papageorgiou 2007). And the impact of the study, once all
these hurdles have been overcome, may be marginal or nonexistent.
It is reasonable to assume that any anthropologist working in the field, and not
just the novices among them, will at one point or another face failure in at least one
sense of the term: that is, as an “omission of occurrence of performance,” a “failing
to perform a duty or expected action,” a “state of inability to perform a normal func-
tion,” an “abrupt cessation of normal functioning,” a “fracturing or giving way

D. Mattes
Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1171) Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin,
Berlin, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Dinkelaker (*)
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University,
Osnabrück, Germany

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 227

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_20
228 D. Mattes and S. Dinkelaker

under stress,” and, in very general terms, as a “lack of success” (www.merriam-

webster.com). Which ethnographer, one wonders, would not be able to offer a story
of failure, an incident or phase of unmet expectations, a narrative of how people,
things, relations, and her or himself “misbehaved,” broke down, or went in a wrong
direction? Experiencing such disruptions, slippages, and deficiencies may provoke
disappointment, anxiety, shame, depression, guilt, frustration, and a wide range of
other profound emotional reactions in the researcher (see Pollard 2009).
Notwithstanding the fact that such emotions are often glossed over in scientific
publications, we argue that they are highly relevant to the anthropological endeavor,
inasmuch as they significantly shape how anthropologists subsequently engage with
people, objects, and places in the field, how they interpret their findings, and which
style of written (and other forms of) representation they opt for. In other words,
attending to and transparently reflecting on failures during (and after) fieldwork,
along with their concomitant emotional disturbances, is of vital epistemological
significance. In this sense, we agree with what Gillian Goslinga and Gelya Frank
propose in their foreword to the edited volume The Shadow Side of Fieldwork
(McLean and Leibing 2007):
The willingness of [anthropologists] to describe moments of perceived failure or disso-
nance, or of intense identification and gut reaction, or of uncomfortable feedback or silence
from their subjects, enables them to engage with something beyond the representational
veneer of the ‘successful’ ethnography”. (Goslinga and Frank 2007, p. xvii)

In fact, we would argue that it is precisely these additional efforts of self-­

reflection that determine what we would conceive of as a successful ethnography.
For failure does not exhaust itself in rupture, collapse, and defeat. Rather, it desig-
nates the awkward moment preceding a new start, before one reorients oneself,
reappraises a situation, and recalibrates one’s sensibilities. In other words, “failure
is inevitably productive” (Carroll et al. 2017; see also Okely 2009). In this sense,
anthropologists’ emotionally charged experiences of failure always have to be
thought of together with the researcher’s subsequent retuning of their self-­
understanding, adapting their appraisals of other people’s behaviors, their engage-
ment in social relations and with material-spatial environments, their moral
positions, and their methodological approaches.
Sincerely occupying oneself with and providing analytical room for one’s own
perceived failures in fieldwork—both in situ and retrospect—may be a challenging,
even painful exercise (see chapter “Attuning Engagement: Methodological and
Affective Dimensions of a Failed Collaborative Research Project in Timor-Leste”,
this volume). Yet, as the papers assembled in this section illustrate, it is highly
rewarding in that it opens up new avenues, both for researchers and their readers, to
a more nuanced understanding of the analytical—and affective—trajectory “of
transforming fieldwork—with all its complexity and indeterminacy—into a text”
(Delamont et al. 2000, p. 94), a specific fragment of scientific knowledge. It is our
hope that candid reflections of this sort will help students and young scholars in
anthropology gain a sense of how their aspirations concerning fieldwork may be
thwarted, but also of how instances of struggle can be overcome and turned into
Failing and Attuning in the Field: Introduction 229

moments of additional insight. Ultimately, we wish that this will enhance their
(self-)confidence prior to and during the experience1 of ethnographic research, not-
withstanding the lacunae that any fieldwork preparation will necessarily entail. For
“mistakes are made, whatever the prior experience of the anthropologist, precisely
because the relevant and detailed contexts cannot be predicted, because they are part
of the emergent discoveries” (Okely 2012, p. 7). More than that, if any anthropo-
logical fieldwork went strictly to plan, it would actually have to be considered a
failure.
The fieldwork experiences portrayed in the three contributions of this section
cover accounts of a collaborative research project with East Timorese university
students and young graduates on the topic of citizenship, of a study on the identity
constructions of street-associated youth in Indonesia, and of the process of studying
and learning the Indonesian martial arts Pencak Silat in Central and West Java,
Indonesia.2 Moments of failure, when “things behave unexpectedly” (Carroll et al.
2017, p. 15), caught the authors off guard. Sara ten Brinke found that the relation-
ships with her research partners in East Timor were not as nonhierarchical as she
had conceptualized in her collaborative research design. Paul Kellner was not pre-
pared for the fact that the challenges of his fieldwork would not lie in his engage-
ment with the street-associated youth who participated in his research, but in the
anxieties that he experienced in the neighborhood where he and his wife resided
during his fieldwork. Patrick Keilbart had not anticipated the ethical dilemmas sur-
rounding the frictions that arose from his approach of studying Pencak Silat as an
apprentice in different, competing schools, whose varying styles he endeavored to
compare.
The authors describe feelings of disappointment, disillusionment, sadness,
bewilderment, anxiety, self-consciousness, worry, reticence, nervousness, discom-
fort, frustration, guilt, and shame. This spectrum of “negative feelings” could be
read as the “moral underpinning that makes failure such a horrible affront to the
ego” (ibid., p. 14) and as the emotional undertone to the inability to perform. Finding
themselves in “interstices of breakage” (ibid., p. 2) between what they had expected
and their present realities, the authors experienced impasses, discouragement, and
inhibition. Ten Brinke reflects on the collapse of the research group she was initially
committed to conducting her collaborative research with. Kellner describes how the
sense of discomfort in his neighborhood affected his fieldwork and impeded his
capacity to engage attentively with research participants. Keilbart gives an account

1
We deliberately do not use the term “conduct” here because, as Judith Okely aptly notes, “it
implies that fieldwork is managed and pre-directed” (Okely 2012, p. 5), and thus implicitly pre-
cludes the idea of methodological, personal, and cognitive openness, spontaneity, and flexibility or,
put more abstractly, a general susceptibility to the unexpected that is central to the anthropological
enterprise.
2
Given the above-mentioned inevitability of failure in anthropological fieldwork, the articles col-
lected in this section are not the only ones to depict moments of (experienced) failure (see chapter
“Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi”, this volume). However, it is in this section where
we explicitly invite the readers to look at fieldwork experience from the viewpoint of the produc-
tivity of failure in fieldwork.
230 D. Mattes and S. Dinkelaker

of the feelings of failure that accompanied the realization that he could not fulfill his
mission as an international “ambassador” of Pencak Silat. The exclusiveness of
Pencak Silat apprenticeship seemed to make it impossible to publicly represent his
Pencak Silat schools as a foreigner and thus “give something back” to his teachers.
Moreover, he risked losing his teachers’ trust. Ten Brinke made the emotional effort
of accepting that her fieldwork involved power imbalances, notwithstanding her
efforts to dismantle and overcome them. Kellner sought support from friends and a
mentor in trying to regain a sense of (self-)security. Keilbart made an intellectual
effort and reexamined his own understanding of reciprocity in Pencak Silat
apprenticeship.
The authors provide valuable reflections regarding methodological questions,
research ethics, and coping in the field. Ten Brinke’s contribution thoroughly
explores the problem of how to approach engaged and collaborative research proj-
ects in a way that is more sensitive to hierarchies in the field. Keilbart highlights the
fact that the embodied knowledge he acquired as a Pencak Silat apprentice proved
an effective method in navigating the challenges of his fieldwork. And Kellner
addresses the importance of self-care through supervision and resorting to spaces
that give feelings of security. While this should not replace other forms of support
such as mentorship by postfieldwork PhD students (see Pollard 2009), Kellner’s
proposition might be a helpful resource for researchers in managing tensions, stress,
or self-doubt. Moreover, Keilbart’s reflections on how he negotiated the expecta-
tions that he encountered as a martial arts apprentice might stimulate other ethnog-
raphers who face ethical questions related to reciprocity and responsibility (see the
section “Reciprocity in Research Relationships,” this volume).
In addition to the importance of reflecting upon the process of fieldwork, we
particularly wish to highlight the productivity of failure with respect to deepening
the authors’ understanding of their research topics. Addressing their emotional
experiences has illuminated the authors’ engagements with their respective subjects
of research. By contemplating her frustrations and the dissolution of her collabora-
tive research group, ten Brinke gained a more profound understanding of what “par-
ticipation” means to young Timorese—not only in the context of participating in
collaborative research projects but also in the sense of political participation. We
agree with Kellner when he suggests that the rich description of his own anxiety and
his efforts to regain a sense of comfort and security in the spatial environment could
be a fruitful point of departure for further inquiry into space-related strategies of
comfort-making that are practiced by the street-associated youth who participated
in his fieldwork. In outlining how he addressed the quandaries he faced upon real-
izing that he could not fulfill his teachers’ expectations, Keilbart underlines his epis-
temological process of gaining deeper insights into the shared values of different
Pencak Silat schools.
Each of these contributions demonstrates the productivity of (reflecting on) fail-
ures in fieldwork and acts as an invitation to make use of “failure” as a heuristic tool.
When approaching their oftentimes messy research material, ethnographers might
not only profit from the question, “What did I find out?” but also from the questions,
“When did I fail, how did I cope, and what did this do to my research?”
Failing and Attuning in the Field: Introduction 231

References

Carroll, T., Jeevendrampillai, D., & Parkhurst, A. (2017). Introduction: Towards a general theory
of failure. In T. Carroll, D. Jeevendrampillai, A. Parkhurst, & J. Shackelford (Eds.), The mate-
rial culture of failure: When things do wrong (pp. 1–20). London: Bloomsbury.
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How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial
Arts Master): Critical Reflections
on Participation and Apprenticeship
in Indonesian Pencak Silat Schools

Patrick Keilbart

Introduction: From “Karate Kid” to “Oriental Monk”

In 2010, the Chinese-American martial arts film The Karate Kid (Columbia Pictures)
was released (Weintraub, 2010). The plot of the movie closely follows the story
written by Robert M. Kamen for the original 1984 film of the same name. In both
films, a newly arrived boy gets into trouble in his neighborhood, but he manages to
solve his problems with the help of an old and wise master who teaches him martial
arts. Yet, unlike the original, the remake is set in China and features Kung Fu instead
of Karate. Despite its misleading title, the remake won a number of awards and
topped the US box office, grossing $359 million worldwide.1
Images and discourses circulating in the global media influence the general per-
ception of martial arts in their countries of origin and abroad. Yet, such romantic or
symbolic representations mostly fail to correspond to the profound implications of
martial arts education, both for the student or apprentice and for the master.
Retracing the construction of martial arts as means of self-actualization and self-­
improvement, Berg and Prohl (2014) analyze “Shaolin Kung Fu” in relation to the
Shaolin Temple in Germany. According to Berg and Prohl, the Shaolin Monk comes
to stand for the Asian martial artist par excellence—the “Oriental Monk” (Iwamura,
2011)—a certain stock figure of popular culture. Different cultural influences con-
verge in the discursive formation of the Oriental Monk, whose general features—
extraordinary physical abilities, spiritual commitment, calm demeanor, Asian face,
and manner of dress—have been absorbed by popular consciousness through mediated

1
http://www.boxofficemojo.com (accessed September 9, 2016).

P. Keilbart (*)
Comparative Development and Cultural Studies – Southeast Asia, University of Passau,
Passau, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 233

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_21
234 P. Keilbart

culture. The practitioners of Shaolin Kung Fu in Germany follow the living example
of the Shaolin/Oriental Monk and apply the “technologies of the self” provided in
martial arts training, accepting its inherent promise of self-actualization or self-
improvement: “The martial arts myth or promise is precisely this: through nothing
more than physical discipline, dedication, devotion, and diligent training, you too
can [come] closer to the invincible ideal depicted in these films and programs [i.e.,
martial arts movies and series]” (Bowman, 2012, p. 5, as cited in Berg & Prohl,
2014, p. 6).
Reflecting on my personal and professional interest in martial arts, much of it
stems from my own affection with the figure of the Oriental Monk and the “martial
arts promise.” As a schoolboy, movie and television series of the 1970s and 1980s,
such as Kung Fu (Thorpe, 1972–1975) or (Weintraub, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1994)
fascinated me. I could identify myself with the main character, the “Karate Kid”
Daniel, who moves to California and gets bullied by other students at his new school
there. When the Japanese house caretaker, Mr. Miyagi, initiates him into self-
defense techniques and the philosophical foundations of Karate, Daniel can hold his
ground against his bullies. Despite similar experiences during my early school days,
I never joined the local Karate club in my hometown. (Instead, I joined the local
soccer team, tried to integrate, and adapt myself.) Only on the occasion of carnival,
when boys usually dressed as cowboys or knights, did I act out my fantasy as the
Karate Kid.
I started to practice martial arts about a decade later, around the same time that I
began my studies at university. What drew me then to martial arts was not practical
self-defense, but their athletic, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects—the martial arts
promise of self-improvement. Again, I did not join a local martial arts school, of
which there would have been a great variety. Instead, I learned Kung Fu from a
master who had come to Germany from Bagdad, as a political refugee who had been
persecuted by the regime of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. So for me, the Oriental
Monk manifested as a somehow both Middle Eastern and Far Eastern character at
the same time. Being his only student at that time, my apprenticeship was a very
personal and intense experience. Besides physical and organizational discipline,
cultural antagonisms or contradictions between my sociocultural background and
the values and ideals (of honor and masculinity) conveyed through martial arts
training were most challenging. Yet, the masterly self-control of my teacher, that is,
his body control and control over himself, in my view provided a perfect role model
and example of an Oriental Monk. He implicitly and explicitly extended to me the
martial arts promise of achieving that same level of self-control, under the premise
of carefully following his instructions and training diligently.
At university, I majored in cultural studies with a focus on Southeast Asia, par-
ticularly Indonesia. It turned out that the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat repre-
sented a rewarding field of research. In Indonesia, Pencak Silat schools represent
institutions of social knowledge communication for a large part of the population.
Reasonable estimates run into the tens of millions of practitioners in Indonesia. The
importance of Pencak Silat schools is reflected clearly in the figure of the guru, the
master of a school (perguruan). School leaders are “usually national figures in
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 235

r­itual, religious, political, and economic domains, and they are often practitioners
themselves” (De Grave, 2014, p. 48).
Ultimately, my personal and professional, anthropological interests in martial
arts were mutually beneficial. Learning about Indonesian martial arts and culture
helped me reflect on my personal, intense experiences with a master personifying
the Oriental Monk. Linking personal interest in martial arts with academic interest,
I was able to write my Diploma dissertation on Pencak Silat and religious noncon-
formity in Java. I am currently writing a doctoral dissertation on Pencak Silat, medi-
atization and media practices in Indonesia.2 The dissertation is based on a total of
24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over a period of 10 years (between
2006 and 2016).3 This chapter provides critical reflections on my fieldwork, on
observant participation and apprenticeship in Indonesian Pencak Silat schools.
Especially, the relationship between guru and student, the obligations and chal-
lenges of being a researcher and apprentice at the same time, are illustrated. The
focus of this chapter is on embodied participation and apprenticeship as research
methods, a perspective that is necessary to understand processes of mediatization in
martial arts and body cultures in general. A notion of martial arts as embodied
knowledge (Farrer & Whalenbridge, 2011) sets embodiment as the “existential con-
dition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experi-
ence” (Csordas, 1999, p. 143). Content and capacity of the body as a medium are
developed and changed in Pencak Silat, especially in connection with the use of new
media technologies. The construction of Pencak Silat, the guru as Oriental Monk,
and the researcher as apprentice can be retraced both in immediate performance and
in media representations. In this study, I illustrate the specific concept of embodied
knowledge in Pencak Silat. It is based on situated, relational, and transformative
learning, and results in particular bodily and mental states. The study also takes into
account the related knowledge management in Pencak Silat, which is characterized
by exclusivity, competitive thinking, and a sense of mission. Based on this, the obli-
gations, emotional predicaments, and reciprocity issues that arose from embodied,
spiritual, and cultural apprenticeship in various Pencak Silat schools are described.
As will be shown, these predicaments arose not only from bodily experience but
also from a comparative research design (which was problematic due to the schools’
demands for exclusive membership). Despite the emotional challenges I faced due
to the comparative analysis of different Pencak Silat schools, this approach revealed
shared values in martial arts education and apprenticeship.

2
Martial Arts, Mediation, and Mediatization. Pencak Silat and (dis-)embodied Media Practices in
Indonesia (University of Cologne; Working title).
3
In 2006, I joined a guided excursion to Eastern Indonesia and made contacts with Pencak Silat
practitioners there (and also in Jakarta). In 2008, I was accepted to the scholarship program
‘Darmasiswa’ of the Indonesian government. Eight months of studies in Bandung, West Java,
between September 2008 and April 2009, resulted in my Diploma dissertation. In 2014, I received
a 1-year scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst, DAAD) for my PhD research in Yogyakarta. In 2016, another 5-week stay in
Yogyakarta was funded by the department of South Asian and Southeast Asian Studies at the
University of Cologne, allowing me to conclude my PhD research.
236 P. Keilbart

 pproaching the “Oriental Monk” in Indonesia: Becoming

A
a Pencak Silat Apprentice

My first encounter with Pencak Silat and “Inner Power” was a video I had been
shown in the Jakarta headquarters of the prominent national Pencak Silat school
Merpati Putih (indon., White Dove). It was September 2006, the Muslim fasting
month of Ramadan, so I had no chance to join training or watch a live performance.
Membership in Merpati Putih is independent of religious affiliation, but during
Ramadan, physically strenuous performances are avoided to ensure the well-being
of fasting members. For me, this was disappointing. I had been practicing martial
arts in Germany for several years, and I was eager to experience the Indonesian
fighting art, to get my first lesson in Pencak Silat. Instead, the management team of
Merpati Putih (MP) presented me with their demo-DVD. It showed practitioners
breaking concrete blocks and metal bars with their bare hands, driving a motorbike
through an obstacle course or recognizing different colors of cloth with their eyes
blindfolded. My disappointment quickly changed to excitement. The martial arts I
had trained in before concentrated on self-defense and sport competition, not on
spirituality and the Inner Power with which the MP management explained the
extraordinary skills displayed in their demo-DVD. I also became excited from a
scientific perspective, because the explanations given were based on metabolic pro-
cesses of regeneration and clearly emphasized distance toward mystical beliefs;
they implied a very rationalist approach to spirituality. I had the impression that my
Indonesian hosts were somehow able to read my mind, because—despite all excite-
ment—I felt that the rational and intellectual dimensions of my own “belief system”
made me doubt the exceptional powers shown in the video. After watching the
DVD, the founder and grandmaster of Merpati Putih, Poerwoto Hadi Poernomo
(Mas Poeng4), talked to me about its content and asked me about my impressions,
my intentions, and about my personal background. I addressed my doubts, but
assured him of my enthusiasm and expressed serious interest in learning at MP. At
the end of our conversation, Mas Poeng held out the prospect of training during my
next visit to Indonesia, with the goal of qualifying me to open the first Merpati Putih
branch in Germany. His offer took me by surprise, but I felt honored and returned
home with a new personal as well as professional objective.
Two years later, in September 2008, I joined the Indonesian government’s
“Darmasiswa” scholarship program and was sent to study in Bandung (West Java).
At the partner university, the High Conservatory for Indonesian Arts (Sekolah Tinggi
Seni Indonesia, or STSI), I joined mandatory Pencak Silat classes in the dance
department and as extracurricular training. I also joined Merpati Putih at the local
Universitas Padjadjaran (UNPAD), where I eventually started practicing the ­control

4
‘Mas’ (sir, brother) is the Javanese form of address used for males without a higher status, but in
Merpati Putih also teachers and masters are addressed with ‘Mas’ and the founding father is com-
monly known by ‘Mas Poeng.’ This emphasizes the equality of all members and the overcoming
of old hierarchic structures (see also below).
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 237

of my Inner Power. The regular MP training sessions (two times a week) included a
set of breathing techniques which aimed at influencing physiological processes
within the practitioner’s body. Together with hardening and conditioning certain
body parts, these breathing techniques were employed for breaking hard objects
(patahan benda keras). Reflecting on my first personal experience of expressing
Inner Power, I wrote in my field diary:
Yesterday, after only one month of latihan (training), my pelatih (trainer) made me try to
break a concrete block (60 × 20 × 10 cm) with a vertical blow of the edge of the hand. I
performed the breathing techniques and tried to concentrate my Inner Power in my hand.
Again, my rationality and skepticism made me doubt the success of this undertaking; I was
afraid I’d rather break my hand than that my hand would break the concrete block. However,
when the performance of the breathing techniques generated a warm, tickling sensation in
my hand, I summoned up the courage to complete the task and actually broke the concrete
block to pieces. Beyond that, my hand remained uninjured and after performing certain
breathing techniques again, I didn’t feel any pain at all. (Field note November 16, 2008).

Of course, my aim here is not to promote Merpati Putih or convince the reader
of the effectiveness of Inner Power. One of the points I like to make is that, for me
at least, seeing was not believing.5 Watching the extraordinary powers displayed in
the MP demo-video made me doubt their authenticity, their realness. Experiencing
the effectiveness of MP breathing and Inner Power myself did not completely elimi-
nate all my doubts and make me a “believer” right away, but it made me question
my doubts, trace my impressions and perceptions, and reflect on my comprehen-
sion. Closely related to this is another associated phenomenon, namely the interme-
diate position of Inner Power in Pencak Silat, hovering between rational, scientific
explanation, and religious practice or belief. After a few months of latihan MP, one
of the trainers, who had also become a friend of mine, gave me a private lesson and
introduced me to ilmu getaran (knowledge of vibration) or “Vibra Vision”:
After I had performed some of the breathing techniques, Danil blindfolded me with my MP
belt and then asked me to try and feel different objects he placed on the ground in front of
me. He explained to me that all objects, and living beings as well, emit certain electromag-
netic vibration which humans could learn to sense, and ultimately see without using their
eyes. My efforts to sense the objects in front of me were, unfortunately, not very successful.
Danil asked me to carry out some of the breathing techniques again; when I had finished
and was about to try again, he said, “This time, try to let go and give yourself to ‘God’—
according to your own understanding of ‘God’.” (Field note February 18, 2009).

Apart from the failure of my first attempt to use Vibra Vision, this instruction
made it a religious experience for me. It urged me to look into myself, and to deal
with the question of how I actually understand “God.” This eventually reoriented
my research project toward the relation between Pencak Silat, Inner Power, and
religion. When I started my research in September 2008, one of my key informants,
a Pencak Silat master and lecturer at the STSI in Bandung, stated: “Pencak Silat

5
The idiom “Seeing is believing” can be explained as “[I]f you see something yourself, you will
believe it to exist or be true, despite the fact that it is extremely unusual or unexpected” (http://
dictionary.cambridge.org). A more detailed reflection on the difference between “seeing some-
thing in a video” (mediated), “seeing something yourself” (immediate), and actually experiencing
or performing it yourself is provided in the conclusion.
238 P. Keilbart

bukan Agama”—Pencak Silat is not [like] religion. Six years later, in 2014, I met a
Pencak Silat master and lecturer at the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in
Yogyakarta, Central Java, and she told me: “Pencak Silat is like religion.”6 The
question as to what extent each statement applies to different Pencak Silat schools
is not relevant here. Instead, I will give another example of challenging personal
experience as an apprentice in a more traditionalist, Muslim perguruan named Sang
Cipta Rasa:
Today, I participated in a debus performance [a demonstration of invulnerability]. The mas-
ter, GusMus,7 cut cucumbers and bamboo sticks with his razer-sharp golok (machete) to
demonstrate its sharpness. Then he cut himself with the golok, at his arm, his throat, and his
tongue, without being hurt. He also brought viewers from the audience on stage to demon-
strate his debus skills. After splashing a little water at them and mumbling something (in
Arabic?), he cut them with his golok, too, but they too were not hurt. At the end, GusMus
asked me to come on stage. He smashed a glass bottle and, after splashing me with water
and mumbling his prayer, he used broken bits of glass to cut me at my arm and my belly. I
could feel the sharp edge of the glass splinter scratching my skin, and felt the pressure
GusMus applied on it, but I was not wounded or hurt. I was not frightened, but rather felt
surprised. Later, when I watched the video one of his students had taken with a mobile
phone, I saw that all participants GusMus used for his demonstration—including myself—
looked really uneasy or stressed. GusMus laughed at these reactions and told me there was
no need to worry, since his knowledge (ilmu) and God’s strength protected us. (Field note
March 01, 2015).

In the course of my fieldwork I conducted participant observation as an appren-

tice in different Pencak Silat schools, mainly in West and Central Java. The exem-
plary field notes and the two different perguruan presented above illustrate my
engagement in embodied anthropological fieldwork, and indicate the expectations
in me held by Pencak Silat masters and educators. The tests or demonstrations of
strength in the two different schools set the ground for grasping the profound impli-
cations of Pencak Silat education, and the particular challenges of reciprocal
exchange and structural power relations within Pencak Silat.

Power Relations, Expectations, and Impasses

Compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry, Martial Arts Studies has a distinctly demo-
cratic flavor. This stems from a number of sources. Most obviously, the martial arts are
widely practiced in both the East and West in the current era. (Judkins, 2015, p. 1).

Judkins does not further substantiate his claim; it appears to stem from the acces-
sibility to the field (martial arts as an “Eastern” cultural export), and the collabora-
tive nature of research carried out by practitioners in different parts of the world.8

6
Interviews with Pak Nanan, Bandung, October 24, 2008, and Ibu Wening, Yogyakarta, December
11, 2014.
7
GusMus is the short form for Gusti Ali Mustofa, with Gusti being a Javanese title for a master.
8
The collaborative nature of martial arts studies is presumed to lie in the common ambition of both
(Eastern) masters and (Western) students to elaborate research and ensure a more intellectually
rigorous, academic consideration of martial arts.
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 239

According to my experiences during fieldwork, as an anthropologist and as a martial

arts practitioner, the “distinctly democratic flavor” of martial arts studies is often
covered by strict hierarchical structures in a school and expectations that students
demonstrate respect and unconditional obedience toward their masters.
Pencak Silat masters have sought to modernize, that is, liberalize, their schools
and Pencak Silat in general, in particular since Indonesian independence. For centu-
ries, martial arts in the Indonesian archipelago were characterized by secrecy, privi-
lege, and the unquestioned authority of the master of a perguruan, who represented
a spiritual preceptor and source of knowledge. In the context of nation-building in
Indonesia and the inclusion of modernization theories into state ideology, the term
“mental-spiritual” was introduced to replace former, established concepts such as
kebatinan or kanuragan and common notions of martial arts mysticism and magic.9
The introduction of the mental-spiritual has affected the roles and understandings
of a guru. In progressive schools like Merpati Putih, the master is no longer viewed
as a powerful spiritual medium, but rather as a facilitator of self-development.
Implementing the mental-spiritual‚ Inner Power in MP is “substantive and focused
on the individual, cultivated through disciplined practice” (Wilson, 2011, p. 73).
The modernizing processes of Pencak Silat, however, create a paradox: “modern”
Pencak Silat is envisioned as rationalized and liberal-democratic, while secrecy and
privilege, hierarchical structures, and ideas of unquestioned authority remain. The
latter are romanticized and valued as adequate behavior toward and of a real master,
which contradicts the idea of “modernization.”
This is also reflected in the relationship between a master and a foreign (Western)
student and researcher. As an apprentice in MP, the leadership expected me to con-
tribute to the modernization, that is, rationalization and scientific foundation of
Inner Power, and to share the knowledge I gained in MP upon my return to Germany.
When the founding father and headmaster Mas Poeng directly addressed that issue
at our first meeting in 2006, I did not fully assess the implications of his offer. In
early 2000, Mas Poeng appointed the two US-American brothers Mike and Nate
Zeleznick to become pelatih MP; together they officially inaugurated Merpati Putih
USA in Ogden, Utah. Since then, the Zeleznicks have spread and promoted MP in
the USA, as a spiritual practice and New Age movement, and they have contributed
significantly to the scientific foundation of Merpati Putih and Inner Power. In mid-­
2000, they invited a delegation of MP members to Utah, to test and validate Vibra
Vision scientifically (Keilbart, 2017). As an anthropologist, I could not and cannot
contribute to the scientific investigation of Inner Power and Vibra Vision as the MP
leadership intends. In my ethnographic account of Merpati Putih, scientific expla-
nations based on metabolic processes and wave theory are identified as part of MP’s

9
The concepts of kebatinan and kanuragan are related to mystical practices and beliefs. They
represent the basis for and an expression of a Javanese worldview (kejawen). At its core lies the
aspiration to acquire cosmological and spiritual knowledge. The intrinsic link between martial arts,
war magic, and warrior religion has been analyzed comparing various martial arts (Farrer, 2014).
The role and influence of Javanese kebatinan and kanuragan on Indonesian ethics, (religious)
beliefs, and ideologies, and its various social applications, have been studied intensively (De
Grave, 2014; Mulder, 1998; Schulte Nordholt, 1991; Sihombing, 2011; Wilson, 2002).
240 P. Keilbart

modernization approach. This does not provide scientific proof for the existence or
efficacy of Inner Power. In contrast to findings in the medical and natural sciences,
the kind of knowledge a social scientist produces is not perceived as useful by the
school leadership. The same applies for Sang Cipta Rasa and GusMus’ debus, but
for a different reason. The master of this rather traditionalist Muslim perguruan did
not see any sense in a scientific examination of his invulnerability skills and prac-
tices at all. On the contrary, he repeatedly emphasized that debus could not be
explained rationally or scientifically, that the secret knowledge can only be passed
from master to student, who must experience it himself. Thus, my scientific knowl-
edge and my proposal of mutual sharing of knowledge were not well received, nei-
ther by the modernist nor the traditionalist master. This was also due to the fact that
my comparative analysis of different Pencak Silat schools runs contrary to the
established principle of secrecy and the exclusivity requirement of membership in a
school. The lecturer at UGM also referred to that exclusivity requirement when she
equated Pencak Silat with religion. She said for her, as a member of a certain pergu-
ruan, it was impossible to change to another school or do comparative research in
different schools. For her, affiliation with a certain perguruan was like religious
affiliation—implying exclusivity.
For me, this statement helped explain the limited acceptance of my (scientific)
contributions. It entailed a sense of failure, which came from the concern of having
misjudged both the obligations of a Pencak Silat apprentice toward his master and
school, and my opportunities for cooperation and research. I felt stupid for having
overlooked something I thought I should have known, due to former studies and
also to former experience with my master back home in Germany: competitive
thinking among martial arts schools and styles, and claims of exclusivity, superior-
ity, and nonappealability appear to remain overriding principles. So my comparative
analysis of Merpati Putih and Sang Cipta Rasa was problematic in several respects.
At some point, this made me doubt my comparative and embodied participation
approach. My apparent misjudgment of possibilities, of my ability to contribute to
the development and modernization of a school made me feel guilty for not fulfill-
ing the expectations masters had of me. It made me feel frustrated for not being able
to fulfill my own expectations. I had started my fieldwork with a concept of dialogi-
cal research in mind: I sought to work in a collaborative, comparative research
endeavor, and to make (preliminary) findings available to all contributions. Although
I disclosed my comparative approach ab initio, and the masters of both schools gave
their approval, the democratic flavor of martial arts studies and the dialogical
research I had planned could not really develop. Not only were my scientific find-
ings of no use for my informants, my comparative approach ran contrary to the
prevailing principle of exclusivity, and restrained the method of performance and
participant observation. I could not attend public performances of a school to which
also other schools potentially had access. So I could not fully meet the expectations
of Pencak Silat masters placed in me, as a foreign (Western) apprentice, to attend
public performances, to represent the school in Indonesia and abroad, and to dem-
onstrate its success expanding to foreign countries.
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 241

This problem expanded with schools providing photo and video material via
social media, and discourses evolving around such material. As Patrick Eisenlohr
(2011, p. 45) notes, media representations can be used for “claiming a more imme-
diate link to desired political or religious destinations or moral goods.” In Pencak
Silat, this does not entail the revelation of any secret knowledge, but is rather
deemed proof of efficacy and the master’s ability to exploit and impart this kind of
knowledge. In Merpati Putih, it is used to demonstrate that in MP anybody, even a
Westerner and anthropologist, can learn to control and harness their Inner Power for
breaking hard objects or to use Vibra Vision to “see without using the eyes.” In Sang
Cipta Rasa, it is used to demonstrate that GusMus, as a master, can transfer the
strength of God (Allah) to anybody, even a non-Muslim Westerner, protecting him
from bladed weapons or sharp objects. For me as a researcher and apprentice, who
was both portrayed in social media and engaged in it, this further complicated the
situation. It entailed the difficult task of very consciously engaging in social media
activities while selecting networks or groups according to the (potential) access of
members of different Pencak Silat schools. When users and members of a certain
perguruan found material on social media which displayed me practicing or dem-
onstrating routines of another perguruan, this clouded our relationship of trust. The
negative effect on my research was that important information and knowledge
would then not be shared openly with me anymore.
Since my scientific knowledge was not really valued, performing for a school
(immediate and in media representations) seemed the only possibility for me to
“give something back.” I felt it was what the masters and leadership of a school
expected from me. In my research, the paradox of modernization, exclusivity, and
hierarchical structures in Pencak Silat schools obscured the “distinctly democratic
flavor” of martial arts studies. It restrained my performance and dialogical research
approach and gave me a feeling of failure. When assessing these preliminary find-
ings and developments during my research, the situation seemed to represent an
impasse.
Nonetheless, I argue that apprenticeship and embodied participation in different
Pencak Silat schools is an anthropologically fruitful approach to assess the shared
common principles of Indonesian martial arts education. Furthermore, the follow-
ing section illustrates that the comparative perspective and methodology does not
prevent the researcher and/as apprentice from performing his main and essential
obligations.

Apprenticeship, “Taking and Giving” in a Perguruan

Martial arts fieldwork may involve a higher degree of participation as compared to observa-
tion in regular anthropology. (…) Observation without participation may leave the field-
worker with scant appreciation for what is really going on. (Farrer, 2015a, p. 1).

What makes martial arts fieldwork a potentially more intense form of participa-
tion, compared to other fields, is its demanding requirements, both physically and
242 P. Keilbart

mentally. Similar to Wacquant (2004) “carnal sociology” of boxing, which is based

on participant observation, the researcher joins in and learns a martial art from the
ground up as a basis for research, understanding and writing. In my case, such
apprenticeship and embodied participation included strenuous training sessions,
physical confrontation and combat performances (unarmed and armed), physical
and psychological conditioning, and challenging tests that pushed me to the limits.
Being a researcher and apprentice at the same time poses questions of reciprocal
exchange, structural power relations, research ethics, and epistemology. Using the
methodology of “performance ethnography” (Farrer, 2015b; Zarrilli, 1998),10 learn-
ing Pencak Silat in Indonesia provided me with the demanding challenges of mysti-
cism and embodied (mystical) experience. According to Michel de Certeau,
“Mysticism arises against the backdrop of modern Western discourse, while the
mystical (…) is an adjective that describes a secret and concealed aspect of experi-
ence” (Napolitano & Pratten, 2007, p. 5).
The mystical presents physical, intellectual, and emotional challenges for the
researcher, who has to deal with (and work through) embodied mystical experiences
that potentially question personal convictions and traditional anthropological ways
of reasoning. Dealing with martial arts mysticism and transforming embodied mys-
tical experience and knowledge into scientific knowledge—its adequate representa-
tion and introduction in “Western discourse”—is a difficult task. But the essential
obligation of the researcher and apprentice, and the most important expectation of a
guru, does not go as far as scientific representation. It is to open up toward and be
receptive to embodied experience and knowledge, allowing it to influence personal
convictions. First and foremost, an apprenticeship in a Pencak Silat school is a rela-
tionship of mutual trust. The researcher as apprentice has to trust the guru, accept-
ing the instruction provided and a regimen of training that includes potentially
dangerous methods or examinations. The guru, by accepting the researcher as an
apprentice, trusts him to handle responsibly the knowledge imparted and skills
learned, according to the master’s guidelines and expectations. Despite different
ideological foundations and explanations for embodied experience and knowledge,
the common shared values and ethics in Pencak Silat nonetheless became clear in
the long term. Maryono (2002, p. 47) names them the principles of harmony and
etiquette, and the Javanese cosmological concept of manunggaling kawula Gusti
(the unity of humanity and God). Both in Merpati Putih and in Sang Cipta Rasa
these common shared principles became comprehensible for me through personal
experience as an apprentice. This is why performance ethnography and apprentice-
ship are viable methods of choice, also and especially for a comparative analysis of
Pencak Silat education. As Coy (1989, p. xv) has summarized, apprenticeship as
research method provides insights into “ways of knowing and ways of seeing things

10
Performance ethnography is an arts-based method of qualitative inquiry, designed to bridge the
gap between scholarly activity and education in performance arts. Following Zarrilli (1998), it
represents an ethnographic research strategy that is implemented through the full participation of
the researcher in the performance genre. The aim is an ethnography based on communication and
dialogical conversation rather than observation.
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 243

that can only be experienced” and “an excellent way to learn about learning (Goody,
1989, as cited in Coy, 1989, p. 2).
Apprenticeship is often viewed as an education in the ‘secrets’ of a craft (…). These secrets
might lie in any of the dimensions of training. Often they are secrets only inasmuch as they
are not shared with those who have not engaged in apprenticeship. (Coy, 1989, p. 3).

