Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process [1 ed.] 1443817546, 9781443817547

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Emotional Labour and Relational Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork • Dimitrina Spencer
1. Emotional Apprenticeships: Reflection on the Role of Academic Practice in the Construction of “the Field” • Celayne Heaton Shreshta
2. In “The Field”: Intersubjectivity, Empathy and the Workings of Internalised Presence • Maruška Svašek
3. Emotional Interpretation and the “Acting” Ethnographer: An Ethical Dilemma? • John Curran
4. Assessing the Relevance and Effects of “Key Emotional Episodes” for the Fieldwork Process • Peter Berger
5. Emotions In and Out of a Meditation Retreat • Shuenn-Der Yu
6. Mixed Emotions about Barbie’s Nose: Narratives Against Despair • Marjorie Mitchell
7. “Being a Hostage to the Other:” Levinas’s Ethical Epistemology and Dysphoric Fieldwork Experiences • Galina Lindquist
8. Emotions, Interpretation and the Psychoanalytic Countertransference • Louise Braddock
Conclusion: Subjectivity in the Field: A History of Neglect • James Davies
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Anthropological Fieldwork

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process

Edited by

Dimitrina Spencer and James Davies

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process, Edited by Dimitrina Spencer and James Davies This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Dimitrina Spencer and James Davies and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1754-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1754-7

We devote this volume to our much loved colleague - the late Galina Lindquist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Emotional Labour and Relational Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork Dimitrina Spencer Chapter One............................................................................................... 48 Emotional Apprenticeships: Reflection on the Role of Academic Practice in the Construction of “the Field” Celayne Heaton Shreshta Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 75 In “The Field”: Intersubjectivity, Empathy and the Workings of Internalised Presence Maruška Svašek Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 100 Emotional Interpretation and the “Acting” Ethnographer: An Ethical Dilemma? John Curran Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 119 Assessing the Relevance and Effects of “Key Emotional Episodes” for the Fieldwork Process Peter Berger Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 144 Emotions In and Out of a Meditation Retreat Shuenn-Der Yu Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 172 Mixed Emotions about Barbie’s Nose: Narratives Against Despair Marjorie Mitchell

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 195 “Being a Hostage to the Other:” Levinas’s Ethical Epistemology and Dysphoric Fieldwork Experiences Galina Lindquist Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 204 Emotions, Interpretation and the Psychoanalytic Countertransference Louise Braddock Conclusion............................................................................................... 229 Subjectivity in the Field: A History of Neglect James Davies Contributors............................................................................................. 244 Index........................................................................................................ 247

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to many individuals who supported us in the preparation of this volume. We thank Professor David Parkin for all his inspiration, wisdom and backing of the project as a whole. We also thank Professor Marcus Banks, Professor Michael Jackson, Professor Vincent Crapanzano, Dr Francine Lorimer, and Professor Tanya Luhrmann for their intellectual and moral support. We are also grateful to Professor David Gellner, Professor Harvey Whitehouse, Professor Del Lowenthal, Professor Roland Littlewood, Dr Jenny Hammond, Dr Celia Kerslake, Sarah Bryson, Dr Stephen Clarke, Dr Elizabeth Ewart, Joanna Cook and Professor Elizabeth Tonkin. We also thank all those involved in the early meetings at the University of Oxford and at the seminar held at Harvard University. We thank Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, Soucin Yip-Sou and Nick James for helping tremendously with the production of this volume. We are indebted to Creative Advisors (Sofia, Bulgaria) for designing the excellent cover of this volume. We also thank the British Academy, The Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Oxford), the Centre for Therapeutic Education (Roehampton University), and the Oxford University Anthropological Society for their financial support and institutional backing.

INTRODUCTION EMOTIONAL LABOUR AND RELATIONAL OBSERVATION IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK DIMITRINA SPENCER

The Truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is, in fact, an event, a process. —William James (1978:97)

Introduction Despite various transformations, fieldwork remains at the heart of anthropological research and continues to be “the rite of passage” for aspiring anthropologists. Indeed, immersion in “the field” and gaining knowledge through experience and interaction continue to be the predominant methods of anthropologists. What this immersion entails and how it becomes transformed into knowledge has been a central topic in anthropology since its inception. The way we think about anthropology has undergone a series of intellectual leaps through the years, yet key intricacies of anthropological fieldwork experience remain to be uncovered in order to demonstrate anthropology’s potential, strengths and rigour. Our individual trajectories in making sense of fieldwork experience sometimes mirror those of our discipline. It is not unusual to encounter young anthropologists who arrive at their first fieldwork site under the spell of romanticism, scientific idealism and the promises of “traditional empiricism,”1 (which, despite abundant critique, continue to find ways into our work) only to uncover both personal and professional challenges in becoming a participant observer. Some of the usual difficulties surrounding the reflection upon lived experiences during fieldwork, have pointed to the

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need for transmitting the craft of fieldwork methodology through training where the main use of method is not only meant to alleviate anxiety (see Devereux 1967, Jackson 2010) but to reveal the depths and meanings of life as well as the authority of our discipline. How many of us have got to grips with, say, phenomenology2 or psychoanalysis3 which might offer some useful tools for understanding fieldwork experience, before going to do fieldwork, say, on transnationalism or community development? Our volume documents and discusses a range of experiences of fieldwork, in particular, emotional ones, as well as common challenges in making sense of these experiences both personally and academically. In this way, we highlight the values - academic, moral, ethical, political and humanistic – inherent in sharing and discussing our research process. We argue that emotional reflexivity should be an important part of our methodological palette – it allows us to gain deeper understanding of our involvement in the field. Anthropologists are affected by and affect others through emotional engagement; they “manage” emotions or allow them to unfold as vehicles of understanding. The contributors to this volume show that participant observation is an embodied relational process mediated by emotions,4 some of which could be described as a relational observation or relational reflection. Emotions could be ways of knowing and they form the living flesh of relating in the field - through acting upon or living our emotions, we affect our relationships, the ways we know and what we know. The contributors to this volume are mostly young scholars who have completed their first fieldwork only recently and who initially met at the conference Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience in September 2006 at the University of Oxford in the UK.5 The conference call for papers addressed the following themes, also reflected in this volume: Emotions in the field are often buried in individual memories and personal diaries, in confidential accounts to friends and family, colleagues and students. And yet, despite ‘scientific’ efforts to exclude, tame, or redress our own feelings and personalities, subjectivity leaves its mark upon all facets of research: from the topics we select and the methods we employ, to the tone and hidden messages of our ethnographies. How do our emotional experiences, attachments and detachments, affect anthropologists as both persons and researchers? 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 interpretive and explanatory enterprise?

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How do we reconcile the emotional and the subjective with our scientific goals, and what are the consequences of such integrations for anthropology? Are all of the above issues relevant to the training of anthropologists?

The chapters in this volume engage with these questions and provide valuable insights. We portray the uneven trajectory of knowing and bear witness to the forces affecting the anthropologists and their fieldwork relations. These vivid autobiographical accounts show the challenges and opportunities for young anthropologists who are searching for ways to think and talk about fieldwork, and the methodological lessons that follow. We also show some individual or professional limits to knowing through reflection upon emotional experience. Each chapter documents important stages in the professional and personal trajectory of the writer and these trajectories contain, like a fractal, the strengths, needs and weaknesses of our discipline as a whole. By describing individual shifts between methodological approaches and aspirations, we partake in discussion about the opportunities to shift from positivist beliefs and practices to prioritising practical knowledge and lived immediacy, and accepting vulnerabilities in knowing through fieldwork experience (cf. Jackson 1989, 1998; Behar 1996). We bring into focus the anthropologists themselves and their experiences of fieldwork. Here, in this first section of the Introduction, I briefly remind the reader of some episodes in the long history of the demystification of fieldwork experience before I discuss fieldwork as a relational process. Little was published on fieldwork experiences and emotions until the 1970s.6 Barbara Tedlock (1991:69) describes the 1970s as involving a “shift in cultural anthropological methodology from ‘participant observation’ toward the ‘observation of participation.’” In the former, ethnographers “attempt to be emotionally engaged participants and coolly dispassionate observers;” in the latter, the ethnographers “both experience and observe their own and others’ co-participation within the ethnographic encounter.” As Tedlock (2000:471) further describes it, this transition “from objectifying methodology to intersubjective methodology” also led to changes in representation, and ethnographers began to bring together the political and the personal, as well as the philosophical in their written accounts. This shift opened a more systematic discussion of fieldwork experience and revealed it as “intersubjective and embodied, not individual and fixed, but social and processual” (p.471). Marginal Natives at Work, edited by Morris Freilich (1970), is a vivid record of some general concerns with “fieldwork culture” before this shift. He documents several key reasons for the “mystification” of fieldwork

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experience until then, some of which may still be relevant today: the “common sense” approach to fieldwork due to the lack of consensus over whether anthropology was a science; fieldwork as a “private affair” between anthropologists and the people they studied; and the commitment to collect a large amount of data, rather than spend time reflecting on how it is being collected (p. 15).7 Freilich’s solution (p. 17) to fieldwork “mystification” was to devise core principles for “field work as science” – to standardise techniques and replicate methods. And, yet, he was aware of the importance of psychological processes during fieldwork. Like many others, he was aware8 of questions that later became central to postmodern anthropology and are still valid today: how do the internal experiences of the anthropologist affect data and analysis?9 What can be done about expanding writing about the research process? Interestingly, in 1977, in the preface to the second edition of Marginal Natives at Work, Freilich announced that: The mystique of fieldwork – the aura of magic, mystery and glamour which anthropologists once attached to life in the field – had gone. In its place, in less than a decade, there was an ever-growing literature of what problems, pains and pleasures face the researcher in a foreign culture and, thus, the “mystique has been solved.”

Clearly, his “scientific” optimism grounded in the few publications that “tell it like it is” (see Freilich 1977: vi), was rather naïve - as we can see from the ongoing debates about the nature and methods of fieldwork in anthropology today. Around the same time, a different approach to understanding the self and the Other during fieldwork developed. This was the self-reflexive approach. In 1974, Rabinow (2006:xiv-xv) shared his experience when attempting to publish on his fieldwork experiences. When his manuscript Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco was first written he had trouble finding a publisher and: “the reception was one of shock and annoyance; it was held to be inappropriate for a young anthropologist to reflect on his experience […] it was not written in scientific style […].” However, the book did get published in 1977 and became one of the icons of reflexive anthropology, as did Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan by Vincent Crapanzano (1980) among others. This work revealed the ethnographic encounter and knowledge production as an intersubjective dialogue and critically addressed the limits of objectivity. Since the 1970s and 1980s, following the reflexive turn in anthropology and the rise of postmodernism, and particularly the publication

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of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Cilfford and Marcus 1986) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fisher 1986), as well as the contributions of feminism (e.g. Cesara 1982) and anti-colonialism (e.g. Asad 1973) anthropologists have begun to engage more with eliciting knowledge from experience and with different ways of writing about it. The major contributions of this work critically reveal the inherent workings of power and inequalities in the ethnographic encounter; a residue of colonial domination in the ethnographic gaze; the impact of rationalistic thinking; the workings of racialised and gendered discourses; and the situatedness and partiality of knowledge. They also addressed the need to question the positionality of the researcher at all times. We partake in this critical approach by focusing on some of the power dynamics in fieldwork and on post-colonial, racial, gender-based and nationalist forces in fieldwork research. We also discuss how subjectivity, emotions, the relational, and the political are mutually constitutive in social interaction (see in particular, Curran; Lindquist and Mitchell, this volume)10. At the same time, as we bring forward the self of the anthropologist, it is important to bear in mind Ruth Behar’s reminder (1996:13), that there is value in this only if one is able to draw deeper connections between one’s personal experience and the subject under study. That doesn’t require a full-length autobiography, but it does require a keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world, and more particularly, the topic being studied.

Our feelings and personalities, enacted through our engagements in relation to our fieldwork - whether acknowledged as part of our professional activity or not - continue to define, rather than undermine the strength of anthropological knowledge-production. In this sense, we attempt to respond to the call that Rabinow (1986:253) made - to make the practices defining anthropological authority visible - and to the invitation by Behar (1996) to allow ourselves to experience, acknowledge and understand the authority and insight that might come with vulnerability. While many anthropologists have followed suit with the “confessional” literature about the ethnographic Self, which places limits on the possibility of knowing the Other, others have made important contributions to understanding how the ethnographer’s subjectivity, lived experience and relatedness in the process of fieldwork may lead to valuable insights and valid ethnographic knowledge.11 But despite the accumulation of self-reflective experience in anthropology, in the midnineties, Hastrup and Hervik (1994:1) felt that it was still far from clear

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how fieldwork experience makes knowledge. Their main reasons included the difficulty of putting experience into writing; and the tension between two poles of framing knowledge: on the one hand, rationality and objectivity - sometimes taken to extremes in the hope of a “scientific” method - and on the other, subjectivity and intuition - sometimes taken to extremes in the postmodernist denial of realism. Within this tension, the understanding of what Hastrup and Hervik (1994:7) refer to as ethnographic “internalisation,” and “gradual familiarisation in practice,” has continually escaped the analytical lens. Hastrup and Hervik called for an anthropological reflection that sustains the legitimacy of anthropological authority while leaving behind both the positivist notions of observation and the romanticisation of participation. Hastrup (1995:15-16) argued that the nature of fieldwork experience implies a dissolution of the subject-object opposition, “posits truth as an intersubjective creation” and posits anthropology as “radical interpretation.” At around the same time, Watson (1999:11) describes the British context: “What we have from British anthropology [in terms of books describing the subjective experiences of fieldwork] is relatively meagre.” He points to the fact that most of the literature on fieldwork experiences is from American anthropology. The reasons listed by Watson (p.12-15) refer mainly to a culture of “self-disclosure” where the British confessional style is “more ironic, more detached, never in fact being explicit, and frequently obscuring emotion entirely behind self-mockery and humour” (p. 12). Shore (1999: 27-29) also explores British academic reluctance to write about fieldwork experience. Recognising that “fieldwork is an emotional encounter as well as an intellectual exercise,” Shore (p. 28) critically discusses the following reasons for this silence: that anthropologists may feel insecure and uncertain in talking about fieldwork experiences; that anthropologists are trained in conditions of a “… conspiracy of silence” on fieldwork; and the grips of the structuralfunctionalist legacy on British anthropology. He elaborates further on how British anthropology held to a rigidly Durkheimian self-image, one that was positivistic but strongly anti-psychological, that defined anthropology as a scientific study of “other” cultures. British anthropologists were therefore strongly discouraged from introducing their own ‘subjectivities’ into the frame of analysis...

It is important to note here, that today we see not only a shift in the way in which emotions are addressed as form of knowledge within anthropology but we also see that how anthropologists employ the notion of emotions

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has transformed over time as our approach to knowledge has transformed.12 Davies (this volume) offers further thoughts on the neglect of subjectivity in British anthropology highlighting three reasons: the Durkheimian legacy; the influence of “traditional empiricism”; and the “poor provision in anthropology departments for training students to think psychologically about field experience;” see also Watson (1999:17). At other times, omission of the subjective experience as a source of knowledge in publications might have been led by moral and methodological concerns - such as the conscious act of protecting people in the field, or ourselves. Thus, some details of the research process might have been left outside the account on ethical grounds or to close the doors to the most sensitive aspects of what Herzfeld (1997) terms “cultural intimacy.” For example, one of the chapters in this volume was withdrawn by its author although it was written up and even presented at a seminar series. This author’s reflections on her field relatedness were valuable in showing the process of understanding people in the field through emotional engagement but, on this occasion, the author chose to respect the deeply painful intimacy through which this understanding was reached. Vulnerable anthropology, as each author here demonstrates, is challenging on many levels as it is insightfully discussed by Ruth Behar (1996). Some discussion of fieldwork may justifiably remain in the corridors of academia or only continue to be transmitted orally. Furthermore, as Herzfeld (2007) discusses it, the recent rise of new positivism invites us to resist rampant accountability and the seduction of methodological replication; and we need to be careful with invitations to “measure” experience – however, we also need to note here that there have been recent advances in cognitive anthropology and psychology that may open exciting possibilities for combining different methods (see e.g. Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007 and Luhrmann 2010). Some anthropological experience may not lend itself to analysis or writing or may indeed be better off left in the realm of “persistent ambiguity” and outside the “totalising professional models of knowledge,” as Hastrup and Hervik remind us (1994: 9-10). However, most anthropologists would agree that there is value (personal, moral, methodological, theoretical, and political) in understanding how we produce knowledge through experience. The rapidly growing anthropological effort to understand fieldwork experiences as methodologically and theoretically relevant has resulted in the opening of whole new areas of research. Anthropologists have finally begun to produce more systematic analyses of how our behaviours, thoughts, feelings, memories, fantasies and imaginations or states of being13, may

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affect the collection, analysis, writing up and sharing of anthropological data - see, in particular, work by Tanya Luhrmann, Michael Jackson and Vincent Crapanzano. More recently, the importance of analysing fieldwork experiences has been highlighted directly and indirectly in a number of publications, particularly in the fields of psychological anthropology, medical anthropology and phenomenological anthropology. The volume Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer (2010)14 calls for the approach of radical empiricism introduced by the Harvard psychologist William James and more recently, brought back to anthropology by Michael Jackson (1989, 1998). As Michael Jackson reminds us, the central proposition of William James’ radical empiricism is that “the field of empirical study includes the plurality of all experienced facts, regardless of how they are conceived and classified – conjunctive and disjunctive, fixed and fluid, social and personal, theoretical and practical, subjective and objective, mental and physical, real and illusory” (James 1976:22-23 in Jackson 1996:7). A radical empirical approach as described in Jackson (1989, 1998) focuses on the relations between people, things, concepts, the environment and with the self and it is informed also by a psychological perspective (see Braddock, Curran, Davies, Lindquist, and Svašek, this volume). The contributors to Emotions in the Field also argue for the empirical value of certain emotions, senses, experiences or reactions arising in the fieldworker. The radical empirical approaches to fieldwork show that the emotional is not opposed to reason and it could complement the “traditional empirical” methods of anthropological research. Drawing on the case studies in Emotions in the Field and, like some of our contributors and the introduction here, Davies (2010) discusses the interrelationship between person and method15 – see also the chapters by Luhrmann 2010, Jackson 2010, Crapanzano 2010, Hage 2010 and Spencer 2010. In other fields of anthropology, a variety of innovative methodologies has developed, some of which would link anthropology to other disciplines. Insightful experiential approaches in psychological anthropology such as person-centred ethnography and studies of transference and countertransference, or dream analysis can be found also in The Handbook for Psychological Anthropology edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton (2005). The authors employ such methods in order to study the relationship between the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective, the local and the global. Anthropologists whose work is informed by concerns about social agency - such as the team editing Subjectivity. Ethnographic Investigations

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- João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (2007), explore “how individuals actually interact with global processes and local symbolic forms” and “how to relate psychological constructs to analyses of political subjectivity…” (p.16). The authors provide a number of case studies from different disciplines and demonstrate that in order to understand the “inner reworkings of the world and the consequences of people’s actions toward themselves and toward others,” (p.15) we need to focus on subjectivity and study it as “refracted through potent political, technological, psychological, and linguistic registers” (p.5). Another rich discussion of fieldwork experiences focuses directly on the parallels between the life worlds and ways of knowing of those we study and anthropologists themselves - in the volume Ways of Knowing edited by Mark Harris (2007). This volume explores knowledge in practice and experience as a shifting phenomenological trajectory comprising the political, philosophical, and biological bases of participant perception, or participatory learning (Dilley, 1999 cited in Harris 2007:2) - always emerging and transforming; and situated in a particular place and time. Their contributors suggest stepping away from formal procedures and methods and propose an artisanal approach to anthropology whose field techniques elicit the tacit in the ethnographic encounter. In order to avoid reducing what people know to what they say, they bring together work from anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, art, and neuroscience. As they explore how others know in practice, they also draw parallels with the way anthropologists come to know. Their volume also makes a contribution to the debates about the links between cognitive and subjective ways of knowing, which Harvey Whitehouse (1999, also cited in Harris 2007:21) identifies as one of the key debates to engage with in anthropology today. Our volume offers some variety of theoretical and methodological approaches coming from medical anthropology, migration studies, anthropology of childhood, anthropology of development, and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Future research may explore in more depth how the themes we discuss about fieldwork as relational process could establish a dialogue with other anthropological sub-disciplines and approaches as well as with other disciplines such as neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, migration studies, and in particular, feminism, psychology, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. It is very important that in future research we also draw links to other contributions to “the intersubjective turn” (see Jackson 1998:5-38) and also to approaches engaged in the “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) from sociology, critical theory, women’s studies and cultural studies and,

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particularly to recent work on the relational in feminism such as Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000) and earlier feminist work on emotions and knowing such as Jagger and Bordo (1989) and, in particular, Jagger (1989). In the sections to follow in this introduction I discuss field work as “emotional labour” (Hochschild 1983) referring to when anthropologists believe they should or feel compelled to “manage” their emotions and I note some possible implications. I then distinguish this way of thinking and experiencing emotions from other ways in which emotions can offer a route to understanding and insight. In this context, we argue that emotional self-reflexivity should become a key element of the self-reflexive project, as Curran (this volume) stresses in particular. Such a project would demand better self-knowledge from the anthropologist – and I examine some potential questions regarding the training of anthropologists. I then briefly explore fieldwork as an embodied relational process marked by psychological, bodily, social, political, cultural, and bureaucratic forces. Finally, I suggest that acquiring knowledge through embodied relating can also be discussed as “relational observation” or “relational reflection” pointing to the work of Crapanzano (1992, 2010) and Jackson (1989, 1998, 2010). Drawing on such work, I argue that our lived relationships (past, present and future) at home, at our fieldwork sites, and with our always emerging inner self (as indivisible from the relational and the political) all together constitute what we understand by “the field.”

Emotional Labour, Emotions as Knowing and Anthropological Fieldwork Every profession entails some form of emotional work insofar as it may involve a focus on emotions. Some professions involve emotional performance, such as the service industries (as described by Hochschild, 1983, see further below). Other professions, however, can be singled out for their particularly interpersonal or intersubjective (and, thus, unpredictable) nature, where emotions play a key role. Such professions (especially nursing, psychotherapy, psychiatry, child-care, and social work) can generate strong emotional experiences and involve various degrees of attention to emotions. We have long known that emotions (particularly during fieldwork) play an important role in anthropological insight and work before, during and after the “field,” but until recently (as pointed out by Davies 2010 and this volume and Spencer 2010), there has been little explicit and systematic discussion of how emotions actually form part of anthropological method. While anthropologists have only

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recently begun to write16 in more depth on our own fieldwork emotions,17 they have often discussed the emotions’ formative and informative nature of others as discussed in Lutz and White (1986), Beatty (2005), Casey and Edgerton (2005) and Wulff (2007). Such work has pointed to the cultural construction of emotions and to the cultural variations in felt experiences of relatedness; in this sense, when we discuss emotions as knowledge, we need to bear in mind how we think about emotions and knowledge and also how people in the field think about emotions and knowledge.18 Some may argue that by focusing on the emotional, we reproduce a familiar dichotomy between thinking and feeling. If emotions are defined from a “traditional empirical” standpoint, such accusation may be tenable. However, referring to the emotional here, is seeing it as inseparable from other aspects of existence – emotions permeate, as capacities or potentialities, all human and social experience, affecting it and being affected by it. When we emphasise them, we hope to show precisely this relationship. More specifically, following Lutz and White (1999), Casey and Edgerton (2005), Lindholm (2005), Svašek (2006), we see emotions are both cognitive and physical, both discourses and embodied experiences, both individual and collective and arising within a relational domain. They become mechanisms or ways with which we may, through analysis of their meaning in our lived relational engagements, better grasp, orient ourselves in, question, sense and embody the lifeworlds we study (cf. Jackson 1989, 1998, Davies and Spencer 2010). Such analyses include close attention to the workings of power and politics, and to rationalist, statist, gender-based, sexual, racist, colonialist or nationalist ideologies, which might partake in the research process. As many have argued, taking emotions seriously could demonstrate how the emotional and the political mutually constitute each other (e.g. NavaroYashin 2003, 2008, Hage 2010, Hsu 2010, Smith and Kleinman 2010).

Emotional Labour in Anthropological Fieldwork Experiencing emotions as part of anthropological research can be explored as “emotional labour” when anthropologists believe they have to “manage” their emotions to elicit knowledge (cf. Bellas 1999, Svašek, this volume). The term “emotional labour” was introduced by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) in her The Managed Heart (informed by Marxism and the performance theory of Goffman 1959). Hochschild was referring to the kind of “management of emotions” that occurs in response to the demands of working face-to-face with people in the service economy (e.g. flight attendants) and is seen as a product of and as producing the capitalist

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system.19 Hochschild critically discussed how such emotional “management” induces the employee to suppress their own feelings in order to sustain an outward countenance that produces the “proper state of mind in others” (p. 7). Hochschild also introduces the notion of “emotional dissonance” – when the “private” feelings of the worker differ from what the worker is allowed to express “publicly,” denoting an interplay between detachment and involvement and places these in the capitalist context.20 Following Hochschild, sociological research has expanded the term “emotional labour” to include work centred on efforts to “understand others, to have empathy with their situation, to feel their feelings as a part of one’s own” (England and Farkas 1986:91). It has also focused on “genuine” emotions at work, not just the ones performed under management control. Today, this sociological research has grown significantly, and has become a sub-field spanning several related fields: the sociology of emotions, the social construction of skills, and organisational behaviour (Steinberg and Figart 1999).21 A part of this research in sociology has taken a rather problematic empiricist direction concerned with the refinement of how one could “operationalise” or “measure” emotions or aspects of emotions – and this is different from the insightful potential that some cognitive and psychological studies offer (e.g. Luhrmann 2010). Some of these sociological approaches evoke the gloomy spectre of what Strathern (2000) describes as the contemporary audit culture. Our volume testifies to the value of resisting undue standardisation and codification of fieldwork methodology and, instead, we employ ethnography (including the historical ethnography of emotions in William Reddy 2001, see Heaton Shrestha, this volume) and emotional reflexivity as methods in understanding critically how the “emotional labour” of anthropologists evolves. Future research may lead to links with quantitative approaches in cognitive anthropology and psychology. Although all chapters study emotions’ “management” in one way or another, three of the contributors to this volume (Svašek, Heaton Shrestha and Curran) explicitly discuss it. Some of our contributors (e.g. Berger, Mitchell and Shuenn-Der Yu) also pose questions about how we may sometimes stop ourselves from participating through the use of methods, or what we have embraced during professional socialisation and internalised as rules of how to do research. Here, we draw on the sociology of emotional labour, because it pays attention to institutional practices, and how institutions and individuals shape each other’s emotions; and because it also unpacks critically the production of “emotional labour” as part of the contemporary conditions of capitalism and globalisation. Wharton (1999:173) for example, points to

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the key role of the way Americans spending money and time on their emotions could be seen as part of the culture of “therapeutic individualism”22 which “involves the belief that each person has a unique, uncorrupted, inner self that deserves expression and thus views emotions management, not as a deviant, but, rather, as a normative process.” In the current UK socio-political climate “emotions management” takes on its own particular meaning, with the government planned expansion of shortterm cognitive-behavioural therapy that will “manage symptoms” rather that address the causes of suffering. How does “emotional labour” in anthropological research form part of the dynamics of the wider world? How is it institutionalised? In addition to the crucial and urgent debates surrounding globalisation, racism, gender and anti-colonialism which could provide an insight here, anthropologists could also turn toward exploring the role of the daily work of educational and research institutions, funding bodies and stakeholders in the conditions of the flexible academic labour market. What is the role of anthropologists in this institutional arena? As Christopher Wellin and Gary A. Fine (2007: 323) put it eloquently: “Whatever else it may be, ethnography is work. This reality and its implications for the doing of and institutional support for ethnography has largely been neglected.” These authors draw our attention to the importance of distinguishing between, and attending to, two different levels involved in anthropological work. They say that “revealing the fluidity of meaning within research encounters is different from documenting the obdurate institutional contexts in which such fluidity is either glossed over or resolved in routine ways,” (p. 325). Some of the contributors to our volume directly show the importance of examining both levels as well as the links between them. It is timely to understand how teaching and learning anthropology, reading textbooks, going to conferences, dealing with the demands of publishing, and attending the weekly seminar can be a key part of how we become “tools” of fieldwork research and conduct fieldwork. As Shore (1999:45) stresses: A more critical and analytical reflexivity should also oblige anthropology to turn its professional gaze towards the broader context in which the research practices are embedded, including the institutional setting in which anthropology takes place (particularly the conditions of its existence within the university system).

This, according to Shore, should include questions such as: who funds research? And, what is the impact of government policies, publisher

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Introduction

demands, of research councils’ strategies, commercial constraints, on research and training? The immediate contextual and institutional factors shape anthropological lived experiences in the field as much as broader and historical contexts and it is well worth exploring their significance. Anthropological “emotional labour” marks all stages of our professional career: from our early educational experiences, through to our fieldwork encounters and writing-up. It evolves within the context of the emotional regime of academia and of anthropology as a discipline. The main questions that anthropologists need to address, with regard to anthropology as emotional labour, concern the impact of these emotional “regimes” (see Heaton Shrestha, this volume) on ourselves and the people we study. One way to examine this is to pay attention to how we acquire and adhere to our methodological habits and relate to our methods (cf. Davies 2010, Spencer 2010). The chapters in this volume provide a range of examples about how we develop, challenge or sustain our methodological beliefs in social practices. Celayne Heaton Shrestha (this volume) analyses the emotional regimes of anthropology and shows how they do not foreclose the space for the emotional (as some traditional empiricists might have hoped); rather, they shape emotions in particular ways, playing an important role in data collection and analysis. Her auto-ethnographical account shows how the process of writing up her doctoral fieldwork among NGOs in Nepal involved a complex “management” of her emotional experiences, where certain emotions were suppressed and others altered, unleashing important ethical, moral, methodological and theoretical implications. Heaton Shrestha describes a number of institutional, pedagogic and interpersonal relational practices, as well as writing practices and conventions. She illustrates how such emotion work could result in the researcher reinterpreting her experience, in the light of dominant institutional prejudices, at the expense of more nuanced and even vulnerable experiences that might command a different analytical framework. An analysis of such post-fieldwork “emotion work” contributes to our understanding of how anthropologists construct the field through emotional distancing, that is, how our methods may stay in the way of particular forms of relational engagement and our understanding of it. Similarly, Maruška Svašek (this volume) describes her experiences with empathy as “method.” Svašek reflects upon her relationship with a Dutch migrant, Jan, and explores their connection as a trajectory influenced by inner presences and emotional resonance. Despite her personal reservations and professional doubts, the empathic relationship that develops inspires a willingness to engage with the Dutch society in

Emotional Labour and Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork

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Northern Ireland. Sharing happy childhood memories with Jan also transforms her research persona: from applying empathy as a "formula," or a "method," to empathy as “feeling a mutual connection.” Svašek demonstrates how sharing emotions and feeling empathy during fieldwork is riddled with ambiguity and may pose ethical dilemmas that may eventually foreclose "the field." Svašek’s chapter poses further questions about the difference between what may be seen as “technical” empathy and a more authentic empathic engagement in the field that that comes from getting to know people. As Lorimer (2010: 106) suggests about the latter: The empathy an anthropologist feels is part of his or her desire to be in a real human relationship with some informants; one that will outlast fieldwork. It is a celebration of a genuine mutual understanding between anthropologists and the people they come to know, based on the anthropologist’s struggles to grasp what informants really mean in their own terms.

Thus, we could distinguish between the performance of “method” as part of emotional labour and the authentic emotional engagements in the field, each of which may lead us different ways and, as Svašek points out, this poses important ethical questions. In this manner, we discuss the impacts of emotional labour on both the anthropologist and the people we engage with, on our institutions and our discipline. Some of the questions arising here include: How do we create and reproduce the emotional regimes of anthropology and with what impact? What do we do with emotions during fieldwork (or before and after) – do we “manage” them and how? How is this part of a wider socio-political and economic landscape? But most importantly, how do these emotional regimes shape our relationships with people in the field?

Emotions and Knowing A different but still related set of questions arises when we focus on the actual experiencing of emotions. How do we notice, experience and think about our emotions? How do we reflect on and with emotions? How might we rely on emotions as methods for deeper understanding and how is this different from emotion management? In addition to these, Vincent Crapanzano proposes that “it is less interesting to pose questions about knowing the emotion of the other or our own, but instead, it is important to pose questions about how we participate in each other’s emotions.”23 Our main goal in this volume is to demonstrate the important role of reflection upon emotion and to open further discussion about how we

16

Introduction

might expand the methodological relevance of such reflexivity. We also show how the analysis of embodied emotions in fieldwork, including political and moral emotions, as well as non-cognitive ways of knowing might support us in understanding and knowing each other.24 Similarly to most of our contributors, Louise Braddock argues that: experiencing an emotion does more than orient the subject to the way the social world bears on his interests; it also orients him to the experience of other persons in that world and to their own sense of self as a subject.25

Indeed, upon reflection, emotions may illuminate something beyond the way we are influenced by the world, they also tell us something about life, about the people we study, about us and about our work. Thus, we explore emotions in terms of how we might develop an understanding, a sense of the people and the field and learn through them. This includes paying attention to a variety of sensing and embodied experiences (in the chapters by Shuenn-Der Yu and Mitchell), “third space” (Mitchell, this volume) empathy and “internalized presence” (in the chapters by Svašek and Lindquist), “inner phantasies,” (Curran, this volume), “key emotional episodes” (Berger, this volume), distancing and cynicism (Heaton Shrestha, this volume), and projection, transference and countertransference (in the chapters by Lindquist and Braddock). These examples present analyses of how the ethnographer’s emotional experiences play an important role in the production of anthropological knowledge. For example, John Curran, this volume, describes his fieldwork experiences in a London hospital and analyzes his feelings as part of “inner phantasies,” where “feelings of power and desire, belonging, hatred and racism are present within the anthropologist’s mind, but also suppressed within it” and which influence conscious attitudes and behaviour. These “inner phantasies,” as Curran demonstrates in his chapter, impact on the questions posed and on subsequent analyses that allowed him to understand deeper the meaning and reproduction of prejudice and race in the hospital where we conducted his fieldwork. The author argues that through being emotionally reflexive, the anthropologist may become more aware of the limitations of impression management that our field oscillation between “back stage” and “front stage” performances involves. On these grounds, Curran calls for an on-going awareness that includes fieldwork emotions as methodologically and theoretically legitimate data for thick description. Fieldwork as an embodied experience of relatedness is also discussed by Marjorie Mitchell, this volume. Drawing on her field experiences in the Philippines, the author explores how her embodied self was inscribed and

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redefined by her fieldwork relationships, and how she was able to reflect productively upon this process, albeit in retrospect. Mitchell describes that she was only able to reach a deeper understanding of the field in a “third space” where the ethnographer is as affected in the field as the people they study. The chapter opens with the discussion of a widespread ethnographic practice: the splitting of fieldwork experiences into professional (fieldwork journals) and private accounts (countless letters, mainly e-mails, to colleagues, friends and family). The journals where Mitchell strove to achieve “objectivity” adhering to the ideals she embraced during her training contained hardly any information about her feelings during her fieldwork among children in the Philippines. In contrast, her e-mails were full of systematic accounts of her emotions and daily encounters, constituting her field position as a local marginal in both body and class. The author shows how the post-fieldwork re-reading and re-connecting to her lived experience described in her e-mails became the key to understanding her field conceptually. It was her reflections upon the diverse and nuanced lived moments of field interactions with people that led to insights, rather than simply her collected “conventional ethnographic data,” which followed the requirements of “traditional empiricism.” The chapter bears witness to the fact that reflecting systematically on the lived experience of fieldwork relations, may play an important role in understanding the dynamics of power in the field and, in particular, the living embodiment of local and global power hierarchies. Further analysis may address the role of new technologies in field research - such as the use of internet in the field – are they creating a partial or fragmented experience or a new way of relating and co-presence? While one may argue that e-mailing may be a way of withdrawing from fieldwork experience or a source of emotional support (cf. Cook 2010), we could ask if e-mails might also form an additional social and psychological space and an arena to explore the bridges and barriers between relations at home and those in the field.26 Drawing on Luhrmann (1989 and 2010) Shuen-Der Yu explores how he was engaged in learning his field through an embodied experience of meditation in a Buddhist retreat in Taiwan. In the retreat space where little explicit didactics was available (yet it was nevertheless important), Shuenn-Der Yu zooms in on his own non-cognitive learning through bodily practices, which facilitated the learning of Buddhist concepts. Further ethnographic data could possibly show some parallels to what Luhrmann (1989) describes as the “interpretive drift” in social learning (cf. Cook 2010) among the magicians she studied in London - they learned ideas, and then they confirmed them in their experience; once they would

18

Introduction

experience the “magical power” in their bodies, they would regard the discourse as more real, which would then lead to further confirmation in experience and so on. Shuenn-Der Yu describes how his embodied emotions allowed him to establish a “contact zone,” to formulate new sets of questions and to arrive at new takes on phenomena that may have otherwise been taken for granted, misunderstood, misinterpreted or considered unworthy of research. This allowed him to engage in completely different way of relating in the field, which regards the experience of the Other as valid. Jackson (1983: 337) discusses further how “bodily practices mediate a personal realization of social values, an immediate grasp of general precepts as sensible truths” (cf. Desjarlais 1992:27, Csordas 1994). Reflexivity should include emotional as well as intellectual reflexivity about embodied habits and, in some cases, emerging fully in “participant experience” (cf. Hsu 2008), may be the only way forward to reach an adequate understanding. Shuenn-Der Yu’s description of learning Buddhist meditation may pose questions about anxiety and doubt and the embodied process of acquiring certainty in both meditation practices and field research (cf. Cook 2010). Many anthropologists have discussed what happens when we participate fully, with our whole being at fieldwork, and some have focused on sudden or powerful emotional experiences emerging from such invovlement. Such experiences may illuminate our non-cognitive knowledge of the field (e.g. Luhrmann 2010, Hastrup 2010) and allow us to experience our common humanity (e.g. Rosaldo 1984). Kirsten Hastrup (2010) analyses some of the experiences that she had during her fieldwork in Iceland, as “raw moments,” which allowed her to understand intimately the importance of landscape in the Icelandic world-view. She sees “raw moments” in the following way: moments where emplacement within the field impinges upon subjectivity and allows for an unmediated perception of something that cannot be called up but which manifests itself as a presence… (p.206, author’s emphasis)

She describes how “they are related to the feelings of the fieldworker rather than the analytical habitus. The raw moments strip us bare of conceptual prejudice and deliver us to pure sensation.” Hastrup’s and Luhrmann’s (2010) discussions of “raw moments” show how fieldwork experiences and methods simultaneously affect and are affected by the researcher’s subjectivity (e.g. through their proclivities), the environment

Emotional Labour and Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork

19

and landscape, social practice, and the immediate moment and in this process produce insight, an entry to the local lifeworlds. From a different anthropological perspective, Peter Berger, this volume, suggests that such moments may be part of the immersion into the local habitus.27 Berger refers to such emotional situations as Key Emotional Episodes (KEE). He provides an analysis of a key emotional episode during his fieldwork in India and compares it with key emotional episodes reported by other anthropologists.28 During such episodes, the anthropologist may not have conscious control over the flow of events or their own behaviours and experiences, and as a result may act in unexpected ways that could change their position in the field. The author makes two methodological points about such episodes: firstly, they may exert a strong influence on the field situation and may change the status of the researcher, facilitating or rupturing field relationships; secondly, they may highlight certain crucial themes, norms or values of a particular society. Further research may examine the role of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in these episodes as suggested by Hastrup (2010). As I discuss also in the next section below, Tanya Luhrmann (2010) shows the importance of one’s proclivity in learning in the field. Her work demonstrates that psychological, bodily, and emotional qualities of the researcher shape significantly the way she engages in field research and makes meaning out of it – thus, they seem to have a direct impact on our methods and vice versa, our methods may produce specific emotional experiences.29 We could also consider further how key emotional episodes may become spaces for arriving at what Jackson (1983:339) describes as “experiential truths,” which, seem to issue from within our own Being when we break the momentum of the discursive mind or throw ourselves into some collective activity in which we each find our own meaning yet sustain the impression of having a common cause and giving common consent.30

One of the most widely known key emotional episodes in anthropology is the one described by Renato Rosaldo in Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage (1984). Rosaldo (p.193) describes how “most anthropologists write about death as if they were positioned as uninvolved spectators who have no lived experience that could provide knowledge about the cultural force of emotions (cf. Berger, this volume). When Rosaldo experienced grief himself, he began to see connections between the Illongot experience and his own. Michael Jackson (1989:5) sees this emphasis on connectedness as

20

Introduction

an experience of the common humanity and as going against the grains of traditional empiricism which assumes the knower and the known inhabit disconnected worlds and regards experience as something passively received rather than actively made, something that impresses itself upon our blank minds or overcomes us like sleep.

He then argues that Rosaldo’s essay reveals “the extent to which our thought is metaphorical and our choices of metaphor partly determinative of the kind of understanding we reach.” Could literal understanding sometimes be (among other things) a part of objectification? How could we know that our experience of empathy is not actually a “projection” or identification with the other?31 Several of the contributors to our volume (in particular, Curran, Svašek, Lindquist and Braddock) discuss some possible ways (among many) in which a radical empirical approach and a psychological perspective can inform fieldwork methodology and the analysis of the emotional labour in which we engage (cf. Jackson 1989, Davies 2010, Davies and Spencer 2010). They aspire to the radical empirical approach in that they attempt to derive insight from experience and translate emotions into knowledge through becoming participants and observers not only in field relations but also in their own subjectivity. A fruitful engagement between anthropology and psychoanalysis (see also Lorimer 2010) on this front is present in our volume in the dialogue between our late colleague Galina Lindquist, an anthropologist, and Louise Braddock, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. Galina Lindquist shared her field experience and offered it for analysis to Louise Braddock in the discussion of “countertransference” and its potentially useful application to anthropological fieldwork. Galina Lindquist’s chapter is centred on the analysis of an experience of dread induced in a field interaction with a healer in Russia. The author shows how anthropological subjectivity is central to epistemology, especially in studying processes such as healing, predicated on intersubjective manipulations of embodied consciousness, and in cultural contexts where “the borders between selves are blurred and permeable.” Lindquist describes how her understanding evolved through the phenomenology of an intersubjective encounter built on power games, subjugation and fear. The author poses the question: what happens to understanding through empathy when the fieldworker experiences the same pains and dangers as those the Other experiences in her life? Lindquist considers some of her fieldwork experiences as a challenging

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balance between three stances: firstly, being unconditionally open to the intensities of the field, and thus getting to understand the vulnerability of victims; secondly, developing perceptions and sensibilities of the players in power games, thus taking responsibility for others; and, thirdly, detached observation, which, in the end, turns out to be largely unavailable or impossible. As Louise Braddock illustrates discussing Galina Lindquist’s and also Jean Briggs’ field experiences, some emotions may orientate us to the sense of self of another person and to what is communicated consciously and unconsciously by the research participants. This shows how emotional interpretation might have important implications for theory, method and training in anthropology. The account of emotional interpretation, as we see from these two chapters, does not necessarily require, as Braddock stresses, all possible emotion-concepts to be available to the anthropologist (although it is not a trivial affair either). Rather, since interpretation itself is a shared activity, new concepts can be learned from the interpretive input of others, such as research participants. The material accessed by the anthropologist in this way could include the “accidentally inaccessible,” that is, something forgotten, tacit and unarticulated, or subject to defences such as denial or projection, potentially revealing important aspects about the field. Yet the question remains: how could anthropologists ensure that they are not imposing their own cultural/personal interpretations on a particular field in the process of emotional interpretation? Here, Braddock reminds us that “as in psychoanalysis, interpretation needs to be confirmed” and this may take place by formulating questions, direct or indirect, with the aim of confirming or renegotiating the initial understanding. In relation to Lindquist’s experience, Braddock suggests that we can interpret the dread induced by the healer as a form of unconscious communication of the powerless who inhabit a world continually threatening aggression. Braddock finds confirmation of this “counter-transference interpretation” in Lindquist’s wider contextual understanding of post-Soviet society as a result of extensive fieldwork in the region and years of coming to know the field marked by the emotional conditions of life in the post communist world. Thus, “reflectively directing attention to one’s own feelings” could be a credible way of coming to understand both oneself and the other in service of discerning new dimensions of the field through our field relationships.

22

Introduction

Emotional Reflexivity32 and Training Participating in one’s own subjectivity is about knowing oneself, not just in terms of one’s position, interests and motivations; it includes also understanding one’s bodily and psychological predispositions and reactions and in relating to others. This does not exclude the political, on the contrary, as the latest studies on subjectivity show (e.g. Biehl et al. 2007), it illuminates how we participate in the political and how we question the “politics of significance” (Herzfeld 1997). Engaging with one’s subjectivity might (to a certain extent) be similar to how some psychotherapists conceive of the notion of participantobserver (although there are also important distinctions, see Heald and Deluz 1994, also Brody 1981). For example, the American psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) - who first introduced the notion of participant-observer in social psychiatry in the 1930s - denotes by this term the need for psychiatrists to be able to evaluate interpersonal processes by entering their own experience while at the same time observing it; that is, making sense of it. Expanding on this, dialogical and contemporary Gestalt psychotherapy draws on Martin Buber’s (1996) concept of “inclusion”33 as the heart of effective dialogue: while therapists retain a sense of their own self and separateness, they enter the world of another, thus, practicing inclusion; this is distinguished from a relationship without inclusion where the focus is mainly on the other without paying attention to the impact on oneself (Gilbert and Evans 2000:10). Maria Gilbert and Kenneth Evans, among other proponents of relational psychotherapy, point to the importance of trainees developing such a capacity for inclusion. They argue that an important condition for its attainment is the development of a “third position” (2000:14). By the “third position,” drawing on recent psychoanalytic and psychotherapy ideas, they mean a sensitive awareness of one’s own position, an empathic attunement to that of the other and the capacity to appreciate the interaction of these two processes at a meta-level. Anthropologists may draw on such diverse professional experience with emotional work and may also contribute with anthropological insights to such ideas. It is sometimes said that it takes psychotherapists on average about ten years to attain capacities such as the “third position” and this takes place through intense experiential learning including going into long-term psychotherapy.34 It remains to be discussed how anthropologists might be trained effectively in emotional reflexivity. Indeed, many have argued for the positive impact of psychotherapy on researchers. As Tanya Luhrmann reminds us (2010) “Margaret Mead famously thought that all

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23

ethnographers should experience personal therapy. It’s not a bad idea. Training in psychotherapy makes one a better ethnographer. 35 Curran (this volume) shows clearly the deeper understanding he achieved following his own personal development and his shift had significant theoretical, methodological, and ethical implications. He explores a conflict about a possibly racist joke during his fieldwork in a London hospital and uncovers the importance of analyzing powerful emotional experiences during fieldwork, not usually included in the reflexive efforts of the researcher. He argues that lack of emotional reflexivity may lead to misunderstanding, misrepresentation or even unethical involvement in field relations (see also the chapters by Mitchell, Svašek and Lindquist). But should training in emotional reflexivity simply be outsourced to psychotherapy – despite its undisputed value? Anthropology and psychotherapy have very different goals – anthropologists are concerned with the cultural construction of subjectivities while such critical awareness is less imperative for psychotherapy; psychotherapy aims to transform the Other; such different goals may lead to very different attitudes towards the same behaviour.36 Within this context, is there anything we could also do in anthropology classes? Should this be an individual responsibility of each researcher (a “personal” task) or should anthropology departments offer instruction or at least guidance (is it a “professional” requirement)? The challenges in understanding the role of one’s subjectivity in the process of fieldwork, described by the contributors to this volume, point to the fact that it is not sufficient to rely on the advice of Evans-Pritchard (1976:241), cited in Watson (1999:4), that the best preparation for fieldwork is familiarity with theory because it directs observation and contextualises impressions. Instead, as Jackson (1983:340) reminds us, drawing on Devereux (1967: xvi-xvii), because “one’s personality inevitably colours the character of one’s observations, ‘the royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious, objectivity’ is perforce the way of informed subjectivity [… where] subjective determinations are as much somatic as psychological in character…” The chapters in our volume describe a range of examples of working towards an informed subjectivity through emotional reflexivity – some are concerned more with the intersubjective level, and others with the emotional considered as an aspect of social relations. In either case, the contributors demonstrate that our emotions deserve ethnographic analysis and every step in that direction which opens further discussion, is valuable, particularly with regards to the training of anthropologists. If we agree that participant observation is also a form of “participant perception” (Dilley 1999 cited in Harriss 2007:2), then we need to

24

Introduction

consider more seriously what Ingold and Lucas (2007:287) propose in terms of learning anthropology “as understanding in practice.” They show that anthropological training itself could also offer a lot to developing one’s senses, perceptions, the imagination, and self-awareness. … the novice gradually learns to see things and of course to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do.[…] it elucidates our perception of the world and opens our eyes to other possibilities of being. And, in bringing these possibilities to bear upon our own experience, we can be led to new discoveries.”

But there is hardly any discussion on such pedagogy, including the role of the relationship between supervisors and supervisees, or apprenticeship, in anthropology.37 Hume and Mulcock (2004:xxiv) suggest further that participant observation requires “constant awareness of multiple sensory input and often demands extensive personal compromise in order to ‘fit in,’” thus calling for high levels of sensitivity and relativism. They argue that such skills usually pertain to individuals who are self-critical or susceptible to criticism from others and thus anxiety, doubt (see also Cook 2010), confusion, awkwardness and discomfort may mark many experiences, especially those of novice anthropologists. These authors then propose that one of the tasks of anthropology should be to normalise these feelings as an inevitable and potentially fruitful part of the research process. The question that arises is how current training programmes may contribute to such normalisation of fieldwork experiences. An individual’s proclivity (understood as capacity for and willingness to engage) plays a significant role in how different people experience cultural ideas and social practices, as Lurhmann (2010) shows in her study of religious practice in the US. She argues that this is as true for the ethnographer as it is for the people we study: “The judgments we make about other societies are affected by our own bodily and psychological orientations, the way we bend and flow.” So far, anthropologists have been aware that we need to understand the impact of our interests, beliefs or psychic uncertainties on how we choose and study our research topics. However, we have yet to examine how our bodily and psychological proclivities bear on the questions we ask and how we go about asking them. Luhrmann argues that “it is to the advantage of the anthropologist to understand their own proclivities and the way those proclivities may shape the way they learn about culture in the field.” This may also be addressed in the training of anthropologists, particularly as it plays a role in how we engage in the field and make sense of this engagement.

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Anthropological Fieldwork as a Relational Process Whether we include emotions and reflections upon emotions in our research, tells us more about how our methodological and epistemological practices are culturally shaped and about our proclivities than about the nature of our findings. Anthropological epistemologies are specific sociocultural and historic phenomena – they include our context-specific beliefs and practices about how to study things anthropologically (cf. Strathern 1988, Jackson 1989, 1998). For example, the ways in which we know may be permeated by Western individualism; specific notions of linear time and communication or pre-existing space; and disembodied rationality we may believe that we know in a disembodied way even if we actually rely on our embodied experiences, such as emotions, to guide us. We may confirm and reproduce these beliefs in our daily practices of knowing. This could foreclose or open the doors to certain forms of knowledge. The exploration of emotions in the field reveals that ethnographic fieldwork is underpinned by what we may refer to as a relational epistemology – we know through relating (socially and psychologically) to people, things, concepts, the environment and to Self (see Jackson 1989, 1998).38 A relational perspective may also allow us to notice and take seriously the relationships between both material and virtual things or people (Jimenez and Willerslev 2007), as well as those co-present and not present (Crapanzano 1992, Jackson 1989, 1998). Although those who have conducted fieldwork know that it is through our relatedness in the field that we discover most of our richest data,39 many have not given sufficient analytical space to the lived experience that anthropological relatedness deserves. Relational epistemologies, and particularly those paying attention to our affective capacities, could potentially open further avenues for gaining knowledge - they could become roads to new types of knowledge. Future research could formulate the principles of such epistemologies in more detail, indeed, drawing on the existing experience. Here, I mention briefly how employing in practice a relational epistemology in further studies may include seeing the world (including e.g. space, time, the self and the field/work) in a particular relational way. This would require “epistemological openness” (see Jackson 1989:186-187) from the researcher - the relational epistemology may be very different from our existing cultural or individual knowledge ideologies, beliefs, habits, or predispositions and we need to be open to new ways of knowing. The relational understanding of fieldwork may also require the application of specific methods, such as relational observation (or relational reflection) and “participant perception.”

26

Introduction

In the remaining sections below, I remind the reader of one among many possible ways to think relationally about “space” and ‘time” in fieldwork and consider a variety of approaches to the relational. Space: For example, we may draw on and extend the way Jimenez (2003) discusses space as a relational category. Space is the physical manifestation or residue (a secretion) of social relationships in action and it is also a capacity rather than a pre-existing entity. Jimenez argues that space (and I add to it the anthropological field) does not pre-exist as geographical space but consists of events and capacities emerging in our moments of relating (p.141). We could say about fieldwork what he argues about space: that the invisible fabric of our field[work] is not simply a context of our relationships and of knowing, but an aspect of the relationships themselves; field(work) is threaded/secreted by our relational involvements and communicative practices; the web of fieldwork relations is “a structure of distributed capacities, linking people, environment, and things, to social practices, bringing together the material and the social, extending agency across things and people” (p.141). Our field(work), as Jimenez argues about space, thus “becomes materially woven into the world and distributed as a capacity”; “through our engagements with and in the world, we become the spaces to which we have invested our practices” (p.141). Here, we can add that these moments of relating, that thread the field, are felt and embodied, they are both social and psychological – the becoming of the field is inseparable from the becoming of the self (psychologically, bodily, socially, politically, etc.) in relatedness (including dynamics of separateness and detachment). Our fieldwork relations include both social and psychological (internalised) relations (see Crapanzano’s 1992 “shadow relations” and also Jackson 1989, 1998); thus, the field emerges and begins to grow some time before we have even chosen a field site. In this sense, our field is a simultaneously evolving geographic, social and psychological space. The field becomes an aspect of our relating and extends as far as, firstly, our bodily, psychological and social capacity for relatedness and, secondly, our capacity for reflecting on and understanding this relatedness. Our field may expand and foreclose in unison with the dynamics of our affective sociality, of socio-psychological relatedness; and how we apply both “methods” and Self in the field. John Curran’s field (this volume) developed to include a critical understanding of racism as soon as he grasped the meaning of his psychological processes in addition to his socio-political position. Mitchell (this volume) realized that she was in a “third space” as she began to pay attention to the embodied experiences in the field – this led her to see how she was both

Emotional Labour and Observation in Anthropological Fieldwork

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affected by and affecting the field of inequality, power and vulnerability. Svašek’s field became possible, grew and then closed with the changing rhythm of empathy, memory and internalised presences. We arrive in academia with our personal history of socialisation and our bodily and psychological proclivities. As we begin our training, we develop and actively engage in relationships within the academic institutions and we prepare for the field. This is where our fieldwork relations (social and internalised) begin to form in our imagination, in our hopes and in our expectations while we embody and internalise rules of how to do research. This process is indivisible from the immediate and historic social, political and bureaucratic contexts weaved through and with our psychological processes. The scope of our field begins to emerge in the social as well as psychological process of our training, preparatory reading, and engaging with peers and colleagues. We continue to live, engage with, cut, nourish, change or forget those relationships during fieldwork – this is how we are secreting (in the sense of exuding) the field through our daily interactions and in the context of our Self. After fieldwork, again, we do not cease to relate to the people we met in the field, the spaces we connected to and the things we engaged with these relationships, now new internalised presences, become altered by new immediate relationships (see e.g. Heaton Shrestha, this volume): our relations with the incessant demands, expectations and requirements of our department and/or our colleagues, students, supervisors or heads of department, journal reviewers, our favourite authors, in sum, academia at large as well as the world beyond academia, or what we call today the “various stakeholders of research” 40 including politicians, industries, governmental and non-governmental organisations, the private sector, and last, but (alas!) not least, funding bodies and research councils. Our family and friends are indivisible from this process too - as people and as internalised relations. All these mutually co-constructing social and internalised relationships are characterised by power dynamics, insider-outsider shifts, distance, intimacy, inequality, vulnerability, empathy, trust, dependency, emotional attachments, reciprocity, or responsibility among others. These continuously evolving past and present relationships involve our whole being and form part of the process through which our “field” or “fieldwork” constantly emerges and evolves together with and through our self. These embodied (also methodological, among others) practices are collective and individual, personal and political. And, as discussed in the previous section, they form part of the emotional regimes of academia as well as the wider cultural and socio-political contexts.

