“[Anthropology] encourages one to embrace the whole world as one’s home and, thus, made me feel at home in the world. I soon learned, however, that practicing anthropology ironically meant that I would have to put myself in situations where I would feel emphatically out of place. Whenever I conduct fieldwork, whether in Papua New Guinea, Tahiti, or elsewhere, my sense of self and place get rattled. I feel, as Foucault has said of ships, like ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place’ (Foucault 1986, p. 27). I am always the awkward outsider – observing, listening, learning, and responding from a place in between. Trying to feel at home in the home of someone else, I face my ultimate challenge – to go from feeling dislocated to feeling ensconced – a Sisyphean task that can never be accomplished” (Kahn 2011, p. 6).
For those of you unfamiliar with anthropology, the classic methodological tactic is called “participant observation” in which the researcher works to live as a member of the culture in which s/he studies. By participating in the everyday life and cultural activities of his/her given research area, the researcher has both their own feelings and experiences as well as their observations of others to try and understand cultural dynamics. Thus, a researcher’s own body is a tool and their thoughts can be data (I will acknowledge the great debate of subjectivity vs. objectivity in anthropology here, but I will not discuss it). Another key component of anthropology, however, is long-term research, key because it takes years for a researcher “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (Malinowksi 1961, p. 25). And even after years of living within a given community, your sense of self may have shifted but you can never be a “true” local, you will always be looking in from the outside.
This of course, is only a very short synopsis of participant observation and an anthropologist’s use and sense of self during fieldwork… My experience with these matters only spans a few years and thus I do not proclaim myself an expert, only an amateur.
Shout out to those out there completing fieldwork now. I don’t have a PhD, so I don’t know what it feels like to do a whole continuous year of fieldwork, but I have spent time living and researching in foreign places and this quote resonates with me.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 