My apprenticeship put me in a position to be introduced to at least some of the

“secrets” of Pencak Silat that lie behind the extraordinary feats practitioners are able
to perform. As indicated in the field notes above, extraordinary feats, explanatory
approaches, and fundamental ideas differ considerably. Apprenticeship in essen-
tially different Pencak Silat schools disclosed secret, implicit, specialized knowl-
edge in terms of performance skills, but also concerning physical, mental, and social
education. Approaching the Oriental Monk and the “martial arts promise” of self-­
improvement as an apprentice in different Pencak Silat schools provided the basis
for an examination of martial arts education beyond an individual case study.
Acquiring specific body knowledge and learning performance skills through partici-
pation, long-term observation, and experience revealed the implicit knowledge of
how the senses are educated in Pencak Silat. The comparative approach revealed
how the ideal master and his relationship with his11 students are imagined and con-
structed, despite different ascriptions. Mystical insights can be perceived as contra-
dictory to Western rationalized, technologized, materialistic culture, or as
complementary to it. The guru can be seen as spiritual medium or as facilitator of
self-empowerment. In any case, learning Pencak Silat means learning about
Javanese (and Indonesian) culture, ethics, ways of perceiving the environment,
respectful interaction with educators, elders, and other human beings in general.
Being a researcher and apprentice, taking and giving, first and foremost entails trust
in the methods and aims of the guru, and in the embodied experience, reception, and
implementation of the imparted knowledge. For the student, testing one’s Inner
Power by breaking hard objects and demonstrating the ability of a master to provide
protection against sharp objects have similar effects. Both practices are initially
disconcerting and frightening, presenting a physical and mental challenge for the
apprentice. To face such a challenge, to overcome doubts or even fear, and to experi-
ence the relief of physical integrity has several synergetic effects: trust in the guru
and his methods proves justified, substantiating his leading position; the apprentice
develops self-confidence and a sense of belonging, experiencing a personal connec-
tion to a higher power (either immediate or mediated by the guru), and embraces a
cultural identity rooted in Pencak Silat. A predicament for the Pencak Silat appren-
tice lies in the sense of commitment or obligation toward a master (and school) for
having shared this secret knowledge with him or her. As an apprentice, I experi-
enced this feeling of obligation, the sense of duty and responsibility toward the
perguruan, especially while experiencing the discomfort of simultaneously studying

11
Female Pencak Silat masters do exist, and during my fieldwork, I got in contact with female
masters, too. Yet, the headmasters of both Merpati Putih and Sang Cipta Rasa are male; therefore,
the masculine form is used here.
244 P. Keilbart

(in) various schools. The sharing of (religious or scientific) knowledge, and the
resulting extraordinary abilities an apprentice experiences, constitute a firm bond
with the master—a bond that is anchored in affective and relational dimensions.
This defines embodied practice as an active constituent in the construction of iden-
tity and meaning.
According to my personal experience, at the core of this deep bond between a
Pencak Silat master and his apprentice lies the sense of duty or obligation on the
part of the latter. That is why the feeling of not being able to fulfill the expectations
placed in me, not being able to give something back, came close to an emotional
impasse. Toward the end of my research year, these experiences and emotions, and
preliminary findings from my comparative analysis compelled me to develop a new
strategy. A shared common aim of Pencak Silat masters and practitioners is to raise
awareness for their beloved Indonesian martial art nationally and internationally.
Despite competitiveness and dissociation between different schools, Pencak Silat is
perceived as a nationally shared common cultural asset. My contribution to the pro-
motion of Pencak Silat (inter-)nationally was acknowledged and valued by masters
and practitioners regardless of affiliation. I was able to make this contribution by
attending large public (media) events and participating in public performances with-
out visible affiliation to a certain perguruan (i.e., wearing a school’s emblem or
uniform). After the completion of my fieldwork and my return to Germany, internet
research for an article provided unexpected affirmation of this strategy:
The picture of me was taken at a public Pencak Silat festival at Malioboro street
in Yogyakarta, where practitioners from all over Indonesia represented their schools
and skills (Fig. 1). Instead of wearing a particular school uniform, I chose to wear
neutral black Pencak Silat clothes with the emblem of the superordinate, national
Pencak Silat Federation sewn on it. The image caption “Bule aja bangga sama
budaya Indonesia”—“Even a Westerner is proud of Indonesian culture”—indicates
that the common aim of promoting Pencak Silat as an Indonesian cultural asset
prevails over competitiveness. This, at least, is what is portrayed in social media. At
a more fundamental level, it indicated to me what a Western apprentice is obliged to
achieve or “give back”: to value the culture of Indonesian Pencak Silat, one which
questions his or her Western worldview, perception, and moral and ethical precon-
ceptions. It shows that, beyond dialogical research, the democratic flavor of martial
arts studies essentially lies in the acceptance and exchange of embodied cultural
knowledge.

 onclusions: Apprenticeship: From Impasses to Learning

C
Effects

The construction of martial arts must be regarded as a continuous process which is

circulated through cross-cultural, mutual exchange, and learning, via media tech-
nologies and onsite experience. The discursive formation of the martial artist par
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 245

Fig. 1 “Westerner proud of Indonesian culture”—Instagram photo

excellence, the Oriental Monk (and his general features, absorbed by popular con-
sciousness through mediated culture), shapes the aims and ideals of practitioners
everywhere. Both in “the West,” as in Berg & Prohl’s example of the Shaolin Temple
Germany (Berg & Prohl, 2014), and in “the East,” that is, in the countries of origin
of various martial arts, it influences self-conception and concepts of the (ideal) mar-
tial arts master. Yet, neither a master nor a student are “hyperreal” figures in
Baudrillard’s terms. Images and discourses in local and global media spheres sim-
ply provide an additional reference to embodied learning and intersubjective bodily
experience. The martial arts promise of self-improvement, the “work on the self” in
Foucault’s sense, requires active action and participation. Bowman’s statement,
cited above, referring to the martial arts promise and its requirement of “nothing
more than physical discipline, dedication, devotion and diligent training” (emphasis
added) must sound ironic to anyone who has actually tried it. Moreover, Indonesian
Pencak Silat combines hard physical training with mystical-spiritual practice.
Personal, physical experiences of extraordinary powers and phenomena challenge
the rational and intellectual comprehension the “Western” apprentice, and researcher
is supposed to be grounded in. This points to the difference between “seeing some-
thing in a video” (mediated), “seeing something yourself” (immediate), and actually
performing and experiencing it yourself. Performance and bodily experience pro-
vide the basis for a more differentiated self-perception and access to the holistic
Pencak Silat education that incorporates physical, perceptual, intellectual, cultural,
ethical, and religious aspects. This represents the primary argument for performance
ethnography in martial arts studies, for participant observation that sets embodied,
246 P. Keilbart

perceptual experience as the analytical ground for human participation in the world
(see Csordas, 1990, 1993). Performance must be regarded as an “ontological device”
that renders tangible conceptions of self and other, student and master, and social
relations as instantiated in such a close, personal bond of trust.
‘Epistemology,’ how to know, via experience, exposure, then, is intimately tied to ontology.
Ontological assumptions concerning the subject, for example, whether societies are funda-
mentally moulded by economic structures or religious actions, condition epistemology—
how to know—with scientific, positivist/realist/Marxist or phenomenological/interpretivist
theoretical perspectives. (Farrer, 2015a, p. 1).

In the two Indonesian Pencak Silat schools portrayed, either religious or rational-
ist (positivist) explanatory approaches reinforce a specific epistemology grounded
in embodied experience. In reaction to the Indonesian state’s modernization mea-
sures, the disenchantment and (re-)enchantment of formerly mystical practices can
be identified as the different styles and strategies of Pencak Silat schools. Despite
the illustrated difficulties of exclusivity and rivalry between schools, my compara-
tive analysis allowed for conclusions regarding a common ground shared by dif-
ferent communities formerly classified as “mystics.” Performance ethnography
generated conclusions beyond mediated and even immediate observation. The onto-
logical device of performance, of embodied participation, provided a more thor-
ough appreciation of what is really going on: it disclosed the convergence point of
efficacy and entertainment in Pencak Silat (or martial arts in general). Beyond the
martial arts promise offered to the audience of a performance or in media represen-
tations, the practitioners’ persistent belief in the fulfillment of this promise is based
on the bodily experience of actually getting closer to the desired ideal. Nonetheless,
a martial arts apprenticeship is a relationship of trust. The student is self-confident,
but must respect and trust the master and their application of extreme training and
testing methods. The master’s primary concern is that his apprentice values the
imparted knowledge and uses it respectfully, in a productive way. This means it
should not be used to hurt people and not be passed on to others who might use it to
hurt people. Instead, “every student is obliged to find trustworthy people to whom
the knowledge can be passed on, be it in Indonesia, in Germany, or elsewhere.”12
Masters like GusMus or MasPoeng accept a Western apprentice on the premise of
helping to promote (their) Pencak Silat in Indonesia and disseminate their knowl-
edge in “the West.” As a researcher and apprentice, I did not fully meet their expec-
tations. My scientific knowledge was not seen as useful, my contribution to the
public promotion of a given school was limited. I have not yet demonstrated Pencak
Silat publicly or opened a school in Germany. Mas Poeng’s offer, which initially
filled me with honor and pride, ultimately evoked feelings of pressure, deficiency,
or even guilt for not being able to fulfill his expectations. Yet exactly these emotions
helped me to better understand or reflect upon my research topic, Pencak Silat edu-
cation and practices, and my methodology. The relationship of trust between a mas-

GusMus, interviewed in Yogyakarta on September 4, 2016. Translation from Bahasa Indonesia

12

by the author.
How to Be a Good Disciple (to a Martial Arts Master): Critical Reflections… 247

ter and his apprentice implies far-reaching obligations and expectations; the gift of
knowledge imparted by a guru always comes with a sense of responsibility or
(ethical) obligation toward the guru, his school, and his Pencak Silat. My comparative
approach restricted the scope for dialogical research, performance, and media
engagement during and after my research. Nevertheless, apprenticeship, perfor-
mance, and embodied participation in different Pencak Silat schools offered an
opportunity to identify overall common educational principles, common to all
Pencak Silat schools in Indonesia. My comparative analysis of embodied experi-
ence in different schools revealed essential characteristics of the martial arts prom-
ise of self-improvement in Indonesia. It made the continuous authority of a Pencak
Silat master and the trust and respect shown to them by students plausible and com-
prehensible. My contribution on the ground, what I was expected to “give back,”13
was physical involvement, openness and trust, respect toward the master, and assis-
tance in promoting Pencak Silat. The shared aim of raising public awareness of
Indonesian martial arts culture (as expressed in the Instagram photo) points to the
conception of the collective self in Pencak Silat, which resonates with the message
of the Karate Kid films (those of the 1980s and of 2010). In increasingly globalized,
mediatized world, learning martial arts can provide a basis for communication,
solve interpersonal and societal problems, and bring initially “different” ontological
perspectives into dialog.
Reflecting on participation and apprenticeship as research methods, beyond
Indonesian Pencak Silat and martial arts, two conclusions can be drawn. First,
dialogical research and collaboration with research participants and partners at
eye level—approaches that challenge imbalance and the reproduction of colonial
structures in academia—are a promising yet challenging endeavor. This chapter
indicates ways of dealing with the limitations of these approaches, and the emo-
tional predicaments of reaching one’s own limits while trying to implement them.
The researcher must acknowledge that there might be different understandings of
“collaboration,” that mutual expectations and commitments might differ funda-
mentally vis-à-vis local power asymmetries. Second, I am inclined to argue that
emotional predicaments related to apprenticeship relations can be considered
symptomatic of any ethnographic research. The gift of knowledge always comes
with expectations of reciprocal consideration. Researchers and apprentices, I sug-
gest, can transform feelings of discomfort, obligation, guilt, or deficiency into
their motivation to take responsibility by seeking a deeper understanding their
mentors’ expectations.

13
See section “Reciprocity in Research Relationships” on expectations to “give back.”
248 P. Keilbart

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The Anxieties of a Changing Sense
of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters
at Home

Paul J. Kellner

The goal of this chapter is to reflect on my first experience engaging in long-term

ethnographic fieldwork through the lenses of emotion and affect in a way that might
prove useful to other first-time ethnographers preparing for their research.
Specifically, I will explore how an already well-established sense of place at my
fieldwork site became emotionally disruptive for me, leeched more deeply into my
person, and engendered affects which I carried with me through the early days of
my fieldwork. I will signpost how anxieties about safety at home that were unantici-
pated in my preparations were reflected upon more systematically in the aftermath
of fieldwork. I find that the disruptive emotional experience of anxiety reshaped or
impeded the interpretive process I was carrying out between ethnographer and inter-
locutor; therefore, emotions and affect are aspects of fieldwork about which I wish
I had been more reflexively aware. This experience provides support for the growing
literature that argues that emotions can broaden and deepen an ethnographer’s
insight into her and her interlocutor’s lives (Stodulka et al. 2019). I will also briefly
discuss the important role of privilege (see Twine and Gardener 2013), and its
emotional implications (see Kimmel and Ferber 2014) in my responses to a shifting
sense of place. Though the chapter will take a confessional tone, this approach is not
seen as an end in itself. Rather, I view the reflections as a first step in more system-
atically engaging with emotions and affects in future fieldwork. Finally, I will posit
a few practical ways to prepare for and implement increasingly “relational and
affectively-aware” (Stodulka 2015, p. 85) ethnography, in order to help diversify the
toolkit of other first-time ethnographers.

P. J. Kellner (*)
Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Department of Health Promotion and Development, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 251

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_22
252 P. J. Kellner

The Fieldwork and My Sense of Place

The experiences described in this chapter took place in a medium-sized Indonesian

city, which I will call Kota Kaki Gunung,1 between June 2015 and May 2016, in the
course of doctoral research exploring how street-associated youth perform and con-
struct their identities in social and spatial contexts. The research focuses on how
youth identify and categorize themselves, how others categorize them, and how these
dynamics shape youths’ relationships with peers and communities. Several ethno-
graphic methods were used, including participant observation, unstructured and
semi-structured interviews, and youth-led tours of their neighborhoods. Most of the
core interlocutors were first encountered while residing in a volunteer-run homeless
shelter, but the field sites included street-side informal workplaces, places for social-
izing, and places where youth encountered law enforcement or social services. Before
departing for fieldwork, I had prepared myself for the practical and emotional aspects
of fieldwork engaging with street-associated youth: I reminded myself of lessons I
had learned in my experience conducting applied research with displaced young
people in several countries; I reviewed resources on secondary trauma and the ethical
clearance process; and I considered how I would respond to a wide range of poten-
tially stressful situations that may arise in the lives of my interlocutors. However, I
had not prepared myself as effectively for how emotions in my home life (i.e., the
neighborhood or “home” where I resided during fieldwork together with my wife)
might shape the day-to-day implementation of the research. Therefore, this chapter
focuses primarily on the affective dimensions of fieldwork that are derived from
interactions beyond my encounters with street-associated youth, activists, volunteers,
or bureaucrats, and how the former shaped my understanding of the latter.
During the work, my existing sense of Kota Kaki Gunung shifted from a place
that I thought of as contained, bounded, and singular, to a sense that the city’s iden-
tity had become multiple and its values no longer monolithic. This shift is reminis-
cent of a wider change that took place within cultural anthropology in the 1990s,
away from sense of place that involved contained, bounded identities towards
“boundary erosion” (Feld and Basso 1996, p. 6; see Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
Such boundary erosion in my sense of Kota Kaki Gunung engendered anxious
feelings and heavy affects that I carried into the field each day. In this reflection, I
hope to explore how affective aspects and senses of place intertwine (Aoki and
Yoshimizu 2015), and how such a process can shape the practice of fieldwork.

My Kota Kaki Gunung Before Fieldwork

I first came to know Kota Kaki Gunung when I went there in 2010 to learn
Indonesian. It was an ideal place to learn a language—a college town with friendly
relaxed people. It was clear that it is a place with a strong sense of its history and

1
I have chosen to pseudonymize Kota Kaki Gunung to foreground my emotional and affective
experiences as the purpose of this discussion. Kota Kaki Gunung is a well-known city, and readers’
own knowledge of or experiences in the city may distract from the purpose of this piece.
The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters at Home 253

culture, and that it seeks to share these things with its many international visitors. At
the time, I stayed in a neighborhood full of international, and internationally minded,
students. Shortly after my arrival in 2010, I also met my future spouse. We spent
many of the formative moments of our relationship sitting in street-side food stalls
in the same areas where I would eventually do my fieldwork. It is, and will always
be, my partner’s home city. Kota Kaki Gunung’s culture and mindset are deeply
embedded in who she is, and her personality reflects many of the cultural norms
synonymous with the city. She is keen on multiculturalism and highly accepting of
diverse people and viewpoints, aspects that also reflect my sense of the city. These
traits of the city, therefore, constitute a meaningful part of our relationship. Kota
Kaki Gunung is also a place where we both learned how to negotiate and build our
intercultural relationship. I spent many weekend visits with my future in-laws, get-
ting to know them and their cultural and religious traditions. My new family led me
to make several visits to the city over the next several years, and their proximity was
a welcome bonus to selecting the city as my fieldwork site. A few months before
beginning my 2015 fieldwork, my partner and I had a wedding reception in Kota
Kaki Gunung and moved back to the city. We found a house in a quiet neighborhood
on the edge of town and began our married life.
If I reflect on how I have described my experiences of Kota Kaki Gunung to oth-
ers, some key points emerge. At the outset, I want to emphasize that although these
impressions have been elaborated upon by undertaking fieldwork, my positive
impressions of the city remain and have been reinforced. It is still a place for which
I care deeply and have a great affinity. I’ve often experienced Kota Kaki Gunung as
a hub for culture, arts, and education that embodies and encourages the national
motto “unity in diversity” (bhinneka tunggal ika). For example, I remember bring-
ing a foreign guest to a dance festival that was being held in the center of town in
2011. It featured traditional dancers from all over the country. This type of event
was and is commonplace in Kota Kaki Gunung, and articulated the idea of unity in
diversity in an everyday circumstance. Although such representations of the idea of
unity in diversity have more complicated historical roots in former president
Suharto’s depoliticizing nationalism (Pemberton 1994), my experience of events
like the dance festival created a persistent impression that the city thrived on multi-
culturalism. I took pleasure in recreating that impression for others.
Second, I had long described it as a very safe and hospitable city. Family and
friends who know little about Kota Kaki Gunung have often asked about safety, and
I have been quick to explain that violent crime in my home country is likely more
common than in Kota Kaki Gunung. For instance, in my home, such events often
involve firearms; in Indonesia, that would be a rare and very serious event. As with
the emphasis on multiculturalism, there exists a more complicated history, and the
absence of violent crime is likely an effect of the colonial, Japanese, and New Order
security regimes that were rooted in neighborhood surveillance (Barker 1998;
Kusno 2010). However, my experience, nonetheless, created a strong sense that I
was safe, and all my time in the city has confirmed this notion. Moreover, Kota Kaki
Gunung is exceedingly hospitable. When I first moved to Kota Kaki Gunung for my
fieldwork in 2015, I was in dire need of a haircut. I asked a group of young men who
often hung out across the street from my house where to go. One fellow, Dino,
254 P. J. Kellner

immediately said, “I’ll show you; get on my bike.” He drove me to a hiplooking

shop about a mile from my house. When I got off the bike, he asked, “do you want
me to wait for you?” I thanked him and told him I would walk home. I wanted to get
to know the neighborhood. Shortly after he drove off, I realized that I had forgotten
to give him a tip, which would be a common thing to do. When I returned later
that day, Dino was by himself in the same place I had met him before. I said thank
you again, and then apologized for not giving him a bit of money for fuel and
offered a few 1000 Rupiah. He replied, “Don’t worry about it; I [did that with] sin-
cerity (nggak pa pa, saya ikhlas).” I have had several similar interactions with
strangers in Kota Kaki Gunung, which for me demonstrate a high degree of hospi-
tality rooted in local norms of hospitable actions and emotional performance
(Stodulka 2017a, p. 62).
In short, spending large amounts of time between 2010 and 2017 in Kota Kaki
Gunung helped me to develop a strongly positive, however limited, sense of place.
I knew my international neighborhood and my family life. However, there was a
great breadth of experience in the city with which I was not well acquainted. I had
worked on poverty and health issues with children and youth in several countries,
and had collaborated with Indonesian colleagues at NGOs and universities on pro-
grams for children and youth in the past. Therefore, I had a sense of how in-depth
engagement with street-associated interlocutors might reveal new and challenging
ideas about a place of which I was so fond of. I prepared myself for many of these
challenges from the perspective of a researcher, reflecting intensely on building rap-
port with my interlocutors, i.e., by ensuring that I was respectful of their experi-
ences and the time they shared with me, by creating reciprocal relationships, and by
responding to emergency situations during the research. However, I was less well
prepared for how experiences of anxiety in my home life, and their affective impli-
cations, would shape the daily work of my research.

Approach to Emotions, Affect, and Anxieties

This chapter employs Stodulka’s (2015, p. 85) definition of emotions as “embodied

biocultural processes between and within persons.” This definition is well suited to
this analysis, as it places key emphasis on emotions as interactive processes with
concrete, bodily implications. The following discussions will center on the pro-
cesses of interaction that took place between myself and others, between myself and
the city, and between my previous sense of place and the new ideas I was confronted
with, and will describe the bodily implications of these various interactions. In other
words, I will pay “direct attention to how ‘feelings’ are generated in dialogue with
the world” (Pelkmans 2013). Moreover, because some feelings yielded a palpable,
observable affect in me, I intend to integrate the concept of affect into my theory.
Jeremy Gilbert (2004) paraphrases Brian Massumi (1995) to define affect as “orga-
nized experience, an experience probably with empowering or disempowering con-
sequences, registered at the level of the physical body, and not necessarily to be
understood in linguistic term.” The idea of affect will be employed because theorists
The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters at Home 255

have emphasized the pre-cognitive ways in which affect can shift “bodily intensity”
and reshape how one engages in social worlds (Athanasiou et al. 2012). Moreover,
there is value in consciously considering the bodily intensity of, energy associated
with, and empathy engendered by emotions (McLean 2007). Thus, these issues will
provide the backdrop for my argument that taking emotions and affect more seri-
ously in fieldwork may open new opportunities for intersubjective processes.
Finally, this reflection will be loosely framed in terms of Michalowski’s (1996)
notion of the anxiety of surveillance during fieldwork. His work puts forth the idea
that reflexivity in fieldwork should be sensitive both to the fieldworker’s biography
and towards the macro-political processes in the lives of informants and the field-
worker’s post-fieldwork audiences. Although my research site did not have acute
political tension hanging over it, like Michalowski’s work in the context of tense
US–Cuba relations, this framework proved a useful starting point during my analy-
sis for systematically thinking about the relationships and processes that shaped my
emotions and affect. For a first-time ethnographer like me, such tools for building
one’s reflexive practice are highly welcome. In brief, Michalowski’s work builds on
de Certeau’s (1988) notion that power is expressed in two basic forms, and gener-
ates two forms of pleasures, namely disciplinary and discursive pleasures. Through
an examination of his reflexive anxieties about undertaking fieldwork in the context
of tense US–Cuba relations in the early 1990s, he developed notions of disciplinary
and discursive anxieties. He describes disciplinary anxieties as akin to the idea that
“my behavior is being shaped by others.” He describes two sub-types of anxiety
within the concept. Surveillance, the sense that “I am being watched,” and control,
the suspicion that others are exerting agency over one’s experience. Discursive anx-
iety is described as asking the question, “Can I trust my interpretation of others’
motives and underlying meanings?” The sub-type that will be applied in this discus-
sion is interpersonal, which he describes as the question, “How are others framing
their discourses for my position?” (Michalowski 1996, p. 69). My reflection will
solely focus on his notion of surveillance, though I found each domain of anxiety he
describes useful in post-fieldwork analysis. This said, most salient were my experi-
ences of feeling conspicuously different, being observed but not accepted, learning
new social norms, and simply not having as much physical privacy as usual while
not conducting fieldwork. These undermined a previously stable sense of place and
engendered burdensome affects that I carried to the field.

Feeling self-conscious

Michalowski’s notion of surveillance is a good starting point, as this was the most
immediately felt, and possibly most potent form of anxiety during my fieldwork.
Although the sociologist refers to affective experiences when researching in totali-
tarian regimes, a Javanese kampung2 can at times feel similarly authoritative with
regard to its complex neighborhood obligations and idealized standards of moral

2
A small neighborhood, usually set away from a main street.
256 P. J. Kellner

conduct (Beatty 2010; Newberry 2006; Reddy 2001; Stodulka 2017b). I was
observed more than was normal for me, and this led me to be highly self-conscious
and vigilant of the ways in which I was being observed. It resulted in emotions of
worry, anxiety—or “stage-fright” in Keeler’s (1983) terms—and alienations that
slowly reshaped the affect that I carried into the field. It is prudent to mention my
background before discussing these experiences. I am from the midwestern United
States. My city has a sociable tone, but also affords one a great deal of privacy.
Moreover, the time directly preceding this fieldwork was spent living in the UK and
Norway, both places in which, generally speaking, one has the ability to place wide
boundaries around one’s privacy, personal life, and body. Having become accus-
tomed to such a level of control of personal space and comfort is a highly privileged
position. It speaks to privilege in the form of a wealth of control over how and when
I am seen in public space. I had spent time reflecting on other aspects of my social
position such as ethnicity, nationality, education level, and wealth that would affect
my interactions, but I had not unpacked my own privilege regarding feelings of
space-related comfort and security before the research.

At Home in a New Neighborhood

My wife and I moved into our new home in a sleepy neighborhood populated pri-
marily by retirees. I was initially pleased. When we moved in, the neighbors barely
acknowledged us, and in the following days they mostly stuck to their well-worn
routines. One would have hardly known that we had moved into the neighborhood
if it wasn’t for a few young people who hung out at the corner shop treating us as a
novelty.
As time went on, the subtleties of adapting to my new surrounding put me off bal-
ance. The last time when I had lived in Kota Kaki Gunung, I had stayed in an inter-
national student neighborhood. I stayed in a large shared house in which I had plenty
of private space, and I was physically and socially insulated from the street outside.
The leaseholder of the house maintained many neighborhood social obligations that
follow from living in many areas of Kota Kaki Gunung, for instance, offering pay-
ments and support to the local neighborhood watch (ronda) or chatting with the
neighborhood head to ensure she/he was informed and happy. I reasoned that even in
our new, quietly accepting neighborhood, we would be responsible for these and any
other obligations—a social experience that I was looking forward to navigating.
On the whole, the neighborhood, like Kota Kaki Gunung as a whole, was very
friendly. However, my previous experiences in Kota Kaki Gunung had often made
me feel as though people were keenly and kindly interested in difference; our new
neighborhood, however, did not give that impression. Many new acquaintances
beyond our housing compound approached initial interactions with a skepticism
that I found surprising. In Indonesia, it is common to ask someone new about
matters that might be too private or personal in my country of origin. For instance,
one's faith or marital status might be brought up early in a conversation.
The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters at Home 257

From previous experiences in other neighborhoods, I had grown accustomed to

religious questions being accompanied by interlocutors kindly teaching me about
religious law, discussions of values shared between faiths, or even a warm invitation
to further discussion or to join a religious service. However, I had fewer encounters
with this warm tone in my new neighborhood, and it made me feel conspicuous as
a member of a non-majority faith. Alongside this, there were a few members of the
community who outright ignored me as I went about the neighborhood. Based on
my previous experience in the city, this could be seen as a negative social gesture.
Some neighbors averted their eyes or blankly stared when I said “hello.” In other
places, I gained the impression that acknowledging others’ presence in public space
was not only a norm, but a social obligation that, if not fulfilled, could lead to one
being seen as problematically too proud, aloof, or not sociable enough. At first, I
responded to averted eyes and blank stares by re-doubling my efforts to connect
with the community in the ways that I knew how, but some new connections were
unsuccessful. Through these experiences, I began to feel that many of my neighbors
were not merely indifferent to my presence; rather, I was, for some reason, not being
included in the niceties of usual neighborhood life. In short, they were aware of us,
and in some way disapproved. I can only speculate as to the motivations behind this
behavior, but if I were to do so, I would assume that most people simply didn’t feel
they knew how to act around me. I began to feel out-of-sorts, and when I discussed
these feelings with my wife, she was mostly relieved because she said it meant that
we were much less likely to be pulled into aspects of neighborhood life that can be
rather time-consuming. I didn’t share that sentiment and began to feel frustrated at
home because I had the impression that I understood the social norms for neigh-
borly interactions, but that I, in this place, had either misunderstood or violated
them. My wife’s perspective offered the insight that I likely perceived the social
norms and forms of obligation correctly, but that our lack of inclusion should not be
cause for concern.
I also began to feel self-conscious at home due to mild discomfort engendered by
the house itself. Our complex featured six small detached apartments that could see
directly into our home when our windows were open. The house was also receptive
to sound. Tall ceilings and walls made of concrete ensured that even the footsteps
and hushed conversations of those walking on the road more than 25 m away could
be heard. Conversely, conversations from inside our house at a normal volume were
audible from the street as well. Physically and socially, I felt very exposed. I had
not prepared myself for how “public” even minor moments in my day would feel.
This again brought my privilege to light in the form of an assumption that I deserve
a private, quiet space. These atmospheric discomforts of feeling unwelcome and
physically exposed left me with uneasy emotions entirely derived from my own
privilege and assumptions about the norms of community in Kota Kaki Gunung.
As my unease in the neighborhood was taking root, I began to notice signage that
also made me feel worried. At first, I noticed the flags of the activist wings of a
conservative political party. This made sense, as I knew that political party was
popular in the area. I also knew that our neighborhood was near a district border, on
the other side of which such displays were much more common. However, as time
258 P. J. Kellner

went on, I noticed other signs, murals, and flags invoking the names of GAM3 and
Hamas. For me, it was one thing to see signs for a political party about which I could
read in any newspaper, but these newly invoked names made me feel self-conscious.
And so, I began to wonder and worry, could this be part of why my neighborhood
felt like an unwelcome place for me? How am I being perceived by members of the
community who may disapprove of people of my religion or nationality?
When turning these questions over in my mind, I mainly relied on local friends
and family to tell me what they knew about these expressions of bold political
opinions. They invariably said, “This is a common thing, you don’t have anything
to worry about.” It was indeed common. As I reacquainted myself with Kota Kaki
Gunung, I could see similar artwork in several conservative neighborhoods.
Newspapers indicated very few incidents indicating intolerance, and none directed
at foreigners. My under-examined position of privilege created a critical blind spot.
In retrospect, placing my anxieties and their origins within a wider view of consid-
ering how they compare to the same anxieties experienced by my respondents could
have opened the door to greater affective exchanges during fieldwork. Because,
indeed, my respondents, and others whom I encountered on the streets, were some-
times the targets of the intolerance that caused me my selfish worry. Yet, my worries
led me to question whether my neighborhood was the right place for my wife
and me to live. This worry created an atmosphere that undermined my previously
felt sense of comfort and safety in Kota Kaki Gunung. For the first time in this place,
I felt that my difference may not be an object of interest, but a liability.

Effects, Responses, and Reflections

My worries were present during the early days of my fieldwork. They lowered my
energy level and slowed me down. I had low morale and brought nervousness and
reticence with me into various social settings. Experienced ethnographers had
primed me for the possibility that the early months of my research would feel labo-
rious, and that building a rapport with my interlocutors would take patience. Hence,
I initially took this heavy feeling to be simply a manifestation of this laboriousness.
However, after reviewing my field notes from this period, it is now clear that I car-
ried my anxiety about surveillance with me, in the form of affect, into the rhythms
of community life in my field site. This affect was present at the street-side hangouts
and volunteer-run shelters. The lazy weight of worry hung over me like low-­hanging
clouds, and I found it difficult to get up and out the door to spend more time with
my interlocutors. I took more opportunities to return home when the opportunity
arose. I was reserved and more awkward when working with my interlocutors. One
of the volunteers at the shelter observed that I was slow to warm up, and asked me
when I would begin more active research. I found myself slow to start my research
on many days, finding distraction in more background reading, administrative work,
or tidying up.