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The field emerges and evolves with/within our selves and with/within the academic and socio-political regimes in/to which we relate. As anthropologists, we develop the skills of our profession, that is, the skills for being-in-the-world through being engaged with others and with ourselves in this way - and through reflection. Furthermore, while anthropologists traditionally tended to undertake fieldwork in, preferably, crowded and bounded fields, understanding our emotions can enable our engagement with what might at first sight appear to be silent, empty, fragmented or illegible spaces. If, through relational reflection, we can engage with, for example, an empty, quiet and vast space (Hastrup 2010); a conversation with what is referred to as “God” (Luhrmann 2010); or the silence of individual meditation (Cook 2010, see also Shuenn-Der, this volume); then in the future, as certain anthropologists are now indicating, what of our engagements with the State (e.g. in Aretxaga et al. 2003 and Aretxaga 2005); the political in “no man’s land” (Navaro-Yashin 2008); happiness; kinship love (Trawick 1990); machines, science and new technologies; or anything with which, about which or to/through which humans relate and thus create space/time including the virtual? Acknowledging and understanding the emotional within our research practices could thus open new or previously challenging research spaces, and redefine old ones, while raising professional standards. Time. An affective relational understanding of time in fieldwork, would further extend what we mean by field[work]: the field comprises past and future affective relations which become alive and coalesce in the present (see also Crapanzano 1992, 2010 and Jackson 1998, 2010 and the discussion further below). Indeed, seeing emotions as discourses, practices and embodied experiences, as, for example, Svašek does in this volume, uncovers the intersubjectivity of field relations as a complex intermingling of past, present and future desires, memories, imagination and expectations. Shuenn-Der Yu (this volume) shows that our emotional experiences may not only be activated through the actual and immediate field relations. The author suggests that our field emotions may be the result of clinging to particular ideas, habitus, or preferences predating fieldwork, but stirred by it. Thus, our deconstruction practices should include not only ideas and structural positions but also emotions and emotion work. A relational understanding reveals the field[work] as a messy web of living and dynamically changing relationships and as a process of ongoing dialogue, or rather of an ongoing “trilogic” (see Crapanzano 1999:84, cited in Mitchell, this volume, cf. Jackson 1998, 2010). This asks us to pay attention to the actual living substance of the relationships in action (how

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we embody them and experience them), in addition to the relating positions, which we occupy socially or politically. Modes of Relating. The chapters in this volume show different approaches through which anthropologists understand, engage in, report on and analyse relating before, during or after fieldwork. Some of our contributors join the growing trend, which sees fieldwork as intersubjective experience of empirical value (Devereux 1967, Jackson 1989, 1998, Crapanzano 1980, 1992, Davies and Spencer 2010). Such an approach sees the subjective as intersubjective and offers an understanding of the subjective as emerging and evolving with time, place, encounters and events. Other contributors to our volume attend more to the relatedness between anthropologist and the Other in terms of social practices. And some alternate between or integrate them when they write about them. Thus, when we talk about a relational process, we stress one or both of two always co-present, co-creating aspects of relating41: the social (external) and the psychological (internal) – although they are always inseparable in practice. Some anthropologists, as demonstrated in the variety of approaches in our volume, choose to focus more often on the one rather than the other. How we choose to stress one of these aspects of relating and how we go about studying it does not depend solely on our theoretical orientation or subject positions (cf. Luhrmann 1989, 2010). The modes of relatedness we engage in and choose to use as tools of learning may stem also from our personal or professional socialisation (which includes the psychological and bodily proclivity) in particular institutional, sociocultural or political contexts. Our methodological practices are accompanied by embodied beliefs and individual proclivities as well as by socio-political and theoretical concerns, and all of these shape our capacity to engage in knowing through relatedness and to reflect upon it. Kathryn Linn Geurts (2003) provides an example about the links between her bodily experience and her epistemological and methodological beliefs. She describes how her own socialisation in Euro-American contexts had predisposed her to discount direct experience through her habits of resisting any inclinations to attend to it. This had initially prevented her from making sense or even noticing the importance of some central notions and ways of being among the Anlo-Ewe – they did not make sense to her in her body, not just in her mind. Learning about the Anlo-Ewe way of sensing the world, “opened a door to an ontological mode containing some subtle but interesting contrasts with a way of being steeped in a tradition that reifies a five senses model” (p.182). She, thus, began to pay attention to how she knows

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through her whole embodied being which in turn allowed her to understand her own direct experiences and the experiences of Anlo-Ewe. Another example is the lifelong work of Michael Jackson (e.g. 1989, 1998, 2010) and Vincent Crapanzano (e.g. 1992, 2010) who, each in their own way, see the relational as intersubjective. Here, the intersubjective includes relating with both the co-present and the absent (“shadow relationships” in Crapanzano 1992). Both anthropologists attend carefully to their subjectivity (as an always emerging one) throughout the research process. Indeed, observing their own subjectivity in the process of gaining insight plays a prominent role in how they gain knowledge. Analysing their approaches, we could say that they conduct research by embodying experientially their relational approaches and by reflecting upon them. We may call such approaches relational observation or relational reflection because they pay attention simultaneously to their own subjective experience of applying methods, to the embodied experience of relatedness in the field and to the links between the two (cf. “inclusion” discussed in the previous section above). This brings to the fore the actual experience of doing ethnography and its significance. Paige West (2005) contrasts this mode of observation with that of Marcus (1997:122). She argues that while Marcus provides a “productive critique” of ethnography as “social production” that “hinges upon complicity between the anthropologist and the other, it does not examine the way that anthropologists experience the practice of ethnography.” According to West (2005), Crapanzano (1992) clearly shows how our field relations are not only dyadic dialogues, but comprise multiple dialogues with co-present and absent, past and present participants, including our internal dialogues, and these are embodied. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Crapanzano (1992, see also 2010) offers the notion of “The Third”42 to describe the lived, internal and external, experience of intersubjectivity and its meta-structuration. This is different from using “The Third” to describe the externalised relatedness or socio-political positions as in Marcus (1997:122, cited also in West, p. 267). West (2005) proposes that the way Crapanzano (1992) and Ogden (1999) use “The Third” to talk about ethnographic labour describes better its essence. She refers to their dominant modes of relatedness as “aesthetic or bodily” “ethnographic sociality” (p.268) – “the social relations that comprise the ethnographic research and transcend the times and spaces of ethnographic research and writing.” West’s discussion suggests that we all experience and notice this mode of ethnographic sociality. She also argues that it is not always easy or necessary to write about it and this is what may have prevented discussions of it. She further suggests that we could

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make it more explicit if we change the way we have traditionally thought about ethnographic research - as a practice located in a particular time and space and begin instead to see “the field” more “as connected to past, present and future” (p.274). However, I would argue that it is also important to show how the experience of doing fieldwork emerges or becomes significant in the present. This should include an understanding of not just how we think about employing methods in the field or about relating, but how we actually experience the use of methods and relating. The use of methods is not just an intellectual thought, it is an embodied experience. Then, drawing, for example, on Luhrmann (2010) and Rappaport in Rappaport and Harris (2007) future research could pose questions as to whether and how our individuality, or our proclivities may play a part in us experiencing and choosing to explore more of one rather than the other mode of attending to the “The Third” in ethnographic labour. In similar vein, the work by Devereux 1967, Crapanzano 1992, 2010, Jackson 2010, Lorimer 2010, Luhrmann 2010, Hage 2010 and Davies 2010 offers an understanding of the experience of applying methods in the field and our role in creating this experience. Humanistic Understanding. Fieldwork as a relational process also reveals people in the field and anthropologists as fellow human beings and thus, it has the potential to humanise research, to form part of a humanistic epistemology (see Jackson 1998, 1989). Here, I return again (see above) to Jackson’s (1989:5) discussion of Renato Rosaldo’s essay (1984): “our understanding always emerges out of our interactions and experiences with others in the everyday world” or the force of what William James refers to as “conjunctive relations,” which make it possible “to reach into experiences as seemingly alien as headhunting.” Such a view treats the self not as a thing but as “a function of our involvement with others in a world of diverse and ever-altering interests and situations” (1989:3). Jackson stresses that unlike traditional empiricism which draws a definite boundary between observer and observed, between method and object, radical empiricism denies the validity of such cuts and makes the interplay between these domains the focus of its interest […] it is the interaction of the observer and observed which is crucial. (p.3)

Such relational and humanistic notions of fieldwork reinforce the critique of instrumentality of fieldwork relations and the ideology of methodological individualism. This ideology promotes the intentionality of individual action as the key to data collection and analysis - sometimes evident in “emotional labour.” At the same time, as we step away from this

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individualism, the individuality of the researcher stands out (see Rappaport in Rappaport and Harris 2007:317-323). As Rappaport43 reminds us: individuality is not the same as individualism, and the issue of other minds, other consciousnesses, for instance, is not so easily dismissed as an aspect of cultural construction… The otherness of others' consciousness is real, whether or not it is validated and valued by cultural ideologies and rhetorics… How I allow myself to relate, how I present myself, at different moments of interaction, derives from the context in which I place myself at that moment; and that context is a personal creation and possession: context is a psychological and cognitive matrix, and an imaginative process as much as it is an aspect of collective and exterior ascription.

Future research must also explore the role of our individuality in the psychological, intuitive and imaginative ways through which we produce, link and experience “fieldwork relations.”

Conclusion The contributors to this volume offer insightful analyses of how anthropologists experience, sense, understand, and allow themselves (or not) to be influenced by the social and psychological aspects of relationships during fieldwork. Our focus on the emotional reveals our lived relationships and how they thread/secrete space and time to form our field [work]. Our emotions and “emotional labour” tell us about relating and knowing through relating and about the co-creation of our discipline both in the context of wider ideological, socio-economic and political forces, and in the context of the Self. Writing about our emotional experiences is important as long as we reflect on them theoretically and methodologically in order to understand how we produce knowledge in relatedness and how both we and people in the field are affected by this relatedness as human beings. We have yet to explore how, through lack of emotional reflexivity, we partake in a denial or repression of our embodied involvement during fieldwork and how this may limit our capacity to know, to understand or to connect to the humanity of others. Omitting or misunderstanding our embodied experiences of relatedness might prevent us from asking important questions, or making sense of some of our experiences and findings. Indeed, the supporting pillar of this book is the idea that self-reflexivity is incomplete if it does not include emotional reflexivity. However, as all authors here also demonstrate, emotional reflexivity is a very intricate process, and places serious demands upon the fieldworker to know themselves – not only in terms of the positions we occupy but also in terms

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of our bodily and psychological proclivities, and the dynamics of our “inner Self.” This, in turn, places demands on the institutional practices of our discipline and in particular on the training of anthropologists to support the development of “capacity for inclusion”44 “informed subjectivity”45 and “epistemological openness.”46 Understanding fieldwork as a relational process also changes the meaning of “observation.” Here, “observation” could be understood as embodied/emotional reflection. If we employ the notion of knowing through relating, the anthropologist becomes an observer reflecting in and through relatedness; an observer whose knowledge evolves as far as their capacity for reflection on and with the shifting horizons of lived field relationships. These relationships have two mutually co-creating aspects the social relationships and the ones that we (in “The West”) may refer to as “internal,” psychological ones (activated or dormant). Such a viewer, an individual, yet related to others both socially and within the Self, who is reflective, mindful and somewhat more vulnerable, might find it more challenging to objectify people in the field as an uninvolved, passive, immoral or unethical subject.47 Perhaps the terms relational observation or relational reflection rather than participant observation reveal better certain realities of fieldwork (but not all). Relational observation/reflection (as some of our contributors show) pays attention simultaneously to our subjective experience of applying methods, to the embodied experience of relatedness in the field and to the links between the two. Relational observation or reflection may keep methodological individualism and “traditional empiricism” in check; may allow an understanding of how our individuality defines fieldwork; may challenge our desire for certainty or a definite truth in a productive way; and, may show the potential to humanise fieldwork. The volume’s focus on emotions aims to pose more questions (rather than provide answers) about how both the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge are made in the process of sharing or weaving relationships, which are perceivable and analysable because they embody emotional, sensed dynamics. Thus, the fieldwork of the anthropologist is the sum of the relations that transpire in actions and practices, and that have been experienced, perceived, felt, imagined, remembered, dreamt, forgotten, fantasised, or fabricated before, during or after the process of research. The notion of “knowing through relating”48 as constantly emerging and sensing being-in-the-world draws attention to the fact that anthropologists do not sit statically within structural or functional positions in relation to other positions, but that we actively (physically and psychologically) engage and through this dynamic engagement understand,

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discover or orientate ourselves towards people and the ethnographic data. Our “fieldwork,” then, is not simply a geographical entity but a psychological entity and a relational process. Future research may point to the ways in which we could better access and understand this “field.”

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Shirley Ardener, Marcus Banks, Robert Barnes, Sarah Bryson, Stephen Clarke, Vincent Crapanzano, James Davies, Frances Hawxwell, Michael Jackson, Celia Kerslake, Francine Lorimer, David Mills, Marjorie Mitchell, David Parkin, Robert Parkin, Nigel Rappaport, Maruška Svašek, Elizabeth Tonkin and Stanley Ulijaszek who provided invaluable comments to an earlier version of this introduction. I am particularly grateful to Maruška Svašek, Elizabeth Tonkin, Kaveri Harriss and Andrew Beatty who supported the initial steps towards this project and to David Parkin, Michael Jackson, Marcus Banks, Vincent Crapanzano and Robert Spencer for their inspiration and support throughout. I am grateful to the British Academy for awarding me with the British Academy Conference Grant and a further travel grant to Harvard University.

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Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 171-190. Spencer, D. 2010. “Emotions in the Field and Relational Anthropology.” CDEN Working Paper 1. Cultural Dynamics and Emotions Network, http://www.qub.ac.uk/cden. Steinberg, R.J. and D.M. Figart. 1999. “Emotional Labour since the Managed Heart.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 561:8-26. Stern, D. 2003. “The Fusion of Horizons: Dissociation, Enactment and Understanding.” Psychoanalytic Dialogies 13: 843-873. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, University of California Press. —. ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, London: Routledge. Stoller, P. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sullivan, H.S. 1953. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. Svašek, M. 2005. Introduction: Emotions in Anthropology. In K. Milton and M. Svašek eds. Mixed Emotions: Anthropological studies of feeling, Oxford: Berg. —. 2006. Introduction: Postsocialism and the politics of emotions in Maruška Svašek ed. Postsocialism. Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, New York: Berghan, 1-34. Tedlock, B. 1996. “Works and Wives: the Sexual Division of Textual Labour.” In R. Behar and D.A. Gordon, eds., Women Writing Culture. California: University of California Press. —. 1991. From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research 47: 69–94. —. 2000. “Ethnography and Ethnographic Representation.” In N.K. Denzni and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Third Edition), 455-486. Trawick, M. 1990. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkley: University of California Press. Walton, S.P. 1993. “Jean Brigg’s Never in Anger as an Ethnography of Experience.” Critique of Anthropology 13(4): 379-399. Watson, C.W. ed. 1999. Being There. Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto. Wellin, C. and G.A. Fine. 2007. “Ethnography as Work: Career,

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Socialisation, Settings and Problems.” In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland, eds., Handbook of Ethnography. Los Angelis: Sage. West, P. 2005. “Holding the Story Forever: the Aesthetics of Ethnographic Labour.” Anthropological Forum, 15(3), 267-275. Wharton, A. 1999. The Psychological Consequences of Emotional Labour, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 561, 158-176. Whitehouse, H. ed. 1999. The Debated Mind: Ethnography versus Evolutionary Psychology, Oxford: Berg. Whitehouse, H. and J. Laidlaw 2007. Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Durham: Caroline Academic Press. Wikan, U. 1992. “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19(3): 460-82. Wolf, D. ed. 1996. Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wulff, H. ed. 2007. The Emotions. A Cultural Reader. Oxford: Berg. Young, D. E. and Jean-Guy Goulet eds. 1994. Being Changed by CrossCultural Encounters. The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Notes  1

I refer to “traditional empiricism” here as discussed in Jackson (1989) and Davies, (2010), see also Davies, this volume. It refers broadly to the way of thinking about methods that neglects how the researcher’s subjectivity partakes in knowledge production. 2 The volume Things as They Are. New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology edited by Michael Jackson (1999) shows clearly the numerous benefits of thinking phenomenologically in an anthropological way about fieldwork research and could make a key addition to texts preparing doctoral students for fieldwork. 3 As in Devereux (1967), see also Jackson (2010) for a recent appraisal of Devereux’s ideas. 4 Among others, see Jackson (1998:207) who argues: “Structure has to be understood transitively and intransitively, as an ongoing process in which concepts, objects, and persons are all implicated. It has to be approached in a radical empirical way, as mediated by physical emotions, senses, gestures, and instincts as well as by ideas and ideals.” Some of the contributors to our volume also strive to demonstrate the value of employing radical empiricism (see further below). 5 Another volume originated also from this conference (Davies and Spencer 2010) – its focus is on radical empiricism and the psychology of fieldwork; although both

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 volumes were produced simultaneously and all of our contributors in this volume here aspire to radical empiricism, only some of the chapters follow this approach in that they analyse their own subjectivity; our volume here presents somewhat various approaches to the relational processes of fieldwork and some of the chapters attend more to the social rather than the psychological processes involved in fieldwork. 6 See Tedlock (1991) for a detailed review of the literature; Davies (2010) - for a review of work on emotions in the field; see also Spencer (2010) and Davies, this volume. 7 Freilich also talks about the “necessity” to resort to one’s own devices in fieldwork - which had “developed its own rationalisations” and had turned into a virtue (1970: 14). He goes on to summarize this: The good professional came to be one who went into a mysterious situation (the field) gained rapport through a likeable personality and an imaginative mind, and created valid data through hard work and creative thinking. The researcher was regarded as a creative problem solver and the field as a place full of unpredictable situations. The result was that few anthropologists attempted to develop sophisticated fieldwork procedures for within this framework such attempts appeared foolish. 8 However, the role of emotions in fieldwork has clearly been considered in early anthropology, even among those who were not explicitly interested in psychological themes. For example, in Appendix B to his Introduction to Social Anthropology, Ralph Piddington (1957:782) mentions that due to his youth and “cultural distance”, he could not achieve the “degree of ‘affective assimilation’” among the Karadjeri that he later experienced among the Maori and that had helped him work among them. In his chapter on fieldwork methods, when discussing “participant observation,” he reflects albeit briefly on the limits of learning through experience and suggests that anthropologists cannot participate fully both in psychological and sociological sense (p.548). Anthropologists have always thought about emotions in the field and how we derive knowledge through experience, but the question is how they have thought about these and how come they have not written or published on this topic. In the UK, as Davies this volume notes in Footnote 2, M. Fortes, M. Gluckman, S.F. Nadel, E. Leach, and J. PittRivers, all relied in some way or another on psychology or psychoanalysis, cf. Jahoda (1982) and Heald and Deluz (1994). 9 Here, Freilich even if preoccupied with the replication and standartisation of methods, still argued that “the greater the reality-orientation of the anthropologist, the more likely that his raw data and his interpretations are valid. Hence, anything that tends to increase the fieldworker’s reality orientation makes him a superior fieldworker” (p. 35). It is interesting that he does not see much else that anthropology can do except turn to “writing as a tool for introspection.” In footnote 22 (p. 35), he suggests that psychotherapy would be a “valuable adjunct to other forms of fieldwork training” and lists several anthropologists, including himself, who had benefited from therapy in relation to their research. 10 cf. Hage 2010, Hsu 2010 and Smith and Kleinman 2010.

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11 Until the end of 1990s, see, in particular, Devereux 1967, Rosaldo 1980, Crapanzano 1980 and 1992, Stoller 1987, Jackson 1989 and 1998, Luhrmann 1989, Heald 1989, Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, Kleinman and Kleinman 1991, Okely and Callaway 1992, Hobbs and May 1993, Heald and Deluz 1994, Young and Goulet 1994, Csordas 1994, Hastrup 1995, Behar 1996, Tedlock 1991,Jagger and Bordo 1989, Jagger 1989, and Watson 1999. 12 I owe this observation to Francine Lorimer. 13 Cf. “states of being” in medical anthropology and also in the psychoanalytic literature, particularly in relational psychoanalysis - e.g. Stern (2003) who discusses through specific examples that how we understand ourselves or others depends on the states of being we occupy; cf. Jackson 1998:18-22. 14 See Footnote 5 above. 15 Davies 2010 also sees method as “the set of internalised rules governing data collection and analysis,” cf. Devereux 1967. 16 Much of this discussion has also taken part in what we might refer to as “informal” spaces: in the corridors of the department, in the pub or at a dinner party, and over coffee in the breaks between conference sessions, in personal diaries and travel writing.16 A notable exception (except our conference Emotions in the Field, 2006, see above) was the interdisciplinary conference on emotions and human mobility: Transnational Families, Emotions and Belonging organised by Maruška Svašek in May 2007 where emotions of participants took centre stage (see Svašek, this volume). 17 In particular, Crapanzano, 1980; Rosaldo 1984, Briggs 1970, Behar 1996, Kleinman and Copp, 1993; Jagger and Bordo 1989 and, in particular, Jagger 1989, Milton and Svašek, 2005; Harris 2007, and Davies and Spencer 2010. 18 I owe this reminder to Francine Lorimer. Indeed, as anthropologists, we recognize that people from other cultures may not have a word for emotion, or may have radically different ideas about the locations and meanings of emotion, emotional expression, perception, experience, and the antecedents and physiology of emotion. This however, does not have to discourage us from studying emotions. 19 “Emotional labour” thus refers to the relational rather than the task-nature of work such as employers hiring “smiling faces” to enhance productivity and profitability. 20 Hochschild also poses some interesting questions about the growing value of “spontaneity” in contemporary Western society as a result of the increasing demands on “managing the heart” and she opens debates about the “private” self and “real” self, the locus of emotional control, and the relationship between individuals and institutions expressed in emotions “management.” 21 Most of this research has included either qualitative studies of the service industries (about the gendered impact of emotional labour on employee satisfaction, well-being and on productivity and profit) or quantitative research on emotional work at home, in nurturing and caring. Some of the research discusses critically capitalist standardisation and hierarchisation of work practices or the more recent informalisation of work where the gap between “self” and “display” is shortened.

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 22

Here the author draws on Schwalbe 1996. Personal communication, cited in Spencer 2010, see also Crapanzano 1992. 24 See Jagger 1989 and Jagger and Bordo 1989. Jagger (1989) argues that some emotions may contribute to the growth of knowledge and the growth of knowledge may contribute to the development of certain emotions, “the feedback loop between our emotional constitution and our theorizing is continuous; each continually modifies the other, in principle, inseparable from it.” 25 Cf. all contributors in Davies and Spencer 2010, Luhrmann 1989, Briggs, 1970, Rosaldo 1984, Behar 1996, Robben and Sluka 2006, Crapanzano 1992, Hume and Mulcock 2004, Goulet and Miller 2007. 26 Cf. Crapanzano 2010 on writing and the transformation of lived experience, also Marcus and Fisher 1986. 27 Cf. Jackson (1998:5) who suggests that “Bourdieu disseminated subjectivity into habitus” and also Jagger (1989) who discusses a positivist strive for justification and replicability when employing emotions to know. 28 Berger discusses key emotional episodes by Jean Briggs, Timm Lau and Renato Rosaldo. For a discussion of Never in Anger by Jean Briggs (1970) and its contributions to anthropology, see also Walton (1993). 29 Another discussion we may open is how we relate not only to people in the field but also to our colleagues when we discuss their published work. For example, we have a choice between beginning our relationship with people in the field with “external social patternings” or with the “the personal and affective” (see Jackson 1989:5 who discusses M. Rosaldo 1980:2). The two may elicit different results. Do we have such a choice in relation to our colleagues? Would it take us to different understanding of their work? How might our subjectivities impact on these choices? It might be interesting to discuss whether we conceive of others’ writings as printed statements or abstract ideas, or if we experience our engagement with their work as a relationship to a real person? For example, Behar (1996: 161-177) discusses Rosaldo’s publication (1984) through her own involved and vivid description of his experience. This humanises his text for me. Reading her narrative, I begin to see Rosaldo as a person. Thus, Behar’s assertion that his publication could also be seen as “a kind of tomb, memorial to Michelle Rosaldo [his wife], and that we must tread on it lightly” begins to make sense to me emotionally as well as cognitively. I begin to think how objectification in anthropology may not be limited solely to the self or to the other at our fieldwork sites. Discussing how we understand the fieldwork experiences of other colleagues might also bring interesting insights into the limits and possibilities of relational knowing and the role of our subjectivity in it. 30 Here, we might also profit from distinguishing, as Jackson (1983: 340) does, different aims of participation and how they impact on our research: To break the habit of using a linear communication model for understanding bodily praxis, it is necessary to adopt a methodological strategy of joining in without ulterior motive and literally putting oneself in the place of another person: inhabiting their world. Participation thus 23

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 becomes an end in itself rather than a means of gathering closely-observed data which will be subject to interpretation elsewhere after the events. 31 I owe this question to Michael Jackson. See Braddock this volume for a discussion of these notions in psychoanalysis; cf. Lorimer 2010; and Svašek, this volume. 32 See in particular, Curran, this volume. 33 “I-Thou is the primary word of relation. It is characterised by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity, and ineffability. Although it is only within this relation that personality and the personal really exist, the Thou of the I-Thou is not limited to men but may include animals, trees, objects of nature and God… IThou… cut[s] across the lines of our ordinary distinctions to focus our attention not upon individual objects and their casual connections but upon the relations between things, the dazwischen (there-in-between)” - Maurice S. Friedman’s (1995:57) summary of the I-Thou concept in Martin Buber (1996) 34 Here, we need to note that the work and training of psychotherapists is itself a socio-cultural practice which needs to be critically understood and situated within its own historical and institutional contexts (cf. Luhrmann 2000, Davies 2009). 35 See also footnote 9 above. 36 I owe this comment to Francine Lorimer. 37 A recent exception is the conference Teaching Anthropology Today, 9-10 September 2008, organised by the School of Anthropology and Keble College at the University of Oxford where discussions included precisely these themes. 38 The exploration of the emotional aspects of fieldwork has led many anthropologists in different theoretical fields to regard fieldwork as a relational process from a variety of viewpoints, e.g., in particular, Crapanzano 1980, 1992, 2010, Tedlock 2000, Behar 1996, Rosaldo 1989, Okely and Callaway 1992, Hume and Mulcock 2004, on radical empiricism, see also Jackson 1989, 1998 and all contributors to Davies and Spencer 2010, cf. the feminist notion of the relational, e.g. in Wolf 1996, and more recently, Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000 – we ought to incorporate more of the insights brought forward by feminism in the future such as Jagger and Bordo 1989. Jagger (1989) suggests that epistemological models including emotions should “display the continuous interaction between how we understand the world and who we are as people.” These epistemological models would “show how our emotional responses to the worldchange as we conceptualize it differently and how our changing emotional responses then stimulate us to new insights. They would demonstrate the need for theory to be self-reflexive, to focus not only on the outer world but also on ourselves, our values, our perceptions, and our emotions. … [they] would explain how the reconstruction of knowledge is inseparable from the reconstuction of ourselves. 39 Hume and Mulcock (2004: xvii) refer to it as the “social self” of the anthropologist. 40 Cf. Shore (1999:44) who also describes the importance of pre-and postfieldwork relations and argues for the need “to subject these to critical ‘reflective’ scrutiny” and that “situating them in our texts is probably more problematic than

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 the conventional ‘reflexivity genre’ of writing” allows for but it is “also more fruitful.” 41 Coming from a particular cultural context including my therapy training using such a model, I refer to these as separate yet co-constructing each other. 42 This notion comes from a different discussion in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to the one on the “third position” discussed in the previous section here above. 43 See also Rappaport and Overing (2000) and, also, Rappaport in e-mail communication (2009) “…The facticity of consciousness - and its individuality even among those who have been socialised or enculturated alike- has a number of consequences. One of these is that social relations are always given an interpreted or imagined quality. The relationship I think I'm having with you need not be the same as that which you think you're having with me, even if we engage in daily mutual practices. The reasons and motivations and gratifications behind those relationships can be individual, and irreconcilable on the level of meaning. This gives to the relational a dual phenomenology: a formal level and a meaningful level…” 44 See Gilbert and Evans 2000:10-14. 45 See Devereux (1967: xvi-xvii) cited in Jackson (1983: 340). 46 See the discussion of “epistemological openness” in Jackson 1989:186-187. 47 In this sentence, and in the last paragraph, I draw on inspiration and paraphrase parts of Bird-David’s (1999) analysis of a relational epistemology in a completely different cultural context. The analogy is meant to stimulate discussion, not to claim similarity. She notes that “the common human disposition to frame things relationally in these situations is culturally mediated and contextualized in historically specific ways (not least in relation with cultural concepts of the person),” and suggests that “it might be important to explore how relational epistemologies articulate with other epistemologies such as the modernist one of the Western world.” How we as anthropologists “nest” within each other with people, things and the environment could be interesting to explore together with Vincent Crapanzano’s question on how we participate in each other’s emotions. Bird-David’s article is followed by an insightful discussion of relatedness some of which is relevant beyond the field of animism studies (cf. Bird-David 1999: 77-78, 86-87). It may also be fruitful to see what we can learn from and through various relational epistemologies, cf. Jimenez and Willerslev 2007. 48 Cf. Bird-David 1999, and also Jimenez 2003 and Jimenez and Willerslev 2007, Jackson 1989, 1998, 2010.

CHAPTER ONE EMOTIONAL APPRENTICESHIPS: REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF ACADEMIC PRACTICE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF “THE FIELD” CELAYNE HEATON SHRESTHA

In this chapter, I reflect on one aspect of the role of emotion in the construction of anthropological knowledge: I focus on the changes that emotions undergo after fieldwork, in the context of scholarly practice. The aim is to question the assumption that the “post-fieldwork” phase is characterised by a suppression of emotion; to describe some of the features of post-field emotion work; and draw out some of the implications for anthropological knowledge and the training of anthropologists. The chapter is largely auto-ethnographic. Defined as a genre of writing and research that connects the cultural to the personal (Reed-Danahay 1997), auto-ethnography draws on the author’s own experience to extend understandings of a particular culture or discipline. The criticisms of this genre have been many: it has been charged with being overly narcissistic and self-indulgent (e.g. Coffey 1999); lacking rigor and validity; and of limited generalizability. Ellis and Bochner (e.g. 2000), two ardent supporters of the genre, convincingly argue against many of the objections to auto-ethnography. With regards to generalizability, they point out that all lives are both particular and generalizable, because they are lived in and through a limited number of cultures and institutions. The insights drawn from autoethnography are as generalizable or as idiosyncratic as the ethnography of a larger community. Regarding validity, they remind critics of the multitude of criteria to evaluate social science. Alongside post/positivist criteria of reliability and validity, are criteria such as dependability, credibility, transferability (as in the constructivist

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interpretive paradigm); or the emancipatory implications of the research (e.g. in Marxist or feminist approaches). For Ellis and Bochner, autoethnography is to be judged on the basis of verisimilitude (is the narrative believable, life-like, and possible) and the extent to which it helps readers communicate with others different from themselves, or offers ways to improve the lives of participants. “The goal”, they write, is to encourage compassion and promote dialogue…. our accounts serve to express the complexity and difficulties of coping and feeling, showing how we change over time as we struggle to make sense of our experience. … the narrative rises or falls on its capacity to provoke readers to broaden their horizons, reflect critically on their own experience, enter emphatically into worlds of experience different from their own and actively engage in dialogue regarding the social and moral implications of the different perspectives and standpoints encountered (2000: 748).

As is the practice in auto-ethnography (e.g. Reed-Danahay 1997; see also Okely and Callaway 1992), I use my own experience in an attempt to illuminate aspects of a particular culture, the “emotional regime” of academic anthropology. I draw on my own changing emotions towards the subject of research, during the course of my doctoral research. Where possible, I bring in material from sources other than my experience. I attempt an ethnographic account of how emotions change during the life of a project (in and after the field), bearing witness to the continual emotional repositioning that accompanies projects. The trigger for this reflection on emotion work in anthropological training is a vignette taken from my thesis. I reflect on the emotions it portrays; the emotional tone it bears; the emotional response it aroused in me, upon re-reading it, at a much later date, towards the end of my PhD training.1 The vignette was written up soon after my return from “the field” among fieldworkers in a national development NGO in Nepal. The timeline for the emotion work that I describe here, therefore, spans the fieldwork stage to the completion of the PhD thesis. This process brings to light a series of tensions between my memories of emotional engagement in the field and the emotional tone of the vignette. I then turn to an excerpt from my field notes where I describe the event re-portrayed later in the vignette. What I find, comparing the vignette in my thesis with my original field notes, are subtle changes in wording and in focus. The differences between the two pieces (the vignette and the fieldwork notes) suggest my emotional repositioning towards the field and subjects of research that had taken place in the period between my arrival from the field and the writing of my thesis. In order to find out how this had occurred, I turn towards the

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broader context in which the vignette in the thesis was produced. At this point, I consider key emotions experienced in the course of my PhD training. Bringing in this broader context makes it clear that the changes between field notes and thesis indicate a repositioning at the level of feeling and are not only a matter of rhetoric. Overall, I argue that: firstly, the final written product of fieldwork consists of a complex layering of emotional experiences and transformations; secondly, the post-fieldwork phase is characterised not by a suppression of emotion but a change of emotional emphasis; and thirdly, that academic emotion work contributes to the construction of distance that, despite repeated challenges, continues to represent a badge of ethnographic authenticity. In order to make these arguments, I begin with an account of how anthropologists have written about the fate of emotion after fieldwork and about the place of emotions in their writing and scholarly practice. I then define the way in which “emotion” is used in this chapter, and relate it to other understandings and conceptions of emotion in anthropology. I follow with the two textual passages: the first one is the vignette from my doctoral thesis and the second one is the excerpt from my field notes. I describe the context of their production and emotional refashioning (institutional and ideological). In the final section, I draw out the implications of these kinds of emotion work for anthropological knowledge and training.

Anthropological accounts of emotion, post-fieldwork The literature dealing with the place of emotions in anthropological practice in the period following fieldwork is scant. However, two contributions stand out, namely Heald and Deluz (1994) and Kleinman and Copp (1993). In Heald and Deluz (1994), the subject of emotions after fieldwork is explored in relation to what anthropology and psychoanalysis can contribute to each other. This includes a discussion of the interface, the relationship and the possibilities for collaboration between the two disciplines. The authors note that anthropological practice is characterised by a divorce of the personal and the professional, and of fieldwork experience and the written anthropological text. Kleinman and Copp’s volume Emotions and fieldwork (1993) focuses on the emotion work of fieldworkers, and particularly on their strategies to control the expression of emotions. The divorce between the personal and the professional is also noted, although it is less clear cut than in Heald and Deluz (1994). They (Kleinman and Copp 1993) write about the development of “right feeling”

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towards the subjects of research – an appropriate closeness during fieldwork and appropriate “lack of emotion” during analysis – as an important part of the ethnographic endeavour. Their more nuanced analysis reveals that even in fieldwork some detachment from emotion is expected and frequently sought by fieldworkers. The latter try to escape from feelings (e.g. feelings of anxiety over the research process or their negative feelings towards participants) in various ways, notably by avoiding analysis and through compulsive data collection. This complex emotional landscape of fieldwork is lost after fieldwork when the ideal of detachment takes over. Fieldworkers omit emotions from published accounts; and consistently take a cynical stance towards the subjects of their study, in a bid to secure credibility from readers. In such cases, cynicism is equated with a lack of emotion by researchers (Kleinman and Copp 1993). The suppression of emotionality from written accounts of fieldwork, which has been noted by many others, is qualified by Pratt (1986). She argues that personal accounts of field experience have been recognised as a sub-genre of ethnographic writing, which generally accompanies a formal ethnography. The latter counts as professional capital and authoritative representation. Personal narrative, on the other hand, is deemed self-indulgent and trivial. Through such practices, even if they appear in writing, emotions are still marginalised. The changes in emotionality after fieldwork are attributed to several factors. One of them is anthropology’s hold onto the project of the enlightenment and the commitment to the canons of scientific rationality. Another factor includes the ideology of professionalism that dominates anthropological practice and fieldwork culture. As a result the role of the researcher is effaced, and the experiences of the anthropologist are either dismissed as being of little interest or thought to contaminate research by impeding objectivity and therefore has to be removed. The disciplining of emotion occurs at both the individual and collective levels. Thus, Kleinman and Copp (1993) find the suppression of emotion to be a function of the individual’s need to appear competent and confident of his or her findings. The valence of other emotions felt by the researcher is seen to be dependent upon the value placed by self and colleagues on the subject of research. Heald and Deluz (1994) place more emphasis on the role of the academic community: they write, “returning from the field, many anthropologists of this generation found that they had no one to talk to about their experiences; they were encouraged to forget, to regain the distance that had been compromised in the field” (p.10). Personal experience was then laid aside, only to appear in anecdotes to amuse

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colleagues and students (p. 10-11). And, “in the same way, the anthropologist was expected to come back to join the community of scholars, now as an initiate, but bearing little trace of the experience in his or her person” (p. 10). These accounts, while they already represent a valuable contribution to our understanding of the anthropological project, are wanting in several respects. In Kleinman and Copp (1993), while “feeling rules” and the emotion strategies of fieldworkers are spelt out in detail, there is little sense of the institutional practices through which these rules are taught, enforced, or emotions policed. Heald and Deluz (1994) are equally imprecise: nowhere is the source of the individual’s need or the origin and nature of the encouragement they note, described. There are two further issues that render existing work somewhat unsatisfactory. Firstly, when the effects on anthropological practice of emotion work or emotions are considered, they are only examined in relation to the act of suppression of emotion, and do not address the generation of emotion. For instance, the effects of cynicism (which, as Kleinman and Copp (1993) note is an emotion, although it is frequently associated with detachment, hence lack of emotion) are left unexplored. Secondly, even the account of the effects of suppression appears to be incomplete, as it only covers two moments of the anthropological endeavour, namely, data collection and writing. This account surprises, too, in making “suppression” appear unproblematic and inconsequential. Reddy (see below) or others such as Freund (1997), lead us to expect that suppressing emotions or having one’s emotions ignored, would have significant implications on the anthropologists’ feeling states and sense of Self. These effects, however, are not yet given sufficient consideration in the existing literature (for an exception see Davies and Spencer 2010). In this chapter, I seek to describe some of the mechanisms involved in the suppression of particular kinds of emotion and the generation of other kinds. I will only touch upon the implications for the anthropologist’s sense of self. Before I do so, however, I will define more precisely how “emotion” is understood in the present text.

Defining “emotion” The last two decades, as Reddy describes it (2002: ix), have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of studies relating to emotions. Despite this growth in interest across numerous disciplines, defining “emotion” is still a difficult task. Recent reviews of the field of emotions in anthropology (e.g. Beatty 2005) point to enduring controversies over the status of

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emotions. Among these is whether emotions and emotion talk refer to a psychological reality or should be best thought of as culturally constructed, discursive practices that have little to do with “inner states” or “feelings.” On one hand, anthropologists such as Michelle Z. Rosaldo (1984) and Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) have argued that the discourse of “interiority” is historically specific to the West, and in support of their claim, have pointed out that numerous societies lack any “psychologising discourse.” Indeed, for Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990) it would be “non-sensical” in many non-Western cultural settings to engage in the kind of “emotion talk” that characterises talk-shows in contemporary America. Nonsensical, Lutz and Abu Lughod comment, “because it implies that there is a satisfying explanation to be had by resorting to the introspection of emotions” (p. 24). Emotions are seen as primarily public phenomena, or ideological practices shaped by and supporting relations of dominance (between men and women, western nations and other parts of the world) (Lutz 1988) or mobilised to ensure the reproduction of a group’s power (Rosaldo 1984). On the other hand, psycho-cultural anthropologists (e.g. Chodorow 1999, Obeyesekere 1990 or Kracke 1987) have argued that human beings everywhere have some sort of internal life, that selves, emotions and powerful experiences are there to be described. They have approached this task with varying degrees of sensitivity to cultural variation. In contrast with the former group, these writers acknowledge that culture and society may shape, contain, and channel emotion, but reject the notion that emotions are “constructed out of “nothing”; social and cultural emotion work acts to bring about change in emotion states, rather than construct feeling states (Brenneis 1990; Wikan 1990, 1992). William Reddy (1997a, 1997b, 2002) sides with the latter group of anthropologists, building on their approaches and developing a range of tools allowing for a more systematic study of emotions. He draws on work in cognitive psychology as well as ethnographies of emotion, defining emotions as “largely, but not entirely” learned. This approach leaves room for cultural variation and allows for a core concept of emotions, that is universally applicable and therefore provides a basis for making judgements about emotional suffering and oppression. For Reddy (2002: 55), three main features of emotions can be seen as universal. The first universal feature is that emotions are construed as an important domain of effort. The second universal feature is that all communities give prescriptions and counsel as to the best strategies for pursuing emotional learning, and the proper end point of emotional equilibrium. He writes (p. 121):

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Chapter One A normative style of emotional management is a fundamental element of every political regime, of every cultural hegemony. Leaders must display mastery of this style; those who fail to conform may be marginalized or severely sanctioned. In other cases, there may be a hierarchy of contrasting styles, failure to conform to one or another renders one’s identity unclear, subject to exclusion.

The third universal feature of emotions is that emotions and emotional expression interact in a dynamic way, and with varied outcomes. Emotional expressions can confirm or disconfirm, intensify or attenuate the feeling state that is claimed; they can be either self-exploratory or selfaltering. Thus, emotional expressions, or “emotives” (here Reddy follows Austin’s (1962) speech act theory), have a direct impact on the feelings in question. Reddy explains: “if asked the question ‘do you feel angry?’ a person may genuinely feel more angry in answering yes, less angry in answering no” (1997a: 331). “Emotives” can be used to change, build, hide or intensify emotions; they may be used by political regimes to buttress their power, and alter the course of history. In addition to the concept of “emotives,” Reddy develops the following conceptual tools for the study of emotions acknowledging their historical and political significance: emotional liberty, emotional suffering, emotional effort, induced goal conflict, emotional regime, and emotional refuge. I draw on two such concepts here, namely, emotional regime and emotional refuge. Reddy defines “emotional regime” as “the complex of practices that establish a set of emotional norms and that sanction those who break them” (2002: 129). “Emotional refuge” is “a relationship, ritual or organisation (whether formal or informal) that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime” (p.129). Like Reddy, I find unconvincing the premise that the absence of psychologising discourses among people studied indicates a lack of an internal life. The “hypocognition” (Levy 1984) of emotions is equally plausible an explanation for such apparent lack. The difficulty in articulating these, as Chodorow (1999) for instance, reminds us, is another possible explanation and the high value placed in some cultures on silence as opposed to verbosity, noted by Bloch (1997), is yet another. The assumption that emotions are wholly culturally constructed too easily leads to a questionable denial of individual agency and exaggeration of collective orientations in other cultures. Such an assumption is at odds with my own experience of Self and others. As Cohen (1994) argues, refusing to extend to others the complexity observed in oneself is

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problematic in numerous respects, and opens oneself to charges of ethnocentrism (which psychocultural approaches to the study of emotions has sought to challenge). In relation to emotional expressions, and their effects on feeling states, I find helpful Reddy’s attention to the diversity of possible effects (attenuation, intensification, confirming, disconfirming effects), and the unpredictable nature of the outcomes of emotion talk. The final point from Reddy’s work I wish to stress here concerns the manner in which emotional styles are effected and communicated: Such styles are best communicated by means of sensory-rich participatory performances: ritual, predication, theatre. But they may also be conveyed, or suggested, by literature, art, music, iconography, architecture, dress. All such practices and products can be viewed as emotive in character. (1997a: 331).

Like Reddy, Leavitt (1996: 522) urges us to look beyond words for traces of “emotion” arguing that emotion not just found in language that is explicitly about emotions, but is also to be found in intonation, and in grammar. It follows that studying discourse about emotions is insufficient, and that this task requires the researcher to impute, to reconstruct, and to go beyond definitions by participants. In the same way, Unni Wikan (1992: 473) writes about how she came to grasp Balinese emotion and the meaning of their notion of “managing the heart”: her understanding was formed through a variety of clues, long before she “stumbled” across the Balinese concept of “managing the heart.” She mentions “quivers in a voice;” “reading somatic complaints about overwhelming pain and suffering” and “too many things for me to remember now, for such clues do not stand out in the field notes I took.” When I searched through my field notes, ethnography and memory for evidence of “emotions”, I looked out for emotion words or Nepali words which, translated into English, refer to “an emotion.” I also searched for expressions that referred to an inner “feeling” or state; and for the tone of voice or the mood of a written episode that, upon reading or hearing, evoked such feelings. When I write of “emotion work,” I intend to refer to work on actual feeling and not (or not only) work at the level of discourse. As it will become clear later on, the emotional apprenticeship, which is the subject of this chapter, is not solely, as Beatty would argue, a “training in language skills and social graces” (2005: 30) but includes also work on the actual feelings, that is, on their experience. Furthermore, following Reddy, I show how anthropology as a discipline gives counsel concerning strategies for emotional learning and what constitutes “appropriate feeling.” The “regime” of which I write here

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is that of anthropology as practised in the context of higher education. The complex of practices that establish the norms and sanctions would include educational practices such as supervision, seminars and others. I find “regime” a useful reminder of Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) insight that education (or pedagogic work) is dependent upon power (or pedagogic authority). They argue that education involves a form of “symbolic violence” through which meanings are imposed as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force. More recent statements on the nature of teaching and learning in higher education in the UK are consistent with these views. For instance, Diane Laurillard in the widely acclaimed Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology conceptualises teaching as a “rhetorical activity,” the objective of which is to persuade students to change the way they experience the world (Laurillard 2002: 23). I return to the significance of these arguments in the final section of the paper. Further to the nature of the anthropological emotional regime, I would like to stress that it also evolves through various types of “informal” interactions, such as corridor or coffee room conversations or in diaries and other forms of “informal” writing.

Emotional repositioning: textual traces I now turn to the ethnographic material in a vignette from my thesis and in the excerpt from my field notes from which this vignette was created. This text does not feature much discussion of “emotions.” I chose the example in keeping with the idea that “emotion” is not only to be found in discourse about emotion states or in explicitly emotional discourse. Rather, these episodes portray events occurring on a fairly unremarkable summer morning during fieldwork. As I described it earlier, the first episode appears as a vignette to a chapter in the final version of my ethnography. The second excerpt describes the same scene, but as it appears in my field notes. The vignette contains details that do not appear in the field notes; these were added from memory to the vignette, which was written up very soon after my return from the field. The differences between the two passages are indicated by means of the symbols Ƈ (this points to a change in wording), • and * (both refer to a silence or omission, in different places in the texts). These point to silences, omissions and changes in wording that occurred as the field notes were written up into the vignette. The reader is asked to compare the

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passages, in the two respective texts, where these symbols appear. The significance of these changes is discussed at the end of the second passage below. In these two texts, I describe NGO fieldworkers, in their role as karmacarya (salaried office workers) on a busy day in a field office. This particular office was one of several established by a national NGO, with its headquarters in the capital, Kathmandu, to oversee its community development programmes on the ground. This vignette was meant to capture the fundamental contradiction at the heart of NGO praxis in Nepal: between the ideals of “service” (epitomised by the NGO field officers and hardships of their fieldwork) and the material wealth and advantages of a professionalizing “voluntary sector” (personified by the karmacarya, his regular wage and comfortable working environment). The suggestion here was that professionalism trumps “service,” as the NGO field officers feel at liberty to ignore a project beneficiary visiting their office2. Their thulo manche (literally, ‘big person’, or “Very Important Person”) attitude contrasts starkly with the beneficiary’s awkwardness, his acute awareness of the wealth and high status of the premises he is visiting. It was the 2nd of May 1997. I had gone down to the NGO field office’s ground floor rooms, after discussing the results of the elections in Britain with staff working on the first floor. There, I was greeted by a familiar scene. Vignette from my doctoral thesis: “Visitors to the field office” It is around 11am. Downstairs, I notice that some man has arrived in the front room. He greets me with a namaste as I enter the room. Kiren and Ram, two field officers, are sitting at the room’s single desk; Ram is reading the annual progress report, a questionnaire printed and prepared by [donor] and which has been filled in in pencil by staff in the various field offices (FOs) and sub-FOs; Kiren is writing by hand the numbers read out by Ram into tables printed out by the office computer. Basanta, another field officer, has come back into the room and I ask who the man is and what he wants. Basanta tells me he’s the chairman of some Saving and Credit Organisation (SCO) [I refer to him as “the chairman” below] and he had come to get stationery. I am standing by the desk; I ask the man if he is an SCO chairman, he replies that “yes” he’s the chairman of Bahugaun’s Saving and Loan Group. Kiren and Ram read and write numbers Ƈ [here I add this symbol to refer to a change in wording between the two texts]. Mahanta, a fieldworker, comes into the front room carrying a piece of paper - the “detailed report” he was writing last night for the FO boss• [by this symbol here I refer to an omission]. Ram lifts his head and informs Mahanta “I’ll be busy today until 1.30pm; then I’ll be free”. Mahanta smiles, looking at me, and jokes, “then Ram will go

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Chapter One off wagging his tail like a dog when it’s happy!” Mahanta sits next to the SCO chairman on the bench facing Kiren and Ram’s desk. The chairman extracts a pair of large glasses from a pocket in his tired brown jacket, puts them on (they look too big for his small face); he takes his wristwatch off; he puts it back on; he smiles at staff as they laugh at Mahanta’s joke. “I’ll get a stool to sit down”, I announce, but Mahanta interjects, “you can sit down on the bench!” - and he shuffles closer to the SCO chairman, making room for me to sit next to him. “You should put a stone in your nose” he suggests. “A small one then, not a big one” I reply and he, chuckling, “No, not big or your nose will become like [he flattens his nose with his finger]!” I say that some people put stones in both nostrils, and I’d heard from my landlady that one amrikan (Western, North American) volunteer who used to work here had put a ring through her nose [I ring my fingers around my septum] and they do it with a needle here! Mahanta says, “It’s a bhulaki” and, turning to the SCO chairman, “What do they call that here?” “A bhulaki” the chairman corroborates* [I use this symbol here to refer to an omission]. Arjun, the FO chief, comes in. The chairman stands up and moves towards the desk where Arjun is talking with Kiren: “It’s a quarter to one, is the report finished?” The chairman stands with his hands behind his back and addresses Arjun in the local language. Arjun leaves the room; the chairman follows him. A few seconds later, I pop my head through Arjun’s room, but cannot see the chairman anywhere, so I return to the bench in the front room. Kiren comes out of Arjun’s room, straight through the front room and out of the back of the office. It’s 12.50pm. A few minutes later, Kiren is back and I ask, “What did the SCO chairman want?” “I don’t know,” Kiren replies. “Ask Basanta”. I’m still in the front room. Then a man, thin, dark, with longish hair, comes through the gate and stands outside the front room, clutching a chicken. Kiren and Ram are back at their desks, negotiating the finer points of format fillingƇ [I use this symbol here to refer to a change in wording]; they do not notice the man…

Today, upon reading this and similar passages, I am struck by their cynicism. To be sure, cynicism, suspicions of inauthenticity, deceitfulness, even, were a salient element of the public discourse about NGOs in Nepal. At the time of research, NGOs were widely suspected–and accused–of corruption and being profit-motivated. Questions about whom the NGOs were truly benefiting were fuelled by reports of the considerable sums that had been made available to the non-governmental sector since the 1990s3 and also of high NGO salaries4. If their reputation for being “dollarfarmers” (dollar-kheti) was not always deserved, for the sake of keeping good working relations with project beneficiaries and local dignitaries, NGO fieldworkers often played down indications of wealth and privilege. As a mood or emotion, cynicism also pervaded the experience of everyday life of staff members of this Nepali NGO.

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However, this was not the single emotion there: the emotional experience of the protagonists in the story (described above) actually ranged from humour, anxiety, and excitement to boredom, but were not featured or stressed in the vignette above. Loneliness, longing, pain and hardship (dukha) and less avowable sentiments such as irritation or even antipathy and desire were also present in the actual experience, but they are not obvious in any of the accounts that I produced, subsequently, from this research. A cursory glance over my field notes reveals all manner of emotion words and expressions, many of which were anglicisms – research informants’ reporting various kinds of “philling” (feeling); “mud” (mood); or, as was frequently the case in project field sites, of being “bord” (bored). The fieldnotes report instances of my own learning to recognise particular expressions of emotion (e.g. of being the object of a glare indicating anger and disbelief, or what is called in Nepali language, “ankha judhaunu” or surprise on the part of a member of NGO staff, from the similarity in “tuning” of European and Nepali songs). The field notes contain throughout passages or sentences indexing diverse feelings–of maya (“caring”) by NGO field staff towards me (going to some lengths to obtain “strengthening foods” after a bout of illness, for instance); of laj or embarrassment / shyness (my own at being “teased” by some staff; or recognition and approval, by staff, of my embarrassment for example, at wearing sunglasses); of exasperation, of joy, of vulnerability, of anger (at feeling “bullied” by male research participants), my pride, even, when a delighted member of staff drew others’ attention to my absent-minded use of the expression “yeeee” and many others. By contrast, in the postfieldwork phase, cynicism suffused recollections and re-readings of the “raw” field notes and, subsequently, the choice of detail and themes in writing up the final ethnographic text. Comparison of the vignette “visitors to the field office” with the field notes recording this event is instructive. I reproduce the field notes here below, and then comment further on their differences. Fieldnotes5: 2nd May, 1997 fn283a I go downstairs and note that a man has arrived in the front room. P and L are sitting at the desk: L is reading the annual progress report, a questionnaire printed and prepared by [donor organisation] and which was filled in in pencil by the staff in the various offices and sub-offices; and P is writing the numbers read into tables printed out by the computer here. I ask what they’re doing and P says copying the tables because they were written in pencil in the progress report questionnaire given by [donor organisation] and they can’t be given to Mark (of [donor organisation]). …

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Chapter One CR has come back into his room and I ask who the man who has arrived is and what he wants and CR says he’s the chairman of some SCO and he has come to get stationery. For one year [the project] provides stationery free of charge to SCOs. … I remember the man namaste-ing me as he came into the front room and sat on the bench. I go in to the front room and stand by the desk. The man is sitting there quietly. I ask if he is the adhyaksha [chairman] of a SCO samuh [organisation, group] and he says yes, bacat tatha rin samuh [saving and loan group] of MaurigaunƇ. P and L continue working. F comes into the front room. He doesn’t greet or acknowledge the SCO chairman. F is carrying a piece of paper. The detailed report that he was writing last night on the necessity of getting a “lift system” water project up and running in Chandikhola for his boss (KB)•. L says he’ll be busy until 1.30pm, then he’ll be free. F jokes: then L will go off wagging his tail like a dog when it’s happy and F sits next to the chairman on the bench. The SCO chairman puts on glasses (that look too big for his small face), takes his watch off and puts it back on. He smiles and looks at the male staff as they (L F and me) laugh at the joke F made, but the male staff do not look at him. I say I’ll get a seat to sit down and F says I can sit on the bench and he moves close up to the SCO chairman. I sit here. F says I should put a stone in my nose and I say a small one, not a big one. And F laughs no not big or your nose will become like (he flattens his nose with his finger) and I say some people put phoolis [nose stud] in both sides of their nose and I heard of an American volunteer here who’d put a ring in her nose here. They do it with a needle! And F says it’s a bhulaki and to the SCO chairman: what do they call it here? SCO chairman says a bhulaki. The SCO chairman is silent after that*. KB comes in, the chairman stands, with his hands behind his back, near KB who is standing by P’s desk and talking with P. It’s a quarter to 1 pm, says KB. Is the report finished? The chairman then talks with KB in the local language and then KB leaves and the chairman exits the room–I do not see him in KB’s room, a few seconds later as I pop my head through. I go back and sit at the bench in P’s front room. L is here until 12.50pm. P comes out of KB’s room and out through CR’s. L goes and stands out in the front of the office. After a few minutes, he comes back and I ask him, “What did the SCO chairman want?” L says he doesn’t know, and I should ask CR. I ask if SCO members, veg production groups come here often and L says “aunchan” (“they come”). Full stop. I’m in the front room; a man, thin, dark, with longish hair comes to stand outside the front of our office with a chicken. P and L, who are filling the format form?, again do not talk to himƇ. CR comes and has a look and says to the man, “No we are only 3 people, so we don’t want that chicken.”. KB calls me over and says; “What do you think? Should we have chicken and ciura [beaten rice] today for khaja [snack]? It will only be 50 rupies per person.” and I say, “If the others want it, then it’s ok.” We talk about elections, money to [pay for a university course] and how to get

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a list of NGOs from the CDO office. He tells me he’s thinking of going to Besgaun but the weather’s kharab [bad, horrible], so he may not go.

Undoubtedly, knowledge of the debates surrounding NGO activity at the time, and the growing challenges to the normative claims by members of the NGO sector and expectations with regards to their ability to “reach the poor,” increases the likelihood of the vignette appearing cynical. But it seems, too, that the cynical and critical reading of these pieces is accentuated in the vignette by certain textual devices – among these the silences and ellipses (indicated by an “*”), the effect of which is to intensify the marginality or marginalisation of beneficiaries and locals in the account. The omission of the description of “F” or Mahanta’s report in the vignette (this is marked with a “ •”), for example, tends to play down the fact that NGO workers were very busy that day, and thereby make the explanation of their “ignoring” visiting beneficiaries as the product of their business, less plausible6. A similar effect is achieved through the choice of words to describe NGO workers’ activities in the vignette (identified with an “Ƈ”), questioning the value or importance of the work that occupies fieldworkers and prevents them from attending to their visitors. I would argue that the fact that these devices or my subjectivity (e.g. my own cynicism towards the subjects of research) “intruded” into the ethnography is less interesting than how specific kinds of feelings “intruded,” while others did not. Before I begin to explore the institutional and interpersonal practices that fostered these particular “intrusions,” I describe another sentiment that dominated the post-fieldwork phase.

Beyond the field: new emotional experiences of research sites and participants Other sentiments such as a sense of indebtedness and guilt, and a sense of power that did not characterise my fieldwork experience, insinuated themselves into the “post-fieldwork” phase and blossomed as the postfieldwork period unfolded. A balance of power loaded in favour of the researcher was certainly not a feature of my experience of the field. While not exactly feeling powerless during my fieldwork, I nonetheless felt that I needed to tread carefully and that my access to the NGO was conditional and could be withdrawn by management at various levels of the organisation. It was effectively withdrawn in one NGO when I was encouraged to leave the field by NGO managers after a stay of just over three months. I am unsure, to this day, what mischief I may have caused7.

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There was a requirement, post-fieldwork, to develop such feelings of potency and powerfulness and this jarred with my experience of Self in the field. Gradually, however, I came to reinterpret experiences in the field and began to glimpse moments of powerfulness in my relations with research participants from the mass of field notes and memories. Upon rereading it years after it had first been written I was also struck by the vignette’s cynicism. Today, I almost find it distasteful. This emotional response, I suspect, indicates that, at least partially, I had come to identify with and internalise the values of indebtedness and responsibility towards research participants. Even as I was learning to feel uncomfortable with these ways of feeling, I seemed already to have internalised the values of professional anthropology: I aspired to the kind of self that embodied these values. It seems, then, that after fieldwork, some emotions came to dominate my recollections of the field and representations of it. Some emotions that I experienced during fieldwork, were accentuated or intensified (e.g. cynicism). Others were suppressed or attenuated (e.g. anger, vulnerability), and yet others, which were not experienced during that period, were introduced (such as indebtedness and powerfulness). This involved also a profound rethinking of self-identity, and my place in and impact on, the world. How this occurred is the subject of the following section.

Regimenting emotion: learning to talk about the field Among the processes that operated to impose meanings as legitimate and to persuade me to change the way I experienced relationships in the field were: peer pressure; a desire on my part to acquire “legitimate meanings”; and speech and interaction norms in academic setting. Behind my cynicism and sense of power, stood my desire to fit in with the dominant intellectual mood of the time and within the institution in which I was writing. Cynicism, indeed, was a strong feature of the anthropological engagement with development (and, by extension, NGOs). To be sure, not all anthropological writing was critical of development, e.g. Messerschmidt (1981; 1995) but these were not the ones drawing most attention. Hobart’s Anthropological Critique of Development (1993), Escobar’s (1995) Unmaking the Third World to name but a few, suffused the intellectual atmosphere. In this latter respect, it is telling that the critical yet sympathetic stance of Mosse’s recent (2005) book on development was singled out for particular praise by the book’s reviewers. The desire for credibility was certainly a motivation as Kleinman and

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Copp (1993) observed, but credibility here was sought through a demonstration of having acquired “legitimate meanings.” Similarly, as I noted above, feeling “powerful” was at odds with my experience of relations in the field. Yet, I reinterpreted experiences in the field in the light of some of the accepted thinking on the subject of western researcher versus non-western researched. In casual conversations, peers would seek to impress on me that my sense of powerlessness was misguided – a product, it was postulated, of my own psychology. And so too, through readings such as Asad (1973), Said (1978) or Inden (1986), I came to feel that holding such views (about my own powerlessness, notably) made me an agent of cultural imperialism, and deliberately sought to correct my erroneous assessment of relationships in the field. Among the practices that worked to encourage particular emotional styles, was the seminar. A key part of academic apprenticeship and a site for the production of anthropological knowledge, the seminar fostered the development of a specific emotional style in several ways. Firstly, this took place through explicit injunction. This is illustrated by Christine Barry’s (2002) article entitled “Identity/ Identities and Fieldwork: Studying Homeopathy and Tai Chi 'at home' in South London” in Anthropology Matters, a postgraduate research journal. In the account of her slow disengagement and growing scepticism towards the subject of her research “post-fieldwork,” Barry highlights how departmental seminars offered an opportunity for explicit admonition and proffering of textbook warnings against “going native” (such as Bernard 1995). She writes: In December I gave a paper to the anthropology department and talked about my embodied experiences of Tai Chi as a participant observer. The feedback from colleagues included the observation that I seemed to have had some kind of conversion experience, and that I was insufficiently reflexive about my experiences. I experienced the sub-text as ‘Oh no, she is going native. (Barry 2002)

Other instruments of emotional “suppression” or change of emphasis were more implicit: one of these consisted of the privileging of particular modalities of expression. The aversion (or unease) of academic fora towards the expression of “the personal,” and by extension, “feelings,” which are seen to belong to the realm of “the personal” in Western cultural settings (Heald and Deluz 1994), is also noted by Okely (1996). She writes: “women are often less inhibited about exploring and expressing the personal element although they may apologise for this in academic debate” (p. 29 my emphasis). What Okely’s point highlights, is that the “personal” is unacceptable as a mode of debating in face–to-face academic

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exchanges, as well as unacceptable as an expressive mode in writing. That auto-ethnography is still considered controversial (Holt 2003) is a further case in point. The above could have been written about the seminar experience in the institution of which I write. On the whole, personal anecdotes were not encouraged, nor sought: “I’m not interested in reading about ‘Celayne” a classmate of mine remarked on my enthusiasm about auto-ethnography. When I attempted to tell of fieldwork experiences that had angered me, the response of peers was frequently stunned silence, or a deflection of the topic of conversation into general discussions of the culture under study. I usually desisted from the telling for it seemed that to insist marked one as “not up to it,” or “less worthy” of membership of the professional anthropological community. Field note passages describing such feelings, and my defensive reactions to NGO staff, never made it into the thesis or subsequent publications. It was also clear to (some, at least) participants in such fora, that the preferred linguistic modalities and interpersonal styles in seminar settings, (with a tendency towards the expository rather than the exploratory; the propensity to offer extended commentary rather than an invitation to dialogue), did not lend themselves well to the expression of the “personal.” The exception to this were expressions of feelings of debt, power, and responsibility, which were cultivated through the invitation to be “reflexive” about the experience of fieldwork. Another mechanism was what I experienced as the refusal (usually by teachers or mentors) to engage in talk about emotions or emotionally toned conversations. In this way, I learnt that emotion talk was “not relevant” to the academic task at hand. For instance, I recall sitting with a mentor, over a coffee, in the graduate lounge. As we talked over the thesis, my mentor enquired: “How will you introduce your own experience of all this?” I replied it would have to do with being a woman “because it got in the way in research.” I admitted that I just wasn’t aware gender issues would be problematic. The answer was that well, that was rather naïve of me, and then the recommendation was made that I read Kandiyoti’s work on gendering of the national community. Very powerful feelings, that arose from my experience as a gendered being, could never be expressed. I felt as if I could never speak of what I perceived to be blatant sexism on the part of senior NGO personnel–the exaggerated solicitude, their barely disguised concern over my (lack of) morality (while ostensibly discussing ways to preserve my reputation); their blaming women fieldworkers for developing “bad reputations” while in the field (due to their lack of modesty, “their frankness”); and my horror

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at being asked by a coordinator’s wife to translate from English to Nepali, a letter sent to him by his mistress. I should also point out that the suppression of emotion and encouragement of detachment was not effected through prohibition alone. Another mechanism was through “humour,” which, while not explicitly encouraged, was always welcome, a relief during late Friday seminar sessions. Humoristic quips more often than not involved the narrator laughing at herself-for instance, recalling gaffs committed early in the field, followed by an account of how she learnt from them. It further encouraged detachment from the fieldwork experience, the simultaneous creation and repudiation of a “fieldwork Self” distinct from Heald and Deluz’s “initiate” self (see above) reintegrated in the community of scholars. It seems, then, that the emotion work involved in the post-fieldwork setting had many facets. It involved the reinterpretation of experience by the researcher in the light of prevailing thinking on topics central to the research within the institution; the suppression of particular emotions, and the expression of other kinds of emotions at the level of speech and writing,. The mechanisms that encouraged the development of what might be termed a new emotional style, too, were several. Emotional repositioning was effected through both institutional and interpersonal practices within a community of learning and teaching, as well as through writing and writing conventions.