3
A separatist movement active in Aceh province for several years.
The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters at Home 259

I also remember carrying this affect into other moments that were characterized
by my being more impulsive and less persistent. In particular, I became impatient
with interviews scheduled for late in the evening, in distant, uncomfortable settings.
When interviewees were not punctual, I would often attempt to reschedule. A fact
of many research projects with street-associated youth is that it is very hard to
schedule fixed times at which to do anything. There are always latecomers, “no
shows,” and changes. Moreover, Kota Kaki Gunung has some communities in which
being an hour or two late to an appointment may be acceptable. Yet, my heavy affect
muted my ability to accept this fact, and in that period, I often gave up early on
potential moments of intersubjective learning and understanding. My emotions
impeded my capacity to be attentive to the highest degree possible at that time. As
the research gained momentum, the lazy clouds of worry and discomfort evapo-
rated. I was grateful to the family and friends, colleagues, and interlocutors who had
been patient with the results of these emotions. However, it is evident now that, had
I taken a more emotionally aware approach to my reflexive practice, I could have
been more present and engaged in the early stages of the fieldwork. First, regarding
my unfounded worries about safety, my intense emotions at home made processing
information from the field more challenging. I believe that systematically taking
time while writing my daily field notes to check in with emotions would have helped
me recount more effectively the raw data of my experiences as well as the emotions
that I was feeling at the time. It now seems clear that applying a critical, analytical
lens to my worries about safety would have helped me take a closer, dispassionate
approach to these emotions. Additionally, it would have been of value to more fully
acknowledge how emotions and affect may have shaped the ways in which I was
perceived by others, how they may have fed into my own assumptions or biases
about others and my field, and how my lack of energy may have muted many poten-
tially lively, more empathetic interactions. Additionally, regarding my worries about
safety, I found myself with lingering doubts even after several reassurances from
local friends and family. In hindsight, it feels clear that my emotions prevented me
from better engaging with the evidence and experience that my confidants used to
provide me with reassurance. Only when an Indonesian mentor who had spent many
years in the US reassured me, priming me with language that affirmed my concerns
and then communicating evidence in a way that I found comprehensible, did I start
to trust this message. In other words, he affirmed my desire feel individually heard,
and communicated with great specificity, because he knew how to communicate
evidence that I would perceive to be valid. My local friends and family had reas-
sured me with very similar messages, but sought to show me that I should not be
worried by having the confidence to demonstrate that such worries could be dis-
missed outright. I find that my strong desire for specificity and the affirmation of my
individual feelings was often incompatible with my friends and family’s emphasis
on a trust that was built on plausibility and reasonable community consensus. Had I
been more reflexive about the ways in which my emotions mediated my uptake of
support from local friends and family, I could have more effectively engaged during
the early days of fieldwork. This issue again puts my privilege into stark relief.
The idea that it took some time for me to feel reassured by dear, trusted friends and
260 P. J. Kellner

family was presumptuous of me. I had immersed myself in a fieldwork site in which
I should always have sought to better understand. I had carried that perspective into
my research, but not into my home life adjacent to the fieldwork. I needed to employ
a similar approach to communication in my home life, yet I stubbornly adhered to
my most comfortable notions of what constituted valid evidence and emotional
care. Pre-fieldwork practice in reflecting on individual privilege, position, assump-
tions, and biases—and how they might be manifest in multiple places, not just the
field—might have been valuable, especially if such practices included a component
that examined how such issues shape emotions carried into daily fieldwork and
analysis. One mode of doing this might be utilizing emotion diaries as described in
this volume’s introduction. Another method could be practicing journaling tech-
niques borrowed from fields like cognitive behavioral therapy to identify potential
emotions that result from such concerns, appraise the potential realistic ramifica-
tions of behaviors driven by those emotions, and determine how such behaviors
might lead to ineffective engagement in fieldwork.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that my research did not take place under a tense political climate
like Michalowski’s, my feelings of self-consciousness engendered worries and a
heavy affect that meaningfully shaped my fieldwork practices for several weeks. It
is likely that such emotions and affects could intensify in contexts where experi-
ences of surveillance are more substantial, and where concerns over security were
more real. These worries about insecurity upended my pre-existing sense of place in
Kota Kaki Gunung and proved to be disquieting in a way that elucidated my failure
to incorporate my personal historical sense of place into my preparations for
fieldwork. I had begun my fieldwork with the unacknowledged assumption that the
identity of city that I knew was static and bounded within its friendliness and keen
support of multiculturalism. Yet, when I arrived, these boundaries eroded, and the
city’s multiplicity and dynamism were revealed to me through a few everyday expe-
riences. As a first-time ethnographer, I believe that I could have benefitted from
additional skills and strategies for better anticipating the ways in which such emo-
tions and affect might appear in my fieldwork practice, means for more reflexively
attending to them while in the field, and analytical methods for accounting for such
experiences in my writing. Specifically, this could mean more affectively-aware
pre-fieldwork pedagogy in the form of keeping a fieldwork diary featuring emo-
tional and bodily awareness as critical aspects. Additionally, pedagogy might also
do well to encourage researchers to more thoroughly examine their pre-existing
senses of place and people in their fieldwork site, and take more seriously the way
that intended fieldwork may complicate or uproot such impressions. Building on
this, analyzing the ways in which ethnographers’ positions of privilege drive their
fieldwork-related emotions and affect may be an exercise that helps researchers
both better acknowledge their own limitations and find additional means of
The Anxieties of a Changing Sense of Place: A Reflection on Field Encounters at Home 261

emotional support in the field. Rigorous pre-fieldwork consideration of emotions

and affect can be complemented by journaling and note-taking practices in the field,
as well as discussions of self-care in challenging field sites. Journaling using tech-
niques based on cognitive behavioral therapy may have helped me separate thoughts
and emotions more effectively in my own fieldwork, and therefore may have helped
me to be more present in empathizing with my interlocutors’ shared emotional
experiences. Finally, this notion of being more present and able to empathize
with interlocutors is vital to the process of analysis once one returns to the field.
The calm, space, and privacy of my own return from the field helped to view my
emotions and affect from new vantage points, and only then was I able to better
empathize and understand some of the interactions I had in the field. I will carry
these lessons with me into future fieldwork.

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Attuning Engagement: Methodological
and Affective Dimensions of a Failed
Collaborative Research Project
in Timor-Leste

Sara ten Brinke

Introduction

At the end [of the first meeting] each of us told the others about the feelings we were going
home with. I felt thankful for sitting in this circle, for the fact that it had felt so easy to
prepare this session, but I was mostly thankful for all these young people full of enthusiasm,
lust for learning and commitment. I was reminded of the fact that this aspect was what had
always inspired me so much here. And I don’t expect all eleven of them to present a paper
in December. Even if there are only four or five, it would already be great!
(Diary entry 11 April 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)1

What did I do wrong?! Why could everybody make it in the beginning, and now they are all
too busy? Is it really that boring?! I thought I had communicated clearly to them that joining
this group meant commitment…maybe they have different standards from me… I don’t
blame them. I will not allow myself to blame them. I have to accept that they have a lot more
responsibilities than I do, more difficult lives. But what drives me almost insane is the idea
that it is me who is making the mistakes, that they just do not enjoy it anymore and that they
do not tell me, but just, one by one, they have better things to do…
(Diary entry 13 June 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)

“Mana2 Sara,” João3 said to me in December 2012 when I was preparing to leave
Timor-Leste, a country I had fallen in love with during 5 months of fieldwork for my
master’s dissertation, “When you come back for your PhD, I want to do research
together with you, so that I can learn about doing research.” João was not the only

1
Diary entries were originally Dutch and have been translated by the author.
2
Tetun (the Timorese national language) for “sister,” which is the polite way to address an unre-
lated woman.
3
All names are pseudonyms.

S. ten Brinke (*)

Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 263

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_23
264 S. ten Brinke

university student who had expressed interest in doing qualitative research together
with me over the course of my fieldwork in Timor-Leste. Many students had been
intrigued by the fact that I did research without questionnaires and they wanted to
know more about it. So when the wheels of the plane lifted away from Timorese
soil, I was determined that the next time I touched down on that airstrip, I would
arrive with a prepared collaborative research project. During the intervening two-­
and-­a-half years, I finished my master’s degree, wrote a PhD proposal, studied the
principles of collaborative research, and attended a “participatory action research”4
workshop organized by a group of young academics and activists interested in this
method. I began to believe that I was well prepared.
Collaborative and participatory forms of research became increasingly appealing
to me as I progressed through my studies in cultural anthropology. Several factors
convinced me that research should consist of an exchange and not an extraction of
knowledge: my previous experience of being confronted with the shortcomings of
the daily practice of conventional ethnographic research; the astonishing willing-
ness of people to participate and invest their time in my research; and the sad reality
that almost all the literature about Timor-Leste is written about Timorese and not by
or even with Timorese. In advocating a more engaged and reciprocal form of
research, I of course do not stand alone. According to Johnston (2010, p. 245), the
“call for a socially relevant action anthropology echoes across the generations.” The
field of active and engaged research approaches is vast and varied, containing a
patchwork of sub-fields such as engaged research (Beck and Maida 2013; Low and
Merry 2010), collaborative research (Lassiter 2005; Okwaro and Geissler 2015),
participatory (action) research (Bastien and Holmarsdottir 2015; Bergold and
Thomas 2012; Hemment 2007; Reason and Bradbury 2006), and activist research
(Cancian 1993; Hale 2006; Huschke 2015), to name just a few. These sub-fields of
course partially overlap and borrow from each other.
The common denominators among them that resonated most with me were, first,
that research participants could play an active role in research practice and preferably
also in the process of analysis and writing, and, second, that research practice and
results could in some way have a direct, beneficial impact on the lives of the research
participants. I oppose (with Johnston 2010) the idea that only applied research taking
place outside of academia can fulfill this premise. Additionally, I argue that academ-
ics do not only have a responsibility to their research participants, but can also profit
from a closer collaboration with them. The intense mutual engagement with the
research topic can yield a much richer understanding of participants’ emic perspec-
tives and life situations, as I will elaborate further below (see also Hale 2006, p. 13;
Huschke 2015, p. 61). This, however, does not mean that there is a clear-cut, success-
ful way of conducting engaged academic research. This chapter highlights how chal-
lenging this attempt can be, in both methodological and emotional terms.
As various research participants had, over the course of my previous fieldwork,
expressed the desire to conduct research together with me, I envisioned a (partially)
collaborative research design, which I will present more extensively below.

4
See for example Kindon et al. (2007).
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 265

Furthermore, I saw collaborative research as a method that would put me, as a

researcher, among the people I was studying, instead of above them. Engaged and
collaborative forms of research are often carried out in an attempt to create less
hierarchical relationships between researcher and researched. This attempt is not
always successful. Okwaro and Geissler (2015, p. 507), for example, point to the
power imbalances and potential for exploitation inherent in “North–South” collab-
orative research projects in medical science. They argue that in collaborative
research, there is a “need to find ways of speaking and acting about inequalities and
diverging interests, as well as about one’s shared commitment to equality, to make
strides toward an ethic of truly equitable partnerships.” In addition, Lassiter (2005,
p. 96) states that the power anthropologists have in the process of collaborative
research “must not be underestimated.” It is therefore of crucial importance to
describe in detail the nature of the collaborative effort (ibid.). Finally, Bastien and
Holmarsdottir (2015, p. 5) refer to the necessity of moving “beyond tokenism” in
participatory forms of research and to provide research participants with more sub-
stantive forms of participation. These are warnings I did not seriously consider
before going into the field, as I naively saw collaborative research mostly as facili-
tating the deconstruction of hierarchy. Only when confronted with the messy reality
of fieldwork relationships and their inherent hierarchies, did I become more aware
of the complex interweaving of overt and hidden power dynamics that greatly com-
plicated this collaborative effort.
In reading this chapter, the reader should keep in mind that I am a young, white
European woman, characteristics that deeply impact(ed) both my own feelings and
reactions to the small Southeast Asian ex-colonial nation-state that Timor-Leste is
today, as well as how people in the field perceived, approached, and treated me.
More specifically, having both Portuguese and Dutch roots, I was often uncomfort-
able with my double colonial heritage on the island, a discomfort that my research
participants did not in the least seem to share. On top of the status accorded to me
as a white person, the fact that I was pursuing a doctoral degree while being under
30 years old (which is rather rare among Timorese) also conferred on me a higher
status, which made me feel uncomfortable. Furthermore, I learned to speak the local
language, Tetun, relatively fluently within a few months of beginning my fieldwork,
an effort many foreigners are unwilling to make. This brought about a level of good
will and awarded me a kind of exceptionality I did not feel I deserved, because
learning the local language is mostly treated as a sine qua non of anthropological
training and conducting fieldwork abroad. These factors placed me in an elevated
hierarchical position, something that made me feel uncomfortable and further
enhanced my wish for a democratized research practice.
Hence, I wanted to join the network of anthropologists who engage in activist
and participatory forms of research. I wanted to cut through boundaries of other-
ness, foreignness, and hierarchy. I naively ignored the admonishments of other
researchers (Lassiter 2005; Okwaro and Geissler 2015) about power imbalances in
collaborative research, and I was convinced that my research design would auto-
matically solve these issues for me.
266 S. ten Brinke

This chapter is about “waking up to reality.” Based on diary entries, field notes
and reflections written during the process of planning, implementing and finally
dismantling a collaborative research group with students from the National
University of Timor-Leste (UNTL) in Dili, I will discuss the methodological adjust-
ments I made during the process and the intricately related affective dimensions of
this attempt at reciprocity between researcher and research participants.

Excited and Expectant

In the early stages of my project, I planned to set up a research group with about
four or five university students. As my research proposal, in applying for a doctoral
grant, had to be very specific, I could not let the research group fully define its topic
or scope, as a classic collaborative research approach would demand. Hence, the
collaborative nature of the project was already limited. Personally, I was interested
in researching inter-generational power dynamics in an emergent and post-conflict
democracy5 and their consequences for how citizenship is interpreted by the post-­
conflict generation. Furthermore, because the divide in Timor-Leste between the
capital city of Dili and the mostly rural remainder of the country is very pronounced,
I wanted to further probe the role played by this urban and rural dichotomy in these
processes. As the underlying theoretical framework of my research was citizenship,
I decided that the research group could also utilize citizenship as an overarching
theme. Yet, I would leave it to the individuals in the group to decide how exactly to
engage with this topic.
I had chosen to work with students and young graduates as they were an impor-
tant part of my research population; they also had some basic training in academic
work and thus could engage in issues more analytically. Furthermore, some students
had explicitly expressed the wish to do research with me. To bring together the
research group, I tapped mostly into the contacts I had made during my previous
research, i.e., students from the UNTL in Dili. My plan for the group spanned the
months from April to December 2015 (the initially planned period of my fieldwork).
The idea was to start with some intensive sessions concerning research methods,
after which each participant would write a research proposal. Consequently, there
would be a 3-month period in which each participant would conduct 1 month of
fieldwork (the 3-month period was to allow for personal flexibility) at a fieldwork
site of their choice. In September 2015, we would come together again as a group
and start writing our individual papers and preparing a symposium (to take place in

5
The island of Timor was split into two by Portuguese and Dutch colonizers. The eastern half
(today Timor-Leste) remained Portuguese territory until 1975. In that year, after a unilateral decla-
ration of independence, Indonesia violently invaded and integrated East Timor. Twenty-four years
of occupation and fierce resistance came to an end when, in 1999, the UN hosted a referendum in
which 78.5% of the population voted for independence. Timor-Leste became an independent
nation-state in 2002 (CAVR 2005).
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 267

December) for university staff and students, Ministry of Education staff, and staff
from NGOs working with citizenship education. During this symposium, the differ-
ent papers would be presented. These were the ideas I brought with me when the
wheels of my plane touched back down on Timorese soil.
I was very excited about the project. I hoped that the research group would pro-
vide a way for me to democratize my own research, giving a few research partici-
pants the chance to gain deeper insight into my research practice by letting them
decide (to some extent) which direction the research would take, and allow me to
put the knowledge I had gathered about research methods and research practice to
work for others who wished to know more about it. Also, I was convinced that by
observing the ways participants defined what was important and worth investigating
in connection with the topic of citizenship, I could gain crucial insights into emic
understandings of citizenship and how they were operationalized. Most of all, I
thought that the research group would be an opportunity for me to “give something
back” (Huschke 2015) to the country and the people I had grown so fond of. It
would produce knowledge about Timor-Leste, in Timor-Leste and by Timorese. It
would empower young Timorese academics to start contributing to the body of
knowledge about their country, and it would give me the feeling that my research
was not just opportunistically extracting knowledge to further my own career, but
that it would actually leave something “useful” behind.

Inspired and Energized

The first meeting took place 3 weeks into my fieldwork with 11 young Timorese.
Four participants (Vasco, Luis, Eurico, and Alfredo) were young men, and seven
were young women (Ana, Helena, Aurora, Maria, Tereza, Rute, and Lucia). Ana,
Tereza, Eurico, Rute, Lucia, and Maria had recently finished their bachelor degrees;
Aurora, Luis, and Helena were in their last year; and Vasco and Alfredo still had
some semesters to go. All were UNTL students or alumni. I was saddened that João,
who had so vehemently urged me to come back and involve him in my research,
could not participate, as he had just taken up an exceptionally demanding job. Other
students who I had hoped would participate were now too occupied by their new
jobs or studying abroad. Because all of the participants took part in an extracurricu-
lar course I offered on Saturday mornings, we agreed that the easiest approach
would be to meet once a week on Saturday afternoons—the extracurricular course
focused largely on research methods, and the Saturday morning sessions thus com-
plemented our project and saved some time inside the research group. Participation
in both sessions was voluntary and students did not receive university credits for
their engagement.
The first meeting, which I had prepared, and during which I acted as the work-
shop facilitator, was very inspiring. I explained the ideas behind the project and
expressed my hopes and expectations. We all wrote down and shared what we
thought we could contribute to the project, what we hoped to achieve, and what our
268 S. ten Brinke

fears were. We also established basic rules for the group through a brainstorm for-
mat. Then we split into small groups and wrote down ten concepts we associated
with the word citizenship and discussed why we chose them. The results of these
discussions were then presented and discussed in plenary form. We concluded the
meeting by taking stock of the feelings which people took home. At the end of this
first meeting, everybody was slightly euphoric and full of energy and commitment.
The diary passage with which I prefaced this chapter illustrates my own state of
mind after this first meeting (“I felt thankful...inspired...”).
After the project’s launch, I started making a detailed long-term plan for the
weekly sessions, choosing some literature to read and discuss with the group and
preparing the methods course for Saturday mornings. In the end, the full Saturday
program (both the research group and the extracurricular course) took up a consid-
erable portion of my time, and I felt a certain discomfort or unrest. Not yet collect-
ing much data through conventional methods, I feared that I would start lagging
behind with my research. The “emotion diary” proposed by the Researchers’ Affects
project included one section that asked the ethnographer to describe herself in the
field. I sometimes described myself in the third person singular to assume a detached
perspective on my emotions, and the following diary entry illustrates my latent dis-
comfort with engaging in non-conventional research methods:
She is still more the activist than an anthropologist. She writes relatively few field notes,
has not planned any interviews yet and also has not yet invested in getting a discussion
group together. Nevertheless she doesn’t worry too much. The interviews will come at
some point. Everything in its own time. And so activism provides the perfect excuse for
procrastination… (18 April 2015)

Although I often felt uncomfortable with the engaged research I was conducting
taking up so much of my time in the field, I continued to be convinced of its benefits.
However, my doubts as to what it means to conduct engaged research successfully
grew over the course of the project, especially due to three central problems.

Dispirited and Disappointed

Although the decline of the research group was something very gradual, I will high-
light three interrelated and concurrent elements that, in my view, were crucial to its
eventual failure: (1) my own role and the utopian disregard for internal power dif-
ferences; (2) a personal crisis that led me to almost quit my fieldwork; and (3) the
conflicting commitments of the research group participants. During the earlier ses-
sions I remained optimistic, although no one was as full of energy as they were in
the first meeting. Lucia did not come back after the first meeting, as she had to take
care of her sick mother in a rural village. Maria stopped coming after the second
meeting because she was selected for a workshop in the Philippines. Although she
shortly rejoined the group after coming back, she finally dropped out because she
felt she was too far behind. The subsequent week, Rute announced she had been
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 269

accepted into vocational training and the training schedule conflicted with our meet-
ings. What I most struggled with in the first weeks was not so much their absence; I
had counted on losing some participants to other commitments along the way and
had thus set out with more participants than I had initially intended for the project.
Rather, what bothered me was my own role. I had envisioned a group in which I
would not stand above the others, a group in which we could discuss different theo-
retical and empirical topics related to my research, a group in which people would
not always agree with me, and a group in which new ideas would come up, the ideas
I would not have had myself. The reality, however, was different, as my diary entry
from this period suggests:
At our meeting’s concluding round touching on ‘the feelings I go home with,’ I expressed
that I am searching for my role within this group. I have the feeling I am still way too much
a teacher, and that makes it difficult for me to see how we can really become a research
group. On the other hand that is maybe also not very realistic because there is in the end
quite a big difference in experience and knowledge (at least concerning research practice)
and maybe they are not served by me trying to stay in the background all the time. I guess
that they do need a certain degree of training and I can provide that. But as it was today, it
does not yet feel good enough (…) Maybe I am also too impatient, maybe I should invest
in a few sessions before I get anything content-wise back… (Diary entry 18 April 2015,
Dili, Timor-Leste)

Although I repeatedly stressed that I wanted to do this together with them and that
I wanted their input, it became clear that the principle of “everybody is the same,”
which we had included in our ground rules for the group, was utopian. I wanted it
to be true, but it was not. This was for a few reasons: I was further down the road in
my academic preparation; I came from an institution that taught (and expected of)
me a much higher degree of independence and proactivity than their university did;
I came with resources; I introduced the idea and brought them together; I was the
one training them in research methods inside a university classroom; and, after all,
I was a white western foreigner. Protracted colonialism and, to a similar extent,
intensive post-colonial international state-building interventions led most of my
interlocutors to view white foreigners as more knowledgeable than themselves. It
often genuinely confused people when I asked them questions, and it often genu-
inely confused me when I was asked to tell my research participants what the politi-
cal participation of young adults looks like in Timor-Leste, the thing I was actually
trying to learn from them. It was only later, after leaving the field, that the absurdity
of my self-created role also became clear to me. I became aware that my repeated
stressing of a flat hierarchy explicitly neglected the power imbalance that existed
within our group and that it was was based more on wishful thinking than on the
reality we faced.
Another example of my resistance towards the teacher–student dichotomy is that
for some weeks I refrained from providing input about theoretical debates on citi-
zenship, as I did not want to “influence” the participants’ perspective on this issue.
Instead, I wanted to be able to capture the emic understandings of the concept.
Participants, however, at some point expressed their need for this input in order to
get ideas and inspiration as to what to research. I ended up giving an overview of
270 S. ten Brinke

how ideas of citizenship have developed in academia over the past decades and of
the currently held definitions. I also gave them an English academic article about
citizenship education in post-conflict situation written by Yuval-Davies (1999). I
thought this article was quite easy to digest. As their feedback evinced the consider-
able difficulties they were encountering in reading this text, we devoted a whole
Saturday afternoon session to it, which I thus summarized in my diary:
We went through the text bit by bit, sentence by sentence. Aurora had translated the abstract.
Some had read nothing and a few, to my alarm, had translated the textbox with information
about Taylor and Francis, the online publisher. I am so blind to these kind of things. The
idea to tell them to start reading at page 2 under the official title doesn’t even come up! We
translated together. In every sentence there were words that I had to explain. After I referred
a few times to metaphors, Ana asked me what a metaphor was. I explained about the Gulf
War, I told them what the post-conflict situation in South Africa was (Helena was deeply
shocked when I explained what Apartheid was, only Tereza had ever heard something about
it). I explained that Bosnia was not in Africa and I explained what had happened there, etc.
There were so many things I just glossed over, because for me they are normal, they are part
of my common knowledge. Wrestling ourselves through the text, I slowly became aware of
how difficult this was for them, even for the ones who are a bit further in their studies, the
ones who I thought would be able to read the text by Yuval-Davis! But they loved it! Vasco,
who actually had to leave at 2:30pm, in the end left at 3pm because he thought it was so
interesting. We continued until 3:30pm. We were on page 3 by then. We decided to continue
next week with something else because they preferred one of the other options I proposed.
But they had learned a lot today, they said. (Diary entry 2 May 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)

The session on the journal article sobered my view of the epistemological possi-
bilities of this project. It made me realize that it would be unfair to expect from
these students an academic paper at the level that I had unconsciously envisioned.
I realized that I had conceived of a collaborative academic project within my own
epistemological terrain, not theirs. I had expected participants to read academic
texts in English (something they very rarely did at university), to write their own
academic text (something they did just as rarely), and to engage critically with
arguments, both mine and in texts (something they had barely ever been asked to
do before).
While reading the article during this pivotal session, I realized I was asking too
much. In wanting them to be equal research partners, I had neglected the fact that
that the reshuffling of curricula and official languages during their school careers, in
the transition from occupation to independence, had set them at an educational dis-
advantage (ten Brinke 2013). This disadvantage has been further exacerbated by the
severe underfunding of (tertiary) education in post-independence Timor-Leste.
Hence, participants in the project repeatedly stated their wish for me to share my
epistemology with them, to teach them the methods I used, and to teach them how
to research and write about it. The realizations surrounding our diverging epistemo-
logical terrains, the participants’ requests that I teach them about conducting
research, and perhaps the wish to still be able to make something out of the project,
prompted me to increasingly take up the role of the “teacher” within the project and
to “call the shots.” In retrospect, it seems this was the point at which my research
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 271

ceased being collaborative, if it had ever been (Lassiter 2005), and entered the more
passive realm of engaged research (Low and Merry 2010).
The session described in the vignette above motivated me to adjust my method-
ology. I started preparing more content and making handouts that contained the
information we discussed at every meeting. I began to prepare specific assignments
about choosing a topic, defining research questions, thinking of appropriate research
methods, and developing interview questions.6 Although this adjustment of expecta-
tions and methods yielded more concrete results in the participants’ research pro-
posals, it removed the element of collaboration from the project. It also coincided
with other events and dynamics that all contributed to the downward spiral that
would finally lead to the dismantling of the research group. These events and
dynamics were not only related to the research group itself, but also to circum-
stances in my personal life.
It is reasonable to assume that the eventual failing of the research group was to a
significant degree also related to a personal crisis that almost led me to discontinue
my doctoral project. In short, I had to choose between continuing my research in
Timor-­Leste and giving up my research in order to return to Europe to save my
personal relationship. Over the course of several weeks, it was unclear how long I
would stay in the field, and I eventually cut short my fieldwork by 2 months. This
lack of clarity about my ongoing presence in Timor-Leste had negative conse-
quences for the research group, as planning became difficult and the outcomes
became uncertain. Deciding to quit my PhD (a decision I later reversed), however,
alerted me to the central role the research group played in my project:
There are often moments in which it hurts me to stop, to give this up. For example, when I
sit together with the research group and I notice how deeply saddened they are when I
announce that I will quit. And I am conscious that the research group was mostly why I was
doing this [PhD], to try this out with this group, to write about this, to experiment with it.
(Diary entry 27 April 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)

Even throughout the weeks when I did not know whether I would stay in Timor-­
Leste or whether I would quit my fieldwork and fly back home to save my relation-
ship, we continued having weekly meetings, both in the extracurricular course and
in the research group. As the symposium became unrealistic, we decided that we
would finish the preparation of the research proposals together, that the participants
would still carry out their research and write about it, that I would provide my
­feedback via email, and that we would find a way to locally publish the results. It
was a very difficult time for me in which I questioned many of the pillars around
which I had built my existence: personally (a long-term relationship with my part-
ner), professionally (working in academia), and ethically (doing anthropological
research in collaborative and ethically sound ways). All of these seemed to become

6
This meant, for example, that I explained the process of writing a literature review step by step,
outlining the different kinds of sources they could use. It meant preparing matrixes in which they
could fill in the texts they read, the sub-topics they found, and the pages on which they could find
them. It meant I prepared the basic structure of an outline into which they could enter their topics
in order to create their own research outline.
272 S. ten Brinke

unattainable at the time, at least in combination. And even though I was committed
to taking the work with the research group as far as I could, I was also absorbed by
my own emotional distress. Undoubtedly, this diverted my attention, engagement,
and energy from the research group project.
We often insufficiently acknowledge the profound ways in which our personal
situations, relationships, and emotional distress impact our research, perhaps
because this does not fit into conventional formats of academic writing. While much
has been written on how the experience of fieldwork itself impacts on the research-
er’s emotional constitution (see for example Davies and Spencer 2010), the ways
the emotions we bring into the field from “home” impact on our fieldwork have
garnered significantly less attention. By systematically tracking our emotions dur-
ing fieldwork, we can become more cognizant of the complex ways in which a
number of aspects interact: positive and negative emotions; field and epistemic
emotions; emotions arising in the field, and emotions brought into it. It can also help
us analyze how this complex matrix in turn impacts our production of knowledge.
Recognizing this dynamic is a first step, but in discussing it, we have to beware of
falling into the navel-gazing psychologization of fieldwork practice. Instead, we
must develop productive ways of communicating our emotions.
The problem here is that emotions (and especially negative emotions) are
intensely personal and private. Hence, writing about them easily trespasses the line
of what we can or want to communicate to a wider, anonymous readership. I do not
have a formula for striking this difficult balance. Instead, what I attempt in this
chapter is to delineate how the emotions connected to my relationship crisis inter-
acted with my fieldwork, without compromising too much of my own privacy and
that of my partner. To put it briefly, my relationship survived and so did my PhD. The
research group, however, did not. I think, in part, this was due to the disappearance
of a clear aim and time frame and my own waning enthusiasm. This might have led
to the research group participants’ (re)turning to other commitments, the third prob-
lem I want to address here.
Every week at least one of the participants had something else to do, and the
group became progressively smaller. I reached the peak of my frustration one day,
when only Aurora was present. After that session, I wrote the diary entry with which
I preface this chapter (“What did I do wrong?!... Is it really that boring?!”). Most of
the time, there was a reasonable cause for the participants’ absence, as I also
described in my diary:
‘What feeling describes you best today?’7 Irritated, frustrated, disillusioned, sad (…) Ana
wrote me a little note that she had work to do in the afternoon and would maybe (read: not)
come back in the afternoon for the research group. Maria was ill and had to go to the hos-
pital and would come later (read: not). Helena announced that she was tired and still had a
report to write for her work and so she was going home. Then Vasco came to tell me that he
was preparing a group assignment and that his fellow students had demanded him to be
present there. Alfredo was ill and I haven’t heard anything from Eurico in ages anyway.

7
This was one of the questions in the structured “emotion diary” that I kept throughout my field-
work for the Researchers’ Affects project.
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 273

That meant that in the end it was just me and Aurora left in the research group. I could cry.
And I think she could also see that. (Diary entry 13 June 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)

The fact that fewer and fewer participants were committed to the project really
affected me. I began to see their absence almost as a personal insult. At the same
time, I felt that I was personally responsible for this problem, yet I did not know
what to do about it. In retrospect, I see that this reaction was quite self-centered and
unproductive. However, in the heat of the moment and immersed in the complex
emotional landscape of fieldwork, I was confronted with a messy intermingling of
expectations, disappointments, uncertainties, hopes, guilt, inspiration, and bewil-
derment that was, to me, impossible to see through. I repeatedly (and, increasingly,
desperately) asked the participants of the research group how they felt about it and
what we could do differently. They always assured me that they were very inter-
ested, but just really busy. I never managed to elicit a more comprehensive or critical
appraisal of the project from them. In the next section, I will describe the process of
adjustment that followed the collapse of the research group.

Accepting and Adjusting

With the number of participants dwindling and my own motivation at a new low, I
came to accept that maybe my expectations had been too high and that it would be
unfair not to adjust them. I came to accept that in the present situation, with an
unclear perspective on how my fieldwork would continue, I could not expect the
research group to deliver what I had hoped for. It was a difficult and painful process
of letting go, but it was also liberating:
After [the morning program] it seemed like everybody was going to go away and that
nobody felt like participating in the research group. For one moment I thought, ‘Whatever,
I do not care about this anymore,’ but in the end I managed to convince four people to stay.
I thought that in this way I could at least ask them what exactly the problem was. After
lunch I quickly walked to the copy shop to print the handouts I had prepared and I thought
to myself, ‘You know what? I will make today the last session, I will make sure that every-
body knows what to do for their research and then I will let go of it. If I end up staying here
after all, we can still see what we do about it.’ When I came back, Helena, Vasco and
Alfredo were involved in a very personal conversation about boyfriends and girlfriends. I
entered into the conversation and when Aurora arrived she did so too. And so we ended up
having a very interesting conversation mostly about Helena’s problems and we all agreed
that she is accepting too much shit from her brothers. At some point I expressed my aston-
ishment about the fact that in 2012 nobody had told me about these kinds of problems.
Aurora told me it was because at the time I did not speak Tetun so fluently and also because
it was at the end of my stay, when we started working together in the library, that we got to
know each other better. But at that time, we were mostly very busy. Just hanging out
together like we were now, we did not do that back then. And I guess she’s right…
Eventually I did put an end to our conversation and announced that for the time being, this
was going to be the last session of our research group. To my great astonishment, they
seemed genuinely surprised and saddened by this fact. Somehow, this brought me a comfort
that was greater than I could have anticipated. We spoke about interview questions they had
prepared. We spoke about the methods they were going to use and about their time sched-
ule. Of course, they are not nearly as well prepared as I had hoped, but I don’t think I will
274 S. ten Brinke

get much more out of it. And so I think: Let them do their thing and we’ll see how this goes
on. At 3:30pm we said our goodbyes and I took a microlet8 to Lecidere. It felt good to let it
all go. My anger had already vanished completely… I was thankful for the people who had
been willing to stay and thankful for the fact that my Tetun was now good enough and that
I knew the people well enough for them also to share their problems with me. Through the
back window of the microlet I saw the figures of Helena and Vasco becoming smaller and
smaller, and I felt a great affection towards those two little dots that ended up disappearing
behind the bend of the road. (Diary entry 20 June 2015, Dili, Timor-Leste)

The research group cannot simply be considered a failure. The intensive Saturdays
we spent together gave my relationship with some of the participants a depth that
it would otherwise not have had. Our sessions made me aware of very important
elements in my research and helped me better understand other research partici-
pants and processes. I became more attuned to how my research participants took
responsibility (or not) for the course of their lives; the major role played by health
and sickness in the lives of people; the role played by family conflicts in the lives
of students; and, in some ways, even what it means to be a citizen. The sessions
also provided me with new insights about my role as a researcher. They made me
more aware of the intricacies of being a white researcher in a post-colonial context
and the challenges this poses for doing participatory and collaborative research.
They furthermore prompted me to agree with Lassiter (2005) on the crucial impor-
tance of communicating to our academic peers about the challenges and possibili-
ties inherent in collaborative research, in order to further scrutinize its
possibilities.
Parallel to the collapse of the research group, I started working with methods that
were less collaborative and participatory but more successful in generating data.
Solicited by a group of students who very persistently came and asked me to teach
them about leadership, I started giving workshops that I later expanded to other
groups of interested students (from both the National University and a private uni-
versity also situated in Dili). I gave a maximum of three to four workshops to a
group in order to prevent a process of dissolution similar to that of the research
group. I worked with methods I had developed myself based on participatory action
research: working in small groups (with posters, post-its, visualizations, etc.) and
presenting in the plenary. The topics addressed in the workshops included youths’
positions in local hierarchies, the problems youths face in Timor-Leste and the ways
these could be addressed by the youths themselves, and the rights and duties youths
felt they had at different levels in their communities. From my perspective, these
constituted elicitation sessions into which I could integrate my own research ques-
tions. To the participants, they constituted training in group work and public speak-
ing, which made collective knowledge visible and solutions feel more attainable. It
was not nearly as collaborative and participatory an approach as I had wished for,
but participants enjoyed the workshops and took away more from them than they
would have from a regular focus group discussion or interview. So did I.

8
Public transport minivan.
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 275

My “letting go” of the research group project was quite absolute. I had decided
that I would not force field research onto any of the participants, because that would
further contradict the collaborative nature of the project. So I waited to see whether
participants seriously wanted to carry out research. I inquired a few times about it,
and after most participants expressed they were too busy with other commitments,
I did not insist, my disappointment notwithstanding. When I left in October 2015, I
could not help but feel a sense of loss—loss of a dream, loss of a certain degree of
faith in collaborative research, but most of all, a sense of a missed opportunity. I had
learned a lot, I had developed new methods, I had gotten one tiny step closer to
understanding the lives of the people I cared for so much. But I had not accom-
plished what had mattered most to me: the establishment of a collaborative research
group. I felt that I had adapted the project to its dissolution. However, I did not
really know what I should or could have done differently.