Implication for anthropological knowing and training Constructing “the field” A major consequence of the emotion work carried out during and after fieldwork was the reinforcement of a sense of Otherness – research participants and I no longer shared feelings or even the “same” life world. Another important consequence was a larger sense of inequality. I was no longer part of a landscape of power that was ever-fluctuating, instead, I began to occupy a definite position of power. Emotions that intimated a degree of “sharing” were displaced by ones indexing hierarchy and inequality. The feeling of indebtedness (however commendable) contributed to this, as it amounted to a denial of the reciprocity of day to day relations in the field. I believe that there are implications for how we understand “the field” to be constructed in anthropology. Fieldwork has, in recent years, been the subject of intense scrutiny. The publication of the volume Constructing the Field by Vered Amit

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(2000), and the theme of the 2004 Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) Conference Locating the Field: Metaphors of Space, Place and Context in Anthropology are but two among many examples that testify to the growing interest in this subject. Debates surrounding fieldwork have been prompted also by the changing dimensions and scale of fieldwork, and the recognition that social processes and theoretical perspectives such as globalization and cultural commodification are challenging a practice that has long been the badge of social anthropology’s distinctiveness as a discipline. Ideas about what constitutes valid fieldwork and valid anthropological field sites are also crucial for the individual researcher: indeed, these are key to the recognition of a piece of research as “anthropological” (inter alia, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). “Conventionally,” notes Amit (2000:2), “the field” and “fieldwork” have been imagined as involving “travel away, preferably to a distant locale where the ethnographer will immerse him/herself in personal face-to-face relationships with a variety of natives over an extended period of time.” Recently, we have begun to reconsider what constitutes valid “fieldwork” and “anthropological field sites.” The questions being asked are: does fieldwork require total immersion? Does it require face-to-face, that is, physical co-presence of researcher and informant or would long-distance or experience communicated in dialogue (as opposed to performed) count as valid methods? And, how central is distance to anthropological understanding? However, if, as Simon Coleman (2004: 26) argues “contemporary anthropology now accepts that the notion of the isolated, autonomous fieldwork site has been something of a convenient functionalist fiction,” it seems that the need for compartmentalization of fieldwork still prevails. Amit (2003:3) comments: Anthropologists whose principal methodology has rested on a maverick if sometimes uneasy melding of these domains [work and home, the personal and the professional] have nonetheless attempted to uphold their overall separation by compartmentalizing fieldwork spatially, temporally and textually.

This need for compartmentalization continues to expresses itself as a preference for the “distantly exotic” sites which are deemed more “valid” sites for fieldwork. Caputo (2000) found that the notion of journey and geography continued to inform training (and ultimately, hiring practices), appearing, inter alia, in the assumption of regional specialization on the part of doctoral students in record keeping and examination practices.

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To some extent, the bias towards distant field locations is supported by a recent report by Jonathan Spencer, Anne Jepson and David Mills (2005) on the destinations of recent anthropology PhD graduates (Where do all the Anthropologists go? Research training and “Careers” in Social Anthropology). They comment (2005:8): It has been recently suggested, for example, that since the 1980s, the shape of an anthropological career has ceased to be so closely tied to the crucial rite of passage of doctoral fieldwork in a more or less remote site (Marcus 2005). Our data suggest this may be less true for careers in the UK, where for example, the modal doctoral student as would-be academic anthropologists in our cohort is an EU national, trained in London and specializing in South Asia.

The authors point out that this bias is not clearly reflected in the hiring of anthropologists in UK HEIs8. However, accounts and reports by anthropologists indicate that the need to explore and question the (often subtle) institutional practices which sustain the association between “authentic fieldwork” with distant (often geographically bound) places is still urgent. A lot has already been written on strategies of distanciation: writers have variously pointed to textual (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986); social (e.g. Amit 2000) and conceptual (e.g. Rapport 2000) strategies. One of the implications of the emotion work described in this chapter is a process of “othering” the field at the level of experience. This type of distancing is the product of a specific set of institutional practices: both academic and pedagogic practices. It follows that, to the strategies of distanciation already noted, we should add the role of emotions and emotion work, and the role played by academic practices in the construction of anthropological fields and subjects.

Implications for training anthropologists Another important point emerging from the reflections presented above, is that the training of anthropologists also involves an emotional apprenticeship. Academic practice was characterised not by a suppression of emotionality, as has often been argued, but by a change of emotional emphasis. One implication is that any initiative to include emotion work in the training of anthropologists will have to contend with an existing emotional regime, which may or may not support this aspect of anthropological training. Here, implicit pedagogy (that which is already, albeit ‘invisibly’, from the learner’s point of view, being taught) may clash

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with explicit pedagogy (any new, explicit, training in “emotion work”). Burman (2001) suggests that the exclusion of emotion from scholarship and research is a general feature of academic practice, and that distance “and even hostility” (p. 314) are the dominant emotions structuring research and writing. She argues that hiding subjectivity (or disguising it as objectivity) is “central to the maintenance of traditional power relationships of, and surrounding, academic practices” (p. 315)9. If, as Burman suggests, excluding emotion is central to relations of power within academia, (and this would include pedagogic relations of power), as well as the definition of the subject of anthropological study, the impact of such training would be farreaching but may also encounter considerable resistance. I noted also that the suppression or attenuation of emotions contributed to these repositionings and this was tied to the excluding of “the personal” from scholarly activity, and the association of emotions with “the personal” in the setting in question. Perhaps we could learn from pedagogical practice in other discipline areas: Burman (2001), for example, describes ways to promote the exploration of experience within educational contexts that avoid turning the course into “group therapy” (which she argues would be inappropriate in an educational setting). Strategies described include experimentation with modes of writing and discussion of accounts of experience, inclusion of modules in creative writing (for example, teaching practices of writing as a craft that safeguards the academic task but also maintains emotional reflexivity of the political-academic analysis); and also setting up an experiential group for students to explore issues emerging for them individually and interpersonally through their engagement with the degree.

Conclusion To summarise, in this chapter, I have attempted to add to our understanding of how “the field” is constructed in anthropology and also in existing work on emotion in anthropological practice. The material presented here raises issues of relevance to our understanding of how emotions influence our participant observation, and our wider interpretive and explanatory enterprise. I considered, briefly, how emotion states influenced the writing of field experiences and representations of research participants. I was more concerned, however, with the related question of how emotional shifts and repositionings occur and are fostered, and their effects on these enterprises.

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It appeared that the post-field emotion work involved not merely a suppression of feeling–although certain feelings were certainly suppressed–but a change of emphasis, amounting to the development of a new, distinctive emotional style. There occurred an increasing distancing and sense of empowerment, as feelings of cynicism and indebtedness were encouraged. Other emotions, by contrast, particularly pain or the sense of having been “hard done by” by research participants, were dismissed as “whingeing” and effectively delegitimised. The regime which established and sustained these emotion norms involved series of interpersonal and institutional practices such as seminars, supervision, writing groups and workshops. I have suggested that emotion work led to the distancing and othering of research sites and participants. This seemed to contradict the ongoing efforts to challenge the association of valid anthropological fieldwork with distant places, and the opening of anthropology to a multitude of “new fields.” In brief, emotion work was shown to be implicated in the definition of what is or is not an authentic, valid site for anthropological research. It follows that questioning emotion work within anthropology could lead to more thorough challenging of the continued privileging of “distant” field sites. An issue of concern may be how to avoid these emotional shifts and repositionings or minimise the emotional distancing they involve. The emotional style and form of subjectivity of which I write were, no doubt, in large part the product of doctoral level pedagogy. Johnson et al (2000) argue that the goal of postgraduate pedagogy is the production of independence and autonomy. In turn, independent, autonomous scholarship is achieved by “rejecting the emotions, embodiment and human dependency” (p.140). Although there have been attempts to develop alternative pedagogical practices, this is not the norm: “even the more pastorally oriented practices of supervision continue to work unproblematically within the notion of reason and autonomy from the Enlightenment tradition.” (p. 141). Further, contributors to a recent volume (Dresch et al. 2000) suggested that we need to make finer distinctions within the category “fieldworker,” distinguishing the novice from the seasoned fieldworker. Long-term fieldwork, they remarked, brings with it dilemmas and challenges peculiar to it and not shared by the archetypical “novice fieldworker.” Also, I have no doubt that not everyone will react the way that I did to emotional shaping. It is likely that my own psychological make up and history might have rendered the contrast between fieldwork and postfieldwork emotional regimes more acute. The fact that I am reporting of

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changes occurring during a period of apprenticeship, is also highly significant, and may also have exacerbated these feelings and transformations. PhD years, as research in different discipline areas has highlighted, is marked by high levels of emotionality, quite independent of subject matter (Gunn 2002). The occurrence of emotions such as loneliness and isolation, feelings of inadequacy or being an “impostor” have been widely noted and studied by research in the field of education (e.g. Leonard 1997). I too have, in all likelihood, presented only “half the story.” However, even if the specific feelings that I describe do not resonate with the reader’s experience, I hope she will agree that the cultivation and suppression of emotion has not received adequate attention. Though the latter has been more widely documented, neither the mechanisms of this suppression nor the implications have been sufficiently explored (but see Davies and Spencer 2010 as well as the contributors to this volume). I hope, at least, to have demonstrated that this is an area that is deserving of further scrutiny, and that we need to explore more fully the “suppression of emotion” in anthropological practice; and, also, to broaden our exploration of the researcher’s changing emotional relation to the field and subjects of research, to include the cultivation of emotion, post-field. A full understanding of the ways in which the field is constructed and an interrogation of the processes of othering they entail, will need to take into account the many and diverse contexts of anthropological practice today– be they within academic departments or the commercial sector (where the autonomous, independent scholar’s Self may be less important), practiced in a professional capacity or during apprenticeship. In the context of academic training, an exploration of the practices that foster the “indebtedness” that I mention above, and its relation to the development of a “moral professional self;” or practices of emotional suppression across different institutions, could be starting points.

Acknowledgements: I thank all those that have made this chapter possible, including the members of the NGOs in the study, my colleagues and mentors; Dimitrina Spencer for her unflinching support, and Jenny Hammond for going through and polishing the final text.

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References Amit, V., ed. 2000. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge. Asad, T., ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barry, Ch. 2000. “Identity/Identities and Fieldwork: Studying Homeopathy and Tai Chi 'at home' in South London.” Anthropology Matters accessible online at http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2002/index.html Beatty, A. 2005. “Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 17-37. Bernard, H.R. 1995. Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology Newbury Park. London: Sage Publications. Bloch, M. 1997. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy Boulder. Colorado: Westview Press. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Brenneis, D. 1990. “Dramatic Gestures: the Fiji Indian Panchayat as Therapeutic Event”. In K. A. Watson Gegeo and G. M. White, eds., Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 214-238. Burman, E. 2001. “Emotions in the Classroom and the Institutional Politics of Knowledge.” Psychoanalytic Studies 3: 313-324. Caputo, V. 2000. “At ‘Home’ and ‘Away:’ Reconfiguring the Field for Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology”. In V. Amit, ed., Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge, 19-31. Chodorow, Nancy. 1999. The Power of Feelings; Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Clifford, J. and G. E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coffey, A. 1999. The Ethnographic Self. London: Sage, 1999. Cohen, A. P. 1994. Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity. London: Routledge. Dahal, D.R. 2001 Civil Society in Nepal: Opening the ground for Questions. Kathmandu: Center for Development and Governance.

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Dresch, P., W. James, and D. Parkin, eds. 2000. Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research. Oxford: Berghan. Ellis, C. and A.P. Bochner. 2000. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” In N. K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 733-768. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freund, P. 1997. “Social Performance and Their Discontents: Reflections on the Biosocial Psychology of Role-playing.” In G. Bendelow and S. J. Wiliams, eds., Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues, London: Routledge, 268-294. Gellner, D. and E. Hirsch, eds. 2001. Inside Organisations: Anthropologists at Work, Oxford: Berg. Gunn, V. 2002. “It's Like the Spider Realising the Web: Understanding the Emotional Processes of the First Year of a PhD.” SRHE, Glasgow. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries of a Field Science. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Heald, S. and A. Deluz, eds. 1994. Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An Encounter through Culture. London: Routledge. Hobart, Mark, ed. 1993. An Anthropological Critique of Development: the Growth of Ignorance. London: Routledge. Holt, N. L. 2003. “Representation, Legitimation and Autoethnography: an Autoethnographic Writing Story.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2: 1-22. Inden, R.1986. “Orientalist Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies 20: 401-46. Johnson, L., A. Lee and B. Green. 2000. “The PhD and the Autonomous Self: Gender, Rationality and Postgraduate Pedagogy.” Studies in Higher Education 25: 135-147. Kleinman, Sh. and M. A Copp. 1993. Emotions and Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Kracke, W. 1987. “Encounter with Other Cultures: Psychological and Epistemological Aspects.” Ethnos 15: 58-81. Laurillard, D. 2002. Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. London: Routledge. Leavitt, J.1996. “Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions.” American Ethnologist 23: 514-539.

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Leonard, D. 1997. “Gender Issues in Doctoral Studies.” In N. Graves and V. Varma, eds., Working for a Doctorate: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, New York: Routledge, 152-183. Levy, R. I. 1984. “Emotion, Knowing and Culture.” In R.A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds., Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 214-237. Lutz, C. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lutz, C. A, and L. Abu-Lughod. 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Messerschmidt, D. A. 1981. “Nogar and Other Traditional Forms of Cooperation in Nepal: Significance for Development.” Human Organization 40:40-47. —. 1995. “Local Traditions and Community Forestry Management: A View from Nepal.” In M. Warren, L. J. Slikkerveer and D. Brokensha, eds., The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge System, London: IT Publications, 231-244. Obeyesekere, G. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Okely, J. and Callaway H, eds. 1992. Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge. Okely, J. 1996. Own or Other Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Pratt, M.L. 1986. “Fieldwork in Common Places.” In J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 27-50. Rapport, N. 2000. “The Narrative as Fieldwork Technique: Processual Ethnography for a World in Motion.” In V. Amit, ed., Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London: Routledge, 71-95. Reed-Danahey, D.E. 1997. “Introduction.” In D.E. Read-Danahey, ed., Auto/Ethnography: Re-writing the Self and the Social, Oxford: Berg, 1-17. Reddy, W. 1997a. “Against Constructionism: the Historical Ethnography of Emotions.” Current Anthropology 38: 327-351. —. 1997b. “Emotional Liberty: Politics and History in the Anthropology of Emotions.” Cultural Anthropology 14: 256-288. —. 2002. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: CUP.

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Rosaldo, R. 1984. “Grief and a Headhunter's Rage.” In E. Bruner, ed., Text. Play, and Story, Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Washington DC, 178-195. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Spencer, J., Jepson, A. and D. Mills. 2005. Where Do All the Anthropologists Go? Research Training and ‘Careers’ in Social Anthropology http://www.theasa.org/news.htm, last accessed 4/08/06. Wikan, U. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: a Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. —. 1992. “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19: 460-482.

Notes 1

This article is an expanded version of a piece originally written in late 2001, immediately after the submission of the thesis. 2 This view is heavily qualified in the remainder of the chapter, but is not detailed here as it is not germane to the paper’s argument. 3 In 1997, it was estimated that the total funds channelled through NGOs amounted to US$150 million while the total official development assistance to Nepal totalled US$391.8 million and the vast majority of Nepali NGO were almost wholly financed by INGOs. 4 In some NGOs, the difference in wages between the public and NGO sector was considerable: In 2001, the wages of NGO and government workers, on average ranged between US$600-2500 and US$80-120, respectively (Dahal 2001). 5 The only changes I have made here concern the initials used to identify individual fieldworkers, the name of the donor organisation, donor representative, the project and place names. I have also added in square brackets English equivalents to the Nepali words that were used in the notes. 6 Further such occurrences in the field indicated that their “being busy” indeed, was a less likely explanation. 7 I would like to believe, however, that my “expulsion” was tied to problems of appropriate categorization that, D N Gellner and Hirsch note, can arise as the anthropologist strives to acquire “insider status” within the organisation, challenging existing procedures for dealing with “outsiders” (2001:5). 8 They write: “Those who conducted doctoral fieldwork in Britain are (despite stereotypes to the contrary) as likely to be employed in mainstream academic Anthropology as any other area specialist” (p.8). 9 She also indicates that changes are occurring with respect to the recognition of the significance of psychodynamic processes in the generation of knowledge, in academic practice. Such changes are yet to enter mainstream practice, however.

CHAPTER TWO IN “THE FIELD”: INTERSUBJECTIVITY, EMPATHY AND THE WORKINGS OF INTERNALISED PRESENCE MARUŠKA SVAŠEK

This chapter1 will focus on the development of relationships between anthropologists and the people they construct as “informants,” and will explore the emotional dimensions of intersubjectivity, the process by which individuals position themselves in social fields and experience themselves and others in dynamic interaction. Focusing in particular on the interaction between two migrants, namely myself and an elderly Dutchman residing in Northern Ireland, I shall argue that emotional intersubjectivity is not only shaped by co-presence, by being together in space and time, but also by our past experiences, present aims, state of being and expectations. In the context of anthropological research, this means that the memories, desires and imaginations of both fieldworkers and the people they interact with in the field, influence how fieldwork and ethnographic analysis take shape.2 Consequently, the spatial and temporary boundaries of “the field” are fuzzy and ambiguous. Drawing on work by Casey (1987), I shall call these emotional memories and imaginations “internalised presences.” The idea of “an inner presence” alludes to the evocative force of strong impressions. These presences, produced by encounters with the world around us, are truly impressions, imprints that have an impact on body and mind. People actively feel and think with internalised presences, (which may be important others, or past, present and future selves) and strongly identify, or de-identify with them (Svašek 2005b).3 To explore these dynamics, I shall use a theory of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity which, on the one hand, acknowledges that “[t]he self provides experiential continuity

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throughout a life” (Cohen 1994: 68), but which, on the other, defines the self as “a multiplicity of I-positions among which dialogical relationships are established” (Svašek 2005b: 202, see also van Meijl and Driessen 2003: 24). In earlier work on emotional processes (Svašek 2005b), I have distinguished three levels of analysis, looking at emotions as discourses, practices and embodied experiences. To explain this perspective in the context of this chapter, let us briefly look at feelings of “homesickness.” I selected the example of homesickness because it relates to human mobility, an important theme in this analysis, while not being exclusively a migrant issue.4 It is also an emotion that could potentially trigger “empathy,” the main topic of this chapter. In the case of Dutch migrants, the discourse of heimwee naar Nederland (homesickness for the Netherlands), the first level of analysis, constructs ‘the Dutch homeland’ as an object of longing and belonging. It also suggests that a return visit to familiar places and people may (at least temporarily) resolve feelings of disconnectedness and incompleteness. The homeland is imagined as a social, spatial and emotional environment significant to the experiencing self – as an external reality and inner presence that has shaped and continues to shape individual subjectivity (see also Rapport and Dawson 1998). When I asked Dutch people in Northern Ireland5, whether they ever felt homesick, I received a variety of replies signifying the rich spectrum of experiences while at the same time forming part of a familiar discourse. Most of the people I talked to answered something along the lines of “well, I miss my friends and family at times, and it’s good to stay in touch and go back to see them regularly,” “I miss cycling and going to the market in Amsterdam; the atmosphere is quite different here,” or “I don’t like to spend time with my cousins but it’s nice to be surrounded by Dutch speakers.” Some were reluctant to use the term heimwee, finding it too strong an expression to communicate their sporadic feelings of longing. One person felt embarrassed, using the term, and said that admitting to feeling homesick would give the impression that she was not cosmopolitan enough to cope with transnational life. Another, elderly informant noted that his heimwee naar Nederland could not really be resolved, as friends or relatives in the Netherlands had passed away and familiar landscapes had disappeared. For him, heimwee rather felt like nostalgia (nostalgie) – as a longing for times gone by. But how, when examining emotional processes, do discourses of homesickness link up with practices, the second level of analysis? Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz (1990) have argued that the (re)production of discursive formations is itself a practice, often occurring in social

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situations, for example through situated speech. They argued that rather than seeing them as expressive vehicles, we must understand emotional discourses as “pragmatic acts” and “communicative performances” (AbuLughod and Lutz 1990: 11). Emotional practices are also bodily actions, a fact that has been underemphasised by discourse analysis (Svašek 2005a: 11-13). Such practices may occur, for example, through customary actions, such as eating, or through ritual behaviour, such as attending a church service or a political rally. They may build on discourses of homesickness, for example when a Dutch migrant eats imported Dutch dishes, or participates in national celebrations organised by Dutch migrant communities. Emotional practices link the individual to the social, not only through communication with others (saying “I miss you”), but also through inner dialogues (phantasizing or thinking “I miss him”) and through non-verbal bodily interaction. Individuals are also engaged in intersubjectivity through sensorial engagement with objects and images. To exemplify the latter, a homesick migrant may, for example, look at and stroke a photograph of an absent friend in an attempt to find consolation. Such practices and embodied experiences express and reinforce the heimee discourse – the idea that being away from the homeland decreases a sense of well-being. Homesickness can, of course, be intentionally and strategically evoked in what has been called “politics of emotions” (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Svašek 2006). For example, a member of a Dutch expat family may want to persuade the other family members to make a return visit to the Netherlands. Through utterances such as “don’t you miss your parents?” he may try to generate a desire in the others to book a flight to Schiphol.6 As already indicated in the previous paragraph, longing for the homeland is also felt in the body through embodied experience. This third level of analysis refers to the process by which particular physical feelings are perceived as indicators of specific emotion states, and vice versa. As Thomas Csordas (1990, 1994) argued, on the one hand, physical perception influences ongoing processes of self-experience and selfdefinition; on the other, selves and emotions are objectified through engagement with the world. In the case of Dutch heimwee, some informants mentioned physical sensations of “emptiness” (een leeg gevoel), or “tears behind my eyes” (tranen achter mijn ogen) as an indicator of homesickness that urged them to reconnect with the Netherlands. Non-verbal bodily actions can also be communicative in other ways as they are part of people’s habitus. Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 90) introduced

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the term “body hexis” to describe body techniques that are learned through socialisation, including gestures, facial expressions and postures. These can be indicative of personal psychological states, but they may also be used as tools of social engineering. A wide smile on the face of a Dutch migrant who collects his visiting relative from the airport, can mark the intensity of their attachment, reveal kinship obligations, or indicate status difference within the family. Obviously, body language can be consciously performed, and may reinforce, criticise or undermine particular discourses, including discourses of heimwee. As with heimwee, empathy can be explored as emotional discourse, practice and embodied experience. As we shall see, feelings of empathy are not only common in everyday social interaction, but are also an important element in ethnographic production. To illustrate this in more detail, the following analysis will describe my involvement as a Dutch migrant and anthropologist with the Dutch community in Northern Ireland. In this chapter, I am also interested in how shifting roles and their ambiguities affected the emotional dynamics of fieldwork, and shaped my encounters with one of the founding members of the Dutch Society. It must be emphasised that the first part of my account refers to a period when I had no intentions of doing research on Dutch migrants.

Curiosity and Scepticism In February 2001, I was reading a Dutch newspaper while commuting by train from Belfast to Bangor. I suddenly heard a male Dutch voice saying: “Can I read it after you’ve finished?” Looking up in surprise, I saw a tall elderly gentleman in his early sixties with a light grey moustache and friendly eyes. He was obviously curious. What would another Dutch person do on that train? The rest of the trip we had a polite conversation during which we exchanged information about how long we had been in Northern Ireland, why we had left Holland, and where we lived and worked. It turned out that we had arrived at around the same time in the country, in 1999, and that we both worked in Belfast and lived in Bangor. He, let’s call him Jan de Wit, was from Eindhoven, the Eastern part of the Netherlands, and his wife came from Northern Ireland. After many years in the Netherlands, she had wanted to return to Ireland, and Jan and their two sons had agreed. When I met him, Jan worked in Belfast for the international telephone service of a company that provided information to customers, using his Dutch and German language skills. He said he wanted to do the job for a few years before he would retire. I told him that I worked as an anthropology lecturer at Queens University Belfast. Jan

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mentioned that I might be interested in the Dutch Society, an organisation of Dutch people in Northern Ireland that frequently organised activities. He obviously saw me as a potential member. I gave him my contact details, and said that he could send me information if he liked. As emotional dynamics are part and parcel of all social interactions, our meeting had a clear emotional component, and was characterised by curiosity and a desire to know more about the other. Our interaction was partly shaped by what Arlie Hochschild (1983: 7) has called “emotion work” or “emotional management,” “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.” As is quite normal in first conversations, Jan and I tried to find out whether we had anything in common, not digging too deeply and asking for more general clues which allowed us to contextualise each other. As part of this “getting a feel for one another,” we arguably showed a degree of empathy, as we tried to understand what the other person was saying and feeling through comparison with our own life experiences.7 This process was almost automatic, and only in hindsight I could see how it was practiced and encoded by etiquette – by internalised rules about good behaviour that have a moral dimension. The Dutch social rules of polite interaction (beleefdheid) I grew up with, require a genuine, but not necessarily successful, intention to understand another person. Practicing beleefdheid, one should also show respect; for instance, criticism that could harm the other person’s self-esteem should not be expressed (de ander in z’n waarde laten), although a certain directness is appreciated when knowing someone a bit better8. During our encounter, Jan and I automatically followed these rules of polite interaction. Reflecting on my own behaviour, my performance of beleefdheid coincided at times with empathic identification. I could relate to some of the feelings he seemed to express, as we were both dealing with the problems and pleasures of living and working in Northern Ireland. Empathy differs from respect and politeness, as it entails personal recognition that can sometimes be experienced as a shock. Most psychologists who have examined empathy “have agreed on at least one core feature: that empathy in some way involves the transformation of the observed experiences of another person into a response within the self” (Davis 2004: 19-20). Mark Davis (2004) argued that, “in a sense, then, empathy is the psychological process that at least temporarily unites the separate social entities of self and other.” Davis’ notion of unison is, however, problematic. Empathy does not unite, because there are no separate units of self and other to be united. Regarded as dynamic and fluid subjectivities, selves are formed because of their relationships with

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other selves and as a result of their interaction with other elements in the changing environment. Regarded as bodies in space, selves cannot reach unity with others simply because two people do not share the same skin, or tap into the same brain. Biologically separate human beings do not think the same thoughts or experience the same feelings, but rather “feel with” and “think with” one another. As Unni Wikan (1992) has argued, it is more adequate to see empathy as emotional “resonance”: as a process in which people recognise elements of their own lived experience in other people’s emotional narratives and behaviour. Davis’s model of empathy is, however, useful because it looks at various dimensions of empathy, making distinctions between (1) personal and situational antecedents (why somebody is likely to show empathy), (2) non-cognitive, simple cognitive and advanced cognitive processes (what conscious and unconscious processes are involved), and (3) intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes (what happens to individuals and their social relationships). As noted earlier, in my interaction with Jan, I demonstrated politeness, which did not require emotional resonance, but needed correct knowledge of the rules of “proper behaviour.” Yet I also resonated emotionally with him because, both being Dutch migrants, I felt we had something in common. These dynamics were practiced through verbal statements (“me too,” “I understand what you’re saying”) and bodily action (nodding, smiling with a “knowing” expression). Yet empathetic identification did not fully dominate our brief encounter,9 as personal memories and imaginations shaped the impression I had of Jan. Although I was quite amused by this kind but slightly reserved gentleman, and it was somehow comforting to talk to him in my own language, his involvement in the Dutch organisation made me sceptical. Earlier experiences in West Africa10 had coloured my perception of expat communities, whose members were, in my experience, conservative, unadventurous people who for the majority refused to interact with locals outside their work environment. This was a group I did not want to associate myself with; and, seeing Jan as “one of them” set limits to my feelings of empathy. Obviously, as I respected the codes of polite interaction, I kept these reservations to myself. After the encounter with Jan, I started receiving invitations from the Dutch Society for the activities they organised – their annual Queen’s Day celebrations, Barbecue, Bowling evening, and so on. Yet, not feeling the need to meet up with Dutch people simply because they were Dutch, and imagining them as a bunch of conservatives, I did not respond. My feelings were probably strengthened by my interactions with Anja, a Dutch doctoral student in anthropology who also lived in Northern Ireland

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and who, like me, disliked organised expat meetings. Only occasionally, I saw Jan by chance on the train. We would either nod our heads at each other from a distance, or exchange a few kind words. But as I did not engage with the Dutch Society, we did not have much to talk about and our relationship did not deepen.

New Objectives, Renewed Resentment However, things changed. When my son was born in 2001 and began to speak Dutch as well as English, I was eager to get in touch with some other bi-lingual Dutch-speaking children for him to play with, and I thought I might be able to find them through the Dutch Society. My new need constructed the Dutch Society as a social realm of potential positive interaction, an image that competed with my earlier negative appraisal. I began to be quite excited about attending a meeting, but also joked with friends about my change of heart. In terms of different I-positions, there was a clear dialogue between me as a critical individualist and me as a Dutch-speaking mother. “Can you believe what I am planning to do,” the former inner voice said to the latter, “has motherhood completely changed me?” When my mother (who is Dutch) came over for a visit in May 2002, I took her and an American friend to what was advertised as Bevrijdingsfeest, the organisation’s annual celebration of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 from its Nazi occupiers. The three of us were quite sceptical about participating in the event, and my American friend, who had lived in Holland for many years, stated that she would have never gone by herself if I hadn’t invited her. We joked about migrants needing this sort of occasions to feel at home. As explained earlier, since I did not want to be associated with that need, I felt ambiguous and slightly embarrassed about going. Memories and imaginations of “conservative expats” surfaced again and clearly influenced my expectations. Yet, at the same time, I was very curious and hopeful that I would meet some nice Dutch people. My personal embarrassment was strengthened, however, when we arrived in the hall where the celebration was organised. The space was decorated with Dutch flags, a portrait of the Dutch Queen, and orange decorations. Coming from a family background in which I was taught to mistrust collective celebrations of national identity and to perceive royalism as an outdated (ouderwets) and corny (oudbollig) phenomenon, I exchanged critical looks with my mother. Although we kept quiet, we recognised a similar reaction in each other’s eyes, that could be translated as “what are we doing here for God’s sake?” (wat doen we hier in

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Godsnaam?). Yet having come with a purpose, we mingled with the crowd. About thirty people, mainly adults, sat around large tables, some involved in conversation but many just looking around at what was going on. As far as I can remember, there were speeches, we sang the Dutch anthem, and I talked to a few people. Yet I did not feel connected to them at all as I continued to see them (mistakenly11) as a nationalist, royalist bunch and soon became bored. I felt that this was not an environment in which I wished to make friends with anybody. My lessening identification with the Dutch Society was mainly caused by my dislike of organised group events and the use of political symbolism that stresses group identity. My feelings were strengthened by the Northern Irish context in which the event took place. Knowing that political symbolism had been instrumental in the perpetuation of the Loyalist-Nationalist conflict, I felt I should stay away from it. I was also highly sensitive to the fact that orange was not only the Dutch national colour but also a marker of Northern Irish Protestantism. Resenting the notion of a divided society, I did not want to be perceived as belonging to one of its factions. Like myself, my American friend and my mother felt out of place, and we soon decided to leave. I spotted Jan, exchanged some polite words, and said that we had to depart early. When leaving the hall, I said to myself “Never again,” with all my heart defining the Dutch Society as “other.” Any emails I received after that I simply binned.

Emotional memories and identification Despite my disappointing experience and my intention to “never again” participate in anything organised by the Dutch Society, I did, however, go back a year later. In December, the Society organised its annual Sinterklaasfeest, and even my friend Anja decided to join me with her children. To understand my second change of heart, it is necessary to explain the meaning and emotional force of Sinterklaas, a figure quite similar to Father Christmas. Children up to the age of eight might believe in his existence, and learn to sing special songs about the Sint at home and in school. On sinterklaasavond, the evening of 5th December, family members exchange gifts, believed by the children to come from the hands of the Sint. Personally, I find sinterklaasavond so much fun that I have always celebrated it, whether in the Netherlands or in a far-away place. I even convinced my British husband to make surprises (presents wrapped up in a funny way) and to write sinterklaasgedichten (poems that go with the presents, and that often intend to tease the receiver of the gifts).

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Sinterklaasavond is an annual ritual which has the potential to produce strong memories of (or desires for) communality and belonging, making it into a powerful internalised presence. To many Dutch adults, Sinterklaas symbolises the innocence of childhood and the warmth of family life. Embodied memories of the ritual are emotionally evocative, and Dutch migrants often wish to pass the experience on to their children. This needs, of course, some effort when you live abroad. Where to find somebody dressed up in a Sinterklaas outfit? Where to find the special sweets, pepernoten, speculaas, and borstplaatjes? And where to find people to sing the songs with? So sceptical as we were, both Anja and myself decided to participate in the celebrations to give an opportunity to our children to live an experience which had brought joy to our lives when we were young. Participation also allowed us to connect with our own happy memories of the ritual. Once at the party, I began to see the Dutch society in a more positive light, empathising with their efforts to create a community. My cynicism mellowed by my personal wish to create an atmosphere in which I could relive memories of Sinterklaas. At the same time, I became more sympathetic through what psychologists call role taking or perspective taking, defined as “the attempts by one individual to understand another by imagining the other’s perspective” (Davis 2004: 23). Although I remember having critical thoughts (for example about the person dressed up as Sinterklaas, who wasn’t convincing at all) I valued the attempt to organise an event especially for the children. Having organised children’s parties for my son, I recognized myself in what was going on around me and felt connected to the organisers. No doubt the emotional potency of the Sinterklaas celebration also stimulated me to temporarily push away my earlier reservations. I happily joined the group, chatted with the other parents and engaged with the children and the organisers. I also approached Jan and told him that I enjoyed the event. Afterwards, although I still felt ambiguous about the Dutch Society (I had not forgotten my first experience) the organisation had become less “other,” less “not-me.” I could now think about and relive both the Liberation ceremony (which still evoked a negative response) and the Sinterklaas celebrations (mostly in a positive light). In an inner dialogue with these presences I was negotiating their contradictions. They became part of various narratives that produced three notions of self. One was a highly sceptical self who was opposed to the “conservative expats.” In the other two, I was more in resonance with the people around me, either as somebody who shared the experience of organising parties, or as a Dutch person who shared emotional memories of Sinterklaas. In both cases, I

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could enjoy conviviality without experiencing a confrontation with Dutch political nationalism.

Empathy as research method My perception of the Dutch Society changed more drastically when I began contemplating doing research in Northern Ireland. I had already chosen to focus on migrants from China, them being (at the time12) the largest minority group in Northern Ireland, but thought it interesting to also look at a group that did not, like the Chinese, experience racism. The Dutch seemed an obvious choice because I was born in the Netherlands and spoke the language. Interestingly, by turning “the Dutch Society” into an object of study, I was no longer bothered by my personal reluctance to engage with its members on a more frequent basis. In some sense, my professional desire to know more about these people liberated me, at least in the context of the research, from a personal obsession to see myself as a “non-group person” and, being half-Czech, as “non-Dutch.” My willingness to now engage, as an anthropologist, with the Dutch migrants was of course also informed by my anthropological training, which had emphasised the importance of active personal engagement with and openness to others to obtain a “view from within.” To do so, anthropologists are expected to participate in “other societies,” combining the use of standard methods, such as interviewing, with the complex dynamics of “being there,” defined by Elizabeth Tonkin (2005: 55) as “a continuing process, a learning, which pulls together a mass of perceptions into some sort of amalgam with which we make sense of and relate the multiple kinds of information that we are simultaneously trying to grasp.”. “Being there”, she added, “is an activity including interactive encounters with mutual emotional evaluation and response” Tonkin (2005: 55). It requires a willingness to move out of a more fixed role of “the researcher,” as reflected in the following account by Napoleon Chagnon. In the quote, he described his behaviour during a Yanomamö mourning ritual: That night I think I became emotionally close to the Yanomamö for the first time. I remained in my hammock and gave up collecting genealogies. As darkness fell Damowä’s [the deceased] brothers began weeping in their hammocks. I lay there and listened, not bothering to tape record it or photograph it or write notes. One of the others asked me why I was not making a nuisance of myself as usual, and I told him that my innermost being (…) was cold – that is, I was sad. This was whispered around the village (…); I was hushuo, in a state of emotional disequilibrium, and had

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finally begun to act like a human being as far as they were concerned (Chagnon 1968: 135, quoted by Kloos1976:138).

Chagnon’s sadness in response to the grief of his informants can easily be identified as empathy. Interestingly, the fact that he resonated emotionally with his informants, transformed him in their eyes into a “normal” human being. His emotional experience also informed his knowledge about Yanomamö attitudes towards death as the episode helped him gain further access into Yanomamö society. In recent years, several anthropologists have argued that fieldworkers should consciously aim for empathy when doing research (Behar 1996; Svašek 2005a: 16; Wikan 1992; ). With regard to empathy, Leavitt (1996: 530) noted that anthropologists should actively “rework” their own emotions if they want to understand their informants’ life worlds, and should realign their “own affects to construct a model of what others feel.” Renato Rosaldo (1984) has argued that the emotional impact of the sudden death of his wife sparked embodied understanding of headhunting expeditions in Papua New Guinea, that stemmed from grief-related rage. He concluded that “one’s own lived experience both enables and inhibits particular kinds of insight” (Rosaldo 1984: 193). This implies that anthropologists may empathise and connect with their informants on the basis of similar life experiences. Evidently, this does not suggest that similar life experiences always lead to empathy, or that they automatically generate understanding of the cultural complexities of other societies. Instead, it means that similar experiences may be a source of (one-sided or mutual) identification, which may be an important factor in the development of fieldwork relations. Empathy may also influence the ways in which local knowledge is appropriated by the ethnographer and transformed into ethnographic texts, as apparent in Rosaldo’s work (cf. Jackson 1989:5-6). As noted earlier, Wikan (1992: 471) argued that empathy should be central to fieldwork and ethnographic understanding. She stated that anthropologists must show “a willingness to engage with another world, life, or idea,” and use personal experience “to try to grasp, or convey, meanings that reside neither in words, ‘facts,’ nor text but are evoked in the meeting of one experiencing subject with another or with a text” (p. 463). If empathetic skills are required in our profession, it is worth considering whether and how these skills could be taught to students. As empathy is a rather common process in normal everyday action, as demonstrated earlier, I would suggest that it may be sufficient to increase an awareness of these everyday emotional dynamics through introspective learning journals. In addition, exercises in conscious role taking in

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interview situations could train students to engage more fully and imaginatively with their informants (for the purpose of the exercise, these could be other students), using their own experience as one of the bases of understanding and communication. Regarding empathy as a professional skill (related to “social skills” and “communicative skills”), one could question to what extent expressions of empathy need “emotional labour,” defined by Hochschild (1983:7) as modes of conscious emotional management in professional settings.13 Her analysis of emotional management amongst American flight attendants critically examined the ways in which strict, professionally defined rules concerning emotional display affected the working conditions in this professional field. The study found that the constant requirement for the flight attendants to be kind and polite, no matter how rude the air passengers were, was difficult and exhausting.14 The constant pressure to manage and perform emotions, in line with specific institutional rules, caused transmutation of the private ways in which the flight attendants managed their feelings, causing stress and psychological problems in some of the workers. As fieldworkers doing fieldwork, we are also expected to manage our emotions (i.e. showing respect, demonstrating gratitude, downplaying disgust, and others), and some guidelines concerning the necessity to respect and protect informants are stipulated in professional codes of conduct. Interaction with informants is, however, normally not a commercial enterprise, which makes the situation in our professional field radically different to the one in the travel and tourist industry. We are not paid to smile. In addition, as anthropologists we are generally truly fascinated with our research topics, have a genuine interest in our informants’ lives, and ideally, spend considerable time with them. These work conditions make it likely that empathy comes more easily, and that it is a much less laborious emotional process than the requirement in the service sector to constantly smile.15 Some research situations are of course more challenging than others, as Gillian Evans’ (2006) account of fieldwork amongst racist youngsters in London demonstrated. She noted that a problem arises for the ethnographer when the increasing proximity that developing empathy with her informants implies is interrupted or jeopardised because the ethical disposition that appropriate participation among them entails is at odds with what she feels is right to do (Evans 2006: 246).

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In my interaction with the Dutch migrants, I did not encounter any serious ethical dilemmas, as Evans did, but I did feel a certain ambiguity about my double role as “co-migrant” and “researcher.” As co-migrant, I was confronted with expectations (from myself and my informants) inherent in developing friendships; as researcher, I was conscious that I needed to strategically act out politeness and divide my attention between different people to keep the fieldwork going. I first told Jan about my plans to do research on Dutch migrants when I participated in the Queen’s Day celebrations in 2003, an occasion during which I became an official member of the organisation. With my research plans in mind, I had made a conscious effort to engage and participate. My son was wearing orange clothes, and we both wore self-made Queen’s Day hats for the hat competition. From a personal point of view, it was relatively easy for me to get involved. In the Netherlands, these celebrations are far from being royalist events as people use the occasion to sell old books, clothes and toys, perform in the streets, organise parties and have a fun day off. References to the Queen herself are generally marked by irony; people play with royal symbolism rather then referring to it seriously. At the party in Belfast, I recognised that at least some of the participants preferred the ironical mode of celebrating Queen’s Day. At a personal level, the latter insight opened up space for true bonding. The Northern Irish context and the fact that I was a researcher affected my feelings in complex ways. I slipped in and out of empathy, chatting and joking with the other participants and recognising familiar sentiments, but also feeling like a traitor who was playing a role in order to “harvest” ethnographic material. The fact that the other Dutch migrants could easily mistake me for “just another participant” increased this feeling. I did not disguise my professional interest in the Society, Jan allowed me to tell those present about my research plans, and I collected some names and addresses of people who were willing to be interviewed.16 Despite my “coming out” as a researcher, however, I still felt uncomfortable about my double identity. The Northern Irish setting also had its impact on my feelings. While travelling on the train to Belfast, I felt ill-at-ease with my son’s orange outfit, as the colour signified Loyalist sentiments. I was also still confronted with my own scepticism of expatriot settings, even though this no longer kept me from active engagement with the Dutch community. As noted earlier, notions of independence, selfreliance and unrelatedness to Dutch society that have been promoted throughout my youth by my parents, had strongly shaped my self-image and preferences and modes for socialising.17 This meant that, occasionally, my professional interest in the Dutch expat community continued to

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confuse me. At moments like that, I imagined my mother’s disapproval or my father’s cynical smile and felt I had to justify my choice of subject. This blending of past and present again demonstrates the fuzziness of “the field” as experiential domain, and shows the impact of pre-fieldwork impressions on research-related emotional dispositions.

Empathy as a two-way process Being one of the founders of the Dutch Society, Jan was of course an obvious person to interview. On the day of the interview, I took a tenminute taxi drive from my house to his, sat down with him at the dining room table, and began the conversation. His Northern Irish wife sat in a chair, quietly knitting. We talked about his background, their move to Northern Ireland, and his involvement in the Dutch Society. I consciously used “empathic mirroring” to keep the conversation going: nodding my head, making affirmative sounds and appropriate facial expressions, and actively reacted to Jan’s accounts by making comparisons with my own experiences.18 When I asked him which of the events organised by the Dutch Society he liked best, he said: “Personally I like the Sinterklaasfeest best. I enjoy it when the children are having fun, I liked it myself as a child, and it is nice to remember that.” I responded by saying that I also enjoyed seeing the children because it stimulated my own happy memories. Jan smiled and nodded his head. Our exchange created what has been called “emotional synchrony,” the production of “parallel emotions” (Davis 2004).19 Evidently, parallel emotions are not fully identical, as they are experienced by different individuals. In an earlier publication, I made a similar argument about the concepts of remembered and re-experienced emotions, saying that although a person may remember and re-experience past emotional episodes, the experience is always contextual and therefore unique, even if similar types of emotions are felt (Svašek 2002). The same counts for parallel emotions. If I laugh because you laugh, my joy is necessarily different from yours because we experience it in different bodies; although we laugh together, we may have different intentions and associations (see also Berger, this volume). It was clear, however, that emotional synchrony stimulated a process in which Jan and I somehow connected with each other. In the example above, this was put in motion through accounts that alluded to similar childhood memories. Another example shows that similar professional experience also helped Jan and me to identify with each other. Somewhere in 2007, he gave me a lift to the Dutch Society’s Bowling event, and, on the way, told me about his part-time job as an interviewer for the

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University of Ulster. His job was to conduct door-to-door interviews in a Protestant area of Belfast, asking people about their perceptions of the Catholic community. In the conversation that followed, we talked about the challenges of sensitive research, and I gave some examples from my earlier research on Czech-German relationships. We actively reacted to each other’s accounts, and experienced moments of mutual approval and agreement. In terms of our emotional connection, something remarkable happened when, in May 2007, I organised the workshop Transnational Families. Emotions and Belonging, an interdisciplinary one-and-a-half day conference on emotions and human mobility.20 I invited Jan and his wife, partly because I thought it would stimulate our future discussions about Dutch migrants, and partly because I had started regarding Jan as a friend. I knew he was now retired and that he used part of his time to go to public lectures so he might possibly be interested. I didn’t really expect his wife to come, but invited her anyway. I was very pleased when Jan showed up on the first morning of the conference, and his wife attended the second day.21 Regarding experiences of empathy, the workshop was a fascinating event. The various papers discussed the difficulties faced by migrants who maintain (or fail to maintain) relationships with distant kin. There were ten speakers - anthropologists, sociologists and historians, and most of us were migrants ourselves. In the opening speech, I deliberately started by referring to my personal experience of transnational family life22, thus defining the event as a setting in which we could all more openly reflect on our emotional predicaments as migrants, researchers and human beings involved in long-distance relationships. The conference allowed a mixture of migrants and non-migrants, academics and non-academics, to discuss experiences of displacement and loss, and, in relation to the analysis in this chapter, to react with deep empathy to each other’s stories and body language.23 The workshop changed the relationship between Jan and myself. He had now entered “my world,” not as an informant, but (temporarily) as a participant in the academic setting of the conference. The morning after the conference, a car suddenly stopped in front of my house, and Jan and his wife got out. I was happily surprised and invited them for a cup of tea. During their visit, Jan said that, if ever I had a problem, or needed someone to look after my son and couldn’t find anyone else, I should call them. “After all,” he said, “that’s what the Dutch Society is for.” “And we are also Quakers,” his wife added, “so helping others is part of our philosophy.” Jan’s wife also gave me a copy of a book of poems, written by herself, giving me access to a more intimate side of herself.

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The couple had now transformed into “friends,” although Jan has of course also remained an informant. This means that I have had to further negotiate my double-role as researcher and Dutch friend, which has continued to bring up ethical questions about morality, trust and reciprocity.

Conclusion “Doing fieldwork” is not only an outwardly oriented social activity, but also a psychological space in which memories and imaginations shape our interactions with our informants, influencing the ways in which our research develops. In other words, “the field” is an experiential setting with blurred spatial and temporal boundaries, and as researchers we need to actively deal not only with the challenges of day-to-day fieldwork, but also with the emotional pressures of pre-fieldwork memories and postfieldwork futures. Exploring emotional dynamics as “discourses,” “practices” and “embodied experiences,” and applying Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotions work,” this chapter has shown that researchers actively manage emotions as part of their research strategy. In the case of my own ethnographic research, emotional labour has implied (1) making conscious attempts to connect with (potential) informants, demonstrating what seemed like the methodologically “right” emotions, (2) having inner dialogues in reaction to fieldwork events, reflecting on fieldwork and prefieldwork emotional encounters, (3) dealing with mixed feelings about conflicting roles as researcher and potential friend, and (4) having to cope with occasional confusion about research ethics. In the past decade, discourses of “empathy” have begun to shape anthropological debates about ethnographic methods, an important topic in the context of this book. The main point in the debate has been that our own life experiences form an important emotional reservoir from which we can use elements to connect with others in the field. Evidently, this process of resonance – the practice and experience of empathy – is by definition comparative, as we use our own embodied knowledge to respond to similarities and differences in the lives of others. Experiencing, re-experiencing and remembering our own emotional predicaments while engaging with our informants, we aim to negotiate a common ground of understanding. It is important to realise that informants play an active role in this, even thought their aims and interests may be very different to our own. This means that “the view from inside” we intend to produce in our ethnographies always results from interpersonal negotiation and

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intercultural translation, processes that draw on fieldworkers’ and informants’ emotional pasts. The empathetic process may open up doors and stimulate mutual understanding. Yet empathy may also cause anxiety and insecurity, as it raises moral questions about the nature of friendship and relatedness in the field. Comparing my research on Dutch migrants with other research projects I have been engaged in, there is no doubt that I have, in all cases, consciously used aspects of my personal background to stimulate interaction and identification with informants. In the research on Dutch migrants, my familiarity with Dutch emotional practices and significant rituals helped to forge bonds in the field. In a similar vein, during two separate projects in which I focussed on visual art and politics in Ghana and Czechoslovakia, my previous artistic training 24 allowed me to speak from a personal perspective with artists and art students about the pleasures and frustrations surrounding creative work. Life experiences have also created biases that, at least initially, obstructed my willingness to interact with particular people in the field. I already explained how my Czech-Dutch upbringing first discouraged me to get involved with members of the Dutch Society. In a similar manner, other biases have at least initially influenced earlier research projects.25 In all cases, a more detached and self-conscious me (see Cohen 1994) was able to reflect on the negative stereotypical images I had brought with me to the research settings, comparing them to the diverse impressions made by a variety of informants. Their personal stories and emotional enactments of joy, anger and hardship allowed me to see beyond static categories and engage with them on a human level, as individuals. As a result, I could proceed with my research. This process of re-thinking and re-feeling demonstrates another dimension of the experiential fuzziness of ‘the field’, namely the fact that ethnographic findings may change our relatively fixed perception of the past.

Postscript I began writing this chapter in 2006, at a time when I was trying to get funding for research on the Dutch Society, doing a small pilot study in preparation. So far I have failed to obtain a grant, and as a result, my fieldwork has been ad-hoc and limited.26 This has meant that, although my friendship with Jan and his wife has been ongoing, its intensity has fluctuated as we do not meet up very often. Practical limitations have played a role in my lack of progress with the Dutch migrant research. As a working mum with a husband who has work commitments outside

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Northern Ireland, and lacking relatives “around the corner,” it is hard to find the time for non-funded research. In the past two years, these constraints have driven me to focus more on a small number of Chinese informants, most of them mothers of children who attend my son’s school. Shared experience of being migrant mothers and having children at the same school makes it relatively easy to combine meeting up for social and research purposes while our children play together. Our friendship has resulted quite “naturally” from bumping into each other while dropping the kids off, and chatting in the school corridor. Our predicament as migrant mothers has stimulated strong mutual empathy, as we have similar concerns about our children’s linguistic abilities as bi-lingual speakers; about the necessity to keep connections with relatives in the homeland; and about our sometimes problematic embeddedness in Northern Irish society. The fact that my focus has moved away from the Dutch research has also been partly caused by my “Dutch dilemma,” the fact that I have a certain uneasiness with my identification as a “Dutch person,” and because in my own mind, the roles of Dutch compatriot, friend and researcher do not go well together. Whenever I have invited Jan and his wife to my house on Sunday afternoons in the past years, I have felt reluctant to ask questions that concern me professionally while at the same time finding it hard to ignore them. Partly because of this dilemma, I have not taken up the couples’ offer to help out with childcare in cases of crisis, feeling that this would be misusing the relationship. I do not have similar feelings about asking the Chinese mothers occasionally to look after my son, as this is a more “natural” part of our relationship, which is focused around our children. It is important to note that Jan and his wife have also not actively tried to intensify our contact, I guess partly because we do not have that much in common. The fluctuating intensity of field relationships shows what has been a central argument in this chapter, that ethnographic researchers should not be theorised as bounded entities, purely defined by concrete research settings, but rather as individuals with personal and emotional pasts that affect ongoing intersubjectivity in the field (see also Galina Linquist, and John Curran this volume). Our informants are involved in similar processes. Their temporary role as “informant” may offer certain possibilities for selfrealisation or, perhaps more cynically, be a welcome distraction from the humdrum of everyday life. By contrast, they may feel that interaction with a researcher sets limitations on their subjectivity that flow out of the research focus of the researcher, and consequently loose interest. Alternatively, they may simply lack the time to invest in the relationship. Yet intersubjectivity

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is not reliant solely on co-presence, and therefore, empathetic and other emotional engagements with “people in the field” may continue long after fieldwork has ended. After all, “the field” projects itself into the future, first of all when we write our ethnographies and struggle translating our memories of fieldwork into text, and later on when our readers react to our written words through their own imagination and feelings.

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Figueroa, M. and G. Mónica. 2008. “Mexican Families, Slightedness and the Experience of Racism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies. 29(3): 283-297. Fitzgerald, P. 2008. “Exploring Trans-national and Diasporic Families through the Irish Emigration Database.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3), 267-281. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T. and R.L.Rapson. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, Jt. T. and Rapson, R.L. 1992. “Emotional Contagion.” In M.S. Clark, ed., Review of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 14. Emotion and Social Behavior. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 151-177. Hochschild, A. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths towards a Clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Enquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kloos, P. 1976. Culturele Antropologie. Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Lambkin, B. 2008. “The Emotional Function of the Migrant’s ‘Birthplace’ in Transnational Belonging: Thomas Mellon (1813-1908) and Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919).” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29 (3): 315329. Leavitt, J. 1996. “Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions.” American Ethnologist 23(3), 514-539 Littler, M. 2008. “Intimacy and Affect in Turkish-German Writing: Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s ‘The Courtyard in the Mirror.’” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 331-345. Rosaldo, R., 1984. Grief and a Headhunter's Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions. In E. Bruner, ed., Text, Play and Story: the Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society, 178-195. Skrbiš, Z. 2008. “Transnational Families: Theorizing Migration, Emotions and Belonging.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 231-246. Svašek, M. 2008. “Who Cares? Families and Feelings in Movement.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 213-230. —. 2006a “Introduction: Postsocialism and the Politics of Emotions.” In M.Svašek, ed., Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. Oxford: Berghan, 1-33. —. 2006b, “Postsocialist Ownership: Emotions, Power and Morality.” In M. Svašek, ed., Postsocialism: Politics and Emotion in Central and Eastern Europe, Oxford: Berghan, 95-114.

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—. 2005a. “Emotions in Anthropology.” In K. Milton an M. Svašek, eds., Mixed Emotions. Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg, 124. —. 2005b. “The Politics of Chosen Trauma. Expellee Memories, Emotions and Identities.” In K. Milton and M. Svaešk, eds., Mixed Emotions. Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg, 195-214. —. 2002a. “Narratives of ‘Home’ and ‘Homeland.’ The Symbolic Construction and Appropriation of the Sudeten German Heimat.” Identities 9(4): 495-518. —. 2000. “Borders and Emotions. Hope and Fear in the BohemianBavarian Frontier Zone.” Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology, special issue, edited by Hastings Donnan and Dieter Haller, 111-126. —. 1997 “Identity and Style in Ghanaian Artistic Discourse.” In J. MacClancey ed., Contesting Art. Art, Identity and Politics in the Modern World, Oxford: Berg, 27-62. Svašek, M. and Z. Skrbiš. 2007. “Passions and Powers: Emotions and Globalisation.” Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 14(4): 367-383. Tonkin, E. 2005. “Being There.” In K. Milton and M. Svasek (eds.) Mixed Emotions. Anthropological Studies of Feelings. Oxford: Berg. 55-70. Ramirez, M., Z. Skrbiš and M. Emmerson. 2007. “Transnational Family Reunions as Lived Experience: Narrating a Salvadorean Autoethnography.” Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 14(4): 411-431. Rapport, N. and A. Dawson, eds. 1998. Migrants of Identity. Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Ryan, L. 2008. “Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Families 'Here' and 'There': Women, Migration and the Management of Emotions.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3):299-313. van Meijl, T. and H. Driessen. 2003. “Introduction: Multiple Identifications and the Self.” Focaal. European Journal of Anthropology 42: 17-30. Wikan, U. 1992. “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19(3): 460-482.

Notes 1

The paper was written for and presented at the conference Emotions in the Field. Surviving and Writing Up Fieldwork Experience, which took place in Oxford in September 2006. The Conference brief was:

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Emotions in the field are often buried in individual memories and personal diaries, in confidential accounts to friends and family, colleagues and students. And yet, despite ‘scientific’ efforts to exclude, tame, or redress our own feelings and personalities, subjectivity leaves its mark upon all facets of research: from the topics we select and the methods we employ, to the tone and hidden messages of our ethnographies. How do our emotional experiences, attachments and detachments, affect anthropologists as both persons and researchers? 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 interpretive and explanatory enterprise? How do we reconcile the emotional and the subjective with our scientific goals, and what are the consequences of such integrations for anthropology? Are all of the above issues relevant to the training of anthropologists? 2 This implies that the production of anthropology must be imagined as a process with linear and non-linear temporal dimensions. The linear dimension of intersubjectivity emphasises historical sequence: for example, “We met on 20 March 1970,” “we saw each other once a week for a period of two years,” and “our last contact was in November when we rang.” This dimension also maps ongoing emotional ebbs and flows, describing the fluctuating emotional intensity of fieldwork connections over time: for example, “We slowly became friends, but lately we have grown apart,” or “Yesterday I gained her trust, but the first 15 minutes of our meeting were tense.” As we shall see, empathy plays an important role in the historical development of relationships between fieldworkers and their informants. The non-linear dimension is harder to pin down. Past, present and future may collapse when vivid emotional memories trigger particular types of behaviour that influence interaction in the field. 3 Casey (1987: 244) noted that people with whom we have a strong emotional tie are established as particularly powerful internalised presences in the self. In an earlier publication (Svašek 2005b), I argued that the “others” who become internalised presences are not only other people, but also landscapes, artefacts, events, abstract ideas, or indeed anything that has emotional impact on subjectivity, including memories of “past selves.” 4 Like migrants, non-migrants can also feel homesick when finding themselves in new environments, for example as tourists or when moving house. They can also feel disoriented and lost in their own life trajectories. “Feeling at home” should therefore not be defined as rootedness in one physical locality, but can best be conceptualised as a “cognitive and emotional process in which people identify with particular experiences and feel familiarity with their life styles” (Svašek 2008; Rapport and Dawson 1998: 9; Svašek 2002: 497-8).

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5 The following findings are not based on a formal study of Dutch heimwee, but are rather the result from occasional talks with about twenty Dutch people in Northern Ireland over the last eight years. 6 On the emotional dimension of migrants’ return visits, see Baldassar 2001, 2007; Ramirez, Skrbiš and Emmerson 2007). 7 I partially empathised with Jan because we both lived outside the Netherlands, had arrived at around the same time, and our spouses were British, that is, “foreigners.” 8 Dutch directness (directheid) is often not appreciated in Northern Ireland, especially when directed at people who occupy more senior positions, for example at work. At least one (English) colleague has warned me that I am, at times, too blunt. Several Dutch migrants have told me that they had similar complaints. Dutch directness is culturally specific, and does not always agree with Northern Irish/English codes of polite behaviour. Not surprisingly, numerous Dutch people I spoke with find that their Northern Irish/English friends and colleagues can be, at times, overly polite when it would be more productive to know their opinions. 9 Here, I can of course only speak for myself, but I am guessing that Jan may not have fully connected with me because of a number of differences in terms of age, gender, family background, professional orientation, personality, outlook on life, and so on. 10 This was when I spent one month as a tourist in Cote d’Ivoire (in 1988) and six months as an anthropology student doing fieldwork in Ghana (in 1989/90, see Svašek 1996). 11 A year later, when I had started my research on the Dutch Society, I asked Jan about the use of nationalist and royalist symbols during events organised by the Dutch Society. As noted earlier, personally this had put me off completely. Jan responded saying that the Society is not at all nationalistic, it was not involved in vlaggengezwaai (flag waving) and that the celebration of Queen’s Day, is mainly a heimwee feestje, a “nostalgic party.” He said: “You try to get things that are “vaderlands” (typically Dutch, from the fatherland). Flags, oranjebitter (an orange Dutch liquor)… [things that] evoke emotions, pleasant feelings.” I suggested that nostalgia could also be a sad feeling, when people feel homesick, and asked whether the heimwee feestjes had a sad dimension as well. Jan said they did not; that they rather evoked happy memories, for example through the singing of children’s songs. 12 Polish migrants have now become the largest migrant group in Northern Ireland. 13 She defined emotional labour as emotion work “that is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (Hochschild (1983: 7). 14 Her example is telling: “The airline passenger may choose not to smile, but the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it” (Hochschild 1983: 19). 15 This is, of course, a generalisation. Workers in the tourist industry, especially when they spend longer time periods with particular clients, may get close to them, and anthropologists may feel reluctance to talk to certain informants, or feel bored with their research topic.

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16 Over the next year, my contacts with Jan were only sporadic, as we only met a number of times during events organised by the Dutch Society. I was mainly occupied with teaching and finishing three books, and, failing to get funding for the migration project, had little time for new research. See also the postscript to this chapter. 17 My inner dialogues were confrontations with my particular internalised presences. There were, however, also alternative voices “in my head.” I once asked my mother whether she would ever participate herself in Sinterklaas celebrations organised by Dutch people abroad if she would live abroad herself, and she said she probably would, even though she would not make friendships with other Dutch people just because they would be Dutch. I also sometimes imagined my father’s involvement in the Netherlands in Tribuna, a small organisation of refugees from Czechoslovakia. 18 There were also moments when less conscious processes stimulated the process. As Davis (2004) noted, the automatic copying of body postures forms an important part of empathetic communication. See also note 23. 19 Hatfield et al. (1992, 1994) have identified one of the mechanism that can trigger parallel emotions, “emotional contagion,” defined as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (Hatfield et al., 1992: 153-54). Davis (2004: 26-7) has argued that “[t]he most socially important outcome (of emotional contagion) seems to be the greater feelings of rapport between the target and observer – variously operationalized as feeling “in step,” involved, or compatible with the other person.” 20 Apart from myself (Svašek 2008), the academic speakers at this conference were Zlatko Skrbiš (2008), Loretta Baldassar (2008), Patrick Fitzgerald (2008), Margaret Littler (2008), Mónica Figueroa Moreno (2008), Louise Ryan (2008), and Brian Lambkin (2008). I had also invited the poet Humberto Gatica to read his poems, and the director of the Chinese Welfare Association Anna Manwah Lo to talk about Chinese migrants in Northern Ireland and their transnational family links. 21 Jan’s wife explained she was especially interested in “women’s issues” and the theme of Irish transnational motherhood, central to Louise Ryan’s paper (Ryan 2008). 22 In the introductory talk, I noted: “Quite a few of us here are migrants ourselves, so the theme of the workshop is in part self-reflexive. For myself, I know quite well the difficulties faced when one has to cope without much direct family support; I also know about the advantages and disadvantages of long-distant relationships. In my own experience, communication technology, cheap flights and the space offered by somewhat flexible jobs keep such relationships going. Communication from a distance, does not, however, offer the immediacy of physical contact and this can be frustrating and painful. I experienced this recently when my mother, who lives in the Netherlands, got ill, and I could only communicate with her by fax as she is also quite deaf and the medicine she had to take affected her hearing.” 23 Two examples show how this affected the dynamics of empathy at the conference. Louise Ryan (2008), one of the speakers, reflected on the fact that, like

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her informants, Irish nurses living in England, she had to negotiate family relationships “here” and “there,” and juggle career and motherhood. She said that she was, and still is deeply disturbed by some of the accounts, having “an on-going relationship with the stories.” She began to cry when talking about one case study. Interestingly, in the context of the conference, as it partly dealt with emotions and fieldwork, this was totally acceptable. The dynamics of empathy reached its peak by the end of the first day, when Humberto Gatica, a Chilean refugee and poet who now lives in England read his poems. I had invited him because I thought that there should be a space for narrative forms other than ethnography; also, as a poet, he experimented more freely with emotional modes of expression than academics normally do. Humberto’s poems were such powerful accounts of loss, and the images he used turned out to be so evocative that the audience was strongly affected. Since we all, whether migrants or not, have experienced loss, loneliness and grief, it was almost impossible not to empathise (Svašek, 2008). Evidently, Humberto’s images confronted different individuals with different internalised presences. Personally, I was confronted with the image of my father, who, as a refugee, had had similar experiences to Humberto, which had of course impacted on my own life history. Crying, or attempting not to cry, together during this poetry reading somehow forged a bond. Sharing personal feelings about our own struggles as migrants during the various paper presentations, discussions and informal talks was another powerful bonding experience. 24 In 1985, I finished a four-year degree in Painting and Graphics at the Academy of Arts Minerva in Groningen (the Netherlands). 25 Two examples from other researches reveal the same mechanism. In the early phase of my PhD research on career development in the Czech art world, my proposal reproduced a Cold War perspective, creating an image of two oppositional political orientations, “the propaganda-producing official state artist” versus “the art-creating unofficial dissident artist.” When I began interviewing artists who had been prestigious during the state socialist period, I had to consciously suppress internalised presences of “communists as enemies.” Having grown up in the capitalist West and being the daughter of a father who had fled from Communism, I was obviously influenced by his experience and by western political rhetoric (Svašek 1996: 17-19). It was, however, hard, to unambiguously place the artists I met in categories of villains and heroes so I decided to take a more low-key pragmatic approach that allowed me to analyse the often inconsistent participation of artists in both state-supported and alternative structures. Similar feelings surfaced during the early stages of my research on Sudeten German expellees; my historical knowledge of the German occupation during the Second World War had produced an internalised presence of the Germans as “the arch-enemy,” a stereotypical image I had to deal with to allow me to open up to my informants (Svašek 2005b: 211, note 8). 26 In the past few years, I have attended various Dutch society meetings, interviewed several members of the Dutch Society, and met some Dutch migrants informally. Due to time pressure and other research commitments, in 2008, I only managed to meet up once with Jan and his wife, when we participated in the Sinterklaas celebrations.

CHAPTER THREE EMOTIONAL INTERPRETATION AND THE “ACTING” ETHNOGRAPHER: AN ETHICAL DILEMMA? JOHN CURRAN

During my doctoral research, I conducted fieldwork in a psychiatric hospital in London. I explored the ways in which mental health care is constructed and practised by different sections of staff. In the process of this research, I experienced the challenges of having to adapt to a wide variety of sometimes conflicting or conflicted relationships. In the process of fitting in at my fieldwork site, the hospital, I found it useful to think about conducting fieldwork as “performance” (Goffman 1959). However, soon after I began my fieldwork, my ethnographic “performance” posed questions about the meaning and limitations of ethical research. Working through the ethical dilemmas and an episode of conflict resolution that my fieldwork experience involved, I gained an insight about the crucial importance of emotional reflexivity, which I discuss in this chapter as an essential element of research integrity and, ultimately, of ethical research. This will also lead me to discussing the importance of conducting fieldwork in a “radical empirical” way (Jackson 1989) whereby the researcher participates as a person debating, expressing their own views in the attempt to understand people’s live predicaments in the field. Jackson argues that by “turning from epistemology toward the everyday world of lived experience, the radical empiricist is inclined to judge the value of an idea, not just against the antecedent experiences or the logical standards of scientific inquiry but also against the practical, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic demands of life” (1989: 13). It is this approach that I found most useful in making sense both methodologically and theoretically of my fieldwork, and at the same time, I would argue that such approach puts

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greater demands for self-awareness and integrity to the researcher.

Fieldwork and Impression Management Whilst gaining ethical approval from the Mental Health NHS Trust to carry out my research it was agreed with the Trust management, the hospital manager, the ward manager and consultant psychiatrist that I would become a full-time paid nursing assistant (NA)1 because they felt that psychiatric patients would not appreciate having a researcher “hanging around” the ward all the time. Becoming a member of staff provided me with an interesting research perspective because it allowed me to become embedded within the daily routines of work. This embeddedness was shaped around the daily shift work patterns, routines and tasks that I was expected to complete. My position meant that other members of staff quickly became accustomed to my role. It also allowed me to be more flexible in how I observed and questioned areas and emerging themes. For example, carrying out informal interviews with members of staff would happen while serving lunch or in the stock room while carrying out a stock check. My role provided me with a bottom-up view of how the organisation worked that was not just based on observations and understanding the narratives of those being studied, but it was also based on a new lived experience of being part of the system. I was therefore able to gain insights about the culture of the ward, hospital and organisation that would otherwise have remained concealed had I remained just a researcher. The fact that I was moving between different sections of staff meant that my use of “impression management” (Manning 1992) became a vital technique of my field research. In order to fit in and become accepted, I had to adopt different styles depending on the groups I was meeting and interacting with. Some of these interactions were more thought out than others, but the point was that I was often prepared to present myself in relation to how I expected and imagined the other person or group perceived me. Erving Goffman (1959) describes this process as a performance where “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers” (p.32). The performer understands this interaction as authentic and maintains a convincing “front.” This expected image we present to others could be performed via material objects, such as the clothes that doctors wear, or through mannerisms and embodied

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acts, such as styles of speech and behaviour. Thus, “front stage” performances become a “dramatic realisation” that allows people to convey a message. Performances can also be carried out by teams that hold the same aims; for example, a board of directors conveying a message to its employees through a very specific usage of acts and gestures recognised to be representative of the “directing” or “leadership” group. After the individual or team have come off the stage they move into a relaxed environment, or “back-region” – where performances are “knowingly contradicted as a matter of course” (p.110). Thus, for Goffman, the social world is made up of interactions that are situated on a stage where we oscillate between being actors and audience and between back and front stages. Goffman (1959) argues that this process is part of everyday interaction; however, in the case of an ethnographer, it could also become an important tool, which may be consciously used during fieldwork. Berreman (1972:11) suggests that the ethnographer and his subjects are both performers and audience to one another. They have to judge one another’s motives and other attributes on the basis of short but intensive contact and then decide what definition of themselves and the surrounding situation they want to project; what they will reveal and what they will conceal and how best to do it. Each will attempt to convey to the other the impression that will best serve his interests as he sees them. 2

In my case, this “impression management” was a complex process because I continually had to conform to different codes of interaction with male and female nursing assistants, and also with different health professionals who had very different ideas and expectations of me. My initial observations showed that dress code was extremely important in the hospital. Thus, when I attended meetings with hospital management or at the Trust's headquarters, I would be expected to wear a jacket and shoes with an open neck shirt rather than trainers and T-shirt. I would also regularly enter the room holding a diary in my hand and I made an effort to also carry a smart bag on my shoulder instead of my usual small rucksack. But there were times when I would attend meetings with the hospital's management straight after I had finished a shift. I would then make sure that at least the casual clothes I wore while at work consisted of casual trousers, for example, chino trousers and a polo shirt. I would also make sure that my ID badge was attached to the polo shirt and not to my trouser belt, where it would be less obvious to other people. I feared being caught as potentially contravening the Trust policy according to which ID badges must be visible at all times. While working on the ward I mainly wore jeans and a shirt, T-shirt, polo-shirt or jumper. I wanted to make sure

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that my appearance while working was tidy but not too smart. Dress code adaptation was a means for everyone in the hospital, including me, not only to fit in but also to present and live a sense of identity. I made a lot of effort to adapt as I wished everyone to be comfortable in my presence just as I wished to be comfortable too. How I presented myself on a daily basis to the different groups in terms of dress code was influenced heavily by a conscious employment of “impression management.” However, there were certain impressions over which I had less control, for example, my race, gender and academic status. Soon after I began my fieldwork, I realised that all these made my position unusual. Race and class emerged as important determinants of hospital staff’s position and relations, including my own position among and relations with other members of staff. Most support staff were black migrant workers from West Africa and some found it hard to understand why I wanted to work as a nursing assistant if I could get a better job. I soon began to perceive unspoken mixtures of social, professional, racial and class hierarchies in the hospital through the way I was being treated in comparison to others. Doctors, staff nurses, social workers, and other sections of the qualified staff perceived me in a different light from the other NAs. For example, if a doctor who did not know me came into the nursing office while I was there, he or she greeted me as though I was another doctor or qualified nurse. Or, they would ask me questions of a professional nature that nursing assistants would not normally be expected to know. This example from my PhD thesis illustrates such a typical exchange: Doctor: Can you tell me what the results were for patient X’s drug screen? Me: Sorry, I am not sure. If you hold a second I will get a qualified nurse who will tell you. Doctor: Oh, you are not qualified? Me: No, I am a nursing assistant on the ward… Doctor: Oh, ok, don't worry then.

However, when doctors and nurses became familiar with my combined role as a NA and PhD student, I was given tasks and responsibilities that other NAs were not normally given. An example of this would be when a consultant would ring the ward for information on a certain patient, and whether I thought a patient's behaviour had improved or deteriorated over a certain amount of time. In the eyes of most doctors and nurses, my position as a NA did not matter; it was the fact that I was white, middle class and studying for a PhD that informed their image of me within the hospital. This is how I entered a subtle field of racial and ethnic relations

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crossing with social and professional hierarchies. In this context, my daily encounters such as chit-chat and the use of impression management provided me with subtle techniques to gain trust and acceptance but their use also raised important questions about the ethical relationship between the researcher and the researched. For example, my drive to gain access in the field could also result in my becoming a party to moral dilemmas (Norris 1993). Norris argues that the “practice of participant observation is, inevitably, interactionally deceitful. Researchers have to cultivate informants and reduce the distance between themselves and those” (p. 31). Norris goes on to explain: “Manufacturing trust requires getting one’s hands dirty, since it is not something that can be promised with declarations of confidentiality”(p.132). This somewhat, no-holds-barred account of fieldwork leaves the researcher with little scope to adopt an ethically sound approach to their work. May (1993) carries this point forward by stating that the relationship between ethics and social research is a complicated one because the amount of control the researcher has over the research process will influence the exercise of ethical decisions themselves. Quoting Urie Bronfenbreener, May also argues that “the only safe way to avoid violating principles of professional ethics is to refrain from doing social research altogether” (Brofenbreener 1952: 453 cited in May 1993: 43). Such reflections raise important challenges for the ethnographer. Ethnographic research has elements of “covertness” a lot more often than it is sometimes recognized. In my case, for example, I was “doing research” while chatting as walking into meetings with consultant psychiatrists clutching to my Filo-Fax, or going for drinks with my colleagues/research subjects in the pub when I sometimes thought they had the impression that I was not at work as a researcher (see also Burgess 1984). Although I had made it explicit that I was going to conduct ethnographic research and what it may involve, I would argue that I sometimes was conducting what might be considered a form of “covert research.” Akeroyd (1984: 145) points out, “the researcher is never off duty” and furthermore cannot ever be. However, in my experience, research participants sometimes perceived me as off duty and I felt it impossible to break the flow of a situation by reminding them that I was also there as a researcher and therefore researching. The idea that covert research3 is in opposition to ethical approach, where the research subjects have consented to the research, is somewhat misleading because the nature of ethnographic research means that there are times when the research has covert elements to it. One way to resolve this situation has been the introduction of “informed consent” and there has been a widespread belief

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that it may provide ethical certainty. However, arguments against this idea centre around the principle that informed consent can also have elements of “covertness” because the aims and objectives given to the researched are frequently “veiled” (Norris 1993:128-9). Roth (1962) argues that because the fieldworker does not know everything they want to know at the beginning of their study, secrecy is a common occurrence. Thus, we arrive at an intricate link between the anthropological method of extended fieldwork and the complexity of relationships emerging in the process of its implementation. Roth (p. 283-284) concludes by arguing that social science research “cannot be divided into ‘secret’ and the ‘non-secret.’” Such discussion of fieldwork poses important questions about the role of ethics in anthropological fieldwork especially because some scholars believe that “much of anthropological method is essentially theory-less” (Pelto and Pelto 1996: 294). Codes of ethics have indeed challenged anthropologists. Anthropological bodies such as the UK’s Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) provide some guidelines standing in line with the ethical expectations of modern research principles. In relation to informed consent, section 4 states that: “The principle of informed consent expresses the belief in the need for truthful and respectful exchanges between social researchers and the people they study.”4 This appears to be a commonsense view, but it becomes extremely problematic (for the reasons explained above) in anthropological research. Caplan (2003) makes the point that such codes within anthropology are “often highly contested in the formulation, and agreement about interpretation is often problematic” (p.3). This, she argues, is largely due to the fact that ethics goes to the heart of the discipline. She asks the important questions if the concept of what is and what is not ethical research needs to be rethought at each generation or in relation to whether there should be different ethical codes depending on the research context (p.3). Nugent (2001) develops the debate on the ethical role of informed consent by arguing that “Anthropological research is not typically a straightforward reciprocal exchange between scholar and subject, nor could it be. The access the anthropologists have to field subjects is premised on a political asymmetry for which anthropology is not itself directly responsible, but without which it would not have the configuration it does” (2001:13).

Developing this theme, medical anthropologists such as Marshall and Koenig (1996) have argued that informed consent presupposes a cultural disposition that assumes personal autonomy and self-determination. These values, they argue, “often conflict with local traditions that allocate

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decision-making authority to community or religious leaders…. applying western standards of informed consent may represent a form of ethical imperialism” (p. 362-3). “Informed consent” as “good ethical practice” in anthropological research does not really protect the researched staff in a London Hospital, from the anthropologist’s subtle techniques of research, and equally, it does not protect the researcher from scrutiny and criticism. Armbruster (2008) makes the point, in relation to ASA and AAA ethnical guidelines, that the “questioning of ethical conflict between the personal, professional and political remain indeed a subtle subtext” (p.3). The challenge for anthropological research is to maintain integrity within the subtle techniques of research, and this calls for an on-going awareness and questioning by the researched, the researcher and his or her peers. Ethnography, then, should not be seen as a technique as such, but as a system of creative interpretation. It “decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. It describes processes of innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes” (Clifford, 1986:2-3). Ethnography then, is a complex and creative process that incorporates both research and analysis that is heavily based on the subjective interpretation of the anthropologist in the field. In conclusion, fieldwork could indeed be perceived and experienced as impressions management and a performance. A large part of it is about entering, fitting in, understanding and managing fields of relationships, sometimes being perceived as a researcher and sometimes not. Both when I was prepared in a more structured way to conduct fieldwork observations (as in asking questions at a meeting and taking notes) and when I was simply “hanging out,” I was in relation to people not just as a colleague but also as a researcher. This duality posed not only ethical dilemmas but issues about the method, and particularly about emotions management, which I discuss in the following section before I move on to discuss how ethics and method interlink.

Emotions and Fieldwork: the challenges to methods training and reflexivity Thus far I have advanced the argument that the ethnographic process involves the anthropologist using their position in a creative and tactical way so much so that their position becomes akin to an actor playing certain roles at different times. I have also illustrated some of the ethical problems that this concept might raise. I now turn to a discussion of how anthropologists “manage” emotions in the field and to what effect. To do

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this I will first discuss how the emotions of the anthropologist are commonly positioned under the term “culture shock.” I go on to argue that the concept of emotions should also incorporate the conscious and unconscious attachments and reactions that the individual anthropologist has, and how these might be influenced by their own cultural and social past experiences. The term “emotions” in this paper also refers to the unconscious “phantasies” within the psychological framework of the anthropologist, which could influence how we analyse our research. By using the term “phantasy” I am referring to the content of an unconscious mental process, which can influence conscious attitudes and behaviour (Hook 1994). In my experience, most social anthropology students are taught, usually in the first year of an undergraduate degree, to write an essay on fieldwork in order to gain an insight into one of the core features of the discipline. I want to briefly look at an example in the literature widely used for training on fieldwork, not because it is easy material to criticise, but because much of what it refers to, in my experience, still continues to be an accepted training approach and was a large part of my own education to modern day fieldwork. In Social Anthropology in Perspective: The Relevance of Social Anthropology (1976), I. M. Lewis makes an interesting distinction between what the anthropologist does in the field and what psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts do in their disciplines. Although he illustrates that there is a common link between anthropology and the three “psychs,”5 he argues that because anthropology explores the social, emotions are of little use to understanding social structure. He explains that the informant’s “private emotions and idiosyncrasies, and difficulties he experiences in internalising the social norms of his community are of his business” (1976: 22). He goes on to make the point that emotions “are not on our (the anthropologist’s) agenda, at least not until they become such a common feature, showed by so many others, that they qualify as ‘social phenomena’” (p. 22). Such methodological beliefs offer little tools to understand or engage with emotions in anthropology. Lewis also illustrates the need to be able to distinguish the discipline of social anthropology from any other discipline that has a disposition towards the social. In a rather triumphant manner he quotes Seligman as a means of fixing anthropology’s identity: “Field research in Anthropology is what the blood of the martyrs is to the Church” (Seligman cited in Lewis 1976: 27). He then goes on in his own words to say that fieldwork is “our counterpart to the psychoanalyst’s “training analysis,” a traumatic endurance test in which the anthropologist discovers almost as much about himself as about the people he has come

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to study” (p. 27). Although there is a glimpse of emotional recognition, the major difference is that the psychoanalyst is required to have therapy as part of their training, while it appears that the individualised quest for the anthropologist is a self-made option of “finding themselves” whilst in the field. This is most vivid in the concept of “culture-shock” in the context of fieldwork. In a recent book by Russell Bernard called Research Methods in Anthropology (4th Edition): Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (2006), there is a section that reads as a practical manual to coping with culture-shock. Bernard states that “almost all [fieldworkers] report experiencing some form of depression and shock soon after [arriving in the field] – usually within a few weeks” (2006: 379).6 He puts this down to the novelty of fieldwork wearing off and the researcher having to get on with doing research. He recommends that when “anxiety” creeps in about not being able to collect good data that one should focus on highly task orientated activities such as making maps and taking censuses. He then goes on to identify two emotions that can occur. The first is that nothing seems right and you “find yourself very upset at peoples’ eating habits or their child rearing practices. The prospect of having to put up with the local food for a year or more may be frightening” (p.380). The second emotion is that which “commonly involves a feeling that people really don’t want you around” (p.380). However, this subsides when the researcher settles into their research. Bernard makes a further significant point that culture-shock “doesn’t go away because the sources of annoyance don’t go away” (p.381). This is an important point because it illustrates that the emotions of the anthropologist are very present in their day-to-day life in the field and when writing up. However, Bernard’s (p.381) limitation here is that he does not explore to what extent these lingering feelings of “annoyance” are available as conscious, semiconscious or unconscious emotions of the anthropologist and how, if at all they influence how the anthropologist carries out their research and analysis of their data both in a creative or negative way. Furthermore, this account misses out on a whole range of emotions when arriving at fieldwork (see, for example, Davies 2010). Despite recent advancement in understanding fieldwork experience such as the reflexive approach I discuss below, there still remains a concept of the anthropologist “getting on with it.” This implies a rather masculine image of a “stiff upper lip” that in turn excludes the importance of the anthropologist’s emotions so to, as Heald and Deluze (1994) explain, initiate the anthropologist into a Guild. An example of this is the criticism directed at the concept of reflexive practice. Okely (1987) used

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reflexivity as a means of looking back on her childhood at boarding school so as to understand certain areas of her ethnographic material. Autobiography as a reflexive process situated her within the core of the field research and not solely as an outsider looking in. While such an example of reflexivity has a clear role in anthropological research, other approaches have received some critique. For example, Shore calls the “reflexivists” postmodernists who are situated in a “solipsism” or a self-indulgent celebration. He quotes Polier and Roseberry (1989) who state that the concept of self-reflexivity is an “egocentric and nihilistic celebration of the ethnographer as author, creator and consumer of the Other” (Polier and Roseberry 1989 in Shore 1999:29). Beatty (1999) follows Shore’s line by arguing that reflexivity is a failed attempt to show “the readers not only learn the facts but how, in dialogue, the facts are constructed” (1999:95). Beatty goes on to argue that some ethnographic experiences must remain “opaque” and resist analysis. Here, I find similarities with I. M. Lewis’ (1976) account of how to, or rather, how not to approach emotions in the field - both Beatty and Lewis seem to imply that the anthropologist’s own emotions experienced in the field may be a redundant part of the analysis process. Indeed, certain ways of employing the concept of reflexivity could be criticised for creating the image of “naval gazing” or the “righteous researcher” who faces all the elements of the ethnographic experience while “hanging out” with the “natives.” So, Poiler and Roseberry (1989 cited in Shore 1999) have a point when describing it as egocentric. However, Okely makes an important distinction in that self-adoration “is quite different from self-awareness and a critical scrutiny of the self” (1987:2). Okely goes on to argue that exploring and deconstructing oneself is important because the fieldwork process is fundamentally about forming relationships. Therefore, an autobiographical approach means that the anthropologist needs to unpack the meanings behind these relationships (1987:2). Davis (1999:6) mirrors this point by stating that the “purpose of research is to mediate between different constructions of reality, and doing research means increasing understanding of these varying constructs among which is included the anthropologist’s own constructions” (p. 6). In my experience, I found it useful to conceive of reflexivity as making sense of everyday interactions, whether they are mundane or those that appear new, strange or problematic, while carrying out field research. This approach allowed me to include my emotional experiences and explore how they affected my subtle and, at times, unconscious interactions with people in the field.

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The Uses of Reflexivity in a Fieldwork Conflict I will now turn to an extract from my thesis that describes how I came into conflict with a male nursing assistant in the psychiatric hospital in which I was carrying out my research. It illustrates how I analysed the conflict theoretically and by using a reflexive approach. I will also discuss how it was only after a couple of years after finishing my PhD that I realised that the reflexive approach I employed at the time only provided me with limited tools to understand my feelings about the ethnographic encounter. The following passage is from my thesis (Curran 2006:80-83): Mark was a 40 year old man from Nigeria. He had been working as a nursing assistant in the hospital for three years on the ward below mine. He would often come to the ward to play a couple of frames of pool with me if both wards were quiet. Much of our conversation was based on sarcastic joking. For example, he would walk into the lounge where the pool table was and look at me with a serious face and say: Mark: Get off your fat arse white boy and set up the (pool) table because I am going to whip your ass….I have put juju on the table so you are jinxed. Me: Yeah right, let’s see. We would end up laughing and then greet each other by shaking hands and asking how work had been going. One day Mark came to the ward with a new leather Filo-Fax diary that had a leather pouch for his mobile phone to fit into. It was the biggest FiloFax I had ever seen. He sat in the nursing office with it resting on his lap. I told him, sarcastically, that it looked very smart. He replied: Mark: What would you know, you would never be able to afford something like this (joke). Me: Well I would never have enough time to go to Peckham market (Joke). Mark then burst into laughter at my comment. We then spoke about work and then he began to joke again: Mark: John, how can you have a girlfriend and go to university when you dress and look like a thief? Me: (Laughing) Wel,l at least my father is not a thief. Mark: (Not laughing and serious) Never speak about any of my family like that. Mark stood up and walked out of the office and went back to his ward. I had offended Mark by joking about his father. I had misjudged the boundaries of our relationship as to what was acceptable and what was not. The joking dialogue was personal and similar to two close friends who joke on a personal level with each other but do not offend each other. My problem was that I took this for granted and therefore joked with Mark within the boundaries of my own cultural habitus (Bourdieu 1977). Both

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our cultural norms were very similar in relation to joking, but the differences were large enough for me to be able to offend him. Joking among friends and using personal topics such as families and parents is common in my own peer group culture. In turn, this type of joking creates what Radcliffe-Brown calls “relations of alliance” which form and organise stable systems of social behaviour (Radcliff-Brown 1952). An example of this was when I was teenager at school. There was a practice of “cussing” (joking, or “put downs”) whereby two young people would “cuss” each other’s parents. Much of the “cussing” was vulgar and crude; however, the aim was to “out do” your opponent with better “cusses”. If one of the contestants became offended or could not reply with a better “cuss” they would lose the exchange. The group watching the exchange would judge who was the winner. Although “cussing” became an important “tournament of value” (Appadurai 1986) within my school life to gain status, it has now become a sardonic way that one jokes with close friends today. This autobiographical account on my own background allowed me to understand my cultural background and position in the work environment. I apologised to Mark a week later. He did not want any of the joking directed at his family. I felt that I should also tell him why I had said what I did and that it was part of my teenage years at school. The joking continued but I realised any directed to his family was not acceptable and I therefore avoided it.

This is how I approached this conflict and how I wrote about it in my thesis. The concept of reflexivity, in terms of analysing this ethnographic encounter when writing-up, had provided me with a way of questioning my own experiences as a teenager and how they became naturalised and acceptable in my relationship with friends. I learnt from being reflexive because I realised the limitations of being truly myself in the field while also managing impressions and performing. Therefore, being reflexive meant that I only focused on those emotions that seemed to fit into my management of my performance. To fully engage with my deeper emotions would have potentially prevented me from doing this because it would have potentially exposed an unconscious part of my performance that did not portray the right impression. Within my field research in the psychiatric hospital I did try to interact on a social level and be prepared to discuss issues and convey my own views. In other words, I was also trying to be myself. This resulted in not just asking questions, but debating, chatting and joking. Therefore, I placed myself in a position that included being interactive within my field of research. This is similar to Jackson's (1989) idea of “radical empiricism” and the “lived experience” which I referred to in the opening of this chapter when one’s whole experience comes into play, allowing the researcher actively

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to debate and exchange points of views with others. However, in the example of my fieldwork above, the radical part of my being a researcher was not at the forefront when I was simply attempting to patch up Mark’s initial dislike for me. My reaction was more of an attempt to unconsciously maintain an appropriate impression management and performance and fit in. The reason for my not being a radical empiricist was not that my attitude was covert, it was simply not entirely available to myself at that very moment.

Emotional Reflexivity What the reflexive approach I employed at the time of writing my thesis lacked was an ability to work with the unconscious emotions that the anthropologist experiences. In the ethnographic extract, I used reflexivity to make sense of the conflict between Mark and me while I was also able to use anthropological theory of joking and competition alongside my own experiences as a teenager. However, what was lacking was the ability to explore how I felt about the conflict and how this affected how I understood it and how I wrote about it. Such reflexive analysis did not allow me to take into account the feelings of anger I had towards Mark for making me feel that I was to blame, or my feelings of disempowerment and inferiority, or my possible unconscious feelings of racial and cultural superiority which were painful to explore. I could have simply reduced the experience as a “culture-shock” and framing it in this way would have been a sufficient performance to the academic audience. However, I don’t think this would have allowed me to deconstruct how and why I analysed and wrote this interaction in the way I did. Sometime after I wrote my thesis I took an introductory course in psychotherapy and I attended thirty sessions of group analysis at the Maudsley Hospital in London, which was a requirement of the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) for this course. It was during that group analysis when my rather raw emotions towards Mark - emotions that I thought I did not have - became tangible and conscious. Getting in touch with these emotions, prompted me to revisit this ethnographic example and I found myself questioning why I had feelings of anger. Through this questioning, both individually and within the group analysis process, I was able to explore feelings I had in relation to discrimination, racism, power, superiority and masculinity. I then began to question if I would have had a different theoretical and methodological take on that conflict had I then had my current insight into and ability to analyse my emotions (during the encounter, before I

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analyzed it, or while writing-up the process). Even though I do not have a definitive answer, this is still an important question to ask. I might have found it easier to be a radical empiricist and share myself rather than just try to fit in through my response. However, it became clear to me that these underlying feelings had charged my interest and my stance in engaging with academic debates such as those related to the interrelations between power, work and racism. There are questions that remain to be addressed, namely: how come certain emotions take precedence in certain situations, how do we work through them and to what effect, that is, how do they influence the focus of research and the analysis of data? What would be important is to explore how emotions are unconsciously part of inner “phantasies,” where feelings of power and desire, belonging, hatred and racism are present within the anthropologist’s mind, but also suppressed within it. This, I feel, would then challenge the assumption that culture shock is the primary cause of emotions in the field. In my case, the primary cause of my emotions was the complex negotiation of relationships with people in a field charged with racial, ethnic, class and other forms of inequality and conflict, all of which affected and engaged me deeply. I do not advocate that anthropologists should include their emotions as anthropological text within the methodological section of their thesis, or in fact anywhere in their thesis. But what I suggest is that anthropologists experience emotions and these could influence their analysis as well as the formulation of research questions. One anthropologist recently said to me in relation to how anthropologists write: “If you know someone and then read their thesis you could learn a lot about where they are coming from and why they chose to focus on a specific area.” The comment referred to the links that exist between the anthropologist’s subjectivity (including the emotional being of the anthropologist), and their research interests and approach (cf. also Behar 1996). Therefore, understanding the states of being of the anthropologist could potentially become an important analytical process that would support and enhance the anthropologist’s creativity. Equally important, is the understanding of how our states of being that influence our research could also further the debates about the ethical implications of fieldwork and the notion of radical empiricism in anthropological fieldwork (e.g. see all chapters in Davies and Spencer 2010 and Davies this volume). The emotions of the anthropologist therefore need to be seen as thick description, not only of the research topic, but also of the anthropologist’s self. This could also enrich the understanding of sometimes limiting notions supposed to capture fieldwork experience such as that of “culture shock.”

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Conclusion The role of emotions that the anthropologist experiences while carrying out field research could, I have suggested, influence how the anthropologist interprets data and generates meaning from it. The nature of ethnography is largely unstructured and unpredictable and is moulded by the anthropologist’s ability to develop formal and personal relationships which together aim to generate understanding of the culture being studied. Therefore, I have argued that for anthropologists to be ethical, they need to engage in a rigorous evaluation of what an ethical approach (and especially informed consent), actually involves during fieldwork. Such an evaluation comprises a personal process which incorporates the conscious and unconscious emotions of the anthropologist and their ability to engage with members of the culture being studied, and this needs to be explicitly acknowledged. The anthropologist in the field strives to receive approval and acceptance from those being studied while at the same time acting out certain roles (both consciously and unconsciously) within their ethnographic field. This performance, or process of impression management, enables the anthropologist to move between different social spaces within their field research, allowing them to mould their identities in order to create a desired image. Fieldwork may sometimes take the form of a performance based on the creation and negotiation of multiple impressions and identities in relation to research participants, leaving the role of informed consent problematic. Therefore, anthropological discussion of ethics should involve a more rigorous analysis of our methods rather than continue to refer to fieldwork as some mystery. The need for ethnographic research to fit into the current ethical discourses dominated by biomedical research, has sometimes precluded the possibility of acknowledging the importance of the anthropologist’s emotions in the research process. I have also addressed critically the use of important yet sometimes limiting notions to explain emotions in the field such as “culture shock” which implies that emotions become a practical hurdle that is to be “overcome” through time and rationalisation in the field. I have also found some limitations in employing reflexivity if it does not include emotional reflexivity. My ethnographic example from my research on a psychiatric ward illustrated this point by showing how what initially I saw as a reflexive approach provided me with only a certain amount of insight into the meaning of a field conflict. The inclusion of an analysis of both my conscious feelings and my phantasies provided me with a deeper understanding of the research questions I posed. It was

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through working on my self-awareness that I was able to feel able to conduct a radical empirical analysis rather than simply adapt to field situations. However, in British academia, anthropologists do not receive, at least not to my knowledge, an instruction in the far-reaching consequences of self-awareness and self-development. I want to end by revisiting I.M Lewis’s point that fieldwork is “our counterpart to the psychoanalyst’s ‘training analysis’…” (1976:22). Maybe now we could develop the creative nature of fieldwork by incorporating what might be useful from the process that psychoanalysts go through. Just as a psychoanalyst uses the concepts of transference and countertransference as a means of analysing the therapeutic environment, by exploring their own feelings and emotions, the anthropologist could potentially benefit from a pre- and post-fieldwork space to question, explore and discuss the role emotions play within their choice of research theme, analysis, and interpretation of their ethnographic research. Such a reflective space would also enable the anthropologist to deconstruct the meaning behind their performances of impression management whilst in the field. This would both enhance the creative process of anthropological interpretation while creating an anthropological framework to ethical field research and analysis. Failure to do so could result in the field work becoming a process, to use Okely’s phase, “where positivism destroys the notion of experience” (1987:3).

References Akeroyd, A. 1984. “Ethics in Relation to Informants: The Profession and Governments.” In R. Ellen, ed., Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. Academic Press, London, 133-154. Appadurai, A 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspecitve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 363. Armbruster, H 2008. “Introduction. The Ethics of Taking Sides.” In H. Armbruster and A. Lærke, eds. Taking Sides: Ethic, Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 1-22. Beatty, A. 1999. “On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative.” In C. W. Watson, Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Sterling, VA USA: Pluto Press, 74-98. Bernard, R 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology (4th Edition): Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches: Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

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Berreman, G. 1972. “Behind Many Masks: Ethnography and Impression Management.” In G. Berreman, ed., Hindus of the Himalayas: Ethnography and Change. Berkeley: University of California Press, xvii – ivii. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burgess, R 1991. In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research. London and New York: Routledge. Caplan, P. 2003. “Introduction. Anthropology and Ethics.” In P. Caplan, ed., The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas. London: Routledge, 1-34. Clifford, J. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1-26. Davies, J, 2010. “Disorientation, Dissonance and Altered Perception in the Field.” In J. Davies and D. Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 79-97. Davies, J. and D. Spencer, eds. 2010. Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Davis, C. A. 1999. Reflexive Ethnography. A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. London: Routledge Fielding, N. 1981. The National Front. London and New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. 1998. “Deep Hanging Out.” In The New York Review of Books 45 (16): 69-72. Goffman, E 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane. Heald, S. 1994. “Every Man Has a Hero: Oedipal Themes in Gisu Circumcision.” In S. Heald and A. Deluz, eds., 1994. Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An Encounter through Culture, London: Routledge, 184-209. Hook, R.H. 1994. “Psychoanalysis, Unconscious Phantasy and Interpretation.” In S. Heald and A. Deluz, eds., Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An Encounter through Culture, London: Routledge, 114-129. Jackson, M. 1983. “Knowledge of the Body.” Man 18: 327 –45. —. 1989. Paths towards a Clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Enquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lewis, I.M. 1976. Social Anthropology in Perspective: The Relevance of Social Anthropology, London: Penguin.

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Manning, P. 1992. Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marshall P. and B. A. Koenig 1996. “Bioethics in Anthropology: Perspectives on Culture, Medicine, and Morality” in C. F. Sargent and Th. M. Johnson, eds., Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method, 2nd edition, London: Praeger, 349-73. Mascarenhas–Keyes, S. 1987. “The Native Anthropologist: Constraints and Strategies in Research.” In A. Jackson, ed., Anthropology at Home. ASA Monograph 25, 180-195. May, T. 1993. “Feelings Matter: Inverting a Hidden Equation.” In D. Hobbs and T. May, eds., Interpreting The Field: Accounts of Ethnography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 69-98. Nader, L. 1974. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up” in D. Hymes, (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Vintage Books, 284-311. Norris, C. 1993. “Some Ethical Considerations of Field-work with the Police”, in D. Hobbs, and T. May, eds., Interpreting The Field: Accounts of Ethnography. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 122-144. Nugent, S. 2000. “The Yanomami, Science and Ethics.” Anthropology Today 17 (3): 10-14. Okely, J. 1987. “Fieldwork up the M1: Policy and Political Aspects.” in A. Jackson, ed., Anthropology at Home. ASA Monograph 25: 55-73. Pelto, P.J. and G. H. Pelto. 1996. “Research Designs in Medical Anthropology.” In F. Sargent Carolyn and Th. M. Johnson, eds., Medical Anthropology Contemporary Theory and Method (Revised Edition). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 269-297. Polier, N. and W. Rosberry (1989) “’Tristes Tropes’: Post-modern Anthropologists Encounter the Other and Discover Themselves.” Economy and Society 18(2) 245-64. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen and West. Rosenham, D. L. 1973. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179 (4070): 250-8. Roth, J 1962. “Comments on Secret Observation.” Social Problems 9 (3): 283-4. Shore, C. 1999. “Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the ‘Self’ in Ethnographic Writing (Italy).” In C. W. Watson, ed., Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press, 25-48.

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Notes 1

A nursing assistant or NA is an unqualified member of the nursing team. Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes (1987) used “impression management” as a means of gaining access to the different sections of the Goan Village, from women to the 'big-men'. Although she classified herself as a 'native and anthropologist' she still experienced difficulties becoming accepted in her community. She adopted Goffman's notion of “dramaturigical exercise” and arranged her personal wardrobe so that she had both Western and Indian clothes. When meeting the big-men she wore “executive, London style clothes” and lipstick. When she interviewed sailors she wore locally made clothes and when speaking with Hindus she wore a sari and “clip-on” nose ring. 3 By covert research I mean where the researcher “goes undercover” leaving the research subjects with no knowledge that you are carrying out research on them. Two classic examples of this are Fielding’s (1981) research amongst the National Front and Rosenhan’s (1982) research in a psychiatric hospital. 4 http://www.theasa.org/ethics/guidelines.htm 5 I think that it is probably unfair on the latter three disciplines to group them together because it implies that they are a homogenous professional group when in fact they have differing theoretical and methodological approaches that are often in conflict with each other. 6 The concept of culture shock has traditionally been linked to studying abroad where the anthropologists have to make a home in the new environment and adapt to it. The anthropologist researching abroad is expected to become familiar with their alien environment and in some way fit into the daily life. The fact is that the well documented emphasis on distance and travel, culture-shock and the learning of a new language are present wherever research takes place. As far back as the early 1970’s anthropologists such as Nader (1974) argued that culture shock can appear in any research setting and the term is really used as a ploy to attempt to make students study abroad. 2

CHAPTER FOUR ASSESSING THE RELEVANCE AND EFFECTS OF “KEY EMOTIONAL EPISODES” FOR THE FIELDWORK PROCESS PETER BERGER

For a long time the role of “emotions” has been acknowledged as a crucial factor in the process of fieldwork, particularly in those branches of the discipline in the USA and Europe that have been strongly influenced by psychology and psychoanalysis. Devereux (1967), Parin, Morgenthaler and Parin-Matthèy (1978, [1971]) as well as Nadig (1997, [1986]) are examples of the effort to introduce in various ways insights of psychoanalysis, such as the dynamics of transference, into anthropological fieldwork methods (cf. Adler 1993; Zinser 1984). Despite the influence and value of their endeavours most anthropologists without the respective training do not include these methodological ideas in their fieldwork, which, of course, does not mean that emotions do not matter in their cases. Being trained in social and cultural anthropology without any deeper knowledge of psychology and psychoanalysis this also holds true in my case. However, even if lacking this particular background, I attempt in this paper to pay attention to “emotions in the field” in a systematic way and to make a contribution to the ongoing debate. Reflecting on the process of my fieldwork in highland Orissa (India) and on “participant observation” elsewhere (Berger 2004), I recalled an incident, an emotional outburst on my side, in which, for a moment, the side of “observation” was at zero and the aspect of “participation” at a maximum. In the present article, I will take this specific fieldwork experience as a starting point and try to unravel its more general implications for ethnographic research and understanding. More specifically, I will ask whether in the fieldwork process, apart from the

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usual emotional ups and downs, certain situations stand out that have a more radical impact on the persons involved. They may open up a different perspective on the field the researcher lives in and temporarily provide an interface and meeting point of experiencing “self” and “other.” I would suggest calling such situations “key emotional episodes” (KEE).1 They are key because they can exert essential influence on the field situation: a break-up of relations, a change of status, a change of research situation, or a deepening of social ties among other possibilities. Further, one crucial characteristic of KEE is that they happen without the intention of the ethnographer. They are instances when the ethnographer has no conscious control over the situation. Rather, he has lost control and is subordinated to the flow of events. In contrast to the ideal field situation, when the mindful actions of the ethnographer are guided by his rational research aims, here, emotions and the body take over. KEE as understood here, I assume, occur in most fieldwork processes.2 After I have presented, contextualized and analysed the particular incident of my fieldwork I want to compare it with three very different cases as reported by Timm Lau (2006), Jean Briggs (1986) and Renato Rosaldo (1984, 1989) in order to point out similarities and difference of their experiences and to assess the effects and relevance of KEE.

An example from Orissa The situation in question occurred at the very end of my main research period. This is significant for I would not have acted like I did in the early phases of fieldwork.3 I started my fieldwork in the highlands of central India in January 1999 and in three periods closely following each other I spent twenty-one months in the field.4 My research focussed on the rituals and festivals (their interconnections and the broad issues of social structure, cultivation, the person and healing that go along with it) of the Gadaba, a highland society of Orissa whose death rituals have attracted the attention of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1943), Karl Gustav Izikowitz (1969) and Georg Pfeffer (2001). I have described the process of my fieldwork in some detail elsewhere (Berger 2004, 2007: 483ff) and here I will only mention few aspects as a background for the discussion of the present topic. One of the events that particularly consolidated my position in the village was the arrival of Amrei, my German partner. I had already been living in the village for about six month when I travelled to the coast to meet her, to travel back up into the hills together. To our surprise she was received as a new bride in the village and after a week we had a fully fledged wedding. Since I was

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associated with the dominant group in the village of the totemic cobra category, Amrei was immediately associated with “our” affinal group inside the village belonging to the tiger category.5 In the marriage process the respective agnatic and affinal groups were engaged. One of my “brother-in-laws” will feature in the episode I will soon be describing. Shortly afterwards, Amrei had to leave back to Germany and came back almost a year later to stay with me during my last five months in the field. The last marriage rituals were concluded in this period. The difficulties of entering the field have to some extend been pointed out in the literature but most ethnographies I know are rather quiet on the problems of leaving it.6 The last weeks of my major research period in April 2001 were a very intense time in several respects. I was busy doing interviews and had the somewhat naïve ambition to settle all the remaining open questions in the remaining time. As mentioned above, my wife had been with me in the field for the last five months of research and in the last two weeks we were invited by five to ten villagers’ houses each day. Such invitations always included the consumption of rice liquor or beer, meat and rice. Our pleading for mercy and our pretending to have bad stomachs were not sufficient to stave off the many gentle but determined requests that we consume the offered food and drink. Of course all preparations for leaving the field had to be undertaken, buying and secretly distributing gifts for example, and on top of all it was the time of a major village festival that lasts for about four weeks. The long periods of separation from my wife provided enough ground for interpersonal tensions during periods when we were suddenly living closely together in the field. On the tenth day before we left we were invited to nine households and, in the late afternoon, as part of the festival, the men’s ritual hunt was about to take place. Although I was already quite drunk by then (as a consequence of the previously offered or “forced” beer and liquor), I left my wife behind in the mud house. She had been upset and asked me to remain with her, but I felt it was my ethnographic duty to observe and participate in the ritual hunt. As we were about to leave the village someone came running up to me declaring that my wife was crying loudly and that I had better go back to calm her down. I ran back annoyed that she was so demanding and that she had forced me back to the village. On arrival, I saw several of our female neighbours sitting on our veranda. I rushed into the house where a loud quarrel developed between my wife and I. Obviously it reached a degree that worried the people, who were assembling outside, opened our door and came pouring in. At that moment it all became too much for me and I went off the rails, shoved the crowd out of the house so that several of them tumbled into the yard. In a fury, I

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kicked filled water pots off the veranda, shouted insults towards the astonished neighbours and told them to leave me alone. But when I retreated back into the house the women I had just pushed away followed to console and embrace me and my wife, both of us in tears by then. The next morning as I sat on the veranda, I realized that news was swiftly spreading through the village that I had beaten up my wife. Villagers came strolling by to ask me how I could beat her up so severely. Neither our assurances that nothing of the kind had happened, nor the fact that my wife had no marks or bruises, convinced them otherwise. Most seemed more curious than perturbed, apart from one of my classificatory “wife’s brothers” (a member of the tiger group in the village that Amrei was considered to belong to) who was clearly outraged. He threatened to take her back and told me that if he took her, I should then see where I would get my meals from. The situation was complicated further as during village festivals public fighting is prohibited and therefore some villagers, trying to define the quarrel as public fight, also tried to extract from me a fine for breaking the taboo: they wanted a chicken or something of this sort. Although, it must be said, that they did this rather jokingly and no sanctions followed. After I had flatly refused to accept any invitations by the end of the day the round of hospitality had finally resumed and soon the incident was forgotten in the flow of further events.

Contextualization Obviously the behaviours and interpretations of the persons involved have to be situated in context to become intelligible and to distinguish the different aspects of this episode. I will briefly comment on each aspect in turn: firstly, the emotional experience of the researcher, secondly, the expression of emotion; and thirdly, the interpretation of this expression and the reactions of villagers. I would argue that the first aspect, my personal emotional experience, the mixed feelings, the stresses piling up in the last weeks of my research, and the factors prompting the quarrel between my wife and I were all rather irrelevant for the other two facets of the situation. My actual psychological state did not directly determine the way I expressed my emotions, neither did it affect the way the villagers interpreted the event and reacted to it. Rather, what had influenced my mode of expression was my socialization into the local society, which, of course, was never “complete” as my status never lost its ambivalence, oscillating between “insider” and “outsider” depending on context. Despite this incompletion, what socialisation had occurred obviously had affected me. As we know

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doing research means to “inhabit another world” (Henry Louis Gates, in Shokeid 1995: 15) completely, mentally, but also bodily, by adopting gestures, ways of acting, and the like. This process could well be described and analysed with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the incorporation of patterns of thinking, perceiving and acting. At village meetings, for example, I had time and again witnessed how young men went into sudden fits of anger. They would be furious for some minutes, shouting, maybe beating their chest, seemingly on the verge of violence. Then they would calm down again, for no apparent reason and someone else would take over. These meetings never turned into fights, but I regularly witnessed actual violence in other contexts, particularly between brothers and between fathers and sons. In addition to the episode I have just described I recall at least two other occasions when I had been engaged in a quarrel and surprised myself at the emotions I displayed.7 In short, what I want to suggest here is that my expression of emotion in the described situation seemed in consonance with the disruptive show of emotions young men in this society express at times.8 This is perhaps one reason why the villagers who were part of this scene perceived my behaviour the way they did: as a normal event. It felt like most of them thought they knew what had happened and nobody seriously interrogated why I had acted this way or what had made me upset. They might have rather wondered why it had happened only then and not before. The only novel aspect, it seemed, was that it had happened to me. Having pointed out the general potential for emotional and sometimes violent outbursts in young men, I also have to mention what husband-wife and brother-sister relationships are typically about, that is, which standardized forms interaction takes. Unlike husband and wife relationships in the Hindu dominated plains, in the Gadaba village, violent public fights between spouses are not uncommon. In such instances the wife in no way plays only a passive and submissive part. She may slap her husband in the face in the middle of the village while he may try to drag her literally away by her hair. When out fetching wood with other women my wife was not asked if I would beat her, but how much. Thus, the fact of being husband and wife by itself accounts for quarrels and even violent fights. However, I never witnessed or heard about violence between a grown up brother and his sister. To the contrary, it is to her father and brothers that a woman who feels she has been ill-treated will return for solace, leaving her husband behind for a while. In a submissive manner he will show up in his wife’s brother’s place beg pardon and try to persuade her to return. Briefly, a brother-sister relationship remains close and

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protective throughout their lives; a husband-wife relationship is close but frequently strained and possibly violent.9 Having offered these comments, the interpretations and reactions of my neighbours and other villagers may now appear more comprehensible. The quarrel and assumed violence between my wife and I were not regarded as an anomaly but as the usual state of affairs. The latent amusement I saw in some of the villagers’ faces now seems to read: “finally it has happened to them.” Also my wife’s brother’s rage now appears equally understandable, given the conventional brother-sister relationship. By threatening that I would have to cook for myself soon, he ignored the well-known fact that Amrei never cooked but that both of us were eating every day in the house of one of my “brothers.” But it was just the thing you would tell your brother-in-law in such a situation. Also my classificatory “mother,” whom I had pushed into the yard was in no way angry with me, but instantly hugged me for consolation. During the last days of my fieldwork I was too busy to reflect on this incident, although in retrospect I think that this episode can be regarded as one crucial moment of my research. For an instant the realms of “own” and “other” fundamentally became blurred, the perception and experience of self and other merged. I lost my composure and self-constraint and spontaneously acted in a manner I have witnessed many times in this society. In his famous introduction to the Argonauts Malinowski wrote about the “plunges into the life of the natives” (1922: 22). I would now like to explore whether the KEE I experienced can be regarded as such a “plunge” into a culture. If that is the case, what were its effects and can a reflection on these effects contribute to our understanding of method and ethnographic learning or not?

Analysis Malinowski is in fact a good starting point in considering what I have called KEE. He states that contrasting to the “skeleton (…) of the constitution” (1922: 17) or the norms of a society that can be discovered by survey work10 there is another crucial dimension of social life which requires a different method. He variously calls this dimension “realities of human life” (p. 17), “tone of behaviour” (p. 20) and sums it up as the “imponderabilia of actual life and typical behaviour” (p. 20). This is the dimension not about what is done, but about how actions are performed; it concerns the styles of behaviour. The appropriate method to gain insight into this dimension is participation: the ethnographer should “join in” (p. 21) or plunge into the social life around him.

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Besides delineating the dimension and suggesting the method, Malinowski outlines the aims and hoped for results, but he is careful, almost hesitant, in doing so. One should try, he writes rather vaguely, to penetrate the “mental attitude” expressed by such facts (p. 19) and he himself had “carried away a distinct feeling that their [the Trobrianders’] behaviour, their manner of being, in all sorts of tribal transactions, became more transparent and easily understandable than it had been before” (p. 22, emphasis mine). The emotional episode described before could be regarded as a form of the participation Malinowski has in mind. But it is different in regard to his method insofar as this situation in the Gadaba village was not under the control of the ethnographer.11 A crucial characteristic of KEE is that the researcher is not intentionally participating or “joining in” in this or that way, but that it happens to him, it is a situation beyond control. Further, as the immersion is experienced as complete for a moment the results in understanding the other can, if at all, only be perceived through retrospective reflection. Here, I address the question whether “participant experience” can be a viable methodology. The situation at hand could be regarded as a form of participant experience, and, I would argue that it may add to our understanding of the field or it may be important for the fieldwork process in other ways. Since it is accidental, it would, however, be difficult to follow up as a methodology in the strict sense. If a methodological lesson can be drawn it is in equipping fieldworkers before entering the field with an awareness of the relevance of such unpredictable situations of irritation and emotional confrontation (cf. Nadig 1997: 39f). In evaluating the importance of KEEs it may be useful to distinguish understanding from effects of a different kind. I first want to address the notion of understanding on which Malinowski also put great emphasis, as this will be of particular concern when we later discuss other examples of KEEs. Malinowski wrote that he had the “feeling” that he “understood” more through his actual participation. Feeling and understanding seem to stand closely together here. So what kind of knowledge are we talking about? The work of Bourdieu (1997) could provide further insight. I mentioned his notion of habitus already when trying to grasp how I had picked up a certain type of behavioural pattern in the course of my fieldwork. Obviously Bourdieu and Malinowski have more than a faint resemblance in common when contrasting constitution or objective structures on the one hand from actual behaviour or practice on the other. Like Malinowski, Bourdieu distinguishes dimensions of social life, the practice of science from the practice of everyday life. But he then goes

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further and contrasts different modes of knowledge (1997: 25f): theoretical (“subjectivist” and “objectivist”) and practical epistemology, which would then require different theoretical approaches. To understand the actor’s point of view, which is related to primary experience, and to understand how social behaviour is structured without the actors explicitly following rules all the time, Bourdieu devised the idea of habitus as sense of practice which draws attention to the fact that social action is not so much a matter of conscious thinking but rather a semi-conscious state of the body (hexis) that provides orientation in social life as a “sense” (p. 69f). This sense of practice, “the feel for the social game” (p. 27) may be harder to pinpoint ethnographically than what he refers to as “objective structures.” This might be similar to the problem of Malinowski relating his “concrete evidence” to the “tone of behaviour.” For the moment we can note that the described case of a KEE is closely related to what Bourdieu describes as a sense of practice. But if ethnographers do have experiences of this sort, how could they translate them back to the level of reflexive understanding? Malinowski seemed to have the idea that data pertaining to the dimension of “imponderabilia of social life” is complementary to the one leading to “hard facts.” So we would have two different domains, maybe one of knowledge and one of a kind of feeling for the social life. Nevertheless he hoped that experience in one domain could further understanding in the other. Bourdieu also distinguishes internal embodied structures from external objective ones in order to argue for their mutual and perpetual constitution; he considers these two aspects to be two forms of the social and certainly conceives them to be constantly interacting. Both authors, then, seem to see an analytic difference between the two dimensions, but think of them as related. But for Bourdieu, the sense of practice of the actors is particular insofar as they are part of the action with all its consequences. In other words, an ethnographer cannot fully grasp the sense in which, for example, an actor in his society has fear of sorcery, because he is external to social action and has never lost a season’s crop because of black magic. Thus, the ethnographer’s sense of practice will always remain incomplete. A crucial point in Bourdieu’s endeavour of social theory is, as I understand it, that theorizing should be aware of its limits. Thus, an “objectivist” perspective cannot fully grasp the actor’s point of view, and likewise, it would then probably be difficult to simply transfer an actor’s point of view, the sense of practice or the experience of an emotional episode, back to the level of objectification. I would argue that the sense of practice that is at stake in the KEE that I experienced does not necessarily lead to completely new insights, but

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rather complements and elaborates the understanding of a more conscious and reflexive kind the ethnographer achieves through his general work. Like Malinowski and Bourdieu I would analytically keep the levels distinct though very much related. I also come to this conclusion because for me it is difficult to assess what new aspects of understanding “my slip” into “practice” has provided. In experiencing the incorporated patterns of behaviour (i.e. the outburst of anger), with my own person and body, I can in retrospect better assess the relevance and meaning of this particular behavioural pattern. I came to understand more clearly that a certain temporary fierceness, although not generally valued positively, is very much part of the idea of being a young man. Similarly the situation underlines certain key-features of sibling and spouse relationships. Through my experience I can now see it in stronger contours, but I already knew it from before. It is conceivable, however, that new, unknown aspects of a culture can be revealed through a KEE. In this regard, the time of occurrence of a KEE in the fieldwork process is important, as I suggested before, and this will become clear in the examples that follow. One situation of my own fieldwork could have turned into a KEE, and could presumably have led to significant effects and further understanding, but in this case it did not, largely because I was able to keep my composure and remained an uninvolved “observer.” Let me briefly turn to this example. Gadaba women engage in the dangerous task of digging out of a quarry earth they use as colour to paint their houses. Frequently, I have been told, accidents have happened in the past; these accidents are explained by the idea that the voracious rau-demon “eats a life” every other year there. The first and only time I went to this pit happened to be one of these fateful days. When I arrived, I noticed that the women were standing around the pit in the typical mourning position, hands crossed behind their heads and wailing. Two women had just been buried by an earth slide and men were carefully searching for them with sticks. Shortly after my arrival one woman was dragged out of the earth and laid on the ground. From where I stood I could see that her body seemed lifeless and that other women were trying to feed her with millet gruel, which is considered to be very lifeenhancing. During this very short period of time many thoughts rushed through my mind, I was in an emotional turmoil and had to consciously control my first affect to run down to provide first aid. Within a few seconds I tried to get a picture of the situation, of my position in it, and of the possible outcome of different scenarios. I had attended first aid seminars and could try to reanimate her but what would the reactions of the people be? I did

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not know the woman and could not be sure how long she had been buried under the earth and whether any attempt would be in vain from the start. And what if I tried and failed? Had I a right to push the others away just because I thought I knew best what to do? Eventually, I did not do anything and felt miserable about it for a long time. This situation was very emotional for me and for everybody else, but it did not develop into a KEE because I did not interact, I suppressed my emotions and they did not take over as in the other example. Had I involved myself in the situation it would, I guess, have turned into a KEE and it is very likely that through the reactions towards my involvement and actions I would have learned, on careful reconsideration of the situation, something new about, for example, the treatment of dying persons. Perhaps people would have been outraged about my attempt to reanimate her and thus point out relevant norms and values. It is thus important to emphasize that a crucial feature of a KEE is its relatedness. Only in relation to the other people’s reactions my emotional expressions are significant and can turn into a KEE that influences the process of fieldwork.12 I now return to my main example and the question of what my emotional outburst revealed to me. What I experienced with my own body was the social value of anger in young men. As I said in the beginning, the personal motives and the mix of emotions that triggered my action were rather irrelevant for the social aspects of the situation. There was no direct causative or determining connection between the psychic state I was in and the way I acted. Therefore, I assume that the experience of acting in this particular way does tell me much about how such acts are evaluated by different actors, but not what emotions exactly motivate other men when acting in similar ways. There might be a multitude of psychic states that end up in the same or very similar expressions. Having tried to outline what the results of the emotional episode are in terms of experience and understanding, I now want to point out another of its relevant social effects. A precondition for the ethnographer to understand anything in the field is, of course, his status in the field. Much depends on how the ethnographer is perceived by the people he lives with. So it is decisive not only to focus on what the researcher understands and perceives but to include the other actors’ perspectives as well. As the other examples discussed below will demonstrate, KEEs may have a crucial impact on how the ethnographer is perceived by the people around him or her. My impression is that the perception of certain villagers was that I had taken a crucial step towards living in their society as my wife and I were apparently quarreling and fighting like everyone else and I expressed emotions in a way that they thought they recognised and understood. Of

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course the whole process of fieldwork is marked by several such transitions, from a total stranger to something different. The process of integration, which is neither continuously progressive nor teleological, very much depends on such KEEs: the ethnographer wants to be socialized and so do the people with whom he lives often desire his socialization and integration.13 This was my experience among the Gadaba who saw to it that this stranger and his wife who were living among them had turned into something more familiar. Thus, for some, the emotional episode was a proof and an expression of my status as “son,” “brother-in-law” and so forth. On the actual day of my departure from the village I once more experienced the perception of my status by some of the villagers. When I was taking the final farewell with those I had been in closest contact for the last twenty-one months, some old women - among them my “mother” whom I had pushed around ten days earlier - began to wail with their hands crossed behind their head, which is the usual female way of mourning the dead or accompanying a dying person. Just after being more firmly integrated through the KEE I was facing my social death.