Concluding Remarks

After some time and consideration from a distance—revisiting my “emotion diary”

and trying to make sense of the wide array of affective dispositions described in it,
and analyzing the process from the comfortable position of an office desk far away
from the field—it now seems a little clearer to me what I should or could have done
differently.
First, pretending that power imbalances do not exist does not make them disap-
pear. Rather, it discourages us from openly and honestly talking about them, thereby
making it impossible “to find ways of speaking and acting about inequalities”
(Okwaro and Geissler 2015, p. 507). In my case, my unease with the hierarchical
position of a “teacher” that I was ascribed and that I created myself contributed to
feelings of guilt, indebtedness, responsibility, and ultimately disappointment toward
myself. Had I opened up the conversation and addressed the “elephant in the room”
instead of insisting that we were “all the same,” I might have created a new space
for participation, or at least a fairer collaboration. Additionally, in collaborative
projects, we should be aware of the complications that arise in a post-colonial
research context where ideas of superiority and inferiority, domination, power, and
inequality linger, sometimes explicitly but mostly under the surface. However,
avoiding doing participatory research away from “home” (Huschke 2015) in my
view is also not a solution to long-standing global inequalities. Active and reflexive
engagement seems to me a more constructive way of going about it. Within a col-
laborative effort, where different epistemologies meet, it is crucial for both the
researcher and the research participants to be aware of their own epistemological
frameworks and the inevitable potential for ethnocentrism in order to be able to
communicate effectively. Avoiding this in the hope of rendering it unimportant cre-
ates frustration, sustains power imbalances, and most probably results in disap-
pointment for the people involved.
276 S. ten Brinke

Second, engagement and collaboration make little sense if they are built purely
on the researcher’s wish to soothe her own consciousness by “giving back.” In my
present view, collaborative research succeeds only when actively solicited by the
research participants themselves. Although I had been asked explicitly to run a par-
ticipatory research project by my research participants during my previous research,
I actually commenced the project two and a half years after it had been requested,
when most of those who had asked for it had finished studying and were taking up
demanding jobs. Consequently, I offered a collaborative project to people who had
never actively asked for one, and subsequently I was disappointed when I did not
see them taking ownership of a “collaborative” project that I had more or less single-­
handedly created.
Third, the relationships that are established within engaged research have
strongly affective dimensions. The expectations one has of these relationships play
an important role in emotional dynamics such as excitement and exhilaration, but
also frustration, disappointment, or even anger. Once I came to feel personally hurt
by people’s disengagement from the project, the alarm bells should have rung. Had
I at that point, or preferably even earlier, more actively reflected upon and analyzed
what these emotions meant and where they came from, I might have been more
aware of the contradictory position I was taking up inside the research group, and I
might have been able to more successfully adapt.
Finally, and related to the preceding three points, in hindsight, there are actually
interesting parallels between how the personal lives of the research participants and
my own impacted the common research project. While their academic system con-
strained them by putting them at an educational disadvantage (changing educational
paradigms and underfunding), my academic system constrained my liberty in doing
truly collaborative research (through strict PhD funding regulations). While they
had other commitments in the form of university courses or jobs (or both), I had to
invest my time primarily in the more conventional research activities that were
expected from me. And finally, while they were often constrained by family rela-
tions (taking care of sick relatives, being involved in family disputes, having to
conform to household duties), I was involved in an emotional relationship crisis that
constrained my commitment and availability to the project. Hence, while we were
all, in our own ways, navigating the complex terrains of intersection between our
private and public lives, I considered my own constraints to be challenges, while I
interpreted theirs as signs of declining commitment or enthusiasm. This reveals the
importance of open and honest communication within collaborative projects, and
especially the importance of communicating on truly equal terms. It also puts
emphasis once again on the need for the researcher to reflect not only on their own
position but also on the position of the people they work with. Analyzing our own
emotional reactions, due to their deeply social nature, may aid us in this endeavor.
In this complex field of power, guilt, excitement, disappointment, cross-cultural
encounter, inspiration, disagreement, and commitment, it would only seem logical
to keep track of the emotions that, on the one hand, are created in this field of ten-
sion, and, on the other hand, are created elsewhere but profoundly impact it.
Surprisingly, this is something we hardly ever do. If we want to develop more recip-
Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed… 277

rocal and collaborative research, we need honesty, communication, and reflection.

This, in turn, requires a frank and systematic documentation and analysis of the
affective dimensions of our research efforts. While I documented my emotions sys-
tematically in the field, I only analyzed them after coming back. I would argue that
developing a methodology of reflection on the affective dimensions of (collabora-
tive) research while submerged in it is still a field open for further exploration. With
this chapter, I aimed to take a first step towards a more reflexive approach by show-
ing how my own dreams, expectations, and ideals were put to the test in the field, as
well as by dwelling on the methodological and emotional adjustments that I made
across my various encounters in the field. In doing so, I have endeavored to contrib-
ute to the reflection about and further development of an array of methods in whose
potential I still firmly believe.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for their valu-
able thoughts and stimulating feedback. I also wish to thank Lesley Branagan for her generous,
precise, and constructive language editing. Finally, and most of all, I want to thank the participants
of the collaborative research project for the inspiration they gave me and the lessons they taught me.

References

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chegaReport.htm
Davies, J., & Spencer, D. (Eds.). (2010). Emotions in the field: The psychology and anthropology
of fieldwork experience. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
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 Part VI
Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching
and Fieldwork
Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching
and Fieldwork: Introduction

Kelvin E. Y. Low and Noorman Abdullah

Introduction

Do emotions matter? Is there an “anti-emotional culture” (Okely, this volume) in

research, writing, teaching, and other academic regimes of professional conduct? Is
the academic lack of attention to vulnerability an outcome of how these expressions
have been posed as a nonproblem in pedagogy and fieldwork? What can we do as
fieldworkers to stimulate a more emotionally aware academic and research milieu?
Under the influence of institutional emotion regimes that underscore observer
detachment and neutrality in fieldwork, emotions have been downplayed, if not dis-
associated, with expected modes of professional academic conduct. These regimes
continue to place a premium on validity, objectivity, and credibility.
The three authors in this section problematize such hegemonic positions that are
often sustained in various domains of academia. In their writings, they recognize
and reflect upon the centrality of emotions and their associated links to identity,
fieldwork conduct, and sociality. In different yet complementary ways, all three
contributors consider the role, impact, and valence of “emotional labor” (Hochschild
1983; Lutz 2017; McQueeney and Lavelle 2017) and how this notion can be built
into fieldwork and beyond, in pedagogical and other settings in the social sciences.
More crucially, research, writing, and teaching methods need to critically engage
with emotions and reinsert them into academic emotion regimes as part of the proj-
ect of developing meaningful scholarship and pedagogy. Scholars who assume dif-
ferent and interconnected roles as researchers, instructors, and academic faculty
members must both perform and carefully reflect on the emotional labor that is
continually negotiated across a variety of scholarly domains and in relation to dif-
ferent interlocutors within and beyond the field. In this respect, deliberating on these

K. E. Y. Low (*) · N. Abdullah

Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 281

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_24
282 K. E. Y. Low and N. Abdullah

issues unveils and acknowledges the epistemological value of emotions (Stodulka

et al. 2019) in academia and other social domains.
A range of emotions abound in our profession, both as researchers in the field
(Stodulka 2015) and as instructors in the classroom. The question is what we do
with them, and how we navigate them. Instead of being displaced in the academe,
the three contributors encourage such emotions to be reflexively incorporated in
research and pedagogy in variegated ways. This is done to reconcile the analytical
weight and sociocultural importance of emotions with what we do in the different
spheres of intellectual engagement that we address below. By exercising such
reflexivity, the authors here emphasize the pertinence of emotional labor as a
resource in generating further analytical insights on researcher positionality, peda-
gogical training and institutional conduct.
Noorman Abdullah (this volume) calls for researchers to be “emotionally aware”
in presenting their ethnographic analyses. Such awareness runs a gamut spanning
vulnerability, emotional danger, discomfort, remorse, surprise, fear, and emotional
stability. This nonexhaustive spectrum of emotions ought to form a part of the
research epistemology of social science endeavors. Managing one’s emotions, as
Strauss (this volume) and Abdullah point out, are part of the process of generating
as well as analyzing data with the aim of knowledge production. In both chapters,
the authors oscillate between emotional discomfort and awareness in the course of
conceiving and conducting their respective research projects. Strauss is keenly
aware of the gender divide in her research context and how that led to moments of
discomfort. For Abdullah, episodes of studying spirit possession opened up emo-
tional subjectivities between him and his respondents which required careful intro-
spection and management of field relations. He also discusses the latent emotional
impact that research can carry beyond the field and into the social circles of the
researcher. Furthermore, he notes the expectations surrounding male researchers,
who are supposed to be emotionally absent if not stoic in their roles as fieldworkers.
Gender positionality is both divided and ascribed between the two sexes. In these
various contexts, how do researchers maneuver between their emotional states and
the extent to which they continue to participate in fieldwork and sociality? How far
does one engage with emotional moments in the course of gathering data? What
types of self-care strategies (DeLuca and Maddox 2016) do researchers have at their
disposal when confronting these moments, so that emotional experiences and labor
are not truncated and designated as individual failings on the part of the anthropolo-
gist (McQueeney and Lavelle 2017)? Emotional life, after all, is part and parcel of
social life and fieldwork itself is a complex emotional undertaking (Lutz 2017). If
anything, what is produced alongside the researcher’s range of emotions—fear,
anxiety, distress, and vulnerability—is an empathy that lends nuance to our under-
standing of how others’ emotional lives are both studied and conveyed responsibly
(McQueeney and Lavelle 2017).
Fieldwork encounters, as a result, became more dialogic, vicariously felt, and
deeply understood as a consequence of our paying closer and more careful attention
to emotions. These are the core arguments of the three chapters in this section, dem-
onstrating analytical relevance and resonance across the different emotion regimes
Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching and Fieldwork: Introduction 283

prevailing in pedagogy, research, and academic institutions. Emotions do matter, so

long as emotional involvement is carried out in careful concordance and calibration
with the exercise of field reflexivity. Data generation and analysis can be further
enriched by making the ethnographer and her emotional state of being visible,
including feelings of discomfort (DeLuca and Maddox 2016). In sum, these chap-
ters invite a rethinking of emotion regimes that have traditionally tempered param-
eters of objectivity and detached researcher positioning. Emotional epistemologies
matter as they are variable, contextually determined, and impactful.
If emotions matter for fieldwork and the process of research and writing, then
how does one harness emotional reflexivity in the classroom and its related peda-
gogical contexts? In Annika Strauss’s attempt to accomplish this, she raises ques-
tions of embodiment, research ethics, emotions and self-reflexivity, emphasizing the
salience of students’ own emotions and subjectivities in the course of fieldwork as
well as their post-fieldwork reflexivity. Strauss recruited students into a research
project with refugees in Germany, where the former took on the role of volunteers;
part of their fieldwork training included taking down notes which were later openly
reflected upon. She emphasizes that engaging with such reflections among students
required an empathetic approach, especially in order to unpack the sociopolitical
aspects of classroom emotions, as well as to carve out a conducive learning environ-
ment. In the end, what was imparted to her students is the fact that fieldwork is most
transformative when their embodied experiences can be taken into serious consider-
ation. Further attempts are also made to sharpen their sensory and emotional cogni-
zance, in order to connect their volunteer experience to fieldwork analysis more
critically and productively. In a similar vein, Abdullah and Okely also recommend
a closer look at emotional dispositions and management in teaching contexts and
academic relationships, such as those between advisors and students, or among col-
leagues on a faculty. In order to carry out and fruitfully discuss “emotionally aware
ethnography” (Abdullah), the emotional complexities and challenges researchers
and teachers experience can be worked out across these different sets of social rela-
tions before, in the course of, and after fieldwork. As informal mentoring sessions,
they respond to the stoic and positivist expectations of emotion regimes. These
endeavors also counter-critically address how emotions, vulnerability, frustration
and uncertainty are experienced and confronted in different measures. Recognizing
the place of emotional labor, and exercising emotional reflexivity, can be both
empowering and illuminating as it provides opportunities and possibilities for
strengthening our analytical approaches, as well as complementing our teaching
endeavors and helping to resolve the emotional experiences and reactions of both
students and teachers. Thus, emotions should form an important part of fieldwork
training and reflection.
In addition to these emotive dimensions, Strauss also points out the importance
of embodied training for students. Drawing links between the body, the senses, and
social status, Strauss engages her students in various embodied exercises compris-
ing multiple calibrations of their walking styles, bodily postures and facial expres-
sions. In so doing, she opens up discussions among her students on whether such
embodied behaviors are similarly observed either among their informants or
284 K. E. Y. Low and N. Abdullah

t­hemselves, and how such behavior resonates with their fieldwork experiences.
Further connections are then established between such exercises and the theoretical
and methodological literature. Judith Okely, in retrospect, recounts a spectrum of
situations in which emotions and subjectivity have been dismissed as irrelevant or
private over a range of institutional contexts. These also include authorship and
writing style, doctoral supervision, and acts of reciprocity. Beginning with a critique
of the Cartesian dualism as disembodied and how the dominant history of the social
sciences is one of positivism, Okely makes a case for how the personal is enmeshed
with the political. She suggests to researchers the imperative of departing from
detachment and disengagement, proposing that “the fieldworker’s experiences stim-
ulate emergent theories.” Emotions are no longer relegated to the private sphere of
one’s experience, be it in the classroom, in the field, or in various interactional set-
tings. Instead, they possess pertinent epistemological value. Emotions are reflected
upon at the different levels of the self, the interactional, and the institutional. As an
example, Okely draws on her own experience at a conference, where the debate
centers on the question of whether individual presence is a complement or an obsta-
cle to the scientific objectivity of fieldwork and analysis. The employment of the
first person in academic writing is also deliberated upon. The fieldworker’s position
and specificity, including her emotions, are subsequently re-inserted into Okely’s
analysis. At the same time, she identifies what she calls “emotional drives,” includ-
ing nostalgia, childhood experiences, and sensory impressions. These refer to how
fieldworkers’ varied and individualized connections to the past organize and frame
how research is approached.
Drawing upon one’s emotional biography is likewise an important theme for all
three authors. They describe how such linkages to the past color and influence field-
work encounters in the present. Such encounters include being positioned as insider
or outsider, or being positioned vis-à-vis discomforting social realities in the field.
Other examples involve emotional control or emotional outburst in situations in
which researchers constantly have to calibrate their emotional conduct in the pro-
cess of gathering data and maintaining researcher-respondent relations. Abdullah’s
personal biography of experiencing death in the family due to spirit infliction
became an impetus for his own research many years later. Such research is entan-
gled with embodied experiences that are emotionally charged, challenging, as well
as comprising vulnerable episodes in the course of fieldwork and in the social
worlds which we inhabit and study. In Strauss’s case, she was aware of her position
as a Western woman in the refugee camp, and understood that this slice of her iden-
tity, intersecting with being a female researcher, was foregrounded as a point of
curiosity in the field. Paying attention to our own emotional and embodied biogra-
phy is therefore a way to be sensitized to how such reflexivity adds to a richer com-
prehension not only of the people whom we study, but also of ourselves and our
analyses (McQueeney and Lavelle 2017). The self is embodied, sensorial, posi-
tioned, intersubjective, and political. Efforts to carry out in-depth and honest ethno-
graphic work can only be truly successful when one engages with the self, and when
one acknowledges and constantly re-negotiates the multiple positionalities that are
Unpacking Emotion Regimes in Teaching and Fieldwork: Introduction 285

taken up, for information is ‘always mediated through the self’ (DeLuca and
Maddox 2016, p. 286).
Our emotional capacities—complex and multi-dimensional means of human
communication—are the very foundation that makes social relations possible in the
first place. In his Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage (Rosaldo 1989), Renato Rosaldo
writes that he only came to appreciate the meaning of rage that emerged from grief,
loss, and bereavement characterizing Ilongot headhunting after the sudden death of
his wife and fellow anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, while both of them
were in the field. In his candid and intellectually stimulating account, he recognizes
the cultural and communicative force of emotions in fieldwork. This emphasis on
emotions also reignited the methodological imperative to incorporate our emotional
experiences as fieldworkers into the meaningful interpretation and writing of ‘our
others.’
Emotions matter because they are resonant throughout and beyond the research
and writing processes, as well as across a range of other academically related prac-
tices, interactions, and sociopolitical intersections. More crucially, they matter
because they reflect and stem from individual behavior, the social, political, and
economic, in a whole host of everyday life activities and tensions.

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Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions,
Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts
and Spirits

Noorman Abdullah

My interest in studying ghosts and spirits is borne out of my own emotional memo-
ries and experiences of loss as I was growing up. My maternal great-grandmother,
who migrated to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia in the early 1920s, passed
away from what was perceived by many among our extended kin to be the outcome
of a malevolent spirit affliction. I was barely 6 years old then. Petrified and baffled
by the spate of events and emotions that ensued before her demise, I attempted to
banish these memories away. While this was successful as the years passed by, her
image and the circumstances of her passing continue to linger on. This incident
offers a meaningful and profound level of reflection, what I term a “critical moment,”
which gradually piqued my intellectual curiosity to better understand this phenom-
enon. At the same time, I braced myself for what were to be emotionally difficult
and vulnerable experiences.
The field of studying ghosts, spirits, and other supernatural entities is filled with
numerous emotional encounters: pain, sorrow, feelings of discomfort and fear, uncer-
tainty, and vulnerability. As I engaged with different social actors in these settings
afflicted by supernatural entities, I often found myself lodged into unsettling encoun-
ters. Increased emphasis has been assigned to the emotional dimensions of research,
particularly from feminist ethnographies that have facilitated a deeper understanding
of reflexive modes of knowledge (Behar and Gordon 1995; Golde 1986; Wolf 1996).
With some important exceptions (Blanes 2006; Favret-Saada 2012; Goulet and

An earlier version of this paper appeared online as a working paper in the International Sociological
Association (ISA) E-Symposium, Vol. 1 (3). The current version is substantially revised. The author
wishes to thank Kelvin E.Y. Low and other reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

N. Abdullah (*)
Department of Sociology and Department of Malay Studies, National University of
Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 287

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_25
288 N. Abdullah

Miller 2007; Zablocki 2001), most scholars who have studied the supernatural have
not taken a more explicitly reflexive, embodied and “emotionally-­aware” method-
ological approach in presenting their ethnographic findings. Lee (1987) further
observes that many scholars reject personal accounts of the paranormal in view of its
ostensible failure to conform to the regimes of scientific validity, detachment, and
credibility that ground research. There is, however, much to gain from what has been
variously described as “experience-near” ethnography (Wikan 1991) or an anthro-
pology of “extraordinary experience” (Goulet and Miller 2007). Affective experi-
ence, introspection, and emotional dialogue in research comprise complex and
multifaceted intersections that concern the vulnerability of researchers on the one
hand, and the “others” ethnographers study on the other. The concept of “vulnerabil-
ity” is further elaborated in the next section.
The arguments of this chapter are threefold. First, this chapter problematizes the
relatively neglected issue of “vulnerability” in ethnographic research and for the
ethnographer, with particular emphasis on research on ghosts and spirits. Kuiper
(this volume) who studies uchawi (or witchcraft) in Tanzania similarly argues that
“anthropologists need to have the audacity to be vulnerable, in the field as well as in
writing.” I present select ethnographic experiences and “critical moments” of spirit
possession among Malay-Muslim families in Singapore and Malaysia. This is done
to exemplify different vulnerable encounters in the field that ethnographers may
have to confront, but rarely address methodologically or in writing, given the emo-
tion regimes of “objectivity” and “emotional stoicism” that prevail in academia. In
the process of “researching the researcher” (Campbell 2002) and “writing about the
self” (Leibing and McLean 2007), I draw on my own biographically grounded,
embodied, and emotional experiences as a means of analytically discussing vulner-
ability in ethnographic research. Rather than positioning such experiences and
reflections of and from the self as a methodological limitation or as antithetical to
reason, engaging in experiences that draw on personal commitments does not pre-
clude analytical deliberations in ethnographic writing. Such self-examination,
which situates and interrogates the self within the research process and its written
product, therefore constitutes a “crucial part of the research setting” (Diphoorn
2013, p. 206). The personal is always “hybrid in character, in that it blends and
combines an individual’s personal story with his or her scholarly story” (Burnier
2006, p. 412) and “has never been subordinate in the private world of fieldnotes”
(Atkinson et al. 2003, p. 60), or “completely at home” (Danahay-Reed 1997, p. 4).
Second, through the lens of researching ghosts and spirits, I show how these emo-
tional experiences impinge on social relations both within and beyond the field.
Ethnographic research is saturated with relations that are not necessarily always docu-
mented and referenced in our ethnographies and intellectual oeuvres (Grindal and
Salamone 2006; Handler 2004). How do ethnographers competently negotiate and
manage the tensions, conflict, and vulnerability that surface in the course of fieldwork,
and their effects on both professional and private lives? Could it also possibly be that
feelings of vulnerability in academic training and development have been given little
attention in the methodological literature because these have been postured as nonprob-
lems? Was the apprehension experienced during encounters in the field with ghosts and
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 289

spirits unfounded and thus “irrational”? In this manner, ethnographers are entwined in
meaningful and often emotionally intense relationships that frequently spill over the
boundary between us and our respondents in the field. Those who welcome ethnogra-
phers into their social worlds—respondents, friends, families, and extended kin—do so
personally, affectingly, and emotionally, which in turn involve reciprocal loyalties,
duties, and obligations. Ethnographers are all too often regarded as the prototypical
individual “self” or “person,” or, at best, positioned within academia, disregarding our
commitment to the community of kin that we as ethnographers belong to. The domi-
nant emphasis in the ethnographic canon is rather on the immersion among and rela-
tions with the informants and interlocutors whom we are studying.
Straddled between what Keane terms “an epistemology of intimacy and estrange-
ment” (Keane 2005, p. 62), I conclude by proposing practical methodological initia-
tives, both at the institutional and informal levels, which could be potentially
undertaken to manage vulnerability in the field and address dominant emotion regimes
in academic settings. Through this exercise in working through experiences of vulner-
ability and other critical moments, the broad aim of this chapter is to help transform
ethnographic field research and relationships, to help foster a greater commitment to
emotional awareness in ethnography and in our relations within and beyond the field.

Making Sense of Vulnerability

To be sure, the concept of “vulnerability” I use here does not make reference to
blanket policy approaches that do not adequately account for “their own life-world,
capacities, and strategies of the people as actors, nor on the structural and institu-
tional context and dynamics of their position in society and economy” (Nageeb
2008, p. 245; Lachenmann 1999). Following Behar (1996), “vulnerability” seen
through the lens of the supernatural moves beyond the simplified “victimization” of
social actors and recognizes instead their potential agency and capacity. Experiences
of vulnerability can be both debilitating and meaningful lived experiences for eth-
nographers and respondents alike. Therefore, embracing and reflecting on the rela-
tional and emotive dimensions of vulnerability is not a “problem” which needs to be
resolved through recourse to “objective,” “scientific” knowledge but rather through
meaningful engagement with and reflection upon such “critical moments.” This
enables ethnographers to revisit and redraw the boundaries of research and contem-
porary ethnographic field methods.
Though this attention to vulnerability is gradually evolving, much of the extant
literature continues to reinforce dominant emotion regimes.1 Ethnographers have

1
These include the emotional conventions that hail the ostensibly fearless status of ethnographers
(Fincham 2006; Vail 2001). Often, they privilege the rights and safety of respondents over ethnog-
raphers’ (Rosenbaum and Langhinrichsen-Rohling 2006). In many research cultures, ethnogra-
phers are assumed to be able and in many ways expected to “rough it out” in the field. These
experiences are proudly worn as a badge of academic resilience and hardiness.
290 N. Abdullah

addressed “vulnerability” when framed in terms of immediate physical threats to

their personal safety (Gwiasda et al. 1997; Williams et al. 1992). With the exception
of a few cases, field research is often described as a generally safe endeavor, with
“common sense,” or what some term as a “sixth sense,” believed to be all that eth-
nographers require when entering field settings (Renzetti and Lee 1993; Williams
et al. 1992).
While it is important to acknowledge this dimension, vulnerability needs to be
re-conceptualized to encompass other forms, which can include physical danger,
but also emotional, ethical, and professional dimensions. Lee-Treweek and
Linkogle’s (2000) work, Danger in the Field, is instructive here. Using these four
categories of danger, which are not necessarily mutually distinct but intercon-
nected, they argue that although danger in the field is a distressing experience for
ethnographers, it does to a large extent enrich understandings of the field site
(Lee-Treweek and Linkogle 2000, p. 2). Of immediate interest is their discussion
of the issue of emotional danger, by which they mean a serious impediment to
the ethnographer’s emotional stability brought about by negative emotional
states induced by the research process (ibid., p. 4). I extend this argument by
referring to vulnerability not only as emotional discomfort, but also as distress
and feelings of dissonance which can further affect our familial and other per-
sonal relationships beyond the ethnographic field site. Researcher vulnerabilities
related to isolation, fear, loneliness, and despair in the field can also affect our
professional connections with colleagues at work. Paying attention to and reflect-
ing on researcher vulnerabilities enables us to challenge perceptions of ourselves
and our relations to others within and beyond field research.

Experiences and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits

The emotional bearing of undertaking ethnographic research on ghosts and spirits

is potentially a crucial source of further insight in re-conceptualizing the vulnerabil-
ity of the ethnographer. In fact, the discomfort of witnessing tension, violence, ill-
ness, or even death as an outcome of perceived spirit affliction and encounters with
other supernatural entities needs to be situated in terms of our own involvement in
the actions of others in the field. Following Kelvin Low (2005, 2009) and Paul
Stoller (1997), ethnographic research is an emotionally embodied and sensuous
encounter.
With some exceptions (Birckhead 2004; Blanes 2006; Palmer 2001; Zablocki
2001), methodological quandaries concerning the emotional vulnerability faced by
ethnographers studying religious and spiritual experiences in relation to spirit pos-
session, and their exclusion from dominant academic regimes have yet to be given
serious attention. Palmer (2001), for instance, problematizes the extent to which
researchers should be open to spiritual beliefs and practices. She explores several of
her own experiences in which she has been personally affected—both spiritually
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 291

and emotionally—by her involvement in religious movement rituals and her encoun-
ters with their charismatic leaders. Zablocki similarly recounts a personal journey
which made him realize the considerable power of religion in his life. As he puts it,
“religion has always terrified me especially when the spirit is moving and has us in
its thrall” (Zablocki 2001, p. 227). Here, he reports on his childhood mystical expe-
riences that demonstrated “how easy it would be to slip away entirely from the
socially constructed world that parents and teachers called “reality.”’ However, the
privileging of rituals in studies of the supernatural, often typified as “exciting” and
“exotic” in the eyes of ethnographers, have instead steered attention away from
these research processes. These involve not only our personalized, emotional expe-
riences of vulnerability when studying such issues, but also our social relations
beyond the field site. Through my field notes, diaries, and other modes of data
recording, I introduce in this chapter several “critical moments” of ethnographic
detail in my study of ghosts, spirits, and possession. These visceral and emotional
moments of ethnographic discomfort can be epistemologically informative and are
sources of potential insight (Davies 2010; Hume and Mulcock 2004) that challenge
the traditional legitimacy and authority ascribed to “objectivity” and “Western
rationality.”
In spite of the fact that I conducted research in other vulnerable contexts in 2005
(Abdullah 2005), I found that these situations involving ghosts and spirits have been
difficult for me to confront. My interest was in scrutinizing the manner in which
Muslim practitioners in Singapore and Malaysia perceive misfortune and debilita-
tion to be ascribed to supernatural agency, and the resulting pursuit of relief from
such distress. I aimed to interrogate how such social actors meaningfully managed
and negotiated their identities as “good Muslims” during episodes of spirit affliction
in their everyday life.
Throughout the research process, I relied upon different methods to gather data
concerning the sociality of spirit possession amongst Malay-Muslims: ethnographic
fieldwork, informal conversations, in-depth narrative interviews, popular and theo-
logical secondary literature, as well as historical archival data that included colonial
annual reports and religious documents such as Islamic religious Islamic sermons,
texts, and pamphlets/booklets. Other resources included newspapers from both
English and Malay dailies in Singapore and Malaysia, ministerial speeches, and
government printed material. The heart of this study was nevertheless primary eth-
nographic data gathered from fieldwork both in highly urbanized Singapore and
parts of Malaysia. Participant observation from case studies and narrative inter-
views spanned a period of 13 months.
My peers and respondents often perceived the environment in which I con-
ducted participant observation as not necessarily “safe.” Neither did I feel entirely
at ease as a result of such impressions. This is illustrated in one of the entries in my
field diary2:

2
Field notes were written on pen and paper in my field diaries. The diaries captured largely emotional
and personal experiences, but also included methodological, analytical, and descriptive notes.
292 N. Abdullah

It did not help that many people in my personal and professional life, my family and peers
especially, habitually advised me to take care of myself before I embarked on my partici-
pant observation: ‘Be careful not to get too involved;’ ‘Make sure you don’t trust what they
say;’ ‘Try not to believe everything they tell you;’ ‘These are dangerous places, so be care-
ful.’ The inventory went on and on. I found this particularly irksome at first, but then when
I observed my first healing ritual and heard Nurul [a respondent] screaming, I saw myself
questioning my own beliefs of the uncanny, which was really disconcerting since I always
avoided broaching the issue. Now the fear suddenly surged through my body in full force.
(Field diary, n.d.)

On the one hand, I found what some peers conveyed about my respondents to be
“problematic”; professionally, these are ascriptions that I wanted to critically
unpack. On the other hand, there were moments when such thoughts surfaced in my
mind, especially when I was confronted with situations in which I felt potentially
vulnerable. These emotional experiences allowed me to engage in data generation
and interpretation accordingly, particularly in relation to what constituted “data,”
that is, how far I was willing to push to emotionally participate in fieldwork and the
framing of questions toward my respondents. At the same time, such experiences
became a burden to me, because inasmuch as I attempted to brush them aside, the
more thoughts about spirit mediums and members perceived to be afflicted by spir-
its surfaced.
I incessantly asked myself: Would I really get ‘hurt?’ Are they as nice as they looked?
Would they expect me to participate in certain rituals which I did not want to engage in, but
that would be important in obtaining data? … Would the food and drink offered by spirit
mediums and other members in the families I observed be ‘safe’ to consume, given that
food and drink are construed to be potential carriers of magical spells and incantations?
Would my rejection of such food then reflect poorly on my position as a researcher? Not
only that, but would it also portray me as ill-mannered for not following the norms of reci-
procity and respect in consuming your hosts’ food as expected in the field here, and for not
repaying their willingness to talk to me, which could then affect the data I collected? (Field
diary, n.d.)

My experiences paralleled anthropologist Tessa Diphoorn’s own reflexive discus-

sion of her “emotionality of participation” and management of risk in her work on
violence and security agencies in South Africa.
I increasingly asked myself why I had selected this topic. Am I a researcher who wants to
‘seek out danger’ and who thrives on the ‘business of thrill seeking?’ (Diphoorn 2013,
p. 213)

The kind of emotional vulnerability I experienced was difficult for me to describe to

others. There were certain episodes during my research where I wavered about ven-
turing further in the field site, especially in its earlier phases. I often assumed that
these experiences would subside when I became more at ease in the field. However,
there were always periods in the field when I suddenly felt fearful. These “critical
moments” that captured this vulnerability made me reflect upon my ­emotional
engagement in the field, and how this engagement affected ethnographic data
construction:
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 293

I finally managed to secure an interview with a bomoh (spirit intermediary), Nek Siyah,
who was introduced to me by Delia [one of my relations]. I felt elated! Though I knew by
now that I did not want to focus my study on rituals of spirit interference, this was extremely
exciting news, since it has been months before a bomoh was willing to talk to me about their
work, since I was told by most of my respondents that they were often known to be carriers
of secret, spiritual knowledge. I nevertheless decided just to go into the interview process
with an open mind and heart. When I entered into Nek Siyah’s home, I was greeted by an
elderly woman who was wearing a simple, nondescript baju kurung3 and a tudung serkup.4
She appeared robust and strong, even though she claimed she was well over seventy years
of age and a great-grandmother. She was generally forthcoming about her work and what
she did—asserting that she was a “good Muslim” and always insisting she carried out the
work of God, but did not go into much detail when I asked further. While the conversation
I had with her was extremely engaging, it was often marked by moments of silent uneasi-
ness and discomforting stares. What struck me as extremely disquieting, however, was at
the end of my interview, where she looked at me intensely, clasped my arm, and with a very
low and deep voice, said:
Nek Siyah: There are some things that I shouldn’t have told you, cu.5 But right now,
since you are studying this [issue], you better be careful now where you
go and walk…not under big trees, or be careful of the food that you eat at
some places, ok? Don’t offend anyone…What I tell you is private. You
know if you let any of this known, you’ll know what can happen to you or
your family.’
Author: Eh, what do you mean by that, Nek6?
Nek Siyah: (laughs) Why are you afraid, cu? You are a good person. You don’t have
to worry. God is always here to protect you.

This felt extremely uncomfortable and unnerving, even though she laughed at me at the end
and claimed that this was uttered only in jest, exclaiming very candidly that she had known
this was part of my research and was ‘aware’ of my fear, even though we had never com-
municated prior to this meeting! Her later claim was that my close involvement with the
‘victim’ of a spiritual incursion she was attempting to heal, and the close fictive kinship ties
that emerged between the household and me, opened up the possibility of malevolent spirits
harming me. Nonetheless, I thanked her for the interview, and walked away, always wary
thereafter that ‘something’ was following me home from behind, especially since it was
quite late in the night. I increasingly became paranoid. Was this really happening to me?
Could something bad happen to me? I was supposed to talk to her again one of the days next
week to talk about her life further. But should I really? I knew I was afraid, I could sense it
in my heart, and I felt vulnerable, but my professional side wanted to see through the next
interview. Though in this instance I did return to talk to her, since this was part of my pro-
fessional training, I cannot deny that I was fearful and extremely uneasy during my next
meeting with Nek Siyah. (Fieldnotes; Interview, n.d.)