Key Emotional Episodes compared Could such KEEs possibly be similar and comparable given the fact that every research process is specific and every ethnographer’s personality different? In a recent article “on anthropological knowledge” Philippe Descola (2005: 69) pointed out that fieldwork has a certain rhythm, a series of stages, which is independent of personalities and abilities of ethnographers or the specific area of research. Likewise we could ask if KEEs have certain features and effects, which are rather independent from individual researchers. Has the relevance of the ethnographers’ idiosyncrasies been overestimated? In the following, I will compare three other situations that I characterize as KEEs to the situation I outlined above.

Shame in Tibet The first example is an experience described by Tim Lau (2008).14 Just having started his fieldwork in Tibet (he had been in the field for three weeks) he encountered a fight between a Tibetan and an Indian, in which he spontaneously interfered and stopped the violent confrontation. This triggered a very strong reaction by various people present at the scene who publicly rebuked and even threatened him. Among the various emotions assailing the anthropologist shame was the most prominent, because all

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this happened in public. The reason for the wrath of some of the Tibetan people involved was that Lau, being new in the field, violated codes of conduct and acted not in accordance with his status. On reflection, Lau interpreted this incidence as crucial for his fieldwork process. It made him painfully aware of norms and values surrounding the complex of shame and status. Lau also noted a correspondence between his experience of shame and the local discourse on shame (the concept of ngo tsha) as well as the accompanying patterns of action. Further, by sensitizing him, his experience initiated a socialisation process, whereby he gradually (and probably partially) achieved a sense of practice in this regard. This, he writes, helped him to understand shame and status in Tibet. Finally, Lau states, without elaborating the point, that this situation has had a positive rather than negative effect on his acceptance in the community. In other words, concerning the effects of the KEE in question we can note: firstly, it can generate a better understanding of social and cultural phenomena; secondly, it can develop of sense of practice; and, partly as a consequence of this, it can, thirdly, facilitate further integration into society. It is noteworthy that this situation came about because he was acting on impulse. This non-reflective and spontaneous involvement is, I think, a necessary feature of KEE and his behaviour contrasts with mine in the above mentioned accident in the pit where I consciously retained my selfcontrol and did not rush in order to help. Otherwise this situation could have developed into a KEE very similar to the one described by Lau. Significant is also the fact, that the KEE of my research in Orissa I described in detail above and the situation of conflict in Tibet depicted by Lau happened at a very different time in our fieldwork process. Timm Lau got involved in this situation at the very beginning of his research. When I experienced the KEE described earlier, I was at the very end of fieldwork. It makes a difference insofar as Lau was acting according to dispositions foreign to the context of his fieldwork. This clash of habitus and field produced the emotional upheaval and the beneficial effects mentioned. My action, on the contrary, was expressed in a way similar to the local formulae and thus did not clash at all with the context (the only remarkable thing being that it had not happened before). It therefore produced nothing new, only reinforced the already known and possibly deepened social ties.

Anger among the Utkuhiksalingmiut Another example is the fieldwork experiences of Jean Briggs with the Utkuhiksalingmiut of northern Canada, which she summarized in her

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article “Kapluna Daughter” (1986, orig. 1970). Although Briggs does not treat the theme of emotions analytically, her article provides us with a very particular case insofar as the people she studied displayed a marked cultural focus on the management of emotion. They stressed the value of high emotional restraint (“Never in Anger” is the title of her book) with the concomitant behavioural patterns. Vividly and in great detail, she describes the subtle interactions pivoting around the management of emotion in the social (being adopted as “daughter”) and spatial (living together in one igloo for long periods) confines of her fieldwork setting. Throughout the process of fieldwork Briggs struggled, on the one hand, to accommodate her temperament to her hosts’ ideas about appropriate nondisruptive behaviour and, on the other, to identify the thoughts, motives and emotions of her hosts that were concealed behind the normative polite patterns of interaction. Even hostility was expressed in terms of protectiveness and concern. In other words, she could never be sure that what she saw was what she got. Under these circumstances the assessment of any single KEE is particularly difficult, because the mostly implicit discourse on emotion is constantly present and irritations and confrontations about Briggs’ expressions of anger or volatility surfaced at various points in the process of her fieldwork. However, one instance could be singled out (although it cannot be understood in isolation) which had led to a marked change in social relations. The episode described by Briggs as “crisis situation” (1986: 34) had a prelude during the preceding winter when the anthropologist wanted to improve her working conditions and to escape from the difficulties of working in the igloo. Again, misjudging the concealed emotions of her “parents” and others, she thought the tensions were resolved, but as she became aware later they probably were the basis which nourished the crisis. During the following summer a party of kapluna (“white man”) sports fisherman visited the region and asked the Utkuhiksalingmiut for their boats. These boats were economically crucial for the community and their numbers had already been reduced in the preceding years from six to two. The Utkuhiksalingmiut complied with the tourists’ wishes and gave them the boats and thus were unable to follow their economic activities for the time. Another kapluna group came a little later, took one boat, wrecked it, and then asked for the last one, which happened to belong to Briggs’ “father.” The Utkuhiksalingmiut again quietly met the demands of the tourists. At that moment the anthropologist arrived on the scene, “exploded” (p. 34) and pointed out to the sports-fishermen the relevance of these boats for the Utkuhiksalingmiut. She then turned towards the Utkuhiksalingmiut sitting nearby with

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“expressionless” (p. 35) faces. They could not understand what she had said in English, but she had spoken unasked, publicly and, worst of all, in anger. Her “father” allowed the kapluna fishermen to take the last boat. Briggs, again, could not judge the feelings of her “father.” In sharp contrast to what happened to Lau in Tibet, no one scolded let alone threatened her. Nothing visible happened at first but the punishment for her emotional outburst was extraordinary, she was ostracized. People were still smiling at her and protecting her, she was not in physical danger, but socially she was dead. The outward friendly behaviour remained so constant that Briggs did only notice what had happened when she secretly read a letter of her “mother’s father” written to the deacon of the next mission-and-trading centre 150 miles away. The letter flatly stated that the Utkuhiksalingmiut did not what her to live with them anymore, because she is “annoying; she scolds more and more and gets angry easily” (ibid.: 36), as Briggs quotes from the letter. Only with this explicit information, the ethnographer was able to recognize slight changes in the habitual friendliness, she did not notice before. Even then, she was not sure whether she imagined them. Her new status became visible only about two months later when the autumn igloos were built. Then the Utkuhiksalingmiut treated her as if not present. No one came to her and they only spoke to her when they were directly addressed. Despite all this their behaviour towards her was as it should be, guided by friendliness and care. The situation finally changed when Briggs herself wrote a letter to the deacon and his wife (she had not dared to explain herself to her hosts fearing this directness would shock them even more). Later, when the Utkuhiksalingmiut were able to travel to the mission-and-trading outpost where the deacon and his wife lived they were told by them that Briggs had wanted to protect them from the kapluna fishermen. This changed their minds and after being socially dead for three months Briggs regained her status as “daughter” (p. 37f). As already mentioned, Briggs is describing the emotional processes in great detail but she is not concerned to investigate systematically the effects of such situations for her understanding of Utkuhiksalingmiut culture. However, it is clear from her text that the described situation did make crucial aspects of the social life more comprehensible. For example, she finally “realized the dignity inherent in the Utkuhiksalingmiut pattern of authority” (p. 36, my italics). She had already known, and at times “undaughterly” resisted, this pattern of authority but the KEE allowed her to see it in a different light. Likewise was the situation a testimony of the “ethos of concern” (p. 37) which is crucial to the Utkuhiksalingmiut’s selfperception and even adhered to when relationships are tense or hostile.

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Further, it is obvious that this KEE had a strong effect on the ethnographer’s position in the field. While I tentatively suggested that my emotional outburst intensified social relations and Timm Lau assumed that the incident rather enhanced his acceptance, in Briggs’ case the sudden emotional eruption led to a break-up of social relations. A feature that has to be stressed here is the continuous failure of “understanding” on the level of emotions. Briggs repeatedly mentions her vain efforts in grasping what her hosts felt, because in the Utkuhiksalingmiut perspective emotions, particularly “negative” ones such as anger and rage, should be concealed and not guide social behaviour. Her hosts, in turn, just could not understand her incapability to do so and either considered her as a “child,” incapable but educable, or, in the period that followed her emotional outburst, as an “incorrigible offender” (p. 41). Briggs makes a significant observation in this regard. When adopting her, her “parents” knew that their new “daughter” would lack typical Utkuhiksalingmiut skills, but they could neither imagine nor accept the difference on the level of emotions and their management: “(…) it is easier to recognize crosscultural differences in technology or language than differences in the structuring of interpersonal relations; one is far more inclined to think of the latter as given in ‘human nature’ ” (p. 43). I take the word “one” to refer to the Utkuhiksalingmiut and the anthropologist alike. This leads me to my final example.

Rage in northern Luzon Renato Rosaldo’s article “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (first published in 1984 and then widely reprinted) is very well know and deals with various issues that do not concern me here (such as the question whether ritual always encodes significant patterns of meaning). Instead I will focus on his argument that his personal experience of grief and rage enabled him to understand the motives of the Ilongot cultural practice of headhunting.15 The disastrous incident which forms the basis of his argument is the death of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo, when they were doing fieldwork together among the Ifugao in northern Luzon. As he describes, he had not been present when his wife slipped and fell down a precipice. Immediately when he found her body, he experienced a strong rage. In the weeks after his wife’s death he used his field journal to reflect on death, emotion and headhunting writing (in despair and rage, as he emphasizes) of his “wish for the Ilongot solution” and that “I [i.e. Rosaldo] need a place to carry my anger” (1989: 11). He thus used exactly the same expression as the Ilongot when being previously interrogated by Rosaldo as to why they headhunt:

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because of a rage, originating in grief and a need for a place to carry their anger (p. 1). Before this accident Rosaldo had always dismissed this statement as an explanation for headhunting as being too shallow (ibid.: 3). Rosaldo is not reporting anything further about the context of the accident, his interaction with the Ifugao in the weeks following the death (whether he talked about his rage or acted in anger sometimes towards them), their reaction to it, or whether they also used to be headhunters and thus understood the grief-rage-headhunting connection. In the centre of my following discussion is Rosaldo’s “paramount claim” that “concerns how my [i.e. Rosaldo’s] own mourning and consequent reflection on Ilongot bereavement, rage, and headhunting raise methodological issues of general concern in anthropology and the human sciences” (p. 11f). Rosaldo argues that the force of emotions has to be related to the position of the experiencing subject in a “field of social relations” (p. 2). Emotions have no general, abstract value (“an abstract brute fact”, Rosaldo writes (p. 2)). For example, we know what “fear” is as a general concept but it has no force unless we have the experience of actually facing death. Since ethnographers generally are young rather than old, they have mostly not made such experiences. Thus, Rosaldo was unable to comprehend what his Ilongot informants were saying about the connection of rage and headhunting, because he lacked the experience. According to him, the death of his wife enabled him to fully comprehend how the emotional force of rage could lead to headhunting and Rosaldo concludes that this force is a sufficient, in fact for him the only available explanation for the cultural practice: “This anger at abandonment is irreducible in that nothing at a deeper level explains it. Although certain analysts argue against the dreaded last analysis, the linkage of grief, rage, and headhunting has no other known explanation” (p. 18). In the original article of 1984 Rosaldo further writes that, whether motivated by an objectivist perspective or the dogma that emotions are too vague to play a role in social analysis, they are removed from description and analysis and thereby potential key variables for explanation are also removed (1984: 188). The thesis that you have to experience an emotion in order to grasp the emotional force and to come to regard it as an explanation of social facts assumes that the subjective experiences of “the emotion” actually are the same. Rosaldo (1989: 10) remarks on this that: Ilongot anger and my own overlap, rather like two circles, partially overlaid and partially separate. They are not identical. Alongside striking similarities, significant differences in tone, cultural form, and human consequences distinguish the “anger” animating our respective ways of grieving.

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His position is, he continues, an exemplification of the “discipline’s methodological caution against the reckless attribution of one’s own categories and experiences to members of another culture” (p. 10). This relativism can be pushed too far, however, emphasizing only differences. What he hopes to achieve is a “balance” (p.10) between these extreme positions. As a KEE Rosaldo’s experience is, of course, outstanding in regard to the quality of the experience. Further, in comparison with the other three examples of KEEs cited, a crucial aspect is lacking in this case, at least Rosaldo does not write about it: the feature of relationality of emotional expressions. In the other cases the focus was on interaction, on an emotional encounter between anthropologist and members of his or her host society. While this aspect makes comparison of the cases more difficult, I have included Rosaldo’s instance because he directly addresses the problem of translatability or the relation between “feeling” and “understanding” that lies at the heart of the matter discussed here and to which I have already referred above. I have several reservations against Rosaldo’s arguments, in regard to his methodological claims (positioned subject and emotions as explanations of cultural phenomena) and the question of the universality of emotions. I will start with the latter. The image of the partly overlapping circles and the following remark of a balance between relativism and universalism of emotions leave the reader completely in limbo. On the one hand this indeterminacy is understandable given the difficulty of the subject at hand, on the other hand it is unsatisfactory for an analysis that claims to have a general methodological impact. In what ways are there “striking similarities”, which characterize the intersection of the circles? And, if he detects “significant differences” in “tone” and “cultural form” (which he is indicating in his footnote 13 (1989: 227) referring to the preceding paragraph), can we then speak of the same emotion, “anger” in this case, at all? Despite his stated aim to achieve a balanced position, to me this argument suggests the assumption of a kind of emotional raw material to which tone and cultural form are merely added. If this is right then we can safely put Rosaldo’s perspective in the “universalist” camp and his whole argument of being able to understand headhunting by experiencing grief and rage himself would support this. I consider it problematic to divide emotions into a universal core, whatever that may be, and a culturally specific part. I do think that, speaking of emotion, “any two human groups must have certain things in common” (p. 10), but methodologically I find it difficult to assert where culture ‘starts’. As an anthropologist I am concerned with expressions of

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emotion, in bodily behaviour, art or in verbal categories, but they are necessarily always cultural. Speculating about possible intrapersonal universal features of emotion I regard as futile and would, therefore, refrain from deriving methodological conclusions from such an assumption. My critique of Rosaldo’s methodological assumptions subdivides into two aspects. The first regards the value of emotions or emotional force as an explanation of cultural phenomena. When, as I outlined above, Malinowski and Bourdieu see the two domains that can be glossed as “feeling” and “understanding” as related and interacting but as analytically separate, Rosaldo argues to directly derive understanding out of emotional experience. I am in no position to call into question Rosaldo’s conclusion regarding Ilongot headhunting, however, I would pose some questions. The whole context of young men fiercely longing to take a head, to receive the signs of status (earrings) the old men, who have taken heads, wear, and thus to “arrive” (p. 17f), seems to me to be much too complex as to reduce the headhunt to a way for the men to find a place to carry their anger. Why headhunt and not find other outlets? Many such questions arise and I would rather prefer to leave the question of “explanation” open than to reduce the phenomenon to a consequence of the force of an emotion. Apart from this particular question of Ilongot headhunting, I find the general methodological claim of Rosaldo difficult to accept. I consent that emotional force animates, as Rosaldo says (ibid.: 19), human action, but it does not determine the form of action and cannot explain any particular social institution.16 Personal emotional experiences may help to comprehend a cultural phenomenon encountered in the field, to empathize and sympathize with the indigenous actors and thus to give an experiential ground for our understanding of the respective culture. KEEs may provide an interface and meeting point between ethnographer and members of the indigenous culture beyond the level of reflexive discourse. However, I would argue that to deduce explanations from subjective emotional experience can lead to serious distortions and trivial understanding of cultural phenomena. In my view, for the anthropologist in the field emotions and KEEs in particular rather pose questions than provide answers. The examples of KEEs in Orissa, Tibet and among the Utkuhiksalingmiut also bear out this point. By experiencing anger in a local pattern I found myself not able to “explain” the same phenomenon in the young Gadaba men. Rather, from reflecting on the reactions of villagers, I learned something in a personal way about the acceptance of outrage in young men, of relations between affines etc. that I already knew in a general

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way.17 In the case of Timm Lau his experience disclosed for him the complex of shame and status and initiated the process of developing a sense of practice. But his experience could not explain, only point out, the cultural and social phenomenon. Briggs’ description made it particularly clear that the level of emotion does not automatically provide a channel of mutual understanding. She was constantly at pains trying to identify emotions behind the normative frame of polite and friendly behaviour. The issue of making a similar emotional experience as her hosts that might lead to an understanding of their conduct did not play a role, because the anger she subjectively experienced could hardly be detected in her “parents.” Her outburst and the Utkuhiksalingmiut’s severe reaction led her to perceive the ultimate significance of emotional restraint and of comprehending the dignity involved in the patterns of authority. The second aspect of my critique relates to Rosaldo’s methodological claim and to his concept of the “positioned subject,” which he explains in somewhat more detail in his original article (1984: 182f, 192f). Rosaldo rightly argues that indigenous actors and anthropologists alike have a view deriving from their structural position in a field of relationships (gender, age, post-colonial context) and depending on their personal experiences. Thus, each actor (the anthropologist included) has a partial perspective, partial knowledge and a specific personal history. Since he claims that he provides a “critical analysis of anthropological method” (1989: 11), which imperatives does he want to formulate regarding the notion of the positioned subject, beyond the demand that anthropologists should be aware of that fact in their descriptions and analyses? Does his argument also imply a request that anthropologists should more intensely “plunge” into the life of indigenous actors, experience their experiences? I think it does not and that he is aware that his experience, the way he was positioned through his wife’s death to comprehend grief and anger is more or less unique and thus not a feasible method. At the end of his original article Rosaldo (1984: 193) gives a long quote from Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (that is left out in the 1989 version) that bears on the issue of the anthropologist’s necessary status as observer, excluded from the “real play of social activities” (Bourdieu in Rosaldo 1984: 193). Because the anthropologist lacks the indigenous actors’ conditions of existence his sense of practice can only be partial. That also means, in my view, that emotional experiences of the anthropologist in the field such as in KEEs cannot be equated with the actor’s experience and perspective. While trying to grasp the sense of practice, and KEEs may help in that, we have nevertheless to be aware of the principle divide between anthropologist and indigenous actors. Thus, I think, Bourdieu’s arguments

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rather contradict Rosaldo’s claim to explain cultural phenomena and actors’ motives through subjective emotional experiences of the anthropologist.

Conclusion This paper is an attempt to think about “key emotional episodes” (KEEs) in the fieldwork process and their methodological relevance. Starting with the description, contextualisation and analysis of a situation of my own research in Orissa I continued to compare this case with three other instances in very different contexts. KEEs can be described as crucial moments in ethnographic research, when the anthropologist “plunges” into a situation and when his or her actions are not under reflexive self-control but emotionally motivated (as well as constituting an emotional expression) and thus spontaneous. The strong emotions felt by the anthropologist are not confined within his or her personal experience or perception but become part of a social interaction provoking a reaction of other actors of the setting, whether also explicitly emotional or not. In general, a KEE exerts a strong influence on the field situation and may change the status of the researcher. The latter feature is the first reason for paying attention to such episodes. They may, in retrospect (because in the situation itself the anthropologist is immersed into it, but possibly in the field) enable the anthropologist to understand his changing position in the setting of his fieldwork and other people’s perception of his or her person. The effect of KEEs on the researcher’s position in the field can be positive or negative, or be an admixture of positive and negative effects. While Timm Lau and myself assumed a rather positive effect of the situations we encountered, the case of Jean Briggs being ostracized by her hosts as a consequence of her expression of anger made it clear that KEEs can not only motivate further integration of the anthropologist but may do the reverse, lead to a decline or dissolution of social relationships. Another methodological value of KEE lies in the fact that it may highlight crucial themes, norms or values of the particular culture. Thus, Lau dramatically experienced the complex of shame and status in Tibetan society he was not aware of before. Briggs must have more clearly perceived the ultimate relevance of avoidance of anger among the Utkuhiksalingmiut which she, however, had long noticed before. Similarly the KEE I experienced among the Gadaba of Orissa did not point out completely new aspects of the culture but rather reinforced what I already knew. An important factor in this regard certainly is the phase in which the

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KEE takes place, whether at the beginning (as in Lau’s case) or towards the end (as in my case). When identified and reflected upon, KEEs can thus be valuable as indicators, they can lead to questions that guide and stimulate research, but they are not answers and cannot in the strict sense provide explanations. Thus, while fully agreeing with Rosaldo about the necessity to be aware of the position an acting subject (including the anthropologist) has, I am sceptical about his main methodological claim that emotions are keyvariables for the explanation of cultural or social phenomena. In arguing that he finally understood the words of the Ilongot headhunters after experiencing grief and anger himself he directly moves from the level of personal emotional experience to the level of reflexive understanding (even explanation), two domains that, in my interpretation, Malinowski and Bourdieu regard as analytically distinct, though interacting. The possibility of the anthropologist actually feeling like the indigenous actors is, although the anthropologist may develop a sense of practice to a certain extent, very limited because the anthropologist is under usual conditions not part of the “real play” with all its implications. Although being ambiguous in regard to this question Rosaldo’s argument supposes a universality of emotions that is methodologically difficult to maintain. Although, for the reasons I have pointed out, reflection on KEEs can be illuminating, I would be cautious not to overestimate the potential of our own emotions in understanding other cultures. Briggs example has shown that it is sometimes even difficult to identify other people’s emotions, let alone to “re-feel” and thereby understand the cultural patterns in which they are embedded.

Acknowledgments For comments and corrections on the manuscript I am grateful to Michaela Schäuble and Ulrike Blindt. All shortcomings are, of course, my responsibility.

References Adler, M. 1993. Ethnopsychoanalyse. Das Unbewußte in Wissenschaft und Kultur. Stuttgart. Schattauer. Beatty, A. 2005. Emotions in the Field: What are We talking About? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 17-37. Behar, R. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston. Beacon Press.

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Berger, P. 2004. Sozialer Tod und Wiedergeburt des Ethnographen. Erfahrungen aus der Stammesregion Orissa, Indien. Mitteilungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, 25: 17-29. —. 2007. Füttern, Speisen und Verschlingen. Ritual und Gesellschaft im Hochland von Orissa, Indien. Berlin. LIT. —. forthcoming. Conceptualizing and Creating Society in Highland Orissa. Descent, Territory and Sacrificial Communion. In G. Pfeffer, and D.K. Behera, eds., Contemporary Society. Tribal Studies, Vol. VIII: Structure and Exchange. New Delhi. Concept Publishing. Bourdieu, P. 1997 [1980]. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge. Polity Press. Briggs, J. 1986 [1970]. Kapluna Daughter. In P. Golde, ed., Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. Berkeley. University of California Press. Descola, P. 2005. On Anthropological Knowledge, Social Anthropology, 13: 65-73. Devereux, G. 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague. Mouton. Elwin, V. 1950. Bondo Highlander. Bombay. Oxford University Press. Fürer-Haimendorf, C. von 1943. Megalithic Ritual among the Gadabas and Bondos of Orissa. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Society of Bengal 9: 149-78. Gell, S. M. S. 1992. The Ghotul in Muria Society. Reading. Harwood Academic Publishers. Gregory, C. forthcoming. Siblingship as a Value in Middle India. In P. Berger; R. Hardenberg; E. Kattner; and M. Prager, eds., The Anthropology of Values. Essays in Honour of Georg Pfeffer. New Delhi. Pearson Education. Hardenberg, R. 2005. Children of the Earth Goddess: Society, Marriage, and Sacrifice in the Highlands of Orissa (India). Unpublished Postdoctoral thesis. Münster. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster. Hastrup, K. 2010 “Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the Far North.” In J. Davies and D. Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Palo Alto CA. Stanford University Press. Izikowitz, K.G. 1969. The Gotr Ceremony of the Boro Gadaba. In S. Diamond, ed., Primitive Views of the World. New York. Columbia University Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths Toward a Clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington and Indianapolis. Indiana University Press.

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Kahn, M. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Lau, T. 2006. Understanding Tibetan Shame and Hierarchy Through Emotional Experience in Fieldwork. Paper presented at the conference “Emotions in the Field. Surviving and Writing up Fieldwork.” Oxford, 14th September 2006. —. 2008. Understanding Tibetan Shame and Hierarchy through Emotional Experience in Fieldwork. In L. Chua; C. High, and T. Lau, eds., How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Newcastle. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Leach, E.R. 1958. Magical Hair, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88: 147-64. Luhrmann, T. 2010 “What counts as Evidence?” In J. Davies and D. Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Palo Alto CA. Stanford University Press. Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. Michaelsen, S. and D. E. Johnson 2008. Anthropology’s Wake. Attending to the End of Culture. New York. Fordham University Press. Nadig, M. 1997 [1986]. Die verborgene Kultur der Frau. Frankfurt/M. Fischer. Nayak, P.K. 1989. Blood, Women and Territory. An Analysis of Clan Feuds of the Dongria Kondhs. New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House. Obeyesekere, G. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ortner, S.B. 1973. On Key Symbols. American Anthropologist, 75: 13381346. Parin, P.; Morgnthaler, F. and G. Parin-Matthèy 1978 [1971]. Fürchte deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. Pfeffer, G. 1997. Die Haardebatte: Gender, Glatzen und Gewalt der Bondo Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 122: 183-208. —. 2000. Tribal Ideas, Journal of Social Sciences, 4: 331-346. —. 2001. A Ritual of Revival Among the Gadaba of Koraput. In H. Kulke und B. Schnepel, eds., Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and the State in Orissa. New Delhi. Manohar. Rosaldo, R. 1984. Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions. In E.M. Bruner, ed., Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Washington D.C.. American Ethnological Society.

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—. 1989. Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston. Beacon Press. Shokeid, M. 1995. A Gay Synagogue in New York. New York. Columbia University Press. Zinser, H. 1984. Die Wiedereinsetzung des Subjektes: Von der Psychoanalytischen Ethnologie zur Ethnopsychoanalyse. In E. W. Müller; R. König and K.P. Köpping, eds., Ethnologie als Sozialwissenschaft. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Special issue 26.

Notes 1

I coined that term using Sherry B. Ortner’s (1973) notion of ‘key symbol’ and combining it with the expression ‘emotional episode’ I picked up from a recent article of Andrew Beatty (2005). My arguments here are, however, unrelated to theirs. 2 See for example the Hastrup (2010) and Luhrmann (2010). 3 Why this is the case will become clear in the course of this contribution. 4 The periods of research were three, twelve and six months with four and two months gaps in between. 5 My association with the dominant cobra group was based on my residence in their part of the village and, in particular, on sharing their food (sacrificial and every-day). In each Gadaba village one ‘clan’ category (bonso) dominates and the respective group is regarded as the “earth people”, descended from the village founders. In addition, in bigger villages there permanently live some members of other categories as internal affines of the “earth people”. In the village where I lived one of these was a group belonging to the tiger category. Through this oppositional relationship Amrei was automatically integrated into this group (on the social structure of Gadaba society see Berger 2007, forthcoming). 6 A notable exception is Kahn (1986, Chap. 8). 7 For example did I quarrel with the Dombo musicians at our marriage because they kept on demanding more money than had been agreed on. Half spontaneously, half acting I became angry because I had noticed that this would be a situation my Gadaba hosts would become angry too. 8 Regarding violence in Middle Indian tribal societies see Elwin (1950; concerning the Bondo), Hardenberg and Nayak (2005 and 1989 respectively; relating to the Dongria Kond) and Pfeffer (1997, 2000: 340f; regarding the Bondo and Gadaba respectively). Middle Indian tribal societies show very different cultural patterns regarding the expression of emotion and their readiness to violent behaviour. 9 For a discussion of B/Z, H/W relationships in relation to the Muria Gond see Gell (1992:124-33) and Gregory (forthcoming) for a comparative perspective. 10 “the method of statistic documentation by concrete evidence” (p. 17). 11 I do not want to imply here that the ethnographer is under normal conditions in control of the situation in the sense that he also controls the behaviour of other

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actors involved. This is obviously not the case although, as is widely acknowledged, the ethnographer influences the situation. The control here refers to the ethnographer’s own actions, a conscious, reflective and often cautious way of acting in a foreign cultural environment. 12 Because I had the fear of failure, of transgressing norms and of violating other people’s emotions I restrained from acting (motivated by the original affect of empathy), from getting related to other actors in this situation, thereby to provoke responses and possibly to learn something of ethnographic value. It is an anthropological commonplace that we learn by making mistakes, by flaws. But to intentionally engage in transgressing norms, to aggressively engage in “participant experience” is a doubtful method. 13 Ingrid Schindlbeck first pointed this aspect out to me. 14 At the time of writing this contribution only the manuscript of his presentation during the conference “Emotions in the Field” (Oxford 14th September 2006) was available to me, which has been published in the meantime (Lau 2008). 15 After the completion of this article I became aware of more contributions that discuss Rosaldo’s argument. In order to get a more complete picture of the debate the reader is referred to Jackson (1989: 4f), Behar (1996, Chap. 6), and Michaelson and Johnson (2008, chap. 1, 2). 16 The discussion of psychological and cultural aspects of hair symbolism (triggered by Leach 1958, summarized by Pfeffer 1997) might be of interest here, particularly Obeyesekere’s (1981) notion of “personal symbols” that operate on the level of personality and culture at the same time. But I cannot elaborate these arguments in this article. 17 This is similar to Maya Nadig’s comment (in relation to Lévi-Strauss’ reflections on Mauss’ total social fact) that objective cultural conditions can be tested by subjective experience of the researcher in the process of fieldwork (Nadig 1997: 38).

CHAPTER FIVE EMOTIONS IN AND OUT OF A MEDITATION RETREAT SHUENN-DER YU

Greed, anger and delusion do not have true natures; they are poisons only because of the nature of human beings. If we can reflect upon these three poisons, we may be able to realize that greed, anger and delusion are by nature Buddha’s nature. Other than greed, anger and delusion, there is no Buddha’s nature to be found. —Stra of Master Dharma’s Lecture on Awakening

Introduction The limits of cognitive learning in fieldwork have been explored by many anthropologists. Luhrmann (2010) discusses “non-cognitive modes of learning” as including bodily, emotional, or imaginal modes of learning through which we come to enter and understand the field. She also (1989) develops the notion of “interpretive drift” to describe how, during her fieldwork on witchcraft in London she was learning, on the one hand, discourse (in formal and informal interactions and didactics), and on the other, non-cognitively in practice, which was then interpreted within the available cognitive models. Social learning and didactics, as well as bodily practices formed a key part of my fieldwork in the Buddhist meditation retreat. In this chapter, I provide an account of my own embodied experiences of meditation to show how I allowed myself to participate fully in these practices and this, in turn, allowed me to acquire a sense of the field and to grasp how individual bodily practices facilitated learning of Buddhist key concepts. A detailed ethnographic account of meditation lies beyond the scope of this chapter, here, I intend to make mainly a methodological point: “participant experience” (see e.g. Hsu 2006) allowed

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me not only to think but also feel the experience of the Other as valid. The importance of this in understanding the Other is discussed by many anthropologists. For example, Michael Jackson (1983:340) describes the meaning of bodily participation at fieldwork as “a creative technique” which helps “grasp the sense of an activity” and “break my habit of seeking truth at the level of disembodied concepts and decontextualised sayings.” I argue that, indeed, openness to and willingness to engage in such embodied participation is an essential attribute of anthropological methodology even though this poses a number of challenges, some of which I address here too. Through describing my own experience, I seek to stress the level of embodied transformation that was necessary before I could begin to methodologically regard the experiences of others as viable and to make adequate sense of them. I also argue that reflexivity in the field should include emotional as well as intellectual deconstruction of both current and past embodied habits. I begin by describing briefly the retreat in which I participated and some of my key experiences. I then describe how these experiences allowed me to enter the field and develop a sense for it. On this basis, I employ my experience to question participant observation and the role of embodied experiences in fieldwork.

Entering a Buddhist Meditation Retreat The Merciful Creek Zen Center is based in Northern Taiwan. It was established in the early 1980s by the venerable master Chen,1 a lay person whose cultivation program and great ability at interpreting sutras attracted a group of college students and young professionals. Unlike many Buddhist groups in Taiwan, which employ various public campaign strategies, especially in connection to charities, Merciful Creek was seldom publicized in such ways. Its primary emphasis on religious cultivation marks it as a rather unique Buddhist organization in Taiwan. Merciful Creek regularly offers free lectures and meditation retreats for the general public, and provides advanced courses for dedicated practitioners. Because it is unusually meticulous in following its stated Buddhist practices, compared with other Buddhist groups in Taiwan, Merciful Creek has gradually acquired its reputation as a group devoted to Buddhist cultivation and has begun to set up branches in major cities in recent years. If we consider only those who pass the oral tests to attend advanced courses as regular members, Merciful Creek has approximately three thousand regular members attending meditation groups. As its courses mostly consist of sutra reading and meditation, Merciful Creek attracts

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mainly middle-aged, educated, middle-class Buddhists who identify strongly with the Buddhist ideals the center promotes. . I first attended the Merciful Creek (Cixi ិ‿) in the summer of 1995. I had just finished my dissertation on night markets and was looking for a fresh new anthropological project on Taiwanese culture. My sister-in-law’s descriptions of her experiences at a Buddhist meditation retreat drew my attention to Merciful Creek. What really attracted me was my in-laws’ sudden emergence of sensibility (or at least concern) for daily bodily and emotional states, and the use of food in adjusting to these conditions following the retreats they attended. I was very keen to understand how a Buddhist practice of meditation would bring about such changes and how these new practices have suddenly become an important part of my inlaws’ religious lives. From Buddhist’s concepts of “non-duality,” “impartial mind”2 and the famous phrase “lay down the butcher's knife and become Buddha on the spot,” my impression of Buddhism has always been that it is very idealistic, because these concepts all appear to emphasize the importance of mental emancipation. Merciful Creek’s practices made me wonder how “bodily” aspects might be integrated into their conceptualization of Buddhist self-cultivation. Did these beliefs have a tangible bodily and experiential basis? This raised a number of important anthropological questions regarding the mechanisms of embodying religious belief. Because I was raised as a Presbyterian, most beliefs and practices employed in Merciful Creek were foreign to me and it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I went to my first seven-day retreat there. My first seven-day retreat in the summer of 1995 was such an overwhelming experience that I wondered if I can study it “anthropologically.” Following another seven-day retreat two months later, I was finally accepted into the advanced course in 1995 having obtained permission to conduct participant observation of meditation practices. I had told Master Chen that I intended to study Merciful Creek and asked for his permission when I was certain meditation would be an interesting anthropological research topic. The master did not stipulate any rules or restrictions for me; he only told me that I would be responsible for my own research results. Nor did he treat me differently from other Merciful Creek members. Under his leadership, Merciful Creek has always tried hard to prevent its followers’ social and economic status from interfering with its religious aims. This is a clear attempt to avoid problems commonly seen in many Taiwanese religious groups as some elites tend to become the dominant figures in managing the organizations and even religious matters. As

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Merciful Creek has been rather successful in eliminating members’ social personhood from playing significant roles, I was given the chance of not being singled out by its members or offered any privilege as an observer. My entering Merciful Creek, not as a researcher, but as a regular participant allowed me to go through the same ritual process as its normal members and I was subject to the same rules of conduct. My emotional encounters in the meditation retreat took place in an environment where personal interaction among participants was minimal, as the retreat set strict limits for such interactions, and this posed important research questions about the nature of participant observation. My own body became the main tool of research through which I consequently unravelled the embodiment of Buddhist beliefs and practice. This led me to seriously consider the methodological concept of “participant experience” (see Hsu 2006). I do not intend to argue that social factors played no role in the retreat, nor do I mean to imply that social dynamics within the retreat did not influence my experience, on the contrary – the social organisation, including hierarchy, relationships between teachers and trainees, relationships between trainees, routine activities, social learning, social set up, among others played a significant role (cf. Luhrmann 2010, Cook 2010). If all of the participants of this retreat were young students who did not follow the retreat’s rules of conduct, for instance, I believe my experience would have been very different. I do not mean to imply either that social dynamics within the group did not influence my experience – my relationships with peers (even if limited), with my in-laws and particularly with teachers played an important role in my making meaning of my embodied experiences - it is through relatedness that I learnt. However, the retreat’s implementation of anonymousness, silence, and restraint significantly limited the kind of direct social interactions that anthropologists usually draw on in their studies of emotions. In this context, my own bodily and cognitive experiences in this culturally constructed environment took on an important role in providing an insight into emotional articulation. My emotional experience in the retreat can not be reduced to mere “empathic response,” which provides a key to anthropological analyses of cultural patterns, a position Victor Turner has forcefully argued for (1967). Nor is it an interactive encounter with reciprocal evaluation and responses between the researcher and natives, a position examined by Elizabeth Tonkin (2005). Rather it was the use of my own body in fieldwork that led to insights, research questions and knowledge that would otherwise have been unavailable. Even if my encounter was merely a biological response

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to a special training program, this fieldwork would also have been significant in its demonstration of “local biology,” as Margaret Lock has discussed (1993). My experience is very much related to how bodily and emotional states can be activated, stirred, and managed in a social and cultural setting through which I, as an ethnographer, can gain knowledge of an ethnotheory of body and mind and its internal workings. It also becomes a conduit through which I, as a native Taiwanese growing up with traditional concepts of qi and hot/cold food,3 constitute the key parts of this ethnotheory from my experience. For the first time in my life I was able to learn that this local knowledge really “functions” as a way of experiencing and fine-tuning one’s emotional life. My being able to do so is partly because both my body and my “body technique” were changed in this cultivation process. Hence, despite the fact that all people share a certain set of bodily responses, I learned that, depending on our individual progresses in the retreat, sensory perceptions of the world may have been experienced in different degrees because of our different bodily states. At the same time, I also learnt through my own embodied participation, how the variety of individual experiences was seen and experienced as shared and how it was being entwined with common Buddhist beliefs.

Questioning “participant observation” My internal dilemmas upon entering the field were more complicated than establishing relationships with the retreat’s members. As silence was strictly enforced during the retreat, I had almost no interaction with other participants except those meditating next to me. I found myself searching for a strategy as to how to “participate.” In other words, should I employ the anthropological “participant observation,” as described in most writings on anthropological methods - opening my observing eyes while maintaining an objective and slightly distanced stance? Or, should I simply involve myself in the same mode as the other one hundred and ten participants and see what happens? Would I be collecting valid anthropological data through common involvement? Or, was I in a danger of going native and thus losing the value of participant observation? And what was the meaning of going native anyway? I was torn between what I knew as a prescribed and accepted set of research methods and the intensity of my personal experience, which I feared might damage the so-called objectivity of these methods. This raised further questions about how to position myself and how “to be” in the retreat so as to facilitate rather than impede the acquisition of anthropological knowledge. Interestingly, my concern was not so much

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about whether I could let go of my Christian background and engage in a Buddhist self-cultivation program.4 The more difficult dilemma was rather related to my professional stance and desire. I knew clearly that even though I did intend to “go native,” so to speak, underneath this intention I still hoped to figure out whether meditation could be a potential topic for ethnographic research. However, if I kept turning on my “observation mode” as a fieldworker generally should, instead of closely following the retreat’s rules of conduct (e.g. putting down desires, shutting off habitual engagement with the outside world, and keeping focused without paying attention to what was happening to other participants), wouldn’t this influence my meditation experiences and hence my comprehension of what the meditation retreat was all about? I struggled to arrive at a solution as to how to position myself in the field so as to allow my lived experience to facilitate or restrain particular kinds of insight. I believe by temporarily “turning off” my “observation mode” and involving myself with this religious practice allowed my emotional engagement to trigger a continuing emotional reflexivity. That I dared to suspend previous methodological beliefs and plunge myself into the meditation experience had an important impact on my personal, professional, and as we shall see, methodological beliefs. My discussion in the remaining part of this paper will be based on the following field note excerpts recorded after my first retreat in the July of 1995. The retreat was organized and run by a disciple of Master Chen, who I will refer to as the retreat leader. I was one of 110 participants at this retreat; another 50 members either worked in the kitchen or maintained silence in the monastic halls where participants sat. Since participants are not allowed to read, converse, or write during a retreat, nor provided with any private space, I wrote my fieldnotes after returning home. Day One MC intends to make participants feel as though they are entering a training camp. MC people yell at us whenever we do something inappropriate, such as talking to each other or standing watching the scenery. Although this is expected, I still feel somewhat uneasy. The retreat starts without any opening statement by the leader. He only rebukes those who are late and asserts that letting others wait is “wasting other people’s lives”, a kind of “killing of living things” (shasheng ව‫)س‬. He then orders us to enter a large hall with a statue of the Buddha for a chanting ritual. Day Two We get up at four o’clock in the morning. After eating one piece of toast

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and two spoonfuls of powdered cereal, we begin our first meditation session. Each sitting lasts twenty minutes. We take a ten-minute break and resume meditating for another twenty minutes. We are fed a snack once every four 20-minute sessions. We get to choose between bean soup and noodles for the morning snack. The afternoon and bedtime snacks are noodles only. For our three regular meals we have four vegetarian dishes: soup, congee for breakfast, and rice for lunch and dinner. In all, we have four snacks and three meals a day. I feel basically fine during the morning sessions; my crossed legs are not too painful. But my shoulders and back begin to feel cold when meditating. I put on a thick towel and feel better, but then I start to sweat a lot. Each time I get up from my cushion, my pants are all wet. I do not feel sleepy during meditation sessions, but experience extreme drowsiness during lecture sessions. We are not allowed to take naps after lunch, but we are encouraged to take walks after eating. It is also required that we maintain an upright sitting position with our legs crossed when sitting in the classroom. We must remain silent at all times. Interactions with other participants are limited, even observing the scenery is discouraged. Whatever we do— walking, eating or cleaning the floor—we are asked to remain focused only on what we are doing at the moment. Day Three The meditation sessions have been increased to thirty minutes. The cold feeling on my shoulders and back remains, but disappears whenever I get up from my cushion. Also, I am beginning to feel tremendous pain in my legs and buttocks. My right knee is starting to feel penetrating pain at the spot where it was injured some time ago. Stretching my crossed legs offers some temporary relief, but doing so is discouraged. I am also beginning to feel a warm, energy-like circulation within my body. It seems as though I can guide its direction at will. If I focus on a particular part of my body, I feel a warm sensation or penetrating pain at that spot. I notice that if I concentrate on my breath or my heartbeat, my mind remains more focused and the pain seems to lessen a bit. The power of my bodily energy—what Taiwanese generally call qi—is starting to coordinate with the eating schedule. My circulation feels stronger during the sessions right after a snack and significantly lower during the third session. The cycle repeats after every snack. As my body gradually adjusts to the frequent food intake schedule, my metabolism seems to intensify as well.

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Day Four Each meditation session is lengthened to forty minutes. I can clearly feel that each session has been prolonged, as the pain is becoming more and more unbearable. Strength of will has become an important part of my ongoing meditation. I know that if I relax even a little bit, I may fall apart. I can sense my hearing becoming more sensitive than usual. Noises from neighbors, despite being low in volume, have become very piercing. Even the sound of swallowing saliva seems noisy. The retreat leader apparently knows that these phenomena are about to emerge and warns us that careless noises will cause shock and trigger anger. Complete silence and bodily conduct, like walking softly or using only gestures instead of words, are strictly enforced because of our heightened state of awareness through meditation. During the night session I experienced an unexpected “eruption” of qi, from my legs through my back to my head. All of a sudden, my entire body is filled with warm streams and the feeling of pain disappears for a moment. But when I inhale, it simply stops. I tell the leader about my experience and ask for his advice. He only tells me to stick to the retreat’s meditation technique of “non-engagement” and try not to engage with any mental or bodily phenomenon. Day Five Each meditation session now lasts 50 minutes. The qi circulation seems to be penetrating my ears and creating sounds like small explosions of firecrackers. At times my ears also begin to buzz. These phenomena concomitantly emerge with my experience of intensifying qi energy. Meditation also seems less boring. Two sessions of walking meditation are arranged. In the morning we are asked to quickly walk around the temple and to maintain our mental state as we meditate. Retreat guardians apparently intend to create a chaotic situation. They yell at us with loudspeakers and push us to walk as fast as we can. After circling the temple several times, the leader suddenly orders us to stop with an extremely loud shout. The afternoon walking meditation is in the slow path. We are asked to remain focused and match our breathing with our steps. After walking for about 10 minutes, the leader orders us to stop again, this time by smashing a metal container on the floor. Both times the abrupt noise makes several people, including me, jump from fright; a few participants cry. The sudden surges of qi come more often. Sometimes when I focus my attention on my head, qi pours upwards like a tiny firecracker exploding. I experiment with this a few times. MC’s repeated warning to not “play with

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qi” reminds me of the potential danger. However, as meditation feels so boring, having something to entertain myself is always tempting. We are required to meditate the entire night. Only those with health problems or over the age of fifty are allowed to go to bed. A midnight snack is also provided. Day Six After spending the entire night meditating, I feel very tired and sleepy. We are given a vitamin C tablet after lunch and are allowed to take a onehour nap using the sleeping gesture taught to us on day two - keeping legs and arms in close contact. I sleep really well. During the afternoon session, I once again feel qi circulating with great force between my crossed legs, including occasional surges. I notice clearly this time that I am exhaling, and attempt to “ignore” the fact that I am not inhaling in hope that I can prolong this bodily phenomenon. I don’t know how long it lasts, but when the idea that I am not breathing in fresh air enters my mind and triggers an automatic response of inhaling, it simply stops. This time it is much stronger than those in the past two days. I feel its force wash away the continuous pain in my shoulders and back, as if certain “blockages” of circulation are broken through. However, I simply cannot let go of the habitual idea that I am not inhaling and cannot help but engage with my bodily urges. After this, I feel exhausted and can only wait for the session to be over. Day Seven Each meditation session now lasts for one hour. I feel comfortable during the early morning session. The pain is gone. I begin to anticipate certain progress occurring. However, the leader advises us that the right attitude for today is to take it easy and not to worry. It is the last day of meditation. I suppose he is warning us not to get anxious about not having achieved something significant in meditation. The pain returns after breakfast and seems only to get worse. I keep stretching my legs, as the pain seems unbearable. I become very impatient and frustrated, and wish the retreat would end sooner. My impatience lasts the entire afternoon until the meditation session ends. We are allowed to talk to each other during dinner, since the meditation sessions are over. When we enter the classroom after dinner, we are told to relax our legs (instead of sitting with our legs crossed) and to place our hands apart from each other to completely stop meditation. The leader explains to us some of the reactions we may have after meditating for six days and advises us to pay attention to our physical and emotional

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states when the meditation sessions formally end. He also warns us not to eat “high-energy” and greasy foods for the following few days, and suggests that to avoid our quick tempers from getting us into trouble, we should drink some herbal tea before engaging in serious matters with family members or colleagues. Surprisingly, I begin to feel dizzy5 and get a sore throat that night. I am told they are hot symptoms that typically emerge after finishing meditation, and that I should drink more herbal tea. I take some herbal tea to bring home with me before leaving.

Retreat Design as Cultural Environment I do not claim that my decision to temporarily “turn off’ my observing mode allowed my experience to be in any way more authentic than if I had left the trigger switched on. After all, the very fact I was able to use my recollections to put my field experiences in writing was because I, at times, resumed my role as a fieldworker and asked myself to memorize some of the details I considered to be important. Nor do I consider my experience to be “genuine” in terms that are free from cultural construction. Meditation is itself a cultural project and the act of putting it into practice derives from socio-cultural contexts. Also, meditation has various kinds of techniques and each retreat has its own design. Such retreats serve as a socio-cultural environment that allows participants to develop their conceptualization of, and experiences with, meditation as a religious self-cultivation program. My own experience emerged from this socio-cultural environment, through which I began to develop a style of experiencing my own bodily and emotional states (see also further below). Contrary to the general belief that a peaceful mind is a precondition for successful meditation, which suggests that emotions should not play an important role in this particular religious practice, the unique design of the retreat brings the issue of emotions to every participant’s attention. But before I enter this more fully, let me first provide some background information. After reporting to the registration desk, we soon discovered that we were to eat seven meals a day (please see Table1). We were offered a snack between meditation sessions (further below, I provide more details about the relationship between food and meditation practices). This special arrangement was related to the local conceptualization of the meditative body and its relation to Buddhist cosmology, on one hand, and to its practice of dealing with emotions during meditation, on the other. I was taught, in one of the twelve lectures one needed to take before

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being admitted to participate in the meditation retreat, to relate meditation to religious cultivation through the Buddhist worldview of “the ten dharma-worlds (or states of existence).” According to Buddhist conceptions of rebirth, one’s accomplishments (in self-cultivation) are closely related to the state of existence one is to be reborn into. Figure 1 (in appendix) demonstrates the Buddhist ten dharma-worlds. One’s karma in this world decides one’s rebirth along the hierarchy of the ten dharmaworlds. Accumulating merit, through contributing to charities, or through sutra chanting, is one of the means to improve one’s karma. Meditation is another. Hence, what I learnt was that the aim of practicing meditation was not only a search for a peaceful mind as some Taiwanese Buddhist groups emphasize. A more important goal was the pursuit of being reborn in the higher states of existence. We were taught that entering altered states of consciousness created a close affinity with the higher dharma-worlds. But why would intensive meditation allow cultivators to reach these dharma-worlds? I was taught in the same group lecture that it had something to do with the conditions of the meditative body. The retreat’s training included the use of popular metaphoric terms like “energy” and “frequency” to point out that the ten dharma-worlds co-exist in the universe. It is because each world exists within its own “frequency” that we, living in this world, are unable to sense the existence of, or interact with, the other worlds. The co-existence of ten dharma-worlds is as though ten movies were shown on the same screen at the same time, with each continuing to play without interfering with the others. When one is able to change one’s bodily energy level, or “frequency,” through intensive meditation, one may sense other worlds. During meditation, one’s bodily energy keeps on building and one’s frequency continues to elevate so that he/she may be able to enter the states of consciousness that allows him to communicate with the other dharma worlds. Meditation is thus not considered to be merely a psychological or bodily exercise, but is an important form for practitioners to align themselves with the Buddhist cosmology. Based on the idea of a relationship between qi, the body, and meditative states, the structure of the meditation retreat helps those meditating to elevate their bodily energy and increase the chances of entering ideal meditative states. The first three days of the seven-day retreat are called “building the foundation,” that is, to activate the circulation and raise the level of bodily qi so that beginners can manage to meditate through the beginning stage. Food adjustment was used to help this bodily transformation. It was explained that increasing the intake of foods that possess

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qualities that help to activate the body’s qi flow and to accelerate qi accumulation within the body is important. Hence, seven meals are provided, including three formal meals and four snacks (please see Table 1 for retreat schedule). Foods with such qualities function similarly to what can generally be categorized as the hot foods in Chinese medicine. They give certain positive hot impact to one’s body and mind, but if taken too much, they may also cause constipation, sore throat, dizziness, and other hot symptoms. While cold foods tend to slow down qi flow and disperse the accumulation of qi within the body, they may help to compromise certain side-effects of hot foods and to calm minds. The structure of Merciful Creek’s retreat aims at allowing those who meditate to quickly “build up foundation” by increasing the frequency of intake of foods with hot qualities in the first three days, and to use certain cold foods to balance hot symptoms whenever necessary. Participants find more potatoes, nuts, cabbages, and red beans (but not cucumbers, water melons, or turnips that are considered to be cold) appearing in their vegetarian meals and snacks. Fruits, Vitamin-C tablets, and inchen (ⲋ㝖) herbal tea are prepared for those having hot symptoms. A mouthful of food thought to be helpful in heightening qi-state, such as ice cream, cheese, or pizza., is provided for those having difficulty activating their bodies. Two walking meditation sessions both ended with loud, sharp noises. The idea is to let the abrupt, shocking effect makes the qi-flow pour upward and penetrate any “blockages” of qi-circulation. Merciful Creek understands the sudden surge of qi-energy may also trigger strong emotional responses. Right after the alarmingly loud orders, the organizer switches to a gentle voice and tells participants to feel free to scream or cry to release their emotions or tensions. I did hear someone screaming loudly in the other corner of the temple and saw retreat helpers rushed over but no one discussed about it afterwards. The other special design is to meditate all night on day five. The idea is that resting disperses qi-energy. If practitioners continue meditation without sleeping the fifth night, it may potentially increase the chance of entering deep meditative states in the last two days. Healthy participants are hence required to meditate the entire night. The retreat did not explain these designs to participants but simply arranged us to participate in these practices which were obviously devised for our advantage. As most participants were friends or relatives of Merciful Creek members and had been told about some of these designs beforehand, no one appeared to be surprised by the request of meditating the entire night. My body and mind responded to these designs and learning interactions in several ways. I would feel a warm stream of circulation

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within my body gradually getting stronger each day as the retreat proceeded, while other experiences concomitantly occurred: e.g., intensifying pain in certain parts of the body, increasing sensitivity of hearing and smelling, and a growing ease at directing the circulation. I began to judge my performance (of meditation) in terms of the state of my bodily energy. A high energy state intensified the bodily pain, but it also provided a sense of accomplishment and something to counter the tedious boredom during long hours of meditation. My emotional encounter with the meditation retreat was also founded on my experience of a high state of energy. My desire to gain relief from bodily discomfort, to avoid boredom, and to enter into the unknown and mystic world, emerged within my awareness and interacted closely with my practice of meditation. What emerged was in conflict with my intention to diminish the “interferences” but at times it was also what kept me meditating. If I found my body did not progress towards the “high energy” state, I often ate more food with hot qualities hoping it would activate and accelerate my bodily energy flow, a typical response as other participants. I had not anticipated realizing any Buddhist goals when I entered the retreat. My habitual over-achieving tendencies pushed me to seek the effect of a high qi energy state and to intentionally prolong the occurrence when my bodily qi-energy poured upwards massively, in the hope that it might bring something in return. However, it was also my habitual longing to live (or constant worries about life and death) that forced me to breathe in fresh air when, at one stage, I found I was not breathing. Inhaling did bring me back to the normal physiological state but ended the potentiality of entering an unknown condition nonetheless. At the end, it resulted in my falling into frustration during the last few meditation sessions.

Meditation Technique and Practicing the Buddhist Ideals The technique of meditation I began to practice led to important emotional experiences. Unlike the “concentrative meditation” technique, which asks meditators to sustain their attention on specific foci, for example, a sound, a chanting verse, a thought, or counting numbers, I was advised to adopt the “receptive meditation” that did not stress any such focus but rather maintained a non-engaging stance towards outside and inside stimuli, especially the continuous intrusion of thoughts. This technique of nonengagement is the retreat’s most important instruction and is put into rhyme as “non-engagement with anything” yiqie meiyou lita (ୌวỼ᭯⌦ Ꮷ).