In addition, I often had vivid and lucid dreams, in which I, or one of my family
members, was afflicted by a supernatural entity. I felt distressed, vulnerable and
emotionally sapped. I also felt that it was difficult for me to continue to carry out
research, though I was perennially advised by my respondents during periods of my

3
A loose-fitting two-piece long-sleeved dress normally worn by Malay women.
4
An elastic cap-like bonnet to cover the hair of Muslim women popular in Singapore.
5
An abbreviation for cucu (Malay for grandchild).
6
Malay for grandmother, or a term of address given to elderly women.
294 N. Abdullah

observation to take precautions. Such experiences mirrored other ethnographers

who had dreams, illuminations, visions and ineffable, “extraordinary” field encoun-
ters (Diphoorn 2013; Wilkes 2007) that produced a range of emotions including
fear, outrage, anxiety and sadness.
For weeks I had recurring nightmares of the woman’s face floating out of a bathtub and
coming toward me, on the verge of vomiting over me. Simply thinking about that incident
brings back that atrocious taste into my mouth. (Diphoorn 2013, p.210)

Wilkes reflects on the power of dreams in fieldwork and writes on this in the follow-
ing episode:
It was a lucid dream, one in which the dreamer is aware she or he is dreaming. It was as if
I was standing outside of myself at the bedside watching myself sleep. At the same time, I
felt as if I was fully conscious. As I slept, I heard a voice, sharp and insistent. I could not
grasp the words, or comprehend their meaning…Ultimately it became clear the voice
would not leave me alone. So I rolled over in my sleep toward the sound, and there, at the
edge of my bed, to my astonishment (even in my sleep), stood a golden eagle. It spoke to
me in English and simply said, “Come with me”. I was frightened and tried to roll away…
(2007, p. 69)

In many ways, this experience of emotional vulnerability never subsided. I was

certain that I had to reflect on and manage these critical moments, and felt that my
fieldwork and data collection could not progress effectively if I was not able to con-
front these issues head-on. What was important through my reflection on these criti-
cal moments was that the cumulative pressure from the field, the initial difficulty in
gaining access given the sensitivity of spirit possession, and the general shortage of
time and resources, further contributed to the distressing character of the endeavor
of data generation. However, I came to realize that I needed to slowly experience
this vulnerability as an embodied researcher, in view of the fact that “the emotional
intensity of experiences with the paranormal can enable anthropology … to further
harness and advance ethnographic knowledge and practices” (Lee 1987, p. 69).
These critical moments guided me through my periods of participant observation
and data collection. By forcing me to experience such emotional and spiritual vul-
nerability first-hand, they also allowed me to make sense of and empathetically
understand the experiences of my respondents and the prominence of emotions in
their everyday lives when confronted with the supernatural.
My experiences not only generated a strong response from respondents. Given
that they helped me frame questions during my interviews and in conversation with
my respondents, these moments also opened intersubjective and dialogic encoun-
ters through which my respondents could interpret my emotions and behavior, as
well as the responses these conjured from them. For instance, my presence and
vulnerability during a healing session involving a female respondent who was per-
ceived by her family to be afflicted by a malevolent spirit enabled those attending
the session to share their own emotional states, after I expressed my emotions and
experiences of vulnerability to some of them.
Many times throughout fieldwork however, I felt as though ethnographers were
expected to act as semi-robotic, fearless practitioners capable of doing research
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 295

seamlessly. These professional expectations to be fearless are especially clear in the

case of male researchers, who have often been socialized both personally and pro-
fessionally to be “emotionally immune” and capable of suppressing their emotions
(Pollard 2009). “Maleness” is hence not necessarily seen as advantageous, espe-
cially since the emotion regime of masculine emotional stoicism (Kimmel 1996;
Sattel 1988) has been strongly entrenched in relation to appropriate gender perfor-
mance in many academic cultures. While there has been a concerted gendered atten-
tion given to the potential dangers encountered by female researchers, such as
sexual harassment, assault and hustling (Coffey 2002; Gurney 1985; Warren 1988),
there is interestingly a noticeable lack of consideration of male researchers, and the
advantages and limitations masculinity affords them. These issues are especially
acute for male ethnographers researching in field sites that have been construed as
typically “female” domains, and procuring interviews have occasionally been
regarded inappropriately as sexual advances or attempts to set up dates (Kenyon and
Hawker 1999; Sparke 1996). These observations diverge from the multiple experi-
ences of women in traditionally “masculine” institutions—where gender member-
ship has been shown to be either a “stumbling block” (Huggins and Glebbeek 2003;
Okely, this volume) or is rendered as potentially advantageous (Diphoorn 2013;
Marks 2004). Sattel (1988) further explains the differences of experiences in the
field, particularly the centrality of emotional inexpressiveness and its relationship to
the wielding of power and control among men.
In the course of data collection and generation, “maleness” was not necessarily a
safeguard or advantageous while doing fieldwork on the supernatural. Sengers
(2003) demonstrates in her research on cultic healing among Muslim women in
Egypt that her position as a foreigner and woman afforded her advantages at her
field site, while for Strauss (this volume), her students’ experiences as women com-
plicated their efforts to make sense of their emotions and their participation in a
refugee camp in Germany. In contrast, as a male researcher, some of my respon-
dents and colleagues ascribed me with specific gendered attributes including the
ability to be emotionally disengaged and detached from what transpired in the field.
This is despite the fact that witnessing such events was initially discomforting, ter-
rifying and daunting to me. In the early stages of fieldwork, I was expected to be
able to convince myself and others of the rightness of the decision I made of engag-
ing in such research and to guard against my emotional involvement in the conse-
quences of that decision. If other ethnographers—both women and men—were able
to complete fieldwork on the supernatural, then surely this meant I would be able to
accomplish this as well.
However, the oscillation from one intense emotion to another was exhausting,
and I often felt debilitated, unable to share my emotions with friends and colleagues,
for fear that they would downplay these experiences and doubt my competency as
an ethnographer able to “do anthropology” and “masculinity” convincingly. Under
such circumstances, I felt that the most difficult experience was facing and manag-
ing these critical moments of vulnerability, especially with regard to established,
close relationships with afflicted family members in the field and how this in turn
affected the ways they revealed their narratives to me. Nevertheless, by reflecting on
296 N. Abdullah

such critical moments and after spending more time in the field, I decided that it was
immaterial to me whether these fears and emotions emasculated me or were down-
played by peers and colleagues as unfounded and even (problematically) “femi-
nine”; what was at stake was my own emotional well-being, which was an important
personal priority during the course of my fieldwork.
Following Goode and Hatt (1981, p. 121), I acknowledged that I did not neces-
sarily need to participate in and attend all the healing rituals I observed, but could
instead continue to remain open to other experiences and practices, given that the
field researcher “need not carry out exactly the same activities as others in order to
be a participant observer.” I found that it was useful during these critical moments
to reflect on and record my emotions as candidly as possible in a personal field diary
and to intersperse these with my field notes, despite the dominance of the ideal of
masculine emotional stoicism in academic settings. In the field, it also helped that I
brought along objects such as printed religious scriptures which were sources of
comfort and reassurance, despite the fear that some of my colleagues would con-
tinue to brand such responses as “irrational,” thereby affecting my professional sta-
tus. Nevertheless, these strategies ameliorated the tense and lonely periods in the
field when I felt helpless and vulnerable, and which reminded me of early childhood
experiences surrounding the death of my great-grandmother. These techniques of
self-awareness allowed me to generate data more self-consciously as the months
passed.
More crucially, and given my attention to personally and professionally critical
moments of vulnerability, I realized that the focus of the methodological literature
is on respondent-researcher relationships during fieldwork. Notwithstanding several
interventions that attempt to reconfigure what the “field” means (Grindal and
Salamone 2006; Howell 1990; Yamagishi 2006), this focus does not adequately
capture the emotional impact of fieldwork and ethnography on our children, spouses,
parents, siblings, friends, lovers and other relations (see chapter ““Normality”
Revisited: Fieldwork and Family”, this volume). As such, the status of the field as a
site discrete from our personal emotional life largely persists, while the world of
familial and extended kin relations appear as a separate, if not less pertinent meth-
odological category. Correspondingly, the research we venture into and the limits of
involvement we set ourselves occasionally depend on interactions with our immedi-
ate social relations and support networks in our private sphere. Moreover, family
life and ethnographic fieldwork reciprocally and productively inform each other.
Reflecting on these critical moments enabled me to appreciate the fact that the entire
research agenda is enmeshed in a set of social relations in and beyond the field.
In the research I conducted, there were several persons who were especially con-
cerned for my emotional well-being. An earlier discussion, noted in my field diary,
with my mother and grandmother regarding my selection of a topic for fieldwork
can illustrate this point further.
Mother: Why do you always have to choose such sites for your research? Why
don’t you ask any one of your colleagues in the department whether they
would allow their son, daughter or their loved ones to conduct research in
such ‘dangerous’ places?
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 297

Author: Don’t worry. I know how to take care of myself. I know when to back
down.
Mother: Yes, but look, some of the practices are okay, but many are morally
wrong.
Grandmother: Yes, listen to us. Look at me before, someone sent ‘something’7 to me
after I married your grandfather. It isn’t funny, you know. You can’t get
out from this spiritual trouble once you are involved. And you will make
us worried.

Here, the issue of my own personal religious affiliation and experiences of vul-
nerability became pertinent for them, since this concerned the possibility of me
transgressing moral and religious practices, affecting my spiritual well-being. No
matter how many times I reassured them that I could manage it and knew my own
boundaries, they were often displeased and frustrated with me for my purported
moral “irresponsibility,” not only toward my own spiritual well-being, but also
toward my family, in choosing and participating in such research. The strong local
cultural discourse among Malay-Muslim practitioners was that my close involve-
ment with the afflicted “victims” of spirit interference could possibly affect my
immediate family members and loved ones due to our close affective bonds,
thereby rendering them vulnerable as well. This is illustrated in another entry in
my field diary:
Often, I would hear the same oft-repeated issues not only from Mum and Nyayi [grand-
mother], but also from my other friends: ‘Those people [bomohs] are good for nothing;’
‘Are you sure this is all worth it?’ ‘What about us?’(...) It’s so frustrating and tiring to
explain all the time. I know I have to be a so-called ‘professional,’ distancing myself from
the rest. But when I think about this more seriously, we researchers are not only part of the
academic community; we also have different positions and are bound with moral obliga-
tions to others. I had an obligation and duty to my loved ones, as much as to those who I
was studying. (Field diary, n.d.)

Was my relationship with my family members a self-imposed emotional impedi-

ment to my need to proceed further with data collection and generation? Were their
“fears” and feelings of vulnerability groundless? I eventually decided, after several
weeks of fieldwork, that it was more appropriate for me not to inform my family of
my progress. I had made the decision to do this research on my own and for myself.
As self-interested as this decision may be, I wanted to protect my emotional inter-
ests and make sure I was not considered a “burden” to my family and loved ones. As
such, I decided to only inform my closest friends and colleagues of my whereabouts
during the latter half of my research and depended on them during moments of
­distress. I realized that by doing so and through such critical moments, I was able to
better manage my emotions. I was then able collect and generate data more effec-
tively and move in and out of the field with greater ease, unburdened by the “bias”
and fear of having to hear what my family had to say. This did not mean that I did
not consider their interests or advice. On the contrary, it made me reflect more care-
fully upon how far I would be able to endure and experience these critical moments

7
This “something” refers broadly to an act of sorcery or malevolent spirit directed to an individual
or group.
298 N. Abdullah

of vulnerability in the field against the advice and suggestions that I received from
them and many concerned others. At the same time, I acquired a more enriched
appreciation and understanding of the research setting and my respondents.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored notions of emotional and relational vulnerability, of being
affected by others, and of experiencing being “out of control.” It moves beyond the
overwhelming focus on physical vulnerability and demonstrates how ethnographic
fieldwork influences not only professional, but also personal relationships, and our
emotional obligations toward our “subjects” as well as toward our loved ones and
ourselves. The turn toward heightened sensitivity to emotion, self-reflexivity,
embodied subjectivity, skepticism toward absolute truth claims, and the crisis of
representation and authority (Biddle 1993; Clifford and Marcus 1986) that has been
shaped in part by the feminist project has reconfigured the contours of ethnographic
research and the visibility of the ethnographer in the process of writing. Through
embracing and foregrounding the subjectivities of ethnographers, this renders more
explicit the blurred nature of the boundaries between “objectivity” and “subjectiv-
ity,” “self” and “other,” “personal” and “political,” “mind” and “body,” and, more
crucially, “reason” and “emotion.”
The aim is to transcend traditional emotion regimes employed to appraise and
interpret ethnographic writing and knowledge construction, and rethink method-
ological claims made to validity, reliability, and objectivity. The call to what William
James calls “radical empiricism” disavows the “epistemological cut between sub-
ject and object, that endows transitive and intransitive experiences with equal status,
and that investigates phenomena which inductive methods of traditional empiricism
were never designed to treat” (Davies 2010, p. 2). The reference to the self and
human emotions therefore does not render emotionally reflexive ethnographies
epistemologically irrelevant, unscientific or necessarily overindulgent and corrosive
to the research process (ibid.), insofar as self-reflection is “essential to the argu-
ment, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake” (Behar 1996, p. 14).
Far from charges leveled at the recording of subjective experiences as self-­
absorption, personal emotions, thoughts, feelings and experiences of vulnerability
can act as a means by which the social contexts and lifeworlds ethnographers are
interrogating and making sense of can be better illuminated. When treated with the
same intellectual vigor as demanded of our empirical work, rather than as a periph-
eral issue, attention to our states of being, in addition to our positionalities as
researchers and persons, can positively influence the way we generate, acquire, and
understand data (Diphoorn 2013; Pickering 2001).
At the same time, the emotional imperatives embedded in the practice of ethno-
graphic research afford us opportunities to reflexively explore vulnerability more
closely. These are particularly pertinent when ethnographers interrogate emotion-
ally charged encounters with ghosts and spirits, situations in which our emotions
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 299

and those of our respondents weigh heavily in our analysis. Experiences of vulner-
ability that surface at different points of fieldwork—“critical moments” as it were—
are by no means exhaustive, and include moments beyond the study of the
supernatural, and those which occur even after fieldwork is completed. Such “criti-
cal moments” in the field and beyond involve situations which enable and compel
ethnographers to rethink ourselves and reflect upon our relationships with others.
My feelings and emotions influenced how I acted in the field, and my actions simul-
taneously evinced emotional responses from others with whom I interacted. These
moments are not necessarily predicaments or problems per se, but are important for
the research process in understanding the supernatural, as well as for personal and
professional transformation. I realized that these moments further reinforced the
call to examine nonrespondent relationships with much more attention. To be sure,
these moments may not be at all “obvious.” They may involve integral events in
everyday life during fieldwork. What makes these moments “critical” is that these
make ethnographers consider and reappraise issues and relations in and beyond the
field that were taken-for-granted at various junctures in the field. Most significantly,
what is important is how these critical moments inadvertently affect data collection,
generation, and interpretation. These include moments when we may have felt
unsupported professionally and/or personally. They are occasions when we as eth-
nographers experience feelings of pressure, or when we lack confidence and cour-
age, or when we make what we later perceive to be the wrong decision. In effect,
such periods of vulnerability are what critical moments are. Acknowledging these
critical moments helped me not only to manage field relations and my own fears and
insecurities, but also enhanced the quality of my data through emotional reflexivity
(Davies and Stodulka 2019).
How do we then make sense, reflect on, and manage our experiences of vulner-
ability and emotional challenges and complexities in the field? What are some of the
methodological initiatives ethnographers could embrace when confronted with
dilemmas surrounding issues of emotions, vulnerability, and other forms of dis-
tress? Of course, the intention here is not to prescribe suggestions that stifle the
independence of ethnographers in the field. Instead, through such critical moments
and ethnographic reflections, these experiences would provide an outlet for ethnog-
raphers to explore and possibly employ initiatives and strategies that move beyond
mere speculation, “intuition,” and the oft-cited but vague conception of “common-
sense” when confronted with vulnerable encounters in the field. At the same time,
these strategies must also extend beyond the mere exercise of increased reflexivity,
but rather should be accompanied by a concept as to how ethnographers can use
them concretely and persuasively for data collection and generation.
At the institutional level, ethnographers can potentially profit from informal,
open discussions and sharing exercises with advisors and faculty before, during, and
after fieldwork. These can establish social support networks and help foster a non-
threatening academic community in which ethnographers can collaboratively reflect
on critical moments, irrespective of the length of their experience in field research.
These informal mentoring sessions have been important resources for ethnogra-
phers who feel debilitated and emotionally strained by their fieldwork. Under emo-
300 N. Abdullah

tion regimes which posit an emotionally stoic and “objective” researcher, not all
ethnographers may be able to endure constant solitude, anguish, confusion and
other vulnerable encounters in the field. While some ethnographers may be able to
thrive in such environments, others may need to address and process their emotional
responses in a safe environment, even if such experiences may be construed by oth-
ers to be “irrational” modes of thought. Vulnerability and emotion are therefore
experienced asymmetrically and differently based on the given context—different
ethnographers respond in different ways, insofar as certain situations and feelings of
vulnerability count as more pertinent and relevant than others.
My field experience in researching the supernatural is a case in point. Despite the
fact that belief in the supernatural is a social fact regarded as meaningful by differ-
ent social actors, ethnographers who experience moments of vulnerability when
researching supernatural entities have sometimes been regarded as “irrational” and
‘unobjective” by colleagues. In the same way, ethnographers may be afraid to can-
didly express their distress deriving from emotional encounters and experiences of
vulnerability, even to those whom they feel comfortable talking to. Through the
reflection of different critical moments in the field, I came to realize it was impor-
tant to cultivate an institutional milieu that enabled me to do this, without the pro-
fessional fear that I would be regarded as a less capable researcher. Even if these
emotional support networks may not have researched on the supernatural, this sup-
port—whether one-on-one or collectively coordinated—is necessary in helping us
work through difficult issues encountered in the field. Faculty members who have
encountered similar experiences should in turn be encouraged to be sensitive to
such distress, in order to enhance better collegiality and scholarship.
From these reflections and informal discussion sessions, academic departments
can establish flexible and broad guidelines (not didactic or authoritative ones) and
(optional) training especially for early-stage researchers to address not only physi-
cal dangers in the field, but also the management of emotionally vulnerable periods.
These skills, based on the accumulated wisdom and experience of faculty members,
could be shared or disseminated openly, and should at all times be conducted in a
nonjudgmental and nonevaluative manner. In addition, sessions presided over by
senior academic mentors (Pollard 2009) could incorporate issues pertaining to aca-
demic publishing in relation to the codification of such methodological concerns,
including reiterating the pragmatic dimension of fieldwork, such as the importance
of sufficient funding and the need to have adequate “insurance coverage” (whether
this be medical, financial, or/and “emotional”) and be assured that institutional help
will be rendered if and when necessary.
My research on and experiences of the supernatural is thus aimed at initiating a
broader methodological discussion in terms of the potential emotional and spiritual
vulnerability researchers may experience when conducting fieldwork. My own vul-
nerability exists in relation to my multiple positionings not only as a field researcher,
but also as a grandchild, son, brother, and colleague. Inasmuch as we attempt to be
responsible to our respondents in the field, it is also important that we take seriously
the obligations we have to ourselves and to others who are important in our lives. In
writing our accounts of the field, and of the intersection between the personal and
Vulnerability in the Field: Emotions, Experiences, and Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits 301

professional, we ought to openly recognize the vulnerability and emotions that we

may potentially experience, and how these can be drawn upon as a constructive
resource both for ourselves, our respondents, and those beyond our field site.

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“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching
and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity
in an Undergraduate Fieldwork Training

Annika Strauss

Introduction

This chapter examines how emotional reflexivity can be incorporated into teaching
fieldwork. In spring 2016, I led an undergraduate fieldwork training course entitled
“Empirical Methods” (Empirische Übungen).1 The aim of the course was to address
the various sensory dimensions of fieldwork. I repeatedly drew the students’ atten-
tion to “how it feels” to do ethnographic fieldwork by teaching them how to system-
atically reflect on their fieldwork experiences. In the following, I first outline the
background of the engaged anthropology project in which the fieldwork training
was embedded. I then delineate the pedagogical and theoretical conceptualization
of the course. The empirical part of this chapter is focused on the discussion of two
students’ emotional experiences in the field that took place during a class session. It
shows how students’ processes of understanding can benefit from a group-based
collective reflection of field episodes among peers. I will also investigate the socio-
political dimensions of what I call “classroom emotions.” I argue that learning and
practicing emotional reflexivity requires a protected space and a self-reflexive,
empathic teacher.
By reflecting on academic experiences beyond fieldwork training, I intend to
show how the expression and discussion of emotions are shaped by the university
context and how we can challenge the “emotional regimes” of the classroom. My
contribution is based on detailed field notes taken during the engaged anthropology

1
The practice course “Empirische Übungen” (Empirical Methods) offered in the second semester
is part of the curriculum of the BA program “Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie” (Cultural and
Social Anthropology).

A. Strauss (*)
Institute of Ethnology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 305

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_26
306 A. Strauss

project and the fieldwork training. To collect material and address the broader
­context of emotions in academia, I also organized a graduate student group discus-
sion as part of which two students wrote an essay using a free association approach
about emotions in academia. I include some of the information contained in both
essays and complement them with anecdotes concerning students’ emotional expe-
riences in fieldwork and academia that were collected during encounters with stu-
dents and colleagues at conferences and informal meetings, over coffees and beers.

Volunteering at a Refugee Shelter

The undergraduate course was embedded in an engaged anthropology project2 in a

Notunterkunft (emergency shelter) (Bogumil et al. 2016). The project was initiated
in October 2015, when the German government opened the borders to asylum seek-
ers entering the European Union from Southeastern Europe. The project aimed at
establishing a space where refugees and social anthropology students could encoun-
ter and interact with each other. In December 2015, my colleague Natalie Gies-­
Powroznik3 and I began supervising the project. In the shelter, asylum seekers had
to register to be eligible for accommodation and receiving other social welfare ben-
efits. While officially registration is supposed to take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks,
in the winter of 2015 most asylum seekers had to wait up to 10 months for their
paperwork to be completed. The shelter was established on a former military ground
that had been vacated by the British in November 2012. Although the ground is
equipped to house up to 800 persons, about 1200 persons took shelter there. In April
2016, there were still about 300 persons living at the shelter. A remnant of its past,
a high wall topped with barbed wire surrounds the ground and called forth the image
of a prison in many of us when visiting the camp for the first time. During the first
session on a warm October day, we brought several musical instruments like drums,
rattles, a guitar, and a keyboard. The children immediately grabbed all the small
instruments—the rattles and small drums—while screaming and quarreling. Nobody
used the instruments in a coordinated manner as we had imagined. We ended up
playing Syrian music from two speakers that a man had brought from his room and
danced together. The activity was greeted with enthusiasm and followed by an
extended “dance session.” One of the emotional field episodes took place during
such a dancing session and will be analyzed in detail further down.
Apart from organizing the dance sessions, the participating 18 anthropology stu-
dents—who were organized into six groups—set up a slackline at the shelter,

2
The project was headed by Prof. Dr. Helene Basu, head of the Institute of Ethnology at Westfälische
Wilhelms-Universität Münster.
3
Natalie, like me, is pursuing her PhD in social anthropology and carrying out participant observa-
tion in grade schools in order to better understand the situation of young refugees. During the
fieldwork training, she supervised the activity sessions at the refugee shelter, while I taught the
course contents and organized the methodological reflexivity exercises.
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 307

arranged a picnic, knotted friendship bracelets, and baked wafers. We concluded

each session with a feedback round. During these sessions, the students were
encouraged to share their experiences and to address problems and conflicts imme-
diately. As part of their fieldwork training, undergraduate students were asked to
complete several assignments. I asked each working group to submit a short research
proposal and a research report at the end of the course. Furthermore, students were
asked to submit the field notes they took during our initial visit to the refugee shel-
ter. At the end of the course, each student wrote an essay that reflected on a concrete
field situation. We had gone to the field seven times and had conducted six activity
sessions at the shelter. Eight of the altogether 11 classroom sessions were 2-h ses-
sions in which we discussed texts on ethnographic fieldwork (Madden 2011; DeWalt
and DeWalt 2002; Beer 2003; Bernard 2006), the research ethics of engaged anthro-
pology (Huschke 2014a, b), embodiment (Okely 2007), and emotions, and the rel-
evance of self-reflexivity (ibid. 1996). In two 4-h sessions, we discussed the
students’ field notes and employed the Image Theater Method (Strauss 2017) to
encourage collective reflection on fieldwork experiences (Nadig et al. 2009). In the
final session, we discussed the students’ reflexive essays, providing detailed feed-
back for each of them.

The Epistemological Significance of Emotions in the Field

The idea behind the course on Empirische Übungen aligned with the main concern
of this edited volume: using the tools of anthropology and related disciplines to
unravel the sociocultural meaning of emotions (Beatty 2010; Röttger-Rössler et al.
2015; von Scheve and Luede 2005), as a means of reflecting on researchers’ field-
work experiences, and thus generating insights into their research contexts (see
chapter “Foreword: Pathways of Affective Scholarship” to this volume; also Berger
2010; Davies and Spencer 2010; Linska 2015; Pink 2009; Spencer and Davies 2010;
Stodulka 2015). The fieldwork training course was intended to familiarize students
with emotional reflexivity and to support students who were engaging both as vol-
unteers and fieldworkers at the shelter for asylum seekers.

Learning and Teaching (Emotional) Reflexivity

Learning during fieldwork means encountering and engaging with ways of know-
ing, being, and doing that are different from our own. According to Dimitrina
Spencer (2011), fieldwork constantly challenges the anthropologist’s self and ren-
ders it amenable to change. Spencer refers to this process as “transformative learn-
ing” in social anthropology, borrowing the term from educational research (Spencer
2011, p. 70; Taylor 1998). Spencer recommends supporting and creating space for
transformative learning by including and articulating the embodied experience of
308 A. Strauss

students in the classroom. This helps to develop students’ reflexive skills and self-
awareness regarding how they learn and how this might be part of anthropological
fieldwork (Spencer 2011, p. 81). Furthermore, she proposes certain strategies for
including emotional reflexivity in our pedagogy in order to encourage transforma-
tive learning, for example, by creating an emotionally articulate learning environ-
ment, focusing on skills that enhance emotional reflexivity, drawing attention to the
nature of fieldwork research as a process of relational reflection and to the different
degrees of emotional reflexivity required by various research questions, and consid-
ering the moral, methodological, and theoretical implications of not being suffi-
ciently emotionally reflexive (ibid.). Tim Ingold finds that learning takes place as
learners develop their own understanding by engaging with their surroundings.
Based on this consideration, he conceptualized a course in anthropology at Aberdeen
University that supplements traditional lectures with classes applying experiential
learning methods that engage students in doing and making (Ingold and Lucas
2007). Taking up the suggestions and ideas of Spencer and Ingold, I included reflex-
ive and experiential exercises throughout the course to supplement exclusively theo-
retical contents. As I will describe in the following section, restaging fieldwork
experiences through the Image Theater Method was one way in which I embraced
this approach.

Facilitating Reflexivity by Restaging Fieldwork Experiences

Ethnographic analysis is a process of reinserting ourselves into the reality of the

field through the work of memory and imagination. Discussing our findings with
fellow researchers in informal talks, colloquiums, or workshops can help us to make
sense of fieldwork experiences. The Image Theater Method combines memory and
imagination with group-based collective reflection on fieldwork material. Erving
Goffman (1990) understands all social interactions as a kind of theatrical perfor-
mance where we take up the roles both of an actor and of an acting-evaluating
spectator. The concept of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (2008) is based
on the presumption that staging always implies observation and therefore an objec-
tification of social interaction. This performative method encourages nonprofes-
sional “spect-actors”4 to reenact and improvise unsettling scenes from their social
life. Time, space, and social dimensions all become contained on stage, and thus
spect-actors are able to objectify what is happening to them. This objectification
comes close to Tedlock’s concept of an “observation of participation” (1991). It
includes sensory memorization, attention to emotions and relational dynamics, and
finally analyzing and potentially influencing the outcome of the enacted situation.
The Image Theatre Method opens space for reflexivity by (re)staging a fieldwork

4
Augusto Boal developed the term “spect-actor” (orig. Portuguese espect-ator/espect-atriz) to
describe the dual role of those involved in the Theatre of the Oppressed as both spectator and actor
and as both observing and creating dramatic meaning and action.
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 309

situation. This allows a kind of meaning-making through various, multisensory

channels, which stands in contrast to conventional verbal and text-based approaches,
for example, presentations or analyses of field notes. The performance of a single
image serves to physically reembody and condense a situation from the field and
reflect on its possible significance for analysis. The use of language is prohibited
during the first part of the method. Thus, participants concentrate on the physical
aspects of the enacted situation, on what they see and what the image may evoke in
them: “In Image Theatre the use of words would interfere with the language of
images or superimpose itself on top of that language” (Boal 2003, p. 129). Image
Theater focuses on the numerous meanings an image might have: “(...) the meaning
of an image is the image itself. Image is a language” (ibid., p. 175).
To prepare the students for the Image Theater Method,5 I guided them through a
short imaginary journey exercise. I first asked them to recall a situation or scene
from the field in which they were moved, scared, unsettled, or confused. I then
asked the students to sit down, relax, and close their eyes. I virtually sent them back
to the situation in question and guided them in imagining as many details as possi-
ble from the scene: sounds, smells, the environment, colors, and tastes. After every-
one had mentally left the situation, returned to the classroom, and reopened her or
his eyes, I asked the students to write down as many details as possible about the
situation they had recalled. Then we looked at one of the student’s situations in
more detail by conducting the Image Theater Method. Claudia volunteered to reen-
act her situation. She acted as a “sculptor” and asked other students to come “on
stage” to reenact the scene. Claudia’s peers acted as statues and followed Claudia’s
stage directions. She concentrated on the most salient aspects of her experience and
thus created a condensed image.
In this application of the Image Theater Method, the sculptor is only allowed to
use touch and mirror image to give the statues their postures and facial expressions.
Claudia eventually assumed her position within the image (see Fig. 1). At this point,
I took over and asked those students who were not involved in Claudia’s image to
study the image. I encouraged them to move around the “statues,” to see and observe
them from diverse perspectives (see Fig. 2).
I proceeded to ask the students what came to their minds as they were watching
the image. They commented on the various positions and bodily postures and men-
tioned the possible social dynamics, power structures, and hierarchies. The students
made the following associations (translation A.S., see Fig. 3). One of the students
documented them and wrote them on the blackboard:
vulnerability, dance session, demureness/reservation, girls/boys, joy, shame, courage/brav-
ery, vicarious embarrassment, disapproval, demarcation/distinction, observation/monitor-
ing, two parties, roosting,6 discomfort/unease, insecurity, gender, maverick.

5
The Image Theater Method is a tool to access embodied fieldwork knowledge. I discuss its mean-
ing in detail elsewhere (Strauss 2017).
6
This refers to a German proverb meaning literally “to roost as chicken do.”
310 A. Strauss

Fig. 1 Claudia’s image. Photo: Annika Strauss

After all the comments had been written down, I asked those students who were
enacting the situation to share what they felt in their respective positions. Their
experiences were also documented on the blackboard.
Julian: skepticism; Constantin: discomfort/unease; Amir: expectation, transformed;
Hannah: ogled, judged, devalued, outcast; Claudia: trepidation, constrained, judged, unfree,
dominated.

Then, I asked Claudia, the “sculptor,” to disclose and narrate the context of the
situation:
The situation took place during our last session at the refugee shelter. We organized a dance
session for all people currently staying there. We organized two separate sessions: One that
was for women and girls7 and another for everybody. I planned the general dance session,
where predominately men and children took part. The other students who were there were
Amir, Constantin and Hannah. I was particularly looking forward to this session because
dancing is important in my life. For me, it signifies the possibility of personal expression
and a moment of relaxation. It was a hot and humid day and the session took place in a
rather small room. In the beginning, the atmosphere was rather tense and the situation cha-
otic because there were some problems with the stereo. Also, we hadn’t planned which
music should be played. When the music started playing we danced mostly with the chil-
dren. Some men joined the group, but remained in the observing position at first. The songs
we played were current chart hits. Dancing with the children was fun and the atmosphere
became more and more relaxing and cheerful. But a feeling slowly crept over me, that the
men sitting on the sidelines were observing me and I didn’t feel as free anymore; I increas-
ingly adopted a cautious posture/stance. Meanwhile, more and more men entered the room,

7
Almost no women, except some young girls, joined in the general dancing sessions during the
winter term. This led me to suggest that the students might organize a separate session for girls and
women.
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 311

Fig. 2 The spec-actors: Claudia (a), Hannah (b), Julian, Constantin, and (c) Amir. Photo: Annika
Strauss
312 A. Strauss

Fig. 3 The associations. Photo: Annika Strauss

and at some point, I felt the urge to share my oppressive/disturbing feelings. I remarked to
Hannah: ‘Do you realize?...we are the only women in this room...’ But she just waved my
concerns aside by saying: ‘Yes, but what do I care?’ It was very hot and at some point I
observed that Hannah got rid of her cardigan and went on dancing only in her spaghetti-­
strap top. I remember that I was dressed rather inappropriately for the high temperature,
too, but nonetheless I was reluctant to cast off any piece of clothing. The situation was later
resolved as the men started to play their music; we all danced together and Hannah and I
were no longer the center of attention. Other female participants in the seminar joined in as
well. (Excerpt from Claudia’s reflexive essay, translation A.S.)

Next, we began a discussion that was designed to disentangle emotions, irritations,

and associations. We addressed the following questions: What kind of relationship
structures are displayed in the scene? What interpersonal dynamics can be recog-
nized? What role and position did Claudia adopt in the scene? Which anxieties,
fears, irritations, conflicts, projections, and defense strategies are evoked? Which
sociocultural practices/habitus may play a role? Which stereotypes (e.g., concern-
ing gender, religion, age, or ethnicity) may be at work?
The discussion of the image and of Claudia’s and Hannah’s reflexive essays
focused on the diverging behaviors of the two female students. To Claudia’s sur-
prise, though, both equally experienced the male gaze as judging, constraining, and
dominating. While Hannah took a stance that she framed as a kind of “resistance”
and went on to dance freely, Claudia reacted to the gaze by adopting a reluctant and
reserved attitude and body posture. In their essays, both students reflected on how
their socialization probably influenced their reactions to the situation. Claudia was
brought up in a Catholic family of Polish origin, where women were supposed to
adopt rather passive and modest roles. Hannah, on the contrary, described her
upbringing as rather emancipative. She was always encouraged by her mother to
claim her rights and articulate her opinion freely.
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 313

Another aspect brought up by a fellow female student was their age difference,
and that this might be reflected in Hannah’s recalcitrant response, who was 20 years
old, versus the more mature, reflective, and self-disciplinary behavior of Claudia,
who was 30 years old. We also discussed how the feelings of insecurity and disori-
entation in the situation were the result of being in a sociocultural context in which
they could not be sure about others’ norms and expectations, which made it difficult
to assess their own behavior as well as the behavior of others.
The next aspect discussed concerned the position and role of the men in the
image. The diverse associations (“skepticism,” “discomfort/unease,” “expectation”)
reflect Hannah’s and Claudia’s difficulty in grasping the attitudes of the men toward
them at that moment. It became clear that Claudia and Hannah interpreted the gazes
according to stereotypes of Muslim men as disapproving of their behavior, sexual-
izing and objectifying them.8 Hannah stated in her reflexive essay that she realized
her assessment of the situation was informed by stereotypes, and that the men could
have also been just curious or surprised, because freely dancing women may not
have been part of their social reality before coming to Germany. We further dis-
cussed how sexuality is framed differently depending on particular cultural con-
texts, and addressing Hannah’s act of “undressing” herself, how the exposition of
certain body parts can be read as conveying a particular sexualized message: for
example, the décolleté is perceived as sexy in Western countries, an ankle can be a
reason for sexual arousal in Arabic countries, and Japanese Geishas are known for
their back décolleté. Accordingly, what is perceived as appropriate or offensive
behavior varies highly cross-culturally. Nonetheless, it also became clear in the dis-
cussion that the body parts in all these cultural contexts were always attached to the
female body and objectified by the male gaze. What does the discussion of Claudia’s
image teach us about the epistemological value of emotions in the field? A system-
atic analysis of the emotions involved in the scene attends to Claudia’s and Hannah’s
biographies, the structure of their respective narratives, as well as to their socializa-
tion and upbringing: For Claudia, seemingly judging gazes prompted her to restrain
herself; for Hannah, it was a signal “to woman up” and to insist on her rights to
move and dress as she pleases. Claudia and Hannah certainly better understood their
reactions and behavior in the field after reflecting upon their emotions, but what
does the situation say about other persons present in the field? Can we learn some-

8
During the feedback rounds of the volunteer sessions we discussed and reflected on paternalistic
and racist discourses that were particularly salient during and after the “Köln event” at turn of the
year 2015/2016, when sexual assaults and numerous property offenses took place during the New
Year’s Eve celebrations in the city center. Reportedly, the perpetrators were unmarried Muslim
men. Conservative and anti-immigration voices quickly built the image of “sexist” Arabic men,
and particularly refugees, who threatened the freedom of “modern” women, who served as a sym-
bol of “emancipation” in German society (Dietze 2016). Because we wanted to avoid feeding the
paternalistic and racist message that Muslim men were not capable of being integrated and thus
threatened the existing social order by means of their “sexist socialization,” we tried to create a
space for reflection and self-reflexivity, where such incidents could be discussed, interpreted, and
addressed from multifaceted perspectives.
314 A. Strauss

thing about the men’s position in the scene? And maybe also about the women’s
who, as Claudia remarked to Hannah, were not present?
During the discussion, some students suggested that Hannah and Claudia, being
influenced by the media and by what they heard about “suppressed” women in
Muslim societies, may just have “imagined” the gaze. But to dismiss both students’
perceptions as mere inner processes and delusions would not do them justice.
Instead I would suggest that the situation must be understood as an incidence of
“countertransference.” This psychoanalytic term originally designated psychoana-
lysts’ emotional reactions toward their patients. In the therapeutic process, the ana-
lyst pays attention to his or her own emotions and the “activity of self-interpretation”
(Braddock 2010, p. 221) in an attempt to grasp the patient’s life and experiential
world. Ethnopsychoanalysis subsequently adopted the concept and the hermeneutic
approach to analyze ethnographic encounters between field researchers and their
informants:
What that emotional understanding equips the field worker with is a principled basis for
seeing how things are for the other from their point of view, and what it is that they may
unconsciously (…) be communicating, through behaviours and actions which elicit emo-
tion. (ibid.)

Let me add another anecdote that may help us to decode the implicit social message
sent by the men in the encounter (most likely unconsciously). During the round of
feedback that we conducted after the activity session, another graduate student
shared that she later spent time with a Syrian girl who did not want to take part in
the general dancing session. She stated that her father would disapprove of her
dancing openly and that she would not be joining the session. The girl most likely
experienced a so-called “socializing emotion.” Anxiety, fear, shame, and high self-­
esteem “are culturally emphasized and elaborated in order to support and mediate
the transmission of social norms and values to children” (Röttger-Rössler et al.
2015, p. 188). Culturally specific child-rearing practices like frightening, shaming,
praising, and cherishing lead to the construction of cognitive schemas which can
resurface as general psychological control mechanisms: “If children have developed
a schema based on shaming experiences in consequence of a disapproved behavior,
they will start to re-experience shame when intending a similar (mis)behavior”
(ibid., p. 191). The girl decided against taking part in the dancing session because
she was afraid her father might become angry with her.
Claudia’s reaction is similarly caused by an internalized social norm. Accordingly,
the socializing emotion “shame” (Scham) written on the blackboard refers to
Claudia’s restrained and modest posture. Hannah, on the contrary, internalized a
different appraisal. She elicited the socializing emotion “high self-esteem,” which
was instilled in her by her mother, whom she experienced as emancipating. When
she felt she was being judged and dominated, she enacted a social narrative contrary
to Claudia’s: “resistance” and “rebellion.” In this case, Claudia’s and Hannah’s
experiences of adjusting to a strange social situation exemplify how the regulation
of gender appropriate behavior works through internalized norms activated by being
subject to a gaze. Here the individual attitude of the “ogling” men is not relevant as
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 315

such. Whether their gazes imply judgment, expectation, or just curiosity, the objec-
tifying gaze itself implies a process of categorization and evaluation of the
­nonconforming “other.” Hannah’s feeling like an “outcast” supports this interpreta-
tion. These two students experienced how certain emotions are elicited when they
do not conform, and how this leads to self-monitoring and even self-discipline.
Because explicit information about what is socially appropriate is not readily avail-
able, they fall back on cognitive appraisal schemas formed through their
socialization.
Besides the male gaze, we must also consider Claudia’s reaction to Hannah as
she rebels against the men’s stares. An association written on the blackboard antici-
pates a particular relational dynamic: Fremdschämen (vicarious embarrassment).
This German term, difficult to translate in its literal meaning, describes how Claudia
supposedly assesses the behavior of Hannah as inappropriate and feels ashamed on
her behalf. Socializing emotions may not only frame an individual’s situational
response, but through peer regulation their influence can be extended to other per-
sons as well. Even if Claudia did not experience vicarious embarrassment: Hannah’s
action of distancing herself from regulating social norms triggered something in
Claudia; a process which led her to include Hannah when restaging the fieldwork
experience.
Claudia’s and Hannah’s experience, respectively, can be understood as a “Key
Emotional Episode” (KEE) (Berger 2010). Peter Berger coined this term to describe
a researcher’s emotional and physical involvement when she or he “has lost control
and is subordinated to the flow of events” (ibid., p. 120). As part of the fieldwork
process, KEEs can enhance the quality of anthropological insights. The detailed
analysis of the students’ KEEs provides a glimpse into how their emotions are
linked to social structures. When social situations trigger strong emotional reac-
tions, these always imply certain cognitive appraisal schemas, action tendencies,
and social meta-narratives that eventually navigate individual behavior according to
internalized social norms (von Scheve and Luede 2005, p. 322). The contextualiza-
tion of the KEE may enable Claudia and Hannah to empathize with the girl fearing
her father or with any other woman in the field. Its methodological value “lies in the
fact that it may highlight crucial themes, norms or values of the particular culture”
(Berger 2010, p. 138).
At the end of Hannah’s essay, she mentioned that, based on her field experience,
she would like to further explore the position of women, the attitude of men, and the
existent gender hierarchies at the shelter. She further states that she would not have
paid attention to the scene and would have suppressed the thoughts it evoked if she
hadn’t been encouraged to take a closer look at it through the guided reflection.
Since the quality of reflexive engagement varied among students, this approach
must be practiced. As my detailed analysis of Claudia’s image shows, a hermeneutic
approach includes the evaluation and combination of several observations alongside
contextual information. Regardless of the level of reflexive analysis reached, most
students finally embraced the idea that their own experiences, sentiments, and emo-
tions are relevant in participant observation, and that they should reflect on them
rather than ignoring and excluding them from their field notes.
316 A. Strauss

The Sociopolitical Dimension of Classroom Emotions

The classroom and academia are neither free of emotions nor of social norms.
Learning processes do not take place independently from social relations or stu-
dents’ dispositions. Claudia mentioned in her essay that she felt that her fellow
female students could better empathize with her than her male peers. I myself noted
down a similar observation after the session. Two of the male students implicitly
suggested that Claudia and Hannah might have “misinterpreted” the gazes of the
men, and that they might have actually been looking somewhere else. I do not deny
the possibility of misinterpretation, particularly in transcultural contexts. But for a
self-reflective person who is monitoring her senses consciously, which we can
assume is the case during participant observation, it would be highly unlikely for
somebody to feel stared at if she were actually just glanced at. As may have become
clear above, the social and communicative function of emotions mainly work
implicitly, which makes it easy to ignore or render social messages that are sent
nonverbally as nonexistent. Furthermore, arguing that a perceived gaze may be “just
imagined” is part of a paternalistic strategy that purposefully devalues certain—par-
ticularly female—voices. In the following, I discuss the importance of cultivating
awareness of the interpersonal and political significance of classroom emotions and
how social and power structures may be reinforced through emotional practices.

Self-Reflexive and Empathic Teaching

When we organized the dancing sessions at the refugee shelter, I took part in the
session for women and girls only, where one of the students taught us a hip-hop
choreography. Later we joined the general dancing session. In my field notes I
describe how I entered the room right after Hannah had just taken off her cardigan
and was dancing with a young man. I remember how an uncomfortable feeling (a
kind of Fremdschämen) was aroused in me. But I also immediately rebuked myself
for judging her behavior. As we were leaving the shelter, Claudia shared with me
how dancing with the young men and being watched caused her to feel awkward.
We discussed our position as Western women, and I shared my experiences from my
fieldwork in India with her, how I never escaped being marked as “the moral other”
and how this categorization always left me with a sentiment of being indecent.
Reflecting once again on how I felt uncomfortable on behalf of Hannah, I recog-
nize how this was probably elicited by an appraisal schema which I internalized
during my “field socialization” in India. There, while carrying out my graduate and
doctoral research, I could literally observe my behavior and posture changing under
the male gaze. One day I walked to a friend’s apartment one street away from my
hostel in a suburban neighborhood in Delhi. I walked self-consciously, under the
gazes of numerous shopkeepers and men loitering on the street. Aware of the fact
that as a “good girl” I was not supposed to loiter (Phadke et al. 2011), I headed
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 317

straight toward my destination; my eyes did not wander but were fixed on the ground
in front of me. Later that day my friend told me that his landlord observed me com-
ing to the apartment and had praised me for being a “good girl,” one who does not
stroll around or make eye contact with random men on the street. His comment
aroused mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, I was proud that I was able to
accomplish the task of walking in a gender appropriate way in this particular socio-
cultural environment. It was satisfying to “pass the test,” and it was one of the rare
times I did not feel marked as the Western girl who would never be as modest and
innocent as an Indian one. At the same time, I felt suppressed and dominated. I
abandoned a part of myself by subordinating my body and adopting a locally
expected posture.
I think that my familiarity with these ambivalent emotions let me empathize both
with Claudia, who tried to conform with the expectations of the monitoring male
gaze, and with Hannah, who took a stance and did not let anybody regulate her
body—something I failed to accomplish many times in India. By resisting my own
initial intuition to take sides with Claudia, I managed to empathize with both stu-
dents, and thus avoided “silencing” Hannah’s negotiation of the objectification she
was experiencing. By sharing my fieldwork experiences during an informal conver-
sation with Claudia after the dancing session, I hoped to deepen her understanding
of her own experiences. I encouraged her to reenact and discuss the scene during the
class session, because I saw it as an experience that could teach us something about
“gender roles.”
Being empathic toward our students, similar to being empathic toward our infor-
mants in the field, helps us understand what they are going through and the chal-
lenges they face (Golub 2015). Accordingly, Angela Jenks (2016) suggests it would
be better to try to understand students’ feelings, concerns, and opinions than to
dismiss them as rebellious or offensive, or to complain about their inability and lack
of discipline. Teaching methods do not function as abstract, theoretical didactic
models; they work because we implement them attentively and adapt them to the
group and environment in which we are working. We also have to be aware of our
defense mechanisms as lecturers, in order to attend to and understand what really
happens in student–teacher interactions.
Unfortunately, at least in my experience, lecturers are advised to keep a distance
and avoid empathic interactions (and therefore also emotional reflexivity) with stu-
dents. Many argue that this distance is important in order to “safeguard objectivity”
in evaluating students’ academic performances. These unwritten rules of (emo-
tional) conduct in university teaching often seem to serve the function George
Devereux (1998) ascribed to “objective” methods in the social sciences: they con-
trol anxieties, fears, and insecurities. At least when I discussed teaching methods
and student–teacher relationships in more detail with university colleagues, an oft-­
mentioned reason for avoiding “friendship-like” relations with students was to pre-
vent inappropriate feelings—such as anger, insecurity, attachment, or even falling in
love—from developing in “professional” settings.
318 A. Strauss

 ccessing Our “Fieldwork Selves,” and the Meaning

A
of Transformed Emotions

Rules of conduct in academic spaces predominantly expect emotions to be handled

“professionally” and relationships to be framed by “formality.” Affects are ideally
dealt with by means of a logical distance, so as not to interfere with “objectivity”
or “professionalism.” Strong emotions are nevertheless prevalent: competing aca-
demics may envy each other’s success; a young scholar might admire the work of a
senior academic in her field; a scientist may feel joy from a scientific discovery; and
a PhD student is likely disappointed and angry when a research project is not allot-
ted funding. Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren characterize the university as an
“emotion-­controlled” but “contradictory organization” (Ehn and Löfgren 2007,
p. 103). “The taboo of certain feelings at the same time results in a tendency to
indirectness, the appearance of emotions in disguised forms or in surprising con-
texts” (ibid.). They describe how the specific political and cultural organization of
everyday life forms particular “structures of feeling” (ibid., p. 114), and how these,
anchored in certain routines and frameworks, give rise to an institutionalized “emo-
tional habitus” (ibid., p. 115). It is this academic emotional habitus that also sup-
ports “defensive professional practices” and in this way interferes with an emotional,
reflexive pedagogy: “‘Managing’ and ‘controlling’ is a way to keep the defenses
intact and prevents us from understanding emotions and their role in producing
knowledge and from articulating how we feel” (Spencer 2011, p. 76). Dimitrina
Spencer investigates the “compartmentalization of self” as an example. The term
refers to “cleavages between different states of being” and correlates with “feeling
and acting one way in one place, and rather differently in another, with no evident
reason for such disparity” (ibid.). In social anthropology, this corresponds to the
embodiment of a “professional” versus a “personal” self, and feeling and acting in
the classroom differently vis-à-vis the field. Fieldwork emotions are often allocated
to informal spaces such as coffee breaks or dinner parties, while the theoretical–
analytical accounts of fieldwork experience are allocated to classes and confer-
ences (ibid., p. 77).
Similarly, the kinds of relationships we allow to evolve in these spaces—namely,
open, empathic relationships with our informants versus supposedly controlled and
formal relationships between students and supervisors—may originate here. While
Spencer discusses this compartmentalization of self as embodied by academic
scholars, I found it equally present in students’ attitudes, practices, and expecta-
tions. When, in the context of a group discussion among graduate students on the
topic of emotions in academia, I asked two students to write an essay using free
association, they wrote that emotions and academia are in fact two spheres which
should be kept distinct from each other. One called the distinction “personal” vs.
“institutional,” whereas the other labeled it “private” vs. “business.” Both described
how they experience it as irritating and inappropriate when the “personal” or “pri-
vate” are addressed or enacted in the university sphere. This illustrates how the
breach of self-related categories may be experienced as fear invoking and as some
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 319

form of danger. This fear is exemplified in the narrative of one of my students,

whom I had offered to address myself informally on a first name basis.9 After we
had already developed a productive student–teacher relationship, she disclosed how
my proposal to switch to the informal “you” (Du) had completely jumbled her con-
cept of a “formal” teacher–student relationship. She had racked her brain thinking
about how to resolve the situation in a convenient way without rudely rejecting my
offer, and had consequently suffered from a headache. Reframing an unquestioned,
conventional relationship model can entail a transformative learning experience that
challenges former conceptions of the student’s self. Practicing emotional reflexivity
and accessing the “personal fieldwork self” often requires us to transgress the aca-
demic compartmentalization of self.
Indeed, the refugee project enabled us to breach the “academic habitus” in subtle
ways. Natalie and I decided at the beginning of the course to introduce ourselves to
the students by our first names. In this way we adopted the rather informal relation-
ship structures and forms of addressing that marked the interactions between volun-
teers and staff at the shelter. Supervisors and students went into the field together,
all embodying the social role of volunteers. As one student commented, “It was
indeed always clear that you were our lecturer. But you still took part in everything
and you did exactly the same things as we did in the field.” In the classroom, our
different institutional roles as students and teachers are also marked by certain pro-
fessional practices, such as standing versus sitting, lecturing versus hearing, and
guiding versus following. By contrast, at the shelter, we engaged in similar practices
and embodied the same institutional role as volunteers. The experiences we shared

9
We can understand forms of addressing in the context of classroom interactions as contributing to
a compartmentalization of the self. The German language provides two pronouns to address the
other: The first is the respectful, polite, formal, and distant Sie (third person plural pronoun) or
Herr/Frau plus the person’s last name. And the second is the informal and more intimate Du (sec-
ond person singular pronoun) or first name or alternated forms of these two. Of relevance are age
(difference), status, gender, and possibly social category. Additionally, rules of conduct vary
regionally. During most of the twentieth century, persons outside the family circle were addressed
with the third person plural pronoun (except very close [childhood] friends). Nowadays the social
contexts in which people encounter each other seem to increasingly determine how people address
each other. Particularly hierarchical, business, and administrative interactions are marked by a
formal, distant addressing, while the informal addressing predominates in informal contexts like
sports clubs or parties. In some contexts, addressing informally indicates an equal status and/or
belonging to the same social category (e.g., students or university colleagues of same hierarchy
level) or membership in a certain social group (e.g., labor party). In other contexts, addressing
informally can be read as marking antihierarchical, antibureaucratic, or anarchical spaces (e.g.,
politically left milieus or alternative subcultures who construct themselves as antipodes of preva-
lent social norms). Once switched to the informal way of addressing in a relationship going back
to the formal “Sie” is normally perceived as an indicator for a major conflict and/or cease of trust.
Because social rules that guide how to address somebody else are partly inconsistent, and because
how to address somebody else “adequately” depends on the social context, on the social group one
belongs to, on social status, as well as on age, gender, and the relation to the other person, the deci-
sion on how to address somebody else holds manifold pitfalls (Besch 1998). I normally offer to
address students by first names when the relationship transforms from a punctual, mere adminis-
trative-driven interaction into a more or less long-term supervising or learning relationship.
320 A. Strauss

as “personal fieldwork selves” breached the often-experienced gap between “here,”

that is, the classroom, and “there,” that is, the field, between the experiencing stu-
dent and the theorizing supervisor.
Relationships formed within academia have the power to transform those
involved, including our emotions and attitudes toward our fields. Heaton Shresta
(2010) shows in an autobiographic account how interactions with her supervisor
and colleagues brought her to reformulate her emotional experiences in her doctoral
thesis. Referring to William R. Reddy, she argues that “academic emotional regimes”
change, build, hide, or intensify emotions10 by “the complex of practices that estab-
lish a set of emotional norms and that sanction those who break them” (Reddy 2001,
in Heaton Shresta 2010, p. 45). The “power of ambivalence” in scientific settings is
likely to lead to a situation in which “[s]ome emotions are rapidly changed into
other moods” (Ehn and Löfgren 2007, p. 114).
In one essay, a graduate student described her anger, desperation, and disappoint-
ment at the seminars, teaching methods, and supervision, which she felt actually
hindered her learning. The following passage demonstrates how her disappointment
is repeatedly transformed into self-disciplining acceptance and resignation: “Of
course I am annoyed when my expectations regarding a seminar are dashed, but
acceptance and the desire to learn from these kind of experiences is stronger here.
In some things we just have to acquiesce (student essay, translation A.S.).” Sue
Wright (2004) argues that applying personal–political reflexivity to our academic
environment helps us identify and work out ways to act upon sociopolitical struc-
tures, institutional discourses, and unfavorable policies. Wright designates those
students who are able “to analyze daily encounters, their reactions to them, and
signs of how the actors seemed to expect them to act” and “to uncover the detailed
ways in which boundaries, hierarchies and power relations operated in the institu-
tion” as “politically reflexive practitioners” (ibid., p. 40). The student in the example
above might learn to understand her resignation as molded by a context of institu-
tional power structures, which prefer a student who is self-disciplined and adaptive
to one who is angry, rebellious, or transformative. Such a reflexive understanding
would ideally enable us to figure out subtle ways to negotiate and pursue learning
processes. Similarly, university teachers who “problematize the institutional envi-
ronment, and question how national policies, the university’s procedures, classroom
interactions and their own values interact” (ibid, p. 47) are able to encourage and
support their students’ learning careers in sustainable ways.
To be able to measure the historical–political implications of “academic emo-
tional regimes,” we have to take into consideration their sociocultural conditional-
ity. Politically reflexive teachers scrutinize how classroom emotions and their

10
According to William R. Reddy statements about emotions are “an effort by the speaker to offer
an interpretation of something that is observable to no other actor” and as such they are “neither
descriptive (constative) nor performative—they neither adequately represent nor construct (per-
form) emotions” (1997, p. 331). Reddy argues against a strong constructivistic approach that he
renders as viewing the individual as fully plastic, and therefore, as not able to grasp the politics or
a meaningful history of emotions. According to him emotions and emotional expression interact in
a dynamic way, with varied outcomes.
“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity… 321

“repressive transformation” (Reddy 1997, p. 333) are induced and also molded by
certain discourses, sociopolitical structures, and hierarchies (Lutz and Abu-Lughod
1990; Heatherington and Zerilli 2016; Handelman 2007; Denich 1980). While it
seems self-evident that social anthropologists have to critically reflect on their posi-
tionality in the field in order to be able to establish ethical and unambiguous rela-
tionships, in academic interactions this is far from being the norm.

Conclusion: Becoming Politically Reflexive Practitioners

Emotions are epistemologically valuable ethnographic material. In social anthropo-

logical analyses, they are equally as important as field notes or transcripts of infor-
mal interviews. I have illustrated how reading about, discussing, and practicing
emotional reflexivity in ethnographic fieldwork training contributes to an enhanced
understanding of ourselves and the people we encounter in the field. Becoming
aware of our emotions in a university teaching environment and decoding their
meaning helps us to become more sensitive toward our students and to address
emphatically their concerns, fears, and insecurities. Moreover, we can overcome
“anthropology’s blind spot” (Wright 2004, p. 48) by bringing sociopolitical reflex-
ivity from the anthropological field into the classroom, in order to critically evaluate
our teaching.
Critically reflexive teaching methods can challenge the rational–bureaucratic
logic that renders the personal sphere and emotions as “private,” and therefore abol-
ishes the “personal self” from “official” spheres like the classroom. Particularly
young scholars have recently made a vehement call for an inclusion of emotional
reflexivity in social anthropology and academic teaching (Curran 2010; Heaton
Shresta 2010). This book itself is an endeavor in this direction. Besides the students
who plan to pursue doctoral research and carry out long-term fieldwork, the many
students leaving academia to work in other professions (e.g., in pedagogic, thera-
peutic, or health-related professions) can equally benefit from emotional awareness
and self-reflexivity (Dauber and Zwiebel 2006). Only if we support our students in
becoming “politically reflexive practitioners” will they be able to critically reflect
on, engage with, and transform institutional and policy contexts.

Acknowledgements I thank all the students who participated in my course in the summer term of
2016, particularly, Claudia Hirsch and Hannah Hillermann for their openness and for contributing
via constructive feedback. Also, without the commitment of my colleague Natalie Gies-Powroznik
the project would have never come into being. I also thank many of my graduate students and
numerous colleagues for their openness in discussing their emotions and feelings regarding the
academic sphere with me. Thanks also to Prof. Dr. Helene Basu for letting me introduce new and
innovative ways of transferring knowledge into the undergraduate and graduate courses. Finally, I
thank Thomas Stodulka, Rebecca Walsh, and the anonymous reviewers for their critical yet sup-
portive comments.
322 A. Strauss

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Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across
Cultures, Shared, Repressed,
or Subconscious

Judith Okely

Binary Oppositions and Wider Context

Anthropological participant observation should confront binary oppositions and

extreme dichotomies. Western intellectual traditions have illuminated dichotomies
in definitions, especially Descartes’ Mind/Body division. The disembodied “I think
therefore I am” prioritizes the intellect over other aspects of human experience such
as the senses. Nevertheless, another French intellectual, Marcel Mauss, centuries
later, published an outstanding essay on Les Techniques du Corps (1936). He
explored the multiple ways in which bodily movement differs according to culture.
Internal cultural differences are also affected by age and gender, which he did not
confront at that pioneering stage. Notwithstanding, Mauss is relevant to the practice
of anthropological fieldwork across cultures. The anthropologist learns not only
with her/his mind, but crucially, in combination with the body (Okely 2007).

Subconscious Emotions

In the same era as Mauss, Freud (1954) explored the hitherto less researched sub-
conscious core of human experience. He pioneered theories regarding the long-term
influence exerted by infancy and childhood on an individual’s emergent personality
and life trajectory. Here emotions, molded through early relationships, general

J. Okely (*)
University of Hull, Hull, UK
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Wolfson College, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 325

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_27
326 J. Okely

socialization, and various events—whether predictable or unexpected—are crucial

ingredients both as cause and consequence. Their impact and resonance would be
explored through psychoanalysis, a format involving one-to-one hourly encounters
between professional and analysand. In this process, there is full recognition and
exploration of the subconscious or even unconscious. The analysand is encouraged
to free associate, to voice rather than repress any stray remarks, and recount narra-
tives, alongside seemingly irrational dreams or nightmares. Contrary to any domi-
nant hegemony of rationality and ideals of self-control, letting go releases core
insights, new understandings, and more complete knowledge.
Embracing psychoanalysis and its process exposes repressed, almost unknown
experiences, whether trauma or forgotten joy—all lived or hidden emotions.
Hitherto, surface reasonings have taken control of emotions, the latter too often
dismissed as irrational and to be suppressed. The practice involved an asymmetric
exchange where the “patient” free associates and the analyst offers interpretations.
Eventually, the outsider professional has to make sense for and with the patient,
who ideally can eventually confront the past and be transformed. Psychoanalysis of
the Freudian genre privileged the subconscious, which the process aims to make
conscious. All this entails extensive narrative and seemingly disconnected images,
recollections, outbursts or even denials, and unexpected unburdening of long-­hidden
horrors and trauma.
In the social sciences there has, by contrast, been a long-held history of positiv-
ism, namely, an imagined imitation of science where the researcher/scientist is
detached and disengaged, apparently in order to ensure that they have no influence
on the object(s) of study. Such detachment has been transposed to what some claim
is the core of social research. Additionally, the quantitative has increasingly taken
precedent over the qualitative, seemingly in response to governmental policy
demands and the strictures of neoliberal economies. Here voters, citizens, and con-
sumers are judged and valued as mere samples and numbers, the more the better for
capturing profit for those with power and control. This fetishization has occasion-
ally been exposed as misleading: for example,, the opinion polls which failed to
predict the Conservatives winning the 2015 UK General Election and now the 2016
Brexit referendum. As Edmund Leach (1967) convincingly argued, intensive field-
work in one location, through extended time, can reveal the system rather than
superficial mass surveys conducted in multiple locations. The questionnaire based
on a passing encounter between strangers may, as Leach reveals, merely repeat the
inbuilt errors of both question and answer, disguised by intoxicating numbers. By
contrast, intensive fieldwork involves day-to-day, in-depth interaction in every pos-
sible context: verbal, bodily, group, or personal interchange among a wide range of
connected persons. Inevitably, emotions emerge and become entangled, bringing
creative consequences.
Given the current regrettable personal distancing in a sociology that forgets the
celebrated Chicago School of Sociology which first invented the term “participant
observation,” there are bizarre responses in some contemporary UK sociologists.
Strangely, emotional rapport in one-to-one dialogue can be seen by some as mere
distraction. One recent example will suffice. Invited by another university to join a
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 327

PhD committee consisting of social scientists, I was the only anthropologist. The
postgraduate, named Rachel, with outstanding degrees in social anthropology, was
researching identity and domestic history among aged women. Rachel suggested
exploring, during semi-structured interviews, the emotional significance of personal
objects in the home space to each individual, as a route to reconstructing past expe-
rience and values. Immediately, one of the quantitative sociologists declared,
“That’s just psychobabble!” Thus, emotions and their analysis were caricatured and
triumphantly trashed.
Then the postgraduate, whose first language was not English, in a highly original
retort, suggested that treasured objects around the home were “good to think with.”
Thus, she creatively resonated with Lévi-Strauss on Totemism (1958/1962), where
he brilliantly explains that animals are “good to think with.” But the social scientists
declared that the anthropologist should correct her English grammar. No matter that
she was citing the English translation by a distinguished Oxford anthropologist.

 he Personal as Political, Theoretical, and Revelation

T
of Emotions

There has also been a deletion of the use of the first person, again in the name of
science. Some decades ago, I proposed the theme of autobiography for the
Association of Social Anthropologists’ (ASA) bi-Annual conference. I had been
inspired by themes emerging from the now much-cited Writing Culture (Clifford
and Marcus 1986). One article (Rosaldo 1986) had highlighted and analyzed the
appearance of the word I” in the text. It was not inevitably autobiographical, nor
self-revelatory; instead, the article argued that the word I” was merely there to
assert authority at key junctures. It informed the reader that only the anthropologist
was there as fieldworker witness, in contrast to the reader who was not there (ibid,
p. 90). The individual presence, seemingly, added scientific proof of presence and
in-depth fieldwork. This analysis triggered reconsideration of the varying uses of
the first person in publications. My co-convener, Helen Callaway, and I had to
argue the case at the preceding conference. We insisted that the gender, age, ethnic-
ity, and personality had huge influence on the specific insiders who welcomed the
outsider (see ‘Doc’ in Whyte 1955), the anthropologist’s varied responses, choices
and in-depth interpretations. Shockingly, opponents of our theme argued this was
“navel gazing,” “narcissism,” and “California speak.” But, we won the vote by
show of hands, thrilled that “elders” such as Leach and Raymond Firth supported
us. The ensuing volume, Anthropology and Autobiography (Okely and Callaway
1992), triumphantly emerged from that huge controversy. Some now downgrade
so-called reflexivity as under-investigating “the researcher’s states of being”
(Davies 2010, p. 1). Yet, we were reinserting the fieldworker’s specificity, including
his/her emotions.
328 J. Okely

Already, in the mid-1980s, I had controversially used personal experience,

both my own and others, as examples of changing historical positionality in a
book on Simone de Beauvoir (Okely 1986). There I confronted emotions in the
acts of reading, writing, and choosing a subject. This publication did not directly
involve fieldwork. But the past leaves ethnography. Retrospectively, I recognize
that the project was indeed integrating personal, lived, and emotional experi-
ence with what initially seemed a detached re-reading of a celebrated feminist.
By the mid-1970s, the Women’s Liberation Movement had rejuvenated femi-
nism with the rallying cry: “The personal is political.”1 Later, I was to argue in
the ASA volume (ibid. 1992, p. 9) that “The personal is theoretical.” The spe-
cific ethnography from the fieldworker’s experiences stimulates emergent
theories.
Signing a contract for Virago Pioneers, a series celebrating key women authors,
I had initially thought an opening chapter on the historical context of the writing
of de Beauvoir’s (1949) Le Deuxieme Sexe would be apt. Soon I recognized that,
my being no historian, this chapter would take months of amateur research. The
challenge was solved when re-reading my French Gallimard copy, first read when
studying at the Sorbonne, Paris. I was transformed by the text: having escaped a
prison-like English boarding school where intellectual quests and achievement
were discouraged, let alone feminism, and where most emotions, not just personal
grief, but also masculinized rage and anger were to be repressed (ibid. 1996,
Chaps. 7 and 8).
Here are the emotional and indeed personal ingredients to my de Beauvoir writ-
ing. The original French text, read by this English teenager in the 1960s, had been a
much treasured object, among other key books, for example, by Breton, Camus, and
Sartre. The pages were marked by excited (yes, emotional), ink scribbles and key
underlinings from two decades back. Later, in the mid-1980s, now an anthropolo-
gist and Essex University lecturer, this author began preparing the Virago publica-
tion. In the aftermath of the impact of 1970s feminism on gendered research and
cross-disciplinary texts, there was a dramatic contrast between my once naïve teen-
age comments and what most women of multiple disciplines would take for granted
by the mid-1980s. Fancy, in the early 1960s, the then young student had felt it illu-
minating to underline and appreciatively tick de Beauvoir’s assertion that women
were of equal intelligence as men. My school never taught me that. The teenage ink
marks, exclamations and comments in the margins were a record of past emotional,
as well as intellectual enlightenment. I had gradually unlearned the hegemony of the
culture of the “stiff-upper-lip” (see below), and the female subordination born of
9 years of boarding school indoctrination, disguised as privilege (Okely 1996,
Chaps. 7 and 8).
For the proposed book, the strategy was to summarize key arguments by de
Beauvoir and then juxtapose them with early readings and now taken-for-granted

1
The phrase was popularized by Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay title “The Personal is Political” in
Firestone and Koedt (1970), although Hanisch disavows authorship of the phrase. Others have also
declined authorship but cite millions of women as the collective authors.
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 329

assumptions. Additionally and crucially, past personal readings were inserted from
as wide a range of other women’s perspectives, concerning the book’s impact on
them and the historical context of their textual readings of de Beauvoir. These
included my Bengali, mature doctoral student who read it far from Europe and an
English postgraduate of white working class origins. Women of varied ethnicities
and ages, all celebrated the impact of de Beauvoir, often from very different cultural
perspectives, linked to specific biographies. Here then were examples of what, sadly
in 2014, the university social scientist mentioned above might have dismissed as
“psychobabble.”
Alternatively, the approach was legitimated, but misinterpreted as “reader
response theory.” Any critique of this alleged perspective is valid, because this
author never claimed there is NO inherent meaning in a text, but instead, that its
interpretation varies according to cultural, gendered, and historical perspective. By
the 1980s, in contrast to understanding the world as recent school leaver at the
Sorbonne, now having acquired an Oxford BA and doctorate, this author no longer
needed reassurance that women’s intelligence was not inferior to that of men.
Strangely, the American publishers, Pantheon, demanded from Virago, the UK
publishers, that all such personal interjections were to be deleted because Okely was
“not a celebrity.” I refused, arguing that the personal was an historic case study for
many others. Pantheon did succeed in excluding the photograph of de Beauvoir
buying a daily newspaper from a working class Parisienne. I suggested this was one
of the rare instances when de Beauvoir moved beyond the bourgeois elite. Pantheon
insisted: “In America we don’t do class.” Central to my analysis of Le Deuxieme
Sexe (1949) was that its apparently powerful universalism actually drew on sub-
merged autobiography, confirmed in de Beauvoir’s Memoires (1958). Pantheon
excluded all US publicity. But the Virago edition, appearing, dramatically, the week
de Beauvoir died, became an Oxford best seller.2

The Range of Emotions

Thanks to the invitation to the 2015 Berlin workshop “The Researchers’ Affects”
(see chapter “Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography”,
this volume) I had to consider in depth the full range of emotions in fieldwork and
academe. In social anthropology, we are forever confronted by the tension between
the universal and the culturally specific, especially concerning the acculturation of
the body. As Mauss (1936) noted, there are different ways of learning to act in and
through bodily movement. Some become ingrained from childhood. There are dif-
ferences across cultures. It is therefore no surprise that expressions of emotion will
vary across culture, and within cultures across gender and age. One of my students,

2
At the 2016 AAA conference, a leading anthropologist, of Indian descent, confided how influen-
tial my Virago publication had been to her.
330 J. Okely

Roger, when an undergraduate at Durham University, was brilliantly astute in

acknowledging the cultural effects of gender on biology in a tutorial for my course
“Race and Gender.” When discussing the classic difference between sex as biologi-
cal category and gender as cultural (Oakley 1972), he reversed the dichotomy in a
highly original way, declaring: “I have tear ducts in my eyes. But, after being sent
to an all male boarding school, I have not used them since I was aged 11.” At such
elite British boarding schools, boys were ordered not to cry. Here macho culture
overrode “natural” biology. Emotions of grief, sadness and pain, perceived as signs
of weakness, were banned. There was no equivalent censorship of aggression and
properly directed anger in such places. The psychoanalyst, Schaverien, has now
published her long-term study of this “‘stiff-upper-lip culture,” namely Boarding
School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child (2015).
When Roger produced such insights, he was 19 years old. He is now an Oxford
Professor and soon to be head of a prestigious college. Thirty years later, I reminded
him of his insights. He exclaimed: “Did I say that? Goodness I was brilliant. It’s
been downhill ever since.” Here we have insights into British ideals of masculinity.
Men, let alone boys, are stigmatized as weak if they cry, revealing emotion.
Seemingly, they will also be stigmatized as like girls, for whom tearful emotions are
reserved. No matter both boys and girls have tear ducts.