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It was stressed that depending on which state of consciousness one is in, one would encounter constant intrusions of thoughts, images, and various forms of sensory interferences, such as pain, itchiness, and images. Since I found it impossible to still my mind, or to prevent ideas from intruding, the technique I was taught was to maintain a stance of nonengagement toward all of these interferences. That meant, I had to strive to allow ideas, sensory stimuli, and illusions to come and go by themselves. I was advised to differentiate the state of “non-engagement” from that of “disengagement;” the latter was about bringing up consciousness to endure, to tranquilize, or to deal with, which was also a form of engagement. Hence whenever an idea, an emotional disturbance, or even an image of Buddha appeared in my mind, the key was not to bring it to a close with yet another intrusion of a different idea, nor to seize it, but to adopt a non-engagement stance. When put into practice, this technique of non-engagement turned out to require me to manage my emotions in the context of Buddhist cosmology and philosophy. My own experience of not being able to comply with the non-engagement was evidenced in the problem I had with breathing (which I mentioned earlier). When I asked the retreat organizer about how to deal with the problem that I first encountered in day three, I was advised that as long as I followed the non-engagement technique, my breathing would naturally turn into a different mode. But when I encountered this meditative state again (and a few more times after), I still could not perceive of my experience (or of life and death) as merely “illusions” and could not but intervene with my will, or could not help but allow my desire of living to take over. These experiences were not unique to me. “To stop breathing,” that is, when meditators unintentionally enter a stage in which breathing appears to stop totally for a significant period of time, seemed to be a critical stage (or “barrier”) in meditation.6 Regardless of whether or not the act of “stopping breathing” truly occurs or is an illusion, it requires meditators to relax their habitual dualistic discrimination between life and death and to observe him or herself entering into a non-breathing condition and remaining as an observer watching at the side as though it is someone else going through it. Many Merciful Creek members found this a harsh challenge and were not able to get past this barrier. To retain an impartial stance in relation to our desire for life is without doubt the most challenging task, but don’t other habitual desires provide similar testing? Our habitual preferences for bodily comfort over pain, achievement over failure, or excitement over boredom are other sets of desires encountered during meditation which pose similar challenges to

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participants who practice the non-engagement technique. I was learning to witness my own experience of pain as an impartial observer, while giving no preference to the bodily state nor judgement as to my performance in dealing with such pain. This unique training asked from me, the meditator, to endure pain, not with willpower, but rather through maintaining a non-discriminatory stance towards desire for comfort. I understood that the aim was not to eliminate my emotions. Rather, the ultimate goal was to let practitioners understand it was their discrimination between good and bad (or “calm is good” and “anger is bad”) that was the source of the problem. It was my attempt to cling to these kinds of classification that was the very source of my feelings of happiness or suffering. In this I was learning a specific mode of thinking and experiencing emotions and also of reflexivity upon my thoughts and feelings. We were instructed that this reflexivity would be a means of achieving enlightenment. In other words, this non-engaging technique led to my active reflection upon my bodily and emotional habitus, and to think deeply about why Buddhist teachings consider emotions (greed, anger and delusion caused by passions)7 as obstacles to one’s enlightenment. To me, this resembled a deconstruction process of one’s habitual dualistic thinking and an embodiment of some of the most basic principles leading to such deconstruction. Practicing this non-engagement technique is like asking someone to perform with divided consciousness - a self participating in the world, and an uninvolved observing self, to use Castillo’s terms (1991). The former must constantly observe the latter’s attending to the world but remain unmoved no matter what happens to the former. Hence, for Merciful Creek members, meditation can be said to provide a means for one to comprehend and exercise what the ideal Buddhist state is, in both conceptual and emotional terms.

Experiencing my Bodily and Emotional States After going through the meditation retreat, my body continues to react in certain ways similar to those in the retreat. For example, I feel my vigour dropping off quickly when I get hungry while a small amount of highenergy food swiftly pumps me up. Both appear to be results coming from the food-intake design of the retreat. Some symptoms are informative, indicating fluctuations of my bodily energy level: sneezing is caused by a low energy level and buzzing in the ears, or halitosis is caused by a high energy level. When eating too much food with hot qualities I noticed my qi-energy surging upwards making me dizzy, irritable or causing

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insomnia. I got a runny nose after eating too much “cold” food. I have begun to take with me some candy or crackers to supply quick energy and tea - to avoid the fast effect of high-energy food, when I was away from home. I also carefully monitored what I was eating in order to maintain a continual balance for my bodily energy level. Furthermore, I noticed that I was more easily influenced by weather than before. I was told this is because my pores have opened up after the intense meditation. Consequently I also became very sensitive to air-conditioning and sunshine. I began to wear hats (to prevent cold air and sunshine from having direct effects on my head) and I often brought a light jacket to cover my knees when sitting in cold environments. I have began to associate losing my temper, impatience, nervousness, and stubbornness with my bodily state. When I got mad, I sensed the familiar qi-surges ascending to my head, along with the rising intensity of my emotions. I started to conceptualize my body and emotions in terms of qi-energy and related phenomena, and imagined qi-energy may gather at certain parts of my body to cause problems when my qi-energy did not circulate smoothly. As a response, I habitually exercised to “disperse” bodily energy and adjust my food intake accordingly. I believe my body underwent a certain “transformation,” to use Merciful Creek’s term, after attending its retreat, because intensive meditation has elevated my bodily energy level, a common proposition adopted by qigong, taiji and daoist traditions also. It led the above mentioned phenomena to quickly react in my body, which makes qi and related hot/cold symptoms impossible to ignore. This became the focus of my experience of bodily and emotional states. I did not invent this style of experiencing but acquired it through practicing at Merciful Creek. I also understand that my adoption of this particular way of conceptualizing body and emotions is very much related to my being a native Taiwanese, which allows me to quickly grasp cultural categories of qi as well as the hot and cold classification. Nonetheless, albeit my experiences were embedded within the Taiwanese/Chinese cultural framework, it was through my participating fully at the meditation retreat and practicing food regulations that I was able to endow personal experiential meanings to these categories. This is how I allowed this style of experiencing and corresponding food regulations to become an essential part of my life.

In Retrospect In the period directly following the retreat I found my emotions easily stirred and I was inclined to react recklessly if I did not watch myself

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carefully. I thus had to fine-tune my responses accordingly as I knew they were related to my bodily state from the seven-day long intensive meditation. However, I also found that as I continued to observe the selfcultivation program, and as my technique of non-engagement became a part of me, I was able to encounter emotional exchanges in the real world without deeply engaging with them in ways that I was previously accustomed to. What I learnt from the retreat continuously pushed me to be more conscious of my own conditions and at the same time to be more inclined to maintain a non-engaging stance towards what was happening around me. This cultural conceptualization of self-cultivation in religion (xiuxing ಞ⾔), martial arts (xiulian ಞ⦆), or in the cultivation of morals or art (xiuyang ಞ㣬), is a very important part of Taiwanese/Chinese culture (and many other Eastern cultures as well), but has seldom been studied from the anthropological perspective (Laughlin 1994 and Castillo 1991 are exceptions). We can find similar kinds of programs in Confucian and Daoist practices, qigong, taiji, Yoga, and martial arts, that also emphasize the importance of cultivating one’s body in relation to one’s emotional states in specific cultural settings. Even practices generally considered as art forms from the Western perspective—such as tea ceremonies, bonsai, music performances, and calligraphy—also stress relaxing and cultivating an emotional poise and temperament (yiqing yangxing ᛩ᝗㣬ᛮ) as one of the main foci. As they are called self-cultivation programs xiuxing, xiulian, and xiuyang all emphasize individual progress along a hierarchy of stages of achievement in both body and mind. They all involve some form of body discipline. But as the Merciful Creek case has shown, the importance for an anthropological investigation into these practices should be more than the much stressed “body politics” in Foucault (1973, 1979) although, Foucault’s later work on ethics and self-cultivation speaks precisely to the arguments of this chapter (see Foucault 1997, in particular). These practices also invite us to look into forms of long term cultivation of emotions in different cultural settings and, in particular how body technique and local biology are considered to be a central part of this learning process. Engaging with body technique could reveal how we may sometimes be thinking of experiences as if they belong to separate realities. As Goulet and Young point out, we experience “other” realities when we suspend our engagement with the reality of the world of everyday life. For instance, scientists often shift attention from the world of daily life to the world of science by way of suspending the schemata they live by in everyday life to take on scientific research. This allows them to perceive and act in certain

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professional ways and to adopt a specific cognitive style. Such switching between different cognitive styles and transition from one schemata to another is “subjectively experienced as a modification of attitude and a resulting change of reality” (1994). Meditation invites practitioners to adopt a special cognitive style while suspending others, e.g., in my case, when I entered the retreat, I suspended my day-to-day and professional world. I encountered the Buddhist beliefs that there are different realms of realities in the world of meditation. They are perceivable when one is willing to make the transition from the cognitive styles of their secular world to that of the Buddhist mode. In doing so one must seriously put meditation body techniques into practice with openness and willingness, and hope that transformations of one’s bodily and mental states will lead one to experience Buddhist states of existence and realities. Hence, anthropologists interested in studying meditation need to suspend disbelief and be willing and open to learn, through practice. If the fieldworker attends Merciful Creek’s retreat much as a drama critic attends a play—without sharing the intense involvement of other dedicated participants—his/her research findings will be of a rather different order. This, of course, questions the anthropological belief about the dangers of “going native,” and instead may offer benefits from sincere suspension of professional and personal disbelief or schemata that had been taken for granted. Hence, fieldworkers may learn tremendously by equipping themselves with different cognitive styles to better understand the ways in which the people they are studying embody their diverse engagements in this world. Through Merciful Creek’s designs and their participation in the practice of meditation, participants internalize a particular style of experiencing and comprehending their bodily and emotional states in and out of the retreat. This cognitive style allows not only a special way of adjusting emotional lives but also serves as a means of comprehending the Buddhist ideals. Through attending Merciful Creek’s retreat, I deliberately learnt this special cognitive style as a research method. In return I acquired an opportunity to pose questions that led to later research. Such “participant experience,” (Hsu 2006) or an “experiential approach” (Goulet 1998: 246) allows the fieldworkers to gain an understanding of what the experience of the other is like, and create a position that may open unexpectedly rich and meaningful questions, and, in some cases, the most relevant questions. That is, anthropologists may enrich their inventories of cognitive approaches if they learn from their own experiences in addition to what they learn from their research subjects’ experiences.

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I attended Merciful Creek’s retreat because I wanted to experience something foreign to me and to fulfil my curiosity as to how and why my sister-in-laws acquired their new way of sensing bodily and emotional states. How exactly my in-laws and I learned this set of conceptualization and practice was hard to pin down. We learned mainly through taking part in a process that is difficult to “objectively” examine in explicit terms. Lectures taken before and during the retreat taught me important Buddhist concepts and worldview. Merciful Creek’s meditation gave me the opportunity to embody or internalize these Buddhist teachings into my daily life. What my personal experience allowed me was to reach the necessary insights and achieve a cognitive style so that I could sense what my inlaws, and later my informants experienced. This has allowed me to establish a “contact zone,” a “shared communicative space” (Hastrup 1997) with them through which we became able to exchange views and experiences of our daily emotional encounters. Through these, I was able to understand the similarities as well as the differences in meditation experiences and how these become intertwined with Buddhist beliefs. I cannot claim that my informants and I had identical experiences. This is not only because I am a Christian, an outsider to Buddhist life (indeed, as Andrew Beatty has reminded us, cross-culturally “what counts as common experience is highly problematic,” 1999). While, I do not intend to use my direct experience as exemplary data, as though I am my own informant, I do think it is fair to argue, that my lived experience endows me with an embodied (not just intellectual) understanding of what is shared, and a sense of practice in addition to a structural position in the field. Such embodied entrée to the field allows a deeper understanding of the meaning of “shared” experience and beliefs as well as of their variation. Further, such participant experience allows me to have a particular angle of vision into some of the phenomena that may be taken for granted by some or might appear incomprehensible to others and this might include the anthropologist. If anthropologists do not get to experience in person, such experiences may be deemed not to have existed or may be dismissed as unworthy of research (see also the discussion in Luhrmann 2010). Hot and cold food, one of the most traditional research topics, is one such example. It was considered to be a cultural classification of some exotic cultures whose claims of their experiential and medical values were often explained away in societal or cognitive terms (e.g. Anderson 1980; Currier 1966; Foster 1950)8 In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate that I could have discounted the importance and meanings of this Eastern selfcultivation program had I not undergone the retreat’s training. Learning

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the cognitive styles of experiencing bodily and emotional states facilitated my positioning, understanding and connecting to the field. However it was only through my lived embodied experience that I was able to arrive at insights about some of the meanings of the practices, to sense the field and make sense of it, to make connections, and pose questions, which were meaningful within the specific frame of reference. My participation in Merciful Creek’s self-cultivation program benefited me in yet another manner. Being a creation of my own culture, I am as “constrained” by the “culture” as my fellow countrymen are. Due to my profession as an anthropologist, I may appear to be more aware of how what we might refer to as “culture” functions to structure my life. Yet only occasionally could I apply my professional “observing” mode to day-today encounters. My involvement with the retreat’s cultivation program has given me an orientation to develop my theoretical positions and research topics informed by the persistent practice of deconstruction described earlier. What I had adopted from the Merciful Creek teachings is that if I feel mad about something or someone, it is not the fault of the one who makes me angry but it is actually my own problem. That is, my emotional displeasure derives from the very fact that I cling to certain ideas, appearances, or bodily preferences (or what we might also call a cultural habitus drawing on Bourdieu). Hence, I should also explore deeply into my own habitus and trace the very origins of that to which I emotionally cling. With this in mind, my daily emotional encounters at times become reflexive sessions, so to speak. For example, when I am irritated by Taipei’s reckless drivers, the reflexive mechanism also leads me to look into the fact that my definition of bad driving (the cause of my anger) is very much based on my own constructions of many things other than traffic rules. These include my conceptualizations of the boundary of personal space, horn sounds that seem rude, soft or noisy, the right of way, for example, who gets to turn first or when one is not supposed to cut into my lane. This is very much influenced by me unconsciously using my ten years of experience driving in the U.S. as a point of comparison. Other factors include automobile models, brands, characters of the driver (male/female, old/young, well groomed/disheveled) in relation to actual driving behaviour and how these conceptualizations work together to trigger my emotional responses. This conceptual deconstruction process can certainly get deeper and deeper. It includes my construction of how things should be, how they have turned out to be, or how they have been structuring my emotional life (and thus, from a Buddhist perspective, should be let go of).

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Out of these “sessions” what particularly draws my attention is that these daily emotional encounters are in fact anchored on certain seemingly trivial sensory occurrences. This includes the gentle / rude /noisy horn sounds, heavy / light / hard / soft / respectful / intimidating /irritable/ gentle / polite touches, funny / ugly / fierce / stately facial expressions, gentle / loving / dirty looks, loud / fine / piercing / happy / sad voices, and elegant / vulgar / delightful / sickening / fragrant / smelly aromas, etc. From the Buddhist point of view, my unnecessary self-constructed habitual insistences (or clings) are founded on these infinite sets of classifications; for anthropologists, these are what my emotional responses and cultural habitus are built with. Geertz has suggested that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (1973:5). If this is true, my emotional encounters remind me that in order to be able to live in a system of meanings, I need first to be able to recognize the above mentioned sensory occurrences and to organize them into meaningful experiential categories, from hard/soft, coarse/fine, heavy/light, light/dark, fragrant/stink, to the combination of these sensory occurrences into those culturally meaningful experiential categories of pretty, ugly, disgusting, tasteful, fine, vulgar, clean, polluting, polite, rude, sacred, profane, or ying and yang. In other words, my lived encounters are emotional and they are not situated within a cultural system of mental concepts as the culturalists have argued but within a system of experiential categories. This is what I learn from my continuing practice of the deconstruction process inspired by Merciful Creek and this is what I hope to explore ethnographically in the future. Buddhists believe that deconstruction leads to wisdom, or the ultimate enlightenment, but they also realize that this is an enormously difficult task. We may say that anthropologists are also engaged in analogous effort and we have built our careers on the ability of deconstructing the cultural habitus of the Other. For Buddhists, this deconstruction practice is like peeling an onion, with each skin layer representing a different aspect of cultural habitus that has closely structured their lives. Although it appears that there will be nothing left if one continues to peel, this state of “nothing left” is exactly where the Buddhist transcendence emerges. Seldom do anthropologists consider this. After all, our career is exactly built upon this belief in something hence we are able to argue the importance of culture and the role of anthropology in the production of knowledge. Nonetheless, Merciful Creek’s case reminds us that despite the difficulty of this endeavour, the dynamic of people’s active engagement with self-cultivation programs aiming at deconstructing their own cultural habitus should still deserve the anthropologists’ attentions.

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Acknowledgments Marc Moscowitz kindly read and edited the first draft of this paper, to which I deeply appreciated.

References Anderson, E. N. Jr. 1980. “'Heating' and 'cooling' foods in Hong Kong and Taiwan.” Social Science Information 19(2): 237-68. Beatty, A. 1999. “On Ethnographic Experience: Formative and Informative” In C. W. Watson, ed., Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. 74-97 Castillo, R. J. 1991. “Divided Consciousness and Enlightenment in Hindu Yogis.” Anthropology of Consciousness 2: 1-6. Cook, J. 2010. “Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience.” In J. Davies and D. Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Currier, R. L. 1966. “The Hot-Cold Syndrome and Symbolic Balance in Mexican and Spanish-American Folk Medicine”. Ethnology 5:251263. Foster, G. M. 1950. “Food Superstitions.” In M. Leach, ed., Standard Dictionary of Folklore. New York: Funk & Wagnails. 409. Foucault, M. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage. —. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. New York: Vintage. —. 1997. Ethics Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954- 1984 Volume One. New York: The New Press Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Goulet, J.-G.. 1998. Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Dene Tha. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hastrup, K. 1997. “The Dynamics of Anthropological Theory.” Cultural Dynamics 9(3): 351-371. Hsu, E. 2006. “Participant Experience: Learning to be an Acupuncturist, and not Becoming One.” In G.. de Neve and M. Unnithan-Kumar, eds., Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists London: Sage. 149163. Jackson, M. 1983. “Knowledge of the Body.” Man 18: 327-345. Laughlin, C. D. 1994. “Psychic Energy and Transpersonal Experience: A Biogenetic Structural account of the Tibetan Dumo Yoga Practice.” In

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D. E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds., Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 99-135. Lock, M. 1993. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Luhrmann, T. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2010. “What Counts as Data?” In J. Davies and D. Spencer, eds., Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Tonkin, E. 2005. “Being There: Emotion, and Imagination in Anthropologists’ Encounters” In K. Milton and M. Svašek Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg, 55-69. Turner, V. W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Young, D. E., and J.-G. Goulet. 1994. “Theoretical and Methodological Issues.” D. E. Young and J.-G. Goulet Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Ontario: Broadview Press, 298-336. Yu, Shuenn-Der. 2000. Shihwu lengre xitung ,tiyan and renleixve yanjiou: cixi daochang yanjiou de yiyi. (Hot and cold food classification, experience of the body, and anthropological studies: Implications of Cixi case study). In Chinese. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica 89: 117-145. —. 2003. Wnhua ganzhih shenti de fangshih: renleixve lengre yixve yanjiou de chungxin sihkao. (“The sensuous style of the body: Rethinking Anthropological Studies on hot and cold medicine”). In Chinese. Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 1(1): 105-146.

Notes 1

Both Merciful-Creek and master Chen are pseudonyms. “Non-duality” or advaya, refers to all things are by nature the same and it is our constructions and biases that put them into dualistic contrasts. “Impartial mind” is a popular Buddhist term in Taiwan, which refers to maintaining a neutral stance in dealing with daily encounters in this world. 3 Qi, or 㺲, is often considered as energy flow, if we use the modern interpretation, within the body. It might derive from Chinese conceptualization of the body, and has been expanded to describe one’s health, personality, as well as potentiality of actions, and even used to depict the nature of objects. The system of hot and cold food is a typical example, that food is ascribed hot or cold qi quality and is believed to have physiological and emotional impacts on human bodies. How 2

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concepts of qi and hot /cold food are conceptualized and experienced will be discussed further in the chapter. 4 Chanting, reading sutra, meditation and involving in charities are forms of common Buddhist cultivation programs. Some groups emphasize one form over the others and special programs are designed for members to participate. Zen Buddhism, the most popular sect in Taiwan, also stresses that daily practices, including the most simply act like cleaning the floor or making a cup of tea, can also be perceived as forms of self-cultivation if one is able to perform them with a focused and indiscriminatory mind. 5 The term ‘swollen’ zhang or ࿾ is used to express the kind of dizziness or headache participants are likely to experience when having this hot symptom. 6 The retreat never explained what “stopping breathing” really was. Actually Merciful Creek consciously avoided getting into details of any meditative state and discouraged participants to discuss among themselves in order to prevent trainees from anticipating a state or stage to take place during meditation. Participants did talk about certain meditative states during the discussion sessions but they were often advised just to regard them as “illusions.” In other words, any bodily state, including “to stop breathing,” may not be in any case “real,” but something “experienced” as such when entering an altered state of consciousness. 7 Buddhism conceptualizes rƗga (greed or vehement longing or desire,), dvesa (anger), and moha (delusion or stupidity) as being the sources of our evil karma. One of the verses that retreat participants recite every morning is “The evil karma we made all derived from our desire, anger, and delusion whose beginning cannot be traced.” From the Buddhist perspective, these three poisons all have emotions as their base. The first two are self-explanatory. The third, delusion or stupidity, comes from one’s being misled by appearances that one takes the seeming for the real, upon which all kinds of defilement by passions arise. These three poisons constitute the basis of our avidyƗ (vexation and confusion). 8 I have published two articles (Yu 2003, 2000) re-examining the hot and cold issue from implications based on my Merciful Creek case study.

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APPENDIX

Fig 1.The ten dharma-worlds (or states of existence) Table 1. Daily schedule of Merciful Creek’s meditation retreat

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Fig 1.The ten dharma-worlds (or states of existence) 10.

Buddhas

9.

Bodhisattvas

8.

Paratyeka-buddhas

7.

rvakas (mah-rvaka) (Out of trailokya or triloka)

6.

devas The four immaterial or formless heavens,(arpa-dhtu) Arpaloka or Arpadhtu The four dhyna heavens Rpadhtu or rpvacara The six heavens of desire or passion, the (Kmadhhu)

5.

asuras

4.

men

3.

animals

2.

pretas

1.

hells (purgatories)

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Table 1. Daily schedule of Merciful Creek’s meditation retreat (gray areas mark the seven-meal plan in the schedule)

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CHAPTER SIX MIXED EMOTIONS ABOUT BARBIE’S NOSE: NARRATIVES AGAINST DESPAIR MARJORIE MITCHELL

June 2003: Interest in my nose is not new. In 1994, while I was teaching at a university here in Bacolod, several students remarked that they admired my nose, which was “just like Barbie’s.” My nose rose to prominence again when, with NGO friends, I visited a fishing village to the south of the city. I spent much of each day talking with local families, accumulating Ilonggo vocabulary, and attending evening meetings where fishermen told us about the on-going problems of illegal dynamite fishing. Mid-afternoon, while most adults rested, I went for a cooling swim. As I paraded down to the shore in my bathing suit, feeling impossibly large, pasty-faced and hairy, I was surrounded by a dozen or so giggling children shouting “ilóng! ilóng!” (“Nose! Nose!”) or “Barbie!” as they cavorted around me. A few even commented shyly on the length and shape of my nose. I wanted a quiet swim, so the deal was, if they let me swim in peace, my nose would be available for closer scrutiny afterwards. The kids played on the beach where they could keep an eye on me (and my nose), while I swam happily for an hour or so. Once I emerged from the water and sat down on my towel, they lined up as if to buy theatre tickets. And as I lifted my face, each child came forward, reaching out with slender brown fingers for a brief touch of this silly bit of exotica. They laughed with delight, and I did, too, but I think for different reasons. As I walked back to the village, the kids danced alongside, chanting “Guapa ilóng!” (“Beautiful nose!”). What is this fascination with noses?

In 1994, as a visiting professor of Anthropology at a Catholic university in Bacolod, a moderate-sized city1 in the Philippines sugar-producing, Visayan region, I wrote countless letters, most as e-mails, to family, friends, and colleagues in Canada. That correspondence was predominantly a

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way to connect me to people I knew well, few of whom were anthropologists, and to acquaint and entertain them with my impressions, activities, and frequently, my complaints about oppressive heat, unfamiliar foods, traffic congestion, and ever-present cockroaches that I described as “the size of skateboards.” Moreover, letters home gave me familiar people to talk to when I felt acutely without confidantes during my first sojourn to the Philippines. Most e-mails dealt with my collection of informal “field notes” describing interactions with administrators, faculty and students, university Masses attended after persistent urging by male students clad in military-style uniforms, and numerous hallway signs outlining rules for everything from critical thinking to personal comportment in line-ups. When I returned to the Philippines in 2001 to begin long-term ethnographic research2, those early postcard-style jottings that any tourist might write of myriad minor diversions and frustrations were replaced by a diversity of narratives, many in the form of journal entries written in hard-cover notebooks. Most of the pages are filled with fairly meticulous records of interviews, focus-group discussions, and meetings related to our research. Now, these records serve as a supplement to tape-recordings of field sessions and to transcriptions of the material collected. On other pages, however, scattered notes appear, beginning with routine complaints about tedious flights from Vancouver, and relief upon boarding the last one-hour flight to Bacolod. I write, too, about my fascination with the traffic officer we call “the dancing policeman” who brings order to chaotic Bacolod traffic with his performance of leaps, twirls and other captivating balletic moves. One page details watching transfixed as thousands of cockroaches emerge from the rubble of a demolished building, while another details dispatching them by suffocation with baby powder, and still another describes a delicious but nerve-wracking lunch beneath a tree reputed to be the home of a Burmese python. A recipe for tasty squash soup served at the “python lunch” follows a comment about my delight after discovering a Buddhist temple with attached vegetarian restaurant. One feature of the journals that now interests me is their almost uniformly impersonal tone. Other than noting my fear of overhead pythons and loathing of underfoot cockroaches, or my exasperation when confronted by mind-numbing bureaucracy when trying to cash a travellers’ cheque, rarely do my journals record what I felt as I did fieldwork and attended to the quotidian details of living and working in that tropical city. I did not record there my concerns about disturbing details of hunger, illness and injury in the narratives of children, my despair as I watched toddlers play in foul-smelling puddles of

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contaminated water beside their houses, or my fondness for our 18 research assistants who, without complaint or hesitation, chose to share equally the project’s funded allocation of wages for six–none of these sentiments appear in the journals. Nor do I record my feelings when affluent Filipinos or Anglos made disparaging remarks about the poor, or when I confronted the disparities between my own privileged life and the persistent and deepening economic hardships suffered by residents of Purok3 Dagat4, the neighbourhood where our research is based. What touched me deeply as I moved through each day is rarely noted in my journals. Why is so little emotional content recorded there? Part of the answer must lie in the fact that four decades ago, my graduate studies in Anthropology focused on maintaining objectivity and collecting data that lent themselves to statistical analysis. Our determination was to establish cultural anthropology as a science; “humanistic” approaches were suspect and to be avoided if we hoped to write authoritatively and convincingly. Even journal notes, as an extension of field research, were expected to convey this objectivity, so I consciously withheld from them my emotional responses. I was careful to “let the facts speak for themselves.” I kept my self to myself. As well, prior to working in the Philippines, I was teaching at a community college where research not directly related to “adult education” or “instructional skills” received little institutional interest or support. As a consequence, most of my ethnographic research for almost three decades was conducted “off the edge of my desk,” on local First Nations reserves within commuting distance of my home. As a result, it was a simple matter to be in frequent face-to-face contact with those who expressed interest in my research. More important, conducting ethnographic fieldwork close to home meant that I was in a known and familiar physical, if not cultural, space and in a seemingly quite ordinary body, ordinary because I was part of what was perceived as the dominant Anglo-Canadian majority in the province. Moreover, although First Nations people might refer to me as a “xwenitem,” white person, to my knowledge, variations in our bodies were not commented upon, at least not in my presence. By contrast, in the Philippines, I was in not only an unknown physical locality, but also an uncomfortable body and unfamiliar social space not easily navigated. I seemed to be inhabiting a body and persona that required frequent re-definition and re-location in response to my interactions with Filipinos who, at the same time, were attempting to make sense of me and, quite possibly, “to put me in my place.” Spencer’s

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(1989:152) observation that “the anthropological habit of writing at arm’s length is not to be dismissed as an act of simply bad faith; it is often a tactic of emotional self-defense” seems a fitting explanation for this lack of emotional content in so many of my journal narratives. My e-mail correspondence, on the other hand, served as a channel where, to some extent, I could let down my professional guard and write about experiences that had personal and emotional significance. Reviewing the letters now, I regard them as serving a two-fold function. On one level, they reflected a need to make my new relationships and social encounters in the field as meaningful and important to readers at home as they were to me. I was excited by the research, and I felt much affection not only for the children and adults in Purok Dagat, but also for many of the other people we met. To that end, I wanted to capture not so much what my tape recorder and field notes might reveal of conventional ethnographic data, but rather, the diverse and nuanced flavours of lived moments with people in the field. For example, although our research was focused on children, predominant relationships in the first weeks of each field season tended to be with our team of adult research assistants. In the following e-mail, I describe an informal visit with one of those assistants, Adelina5, a 60-yearold widow who, although she had only three years of schooling, participated enthusiastically in our initial household health survey and in subsequent drawing and photography sessions with the kids. I was intrigued by her vivacity and the caring attitude and gentle respect given her by her fellow KASAKI members. Shortly before my visit, Adelina had recounted to a group of us an incident with an unwelcome intruder in her home. In spite of her seeming physical frailty, she successfully fought off the man and later told us the story, complete with a humourous, pantomimed re-enactment of the event. Of my brief visit with her, I write: May 2002: Adelina’s one-room house sits at some distance from the clustering of other homes in the purok. Adelina tells me that she likes “the peace and quiet” of living alone, tending her tiny garden and a few chickens. Children tell me that she lives alone because she has special supernatural powers, and although the kids do not seem to be at all afraid of her, they avoid walking too close to her house which is thought to be located in a mari’it, or “enchanted” place where engkanto, invisible and occasionally malevolent spirits, dwell. Inside her house, next to the bamboo bench that serves as her bed, I notice a kind of tower covered with more than a dozen plastic dolls, action figures, and other toys. When I refer to it as her “shrine”, she laughs and says it’s just her balay muñeca, or “dollhouse”. Some of the figures have names from the Philippine spirit

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Chapter Six world which I record in my notebook. She points to two action figures, a male and female “couple” that she calls Malakasat Maganda, “the father and mother of all Filipinos.” With an impish smile, Adelina adds, “They are like Adam and Eve, but older.” I ask for the name of a chubby Santo Niño figure with a one-legged Barbie doll perched on his shoulder. “Jesus,” she laughs. (I felt silly after she told me – what else would you call him?) Then she points to the one-legged Barbie on Jesus’ shoulder, and adds with another laugh, “and Barbie.” Adelina states that she retrieved all of the figures on her balay muñeca from garbage, and that whenever she finds a muñeca, she “cleans it up” before adding it to the dollhouse. She explains that when she is tired or worried or upset, as she was after the unwelcome appearance of the would-be attacker, she likes to re-arrange the figures. “When I look at all my muñeca, I feel rested and calm,” she says. I ask more questions, but after a while, we sit quietly, looking at the dolls and listening to the wind in the palm trees and the sound of children playing in the distance.

On a second level, although these “fieldwork” e-mails were directed to family and friends, I view them now as what Sökefeld (1999: 430) refers to as “. . . reflexive monitoring of the self and . . the self’s relationships with others.” The letters can be read, then, as narrative perspectives on my ways of being in the Philippines, on what I thought I was doing there and what sense I made of daily encounters with Filipinos, both in the purok and in the wider community. Their often disconcerting observations about me, as a physical body, as a product of our social interactions, and ultimately, as representing a particular historical and political context, profoundly altered my perception of how I inhabited my “embodied self”, as it was being inscribed with and re-defined by a new set of social relationships (Foley 1997:261; Lock 1993:134; see also Heaton Shrestha, this volume). Before I explore further this shift towards writing reflexively about a revised social existence in a re-shaped body, it is useful to put into context the background and nature of our research project. As well, attention must be given to the residual colonial history of the Philippines and the setting and conditions of Purok Dagat.

The Anthropology of Childhood After teaching in the Philippines, I made two brief visits to Bacolod, and then in 1999, came with Lisa Mitchell, a medical anthropologist colleague who is also my daughter, and her two-year-old daughter, Paloma, to assess the potential for ethnographic research. In 2001, Lisa Mitchell and I undertook a pilot study for a research project on the health, security, and

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agency of children and youth6 in Purok Dagat, an impoverished and environmentally degraded neighbourhood situated on, and adjacent to, the former site of a municipal waste dump, on the periphery of Bacolod City. We worked in collaboration with KASAKI, a neighbourhood organization of low-income mothers who were concerned about risks to the health and safety of their children, risks created by pervasive poverty, poor nutrition, and the contaminated and hazardous environment where children live and play. Over a four-year period, we undertook an anthropological inquiry into children’s bodies as sites both for experiencing health, illness, injury, stress and deprivation and for perceiving, interpreting and resisting historical and social forms of power and discipline (Bourdieu 1977; Csordas 1994; Derrida 1994; Kirmayer 2003). The child-centred perspective of our research stems from a reconstituted anthropology of childhood (e.g., Caputo 1995; Helleiner et al. 2001; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998; Schwartsmann 2001) influenced by feminist studies and departing from long-held psychological theories of child development. Instead, an anthropology of childhood takes into account children’s agency, their own views of, and embodied experiences in, the world and their place in it (Hart 1997; Nieuwenhuys 1997; Rowbottom and Colquhoun 1992; Schwartsmann 2001). The traditional anthropological gaze has tended to marginalize children by assuming that they are “passive learners of adult culture,” rather than creators of cultural meaning, that they are blank slates who can only be known and read in terms of the sensibilities and attributions inscribed upon them through “adult-initiated gendered ideologies and practices” of socialization (Helleiner 1999: 28). Rather than excluding children “by representing them as appendages to adult society” (Caputo 1995: 22), the anthropology of childhood begins by representing kids as “cultural agents in their own right” (Theis 2001: 100). As Orellana (1999) points out in her study of children’s photographs in inner-city Los Angeles, their orientation to the world around them is not only different from that of adults because of the children’s size and age, but also because children’s interactions with both adults and other children are subtly different from those of adults. Embedded in this perspective is the conviction that fruitful research with children requires acknowledging, first, that they experience and interpret the world differently than adults do, and second, that they are capable of using their lived experiences and the resources accessible to them with creative “agency and intentionality” (Helleiner 1999: 29). For the purposes of our project, this notion of children as “active creators and reproducers of dynamic social relations and culture” (Helleiner 1999: 30)

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demands that we take seriously the subjective viewpoints of children and, wherever possible, that we involve them actively in the research process. As I discuss later in this paper, this attention to children’s viewpoints became critical to my changing interpretation of their embodied responses to me.

Colonialism in the Philippines Throughout our field research, it was impossible not to note the contrast between our approach to working with kids and adults in Purok Dagat and the predominantly paternalistic and sometimes disdainful attitudes of many of the Filipino elite towards the poor of any age or gender. While a childcentred anthropology enjoins ethnographers of children’s lives to avoid treating kids as colonial subjects requiring adult/Western notions of enlightenment (Nieuwenhuys 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998), that perspective is at odds, not only with traditional anthropological treatment of children, but also with an on-going paternalistic agenda of “infantilization” (Rafael 1990: 605) of Filipinos, especially of those who are female, poor, or indigenous, and clearly including children. This history of paternalism in the Philippines began with the imposition of 350 years of Spanish colonialism buttressed by an Hispanic Catholicism that still retains repressive elements of its monastic forbears, and with the creation of a powerful, landed mestizo elite (Brewer 2005; Constantino 1974, 1969; José 1984; Pinches 1994). This stifling legacy persisted throughout 20th-century American military, political and economic intervention in the Philippines that was formulated initially, in 1898, by a “godstruck” President William McKinley as a mission of “‘benevolent assimilation. . . . [needing] prolonged American occupation to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them’” (Bissell 2006, 48). Solidified by President William Howard Taft in his “iconic patronizing reference to Filipinos as America’s ‘little brown brothers’” (Hawley 2002: 393), the condescension-riddled image of Filipinos as “‘big children, who must be treated as little ones’” (Nation 1898: 476, cited in Vaughan 1995: 303) not only continues today but also doubly stereotypes Filipino kids as the “little” children of “big” children.

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The Research Setting: Purok Dagat Despite daily efforts of residents to keep their “surrounds” clean and attractive, the physical site of much of the congested neighbourhood of Purok Dagat is strewn with animal and human sewage and garbage– containers of tainted food, splintered glass, crumpled paper, discarded plastic packaging, broken furniture, worn automobile tires, containers leaking household and industrial chemicals, scrap wood and other building materials, and rusting shards of metal. The area is frequently flooded during typhoon season from May to November, and even brief rainstorms inundate the pathways, leaving stinking ground water percolating in soapy, grey puddles. Garbage is collected sporadically and only along one main road, and there is no regular municipal re-cycling program. Upon the neighbourhood’s contaminated surface, in 248 cramped, mostly two-room houses constructed of waste materials scavenged from construction sites and the dump, almost 1600 purok residents–at least six people per dwelling–make their homes. Houses are crowded together and connected by a seemingly “mysterious, even forbidding maze” of mostly unpaved pathways whose “spatial intimacy. . . . [can] only be navigated through the possession of particularistic local knowledge” (Pinches 1994: 21). Indeed, after extended absences from the purok, I often lost my way if I didn’t have a guide, thus contributing to my sense of being a foreign intruder and probably affirming, as well, how some residents saw me, although I was always greeted courteously, even by those I didn’t know. While the twists and turns of narrow pathways between tightly packed dwellings do not provide easy access for strangers, the “spatial form” (Pinches 1994: 21) of Purok Dagat enfolds its population in an extensive network of related families and neighbours. Linked by bonds of mutual aid, residents spend much of their daily lives “immediately outside their houses. . . . [or moving quite freely between houses] talking, joking, playing, washing clothes, drinking” and otherwise enjoying a sociability interpreted and dismissed by “wealthy outsiders as . . . spatial and social chaos” (Pinches 1994: 21-22). Compounding the problems of overcrowding, in the past few years, eviction threatens many long-term inhabitants, and a significant number have already been ejected from their homes by prosperous absentee landowners in search of commercial space. Evicted residents are forced to move either to other over-crowded neighbourhoods or, in most cases, from relatively secure locations in older sections of Purok Dagat, where they may have lived for decades, and to re-build closer to the profoundly degraded ocean shoreline, where their relocated dwellings perch precariously atop a thin and unstable layer of sand

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and gravel covering deeper layers of industrial plastic sheeting that will inevitably slide into the sea, whether through erosion, the action of typhoon floodwaters, or earthquakes. Over half the households in Purok Dagat do not have indoor water taps, and only 15 per cent (38) have sanitary toilet facilities. Adults and older kids use the meagre groves of trees and other less-secluded places near the shoreline and at least some distance from most houses; younger children use the pathways where they play. More or less potable water is available from several outdoor pumps connected to municipal lines, although in recent years, even the city water supply has deteriorated, as structural adjustment policies and globalization have combined to shift clean water resources out of public hands and into the grip of private corporations. Non-potable water sources, mostly for laundry and bathing, include wells and the nearby river which residents call “a stinking corpse.” Insect and rodent pests abound. In spite of these obstacles, which at first seemed to me an insurmountable barrier to any sense of well-being and security, the people of this neighbourhood exhibit “an architecture of popular innovation and resourcefulness. . . [by developing] their own systems of pedestrian access, drainage, water supply, waste disposal, and lighting” (Pinches 1994: 22). In 2002, I write about what I did not see until I shifted my gaze away from more problematic scenes: July 2002: Chickens, ducks and pigs are raised next to tiny gardens planted with peppers and edible greens. Scraps of brightly painted wooden scrollwork decorate house fronts. Inside, many homes are graced with small altars; cabinets hold collections of china cups and figurines; colourful fabrics cover scavenged chairs and couches, and walls are decorated with family photographs, paper flowers and posters. Homemade counters are stacked neatly with dishes and clean, scavenged jars filled with spices and dried foods. Floors, where family members sleep, are swept each day, as are neighbourhood pathways in dry weather. Amidst all the muck and poverty of an urban rubbish-heap, residents create orderly and pleasing domestic spaces.

Set against these small but imaginative domestic elements, overcrowding, pervasive poverty and environmental hazards cannot be overlooked. Throughout the entire city, migrant families, who are being forced from rural areas by developers seeking profits or tax benefits by constructing elite housing complexes, shopping malls, golf courses, and gambling casinos, compete for urban space with evicted city-dwellers. As a result, housing accommodation for members of our project was always

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problematic. Each year, we rented relatively luxurious housing for ourselves. More modest rental accommodation was sometimes available, but without such amenities as separate sleeping spaces, electrical outlets for computers and refrigerators, or fire escapes. Instead, we found ourselves living as colonizers have customarily lived in the Philippines–in ostentatious, pseudo-Spanish houses surrounded by walls topped with metal spikes and broken glass or barbed wire. This contradiction between where I lived and where I did research was a constant source of unease. A persistent sense of being in the wrong place, out-of-place, accompanied these daily transitions. In 2002, we occupied one glaringly opulent dwelling that lent itself to several e-mails, summarized here: May 2002: We have rented a palatial , “executive-level” townhouse in Haven Estates, a “gated community” with 24-hour, armed guards. It’s expensive in Filipino terms but all we could find to accommodate 2 anthropologists, 2 students, and 1 child. This ostentatious development even has a swimming pool, a blessing after a sweltering day in the purok, except for the weekly re-chlorination treatment—the effect then is much like swimming in bleach. The house itself is huge, white— inside and out— and devoid of charm or “personality”. The furniture doesn’t begin to fill the cavernous interior. Upstairs, the master bedroom, where Lisa, Paloma, and I sleep, is massive. We have three beds, widely spaced, a built-in closet, private bathroom, and enough unoccupied floor space for a full ballet performance of Swan Lake, complete with orchestra. When we climb into our beds at night, the three of us call out to each other as if we were on three separate islands. Sixyear-old Paloma thinks this is very funny. We have a balcony tilted towards our room. During typhoons, the balcony fills with water which backs up into the bedroom, creating a sixinch-deep verisimilitude of Swan Lake that we must wade through until we swab it out. In place of swans, however, we have fat black slugs who appear, uninvited, in the kitchen after a heavy rainfall and actually climb the stairs, obviously searching for first-class quarters. (I am assigned responsibility for disposing of these creatures which I scoop up and catapult into the netherworld over the back wall.) There are two other large bedrooms for the graduate students, another capacious walk-in closet, three more bathrooms, and a luggage storeroom that I initially thought was the maid’s quarters, but it is far too roomy and bright for that. On the main floor is a vast living-dining room (think ‘hockey arena’) and two more bathrooms. There are almost as many bathrooms in this one house as there are in the entire neighbourhood where we do our research! The kitchen is small, dismal and dark—no more than a concrete workplace for cook and servants (we have neither) to prepare meals. There is a small refrigerator, a grotty-looking sink, and cobwebby cupboard space. Our

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Invariably, I found myself resisting attempts by wealthy and poor Filipinos to assign me to an elite, neo-colonial status. Yet, though I might be critical of seemingly arrogant behaviour displayed by the rich, and incensed by what I considered their elitist judgment of poor people and neighbourhoods, being defined as wealthy North Americans was also extremely useful to us: we were moved to the head of long lines in banks and government offices, we were given unrestricted access to materials in the provincial museum, and we could escape from the stressful conditions in Purok Dagat to a world of air-conditioning, sanitation, and relatively private space wherever we resided. At first, I rationalized being positioned with the elite as something distasteful, but beyond my control. I came to see another dimension of that positionality on the day I closed down our

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Haven house, in preparation for returning to Canada. The rest of the research team had left earlier in the week, so I asked our research assistants for volunteers to help me clean the house for the landlord’s inspection. Four women arrived early in the morning and worked until late afternoon, when the landlord arrived. The house passed inspection, and the women helped me carry my luggage to the living room, where I paid and thanked them for their work. As we sat wearily in the coolness of the big room, awaiting my taxi, Delia, our on-site project co-coordinator, looked around and sighed, “I wonder what it’s like to spend a night sleeping in such a beautiful house. I have never slept in a big bed.” Another woman added, “It would be so quiet and peaceful to sleep here.” All four women expressed similar thoughts, and I realized with chagrin that it had never occurred to me that not one of those women would ever have had the kind of luxury that I had only scoffed at. I had located myself, but none of them, as the rightful occupant of those spaces. If my ambivalent social position relative to the people in Purok Dagat was troublesome and at odds both with the “codes and social scripts” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1993: 25) that conformed to the demands of Philippines society and with my notion of having a fixed social self as a Canadian anthropologist, the re-construction of my physical body was even more disturbing, and it is to that aspect of reflexivity and embodiment that I now turn.

Barbie and the Body-Self Re-constructed As I began to immerse myself in research with Filipino children and adults, my memory of the kids on the village beach lining up to touch my nose faded to an occasional fond recollection of their playful but intense interest in my facial contours. As our research progressed, however, I began to think more reflexively about two related and problematic issues: images of body/self and social space, mine and theirs. One, the image of my physical body and the “lived experience of . . . [that] body-self” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1993: 7-10) became a locus of contrast, conflict, and shifting interpretations in relation to Filipino bodies and selves. “The form and shape of [my] body parts [and] . . . facial . . . structure” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1993: 25), as well as my sense of being an individual, a “socially informed body” (Csordas 1990: 7) were being re-defined, re-located, and socially re-inscribed by Filipinos. An unfolding awareness of this transformation heightened my understanding that for Filipinos, I existed within a very different, culturally and politically

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“correct” Canadian/foreign, body-self context. In the Philippines, my otherness was signaled, not so subtly, in ways that had largely eluded me in Canadian field sites. Two, as the kids encircled and accompanied me to the water’s edge, how I located my physical and social self with respect to others, particularly as an adult, amused by and tolerating their “childish behaviour,” underwent shifts that left me feeling off-balance. Being surrounded bodily by the kids as I moved to the beach, being visually monitored as I swam and physically hemmed-in and touched by them afterwards effectively limited my space and clearly marked theirs. Over time, I became very aware that “the ‘feel’ of . . . [my] body and the naturalness of . . . [my] position and role” in the world I was now inhabiting was indeed “a social construct” and a matter under some measure of control by others, children as well as adults (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1993: 23-24). Caputo’s observation is pertinent: “the locations which children inhabit are replete with power . . . accessed, manipulated and exercised by children according to shifting contexts and by their positioning according to lines of difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and age” (1995: 186). Her comment is echoed by Goodwin and Goodwin’s (2001:241) remark that “if we are to view children as agents in constructing their social worlds, . . . we need to look at how language is used by children to position themselves in actual interactive situations” (1995: 241). Eventually, I understood that the kids’ chants about my nose were evidence of their agency. In re-reading my correspondence about encounters with Filipino children and youth, and in re-thinking their actions and words in terms of their ways of wielding power, I began to see the regulation of bodies and space in terms of the Philippines’ haunted colonial legacy and where kids and I belonged in that legacy (Brewer 2000; Derrida 1994; José 1984; Rafael 1994; Vaughan 1995). Again, interest in my nose was one recurrent example: June 2004: “So pointed!” I heard someone say in an almost reverential tone. I knew instantly that the young woman in the mall’s camera shop was referring to my nose. I was standing at the counter, waiting to pick up prints. There were three young female clerks in the shop, dressed identically in neat blue and white uniforms – emblems of a labour intensive, low-wage economy and a rigidly stratified society. When I had come to the shop earlier, I noticed that all three were staring at me, clearly dumbfounded by something about my appearance. On this, my return to the shop, the same three stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, directly across the counter. As I began counting out the additional fourteen pesos still owing, the middle clerk gathered her courage and blurted out, “We

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love your nose!” “Thank you,” I said with as much grace as I could muster. “It’s so long and pointed,” sighed another. “Just like Barbie’s.” I became very conscious of my nose growing, Pinocchio-like, as I waited. Other customers stared. “Long and pointed” was not how I would have described this protrusion of cartilage and flesh. It wasn’t a body part that I had ever tried to describe, except perhaps in my teens when I was dissatisfied with every inch of me. As an adult, I had allowed my nose to slip into oblivion. Now it sits there, mid-face, sometimes sniffing, sometimes sneezing, but often in a state of olfactory quietude. Yet here, it was the object of no little admiration. “We would like to have a nose like yours,” said the middle clerk. I looked at the three of them – all with shining dark hair, large brown eyes, and noses that appeared no more or less worthy of compliments than mine; in fact, the only time I ever really noticed Filipino noses was when mine became a topic for comparison. “I like your noses, too,” I responded. “I think you all have beautiful noses.” In unison, they shook their heads: I couldn’t win.

But my nose was not the only aspect of my body to receive attention and to be re-constructed. Writing during her first visit to a Philippine fishing village, Pauline Barber (2005: 98) describes herself as being “an incongruous figure in that time and place, a tall woman with pale skin flushed from the intense heat”. Jennifer Robertson remarks that “ethnographers have often characterized themselves as children, ostensibly because at the outset of fieldwork. . . , they say they have felt like children, away from home and wandering within a confusing welter of partially comprehended images and encounters that they have not yet learned to negotiate.” I find kindred elements in both statements: I was “away from home and wandering” in a somewhat confused state, and I did see myself as an “incongruous figure … with pale skin”, but unlike Robertson’s ethnographers, I never felt small enough to be a child. Rather, every time I climbed aboard a jeepney, simultaneously cracking my head on the roof, tripping over several pairs of much smaller feet, and squeezing my body into about six inches of seating space, all the while being scrutinized by other passengers, I saw myself as over-sized and hair-covered, with various protruding body parts and wearing huge, clumsy clown shoes. And unlike Barber, I do not consider myself tall enough to call myself “tall” under any circumstances. Instead, every time I stood among Filipinos, I felt as if I were a short person who had wandered into a much elongated body that did not belong to me. As I wrote in a 2003 e-mail describing a reflexology treatment in the Philippines, “the two-hour

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reflexology session was very relaxing, except when it was excruciatingly painful, but I was definitely startled when the reflexologist commented that my spinal cord was too short for my ‘extreme’ height!” In yet another missive, I write: June 2004: Gabriel, our talented 14-year-old “artist in residence,” presented me with an oil-pastel drawing of me and three teen-age boys as they were taking part in one of our kids’ photography walkabouts. In Gabe’s drawing, I tower over the boys and display massive, Americanfootball-player shoulders, impossibly well-muscled arms, and the suggestion of a more-than-capacious bosom that is definitely not how I perceive mine.

In addition to comments about my body, children and adults made similar blandishments about the appearances of the other Canadians in the research group. They were particularly interested in Lisa Mitchell’s young daughter who accompanied us to the field. Not only was Paloma’s nose made much of for its resemblance to Barbie’s, but as well, she had to deal with being called “Chubelita,” a popular child character in a Mexican television series shown in the Philippines, and with being caressed and embraced, sometimes by strangers – not an easy experience for a selfcontained Canadian child who already embodied an array of distancing mechanisms typical of her culture. When she no longer travelled with us, purok children and mothers alike asked to see recent photographs of her. May 2004: One of the first questions I hear when I return to the purok each year is “Where is Paloma?” When I tell them she is at school in Canada, they ask if I have a photo of her. I do, and mothers and kids crowd around and study it closely. Always, they point to her nose: “Perfect, just like Barbie’s;” to her fair skin: “So perfect and white;” and since she is at least as tall as Filipino kids two and three years older, they remark on her “long, long legs.” When I suggest either that perfection is not real or that all faces, indeed all bodies, are perfect, they insist that she is much more beautiful than they can ever be. I find myself exasperated by their refusal to see their own beauty, and I want to tell them that it’s not good for them to make her their standard. I am irritated by what they seem to impose on one child, but I wonder if some degree of resentment does not underlie the words they lavish so effusively upon a privileged child removed from their gaze by geography, and ultimately, by social distance.

Our research focus was on the kids’ perceptions and understandings of their bodies and their environment, but over time, it became apparent that these references to Barbie’s nose and to other stereotypical, EuroAmerican physical attributes demanded closer scrutiny, as did my feelings

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of annoyance. We did not have to look far. Children and their mothers explained that to become a fashion model or movie star in the Philippines, a girl needed a Barbie nose and long, “American” legs. While our focus groups with girls between ten and sixteen revealed that many of them were familiar with Barbies, and a few said they had owned or played with them, the dolls are so prohibitively expensive in Filipino stores that it seemed likely that opportunities to play with Barbies were limited largely to dolls shared by wealthier school friends or discarded, as was the broken Barbie on Adelina’s balay muñeca. Nonetheless, the girls firmly incorporated ideas about Barbies into their own notions of growing up to have long, pointed noses and legs that would make them several inches taller than the average Filipino woman. In an effort to examine the influence of Barbie dolls more closely, I compared a blonde, blue-eyed Barbie purchased in Canada with two dolls purchased in the Philippines and marketed by Mattel as “ethnic” Filipino Barbies. Aside from having darker hair and grey or light brown eye colour and wearing Philippines costumes, the dolls displayed the same “unbearable whiteness” (Chin 1999: 310) as the standard Anglo-American Barbie. All three noses were typical Barbie noses, not so much long and pointed in my estimation as they were upturned and “pert,” but all six Barbie legs were indeed disproportionately long. I concur with Chin’s (1999: 310) conclusion that “the diversity currently under manufacture in the form of ‘ethnically correct’ playthings does not significantly transform the understanding of race, or even racism.” Ethnically correct dolls are nothing more than a marketing ploy. Moreover, the manufacture of Barbies, most recently in Southeast Asian factories, represents some of the more questionable attributes of globalization, as members of a young, largely female labour force work long hours for extremely low wages in stressful and unsafe working conditions (Pollock 2007; VIDEA 2000). Nevertheless, for Filipino girls7 in the disadvantaged neighbourhood where we worked, Barbie is clearly a potent iconic image, representing idealized, white Anglo-North Americans.8 While I locate the yearnings of young Filipinas for Anglicized faces, bodies, height and skin colour in more than a century of racism fostered by American government and military policies and practices, those yearnings are encouraged today by a Philippine social body consisting of newly rich beneficiaries of globalization (Pinches 1999) buttressed by the neo-liberal agenda of the national body politic (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1993). As Lisa Mitchell remarks, government-legislated education and public health programs in the Philippines impose upon poor children, in particular, academic standards of moral and bodily discipline emphasizing

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that their worth as good Filipino children/citizens depends upon them taking personal responsibility for their own health, hygiene, and nourishment and for “obedience to authority” (2006: 365). She comments further that for many of the children living in poverty, the clean, well-fed, healthy and disciplined ‘A-1 Filipino Child’ [of school curricula] . . . is materially and socially unattainable. . . . [Their] daily intake of poor quality food is insufficient for growth and development, much less for attention to duty and citizenship. The child’s “failure” . . . then perpetuates colonial and contemporary class-based assumptions about the ignorance and laziness of impoverished children (Mitchell 2006: 365). Those classbased assumptions were articulated for me with considerable force one morning: May 2003: A somewhat upsetting encounter this peaceful Sunday morning. I was waiting beside the covered playground at the elementary school for a group of pre-teen girls who were going to show me places around the school where spirit-beings called engkanto lurk in dark, windowless “comfort rooms” and other scary hideouts, causing skin rashes and other ailments. I was sitting on a low concrete wall, watching as a group of about 20 well-dressed men and women set up chairs, a table with a crucifix, and a sign welcoming them to a Catholic family organization. I have been to three such meetings with well-off Filipino friends and found the gatherings to be interesting social occasions where I could learn something about the role of the Catholic Church in lay society. I also knew that the organization was involved in extensive evangelical and charitable work, including construction of housing in impoverished neighbourhoods. One of the members, wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and immaculate white trousers, noticed me and, with a genial smile, walked over to introduce himself. After I told him my name and where I was from, he asked me what I was doing in the schoolyard. When I said I was an anthropologist and that I was waiting for a group of kids from Purok Dagat to talk to them about their views of the local environment and their health and safety, his smile vanished, replaced in a flash with a dark scowl. He moved well into my space, thrust his index finger at me, and snarled, “Before you do any talking to those kids, you put the fear of our Lord Jesus Christ in their hearts. You make sure they know that Jesus marked them to serve. You tell them that they have to bow down and obey the Lord and learn to serve. Don’t give them any false ideas.” Then he added, “What are those kids doing here on a Sunday? There’s no school today. Who gave you permission to talk to those kids?” I was too startled to respond. In fact, I stood up abruptly and walked away, feeling shaken and angry as he continued his tirade. When I did look back, the man was still watching me, as were several other members, none looking very charitable. I stood near the entrance to the school grounds so

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that I could re-route the girls when they arrived. And I keep wondering what Mr. Polo Shirt would have done if I’d said we were hunting for engkanto!

A “Third Space” Writing e-mails about such troubling encounters, coupled with my persistent awareness of real discomfort at being in a body disrupted and a social class unwanted led me to reflect many times on my own marginal status in the Philippines. However, it was not until I compiled and re-read those narratives that I saw with any clarity beyond the end of my own nose, as it were, what children on the margins of Philippine society could see. I had to turn from “conventional narrative strategies” of collecting ethnographic data and discussing “the research process” to exploration of “a third space of research– [one]. . . that encompasses how others inscribe structures and patterns upon us. . . [and] how we write these upon others” (Emoff and Henderson 2002: 2; cf. Lindquist, this volume and the Introduction, this volume). The third space described by Emoff and Henderson seems to parallel Crapanzano’s notion of a “trilogic,” rather than a dialogic encounter, where “communicative conventions between the ethnographer and . . her interlocutors” undergo constant negotiation and transformation (1999: 84). Thus, in this third space, such insight requires that the ethnographer “explore the unfolding of ethnographic events in ways that shake the author’s faith in fixed interpretations, . . . ways that clarify that these meanings are socially produced and historically situated” (Emoff and Henderson 2002: 2). Entering this “third space” led me to re-interpret the transformation of my lived self to mean more than simply a discomfiture with an imposed and othered body-self image. Thomas Csordas (1990:34) argues that “since otherness is a characteristic of human consciousness rather than of objective reality, anything can be perceived as ‘other’ depending on the . . . circumstances.” I began to understand more clearly that my body-self was undeniably socially reproduced and imprinted with symbols of my relative wealth and power (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 2001: 7-8, 25) to which the marginalized children and adults in Purok Dagat called my attention. If, as Jonathan Spencer claims, “the possibility of ethnographic subjects contesting the anthropologist’s [cultural] description . . . [is] a thoroughly good thing” (1989: 159), then could it not also be good to consider how ethnographic subjects might contest the anthropologist’s self-description, as well? Throughout the project, we focused on direct

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input from the children, so that we could investigate their lived experiences of their bodies and of their physical and social environments. Our discussions with them about their body maps, drawings and photographs, our analyses of those items, and discussion groups with them reflected our commitment to eliciting that knowledge and those experiences. It was in informal interactions, however, that the focus on their contributions was sometimes lost. Re-reading my e-mails now, I notice how often I am dismissive of the words used by young Filipinos to describe some aspect of an Anglo-Canadian body. I refer to these unsolicited assessments as not real, not good for them, or just plain wrong. I intended my corrective responses to reassure them about their own bodies, yet my words could be re-interpreted as ones they hear all too frequently in school rooms and at work, words telling them that their efforts have failed. In this retrospective third space of ethnographic research, I contend that the issue is not simply about the kids’ misdirected envy of privileged, white North Americans dressed in Barbie bodies. Rather, the issue is more complex. For a long time, I thought that Filipino children’s comments about my resemblance to a Barbie doll said something about them, about their envy, their desire to have Barbie-like features that they attributed to white North Americans. However, I have come to think that the statements of these young people are better interpreted as being about me, not valorized and envied as a life-size likeness of “the real thing,” but rather as an object of derision, to be taunted and pestered precisely because I am an embodiment, however reluctant, of whiteness, colonialism, and privilege. This is not an upsetting discovery; rather, I suspect that they trusted me enough to try out behaviours that would not be acceptable to people who regarded them as potential servants or as lazy and ignorant. I was never a formal authority figure to the kids, whether years ago in the fishing village or more recently in our project where all of our activities with youth were eagerly attended, because they were voluntary and fun. And even though I seemed determined to convince them that I was not an embodiment of that hopelessly plasticized and unrealistically proportioned figure (Brownell and Napolitano 1995; Dittmar et al. 2006; Merish 1996; Turkel 1998; Rogers 1999), their more than equal determination to cast me in that grotesque form is promising testimony to their agency.

Acknowledgments The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

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of Canada Standard Research Grant (2002-2005). We are deeply indebted to all members of KASAKI, the staff, volunteers and especially Ms. Julie Dojillo of NGO Balayan, University of St. La Salle, for assistance in carrying out the research. We thank Tara Tudor, Anthropology Instructor, Camosun College and University of Victoria students too numerous to name for help with data collection and cataloguing. Most of all, we thank the children of Purok Dagat for their enthusiastic participation. Salamat gid!