Emotions in Fieldwork

Here is a partial range of emotions: anger, aggression, envy, jealousy, fear, terror,
hate, disgust, boredom, joy, love, grief, sadness, remorse, surprise, interest, awe,
admiration, guilt, trust, and vigilance. I have selected some from a Wikipedia chart.
There are others especially relevant for anthropological fieldwork; for example,
there are key emotions linked to cross-cultural choice: curiosity, longing for the
elsewhere. This may be a fantasy of escape and the search for difference. There are
also emotions linked to political engagement; something I learned from Sartre and
de Beauvoir.
Another complex of emotions in fieldwork is giving, as part of reciprocity. Here
we are back with Mauss, but this time with his brilliant book The Gift (1925/1954)
revealing an obligation to give, to receive and to return or reciprocate. Again, I argue
there are specific obligations in anthropological fieldwork. We depend on our hosts’
welcome and hospitality. Eventually, we are not there just to take but also to return.
We can give back in different ways (see section “Reciprocity in Research
Relationships,” this volume). The acts of reciprocity on either side are driven by
emotions, both at the start and completion. Sometimes that continues for years, even
decades.
One example draws on my own fieldwork, elaborated in an article in press where I
explore the key individuals who befriended and guided me through the inevitable
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 331

mistakes anyone makes as outsider entering another culture. They were all literate, in
contrast to the majority of the community of Traveller-Gypsies3 with whom I lived. They
were two men and two women who had lived the other side of ethnicity, having spent
time in houses and in school. One, whom I here call Geoff, had been wonderful com-
pany in extended discussions. Here was a fellow intellectual full of wit, detailed observa-
tions and insights into the traveling way of life. Sometime after fieldwork, he was

3
The author explicates on the histories and politics of designations in Okely and Houtman (2011,
pp. 24–25): “Different groups choose different self-ascriptions, and preferred titles change over
time as labels become stigmatized. Fredrik Barth (1969) pioneered the emphasis on self-ascription
among ethnic groups. “Traveller,” used by the Scottish and Irish, has replaced the once neutral
descriptive label “Tinker.” The latter term originally referred to skills in improvised metal work,
but hostile use by the dominant society led to its abandonment (Helleiner 2000). “Gypsy” is a
shortening of “Egyptian,” long-used from the fifteenth century onwards to denote any so-called
foreigners. It was once a capital offense to be a Gypsy. Nevertheless, Gypsies in England and
Wales have embraced the title. An alternative is “Romany.” In hegemonic media discourse,
“Romany” has been used as a means of constructing “real” Gypsies, as distinct from alleged “half-
castes,” or “drop-outs” (see Acton 1974). When engaging with racist outsiders, Gypsies may prefer
to neutralize their identity by calling themselves Travellers. Another current term is “Roma.” This
label’s increased profile is connected in part to the practice, widespread in the former communist
countries of the EU, of appointing state-salaried ethnic “leaders,” who were often in effect profes-
sional lobbyists, and frequently considered unrepresentative—and sometimes ritually polluted—
by the groups they supposedly stood for (Kaminski 1980). This form of representation stands in
contrast to the decentralized experience and political strategies of Gypsies in other countries, espe-
cially the UK. It was through such figures that the label “Roma” gained its wide currency. In 2004,
the EU, apparently ignorant of these multiple histories and preferred terminologies, deferred to
those who saw themselves as representatives of Roma in the ex-communist countries, who lobbied
for the banning of the label “Gypsy.” In so doing, the EU showed its apparent ignorance of the
existence of the long-established British Gypsy Council (Acton 1974). The label “Roma,” although
certainly embraced by many, is not universal in the formerly communist-ruled parts of Europe.
Czech anthropologists (Budilová and Jakoubek 2009) confirm that Slovak Gypsies refuse to call
themselves Roma, because the high-profile “leaders” who embrace the term do not represent their
interests. Furthermore, the use of “Roma” can emphasize a mono Indian origin and an unadulter-
ated Hindu culture, at the expense of recognizing the variegated histories and adaptations that have
emerged over centuries. This implicit privileging of a single territory of origin is consistent with
the Stalin-era policy of affording greater recognition to minorities with claims to specific territorial
connections. The pre-Sanskrit linguistic connections that can be discerned in the many forms of
Romanes meant that for many communist-governed Roma, it made sense to designate India as
their original territory. The single Indian origin is reiterated by a British-born linguist (Hancock
2002). These issues have been fully debated elsewhere (Willems 1997; Liebich 2007; Jacobs and
Ries 2008). My early questioning of the narrative of a single origin for Gypsy culture was gener-
ally taken to be anthropologically convincing (Okely 1983, pp. 1–27). Regarding the question of
“ethnicity,” for each of these minorities, the principle of descent is crucial. This principle has
gradually replaced the problematic notion of biological “race” in political and legal debate. When
the Irish Travellers were recognized as an ethnic minority, followed by the Scottish Travellers in
2008, it was people’s shared history and shared ancestry that was felt to be crucial. The question of
Indian origin was not deemed relevant. Scottish Traveller Colin Clark and I provided expert wit-
ness for the recognition of Scottish Travellers (see also Clark and Greenfields 2006). As recently
as the 1990s, only the English Gypsies were legally recognized as an ethnic group in the UK, on
the grounds that they had originated in India and were therefore a distinct “race.” All these groups
distinguish themselves from nonmembers. Roma and Gypsies call outsiders “gaje.” The Irish
Travellers call non-Travellers “country people.” The Scottish Travellers use the label “flatties.”
332 J. Okely

wrongly charged with kidnap and attempted murder. A subtext was that he was closet
gay and avoided by other Traveller-Gypsies who then stigmatized non-heterosexuality.
I visited Geoff in Wandsworth Prison, although the director at my research center, a
seconded civil servant, insisted I should be working in the office during afternoons. Here
emotion intruded. I declared that the Traveller-Gypsies had given us so much, the least I
could do was to reciprocate. Emotions of defiance overtook me in confrontation with
power. My boss demanded I take the “free afternoon” out of my limited annual leave.
I was Geoff’s only visitor. Later, he described how much the visit meant to him.
An outsider found him a solicitor who picked up my cultural capital as Oxford
graduate, with ‘posh’ accent. I acted as a character witness in the Central Court of
the land. It helped. Geoff was found not guilty of most charges. Here is a wonderful
memory, full of multiple emotions. It also challenges the lie that anthropologists
only use the ‘other’ for selfish gain.

Emotions Among Varied Anthropologists

Thanks to Thomas Stodulka, who must have responded to the latent emotions in my
Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method (2012b), I was
inspired to re-examine various incidents in terms of emotions in the field. I recorded
dialogues with some 20 anthropologists of 16 nationalities who had done fieldwork
around the globe, some as long ago as the late 1960s, others in recent years.
Unpredicted were the emergent commonalities. At the outset, partly due to my
opening broad questions, I was focusing on seemingly more grounded aspects of
fieldwork practice and a less formulaic means of understanding fieldwork. I regret
not having asked whether and in what way they were changed by the experience.
In this article, I have brought to the fore the implicit emotional aspects of key
incidents, encounters or the very choice of locality and topic. Gradually, I recog-
nized some key aspects linked to crossing cultures. There are emotional drives
which push us to seek the elsewhere, the different, beyond what we may have been
socialized to see as normal. It may be, by contrast, that the search for the elsewhere
is a conscious or subconscious reconnection with some lost, past experience or even
fantasy. A “longing for the elsewhere” extends to choice of location or topic.

The Elsewhere: Emotional Drive

Akira Okazaki, like others, was driven to the elsewhere, in his case from his home
country of Japan to Africa and then to nonliterate communities, namely the Maasai.
But once in place, he changed to something very different:
The first time I went to Africa I wasn’t an anthropologist. I was there as a hitchhiker and a
traveller. I found myself living among the Maasai. I started to be attracted by their way of
life, centered on age groups. But I didn’t have any way of knowing or understanding their
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 333

way of life. (...) I had been studying French symbolist poems, critique, and philosophy,
always dealing with what is writing, like in France at the time, the way we were talking
“Qu’est que c’est l’ecriture?” (What is writing?) This question was common.

Okazaki had believed that people’s perception and ways of experiencing things
might depend on whether or not people have a written form of language.
I was interested in Africa because I thought that some people there are not disturbed by that
written form. My interest was in how they could see the world, landscape and other people
without being disturbed by ecriture (writing).
But after I arrived, and several months living among the Maasai, I completely forgot the
initial reason of going to Africa. I found something totally different and another new ques-
tion coming from that experience. That is, how can I understand?
In French poetry, people are talking about what is truth in poems, I was a master in that
discourse, unable to think about any alternative way of looking at the world.
Many times I returned to Maasai land. From 1981 I decided to find another place for my
fieldwork, to try new ways of learning the stimulation from a new world. I was unemployed
for 10 years or even 20 years, doing fieldwork with my own money, gained by manual
labour, because I wanted to be among the Africans and because I can learn and get interest-
ing things. I found one community in the Gamk area.

Here, in his own words, is evidence of Okazaki’s continuing passion in pursuing

difference and its understanding. He self-financed his fieldwork through the years
and changed the people and locality, but always far from Japan. Among a commu-
nity of Gamk, on first arrival, he was treated as outsider with seeming advantages,
but later, he discovered disadvantages. He did not realize that he was perpetually
treated as a foreigner in a culture used to welcoming outsiders, but kept at a dis-
tance. Then, unexpectedly, he returned to the same community after a long absence
through illness. The people were impressed he had chosen to return and invited him
to join them, albeit to build his own house. Crucially, his hosts were emotionally
touched by this Japanese outsider’s commitment, respect, and drive. His curiosity
was always satisfied with the unexpected. Akira was captivated by the fact that he
could not predict anything happening in this culture:
During my fieldwork always there is something new. Amazing things happen. Not in terms
of spectacular things. Just tiny things like the way a ritual is so different from what I know -
some new word which they use when they are doing rituals.

Emotional Nostalgia: The Past Revisited

Another emotion involves the opposite to the unknown afar: not searching for the
new and unpredictable, as Okazaki did, but instead for a known but lost past. Hélène
Neveu Kringelbach was drawn to a fieldwork site initially by her childhood memo-
ries, a Proustian À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927). Franco-Senegalese,
she returned to Senegal, where she had spent her childhood with her Senegalese
father and French mother. After parental separation, she was brought up in France
with her mother. She reconstructed that highly charged past, which resonated with
Proust’s emphasis on bodily triggers, in his now famous case of the taste of a
334 J. Okely

biscuit. For Hélène, here also is the link with experiences which reconstruct emo-
tions of innocent happiness:
I’d been to Dakar about eight times as a child. I found myself gliding into the place much
easier than I would have done otherwise. I remembered the feel of the city, the sounds and
smells. It helped me getting started(…) I could still find my way around a little bit. The bulk
of my memories were from the age of five playing in the street with other children, going to
the beach and smelling the rotten fish. All these things were still there. Of course, the city
had expanded(…)It had changed. But some of the sensory impressions were still the same.

Escaping Association with Violence

Another choice of field location was also governed by the anthropologist’s ethnicity
and earlier formative experiences, but again in different ways from the ones above.
Paul Clough, with an American father, an English mother and American citizenship,
had lived through childhood in militarily defined locations, because his father had
been in the US army. Electing to avoid any country with a US military connection,
he chose Nigeria; far from Vietnam, Cambodia or Korea, marked by US warfare.
Less significant for him, personally, was the British legacy of colonialism in Nigeria,
given his Americanized upbringing:
It was all pure idealism. I was living in Malta. I had a Peace Corps application. They wanted
to send me to Melanesia. I didn’t want to go because it looked like I was moving into an
American colonial situation – American protected territories. I wanted something genuinely
different. Out of idealism, I started looking for jobs in Africa. There was an American Jesuit
priest at a Maltese school where I taught who said, “Write to the Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu
Bello University.” I sent him this letter saying I wanted to be a volunteer teacher. That’s how
I got to Nigeria – another strange accident.

Escaping Mono-Cultural Bodily Control

Felicia Hughes-Freeland was drawn to dance in Southeast Asia. It was an escape

from conventions, especially her cultural bodily controls. There are parallels with
the yearning for difference, as with Akira.
I let things happen. That’s when things went well. I’d seen a lot of dancing. Everywhere I
went there’d be some sort of dancing. It struck me that there was something going on (…)
that seemed different from what I was used to. When I saw the court dancing in Yogyakarta,
I thought it extraordinary and beautiful. I wondered how it kept going. I couldn’t relate it to
this highly materialistic society I’d been living in, in East Java, after becoming an
anthropologist.

Hughes-Freeland reveals the then shockingly ethnocentric, if not racist, beliefs of

the Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) which:
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 335

made you come home at the end of your second year to stop you “going native.” They had
this funny idea that, if you’d stayed longer than two years, you would be irredeemably lost.

After some years of acquaintance, Felicia and I discovered we had attended the
same constricting boarding school in the Isle of Wight, albeit at different times
(Okely 2012a). Predictably, we had suppressed an emotionally brutal past and hith-
erto never revealed it. She attended the school at a later age so was less vulnerable.
But, inevitably, she found the island internment as ever shocking. After just a few
terms’ attendance, she fled this “total institution” (Goffman 1968) which acted as
both bodily constraint (Okely 1996, Chap. 7), and to popular incredulity, discour-
aged intellectual pursuit, let alone university entrance (ibid, Chap. 8). Here forms of
socialization, however brief, may have emotional legacies of defiance, not necessar-
ily nostalgia.
Anthropologists are often outsiders. They’ve had experiences in their childhood or they’ve
lived in other countries. Something’s happened or they’ve come from outside. Often one
doesn’t feel one belongs. So in the field experience, you passionately want to be accepted.
Belonging is very important.

By contrast, that same boarding school had a different emotional legacy for another
former inmate: Mimi Khalvati, of Iranian origin, was, like a number of other girls,
sent by global elites to this outpost. Dispatched, at primary school age, Mimi did not
revisit Iran, her home and family, for over a decade. Years later, now a celebrated
poet, she returned to her former school grounds in search of the only continuity she
could find in her childhood, the nearest thing to having a “home.” Here, as with
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, the return was made out of emotional nostalgia but,
additionally in Mimi’s case, to make sense of a relatively brutal past where she came
to realize she had been abandoned. Again, there are Proustian sensory resonances.
Key buildings had been bulldozed, but her emergent book of poetry reconstructed
the poignant attachments to remaining vegetation and landscape (Khalvati 2001).
When I showed her select footage of my filmed return to the school, a few years
earlier (Okely 2003), she begged for a copy. She could now visually revisit memo-
ries of the now bulldozed Chapel and Gymnasium, once places of joyful communi-
tas (Turner 1969).
Paradoxically, although this time-warped institution was supposed to indoctri-
nate us into becoming “upper-class ladies” in an imagined English monoculture,
this future anthropologist befriended girls of different cultures sent from around the
world. These included girls from Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Canada,
Hong Kong, France, Sweden, and South America. We exchanged cross-cultural
contrasts. I learned Persian phrases and enjoyed narratives of the Caspian Sea, all in
contrast to our Alcatraz in the English Channel. Thus, like the varied anthropolo-
gists in Anthropological Practice (Okely 2012b), children, not just adult research-
ers, may be open to what intrigues them, especially contrasts with the familiar.
Advance agendas, whether imposed by research committees or by authoritarian
regimes for children, are invariably transformed or subverted.
336 J. Okely

Interpreting and Conveying the Unspoken

The long-term emotional impact of varied childhood experiences is again to be

found in another anthropologist’s future fieldwork and research. The examples of
anthropologists I have mentioned thus far are of Japanese, Franco-Senegalese,
Anglo American, and English descent. The next example is an anthropologist of
Polish descent. Marek Kaminski was, as was the custom for families facing poverty
under communism, out of necessity placed by his widowed mother in an orphanage.
He had only infrequent visits from his mother. His father had been a distinguished
war hero fighting fascism. But after the postwar communist take-over, he was “acci-
dentally” killed when visiting a factory. Kaminski grew up to hate the regime that
murdered his father. He explained how he learned that, as a child among many in the
orphanage, he had to observe the passing adults to understand, then appeal to them.
Learning to be unthreatening through body language, he became fearless when
entering groups and localities where others might have been terrified by prior ste-
reotypes. He elaborated on how bodily movement may convey inner feelings and
attributed his approach to his experience as a once abandoned child:
We project patronizing, uncertain feelings with our movements. Because of my life experi-
ence, (I had to leave when I was five years old for the orphanage), I had in some way gath-
ered non-verbal communication signals which I projected onto other people, because in
some cases, I entered the most dangerous situation. I should have been knifed, or killed, or
raped, or whatever, and nothing happened to me. I believe in some way we project that
innocence, or ignorance sometimes. It could also be interpreted as the core of humanity –
we trust that other person.
So my contact with Gypsies was always the same. I believe they could interpret my
reaction as always friendly, as nothing hidden. Like a dog meeting the more powerful beast,
they will lie on their back and show four legs. I think my entire social situation was of that
dog with the four legs, so I was left un-attacked and allowed to stay.
I project without knowing it, because it was the same when I was in Greenland and
meeting the guys with the guns when we were shooting, or in Lapland when I was left in
the forest suddenly alone. Then the Laplanders brought me back to their things, and allowed
me to meet criminal groups – always in some way this non-verbal communication.
Somebody told me that dogs attack us because, when we are scared, we have some kind of
smell, which they can feel. I believe there are social situations, it could be non-verbal, but
the way we look, the way we approach the person, brings hostility or welcoming. Gypsies,
so many times, are trained through generations to perceive the signals, not only Gypsies, but
all marginal groups.

Kaminski attributed the trust, he elicited, to his deferential, visibly harmless, near
vulnerable approach to strangers and stigmatized minorities. “Never, ever in my
involvement with Gypsies has anyone stolen from me.”
Kaminski’s experience took a new turn when he escaped Poland as a refugee to
Sweden in the early 1970s. Stateless for years, that position added to his emotional
and general identification with other vulnerable persons and groups. This can extend
to empathy with the cause of humanitarian justice against the hegemonic racism of
the majority population, and enhance the engagement of the anthropologist with a
persecuted minority.
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 337

Years earlier, Kaminski revealed a complete contrast with his self-description as

deferential, when, before migrating, he stood up to the fearsomely powerful:
In Slovakia we were waiting for the bus and suddenly Slovak hooligans came and attacked
the Gypsies. I was with them and waiting. It was an automatic response: “Why the hell are
they beating these guys who are waiting for the bus?” That event brought me into their com-
munity. I took their side in this struggle. The area I was studying was not far from the
Slovak/Polish border. There were districts where the majority were Gypsy inhabitants. You
are waiting for the bus from this district town, as it was the only access to these Gypsy
settlements. Then there came some drunkards, non-Gypsy Slovaks, who are, just for the
sport, attacking waiting Gypsies.
Sometimes the Gypsies would defend themselves, but usually, they were extremely pas-
sive. They were beaten, but no reaction. I was from Poland, an outsider, and a privileged
position, because in Eastern Europe a foreigner, even from a neighboring socialist country,
was a privileged person, because the community couldn’t travel easily. We didn’t have
passports, so being an outsider and taking their side and shouting at Slovaks in Polish, I was
suddenly projecting that fight into some international affair at the local level. I was told that
this was frequent. They were beaten at that time, all the time. We talk about Jewish pogroms
in East Europe in the twentieth century. But I am talking about Slovakia in 1968/69/70 –
regular pogroms against the Gypsies by non-Gypsies.
You had to have a residence permit to stay in one area. You had to have a work permit to
move to another. Within Eastern Europe you had domestic divisions. The Gypsies had no
chance, if they gained criminal records, through fighting back. The entire police force had
no Gypsy who admitted to being a Gypsy. Whenever they were attacked and beaten up, they
had no chance of defense. That I recognized.

Such ‘pogroms’ continued even after Slovakia joined the European Union.
Meanwhile, a new generation of anthropologists is emerging with important studies
of Gypsies and Roma in the Czech and Slovak Republic (Jakoubek and Budilová
2006; Budilová and Jakoubek 2009).
The individual may, in fearless protest, draw on his or her emotionally painful,
transgressive biography, which becomes empathy toward the vulnerable.
Consciously or subconsciously, the individual psyche is enhanced or even exploited
in fieldwork encounters. The anthropologist may be both rebel and compliant—a
‘critic at home and a conformist abroad’ (Lévi-Strauss 1955/1973, p. 386).

The Passion for Difference

The anthropologist may not only seek the elsewhere or past nostalgia, but also dif-
ference, wherever encountered, both nearby or faraway. Okely, having been inspired
by difference in the West of Ireland, when accompanying her then partner (2009),
embraced an escape from a monoculture to anthropology, which celebrated the full
range of human possibilities. By chance, after a postgraduate conversion course, she
answered an advert for a research project on Gypsies and other Travellers. The suc-
cessful appointment led to a continuing, multi-faceted engagement. Here was differ-
ence and ingenuity, in the very ‘Home Counties’ and on ‘Gypsy Sites’ sites, midway
between Oxford and Cambridge (Okely 1987).
338 J. Okely

By contrast, as assistant to Evans-Pritchard, Malcolm McLeod became inter-

ested in witchcraft in Africa. An accident led him to Ghana and an Asante commu-
nity. Although there was witchcraft, Malcolm responded passionately to what was
different before his eyes, all without advance planning. He was captivated by the
material culture: tremendous textiles, woodcarvings, and especially goldsmithery.
Here was curiosity, openness, and spontaneous enthusiasm for difference in a feast
of cultural artistry. This unanticipated response to material culture, rather than direct
human interaction, led McLeod to be Curator at the Museum of Mankind at the
British Museum and the Glasgow Hunterian Museum. Eventually, McLeod returned
that gift of creativity by assisting in establishing a Museum in Ghana to celebrate
Asante culture in their home place.
Suzette Heald, planning to examine bilingualism in Africa, had to change topic
just before her departure. Her husband, accompanying her as teacher, was suddenly
assigned a different locality where bilingualism was marginal, if nonexistent. But,
spontaneously driven by immediate, albeit naïve, curiosity as to difference, she
became immersed in the very opposite to her sheltered, middle-class Anglican
upbringing, namely violence and the threat of murder:
I’d had a very middle-class, English upbringing in the fifties, where personal security was
absolutely taken for granted. There were two events that focused me. One was coming
across a party of men one morning armed with knobkerries and pangas. Knobkerries are
sticks with rounded heads, and pangas are called machetes in other places. These men were
quite heavily armed, and me saying: “Where are you off to and what are you doing?” and
them saying: “We’re on the tracks of a thief.” Me: “What are you going to do with those
implements?” “Oh we will kill him of course” – just absolutely straight. That shocked me.
Then very soon afterwards, a witch was killed, an old man, fairly near where I was living. I
was immediately challenged by this violent side of Gisu life.

Like Heald, anthropologists, such as Zulaika (1995) and Okely (2005), may not
specifically have set out to study violence, but if its use and management are integral
to the society or group, the anthropologist cannot ignore it. Violence may be the
outcome of cool calculation and the repression of emotion. In other contexts, it may
be intermingled with emotion, for example, individualistic anger and rage or group
identity, fired by ethnic, nationalist, racist identity, and loyalty.

 he Outsider Anthropologist as Therapist, Confidante, or

T
Rival to Other Academics

In England, from my first week living on a site for Gypsies or Travellers was treated
as an unwitting therapist. A young mother, ‘Gemma,’ still traumatized by the acci-
dental death of one of her children in the previous year, invited this non-Traveller-­
Gypsy (gorgio) to join her for a chat in an abandoned van, every late evening.
Gemma’s husband and other children, like the other residents on the site, were
asleep in their caravans. Gemma talked for hours, re-living the drama of her tragic
loss. The outsider acted as supportive listener and silent therapist. The bereaved
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 339

mother projected her grief outwards, explaining how her neighbors no longer
wanted to listen. The stranger anthropologist was honored to be so incorporated as
co-resident.
Another emotional outlet for the site residents were the dramatic details of a feud
triggered by jealousy, betrayal, and murder. Again, the outsider/incomer was treated
as the listener of endless details surrounding the conflict and ensuing horror, result-
ing in a court case and prison sentence. In fact, the person who had technically
caused the death was not exposed in court. The anthropologist was informed of the
entire context and the name of the individual whom the two feuding parties had
jointly agreed should be named as the guilty party. Details of this were never pub-
lished in my 1983 monograph but concealed in the 1977 doctorate, banned for
decades from public circulation.
The anthropologist did not fear about the knowledge circulation by the Traveller-­
Gypsies, but ‘fellow’ academics, driven by macho jealousy toward a young female
invading ‘their’ patch. Within weeks of my moving onto the site, an established
male linguist, ignorant of fieldwork methods, hearing of my existence on the activist
circuit, asked what this female Oxford graduate looked like and her exact fieldwork
site. He, Donald Kenrick, declared his intention to visit the locality and inform the
residents that Okely was a ‘government spy.’ Ironically, in direct contradiction to
this macho rival, the government had tried to block the research project, financed by
the charitable Rowntree Memorial Trust, at an independent center. The project
director, Barbara Adams had seconded herself from the Ministry because the latter
had already attempted to censor public circulation of her relatively timid (some-
times ethnocentric) Census report, Gypsies and Other Travellers (M.H.L.G. 1967).
It appeared ‘too sympathetic’ toward the persecuted, nomadic minority. But Adams
had also judged that the ensuing 1968 Caravan Sites Act had not fully considered
the wishes of traveling communities. Thus, the research project was proceeding
despite government disapproval.
No matter that this insecure man’s provocative plan could have been life-­
threatening to the gorgio researcher, given the previous feud, emerging from one
member of the Traveller community reporting another Traveller-Gypsy to the
police. Fortunately, the anthropologist was warned by a sympathetic social worker
and avoided all activist London meetings attended by self-styled ‘rival’ gorgios.
Years later, the same man, red with anger, at a university workshop, yelled at this
anthropologist that her monograph should be burnt (Okely 1997a). Such is the bru-
tal venom among some scholars protecting ‘their’ patch.
As for the murderous feud which the site residents individually detailed to me,
according to each perspective, only after key parties were themselves deceased was
the still disguised ethnography published. This was carefully placed in a journal
rarely consulted by ‘rival’ specialists (ibid. 2005). Fortunately, younger interna-
tional scholars, and now Traveller graduates, have expressed appreciation of the
insights into alternative conflict resolution after an emotional catastrophe and mur-
derous feud.
340 J. Okely

The Outsider Normalized by Unexpected Anger

Paul Clough’s actions were misunderstood while measuring land as a favor for his
host, something which aroused unanticipated complaints. His uncontrolled angry
outburst aroused astonishing admiration. Suddenly this white man was seen to be
like them:
‘He is human:’ I was trying to be a detached sociologist, to keep my emotions under con-
trol, to keep smiling even when my leg was being furiously pulled. I was not developing
friendships with older men, apart from two. I was not in a family situation where I could get
to know the wives.
Then something happened. I began mapping the farms of the village, measuring acre-­
ages. One man said would I please come to measure his fields. I was very busy. I had some
research plans. I said: “OK when and where do we meet? What field do we measure?”
I went to the field to measure with my tape. There he was farming with his mother and
she began grumbling in a way I’d heard before. She said to me in Hausa: “You are here to
exploit us. You are here to eat our villages.” It’s a well-known expression in other African
languages. This ‘eat’ idea is popular in West Africa, a word for exploitation. She said: “You
are eating us. You are going to go back to England to make money out of your notebooks.”
I’d heard this before. I was fatigued. Since her son had called me to do this for his benefit,
I blew my top. I lost control. I started shouting: “Damn you, I don’t want to be out in this
bloody field”, all in Hausa. “I only came because your son invited me. I’m happy to leave
this bloody field this moment.”
Their mouths dropped. For the first time, after a year, they had seen this white man show
emotion. He was a human being. From that moment she became my firm friend.

Here, superbly, the loss of control and emotional outburst, all vividly expressed in
the local language, was totally appreciated. If Clough, the white man, had merely
sworn in English, his bodily image might have confirmed his research subjects’
initial stereotyping of the outsider, stranger. As his opening lines reveal here, he had
believed that the control of emotions was a fieldwork requirement.

 he Outsider May Trigger Fear of Competition, or

T
be Invented as Scapegoat

For Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, arriving as a mother proved not to be a technical

handicap, as some university supervisors have presumed, (see Morris in Okely
2012b, p. 38), but evidence of commitment and shared humanity. Moreover, another
unexpected advantage for mutual trust in Dakar, with a practice of polygamy, was
being a married mother:
Having a child with me made me much less susceptible to being a competitor to other mar-
ried women. There is huge competition amongst women, given that there is polygamy.
There is always a threat of a second or third wife coming. When you come as a single
woman you’re very likely to be perceived as a potential competitor.

After becoming well established as a co-resident on a Traveller-Gypsy site, this

author was exploited as outsider-object to resolve an internal problem. However, the
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 341

anthropologist resolved it through a comic riposte. Returning one day from visiting
my partner, a philosopher at Kings College, Cambridge, I confided in a gorgio resi-
dent that I was suffering from stomach upset after a huge college banquet. But the
gorgio lady, whose marital fidelity was under scrutiny while her husband was in
prison, mischievously spread a false, distracting rumor that I was suffering from
‘early morning sickness.’ Soon the story was embellished. Apparently, I was preg-
nant by a married resident of the Traveller community, dubbed a womanizer. This
was the Traveller-Gypsies’ way of getting at him via a gorgio target, without offend-
ing any Traveller woman. The outsider was the ideal object of projection, as non-­
Traveller women were deemed promiscuous: ‘They go behind the hedge with
anyone.’ The narrative spread to other sites. My neighbors joked they would move
the man’s clothes into my caravan.
The womanizer’s wife, who had been my close friend, no longer saw the joke.
Finally, waiting until a number of residents had gathered in or near the alleged wom-
anizer’s trailer/caravan, I grabbed a doll from the collection of toys given by a char-
ity to the ‘poor Gypsy children.’ Swaddling it in a blanket, I joined the crowd,
proclaiming I had just given birth to this ‘baby’ and asked for paternal support from
the ‘father;’ the alleged womanizer. Everyone shrieked with laughter. The rumor
disintegrated. My co-residents declared: “You can muck in!” Thus shared humor
across boundaries can override stress and projected disapproval. Meanwhile, the
youngest child of the ‘father’ seized the doll, as perceived rival, and smashed it to
pieces, enacting sibling jealousy in dramatic form. The original article (Okely 2005)
was part of a Festschrift for Ronnie Frankenberg. He in turn composed a thank-you
poem about a broken doll.

Unconscious Emotions Driving Analysis and Interpretation

Just as social anthropology avoids formalized number-crunching and arguments

dependent solely on quantification, so its alternative analysis draws on material
gathered from intensive fieldwork in limited localities. The anthropologist is
involved at every stage: from initial research designer to fieldworker, analyst and
author. This contrasts with an often scientistic format where the data is gathered via
questionnaires, administered by multiple ‘slave’ assistants. Subject to managerial,
top-down control, they are devoid of all influence, whether in the initial research
questions or in the writing up. The final publication may be credited alone to the
grant holder (see Okely 2015).
The anthropologist, by contrast, if multi-engaged and open to an holistic
approach, may focus on themes never predicted before entering the field. Here the
example from my classically organized monograph. The Traveller-Gypsies
(Okely 1983) also hides a theme, driven by personal emotions and childhood
trauma. Granted, I had been congratulated on the pioneering methods chapter.
This was partly explained by a long struggle in insisting on the method of partici-
pant observation, whereas my initial director had privileged mass questionnaires.
342 J. Okely

Fig. 1 Fathers and daughters. Photo: Judith Okely (1983)

Additionally, people have reacted with continuing astonishment that I lived with
a community stereotyped and demonized. The chapter answered some of the out-
siders’ near racist astonishment.
However, at the time of writing, I thought the final chapter, ‘Ghosts and Gorgios,’
was seen as routine for a monograph. Later, the French anthropologist, Patrick
Williams, lauded it as one of the few concerned with mortuary rituals among
Traveller minorities throughout Europe. He had then been inspired to complete an
entire monograph on French Manouche mortuary rituals (2003), succeeding his ear-
lier publications on this traveling minority. In turn, I questioned my focus. Gradually,
I recognized the unconscious, psychoanalytical drive.
The photograph labeled ‘Fathers and Daughters,’ (Okely 1983, p. 160) which I
had lovingly selected from many, reveals two men and three little girls whom I had
done research with. I knew them as neighbors, but never revealed any identities.
These were photographs by professionals with the subjects’ consent (Fig. 1).
Privately, I knew the seated father was dying of a brain tumor. Only recently, I
noticed the daughter’s foot poignantly placed on his. She knew of his illness. He did
indeed die. The last image of the monograph (ibid. p. 221) is his burial. Children
scatter earth into his grave. I attended that funeral and was recorded in the crowd.
Here this chapter’s early section on subconscious emotions is most apt, and links
up with the anthropologist Williams’ response to my work. But only decades later,
did I experience the Eureka moment. I had unconsciously identified with that little
girl. I also lost my father at a similar age, but was wrongly told: “Daddy has flu.”
Actually, he was paralyzed from the neck down with polio, encased in an iron lung.
In crisis, my sister and I were dispatched to boarding school, far from what seems
Fieldwork Emotions: Embedded Across Cultures, Shared, Repressed, or Subconscious 343

an idyllic childhood in rural Lincolnshire.4 Months later, our mother appeared,

dressed entirely in black, wearing Daddy’s signet ring. Just before leaving, she
found the courage to tell us that God had taken Daddy to heaven. In bewilderment,
we returned to the dormitory. The matron asked me why I was crying. I explained
my daddy had died. She replied: “I know. But you are to stop crying at once. It’s
against the rules to make a noise in the dormitory.”
Here we see the dramatic and brutal contrast between a British ‘stiff-upper-lip,’
anti-emotional culture and that prevalent among Traveller-Gypsies, who are them-
selves the victims of emotive, racist persecution. The children I lived alongside
were fully ‘educated’ in their way of life, but had never been ‘schooled’ in authori-
tarian institutions (ibid. 1997b). That little girl, consoling her fragile father, was
never ‘sheltered’ from tragedy. The children co-experienced, alongside adults, both
the banal and melodramatic; they were allowed to release emotions, not forced to
repress them as in ‘privileged’ institutions, which even separate children for months
from parents. Traveller-Gypsy children can bid farewell to the dead displayed in
open coffins. They participate in funerals, sharing grief among kin. Of all this, my
sister and I were deprived. We never knew our father was dying, nor the day of his
death, let alone being able to attend his funeral. On being suddenly informed, weeks
after our tragic loss, we were forbidden from expressing the slightest feeling.
The ultimate political revelation of that dominant culture is the contrast between
the personal and public, state hegemony. Many months after our loss, the teacher
ran screaming into our classroom and tearing her hair. We were terrified. She repeat-
edly shrieked: “The King has died!” Expected to enact mass hysteria, we covered
our faces, some smothering giggles. Days of mourning ensued, with special Bible
readings in the Chapel. Girls had to demonstrate sacred reverence to the deceased
Head of Empire and Anglican faith. Only then was emotion demanded: public and
performed, but never personalized for lost loved ones, most close.
Thus, decades later, the externally lauded ethnography and analysis of mortuary
rites among Traveller-Gypsies can be explained in finer detail. My attendance at the
young father’s funeral and the choice of that photograph subconsciously expressed
and resolved comparisons and contrasts with the anthropologist’s brutal childhood.
Aspects of the closing chapter, especially its images, can be interpreted as wishful
thinking; something psychoanalysts recognize in dreams.

To Conclude

Individual biography, even trauma, may find emotional resolution elsewhere through
participating and finding empathy in other cultures. It has been argued that the per-
sonal is both political and theoretical while social science has struggled to retain the
detached observer. The alternative is too threatening. This explains both the furore

4
My father lectured in German and French at Royal Air Force Cranwell. My parents first met in
Berlin as fellow Anglos. This chapter celebrates that emotional connection.
344 J. Okely

when the ASA conference theme was proposed and the publisher’s resistance to
auto/ethnography in re-reading de Beauvoir. In Europe, if not beyond, binary oppo-
sitions have included male/female divisions: transposed as reason versus emotion.
The profoundest fear is that ‘The Personal is Emotional.’ Yet, this need not contra-
dict the political and theoretical. All are intertwined.

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Afterword: A Return to the Story

Paul Stoller

Kumba hinka ga charotarey nyumey

It takes two hands to nourish a friendship
Songhay Proverb

Several years ago, I returned to the Republic of Niger after a long hiatus. Indeed, for
a long period of time, I had concentrated my ethnographic efforts on writing about
West African immigrants in New York City and had put my research in Niger on the
back burner. When I returned to Niamey in February 2009, I did so with great
expectation. I planned to visit the gravesite of my mentor, Jean Rouch and wanted
to begin research on how the introduction of digital technologies had altered urban
and rural social life in Western Niger.
February in Niger can be blisteringly hot. For me the searing heat of Niamey had
never compelled me to take taxis or rent a vehicle. I had always preferred to walk
the dusty traffic-clogged streets of the capital city. On my 2009 trip I ventured out
in the early morning and late afternoon, stopping to chat with street merchants or to
visit friends at the University of Niamey’s Institute de Recherches en Sciences
Humaines. One late afternoon as I was debating American politics with a group of
people just outside a cell phone charging station, an older man waved at me as he
ran across the street. He came up close and pointed his finger in the air as if he was
trying to remember something.
“Aren’t you that white man who speaks Songhay with a northern accent?
Onlookers inched closer to hear a potentially interesting conversation.
“I do speak Songhay with a Gao (northern) accent,” I admitted.
“Then it is you!”
I looked perplexed.
“Don’t you remember me?”
I didn’t recognize the man.
“Didn’t you used to sit with Diop?”

P. Stoller (*)
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, West Chester University, West Chester, PA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 347

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_28
348 P. Stoller

“I did.” Diop, a Senegalese man from Dakar, owned a small market stall from which he
sold African art. “Yes, we used to talk for hours. We were good friends,” I said, “but I
haven’t heard from him in a long time. How is he?”
“I am sad to say that Diop died several years ago.”
“I am so sorry to hear that.”
The man smiled. “You know what I remember about you?”
“What?”
“One day in the late afternoon, you and Diop were sitting next to one another outside of his
shop. As usual, Diop was telling a story.”
“And?”
“You laughed so hard you fell off your chair.”
I remembered that moment.
“Afterwards, Diop said that most white men laughed only with their heads, but you,
having lived so long among us, had learned to laugh with your body. Diop said that people
who couldn’t laugh with their bodies would never understand life in Africa.”