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Lock, M. 1993. “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 133-155. Merish, L. 1996. “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple.” In R. Thompson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 185-203. Mitchell, L. 2006. “Risk, Health and ‘Clean’ Children in the Visayan Philippines.” Paper presented at the Society for Medical Anthropology Annual Meetings, Vancouver, Canada, March 30-31. Nieuwenhuys, O. 1997. “Spaces for the Children of the Urban Poor: Experiences with Participatory Action Research (PAR).” Environment and Urbanization 9: 233-249. Orellana, M. F. 1999. “Space and Place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from Children’s Views of Their Social Worlds.” Visual Sociology 14: 73-89. Pinches, Michael. “Entrepreneurship, Consumption, Ethnicity and National Identity in the Making of the Philippines’ New Rich.” In M. Pinches (ed.) Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, London: Routledge, 275-301. Pinches, M. 1994. “Modernisation and the Quest for Modernity: Architectural Form, Squatter Settlements and the New Society in Manila.” In M. Askew and W. S. Logan, eds., Cultural Identity and Urban Change in Southeast Asia, Geelong, Australia: Deaken University Press, 13-42. Pollock, J. 2007. “Safe Barbie. . .Unsafe Working Conditions: Right to Work and Rights at Work.” Paper presented at the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Theme: Political Economy of Violence Against Women, Manila, Philippines, September 12-13. Rafael, V. L . 1995. “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines.” American Literature 67: 639-666. Rogers, M. F. 1999. Barbie Culture. London: Sage Publications, 1999. Rowbottom, I. and D. Colquhoun. 1992. “Participatory Research, Environmental Health Education and the Politics of Method.” Health Education Research 7: 457-469. Scheper-Hughes, N. and M. M. Lock. 1993. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1: 6-14. Scheper-Hughes, N. and C. Sargent (eds.) 1998. Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Berkeley. University of California Press. Schwartzmann, Helen B., ed. 2001. Children and Anthropology:

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Perspectives for the 21st Century. Portsmouth: Greenwood. Sökefeld, Martin. 1999. "Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology." Current Anthropology 40:417-47. Spencer, J. 1989. “Anthropology as a Kind of Writing.” Man, N.S.,145164. Theis, J. 2001. “Participatory Research with Children in Vietnam.” In H.B. Schwartzmann, ed., Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 99-109. Turkel, A. R. 1998. “All about Barbie: Distortions of a Transitional Object.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 26: 165-177. Vaughan, Ch. A. 1995. “The ‘Discovery’ of the Philippines by the U.S. Press, 1898-1902.” The Historian 57: 302-311. VIDEA. 2000. “Barbie’s Trip Around the World: Globalization in the Toy Industry. Global Citizens for a Global Era. Victoria, Canada: Victoria International Development Education Association, 1-30.

Notes 1

Bacolod's population in 2000 was approximately 429,000 (http://www.bacolodcity.gov.ph/bacolod city. htm. 2 See the Acknowledgments. 3 A purok is the smallest named administrative unit within a Filipino city. Throughout this paper, “neighbourhood” is used as a synonym. 4 We have used Purok Dagat as a pseudonym for the peri-urban neighbourhood where we conducted our field research. 5 The names of residents of the research site have been replaced with pseudonyms. 6 Our research focused on children and youth between the ages of six and sixteen years. In this chapter, I use the terms children, youth, kids and young people interchangeably. 7 It is interesting to note that self-portraits drawn by young boys participating in our project often resembled popular, hyper-masculinized “action figures.” 8 Romanticized Western bodies, faces and overall appearance are promoted in Filipino films and television programs, in popular magazines and on billboard advertisements. Among the more disturbing promotions are those for an array of expensive “skin-whitening” creams, manufactured by well-known American and Western European cosmetic companies and promoted for newborns and children, as well as adults. The ingredients in these so-called “skin-whiteners” are identical to those in ordinary commercial “sun-block” lotions.

CHAPTER SEVEN “BEING A HOSTAGE TO THE OTHER:” LEVINAS’S ETHICAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND DYSPHORIC FIELDWORK EXPERIENCES

GALINA LINDQUIST

When teaching undergraduates or talking to people outside academia, we often refer to participant observation as the basis of our disciplinary identity, a methodological starting point that, many of us believe, gives us something that distinguishes us from other academic disciplines also concerned with the study of people. Debates that have been raging in the last couple of decades, on how to reconcile observation and participation, or, as Rorty (1991) puts it, objectivity and solidarity, now seem to have subsided: many brilliant ethnographies have shown how the ethnographer’s experiences of interaction in another life world can be a valuable tool of research. A recipe against solipsism and navel-gazing is an ethnography that focuses not on the ethnographer herself, but on the character and process of dialogue or encounter. Radical empiricism, advocated by Michael Jackson (1989) as a methodology, rests on the assumption that there is no constant, substantive self that can address constant, substantive others as objects of knowledge. At the core of Jackson’s explication of radical empiricism is his insistence on the other kind of the ethnographer’s self than that we are used to living with in our everyday Western life: not a bounded essence or constant core, but one that is protean and processual, a function of involvement with others, in a world of ever altering interests and situations. This self, continuous with others and with the world of nature and unseen non-human beings, is also the self of the world where practices that we study under the rubric of “magical” or “shamanic” are as normal as raising cattle and children, exchanging gifts and goods, not hedged off as religious or sacred but tightly intertwined with other everyday

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practices. Most of the discussions of subjectivity in the field, summarised for instance in the often quoted book “Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters” (Young and Goulet 1994), deal with the ethnographers’ experience of these “spirits,” and are focussed on what is usually glossed as “extraordinary experience.” Much ink has been spilled in defending the rights of ethnographers to allow themselves to have these experiences, and, more importantly, to write about them in their ethnographic accounts. Some have been arguing with the fervour of the converted for the reality of the world of spirits. This stance, predictably, has caused the rage of others – usually people whose professional interests and personal dispositions lie in very different areas – who accuse the former of going native and losing objectivity – and so the old song starts again. Having myself done some of my fieldwork in the places where, as Obeyesekere (1990:21) once put it, the world of spirits is as real as the world of markets, I have long felt that these discussions miss the mark. Engaging in practical, including ritual, activities with these people, it is indeed difficult not to perceive this unseen world, in its many sensory expressions as well as in its many consequences for people’s lives. In these places, such experiences are in no way extraordinary; and the ethnographer having them, and communicating them, does not stand out as especially bold or out of the normal. The question is what one does with these experiences, first in the field, and then in writing, because communicating them and acting on them, is part – but only a part – of the process that places the ethnographer into a complex web of relationships, as an actor in local networks and power games, that are crucial for the course of fieldwork itself as well as for the acquired knowledge and understanding of local worlds. While it can be accepted by most of us that, in the words of Michael Taussig (1992:10), “knowing is giving oneself over to the phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above,” more interesting to me is a point once made by Kirsten Hastrup (1995): understanding how local knowledge is premised and exploited requires taking a step further – further than experiencing and even knowing. It involves cutting yourself loose from your own experiences, acknowledging them, describing and analyzing them as having emerged in the field of interaction with the local world, but also distancing them and putting them in the context where they had emerged. The challenge is to use our experience of involvement, yielded by the methodology of radical empiricism, to formulate an explicit understanding which subsumes and transforms local knowledge. Thus our experiences – emotional, sensual, perceptual, and otherwise – in the intersubjective creation of what we call selves (a process that fieldwork often dramatically precipitates) provide only one step on the way.

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Many extraordinary experiences that people share in their ethnographies tend to fall within the type “peace, love and understanding.” My notes from my fieldwork among the Scandinavian neo-shamans are full of these: meeting wise teachers, seeing forms of light, gaining deep and wonderful insights. Fear and pain may be part of it, but the analysis seldom focuses on these in their own right, always mentioning them in passing, overcome for further self-development. And this is true, for most of even unpleasant field experiences are overcome and in retrospect do feel illuminating, being initiations into new, deeper layers of the local knowledge, for the insights they gave, and, generally, for the chance of experiencing the world so differently, so much more alive, than what we live in our Western academic routines. In what follows, I want to focus on an unambiguously dysphoric experience, trying to see how it can be used for understanding the mechanisms of the phenomenon that I then set out to study: practises of magic and healing in post-communist urban Russia. I would like also to make this episode a touchstone for a personal intellectual project: to spell out the methodology of fieldwork in terms of an ethical epistemology proposed by Emmanuel Levinas (see e.g. 1969) that dovetails with much of the debates mentioned above, but, in my view, takes them a step further. Levinas’s work is about the creation of the self in the encounter with the Other, and, according to him, should be built on sensibility rather than rationality. Rationality, with its drive to classify, categorize, and interpret, leads to what Levinas calls “totalization” which he sees as the ultimate violence on the uniqueness of the Other. The Other is a transcendence that comes from beyond the categories of my thought, from beyond the world, in Levinas’s words, from the other side of being. Sensibility, instead, is prior to the origination of the thought, prior to the ordering of the world into a system of totality. Levinas’s version of “being-in-the-world” is life to be lived before it is understood, the satisfaction of being filled with sensations, what Levinas calls “enjoyment.” But the other person, according to Levinas, does not allow one to be consumed in the egoism of enjoyment. The Other resists consumption, including consumption as ethnographic material, in the name of knowledge. If so, it is inevitable that the Other is encountered as a felt weight against the self, as having some power over it. Levinas’ stance towards the Other may seem suitable when one, as we often tend to be, is in love with the field; when one is carried away, seduced by the otherness, when one is accepted by the Other and invited, tempted, and eventually dares to plunge into the otherness, to experience it from within. But what happens if one, after deep diving into the existence of the Other, becomes its “existent,” that is, falls into the grip of the same pains and dangers that the Other experiences in her life? What happens

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when instead of totalizing the Other in the act of categorization, one is threatened with being subjected, totalized as an object in someone’s power games? Are we then prepared to go all the way towards the possible transcendence, and what can this transcendence imply? With these questions in mind, let me briefly describe one precarious encounter from my fieldwork on healing in Moscow. I was always careful to announce, both to healers and to patients, that I was a Swedish anthropologist doing research. I only later realized that, by making this announcement, a prerequisite of Western fieldwork ethics, I immediately placed myself in the position of double superiority and otherness to the people in the field. In Russia, magic is a matter of survival, which people resort to in situations of utter hopelessness and despair, when all other means are largely exhausted, when a person is completely cornered by life. Saying that I was a researcher meant that I placed myself outside the space of suffering and existential struggle that the field delineated. Saying that I was from Sweden was to emphasize this point. People tended very quickly to forget that I was from Sweden, since Russian is my mother tongue; and also that I was dong “research,” when I positioned myself as a listener giving them an opportunity to tell their story, without trying to shape their discourse in any way whatsoever. Still, I was unable to persistently use one method of observation that I had thought would be central if I wanted to understand how the communication between the healer and the patient worked. My assumption was that it was in these microelements of communicational dynamics that the essence of changes was to be found: to witness and record the interaction between the magus and the patient. It was with this in mind that I once ended up in a healing center, during a lunch break, engaging in conviviality with two resident healers, who were guardedly hospitable: not surprisingly, since I was recommended and asked to be taken care of by their boss. He was a powerful healer priest of the alternative Orthodox Church, which he had instituted - for himself, so that he could practice healing along with officiating liturgies. After having conversed with the two women for an hour, and fed with borsch, I told them that I was doing research on healing, that I had been working with several other healers (I had been in the field for a year by then), and that what I wanted most was to be present at a session. They exchanged glances, and then one said: “All right, you want to be present at a session? You can be present at mine. How about now?” This was not at all what I expected, since being present at a session is a sensitive matter, making the healer and especially the patient uncomfortable, and to receive such permission would require knowing each other well enough. But I was not in a position to wonder; indeed,

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from that moment on, I quickly lost control over the situation. It seemed that if I were serious about my research, I had to obey the orders and to face the consequences. The two women took me to a treatment room, with walls covered with latter-day orthodox icons in the endearing style of contemporary Russian ecclesiastical kitsch, interspersed with acupuncture charts (used for zone massage and bone setting, another specialization of this center) and sweet reproductions of the Russian landscape oil paintings. “Sit here!” one of the women commanded, pointing to the chair in front of her working desk. This was not my intention at all, I did not want to be diagnosed, nor did I have any reason to put myself in the position of a patient to this healer, a stranger to me, but it seemed I had no choice, except for a cowardly flight which would have made me appear foolish as well as made my returning to this place impossible. The healer sat on the chair opposite to mine and locked my eyes in a firm grip of her gaze: “I’ll diagnose you. Don’t be afraid; I’ll only tell you the truth. You are not afraid of the truth, are you? God sent me to this earth to help and to heal, like He did His son, and I’ll help you, however grave your problems are; but for this, you have to be totally open to me. Open up and believe; the truth is here to face; only by facing the truth can we be healed. Close your eyes now! I’ll tell you truthfully about every problem you have; I’ll start from upwards and go all the way down. Your throat chackra is terrible, you have adenoma of the vocal cords and it is unfortunate for you: you work a lot with your voice, but you won’t be able to do it anymore soon enough. I see this clump sitting right there, inside your throat; and it is very bad for you, since your voice is your main working instrument (which is certainly true! [And I tend to have problems with bronchitis and with my voice, I thought, so she must be one of those who see!).] I go further down [she continued] your liver is totally destroyed, you are taking too many tranquilizers [I breathed out inside myself, since that was not the case, so maybe she is trying to scare me, and, after all, she does not see…] but and here her face got distorted with pain, and her eyes filled with tears – the worst of all is that the count of cancer cells in your body is hundreds of times higher than normal. Perhaps you don’t have symptoms yet, but it’s only a matter of time: every normal person has cancer cells, but they do not multiply unless they are triggered, but with you, they have taken the better of you, the whole of you, and they are so many that it really hurts [now tears were rolling down her cheeks]. And all over you, I see the marks, the traces of bad energy left by all those healers that you met before. Cancer in this stage has slight chances to be cured; the only chance you have is to leave all the healers and let me treat you – God punish me if I’m lying – but let me tell you that I have quite a good record of treating cancer. In fact I’m the only healer in this establishment who dares to accept cancer patients. And I keep people alive for years. But my

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Now, in retrospect, I can view the emotions that overwhelmed me in these moments as a musical piece with several interlacing themes, likely familiar to those being caught in an act of violence. Indignation, helpless anger at the other person’s meanness and at one’s own stupidity for having put oneself in such a situation are among them, but the predominant, deafening and suffocating one was: visceral fear. Fear is among the so-called basic emotions, known to all humans and non-human animals. Fear is among most basic emotions also because it can be seen as a kind of desire, desire to avoid unpleasant consequences. As such, it is directed to an object and is defined by a certain grammar, a set of rules that tell us what the object is. In this sense fear is also a basic tool of cognition, it is adaptive, warning us of danger, giving an impetus to fight or flight, and thus increasing the likelihood of our survival. But there is a special kind of fear, something that Kierkegaard called dread (see e.g. Evans and Walsh 2006). It is an expectation of an imminent collapse of one’s life-world, exemplified, in Kierkegaard’s case, by God’s punishment for sin, or by the fear of demise on death row or in terminal disease. In dread, intentionality disappears, and consciousness becomes chained, in Sartre’s terms, imploding or turning away from the horizons of the life-world, onto and inside the self. When these horizons close down upon one’s self, the web of connectedness between the self and the world, the sense of continuity, disappears, and the subject becomes utterly separated from the world; dread is a nadir of loneliness. Having experienced this emotion, and knowing that I share it with others who first encounter healers, I think I gained a deeper understanding of how magic in Russia works, how healers forge themselves as charismatic individuals, or what I call icons of power. Diagnosing you, uninvited, finding a score of ills in your body, some of them known to you, others bad news, is a usual gambit of healers in Russia; one I myself experienced more than once, though never quite as dramatically as in the instance above which also drew upon cultural knowledge of the general dread of cancer in Russia, and the rules of talking about it. This is to say, the diagnosis is never mentioned to the afflicted themselves, and the name is never mentioned even in conversations to close ones, to whom the diagnosis is communicated: it is always talked about as “the worst,” “that disease” etc. All these considerations, if rationally analyzed, would have

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perhaps quenched my fear, qualifying this act as an instance of brutalization and muscle-flexing, making obvious the aim of the woman as stripping me of my defenses, putting me in my proper place, showing me who is the boss. But then and there, the sense of dread was overwhelming. Healing works in the societies where the boundaries of the self are permeable, and where people are preoccupied with power, plagued by powerlessness, and are prepared to recognize the power of the other as invading and totalizing the self. Metaphysical healing belongs to the worlds where cosmologies contain the idea of a supreme power that penetrates the boundaries of the self, and where the inequality of the endowment with this power is an accepted fact of life: some people possess it to a greater extent than others, and some people are prepared to solidify their boundaries and to present themselves as possessing more of it than others – it is those who become healers. To be healed, the individual must accept the permeability of the boundaries of the self, and the others as conductors of power or as its containers. To position oneself as a patient is to construct the self as vulnerable and dependent, and also to accept that the force of affect that underlies healing is of such a dimension that self-obliteration in this act of acceptance is not only tolerated but welcomed and valued. It is in the Russian cultural tradition to succumb to charismatic others, to accept this power as unequally distributed, to accept the Savior, the divine figure that exists already on earth. That is, Russian sociality can be spelled in Levinas’s terms (see e.g. 1969) as achieving self-transcendence towards the this-worldly Other as if it were the divine One. The dread other people would experience in the same situation would be the same emotion, but the reaction to it may be not indignation, apprehension and contempt, but rather the acceptance of the legitimacy of this affliction of dread, much as Kierkegaard’s acceptance of “fear and trembling” before God. The same passional dynamic was the case under Stalinism, where people lived in the state of dread that permeated their everyday life, but saw the human divinity of the leader not as the one who created and directed the terror but the one and only able to save them – the transcendental divine Other on whom love was projected. Thus, it is culturally logical that, at the first encounter, the healer attempts to put the patient into the modality of dread, but that she leaves one single channel of hope, epitomized by the healer’s powerful self. For a prospective patient, hope ceases to be an existential state of becoming, connectedness, and continuity with the world. Instead it zooms in on one specific Other. The Other becomes the world, writ large, the newly found, exclusive object of the intentionality of the self. In dread and hope, the

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patient invests the healer with the charismatic power, the possibility to heal. It appears that, if we take Levinas’s ethics (see e.g. Peperzak 1995) to its logical conclusion, we should accept that transcendence towards the human Other is fraught with the possibilities of the obliteration of the self, and the cessation of its existence, at least in its human form. It is this dissolution of the self that is the essence of mystical experiences in religion as well as of the peak and flow experiences in communitas and in erotic love. In opening the self to the possibilities of these experiences, one should better understand what is involved: both explosion and implosion of intentionality can be terminal, that is, can lead to the ultimate experience of death. I recall that in Levinas’s work (1969), death is the point of reference for the descriptions of the encounter with the Other. In the face of death, the existent confronts the absolute inability to control, intentional consciousness finds its limits, thrusts into the most passive of its modes of being the prototype of passivity, of the “I as being a hostage to the Other.” In Levinas, both time and subjectivity begin with death as confrontation with the first Other, preceding his central concept, the concept of the face, the intervention of the Other that marks the birth of the subject. Perhaps death itself is only a matter of interpretation: by choosing a proper grammar; maybe we can turn the perceived evil of death itself into a peak experience of transcendence. What then of my experience and its implications for my future fieldwork? I must admit that I was not prepared to go that far: the face of the Other as the face of death was too much for me. In the end of the séance, when I did not display any emotional reaction, it was the healer who was astonished and somewhat impressed. Apart from her invitation to use her as a healer for my cancer, she actually invited me to join as an anthropologist in her work, sitting as an observing witness at her encounters with others. This was at the end of the first long stint of my fieldwork, and it was exactly what I wanted to do with other healers I worked with, and invariably failed at. And, it could be taken as an indication that I had passed the test by fire and could ascend to different levels of gaining knowledge in fieldwork. But I never accepted her invitation. Perhaps, knowing how sensitive the encounter between a healer and a patient is, I thought that being present at such séances would mean to violate the boundaries of other people in the same way as the healer violated mine. For me, the aim did not justify the means. Or, perhaps, it is so much easier and more gratifying to work with the people you like than with those you dread. Perhaps I was too cowardly. In any case, I never returned to this healer.

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I also must admit that, when I left her, I went straight to other healers, whom I had known well, to tell them the story, to hear their reaction of indignation and disgust, and, most of all, to hear that I had no cancer. Even so, when I came home that evening, I performed a private ritual of purification from the evil energies that I felt the interaction left me with. Was it an act of superstition, weakness of mind and will? I guess many of my Western colleagues, as well as Russian friends, would say so. The way I prefer to see it is captured by the words of Kirsten Hastrup (1995:18): “This was a consequence of my experiencing a distinct reality of which I had been temporarily a part. After such encounters, we are forever taught that we cannot separate materiality and meaning.”

Acknowledgments The editors have made only minor changes to Galina Lindquist’s paper with her permission and we would like to thank Simon Coleman and Louise Braddock who helped us tremendously in the process. Most of all, we are grateful to our much loved late colleague Galina Lindquist for entrusting us her paper.

References Hastrup, K. 1995. A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge. Evans, C.S. and Walsh, S. 2006. Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay in Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Obeyesekere, G. 1990. The Work of Culture. Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Peperzak, A. T. ed. 1995. Ethics as First Philosphy. The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. London: Routledge. Rorty, R. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, D. E. and Jean-Guy Goulet (eds.). 1994. Being Changed by CrossCultural Encounters. The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experiences, Peterborough ON: Broadview Press.

CHAPTER EIGHT EMOTIONS, INTERPRETATION AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC COUNTERTRANSFERENCE LOUISE BRADDOCK

The paper explores, within the framework of philosophy of psychoanalysis, a question about the epistemology and methodology of participant experience in anthropology: whether the emotional experience of the fieldworker can provide a “legitimate means for knowing.” There is a recognised parallel here with the situation of the psychoanalyst vis à vis her patient; both analyst and anthropologist may be described as engaged in “the struggle to know the other.” Alongside questions about the epistemological status of psychoanalytic theory, it is often asked whether psychoanalysis provides particular knowledge of the state of mind and mental functioning of the analysand. I consider what the psychoanalytic theory of the countertransference might contribute to these discussions. First, I outline a philosophical framework in which to pose the question of, and provide a partial and very general answer to, how our emotions can provide knowledge about ourselves in our relations with others. I then go on to apply this to the situation of psychoanalysis, to show how the “one-to-one” participant experience of the analytic setting can be shown to provide knowledge of both the analyst’s and the patient’s states of mind and of the relation between them. This relation is theorised using the psychoanalytic notion of the countertransference, which in mainstream British psychoanalysis is seen as the lynchpin of the clinical analytic method. I will consider how the idea of the countertransference might be applied in anthropology, indicating what I take (from a non-specialist position) to be important parallels and differences; I shall hope to provide a framework that anthropologists can apply to their own expertise. Lastly, I shall indicate an

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interesting consequence which consulting the countertransference might have for the fieldworker.

Philosophy: interpretation and emotion The theorisation of the countertransference in psychoanalysis goes with a general shift in the second half of the last century within the social sciences in which the investigative standpoint of the detached observer as scientist has ceded to that of engaged reflective participant. This move towards qualitative understanding is driven by arguments about the form of knowledge and the methods of investigation appropriate to the study of human beings considered as rational reflective subjects. In psychoanalysis and anthropology, both “observer-near” disciplines whose contexts bring observer and observed into close contact, the need to take account of how things are for other people as objects of study is more evident than in the positivistic social sciences. In these disciplines the potential usefulness of the observer’s own experiences and of her interpretation of them has then more readily arisen as a topic in its own right. Interpretation thus becomes a prominent issue in the long-standing debate over the epistemology of the social sciences. It is argued that since these sciences’ object of study is the human social world of individual actions and collective practices, the description of these phenomena must involve an account of their meaning for the individuals and collectivities studied, and to the extent that these meanings are not transparent to the investigator they are arrived at through a process of interpretation. The origins of the interpretive tradition in the social sciences lie in Biblical hermeneutics, though with less emphasis on the deciphering of the correct meaning of a text and more on textual interpretation as a route to understanding the mind of the author. Interpretation as a method of investigating the material of social science became, in the hands of its 19th Century proponents, a psychological activity consisting of the exercise of the imagination in practices variously termed as “Verstehen,” “intuitive insight,” “acts of divination” or, more familiarly, “empathy.” But there was at that time no accompanying conceptualisation of these practices and consequently no methodologically serviceable description of what was involved in picking out and writing down the meanings supposedly accessed in this way. The philosopher Peter Hacker has suggested that it is Wittgenstein’s work in the philosophy of language which provides the concepts of meaning and understanding with a philosophical characterisation adequate to justify interpretation as the retrieval of hidden meaning (Hacker 2001).

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Wittgenstein in his later philosophy argues that language is a form of behaviour whose systematicity is owed to a loosely articulated but highly interconnected assortment of rules governing the behaviours through which human beings communicate (Glock 1996: 67-72, 151-154). As a form of behaviour, therefore, it is extremely complex, both in virtue of this systematicity and because, crucially, the rules that govern it are conventions agreed by subjects and not laws of nature. Linguistic behaviour is rule-following behaviour into which human beings are inducted as part of socialisation and it is something for which, so far as we know, only human beings have the intellectual capacity. Learning a language is a social activity in the strong sense: learning the rules for using words means learning to meet agreed norms of behaviour. Once the subject can use a term correctly according to these rules, can respond to its use by others, and can give some account of what it is to use the term correctly, he can be said to understand its meaning. Wittgenstein’s account thus explicates both meaning and understanding in terms of social practice whose rules are publicly agreed and shared. Brought together with the hermeneutical tradition of interpretation this account can be used to ground the methodological claims of the interpretive social sciences to investigate the meaning of human behaviours, activities and practices. Interpretation now becomes the linguistic articulation, the finding of the correct linguistic expression, of meanings embedded or implicit in individual actions and in social practices and institutions. Bringing these meanings into linguistic form is to bring them into the public arena of shared meaning and understanding where correctness of interpretation is, even if never conclusively established, nevertheless accessible to debate. The importance for methodology in the social sciences is that on this account interpretation is no longer conceived as the psychological activity of imagining, although imaginative projection may still provide a route to understanding. Rather, interpretation is a linguistic practice explained in the same terms as our ordinary attempts to understand and attribute meaning to the utterances, actions and practices of others. Furthermore this conception of interpretation also applies to our attempts at understanding ourselves. For as rational reflective beings we humans are continually engaged in interpreting both our experience of the world and reflexively, our experience of ourselves in the world. This is the picture of ourselves as “self-interpreting animals” in the words of the philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues that this is what human beings are, constitutively: the capacity for self-interpretation is part of what it is to be human (Taylor 1985a).

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Taylor’s writing on self-interpretation, itself based in a Wittgensteinian view of meaning and understanding, offers a generalised framework within which to explore what is involved in clinical psychoanalytic interpretation (Taylor 1985b). Taylor’s philosophical treatment of interpretation does not as it stands deal with unconsciously held meaning, but it does provide a theoretical basis for aligning psychoanalytic interpretation with interpretation in the social sciences (Braddock 2006). Psychoanalytic interpretation, like interpretation in the social sciences, has lacked external theoretical justification and has consequently been notoriously vulnerable to familiar objections: that it amounts to no more than suggestion, or that interpretations in psychoanalysis do no more than offer an emotionally acceptable narrative to the patient. For Freud however interpretation was always seen as the elucidation of hidden meaning, of symptoms, dreams, actions and thoughts. Psychoanalytic interpretation is always an individual matter; it aims to help the patient “put feelings into words” by articulating experience in terms of emotions. This may be put philosophically as the bringing of experience under emotion concepts in self-interpretation, an analysis given in more detail in the next section. But it at once raises the question of whether the understanding thus achieved can still be counted as knowledge. When interpretation yields understanding in a form that all can scrutinise, justification can be sought in public debate. But both psychoanalytic and self-interpretation, while yielding understanding to the individual in the sense of making his behaviour more intelligible to him are not in the same way publicly grounded and cannot, it is objected, lead to self-knowledge. The objection has more than one ground. It is held that the data on which the subject’s self-understanding is based are not reliable since (as psychoanalysis itself shows us) introspection of one’s own mental states is (contrary to the Cartesian thesis of the transparency of the mental) liable to mislead the subject. It is also argued that the subjective meanings which are the results of self-interpretation cannot be brought into the public domain for adjudication. While here is not the place to engage with these objections or the conceptions of the mental that lie behind them, partial answers will be found to emerge when we consider another objection to the claim that knowledge is to be got from psychoanalytic and selfinterpretation, the objection that emotions are epistemically “subjective” states. The objection here is that the experience of emotion cannot lead to self-knowledge since emotional judgements, while describing a state of the subject, are not true because of any way things are in the world. As an example of a “subjective” emotional judgement we may consider the sorts

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of judgement that are held about their inamorata by a person in love; notoriously, love is experienced independently of the objective lovableness of its object and judgements about the lovableness of the loved one do not reflect their objective properties but are dependent on the subject’s feelings. However, current theories of emotion in philosophy allow two sides to emotional states of mind. Emotions are taken to be cognitive states, states representing the way the world is “objectively” and as such are epistemically relevant (Lacewing 2004). What however is distinctive about emotions as cognitive states is their evaluative role in informing cognition: an emotion presents the way the world is or is seen to be, but at the same time presents it as being important for the subject. Emotion theorists say that in emotional experience the world is “seen as” or “construed as” significant towards the subject, in a way that involves more than the subject’s having feelings about it. So to make an emotional judgement is to judge the world cognitively, under the aspect of the real, as being a certain way and to construe it, partly through the phenomenology of the emotion concerned, under the aspect of its importance for the subject. It can be seen from this that the correct use of an emotion-term will not be “subjective” in the sense of merely expressing how the subject feels. Rather, from the above, emotions are subjective in indexing the significance for the subject of what is cognised. How then does this help with the objection that the interpretation of experience in terms of emotion is, like emotions themselves, epistemically subjective? Recalling Wittgenstein’s view of language, we see that emotion terms like other words are understood by getting hold of the rules for them, and that we learn these rules in social interaction, from other language users. The correct use of emotion terms in their application to others and to oneself is learned as part of language learning as a social and shared activity. Also, the rules for the use of words are interconnected: the concepts that words stand for all hang together. Our emotion terms do not stand alone but are articulated into language as a whole. Neither experiencing the feelings described by the emotion-term nor “construing” the world as important depends solely on the state of the subject, therefore. When therefore the individual subject reflects on her experience so as to interpret it to herself the emotion-concepts employed place her in relation to others, in the following way. In emotional “construing” of her social and interpersonal environment, she employs emotion terms whose meanings, in the form of the rules for their use, convey cultural norms of social behaviours; self-interpretation thus ties individual emotional experience in to the socially held meaning of these terms. So, emotional

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judgements tell the subject about how the social world presents to her, and about herself, under concepts and on grounds that can, contrary to the objection seen earlier, be made publicly available through language. Experiencing an emotion does more than orient the subject to the way the social world bears on his interests; it also orients him to the experience of other persons in that world and to their own sense of themself as a subject, hereafter referred to as the subject’s “sense of self.” We may then distinguish two ways in which the subject’s sense of self figures in emotion. There is a general way, deriving from the fact that emotion terms, like other psychological terms, are learned in both their first and thirdperson applications. Since part of what is involved in coming to use emotion-concepts correctly about one’s own feelings is to learn also to apply them to others, our feeling an emotion can tell us something about how it is for someone else also to feel that emotion: we can make an imaginative move that allows us to see how they can feel in just “the way we do.” So, though notoriously this is a move that can fail to be made, our understanding of emotion terms does provide a way to help us understand how another person, whom we judge to be feeling an emotion, is affected. This applies quite generally to emotions. Separately however from this general feature of emotions and their attribution, some at least of the moral emotions, such as pity or guilt, have a further characteristic. This is that the state of affairs that forms the content of the emotion is seen as or construed as significant not only for the subject who feels the emotion but also, quite specifically, for the sense of self of the person towards whom the emotion is felt as the object of the emotion. Here it is intrinsic to feeling the emotion that we come more directly to understand the sense of self of the person towards whom the emotion is felt. We may see this from the examples I gave, pity and guilt. In pitying someone I both see their condition as pitiable, their reduced or compromised state as having the import for me that they deserve my forbearance, or my consideration; at the same time part of what is pitiable is the import for them of their reduced or compromised condition, for the way it reduces their sense of self, and this in itself forms part of the ground of the import of their state for me. Similarly in feeling guilt towards someone I see their condition as the result of some action of mine, so that its import for me is one of responsibility or self-reproach. But it is as much as anything the damage to their sense of self, the import to them of its hurt or diminution from my actions, which provides the import to me of my responsibility. Such “other-regarding” emotions are particularly important for interpretation in self-interpretation and in psychoanalysis since it is in experiencing an emotion of this sort towards another person that we can

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come to know how their sense of self is affected. This is not however an intellectualist account; the emotion is experienced, not distantly contemplated, and the import which its phenomenology conveys is such as to put us in a psychological relation with the person that is its object. It can seem natural to couch such an account in terms of identification; one reason not to do so is that the notion of identification is itself imprecise and a more rigorous account is needed. The basis of such an account, of identification as an exercise of the imagination, is given by the philosopher Richard Wollheim (1974). To summarise, what this account of emotion and interpretation provides us with is the following. Human beings are linguistic creatures, whose language use is learned in the social activity of acquiring the rules for the use of words for organising and communicating experience. Emotions as epistemically contributing states provide knowledge of others through the orientation to them that the emotion provides. In “selfinterpretation” humans are continually engaged in reflectively bringing their own experience under emotion-concepts, bringing their cognitive and affective relation to the world under the articulated, conceptually interconnected, set of the social and particularly the moral emotions. Human beings, that is to say, not only interpret, look for the meaning of, their experience of others but turn this capacity onto their experience of themselves in the activity of self-interpretation. And some emotions orient us to the sense of self of the person towards whom they are felt, and put us in psychological relation with them. The account of emotional interpretation does not require all possible emotion-concepts to be available to an individual. Rather, since interpretation itself is a shared activity, new concepts can be learned from the interpretive input of others, such as therapists, helping find the right concept to articulate emotional feelings. With this sketch of a defence of the emotions as a source of knowledge about oneself and others, and of the way that emotions inform interpretation and self-interpretation, I now turn to consider the psychoanalytic theory of the countertransference.

Psychoanalysis: the theory of the countertransference Psychoanalysis is among other things a psychology of the unconscious mind, and schools of psychoanalysis vary significantly in their conception of the unconscious. Most would agree on some distinction between the ordinary psychological notion we have of the unconscious, even though this has come post-Freud to be informed by psychoanalysis, and the

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unconscious as Freud himself conceived it, the “dynamic” or “psychoanalytic” unconscious. The former is readily recognised; a person’s thoughts can be inaccessible to them consciously but “accidentally,” as the philosopher Sebastian Gardner has termed the operation of ordinarily recognised psychological mechanisms such as lapses of attention or memory, or in conditions of cognitive overload (Gardner 1993: 89, 213). The dynamic unconscious by contrast is the field of mental states which are “non-accidentally” inaccessible to consciousness. These states are, according to psychoanalytic theory, made inaccessible to consciousness by mechanisms which operate to keep them that way, so as to protect the mind from painful thoughts. The force of “non-accidental” is that here inaccessibility results from regulative processes organised towards the goal of maintaining mental equilibrium, in what Freud called the mode of mental functioning subserving the Pleasure principle (Freud 1911). States made inaccessible in this way cannot easily be retrieved into consciousness firstly because their absence from consciousness is functionally embedded, the defensive operations being maintained by the requirement to avoid mental pain, and secondly because such operations involve transformations of content through which the painfulness of unacceptable thoughts is neutralised, as a result of which their original content becomes unavailable. The psychoanalytic conception of a dynamically inaccessible unconscious thus departs from the notion of ordinary accidental inaccessibility in two ways, one more radical in its nature and implications than the other. The more radical is the thesis that under the mode of function of the unconscious mind the content of thoughts is transformed; I shall have more to say about this later. Less radical is the theorisation of the defence mechanisms’ regulative role and of the principle of mental functioning they subserve. I have argued elsewhere that it is a recognisably functionalist conception of the mind (Braddock 2006). It is also a conception which shows continuity with ordinary psychology; mechanisms of denial or projection are commonly recognised as ways in which a person may disown or fail to acknowledge their unacceptable thoughts, and the defensive function is often apparent. Moreover, such defensive configurations may, even when functionally embedded in character, be modifiable or even reversible in changes of circumstance. Much of what is achieved by ordinary self-interpretation comes from retrieval in reflection of what is unconscious in these ways. Thus in many forms of dynamically oriented therapy, and in some phases of psychoanalysis itself, material may be retrieved into conscious awareness through an interpretive activity of the therapist that builds on this

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continuity with ordinary reflective self-interpretation. Therapeutic progress can be made by the patient engaging with the therapist in joint reflective interpretation, and insight into the defences can be achieved as traits of character, without interpreting the defences themselves within the transference. Psychoanalysis itself involves more than ordinary reflective insight however. It also involves transference analysis, the making of interpretations within the transference. There are significant differences between theories of psychoanalysis as to how the transference is to be understood, and also how it is to be interpreted (Sandler et al. 1973a). What is generally agreed is that the clinical analytic setting facilitates the transferral by the patient onto his relation with the analyst of unconscious structures which repeat patterns of relating acquired in infancy and childhood. Transference is, as Freud himself considered, a general psychological phenomenon with manifestations in ordinary life, but is brought into salience, and so into interpretive focus, in the clinical setting. There is then a correspondingly broad view (though not one taken by Freud) of the transference as ranging over the entire therapeutic relationship and of transference interpretation as conceptually continuous with the activity of ordinary reflective interpretation just described. The phenomena with which psychoanalysis is concerned and which psychoanalytic practice deals with go beyond the range of ordinary defensive configurations, to those which are ruggedly unresponsive to reality, deforming of real relationships, and intractable with respect to insight. Accordingly the work of transference interpretation is directed to making accessible to conscious experience those unconscious relationships in which the patient is situated, which are responsible for pathology by functionally perpetuating the defences. It is only inside the transference that interpretations can be “mutative” (as Strachey puts it) on these unconscious relationships (Strachey 1934:142). For it is only when these relationships are manifested in the patient’s communicative behaviour towards the analyst in the transference that they become available to the analyst for reflection and interpretation, and through this can be revealed for what they are. As manifested in the transference, however, these relationships are in a disguised and distorted form; they are yet to be interpreted and prior to this they are yet to be understood as transference manifestations. On the more radical view of the “non-accidental inaccessibility” of the dynamic unconscious, part of the distortion arises from the transformation of content. What might then be said to be analytic about psychoanalysis is its mode of interpretation, as directed at decoding

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or deciphering meanings out of material which has been transformed by the unconscious, “primary process” mode of thought. This radical view of the nature of the unconscious and the conception of the transference that it yields, may be taken as definitive of psychoanalysis for its theorists and practitioners in the British clinical tradition, particularly that of object relations theory of both the Independent and Kleinian schools.1 Object relations theory was formulated towards the mid-20th Century among members of the British Psychoanalytical Society and their Scottish colleagues. Building on theoretical outlines in Freud’s own writing, notably in his “Mourning and Melancholia” of 1917, and significantly influenced by the work of Melanie Klein, herself a member of the British Society, these thinkers replaced Freud’s early instinct theory by a relational psychology placing the emotional character of the infant’s relation with the mother at the centre of psychic life and development.2 The term “object-relations” refers to the way that the subject’s patterns of emotional relating to others are represented in the mind, as between subject and object. The significance of this re-theorisation for the present discussion is that it made it possible to see a further side to the clinical interaction between patient and analyst. According to this new perspective the treatment setting does more than provide a favourable set of conditions for the emergence and interpretation of the transference; crucially, it provides for the patient’s object relations to be experienced as holding between him and the analyst in a way that is not only psychically real for the patient, something that Freud himself had recognised, but real also for the analyst. Until this point the analyst’s own feelings had been seen as arising from her own transference to her patient and as such were to be dealt with and understood, outside the clinical treatment of the patient, in the analyst’s own analysis. But it came now to be seen that the analyst, through noting and interpreting to herself her own emotional feelings, could use these to inform her of what the patient was unconscious of but nevertheless communicating to her in their unconscious object-relations. This self-interpretation by the analyst of feelings arising as indicators of the object relations into which she is drawn by the patient in the transference, provided “an instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious, in the words of the Kleinian analyst Paula Heimann (Heimann 1950:81). This “instrument of research” of the analyst is the countertransference as it was originally theorised in the British object relations school, who favoured a restriction of what is to count as counter-transference to what the analyst can tell from analysing her own responses to the patient.3 However, like the concept of the transference, the countertransference also

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has a broader usage embracing all unconscious communication between analyst and patient. A broad definition (though gesturing at a narrow sense) is given by Laplanche and Pontalis as “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analysand’s own transference.” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 92-3).4 The broad application covers not only feelings of emotion, but also behaviours, fantasies, and other responses to the patient’s unconscious communication, including what Sandler has described as “role-responsiveness” of the analyst’s behaviour, and which can be used by the analyst or therapist trained to a heightened form of ordinary reflective self-interpretation to orient him in his relations with the patient (Sandler 1976). Lastly, the broader usage makes the analyst’s self-interpretive activity within the countertransference essentially continuous with the ordinary reflective responsiveness outside the clinical setting, in just the way described for transference interpretation broadly conceived. In the terms of my previous section the countertransference broadly conceived may be said to be the analyst’s own self-interpretive activity directed upon her consciously felt emotions and consciously noted responses, employed to reveal how things are with her patient unconsciously in the transference relation. Also within the theoretical framework of that section we can defend the analyst’s countertransference in its broad sense as emotional self-interpretation which is knowledgeproducing in the clinical setting. The account given earlier of how emotions are used in interpretation of experience showed how in ordinary life we use our emotions in representing and evaluating our relations with others and in understanding ourselves. That general account of emotional interpretation left room for the fact that no-one is in possession of the whole range of emotion-concepts. The account is readily extended to show how some of the interpretive work done by the analyst in the transference involves finding the right concepts to articulate emotions and feelings that are unconsciously felt and communicated to her by the patient, in a way that is continuous with ordinary reflection. Thus it is that reflecting on the whole range of her own emotions towards the patient in the countertransference, as broadly conceived, will help the analyst arrive at knowledge of how things are with the patient. Both broad and narrow applications of the countertransference can be seen in an example from the work of the Kleinian analyst Pearl King (King 1978: 333). She describes a short interaction in the analysis of a male patient in his early twenties. A moment of understanding had arisen between analyst and patient:

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I was feeling sympathetic to him and aware of the disappointment and humiliation he was feeling now and had felt as a child. I was uncertain who I was representing in the transference but I felt sure he was experiencing with me some moments of mutual understanding between himself and his mother that he must have experienced in his childhood and I interpreted this to him. I had been particularly impressed by his mood, as he was generally very negative and critical.

Here we see the analyst’s conscious feelings of understanding and of sympathy, as putting her in touch with how things are for her patient. The account goes on: After a short silence he moved rather impatiently to another position on the couch, as if wanting to leave the pain and insight behind in the former position. He then said in a different tone of voice that the trouble with this analysis is that he never really feels anything, he is really so different from all my other patients that I can’t possibly understand him. I was stupid, and not able to get involved with him as Mr X. (a former analyst) had been.

The analyst at this point is attributing an emotion to the patient; he is distressed by his painful feelings, indeed too distressed to bear them and this leads both to his disowning them and to the attack on her. The interpretation, made to herself at this stage, is about the meaning of this moment of understanding for him: an increased pain and also, an impasse of feeling, a “double-bind that he had felt in as a child.” She continues: I then became aware of the discrepancy between my feelings and those that the patient was attributing to me. I could see that he was reacting to his own painful conflicts by the defence of denial and indifference, and was then accusing me of being indifferent to him. I remembered that he had complained that his parents were often both indifferent and unresponsive to his form of suffering as a child, and I felt he was now experiencing me as these indifferent parents. When I interpreted this to him, he responded with intense scorn and denigration. I was not very bright and rather limited. He was not interested in his family or parents – it was irrelevant. He didn’t know why he paid to listen to all this stupid rubbish. I then remembered that he had a very clever mother, whom he loved, but with whom he felt stupid, and certainly not as clever as his older brother whom both parents idolised. I further realised that he had now reversed roles with me. He was his very clever mother and I was her stupid child, not as good as Mr X, and he was behaving to me as he felt his mother had done to him. He was showing me how he tried to deal with painful affects by identifying with the aggressor-mother and by projecting onto me his stupid and yet very vulnerable little boy self. he was thus unconsciously communicating to me the affective dilemmas of his childhood by reversing transference roles and the affects that had

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The impossibility of understanding referred to here is both that of his early years in the “double bind” with his mother, and as repeated in the transference where, since his own feelings were disowned - projected onto the analyst and left for her to experience and articulate. Although this account does not include an explicit description of the analyst’s feelings when under attack, or when placed in the double-bind, it is in this final passage that we see her registering in the countertransference something outside the range of ordinary self-interpretation. The discrepancy between what she feels and what is attributed to her alerts her to the fact that she is being allotted a role or place in the patient’s relation to his mother, that of the stupid child that he can thereby avoid being and, instead, can side with his mother in denigrating. But, by placing the analyst in the situation in which the attributed emotion is discrepant with the felt emotion, he unconsciously communicated to the analyst what it had been like for him as a child when his mother foisted stupidity on him. In the next section I shall go on to consider how the conception of the counter-transference, taken broadly as a developed form of ordinary selfinterpretation on the part of the analyst which supports reflective understanding of the patient’s unconscious communications, may be applied in the practice of anthropological fieldwork, and provide some illustrative material. It might then be asked whether there is any justification, beyond the theoretical and technical commitments local to the British object relations school, for retaining a “narrow” sense of countertransference separate as a specifically psychoanalytic concept, rather than conceding it to be part of a general psychological phenomenon with a distinctive manifestation in the clinical setting. The justification for this separation lies, I have suggested, in a certain conception of the dynamic unconscious. As a distinction it signals a theoretically and clinically important issue in psychoanalysis which grounds a further and distinctive contribution to knowledge on the part of psychoanalysis, which is the theorisation of operations of psychic defence. I shall end by suggesting that the distinction is interesting for methodology in anthropology, and illustrate this with a final piece of anthropological material.

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Anthropology: countertransference and fieldwork I turn finally to consider the application of what I have said to anthropology, with respect to the practice of fieldwork. For psychoanalysis to be a reliable resource for the anthropologist in the field and in ethnography due notice must be taken of theoretical differences between schools, especially when these are glossed over by uniformity of psychoanalytic terminology. This is particularly important when, as is the case with the countertransference, a concept or theory developed within one theoretical framework, such as British object relations, comes to have a wider field of application in other schools or indeed outside of psychoanalysis altogether. It is necessary, as here, both to specify the theoretical orientation of any psychoanalytically based methodological innovations, and to clarify important theoretical commitments particularly with respect to the unconscious. With this caveat in place I continue now with the question that concerns us here, of how the theory of the countertransference as an “instrument of research” which yields knowledge in the psychoanalytic clinical setting, might be used by the anthropologist to help provide knowledge from her emotional experience in the field. To be serviceable the theory of the countertransference needs to be incorporated into methodology as a practice, and it is important to recognise the bearing on practice of professionalisation, both for training purposes and for establishing norms of good practice. Personal psychotherapy has been envisaged as a way to increase the fieldworker’s self-knowledge and hence objectivity in the field, and more recently as expanding observational skills and sensitivities. But it may be argued that the recommendation of therapy for fieldworkers, whether practical or desirable, would not in any case provide training in use of the countertransference. First, in therapy the patient is precisely a patient, not a therapist and so, not in the right position to experience and employ the countertransference, and second, because any experiential component would need to be suitably professionalised by training. In particular therefore, personal therapy is not sufficient. Nor indeed is it necessary: there are other ways to provide training in self-observation in unconscious interactions, notably in training or supervision groups, such as “Balint groups” for doctors (Balint 1957). Lastly, it must be borne in mind that therapy may have a destabilising effect on ego-defences which are adequate and perhaps necessary for activity in the field. As with any professional practice, then, structures for theoretical and practical training need to be in place, to deliver those parts of psychoanalytic theory which

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might usefully be made available to potential fieldworkers. With this requirement in place it may be asked what psychoanalysis has to offer to methods in the field, which could be transmitted through training. Here, finally, I turn to the question of what aspects of the countertransference might usefully be taken up and applied in the field. Drawing a parallel between analyst and anthropologist, the latter too can engage in self-interpretation through reflecting on her thoughts, fantasies and role-responsive behaviours so as to articulate and understand her emotional experience. This then corresponds to the broad sense of the countertransference, where we consider the totality of the fieldworker’s emotional feelings as they arise in relation to the community she is engaged with. Her emotions can then orient her to what is communicated by members of the study community both consciously, and unconsciously through being “accidentally inaccessible” to them. Accidental inaccessibility may here have the same psychological causes as elsewhere: being forgotten, being tacit through being un-articulated, or being subject to “ordinary” defences of denial or projection, and it is an interesting empirical question what other causes might be identified in the field. Assuming suitable training to enable her to discriminate these responses from feelings of personal origin, or feelings that realistically register the different environment of the field, what then will these “field countertransference” emotions tell the fieldworker? From our philosophical account of the emotions we recall that emotions are cognitive states which present the social world to the subject as having a bearing for him, and through the condition of being able to use the emotion term of both himself and others, as enabling him to see how it is for someone experiencing that emotion. We noted further an important group of emotions where experiencing the emotion involves our seeing something about the sense of self of the person towards whom we feel the emotion, what it is to be in the state that elicits the emotion in us. It might be objected that this runs the risk of imposing alien emotional categories on cultural groups which do not possess them. However, as in psychoanalysis, interpretation needs to be confirmed, and my suggestion is that the emotional understanding of the other’s sense of self gained by the worker will help in formulating equivalents of “interpretation” – by questioning, direct or indirect, or by interpretation of practices – which make confirmation and disconfirmation possible. An illustration of this comes from a paper by the anthropologist Jean Briggs written in part to integrate her own personally-acquired psychoanalytic knowledge with her fieldwork among the Inuit in 1963 (Briggs 1987). Reflecting on this earlier work she writes:

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I experienced often painfully, the discrepancies between my behavior, and that of the Inuit toward me and toward other Inuit. I watched their reactions to my moodiness – their precipitate departures, sudden silences when I snapped, swore, or failed to smile – and discovered from sermons directed sometimes ostensibly at my three- and six-year-old sisters and sometimes directly at me, as well as from disapproving letters written to the Inuit catechist in Gjoa Haven that my behavior was perceived as impulsive, irrational, and aggressive. In discouragement I felt that the Inuit expected superhuman control of antisocial moods and superhuman benignity (p. 9).

The Inuit conduct themselves according to two ‘all-pervasive’ values which Briggs’s behaviour transgressed. She writes: The first of these is nallik-, which translates as nurturance/Biblical love/pity for mankind. Nallik- ideally requires feeding and protecting any human in need as well as suppressing hostility absolutely. The second value is isuma, ‘rationality. Isuma is demonstrated by control over impulsivity – not only antisocial impulses but any at all - as well as by the ability to think problems through calmly and judge accurately the consequences of actions and the likelihood of various outcomes of events. One consequence of - as well as evidence of - a well-developed isuma is the ability to act autonomously, self-sufficiently. A person who behaves in a nallik-like manner is a Good Person, and one who has isuma is an Adult (p. 10).

Returning to this a decade later the author comes to understand the way that nallik- is inculcated into young children, through forms of play that adults engaged in with their children (p. 12). “Games like: ‘Are you lovable? You are? Are you sure?’; ‘Who’s your daddy? You don’t have a daddy.’; ‘What a lovely new shirt; why don’t you die so I can have it?’....And: ‘Why don’t you kill your new baby brother? Like this!’ (demonstrating the technique).” As children’s games often do, feelings and emotions are aroused. These are not only feelings congruent with nallik-, such as protectiveness of the baby brother, a need to be loved, loving feelings for a father, but contrary feelings that are also stimulated: wanting to be rid of baby brother or of father, anxiety at not being loved. The game allows the child to connect feelings and emotions to values, while sustaining awareness of ambivalence towards them: “the awareness that one wants what one should not want, enjoys what one should fear, or fears what one should want – awareness in other words that one wants to break the law” (p. 13). Briggs suggests that this awareness heightens the sense of importance of value for conduct; in experiencing such emotions and their consequences in the play situation (such as retaliation for

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aggression, or hurt caused to another) the child comes to feel “it could happen to me.” Briggs’s interest in psychoanalysis centres on what she describes as “Freudian ideas about the constructive role of conflict in psychic organization” (p. 15). Her observations also provide ample material for demonstrating the thesis about the way emotion words are learned and emotional interpretation of experience is made possible. The games she describes are a concrete example of Wittgenstein’s “language games,” as applied to learning the meaning of emotion words. They provide a way for the child to discover through her own experience what it is like emotionally to be on the receiving end of certain socially undesirable behaviours, and to understand the emotional effect her own behaviour will have on the other person. The potential for emotional learning includes the other-regarding moral emotions. For the playful inducing of such strongly contrasting emotions, of love and hate, or aggressiveness and guilt, might be seen as enabling the child to experience an emotion like pity or guilt for feeling hate towards someone; by understanding from experience what it is like to be on the receiving end of hate – that the other person will also be hurt, diminished, or frightened – the hate can come to be replaced by guilt at having hurt, or pity at the frightened state of, the other person. I said earlier that self-interpretation, bringing one’s own experience under emotion-concepts, was an activity continuous with some aspects of psychoanalytic interpretation in helping the analyst see how things are for the patient. I also raised the caveat that there is no place for, because no analogue of, therapeutic interpretation (and a fortiori not for transference interpretation) in anthropology. Since confirmation of the correctness of interpretation cannot come from a patient it must come from elsewhere. Nevertheless we may take our psychoanalytic understanding of this material further. Briggs’s mention of her early emotional responses, categorised by the Inuit as childish, need not be seen as (nor does Briggs present them as) merely reporting her disorientation in the field. Rather, they show her as occupying the position of the child learning the value of nallik- (of which she had at the time an intellectual understanding) without benefit of a game in which to explore, safely with a parent, the consequences of non-nallik- behaviour. Her later understanding of the way nallik- is taught as a value, through emotional learning, may well owe something to her first-hand conscious experience of what the Inuit adults were helping their children to master. And, as her description makes clear, they did it so effectively that non-nallik- behaviour was rare: “I was surprised to see that children as young as five years were very ‘good’ and undemanding” (p. 10). We may say that this fieldwork allowed her to

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experience directly “how it was” for the Inuit child, and for the child in the adult Inuit: something inaccessible to Inuit consciousness accidentally, because although known about it was unacknowledged or left implicit in practice. Reflecting, years later, she was able to understand how it was hidden, by observing the ambivalence in the games and its role in establishing the value of nallik-. We might say of Briggs’s “fieldcountertransference,” and it may be a useful way to think of fieldcountertransference anyway, that it extended over a matter of years. In summary so far then, I have offered a cautious account of what “field-countertransference” might consist in and what it might contribute, one building on the idea long present in the anthropological world that the anthropologist is herself a “tool” or “instrument.” What I have added is an account of the countertransference which defines and justifies a practice of reflectively directing attention to one’s own feelings, a practice whose epistemological credentials have been clarified as the coming to understand and to know oneself and the other, through the activity of selfinterpretation. 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 (again in the broad sense) be communicating, through behaviours and actions which elicit emotion. Thus it is that feeling the emotion orients the fieldworker to how things are for the individual or group of individuals with whom she is in relation. This orientation then can be used to take her understanding of them further, by questioning or observation, informed by understanding of her “field-countertransference” feelings. I turn lastly to consider the significance to anthropology of the narrow form of countertransference. Part of the impetus for the theory of the countertransference came from the need to explain what is happening when the feelings that the analyst experiences are puzzling or incongruous, and not readily articulated into the analyst’s understanding of the emotional relation to the patient (although congruence with the analyst’s conscious feelings and attitudes is not ruled out). Such puzzlingness or incongruity is seen to be itself a dynamically significant response to an unconscious communication of the patient, indicating that the analyst’s conscious understanding of this communication is lagging behind his unconscious one. This focuses the analyst’s self-interpretive activity on such feelings, understood as part of the unconscious communication between him and the analysand, as being determined by the object relations in which the two of them are engaged in the transference. These transference object relations are being kept out of consciousness by the operation of the psychic defences of the patient, in which the analyst is

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involved and from which he must extract himself so as to reflect and interpret to himself so as to “think.” Then, if all goes well, the analyst’s self-interpretive activity will bring into consciousness a hitherto unconscious emotion which will form part of his orientation to the patient in the transferential object relation: it will “tell him” who in the unconscious relation being communicated to him by the patient he is being and so it will enable him to understand the patient’s own situation. In the terms of the philosophical account of emotion we looked at earlier, the emotion once consciously felt will present the import to the analyst of the object relation he is in, in the transference. Equivalently, it will enable him to construe his and the patient’s relationship in the transference, and so to gain knowledge of what (unconscious) object relation it is. Although the relation is one only “in the mind” of the patient, the very special conditions of the analytic setting allow it to be experienced as a real relationship. It is here that the analyst’s countertransference will inform transference interpretations aimed at understanding the meaning of the patient’s unconscious communications about that relationship. When the object-relationship is brought into consciousness, the object of psychoanalytic knowledge is the subject’s inner psychic world. We can ask, therefore, whether there is any analogue of this situation which can be found in the anthropological situation and in particular whether the field countertransference might provide a window onto, or entry into, the psychic world of the other. An important disanalogy is the fact that the anthropological enterprise is not a therapeutic one. What is to count as confirmation of the emotional understanding achieved by the fieldworker in self-interpretation cannot be the sort of confirmation available to the analyst from the patient’s responses to interpretation or from the progress of therapy. The correct destination of these interpretations is then, not the object that provoked the feeling (individual, institution, etc) but the notes and writing up, as ethnography, of the outcome of reflective understanding. Confirmation of correctness of interpretation resides in the contribution of this data to the overall understanding achieved, from outside sources of knowledge and, perhaps, from endorsement by other workers. Despite the disanalogy I want to suggest a way in which a properly psychoanalytic, narrow, countertransference, one indexing unconscious communication of the sort that can only be made conscious through psychoanalytic transference interpretation, might have an anthropological application in fieldwork. Here another piece of psychoanalytic theory is needed. Freud held that there are two ways that the mind works, which are jointly constitutive of its nature as the organ of thought. One is the familiar

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cognitive and reality-oriented mode of rational conscious or accidentally unconscious thought, obeying what Freud called the Reality principle. The other obeys what Freud called the Pleasure principle, and is the mode in which the psychoanalytic unconscious works: here the mind’s working is oriented to the maintenance of psychic equilibrium and the avoidance of mental pain. This thesis is absolutely central to the psychoanalytic theory of the mind, in introducing the conception of a radically different form of thought in which what is thought is thereby felt to be brought about. We may accordingly understand the operation of the psychic defence mechanisms such as projection, denial and idealisation, as transforming unfavourable representations into favourable ones, in ways that were illustrated in the psychoanalytic vignette given earlier. I earlier characterised the mode of function of the unconscious mind as that where the content of thoughts is transformed so as to render them nonaccidentally inaccessible; this transformation, effected by the defences, is in the service of the Pleasure principle. This psychoanalytic thesis is given a philosophical exposition as the “archaic theory of the mind” (Wollheim 1984). Its significance for the present discussion comes from a feature to which Wollheim draws attention when he remarks that when figures, or persons, are represented in this mode of thought their ‘characteristics include ambivalence: the pursuit of archaic sexual aims: and the alternation between an utter implacability and an unnatural radiance of character’, adding that such figures are presented in a certain way, as having “radical incompleteness or indeterminacy of character...deathlessness, or rather a permanent renewability of existence: an unlimited power to attract to itself novel significance through expanded associations: and a relative imperviousness to reality-testing” (p. 128). What Wollheim is describing here are qualities of thought that, when appearing in consciousness, signal the operation of the unconscious mode of thought. I suggest that we may add to these at least the following: an extreme urgency or an unnatural tranquillity, a sense of compulsion, of charm and seductiveness, feelings of beatific satisfaction and, equally, feelings of menace, strangeness, or alien-ness (it is then plausible that these latter may at times contribute to the incongruity or alien-ness of the analyst’s feelings experienced in the countertransference). These are signs of unconscious functioning to whose significance the analyst will through training be alerted. The interesting parallel that this presents us with here is the question of what signs, detected by a suitably trained observer in the field, might alert her to the operation and content of an unconscious mode of thought in those she studies. The view that the meanings of cultural institutions and practices are to be understood in

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terms of the unconsciously held beliefs of their members is not a new one. But we might envisage the application of the narrow countertransference as providing an “instrument of research” into such beliefs when these are non-accidentally inaccessible. Since my intention here is only to sketch a promising line of investigation I shall explore this with an example. Galina Lindquist (Lindquist 2010, this volume), a Swedish anthropologist herself of Russian origin, describes fieldwork conducted in the 1990’s among traditional healers in post-communist urban Russia. Focusing on her own experiences she sees their significance as placing her, an outsider ethnographer, within the power relationships of the community she was there to study. The experience she describes is a “dysphoric” one: invited to be present at a session by a woman healer working in an urban healing centre, she found herself the subject of the session in which, she says, “I quickly lost control of the situation:” The healer sat on the chair opposite to mine and locked my eyes in a firm grip of her gaze. ‘I’ll diagnose you. Don’t be afraid; I’ll only tell you the truth. You are not afraid of the truth, are you? God sent me to this earth to help and to heal, like He did His son, and I’ll help you, however grave your problems are; but for this, you have to be totally open to me. Open up and believe; the truth is here to face; only by facing the truth can we be healed. Close your eyes now! I’ll tell you truthfully about every problem you have; I’ll start from upwards and go all the way down. Your throat chackra is terrible, you have adenoma of the vocal cords and it is unfortunate for you: you work a lot with your voice, but you won’t be able to do it anymore soon enough. I see this clump sitting right there, inside your throat; and it is very bad for you, since your voice is your main working instrument. (which is certainly true! [And I tend to have problems with bronchitis and with my voice, I thought, so she must be one of those who see!).] I go further down [she continued] your liver is totally destroyed, you are taking too much tranquillizers [I breathed out inside myself, since that was not the case, so maybe she is trying to scare me, and, after all, she does not see…’] but - and here her face got distorted with pain, and her eyes filled with tears – the worst of all is that the count of cancer cells in your body is hundreds of times higher that normal. Perhaps you don’t have symptoms yet, but it’s only a matter of time: every normal person has cancer cells, but they do not multiply unless they are triggered, but with you, they have taken the better of you, the whole of you, and they are so many that it really hurts [now tears were rolling down her cheeks]. And all over you, I see the marks, the traces of bad energy left by all those healers that you met before. Cancer in this stage had slight chances to be cured; the only chance you have is to leave all the healers and let me treat you – God punish me if I’m lying – but let me tell you that

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I have quite a good record of treating cancer. In fact I’m the only healer in this establishment who dares to accept cancer patients. And I keep people alive for years. But my condition is that they only work with me, that it is only me and the energy of the disease, that I don’t have to deal with all those bad energies of these evil people, and these poisonous medicines. And if you do that, we’ll write a book together, because all my life is wedded to science, I could do everything for science…(p. 166).