Until that moment I hadn’t fully realized the importance of laughter in the inter-
personal dynamics that constitute anthropological fieldwork. I also realized why I
had gotten on so well with Nigerien colleagues and friends. I understood why I con-
nected with my mentor Jean Rouch, for whom laughter created the bonds of long
friendships from which emerged some of his greatest films, Jaguar (1955), Petit a
Petit (1971), Cocorico (1975), and Madame l’eau (1992). I then grasped that it had
been laughter—and stories—that had nourished the relationships I had slowly and
gradually developed in Niger and New York City. Put another way, there is no sepa-
ration of the personal and the professional and no Cartesian disconnect between
emotion and analysis. As anthropologists we are personally implicated in networks
of social relations the depth and quality of which shape the depth and quality of our
work. “It takes two hands,” as the Songhay elders like to say, “to nourish a
friendship.”
Despite these ever-present field realities, which constitute the here and now of
social life, there is ongoing academic resistance to the emotional presence of eth-
nographers in their ethnographic works. There is, of course, a very long history of
the intellectual separation of head and heart. It began with Plato’s The Republic
(2016) in which the sage warns of the danger of poets and dramatists whose works
connect to the heart and evoke emotion. Throughout the centuries that followed
scholars continuously reinforced those deeply classical principles. Stories are not
serious science and have little or no place in academic discourse. Humor indicates
a lightness of thought and must be reserved for the margins of scholarly representa-
tion. These conventions have resulted in what has been called plain style—the
bloodless prose of (social) scientific reports. Indeed, in their Introduction to this
engagingly important collection, Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and
Ethnography, Thajib, Stodulka, and Dinkelaker write:
Readers may find that in some of the contributions the writing style and the personal pres-
ence of the authors are jarring at times. This impression may be attributed to the impetus
among many of the authors to address affective challenges in doing fieldwork that contrib-
uted to what they consider substantial anthropological insights of their projects. This is not
an easy task considering that genres which engage in affective scholarship when it
Afterword: A Return to the Story 349

comes to fieldwork and ethnography have so far positioned themselves as ‘anthro-poetics’

(Behar 1996; Rosaldo 2014) or ‘auto-ethnography’ (Ellis 2004), and hence if not at the
margins, at least distinctive from mainstream ‘academic anthropology’ (this volume,
pp. 8–9).

But can we comprehend the human condition without confronting our

emotions?
As Songhay elders like to say: “You can’t follow two paths with one foot,” which
is an oblique way of suggesting that any description of social relations that avoids
human emotions is an incomplete, if not empty, endeavor. It is, after all, such core
emotional sets as love and hate, fidelity and betrayal, and courage and fear—to
name only a few—that shape the human condition. Put another way, the 27 ethno-
graphically rich and conceptually provocative essays that comprise this volume
demonstrate powerfully the need for the inclusion of the affective elements of field-
work and ethnography.
The essays in this volume defy simple and specific categorization, which means
that in this brief Afterword space precludes a detailed summarization of each con-
tribution. Even so, there are some general topics that weave their way through all of
the chapters. Here are some of the important themes that the contributors consider
in their essays:
–– the relationship between the personal and the professional;
–– the link between emotions and personal relations in the field;
–– personal implication in field relations;
–– reciprocity (or giving back) in the dynamics in field relationships;
–– the space between emotion and rationality;
–– personal transformation in the field;
–– fieldwork and family dynamics;
–– the messiness of social relations compromised by disappointment and betrayal;
–– embodiment and human emotions;
–– the sexuality and the human emotions of “being there” and “being here”;
–– the presence of existential uncertainty and anger in field settings;
–– the problem of failure;
–– the emotional whys and wherefores of apprenticeship; and
–– human vulnerability and affect.
The powerful exploration of these under-explored issues in this volume enriches
immeasurably the ethnographic record and deepens significantly anthropological
insights about the nature of human being.
But how can we explore these essential human emotions that undergird our life
in the world? How personal should our personal implications be reflected in a text
or a film? How can emotions guide us to rational insight? Should we express our
vulnerabilities in our representations? What are the limits of authorial presence in
an anthropological text? How much is too much? How little is too little? These are
questions we should ponder when writing about human emotions in fieldwork and
ethnography.
350 P. Stoller

It is one thing to analyze affective dimensions in a typical academic essay. It is

quite another thing to evoke the affective dimensions of human being in a work of
narrative non-fiction, a poem, a documentary film, fiction, a media installation or a
blog. In the aforementioned academic essay, scholars attempt to ‘tell’ their readers
about a subject. In more narrative forms of expression, scholars-artists (say, anthro-
pologists who communicate their scholarship through narrative non-fiction, poetry,
film, or media installations) attempt to ‘show’ their readers the texture of the ­subject.
One tack is denotative; the other tack is evocative. One is a tack works well for the
analysis of data and the construction of theory; the other tack works well for the
sensuous description of human emotions that can evoke theory. The denotative
approach to scholarly representation is a necessarily limited path to social descrip-
tion. The evocative orientation to scholarly representation is a necessarily full-­
bodied approach to understanding more completely the human condition. If you use
narrative to evoke a world, you understand fully that “one foot cannot follow two
paths” (see Stoller 2014, 2018).
So how do we confront the personal and professional perils routinely encoun-
tered on the ethnographic path? How can we take the detour that explores the emo-
tions in order to convey deep anthropological insights about human being in the
world? The answer is deceptively simple: we embrace the story and construct nar-
ratives that capture the ineffable complexity of life. As the late Edith Turner wrote:
the ineffability of “(…) communitas can only be conveyed through stories” (2012,
p. 1).
Although I found the essays in this book to be ethnographically rich and concep-
tually forceful, I often found in them an uneasy alliance between narrative and
exposition, between evocation and denotation. Such textual imbalance is not at all
surprising given the aforementioned institutional constraints that shape academic
discourses that foreground explication (telling) and background narrative
(showing).
If we look to narrative ethnography, there are concrete moves, borrowed from
fiction, that scholars can make to overcome institutional obstacles that obstruct the
powerful evocation of human emotion. Writers who want to emotionally awaken
their readers tend to produce works that feature short sentences in active voice. They
write relatively short paragraphs and craft short-chaptered books. Texts that ‘show’
rather than ‘tell’ tend to sensuously evoke space/place as if those spaces and places
are alive with memory and feeling. Texts that ‘show’ also feature direct—as opposed
to indirect dialogue—in which characters speak idiosyncratically. In these kinds of
texts informants become characters who move, stand, or gesture in particular ways.
In the end, these textual moves breathe life onto the page and sensuously evoke
human emotions.
It is a profound scholarly challenge to write for, about, and with emotion. If you
choose to employ narrative techniques to evoke ethnographic emotions, it doesn’t
mean that you have to abandon traditional academic discourse or, for that matter,
theory development. It does mean, though, that you foreground story and storytell-
ing through the evocation of space/place, the articulation of direct dialogue and the
development of character. As in the story I recounted at the outset of this Afterword,
Afterword: A Return to the Story 351

narrative foregrounding can set the stage for blending story, analysis and theory into
a seamless text that presents the human emotions in all their vexing glory.
The challenge, however, is far more than a textual move. Writing about personal
implication, sexuality, fear, courage, love, and hate creates in the anthropologist a
deep source of vulnerability. It is a choice that is existentially transformative. What
does such a transformation imply? For me, it suggests a fundamental challenge.
That challenge is for the next generation of anthropologists—and to the contributors
to this volume—to approach the world as would an ethnographic painter for whom
there is no absolute Cartesian divide between mind and body, between ‘subjective’
experience and ‘objective’ analysis. By taking an embodied painterly approach to
the world, we follow a path toward the ‘there is’ on which we see-think-feel from
the inside. As the great painter Paul Klee wrote:
In a forest I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days
I felt that the trees were looking at me. I as there, listening…I think the painter must be
penetrated by the universe and not penetrate it (…). I expect to be inwardly submerged,
buried. I paint to break out (Charbonnier 1959 cited in Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p. 31).

Such an artistic move takes you to edge of ethnographic expression. Consider the
insightful words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964b, pp. 122–123):
Given the experience, which may be banal but for the writer, captures a particular savor of
life, given, in addition, words forms, phrasing, syntax, even literary genres, modes of narra-
tive that through custom are always endowed with a common meaning – the writer’s task is
to choose, assemble, wield and torment those instruments in such a way that they induce the
same sentiment of life that dwells in the writer at every moment, deployed henceforth in an
imaginary world and in the transparent body of language.

If ethnographers choose to explore the human emotions from the inside, they
need to approach the forest like Paul Klee an open themselves to experience, an
opening to that brings into relief the considerable existential risks of vulnerability.
Vulnerability, of course, brings personal risk and discomfort, but it also opens a
space for narratives—stories—through which is established a powerful connection
between the ethnographic and her or his audience.
In this way, the (…) [ethnographer] (…)“using evocative language, brings life to the field
and beckons (…)[audiences] (…) to discover something new – a new theoretical insight, a
new thought, a new feeling or appreciation (…). And just as writers need to spend many
years searching for their own voices, so we anthropologists need to find a ‘voice’ and create
works which bring readers to dwell within us and we walk along our solitary paths in the
field, exposing our hearts so full of excitement, fear and doubt (Stoller 1989, pp. 54–55).

The contributors to this volume present us a provocative challenge. Reading

between the lines of these bold essays, are we not asked to take a leap of faith into
the nether world of ethnographic narratives through which ethnographers reconnect
fully with human emotions? That leap takes us into the spaces between things,
where we find the story and know it, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, for the first time.
When we embrace the story, we rediscover the field, reclaim our human emo-
tions, and remember ourselves. That is a challenge worthy of our full attention.
352 P. Stoller

References

Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observed. In Anthropology that breaks your heart. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Charbonnier, G. (1959). Le monologue du peintre. Paris: Juilliard.
Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut
Creek: Alta Mira.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a). L’oeil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b). The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Plato (2016). The republic of Plato (A. Bloom, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Rosaldo, R. (2014). The day of Shelly’s death: The poetry and ethnography of grief. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Rouch, J. (1955). Jaguar 1955. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.
Rouch, J. (1971). Petit a petit. Paris: Films de la Pleiade.
Rouch, J. (1975). Cocorico, monsieur poulet. Paris: DALAROU.
Rouch, J. (1992). Madame l’eau. Amsterdam: NF1 (Netherlands)/SODAPERAGA/BBC.
Stoller, P. (1989). The taste of ethnographic things: The senses in anthropology. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stoller, P. (2014). Yaya’s story: The quest for well being in the world. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Stoller, P. (2018). Adventures in blogging: Public anthropology and popular media. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Turner, E. (2012). Communitas: The anthropology of collective joy. New York: Palgrave.
Appendix

1.1 Emotion Diary Template

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 353

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8
354 Appendix
Index

A Anthropology, 98, 214, 327

Abating fears, 71 characteristics, 79
Academic-career values, 84 compensatory approaches, 81
Academic teaching, 321 department, 101
Activist research, 264 economic asymmetry, 123
Activity of self-interpretation, 314 economic inequality and challenges, 84
Adverse kinship situations, 97 economic integration, 132–133
Affect economic positionality, 130
emotional experiences, 9 embedded economies, 128
ethnographic fieldwork practice, 8 engage in (dyadic) practices, 129
field researchers, 9 ethical values, 126
person’s physiological arousal and ethics debates, 125
experience, 8 ethnographic style/format, 80
sense of place, 254, 255 exchange, 123
training fieldworkers’ emotional extraordinary experience, 288
literacy, 9 fieldwork, 124
Affect, scholarship, 10–12 historic genesis, 80
Anonymity, 104 identify/create social roles, 129
Anthropological and social scientific interlocutors, 125
knowledge construction, 8 local research partners, 82
Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork macro-structural context, 133
and the Ethnographic Method, marginalized groups/communities, 80
332, 335 open and personal forms, 80
Anthropologists positionalities, 80, 81
in Anthropological Practice, 335 power-critical self-awareness, 81
ASA, 327 research relationships (see Research
emotions, 332 relationships)
ethnicity, 334 Anthropology of Islam, 117
fieldworker witness, 327 Anti-emotional culture, 281
generation, 337 Anti-market principle, 124–126
in-depth interpretations, 327 Anxieties, 201, 251, 254–256, 258
knowledge circulation, 339 Apprenticeship, 241–244
with persecuted minority, 336 Arts-based method, 242
The Traveller-Gypsies (1983), 341 Assisted reproduction technologies (ART),
therapist, confidante/rival, 338–339 99, 100

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 355

T. Stodulka et al. (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography,
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8
356 Index

Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), Cognitive behavioral therapy, 261

327, 328 Collaborative research
Attuning, 227–230 accepting and adjusting, 273–275
Authenticity, 237 beyond tokenism, 265
Authoritative scientific knowledge, 117 characteristics, 265
Autobiography, 327, 329 dispirited and disappointed, 268–273
Awkwardness, 207–209 emotional dynamics, 276
and engagement
active and reflexive, 275
B own consciousness, 276
Balanced reciprocity, 110, 111 exchange, 264
Balancing partiality, 90 excited and expectant, 266–267
Bangkok slum children, 41–43 inspired and energized, 267–268
moral economy, 32–35 local language, 265
Binary oppositions, 325 participants, 264
Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological participatory action research, 264
Trauma of the “Privileged” Child, 330 personal lives, 276
Bodily intensity, 255 power anthropologists, 265
Boundary erosion, 252 principles, 264
Business relationship, 125 qualitative research, 264
Colonialism, 269
Commodification processes, 88
C Commodity, 125
Care, see Intimate and caring relations Commodity exchange, 124
Carnal sociology, 242 Communism, 126, 127
Cartesian dualism, 284 Community of Traveller-Gypsies, 331
Classroom emotions, 283 Comparative research design, 235
academic habitus, 319 Compassion
compartmentalization of self, 318 individual persons, families and
defensive professional practices, 318 communities, 184
emotional habitus, 318 Complex social relations, 98
emotions and academia, 318 Confidentiality, 104
fieldwork selves, 318–321 Confusion, 69, 70
formal teacher–student relationship, 319 Conventional ethnographic research, 264
historical–political implications, academic Cooperative research, 117–120
emotional regimes, 320 Correct conduct, 94
learning processes, 316 Corrupt economics, 125
managing and controlling, 318 Countertransference, 314
personal fieldwork self, 319, 320 Critical dialogical relations, 196
personal–political reflexivity, 320 Critical moments, 299
politically reflexive practitioners, 320 Critical reflections, 235
positionality, 321 Cultural antagonisms, 234
practicing emotional reflexivity, 319 Cultural artistry, 338
professional practices, 319 Culture of reciprocity, 111
relationships formed within academia, 320
repressive transformation, 321
self-reflexive and empathic teaching, D
316–317 “Darmasiswa” scholarship program, 236
social anthropology, 318 Data analysis and interpretation, 14
student–teacher relationship, 319 Data generation and analysis, 283
transformed emotions, 318–321 Data processing, 106
transformed into self-disciplining Death
acceptance and resignation, 320 awkwardness, 207–209
Closed reciprocity, 112 confrontation, 203
Index 357

description, 185 Embodied biocultural processes, 254

end of lives, 203–207 Embodied knowledge, 235, 244
incomprehensible, 203 Embodied participation and apprenticeship, 235
intense bonds, 207–209 Embodied subjectivity, 298
life-threatening diseases, 191 Embodiment
Lutz’s approach, 202 divorce, legal option, 150
materiality, 185 knowledge production process, 143
nursing homes, 201–202 quiet political correctness, 144
observe and participate, 210 researcher’s emotions, 143
sensitivity, 207–209 researching emotions, 144–148
Democratized research practice, 265 sensuous experiences and private
Dialogical research, 240, 241, 244, 247 conversations, 151
Diary entries, 263, 266, 268–274 Emotion and self-reflexivity, 59
Dichotomies, 325 Emotion diary, 268, 272, 275
Direct online recruiting, 101 Emotion work, 93
Disciplinary and discursive pleasures, 255 Emotional biography, 284
Disciplinary anxieties, 255 Emotional capacities, 285
Discomfort, 197, 198 Emotional drives, 284
Discursive anxiety, 255 Emotional dynamics, 276
Disembeddedness, market economies, 125 Emotional economy, 132
Distinctly democratic flavor, 239, 241 Emotional habitus, 318
Documentary film, 97 Emotional labor, 93, 281
“Domestication” of occult practices, 73 Emotional memories, 287
Doorstep situations, 206 Emotional reactions, 276
Doubt and feelings of guilt, 69, 70 Emotional reciprocity
Dying empathy/resonance, 113
and death (see Death) friendly research relationships, 114
imbalances and complexities, 115
irreligiousness, 115
E Orientalist, 115
Eastern cultural export, 238 participant observation, 113
Economic asymmetry, 123 professional stance, 115
Economic expectations, 124, 132 research, 114
Economic inequality, 123, 124, 127, 132, 133 Western infidel, 115
Economic participation worldviews, values and convictions, 115
abilities and needs Emotional reflexivity, 13, 25, 189, 190, 197, 198
dealing with demands and expectations, Emotional regimes, 305
131, 132 Emotionality of participation, 292
determining my own abilities, 130 Emotionally aware, 282
economic positionality, 129–130 Emotionally aware ethnography, 283
German Academic Exchange Service Emotionally-aware methodological
(DAAD), 130 approach, 288
managing expectations, 131 Emotionally immune, 295
socioeconomic fabric, 129 Emotionally reflexive teaching
embeddedness, economic transactions, academic teaching, 321
128–129 empathic teaching, 305, 316, 317
ethic and methodology, 128 self-reflexive, 305, 316, 317
framework, 127 social anthropology, 321
Economic transactions, 128–129 volunteering, refugee shelter, 306–307
Educational disadvantage, 276 Emotions
Educational research, 307 advantages, 333
Embedded economies, 128 anthropologists, 220–221
Embeddedness, 125 association with violence, 334
economic transactions, 128–129 binary oppositions, 325
358 Index

Emotions (cont.) social anthropology, 329

challenges, 213 sociocultural importance, 282
commitment and shared humanity, 340 subconscious, 325–327 (see also Uchawi
disadvantages, 333 (witchcraft))
facilitating reflexivity and subjectivity, 284
associations, 309, 312 unconscious, 341–343
child-rearing practices, 314 unexpected anger, 340
Claudia’s and Hannah’s reflexive unspoken, 336–337
essays, 312 value and morality, 202
Claudia’s stage directions, 309 Empathic listening
conventional verbal and text-based rapport and drawbacks, 92–94
approaches, 309 Empathy
dancing, 310 lack of mutuality, 147
disentangle emotions, irritations, and Empirical Affect Montage concept, 12
associations, 312 Empirical methods, 305
epistemological value of emotions, 313 Empiricism
high self-esteem, 314 abating fears, 71
image theater method, 308, 309 balance intimacy and distance, 66
KEEs, 315 confusion, doubt and feelings of guilt,
nonprofessional spect-actors, 308 69, 70
observation of participation, 308 estrangement feelings, 71
position and role, men, 313 family and neighbor relations, 67
reactions and behavior, 313 fascination, 67
reflexive analysis, level of, 315 fear, 70
refugee shelter, 310 feeling irritated, 68
resistance and rebellion, 314 shock, 69
self-monitoring and self-discipline, 315 through interviews and conversations, 67
sexuality, 313 “total” experience, anthropological
socializing emotion, 314 fieldwork, 66
spec-actors, 309, 311 End of lives, 203–207
suppressed women in muslim Engaged anthropology
societies, 314 detailed field notes, 305
undressing, 313 embedded, 305, 306
fathers and daughters, 342 experiential learning methods, 308
feature, 201 group-based collective reflection of field
in fieldwork, 330–332 episodes, 305
at home/in the field, 272 research ethics, 307
interlocutors, 209 tools, 307
learning and teaching reflexivity, Engaged research, 264
307, 308 English translation, 327
mono-cultural bodily control, 334, 335 Epistemology, 246
and morality, 202, 203 social science, 282
and motives, 224 value, 284
natural biology, 330 value of emotions, 282
nonliterate communities, 332 Estrangement feelings, 71
objectivity and stoicism, 288 Ethical clearance, 227
outsider-object, 340 Ethics
passion for difference, 337–338 in anthropological fieldwork, 107
personal, 327–329 decisions, 107
and relationships, 214 and reciprocity, 99
research process, 201 research, 97
rethinking, 283 Ethnicity, 331
self-financed, 333 Ethnographers, 299
sense of place, 254, 255 Ethnographic analysis, 308
Index 359

Ethnographic methods, 288–292, 294, 296, ethical decisions, 107

298, 299 ethnographic, 139
Ethnographic research, 90 experiences, 91
Ethnography, 328, 339, 343, 344 expert information, 106
community, 203 failure, 227–230
description, 202 in formerly colonized settings, 80
emotional layers, 202 giving back/reciprocate, 81
and interlocutor, 251 holistic approach, 129
and psychotherapy, 214–215 inequality, 81
toolkit, 251 interlocutors’ felt, 106
Ethos of compassion and interview sessions, 101
emotions, 31 knowledge construction, 106
governmentality, 32 live-in arrangements, 82
legitimacy and urgency, 31 in lower to lower-middle
post-colonial contexts, 32 class, 83
predominance of, 31 moral and sociopolitical dilemma, 139
public action and policy-making, 31 reassessing distinct features, 82
suffering, 31 relationships, 79
victimization processes, 32 and sense of place, 252
Experience-near ethnography, 288 social privilege, 99
Experiential learning methods, 308 sperm donation, 99
Eye-opening experience, 97 transactions, 101
Fieldwork emotions, 318
Fieldwork reflections, 7
F Financial abilities, 130
Failure, 227–230, 268, 274 Financial agreements, 82
Familiar stranger, 107 Freiburg-Yogyakarta model, 117
Family
domains of life, 137
Fascination, 67 G
Fear, 70 GAM, 258
Feelings Gender-based violence, 56–59
surveillance, 255, 256 Gender/feminist studies, 91
Feminine, 296 Gender positionality, 282
Feminism, 328 General socialization, 325–326
Field relations, 299 Generalized reciprocity, 110, 111
Fieldwork Gift exchange, 124
accommodation arrangements and Group-based collective reflection, 308
everyday acts of consumption, 128
accounts, 90, 92
active and conscious integration, 84 H
anthropological practice, 124 Hamas, 258
ART, 99, 100 Healthcare facilities, 213
attuning, 227–230 Hegemonic positions, 281
challenging endeavor precisely, 94 Heroin, 213, 217
community-based, 82 Hierarchies of oppression, 90
course of, 80 Hierarchy, 126
dimensions, 88 Home, 251–254, 256–260
doorsteps, 81 Hospitable city, 253
economic appearance, 130 Hospital ethnography, 189, 196, 198
economic dimension, 124, 127 Humanitarian emotions
emotional complexity, 140 ethnographer’s theoretical and conceptual
emotions, 107 pre-comprehensions, 29
entering, 100–102 “ethos of compassion”, 30
360 Index

Humanitarian emotions (cont.) Intimate and caring relations

researcher’s “emotional reflexivity”, 30 creative ambivalence, 138
self-reflexive cultural critique, 29 description, 138
sympathetic social operators and pity-­ disciplinary backgrounds, 140
seeking slum children, 30 ethnographic fieldwork, 137
Humanitarian encounters, 35–38 feeling position and experiences, 140
Humanity, 336 intimate ethnography, 139
moral and sociopolitical dilemma, 139
negotiation and interpretive authority, 140
I normative and hegemonic disciplinary
Illegal immigrants, 50 discourses, 138
Illness, 214, 222 official academic and private care work, 140
medical anthropologists, 184 science and technology studies, 137
self-reflexive pieces, 184 sexual relationships and erotic
Image theater method, 308, 309 experiences, 139
Imbalanced reciprocity Islamophobia, 117
dimensions, 109–110
emotional reciprocity, 113–116
intellectual reciprocity, 116–119 J
limits, 119–120 Joy, 201
material reciprocity, 111–113
Indonesia, 252–254, 259
Oriental Monk, 236–238 K
Pencak silat (see Pencak silat) Kampung, 127
Inner Power, 237 Key emotional episode (KEE), 315
Innovative technologies/legal mechanisms, 99 Kinship relations, 99
Instructors in classroom, 282
Insurance coverage, 300
Intellectual reciprocity L
authoritative scientific knowledge, 117 Laboriousness, 258
cooperative research, 117, 118 Learning reflexivity, 307, 308
ethnographic data, 116 Legal witness, 104
international competition, 119 Life-history interviews/in-depth questions, 103
Islamic traditions, 117 Liver transplant medicine, 191
missionary activities, 117 Long-term reciprocity, 116
Muslims in Madura, 118
positionalities, 118
pre-theoretical commitment, 116 M
research data, 116 Macro-political processes, 255
with research partners, 116 Male infertility, 100
social theory, 117 Maleness, 295
tandem research, 117 Market exchange, 125–127
Intense bonds, 207–209 Market transaction, 126
Intensive fieldwork, 326 Masculine institutions, 295
Interaction Masculinity, 295
fieldwork, 103 Material inequality, 123, 130
immersion—means, 106 Material reciprocity
research, 97 accepting hospitality, 111
social, 98 balanced reciprocity, 111
time, 103 closed reciprocity, 112
Internet platforms, 99 and emotional values, 111
Interstices of breakage, 229 generalized reciprocity, 111
Intersubjective ground, 235 giving and returning, 113
Intersubjectivity, 189, 198 imbalances and inequality, 111
Index 361

monetary gifts, 112 construction, 235

open reciprocity, 112 embodied knowledge, 235
rejeki, 112 expectations, 238–241
Media practices, 235 impasses, 238–241
Mediatization, 235 Karate Kid, 233–235
Medical addiction, 222 Oriental Monk, 233–235
Mental hygiene, 214 power relations, 238–241
Mental-spiritual, 239 taking and giving, 241–244
Merpati Putih (MP), 236 Performance ethnography, 242,
Monetary compensation, 125 245, 246
Moral and emotional economies, victimized Personal emotions, 327–329
children, 43, 44 Pleasures, 255
MP’s modernization approach, Policy makers, 116
239–240 Pornography, 207
Multiculturalism, 253, 260 Positionality, 24–26, 51, 52, 321
Multi-faceted engagement, 337 Positionality attunements and analytical
Muslim practitioners, 291 awareness, 53, 54
Mutual expectations at counseling office, Post-conflict democracy, 266
218–219 Post-fieldwork reflexivity, 283
Mystical insights, 243 Power
Mystical-spiritual practice, 245 asymmetries, 107
Mystics, 246 balance, 99
challenging, 90
complex relations, 88
N and empathy, 93
Natural biology, 330 qualitative research, 90
Negative emotions, 272 researcher–researched, 90
Negative feelings, 229 simultaneousness, 92
Negative reciprocity, 110 situation, 91
Neighborhood, 256–258 unequal structures, 87
Non-heterosexuality, 332 Power imbalances, 99, 265, 269, 275
Nonmarket exchange, 125 Practices of reciprocity, 90
Non-verbal communication, 204, 336 Preeclampsia, 103
Normality, 167, 170, 171, 174–177 Pre-fieldwork practice, 260
Nostalgia, 333, 334 Pre-theoretical commitment, 116
Nursing homes, 202–204, 206–209 Profit-making, 125
Psychoanalysis, 326
Psychological therapy, 106
O Psychotherapy, 214–215
Objective knowledge, 89
Ontological device, 246
Open drug scene (ODS), 213–215, 217–221, 223 Q
Open reciprocity, 112 Qualitative inquiry, 242
Qualitative research, 90
Queer migration, 160
P Qur’anic school, 115
Palliative care, 194
Participant observation, 65, 73, 196
Participatory action research, 264 R
Pasted greeting, 111 Race and gender, 330
Payment, 125 Radical empiricism, 298
Pencak silat Reader response theory, 329
apprentice, 236–238 Reality, 291
apprenticeship, 241–244 Reciprocal research relationships, 81
362 Index

Reciprocity ending fieldwork, 105–106

acts of, 330 epistemological issue, 79
anti-market principle, 124–126 epistemological–methodological premises, 80
benefits and burdens, 90–92 ethnographers, 82
economic-anthropological concept feelings, 79
(see Research ethics) financial agreements, 82
economic anthropological notion, 81 giving back, 82
economic concept, 124 gratitude and guilt, 79
ethical and economic-anthropological, 124 in immaterial forms of exchange, 98
ethical and political importance, 94 inequality of roles and motives, 80
expectations, 88 intellectual exchange, 82
in field relationships, 123 intimacy, 102
imbalanced (see Imbalanced reciprocity) live-in arrangements, 82
moral grounds of exchange, 126–127 memorable and defining moment, 102
mutual benefit, 103 mismatched expectations, 82, 83
notion, 124 multi-sited ethnographic research, 83
principle of communities and social participatory/collaborative research
relations, 98 methods, 81
principle of mutual exchange, 98 personal and professional communication, 80
research ethics (see Research ethics) political-ethical, 81
in research relationship (see Research power asymmetries shape, 80
relationship) principle, 98
strategies, 81 reciprocal, 81
Reflexive teaching methods, 321 representatives of relative wealth, 80
Reflexive turn, 24 researcher–researched relation, 81
Reflexivity, 118, 255, 327 social and emotional qualities, 123
Refugee shelter, 306, 307 social, economic and affective dynamics, 84
Rejeki, 112 taboo topics, 83
Relational and affectively-aware, 251 Researchers’ emotions, 7
Reproduces inequality, 126 Researchers’ families
Research historical invisibility, 168, 169
assistants, 125 Role conflicts and aftermaths
with family, 174 academic and nonacademic debate, 23
insights through children, 175–177 academic scholars, 26
participation through domestic anthropological fieldwork, 23, 25
work, 175 anthropologies, 27
without family attachment or/and detachment concern
design, 170, 171 researchers, 26
leaving home, 170 emotional economy strategies, 25
without family design emotional reflexivity, 25
emotional involvement, 173 empirical pragmatism, 26
staying abroad, 171, 172 future informants and participants, 24
Research ethics positionality, 25
economic participation, 84 problematization, 24
responsibility, 85 reflexive turn, 24
Research relationships research and subsequent writing process, 25
academic-career values, 84 traditional healing/witchcraft, 26
compensatory approaches, 81 women’s shelter employee, 23
de-economization, 84
development, 103–105
disagreement/discomfort, 85 S
economic dimension, 123 Safeguard objectivity, 317
emotional experience, 82 Safety, 251
emotions of research participants, 102 Secondary trauma, 252
Index 363

Self-actualization, 233, 234 Student–teacher relationships, 317

Self-awareness, 206 Subconscious emotions, 325–327, 342
Self-care, 261 Subjective source, 235
Self-care strategies, 282 Substitution
Self-control, 234 heroin, 213
Self-defense techniques, 234 stringent rules, 222
Self-description, 337 Subutex, 216
Self-examination, 288 therapy (see Therapy)
Self-improvement, 233, 234 treatment in Prague, 215, 221
Self-reflection, 223, 228, 298 Subutex pills, 213, 215–223
Self-reflective writing, 90 Subutex Maintenance Treatment (SMT),
Self-reflexivity, 298, 305, 307, 316–317, 321 213–218
Self-reflexivity and emotion, 59 Supernatural, 287–291, 293–295, 299, 300
Semi-structured interviews, 327 Supervision, 214, 215, 218–220, 223
Sense of place Surrogacy
affect, 254, 255 commercialization, 88
anxieties, 254, 255 commodification, 88
effects, 258–260 confrontation, 94–95
emotional implications, 251 fieldwork (see Fieldwork)
emotions, 254, 255 and homosexual couples, 88
and fieldwork, 251, 252 legal, social and biological restrictions, 88
at home, 256–258 objective knowledge, 89
privilege, 251 rapport and drawbacks, 92–94
reflections, 258–260 reciprocity, 90–92
relational and affectively-aware, 251 transnational, 87
responses, 258–260 transparency, 94–95
surveillance, 255, 256 Surveillance, 255
Sensitivity, 207–209 feelings, 255, 256
Sexual intercourse, 104
Sexuality, 313
domains of life, 137 T
Short-term reciprocity, 116 Tandem research, 110, 117, 120
Situated knowledge, 89, 90 Tanzania
Skepticism, 256, 298 emotions in field, 160, 161
Social actors, 291 heterosexual, 158
Social and economic entanglements, 128 LGBTQ individuals, 159
Social anthropology, 91, 306, 307, 318, 321, sexuality and emotions, 159, 160
327, 329 situatedness of sexuality, 158
Social gesture, 257 young adults, 158
Social interaction, 98 Teacher–student dichotomy, 269
Social relation, 98 Teaching methods, 317, 320
Social relationships, 80, 98, 128 Teaching reflexivity, 307, 308
Social skills, 104 Team-research models, 110
Social theory, 117 Technologies of the self, 234
Sociality, 282 Television series, 234
Socializing emotions, 314, 315 Theoretical didactic models, 317
Soliciting strategies, 132 Therapy
Spirit intermediary, 293 addiction on the streets, 222
Stiff-upper-lip culture, 328, 330, 343 anthropologist’s emotions, 220–221
Street-associated interlocutors, 254 anthropology, 214
Street-associated youth, 252 ethnography, 214–215
Stress management, 214 medical addiction, 222
Structural inequalities, 110, 131 mutual expectations at counseling office,
Student–teacher interactions, 317 218–219
364 Index

Therapy (cont.) Vocational training, 269

omission/error, 214 Voluntary Services Overseas
open drug scene (ODS) (see Open drug (VSO), 334
scene (ODS)) Volunteer-run shelters, 258
psychotherapeutic training, 214 Vulnerability
psychotherapy, 214–215 concept, 288, 289
SMT (see Subutex Maintenance Treatment critical moments, 287, 289
(SMT)) emotionally-aware methodological
substitutional (see Substitution) approach, 288
Subutex, 216, 217 ethnographer’s emotional, 60
Time interactions, 103 ethnographers, 289
Time-warped institution, 335 in ethnographic research, 288
Timor-Leste experience-near ethnography, 288
collaborative research (see Collaborative experiences, 289
research) ghosts and spirits
Total institution, 335 emotionality of participation, 292
Training methods, 282, 283 emotionally immune, 295
Transcend traditional emotion, 298 fear, outrage, anxiety and sadness, 294
Transformative learning, 307 fears, 297
Transformed emotions, 318–321 field diary, 291, 297
Transforming fieldwork, 228 irresponsibility, 297
Translators, 125 maleness, 295
Transparent profile, 101 masculine institutions, 295
Traveller community, 341 masculinity, 295
objectivity, 291
power of dreams, 294
U reality, 291
Uchawi (witchcraft) re-conceptualizing, 290
emotional experiences, 64 (see also religious and spiritual experiences, 290
Empiricism) respondent-researcher relationships, 296
government and NGO officials, 64 semi-robotic, 294
healing and protection, 64 spirit intermediary, 293
host family, role of, 65 supernatural, 293
intimate and long-lasting relationships, 66 Western rationality, 291
modernity, 65 methodological limitation, 288
participant observation, 65 migrant women, domestic violence, 50
Tanzanian coast and Northern physical danger, 290
Mozambique, 63 professional and private lives, 288
Uncertain feelings, 336 researching the researcher, 288
Unconscious emotions, 341–343 self-examination, 288
Unity in diversity, 253 supernatural (see Supernatural)
Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), 238 and uncertainty, 57
Universitas Padjadjaran (UNPAD), 236 writing about the self, 288
Unstructured and semi-structured
interviews, 252
W
Western biomedicine, 194
V Western discourse, 242
Verbal communication, 204 Western infidelity, 109
Vibra Vision, 237, 239 Wikipedia chart, 330
Victimization processes, 32 Witchcraft, see Uchawi (witchcraft)
Violence, 338 Women’s Liberation Movement, 328
Index 365

Women’s shelter research development, 50

encounters with migrant women, 54–56 research process, 49
ethnographic understanding, 52, 53 shifting positionalities, 51, 52
feminist activist approach, 51 structural difficulties, 50
local social services, 49
migration background, 50
positionality attunements and analytical Y
awareness, 53, 54 Youth identify, 252