The anthropologist comments: “Now, in retrospect, I can view the emotions that overwhelmed me in these moments as a musical piece with several interlacing themes, likely familiar to those being caught in an act of violence. Indignation, helpless anger at the other person’s meanness and at one’s own stupidity for having put oneself in such a situation.” She describes her predominant emotion here as “visceral fear” without an object, an overwhelming sense of dread, and describes too her attempt on returning to her apartment to purify herself from the “evil energies that I felt the interaction left me with.” Writing on the background to her fieldwork in post-communist Russia as a society where old certainties and an old order have been replaced by “a new lawlessness, ruthlessness and cruelty” there is, Lindquist notes, a deep preoccupation with power and powerlessness (Lindquist 2006). The practice of healing of the sort described here flourishes in such environments, where successful healers construct themselves as “persons of power.” Thus in her own case too it is “culturally logical that, at the first encounter, the healer attempts to put the patient into the modality of dread” and so, into a position of dependence on and powerlessness vis a vis the healer. Lindquist analyses these transactions in terms of power relations and the emotions of fear and dread that, induced, manoeuvre her as the patient into a dependent position. But we may also see them as related to powerlessness as its effect; to be without power in a culture overrun by the strongest where might is right, is to live in the terror of the jungle. Considering Lindquist’s experiences from the standpoint of “field countertransference” we might say the following. First, the nature of the emotion was fear; it presented the situation to her under an aspect or import of threat; that threat might be interpreted as presented by the power play of the healer, displaced onto the apparent threat of cancer. This aspect is partly confirmed by her retrospective report of her emotions, in which the interaction is compared to an act of violence. Here, interpretation of the emotion remains within the “broad” countertransference. Second, however, she rapidly “lost control” of the situation, experiencing emotions alien to what is predicted on the balanced emotional judgment with which

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one approaches a treatment setting. This incongruity is a signal that the communication is being driven from something non-accidentally inaccessible to conscious awareness. Third, the mode in which the emotion occurs, its overwhelming and objectless nature, recalls the characterisation of unconscious material given earlier: an “alternation between an utter implacability and an unnatural radiance of character.” (Lindquist experienced only the former, but she makes reference to the “extraordinary experiences” that people share in their ethnographies as tending to fall within the type “peace, love and understanding”(p. 164); plausibly, such euphoric feelings appear on surrender to the power of the healer.) Here we can interpret that the emotion of dread which was induced conveys, in the form of unconscious “communication,” what is unconsciously experienced by those who inhabit a world of the powerless under continual threat of aggression. In this case, confirmation of this “countertransference interpretation” is available in Lindquist’s picture of post-Soviet society. I should like to emphasise the tentative nature of these suggestions. Much more could be said about the three cases that I have been able only briefly to discuss. There are important questions about the cross-cultural applicability of emotion concepts; in particular the concept of a subjectreferring emotion might be thought local to cultures having a certain conception of the self. More needs to be said about the ways that unconsciously held beliefs can be held collectively; this is a philosophical puzzle about which little has been written. In the account I gave of the psychoanalytic countertransference I did not pursue the explanation in terms of the mental mechanisms of projection and identification, mechanisms which psychoanalysis holds to be in operation there. Nor have I dealt with the countertransference as it occurs in groups. These and other theoretical issues require exploration. With this in place, the thesis that a “field-countertransference” can be defended as a model, as well as its implementation as methodology, would then need to be developed in the light of experience in the field. Only then can one assess the value of the psychoanalytic theory of the countertransference for coming to know the other.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr James Davies for guidance in the anthropological literature, and to the late Dr Galina Lindquist for permission to discuss and quote extensively from her unpublished material.

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References All references to Freud are to ‘SE’: Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud edited by James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. Balint, M. 1957. The Doctor, His Patient, and The Illness. London: Pitman. Braddock, L.E. 2006. “Psychoanalysis as functionalist social science: the legacy of Freud’s ‘Project for a scientific psychology.’” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37: 394-413. Briggs, J. 1987. “In Search of Emotional Meaning.” Ethos Vol. 15 (1): 815. Freud, S. 1911. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” SE 12: 213-226. —. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia.” SE 14: 243-58. Gardner, S. 1991. “The Unconscious.” In J. Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993. Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glock, H-J. 1996. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Hacker, P. 2001. “The Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding.” In Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies. Oxford: Clarendon. Heimann, P. 1950. “On Counter-Transference.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 31: 81-84. —. 1960. “Counter-Transference II.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 33:9-15. King, P. 1978. “Affective Response of the Analyst to the Patient’s Communications.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 59: 329334. Kohon, G. ed. 1986. The British School of Psychoanalysis and the Independent Tradition. London: Free Association Books. Lacewing, M. 2004. “Emotion and Cognition: Recent Developments in Therapeutic Practice.” Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 11 (2): 175-186. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. 1988. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books (Translation copyright The Hogarth Press Ltd., 1973) Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse. Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.

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Lindquist, G. 2006. Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in Contemporary Russia. New York: Berghahn. Little, M. 1960. “Counter-Transference V.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 33:29-31. Mitchell, S. A. and M. J. Black. 1995. Freud and Beyond. A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought. New York: Basic Books. Sandler, J., Dare, Ch. and A. Holder. 1973. “Basic Clinical Concepts III: Transference.” British Journal of Psychiatry 116: 667-72, 1970. Reprinted in J. Sandler et al., eds., The Patient and the Analyst: The Basis of the Psychoanalytic Process. London: George Allen & Unwin. Sandler, J., Dare, Ch. and A. Holder. 1973. “Basic Clinical Concepts IV: Counter-Transference.” British Journal of Psychiatry 117: 83-8, 1970. Reprinted in J. Sandler et al. eds. The Patient and the Analyst: The Basis of the Psychoanalytic Process. London: George Allen & Unwin. Sandler, J. 1976. “Counter-Transference and Role Responsiveness.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 3: 43-7. Segal, H. 1979. Klein. Glasgow: William Collins and Sons (Fontana). Strachey, J. 1934. “The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of PsychoAnalysis.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 15: 127-59. Taylor, Ch. 1985a. “Self-Interpreting Animals”. In Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1985b. “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” Review of Metaphysics, 25:3-51, 1971. Reprinted in Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Winnicott, D. W. 1960. “Counter-Transference III” British Journal of Medical Psychology. 33:17-21. Wollheim, R. 1974. “Identification and Imagination.” In R. Wollheim, ed., Freud. A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Anchor Books. —. 1984. The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes 1

See e.g. Mitchell and Black (1995). For Klein’s work see Segal (1979). 3 Heimann (1950), Heimann (1960), Winnicott 1960. See also Kohon (1986). 4 See also Sandler et al. (1973). 2

CONCLUSION SUBJECTIVITY IN THE FIELD: A HISTORY OF NEGLECT JAMES DAVIES

One central idea underpinning this volume is that the production of ethnographic knowledge is the result of the process by which ethnographic facts, before being set down in the final written account, first pass through the observer’s subjectivity. This is to say, the path down which ethnographic facts move when travelling from the “field” to the “page,” directly passes through the internal terrain of our perceptual, cognitive and emotional apparatus - namely, the complex fabric of our individual subjectivity. As no research in anthropology can bypass this psychological influence, the ethnographies we produce invariably bear the imprint of these subjective elements. Our written accounts of the life-worlds we study are therefore always altered by this filtering process, to the extent that we can say that it is because of this process that no ethnography attains full objectivity. What has been said above can be summarised more succinctly in the following way: just as our internal reality can never escape the forces and influences of the external world, so our interpretations and representations of external reality are always influenced by the contents of our internal reality. These internal (subjective) and external (social) domains are thus always pervious to each other, are always in mutually constituting accord. The idea that the subjective and the social world are always mutuallyconstituting, has earned the status of a general axiom in socio/cultural anthropology. This axiom states that individuals and the societies to which they belong are locked in a kind of inviolable embrace where neither party eludes the powerful altering influences of the other. And it is this concept of the “mutuality” of self and society that has formed the backbone of so much social and anthropological theory – (e.g. some variant form being assumed by the schools of functionalism, structuralism, cultural and personality, interpretivism, post-structuralism and post-modernism). Given

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the widespread acceptance of such mutuality we must therefore ask why mainstream anthropology, while using this idea to explain the relationship between the individual and social world, has not been particularly forthcoming in recognising this concept’s relevance for field methodology. This is to say, we wonder why ideas advanced in certain branches of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis (disciplines which daily employ aspects of the researcher’s subjectivity as tools to facilitate understanding and further knowledge), have been greeted with only muted enthusiasm in many quarters of the anthropological community. This neglect grows ever more puzzling as soon as we admit that anthropologists when in the field do not evade such mutuality, but are also subject to the powerful affects that new environmental conditions exert upon them. To ignore this point is to discount how these affects may prove to be epistemologically informative. This is to say: to ignore our subjective responses to the conditions of fieldwork, to avoid translating them through careful reflection into anthropological insight, and to furthermore reject the idea that our “states of being” when in the field significantly affect how we learn and represent culture, is to overlook the influence of the human territory through which all ethnographic events and facts unavoidably pass before reaching the ethnographic account. Of course it would be a gross misrepresentation to say that anthropology has failed to acknowledge the subjective equation in field research. For indeed even before the “reflexive turn” of 1980s anthropologists clearly understood that the ethnographer’s position in the field influences the data he or she acquires, and that our particular identity, gender, ethnicity and personal history invariably affect how we understand, interact with, and write about our field-sites. Thus, the message we have rather advanced in this volume concerns what has been left comparatively under-investigated – namely, the epistemological significance of researcher’s reactions and responses to the conditions of field - this is to say, how our subjective and emotional states during fieldwork not only affect the research process itself, but can shed light upon the communities we seek to understand. This latter domain of enquiry has been reserved for a smaller collection of anthropologists, whose work on this subject, it seems, has struggled for integration within mainstream anthropology. We think of writings on fieldwork by Devereux (1967), Rosaldo (1980), Stoller (1987), Wengle (1988), Jackson (1989), Luhrmann’s (1989) Heald (1989) Behar (1996), Hastrup (1995) Hume and Mulcock’s (2004) Goulet and Miller (2007), Robben and Sulka (2006) and Davies and Spencer (2010) – works which from their varying standpoints, have argued how our

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internal responses to the conditions of field can be rendered empirically informative. In a volume such as this, which has advanced the idea that the analysis of such responses can aid the process of anthropological knowledge construction, I think it is sensible to offer some closing remarks about why, as mentoned in the Introduction (this volume), in much British and continental anthropology there has been such lasting resistance to this kind of investigation. By unsettling some of the foundations supporting this resistance, I hope to play my part in toppling the intellectual structure that has cast a shadow of suspicion over such enquiries for far too long. In what follows I shall identify 3 essential factors which I believe can more than partially account for this resistance: firstly, the Durkheimian legacy; secondly, the influence of traditional empiricism; and finally, the poor provision in anthropology departments for training students to think psychologically about field experience.

The Durkheimian Legacy (the first factor of resistance) The first cause of the lingering resistance to exploring how our states of being during fieldwork can shed light on the researched community, I believe can be traced to Durkheim’s famous division of reality into two types of fact: the social and the individual. As far as Durkheim was concerned, each type of fact could be explained by its appropriate method - the sociological and psychological respectively. This meant that “social facts”, for example, would not easily lend themselves to methods designed for understanding human psychology (i.e. psychological facts). As he exhorts: “Whenever a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon we may be sure that the explanation is false” (Durkheim 1901:128). This is to say, for Durkheim the social world was greater than the sum of its parts and therefore could not be explained by theories designed to understand psychological facts or individual psychologies. This dichotomy justified in the late 19th century the development of a discrete department for sociological investigation, one which no longer needed the insights of psychology to explain the facts of the socio-human domain. The society/individual dichotomy first drawn by Durkheim not only cleared a space for sociology within the academy, but also permitted the new sociological discipline to make inroads into “psychological territory” (Jahoda 1982: 40). This is to say, Durkheim and his followers believed that many facts traditionally regarded as “facts for psychology” could actually be explained in sociological terms. Paradoxically, this attitude

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prompted Durkheim to regard sociology as a “kind of psychology”. By this he did not mean that sociology was a branch of psychology, but rather that sociology could better understand many human facts hitherto thought only explicable in psychological terms (Jahoda 1982). The two anthropologists who arguably did more than any other to introduce the Durkheimian tradition into British anthropology were Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Prichard, since both followed Durkheim in dividing facts into the two domains. Evans-Prichard (1951), for example, saw psychology as concerned with “individual systems”, and anthropology with “social systems”. Each scientist would try to understanding the phenomena of their particular system by means of their distinct methods. In analysing a Jury, to use his example, the anthropologist would charter the operations and structures of the various legal institutions whereas the psychologist would be concerned with the feelings, motives and behaviours of the actors involved. What I would like to stress here are not the subsequent criticisms levelled against the Durkheimian perspective, but the huge influence such a perspective has had in discouraging British and much European anthropology not only from applying psychology and psychoanalysis to the analysis of social phenomena, but also from undertaking any study that seeks to explain social dynamics in subjective or interpersonal terms. This is to say, Durkheim’s influence, and to extend Lewis’ (1977) observation, was not only “the ultimate factor” in setting social anthropology against psychoanalysis, but also against psychological perspectives on society more generally. Yet despite the wide resistance to psychology in anthropology on this side of the Atlantic, from the very beginning of anthropology we can nevertheless observe many rapprochements and integrations, no matter how subtle or circumspect. In the early years of anthropology, for example, we find luminaries such as C. G. Seligman, W. H. R. Rivers and B. Malinowski at times blurring the two analytical domains. Rivers, for example, always took the view that in principle society must be explained in psychological terms (1926), and Seligman had few hesitations using psychoanalytic ideas to interpret his fieldwork (1923). Also, Malinowski clearly proceeded psychologically as can be seen in his “theory of needs”, where the existence of many so-called social facts could be explained in terms of individuals trying to satisfy their basic wants and desires.1 Moving forward into the mid-20th century we find anthropologists such as Meyer Fortes, Lévi-Strauss, Max Gluckman, and Victor Turner also subtly applying psychoanalytic ideas to aid their social investigations.2

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While it is clear from these preliminary comments that some European anthropologists during the 20th century were flirting with psychological perspectives, this is not to say that their colleagues were entirely at ease with such appropriations. That one of the worst charges to be levelled against mid-century British anthropology was that of “psychologism” (the act of reducing social facts to psychology), often deterred the overt undertaking of like investigations. Such reservations dominated right up until the 1970’s, until finally there appeared works that called for an overt rapprochement. Two such works in this vein are of particular note: firstly, Lewis’ (1977) edited collection of essays that was the result of as interdisciplinary seminar exploring the cross-fertilisation of anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis; and secondly, the now classic volume edited by Heald and Deluz (1994) which explored a psychoanalytic anthropology from three distinct directions.3 The spirit of these books was summed up by Lewis: It is simply no longer good enough to pretend that the protective posture of blissful ignorance towards the findings of psychology and psychoanalysis … still entitles us to ignore what our colleagues in these adjacent fields have to say about the emotions and motives we so carelessly impute to our informants. Whether concerned with witchcraft, ritual or symbolism when we assert that customs and institutions significantly modify people’s feelings … we must be prepared to seek the best possible independent evidence (Lewis 1977: 14).

From these few comments we notice that even in the anthropological tradition most hostile to psychological perspectives, the British tradition (as we recall, American anthropology far more enthusiastically embraced psychology), Durkheim’s dichotomy did not go unchallenged. And as the number and strength of these challenges increased, so the stranglehold of this dichotomy began to wane – that is, in all but one area: the area of field methodology. Therefore, questions as to how psychology could be used to facilitate understanding in the field were rarely asked. And while psychology was gradually being accepted as a useful tool for theorising upon and explaining social phenomena, it was not being similarly used to explain how anthropologists could use psychology to better undertake their fieldwork, and thus better understand the communities in which they set themselves down. That this dichotomy might still be impeding anthropology from thinking psychologically about fieldwork, is regrettable for two reasons. Firstly, even if Durkheim was right in dividing life into social and individual systems (the notion par excellence leading him to think that

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psychology had little to offer anthropology), he would be hard pressed to assert that psychology is irrelevant to understanding the researcher’s subjectivity – for researchers, after all, are psychological beings, and by Durkheim’s own admission “subject matter” for psychology. In the second place, so far as cognitive anthropology has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many that cognitive processes play a decisive role sustaining, creating and transmitting culture, it is with no little wonder why this discipline’s insights have only been applied to the study of “researched subjects” and rarely to the study of how culture is transmitted to, or learnt by, anthropological researchers themselves. To make sense of why psychological thinking has barely influenced our writings upon anthropological methodology, we must now understand one further factor which has dominated the anthropological project from its inception – that is, the methodological tradition which has resisted enquiry into how subjectivity can facilitate the production of knowledge. This tradition I shall call, traditional empiricism.

The Traditional Empirical Legacy (the second factor of resistance) Traditional empiricism we can define as that methodological approach which ascribes greater value to the study of things themselves than to study of the relations between things. This tradition assumes that it is possible for an observer to attain a detached and uninvolved stance towards his or her studied object. All the researcher need do is sufficiently subdue his or her subjectivity, since subjectivity in experimental, quantitative and qualitative research could produce potentially distorting “irregularities.” The investigator’s emotions and experiences, then, far from being seen as factors whose study can be empirically informative, are viewed as largely corrosive elements that invariably distort the research process itself. By drawing firm lines between the “researching subject” and the “researched object”, traditional empiricism defined what aspects of the researcher’s “self” can usefully contribute to the activity of knowledge construction; a definition that dictates across the social sciences (e.g. in sociology, economics and political science) as to what counts as valid research. From the standpoint of this tradition, the notion that subjective happenings, reactions and experiences could actually be used to help understanding is simply a non-starter – mainly because this admission contradicts the dichotomies underpinning traditional empiricism. This general deference of social science methodologies to traditional empirical criteria has presented anthropology with a central problem: as

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anthropology’s principle method – participant observation – does not readily lend itself to the controls and procedures characteristic of traditional empiricism, it has often been viewed as a “weaker” form of method and has thus generated much scepticism as to its ability to produce reliable data. Different anthropologists have responded to this slight in different ways. Firstly, some have renounced anthropology’s pretensions to being a science at all, arguing instead for its more viable position among the humanities. Secondly, others have attacked what they see as the conceit of science itself for ignoring the situated (and thus relative) assumptions upon which its whole enterprise rests. In this way this second group has sought to undermine the very basis of the authority indicting them. Finally, there are those who have advanced involved if not sometimes quixotic arguments as to why anthropology should be seen as a science after all, purporting to show how anthropologists can avoid the pits and snares of subjectivity that commonly prejudice research. What is common to these three responses is their investment in protecting anthropological methodology from being branded as feckless and insubstantial. What divides them is the different ways in which they each erect their particular form of defence. If I can be permitted a certain degree of simplification for one moment, I should like to suggest that these responses could be broadly summarised in the following way: researchers have either taken an “appropriating” or “reactionary” attitude towards traditional empiricism. The “appropriating approach”, advanced by researchers such as Jorgensen (1989), Shaffir and Stebbins (1991), Quinn Patton (2002), Adler and Adler (2000) Lichterman (2002) and Klandermans and Staggenborg (2002), has been largely what I would call “imitative” in spirit (i.e. importing the standards of traditional empiricism into fieldwork methodology – an importation which has led to what I would call a kind of “sociologisation” of field research). The “reactionary approach”, on the other hand, and which includes works by Cesara (1982) and Obeyesekere (1990) has been more critical of traditional empirical standards, preferring to take a censorious stance towards what it perceives as the conceits of this research ideology. In the attempt to answer anthropology’s critics, from their different standpoints each approach has proffered its own lasting contributions. For instance, while the “reactionary approach” has yielded many critical insights into the epistemological failings of traditional empiricism, the “appropriating approach” has helped fashion a new generation of anthropologists more sophisticated in the use of codified field methods (methods – statistical or otherwise – which appeal to traditional criteria). Where praise for each begins to wane, however, is insofar as each has indirectly driven

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anthropology into a more defensive than constructive position towards its own methodological predicament. This is to say, in the fervour of the fight, either for or against traditional empiricism, much anthropological work with respect to its own methodological development has been largely restricted to either aspiring after the so-called traditional empirical rigor, or directly and defiantly setting itself against any such traditional aims. Inasmuch as this either/or tendency has dominated our thinking on field methods, it has hindered anthropology from contriving a new methodological framework in which our unavoidable responses and reactions to the field (i.e. the very things that render participant observation a “weak” method from the standpoint of the traditionalists) can be shown to epistemologically count. The terms of the debate so far conceived, I thus argue, is yet another factor dissuading anthropology from rendering into “an opportunity” what from the traditional standpoint is seen as corrosive (the subjective responses and reactions that participant observation provokes). This opportunity can only be realised if anthropologists commit to exploring the heuristic significance of their emotions in the field, and they can only do this by first suspending their deference to traditional empirical standards.

Poor Provision in Training (the third factor of resistance) Anthropological training in field research I would say is the third factor that has dissuaded many anthropologists from thinking psychologically about fieldwork. Within the UK and Europe (and to a lesser extent within the US) I would suggest that this state of affairs has been a direct result of the Durkheimian and the traditional empirical legacies (the first two factors discussed). As we have seen, while the Durkhiemian legacy located psychology on some distant, antithetical and possibly inhospitable plane (with the cry that “never the twain shall meet”), traditional empiricism seduced many with the notion that if we tame subjectivity enough we may finally reach the bright uplands of objectivity. Thus while the first discouraged using psychology to develop our understanding of fieldwork (i.e. barring psychology from getting in through the back door, so to speak), the other inhibited reflection upon the methodological uses of subjectivity, since subjectivity is to be subdued not used. Naturally it is a moot point as to the precise degree of influence these trends have exercised, but what can be asserted more confidently at this point, and as Ceylene Heaton Shrestha’s chapter articulately explores, is that today’s methodological training in anthropology inadequately informs students as to how they may render their states of being during fieldwork

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into epistemologically informative facts. In this sense, current training fails to teach students how to exploit this resource of anthropological insight. In other words, and to trace the implications of Heaton Shrestha’s chapter, researchers must be taught to become critically aware of any factors which pre-structure their field responses and reactions. This is to say, studies of the construction of anthropologists must join anthropological studies of professional socialisation of psychiatrists (Luhrmann 2000) of psychotherapists (Davies 2009); of medical doctors (Sinclair 1997), and of physicists (Gusterton 1996), which have all sought to expose the institutional mechanisms by which persons become professionals, and by which disciplines are maintained as unique intellectual regimes. Anthropologists, like other professionals, are subject to distinct and idiosyncratic mechanisms of socialisation. Thus how we are taught and how such teachings structure what and how we come to know [in the field] must be matters of critical concern in any deconstruction of methodology … deconstructing methodology directly is not enough, we must rather investigate the sites where methodological proclivities and preferences are established – dispositions which, in our case, can and do structure our experiences in the field (cf. Spencer, this volume). At present, the doctoral training in field methods in most anthropology departments generally adopts the following pattern: there is one core course on field methods (usually taking place over one or two terms), and on occasion, but not always, one accompanying course or seminar series on what we might call here “field experiences.” The first course usually teaches standard interview (and sometimes quantitative) techniques, discusses the pragmatics of surviving in the field and acquiring the appropriate data, and explores the common ethical and personal dilemmas fieldworkers confront when living in a new community. The second course on “field experiences” provides, on the other hand, an occasion for those who have conducted fieldwork (e.g. students who are writing-up, or lecturers) to recount what they learnt in the field and how they learnt it. While in this second set of seminars students are likely to hear many personal accounts of fieldwork – accounts in which feelings and experiences may well be disclosed - it is my experience (and the experience of many anthropologists I have consulted), that if reflections upon “personal experiences” are offered in these seminars, they usually constitute lyrical reflections that are detached from any systematic inquiry into their implications for method or theory-making. In this sense they are reminiscent of the personalised fieldwork accounts of the 1960s and 1970s - Bowen (1954), Malinowski (1967), Berreman (1962), Powerdermaker (1966), Lévi-Strauss (1963) - where the emotional is relegated to the

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anecdotal, and so safely shorn from the theoretical; a fact which Heaton Shrestha’s paper in this volume explores only too well. Therefore current training comprises two elements: the more sociological course on fieldwork techniques (one informed by traditional empiricism), and the more personalised course where fieldworkers talk more informally and freely of their experiences. The first sees subjectivity as a possible interference, the other as the stuff of amiable anecdote. But what remains comparatively neglected is the middle-ground where students are taught the means by which they can render meaningful their emotional reactions and responses to the conditions of field. Thus in the main, and despite the number of studies investigating the use of subjectivity, there is still little systematic training in what we might call, after M. Jackson (1989) and Davies and Spencer (2010), the “radical empirical approach” – namely, the approach where the relations between things become just as much matters for empirical study as do things themselves. Radical empiricism includes exploring the relations between person and person(s) (exploring the intersubjective space), between person and method (exploring how traditional methods constrain what we can experience in the field), and between person and materiality and environment (exploring how site and environment affect our subjectivity) (Davies 2010). Radical empiricism specifically concentrates on the subjective phenomena such unavoidable relations evoke within fieldworkers, and how these evocations can actually help reveal dimensions of the social world we would otherwise overlook. In this sense radical empiricism constitutes a kind of psychology of fieldwork so far as it takes seriously the heuristic significance of what transpires in the researcher’s subjectivity during the process of research – a very good example of this being illustrated in Louise Braddock’s use of counter-transference in this volume. In anthropological training this relegation of what we could call “radical empiricism” – the study of the relations between things - (in contradistinction to the elevation of “traditional empiricism”; the study of things themselves) is consistent with the ESRC’s criteria for field methods teaching. The ESRC in Britain in recent years has laid down the gauntlet to anthropological departments: either they introduce systematic courses on fieldwork methods, to the ESRC’s traditionally empirical specifications, or the ERSC will not fund the departments’ doctoral students. That the ERSC requires departments to honour its methodological preferences means that anthropology may well experience increasing difficultly in the future when trying to direct its own methodological development. This is to say, as these criteria now request the teaching of traditional empirical

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methods, this outside imposition subtly discourages the more radical empirical approach, possibly promoting in anthropology the hardening of social science methodology that we witness occurring across the board. The significance of anthropology’s submission to the ESRC cannot be overstated, for whatever prevailing zeitgeist we become subject to in the academy will affect not only how we proceed in the field, but how and what we come to know during research. Following Adorno, the “subject to” and the “subjective” are always indivisible, always mutually entailed. And thus enfolded in subjectivity are the multifarious and manifold coercions of culture that guide individual and professional activity in predictable ways. In other words, if radical empiricism reaches types of fact unattainable by the more traditional methodologies, then honouring the traditional at the expense of the radical is to privilege not only a particular kind of method, but also a particular kind of knowledge, so far as what we come to know is limited by the kind of methods we apply. In sum, I have argued above that there are 3 essential factors which I believe can more than partially account for anthropology’s traditional resistance to exploring the epistemological worth of our reactions and responses to the conditions of fieldwork: firstly, the Durkheimian legacy; secondly, the influence of traditional empiricism; and finally, the poor provision in anthropology departments for training students to think psychologically about field experience.

This Volume (a challenge to the three factors) Given the comments as arranged above, it is clear that this volume unleashes itself into a field of controversy. Its intellectual design pits it against some influential intellectual traditions which still exert wide authority in social anthropology today. For this reason this book is bound to provoke reactions in those whose intellectual preferences take a different direction. But as anthropology is a discipline of many contested beliefs and theoretical persuasions, of many diverse political and scientific interests, and of manifold clashes and contradictions, in short, as it is a collage of ever-increasing and ever-expanding intellectual and ideological diversity, there is no way to win by whatever trick of stealth the approval and assent of everyone. In such a climate it seems only sensible to advance ideas with an eye to one’s antagonist, and insofar as our antagonist has advanced equally compelling ideas, to do so in a spirit of modesty. Each of the papers in this volume I believe has attained this desired humility, promulgating less the assertion of “truths” and “decided opinions,” than

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respectfully inviting others to consider new ways of thinking about how the feelings and embodiments of fieldwork can epistemologically count. I use the phrase “new ways” advisedly, since the intellectual project that this volume advances (using “self”, the “inter-subjective” or the “relational” to facilitate understanding) is of course not new in anthropology or in social science methodology per se. What are new are the unique contributions which the authors of this volume have made. Whether we are considering Braddock’s use of “counter-transference”, Mitchell’s of the “third Space”, Curran’s of “phantasy”, Berger’s of “key emotional episodes” or Lindquist’s of “empathy”, we are considering concepts and ways of approaching emotional phenomena not hitherto explored in such terms. Each paper thus adds additional weight to a methodological tradition, new in conception and aspiring in spirit, that aims to bring certain exiled portions of human experience right back into the heart of social research.

References Adler, P and Adler, P 2000. “Observational Techniques.” In N. K. Denzin, and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Behar, R. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer:Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. New York: Beacon Press. Berreman G. D. 1962. Behind Many Masks. Ithaca: Society for Applied Anthropology. Bowen, E. S. 1954. Return to Laughter. New York: Harper and Brothers. Cesara, M. 1982. Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist: no HidingPlace. New York: Academic Press. Davies, J. 2009. The Making of Psychotherapists: an Anthropological Analysis. London: Karnac Press. Davies, J. and D. Spencer, eds. 2010 Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Devereux, G. 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural Sciences. The Hauge and Paris: Mouton and Co. Durkheim, E. 1901. Rules of Sociological Method. London: Macmillan. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1951 Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fortes, M. 1945. The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gluckman, M. 1963. Gossip and Scandal, Current Anthropology 4(3): 307-316. Goulet, J. and B. G. Miller 2007. Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Gusterson, H. 1996. Nuclear Rights. California: University of California Press. Hastrup. K. 1995. A Passage to Anthropology: between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge. Heald, S. 1989. Controlling Anger: the Sociology of Gisu Violence. Oxford: Ohio University Press. Heald, S. and Deluz, A. 1994. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: an Encounter Through Culture. New York: Routledge. Hume, L. and L. Mulcock. 2004. Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation. New York: Columbia University Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths Towards a Clearing. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Jahoda, G. 1982. Psychology and Anthropology: a Psychological Perspective. New York: Free Press. Jorgensen, D. L. 1989. Participant Observation: a Methodology for Human Studies. New York: Sage. Klandermans, B and S. Staggenborg. 2002. Methods of Social Movement Research. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Atheneum (Originally Published in French in 1955). Lewis, I. M. 1977. Symbols and Sentiments. London: Academic Press. Litcherman, P. 2002. “Theory-Driven Participant Observation.” In B. Klandermans and S. Staggenborg, eds., Methods of Social Movement Research. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Luhrmann, T. 1989. Persuasions of a Witches Craft. London: Blackwell. —. 2000. Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Malinowski, B. 1967. A Diary on the Strict Sense of the Term. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nadel, S. F. 1951. The Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Cohen and West. Obeysekere, G. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powerdermaker, H 1966. Stranger and Friend: the Way of the Anthropologist. New York: Norton.

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Quinn Patton, M. 2002. “Fieldwork Strategies and Observation Methods.” In Q. M. Patton, ed., Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, 3rd ed. London: Sage. Rivers W. H. R. 1926. Psychology and Ethnology. London: Kegan Paul. Robben, A. and J. Sluka, 2006. Ethnographic Fieldwork: an Anthropological Reader. London: Blackwell. Rosaldo, R. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Illongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Seligman, C.G. 1923. “Type Dreams: a Request.” Folklore, 34(4): 376378. Shaffir W. and R. Stebbins, eds. 1991. Experiencing Fieldwork: An inside View of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Sinclair, S. 1997. Making Doctors: an Institutional Apprenticeship. Explorations in Anthropology, Oxford: Berg. Spiro, M. 1951. Culture and Personality: the Natural History of a False Dichotomy. New York: Macmillan. Stoller, P. 1987. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wengle, J. 1988. Ethnographers in the Field: the Psychology of Research. London and Alabama: The University of Alabama Press.

Notes 1

Malinowski explained the existence of certain “social facts” by noting that they fulfilled definite psychological needs. Magic, for instance, rather than being evidence of primitive thinking, fulfilled man’s need to control the apparently arbitrary order of existence. As technologies only provided limited mastery over nature, magic wielded influence where the tool could not. That the weather’s unpredictability responded to rites and beliefs provided for believers the illusion that they could control natural events – this illusion being necessary so far as it fulfilled a psychological need for security. 2 Meyer Fortes (1945), for example, used Freud’s concept of “projection” to account for the Tallensi’s reverence for the ancestral realm - it attracted the projection of internal parental figures. Max Gluckman whose relationship with psychoanalysis was at best conflicted, also frequently applied veiled psychoanalytic ideas to unravel social happenings – for example, the concept of the “cathartic” in his “rituals of rebellion” (Jahoda 1982). Nadel (1951), who was also originally trained as a psychologist, argued that Rivers’ “principle of psychological linkage,” could explain the nature of the link between social antecedents and consequents. Indeed, Nadel’s approach advocated “interactionism” (between

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psychoanalysis and anthropology) similar in aim to Melford Spiro’s (1951) “culture and personality” school. Leach and Gluckman, at different times urged their students to enter analysis before fieldwork so as to curb the influence of the “personal equation” (Heald and Deluz, 1994). While Victor Turner (1967) blended psychoanalytic insights with a Durkheimian perspective, admitting that religion inspired socially cohesive sentiments. He further speculated on how it aroused unconscious forces to assist in this end by domesticating conflicts of an interpersonal and intra-psychic kind (Jahoda 1982; Lewis 1977). 3 The 3 directions were that of complementarity (i.e. how each discipline may offer unique insights into the phenomena under investigation by the other); of unification (i.e. how the individual/society dichotomy could be collapsed by means of a perspective informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis), and of reductionism (i.e. how anthropological data could be submitted to ethno-psychoanalytic interpretations to reveal useful results).

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Peter Berger is assistant professor of Indian religions and Anthropology of Religion at Groningen University, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the Free University of Berlin where he worked as lecturer and research assistant. He did long term fieldwork among tribal communities in highland Orissa (India) and is mainly interested in religion, social structure and processes of indigenisation of “modernity.” Dr Louise Braddock is a former psychiatrist who now teaches philosophy. She is a Bye-fellow at Girton College in Cambridge. Her research is in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, looking at the concept of identification. She has co-edited (with Michael Lacewing) The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis: Papers in Philosophy, the Humanities and the British Clinical Tradition (2007). Dr John Curran is a Visiting Fellow at the Social Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interests vary from the anthropology of organisations to design, material culture and consumption. Dr Curran is principal organisational consultant and professional workplace mediator within the public sector. He is also the Founder of John Curran Consultancy, which is a research and innovation consultancy that works in the private and commercial sectors. Dr James Davies obtained his doctorate in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. He is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Psychotherapy at Roehampton University. He is also a qualified psychotherapist (UKCP) and has worked widely in the National Health Service and other clinical settings. He is author of The Making of Psychotherapists: an anthropological analysis, and is co-editor of Emotions in the Field: the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience. His next book on the anthropology of suffering is due to appear next year.

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Dr Shuenn-Der Yu is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He was born in Taiwan, obtained his undergraduate degree in zoology and received his PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis. His major research interests include consumption and the anthropology of the body. His current research focuses on the social and historical construction of the experiences of the body, particularly in the domains of comfort, cleanliness and convenience. Dr Galina Lindquist was born in in Moscow. Her first degree was in chemistry at Moscow University, and she subsequently studied anthropology at Stockholm University where she became Associate Professor. She completed her doctroal thesis and monograph on neoshamanistic subculture in Stockholm. Later, she studied healers and magicians in Moscow, focusing on suffering and ritual. Her last fieldwork site was Tuva in Southern Siberia, where she studied local practices of shamanism. Her main contributions are in medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion, and particularly on folk religious and healing practices. She also studied play, ritual, social suffering and the anthropology of consciousness. She is the author of numerous publications including: Conjuring Hope. Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia, Berghan (2006). Dr Marjorie Mitchell is an Assistant Professor (Adjunct) of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Canada. Her research investigates practices and perspectives of body, self, health, and risk among impoverished children in the Philippines and children’s understandings of and resistance to their precarious place in a neo-colonial setting of rigid discipline and surveillance. Previously, her research and publications centred on indigenous languages of British Columbia, First Nations women and Canadian law, and on aboriginal education and the impact of colonialism and acculturation policies on First Nations in Canada. Dr Celayne Heaton Shrestha is a Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, UK. She is researching nongovernmental public action in Nepal. She is currently working on a research project exploring the effects of the insurgency on nongovernmental public action in Nepal, under the ESRC funded NGPA research programme. Her previous work has focused on Nepal's NGO sector and articles and chapters have included “The ambiguities of Practising at in 1990s Nepal: Elites, Caste and Everyday Life in

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Development NGOs” in South Asia and “NGOs as Thekadar or Sevak: Identity Crisis in Nepal's Non-governmental Sector” in European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, and “Bracketing Differences and the Professionalisation of NGOs in Nepal” in Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Dr Dimitrina Spencer is a member of Linacre College, University of Oxford where she obtained her doctorate in social anthropology. She has conducted fieldwork in Southeastern Europe, Nigeria, and the UK on borders, migration and social networks, development, and the postsocialist transition. Her current interests are in technology, science and learning and she works at the Department of Education, University of Oxford conducting ethnographic research among young people in the UK on how they use technology in learning. She has also been working as a relational psychotherapist in training since 2006. She is a co-editor of Emotions in the Field: the Anthropology and Psychology of Fieldwork (2010). Dr Maruška Svašek is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Queens University Belfast, UK. Her principal research interests are in emotions, migration, art, material culture and identification processes. In 2007, Svašek established the Cultural Dynamics and Emotions Network (CDEN) with Dr. Kala Shreen (MOP Vaishnav College for Woman, Chennai, India). Her edited volumes include Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe; and (with Kay Milton) Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling (2005) Svašek is the author of Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production, London: Pluto. In 2006 and 2007, she organised three AHRC-funded conferences at Queens University Belfast on migration and emotions that resulted in special issues of the Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3) in 2008, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (forthcoming in 2010).

INDEX

References to notes are indicated in italics, by page number on which the note appears or starts, followed by number of the note, e.g. `44.17` is note 17 on page 44. Abu-Lughod, L. 44.11, 53, 76-77 academia: emotional regimes 2728, 48-74 accidental inaccessibility: unconscious thoughts 21, 211, 218, 222-223 Adler, M. 119 Adler, P. 235 Adorno, Theodor 239 affective assimilation 43.8 Akeroyd, A. 104 Amit, V. 65-66, 67 Anderson, E. 162 anger Buddhism 159, 163, 167.7 cultural forms 135, 136-137 Gadaba attitudes 121-122, 123, 127, 128, 138-139, 142.7 marital conflict 121-122 reflection 112, 127, 225 social value 123, 138-139, 142.7 Utkuhiksalingmiut attitudes 131-133 Anlo-Ewe 29-30 Anthropological Critique of Development (Hobart) 62 anthropologist: definition 33 Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fisher) 4-5 Anthropology Matters 63 anxiety and empathy 91 Appadurai, A. 111 Aretxaga, B. 28

Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski) 124 Armbruster, H. 106 Asad, T. 4-5, 63 assimilation, affective 43.8 Austin, J. 54 auto-ethnography 48, 64 autobiography as reflexive practice 109 awareness: emotions and values 219-220 Bacolod 172-194 Baldassar, L. 96.6, 98.20 Balint, M. 217 Barber, P. 185 Barry, C. 63 Beatty, A. 10-11, 52-53, 55, 109, 142.1, 162 Behar, R. 3, 5, 44.11, 44.17, 45.25, 45.29, 46.38, 85, 113, 143.15, 230 behaviour, styles of 124 being, states of 7-8, 19, 28, 29-30, 176, 229, 230, 231 the Other 197 psychoanalysis 44.13 training issues 236-7 "being there" 84 beleefdheid 79 beliefs epistemological 25, 29 methodological 29, 107, 149 Bellas, M. 11

248 Berger, P. 19, 45.28, 88, 119, 120, 142.5 Bernard, R. 108 Berreman, G. 102, 237-238 Biehl, J. 8-9, 22 Bird-David, N. 47.47, 47.48 Bissell, T. 178 Black, M. 228.1 Bloch, M. 54 Bochner, A. 48 body (see also embodied experience) hexis 77-78, 126 techniques: Eastern cultures 160-161 body-self re-construction 183-190 Bordo, S. 9-10, 44.11, 44.17, 45.24, 46.38 boredom, meditation and 151, 152, 156, 157-158 Bourdieu, Pierre 45.27, 56, 77-78, 110, 123, 125-126, 136, 137138, 139, 163, 177 Bowen, E. 237-238 Braddock, L. 20-21, 46.31, 203, 207, 211, 238 breathing, meditation and 152, 156, 157, 167.6 Brenneis, D. 53 Brewer, C. 178, 184 Briggs, J. 21, 44.17, 45.25, 45.28, 120, 131-133, 137, 138, 139, 218-221 British anthropology 6-7, 233 British Psychoanalytical Society 213 Bronfenbreener, U. 104 Brownell, K. 190 Buber, M. 22, 46.33 Buddhist meditation 144-171 Burgess, R. 104 Burman, E. 68 Callaway, H. 44.11, 46.38, 49 capacity for inclusion 33

Index capitalism, emotional management within 11-12, 44.20, 44.21 Caplan, P. 105 Caputo, V. 66, 177, 184 Casey, C. 8, 10-11 Casey, E. 75, 96.3 Castillo, R. 158, 160 Cesara, M. 4-5, 235 Chagnon, N. 84-85 charismatic others: Russian tradition 201 children Inuit: games: moral emotions 219-221 Philippines 176-178, 189-190 Chin, E. 187 Chodorow, N. 53, 54 class: hospital staff 103-104 Clifford, J. 4-5, 67, 106 Clough, P. 9-10 codes of ethics 105-106 Coffey, A. 48 cognitive-behavioural therapy 13 Cohen, A. 54-55, 75-76, 91 Coleman, S. 66, 203 Colquhoun, D. 177 communicative space, shared 162 complementarity: psychoanalytic anthropology 243.3 confirmation: correctness of interpretation 218, 220, 222 conflict, marital 121-122, 123-124 resolution 100 connectedness: common humanity 19-20 consent, informed 104-105, 105106, 114 Constantino, R. 178 Constructing the Field (Amit) 6566 consumption, resistance to by the Other 197 contamination, environmental: Philippine purok 179-180

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process Cook, J. 17, 24, 28, 147 Copp, M. 44.17, 50-51, 52, 62-63 countertransference 8, 20-21, 115, 204-228, 238 broad and narrow applications 212-216, 218, 221, 222, 225 fieldwork applications 217-226 covert research 104-105, 118.3 Crapanzano, V. 4, 8, 15, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 44.11, 44.17, 45.25, 45.26, 46.38, 47.47, 189 credibility, desire for academic 6263 Csordas, E. 18, 44.11 Csordas, T. 77, 177, 183, 189 culture shock 107, 108, 112, 113, 114, 118.6 Curran, J. 16, 23, 26, 46.32, 92, 110 Currier, R. 162 cynicism in published fieldwork accounts 51, 52, 58-59, 62, 69 Dahal, D. 74.4 Davies, J. 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 20, 29, 31, 42.1, 42.5, 43.6, 44.15, 44.17, 45.25, 46.34, 46.38, 52, 70, 108, 113, 226, 230, 237, 238 Davis, C. 109 Davis, M. 79, 80, 83, 88, 98.18, 98.19 Dawson, A. 76, 96.4 death: point of reference 202 deceitfulness: participant observation 104 deconstruction, conceptual 163, 164 defence, psychic 21, 211-212, 216, 217, 221-222, 223 delusion: Buddhist concept 167.7 Deluz, A. 43.8, 44.11, 50, 51-52, 63, 65, 108, 233, 242.2 departure from the field 121 Descola, P. 129 Desjarlais, R. 18 detachment, expectations of 51, 52, 63-65

249

development, anthropological view of 62 Devereux, G. 2, 23, 29, 31, 42.3, 44.11, 44.15, 47.45, 119, 230 dharma-worlds 153-154, 168-169 Dilley, R. 9 directness, Dutch 79, 97.8 discourse psychologising 53 study of: limitations 55 disembodied rationality 25 distance and distanciation 51-52, 66-67, 68, 69 Dittmar, H. 190 divinity, human 201 Dojillo, J. 191 dolls, ethnically correct 187 domestic order: Philippine purok 180 dominance and emotions 53 dramaturgical exercise 118.2 dread 20-21, 200-203, 225, 226 dream analysis 8 Dresch, P. 66, 69 dress code 102-103 Driessen, H. 76 Durkheim, Émile 6, 7, 231-234, 236, 239 Dutch migrants: Northern Ireland 76, 77-84, 87-89, 89-90, 91-92 Dutch Society 78-84, 88, 91, 97.11 dynamic unconscious 210-211, 212-213, 216 dysphoric experience 197-203, 224226 e-mail correspondence, fieldworker's: self-awareness 175-176, 189 Economic and Social Research Council 238-239 Edgerton, R. 8, 10-11 education perpetuation of class-based assumptions: Philippines 187-188

250 power, dependent on 56 elite, Filipino: attitudes to poor 178, 187-189 Ellis, C. 48 Elwin, V. 142.8 embodied beliefs 29 experience (see also body) homesickness 77-78 meditation 144-171 unfamiliar 174, 176 Emmerson, M. 96.6 Emoff, R. 189 emotion cultural construction 53-55 definition 11, 44.18, 52-56 measurement 12 relatedness 128 suppression 51, 52, 63-64 universalism 135-136, 139 articulated: source of knowledge 207-210 fieldworkers': as anecdote 237238 moral 209-210, 219-221 concepts: cross-cultural applicability 226 as knowledge 11 terms 207, 208-209, 218, 220 work (see also emotional labour; emotional management) 55, 65, 67-68, 69, 90, 97.13 emotional contagion 98.19 episodes, key 19, 119-143 interpretation: constituents 21 labour (see also emotion work; emotional management) 1015, 44.19, 86, 90, 97.13 management (see also emotion work; emotional labour) 44.20 within academia 48-74 within Buddhist meditation 157

Index within capitalism 11-12, 44.20, 86 within political regimes 13, 54 fieldworkers 106-109, 133 regimes of anthropology 15, 27, 69 restraint 131-133, 137, 219-221 emotions see emotion Emotions and Fieldwork (Kleinman and Copp) 50-51 Emotions in the Field (Conference, Oxford, 2006) 2-3, 42.5, 95.1, 143.14 Emotions in the Field (Davies and Spencer) 8, 42.5 emotives 54 empathy 12, 20, 75-99, 143.12, 147, 205 research method 14-15, 84-88 empiricism radical 8, 20, 42.4, 42.5, 111112, 113, 114-115, 195, 196 traditional 1, 42.1, 234-236, 238-239 energy, bodily, meditation and 150, 151-152, 154-156, 159, 166.3 England, P. 12 epistemological openness 25, 33 ERSC 238-239 Escobar, A. 62 ethics codes 105-106 issues in fieldwork 100-115 ethnographic sociality: definition 30 ethnography 106 as work 13 etiquette 79 Evans, C. 200 Evans, G. 86 Evans, K. 47.44 Evans-Pritchard, E. 23, 232 eviction: purok dwellers, Philippines 179, 180 experience

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process reinterpretation 65 embodied see embodied experience of empathy 90 extraordinary experience 196, 197, 226 Farkas, G. 12 fear 20-21, 200-201, 225 feeling and understanding: knowledge 125, 136 feelings, gendered 64-65 feminism 4-5, 9, 177 notion of the relational 9-10, 46.38 Ferguson, J. 66 field, nature of the 10, 26-32, 65-67 field notes v theses: emotional repositioning 56-61 Fielding, N. 118.3 fieldwork (see also space in fieldwork; time in fieldwork) definition 10, 34 demystification of: history 3-10 post-fieldwork emotional management 48-74 Figart, D. 12 fights and fighting 122, 123, 129 Fine, G. 13 Fisher, M. 4-5, 45.26 Fitzgerald, P. 98.20 Foley, W. 176 food, meditation and 149-150, 153, 154-155, 156, 158-159, 162163, 166.3, 167.8 Fortes, M. 43.8, 232, 242.2 Foster, G. 162 Foucault, Michel 160 Freilich, M. 3-4, 43.7, 43.9 frequency: dharma-worlds 154 Freud, Sigmund 207, 210-211, 212, 213, 220, 222-223, 242.2 Freund, P. 52 Friedman, M. 46.33 Frer-Haimendorf, C. von 120

251

Gadaba 120-125, 127-129, 138139, 142.5, 142.6 Gardner, S. 211 Gates, H. 122-123 Gatica, H. 98.20, 98.23 Geertz, C. 164 Gell, S. 142.9 Gellner, D. 74.7 gender: feelings 64-65 Gestalt psychotherapy 22 Geurts, K. 29-30 Gilbert, M. 47.44 Glock, H-J. 206 Gluckman, M. 43.8, 232, 242.2 Goffman, E. 11, 100, 101-102, 118.2 Good, B. 8-9 Goodwin, C. 184 Goodwin, M. 184 Goulet, J.-G. 44.11, 45.25, 160, 161, 196, 230 Gregory, C. 142.9 grief 134, 139 Grief and a Headhunter's Rage (Rosaldo) 19-20, 133-138 group analysis 112 guilt 209, 220 Gunn, V. 70 Gupta, A. 66 Gusterton, H. 237 habitus 45.27, 77-78, 110, 123, 125-126, 130, 158, 163, 164 Hacker, P. 205 Hage, G. 8, 11, 31, 43.10 Halley, J. 9-10 Handbook for Psychological Anthropology (Casey and Edgerton) 8 Hardenberg, R. 142.8 Harris, M. 9, 31, 32, 44.17 Hart, R. 177 Hastrup, K. 5-6, 7, 18-19, 28, 44.11, 142.2, 162, 196, 203, 230 hate 220 Hatfield, E. 98.19

252 Hawley, C. 178 headhunting 133-136, 139 Heald, S. 22, 43.8, 44.11, 50, 5152, 63, 65, 108, 230, 233, 242.2 healers: Russia 198-203, 224-226 Heaton-Shrestha, C. 14, 176, 236237, 237-238 Heimann, P. 213, 228.3 heimwee feestjes 97.11 Helleiner, J. 177-178 Henderson, D. 189 Hervik, P. 5-6, 7 Herzfeld, M. 7, 22 hexis, body 77-78, 126 Hirsch, E. 74.7 Hobart, M. 62 Hobbs, D. 44.11 Hochschild, A. 10, 11-12, 44.20, 79, 86, 90, 97.13, 97.14 Holt, N. 64 homesickness 76-78, 96.4 Hook, R. 107 hope, healers and 201-202 hospital staff: race and class 103104 housing, fieldworkers': Philippines 180-183 Hsu, E. 11, 18, 43.10, 144-145, 147, 161 human divinity 201 humanistic epistemology 31-32 Hume, L. 24, 45.25, 46.38, 46.39, 66, 230 humour in emotional management 65, 110-111, 112 "I-Thou" concept, Buber's 46.33 Ilongot 133-136, 139 imagination, exercise of 205, 210 immersion, experience of 125 impersonal tone: fieldworker's journals 173-175 impression management 101-106, 112, 114, 115, 118.2 inclusion 22, 30, 33

Index indebtedness, fieldworker's sense of 61, 62, 65, 69 Inden, R. 63 individual and social: Durkheimian divide 6, 231-234 individualism 25, 31-2, 33 therapeutic 12-13 individuality of researcher 31-32, 33 inequalities in ethnographic encounter 5, 65, 201 inequality, sense of 65 informed consent 104-105, 105106, 114 informed subjectivity 23, 33 Ingold, T. 24 insecurity and empathy 91 integration, social 130 interiority, concept of 53 internalised presences: definition 75, 96.3 rules 44.15 interpretation psychoanalytical 205-210 social sciences: history 205 interpretive drift 17, 144 intersubjectivity emotional dimensions 75-99 field relations 28, 30, 75-99 in professions 10 intimacy cultural 7 spatial: Philippine purok 179 Introduction to Social Anthropology (Piddington) 43.8 introspection 43.9, 53, 85, 207 Inuit 131-133, 137, 138, 218-221 involvement and understanding 196 isuma 219 Izikowitz, K. 120 Jackson, M. 2, 3, 8, 9-10, 11, 18, 19-20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42.1, 42.2, 42.3, 42.4, 44.11, 44.13, 45.27, 45.29, 45.30, 46.31, 46.38, 47.45, 47.46,

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process 47.48, 85, 100, 111-112, 143.15, 145, 195, 230, 238 Jagger, A. 9-10, 44.11, 44.17, 45.24, 45.27, 46.38 Jahoda, G. 43.8, 231-232, 242.2 James, William 8, 31 Jepson, A. 67 Jimenez, A. 25, 26, 47.47, 47.48 Johnson. L. 69 Jorgensen, D. 235 José, F. 178, 184 journals, fieldworker's: impersonal tone 173-175 Kahn, M. 142.6 Kandiyoti, D. 64 KASAKI 175, 177 key emotional episodes 19, 119143 Kierkegaard, Søren 200, 201 King, P. 214-216 Kirmayer, L. 177 Klandermans, B. 235 Klein, M. 213, 228.2 Kleinian analysis 213, 214 Kleinman, A. 8-9, 11, 43.10, 44.11 Kleinman, S. 44.11, 44.17, 50-51, 52, 62-63 Kloos, P. 84-85 knowing through relating 32-33 knowledge, nature of 5, 9 emotions 11, 15-21, 45.24, 125, 136 articulated emotion 207210 culturally defined 200 self-interpretation 206-210, 211-226 vulnerability in 3, 7 Koenig, B. 105-106 Kohon, G. 228.3 Kracke, W. 53 Kroeber, A. 232 labour, emotional 10-15, 44.19, 86, 90, 97.13

253

Lacewing, M. 208 Laidlaw, J. 7 Lambkin, B. 98.20 language: interpretation of self and others 205-210, 220-221 Laplanche, J. 214 Lau, T. 45.28, 120, 129-130, 137, 138, 143.14 Laughlin, C. 160 Laurillard, D. 56 Leach, E. 43.8, 143.16, 232, 242.2 learning emotional 220 fieldwork see training: fieldwork non-cognitive modes 143 proclivity 19 Leavitt, J. 55, 85 legitimate meaning in academia 6263 Leonard, D. 70 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 143.17, 232, 237-238 Levinas, E. 197, 201, 202 Levy, R. 54 Lewis, I. 107, 109, 115, 232, 233, 242.2 Lichterman, P. 235 Lindholm, Charles 11 Lindquist, G. 20-21, 92, 189, 224226 linguistic behaviour: social activity 206-210, 219-221 Littler, M. 98.20 lived experience, reflection on 2-3, 17, 25 Lo, A. 98.20 Locating the Field (Conference, Durham, 2004) 65-66 Lock, M. 147-148, 176, 183, 184, 187, 189 loneliness, dread and 200 Lorimer, F. 15, 20, 31, 44.12, 44.18, 46.31, 46.36 love: emotional judgement 207-208 Lucas, R. 24

254 Luhrmann, T. 7, 8, 12, 17, 18-19, 22-23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 44.11, 45.25, 46.34, 142.2, 144, 147, 162, 230, 237 Lutz, C. 10-11, 44.11, 53, 76-77 Luzon, northern 133-136 Mackenzie, C. 9-10, 46.38 magic 242.1 Malinowski, B. 124-127, 130, 139, 232, 237-238, 242.1 Managed Heart, The (Hochschild) 11-12 Manning, P. 101 Marcus, G. 4-5, 30, 45.26, 67 Marginal Natives at Work (Freilich) 3-4 marital conflict 121-122, 123-124, 127 Marshall, P. 105-106 Mascarenhas-Keyes, S. 118.2 Mauss, M. 143.16 May, T. 44.11, 104 Mead, M. 22-23 meaning, legitimate, in academia 62-63 meditation, Buddhist 144-171 Merish, L. 190 Messerschmidt, D. 62 method 30-33 empathy as 14-15, 84-88 performance of 15 methodological belief 107, 149 migrants, experience of 75-99 Miller, B. 45.25, 230 Mills, D. 67 Milton, K. 44.17 Mitchell, L. 176-177, 185, 186, 187-188 Mitchell, M. 16-17, 26-27 Mitchell, S. 228.1 moral dilemmas 104 emotions 209-210, 219-221 Moreno, M. 98.20 Morgenthaler, F. 119

Index Mosse, D. 62 mourning 134 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 213 Mulcock, L. 24, 45.25, 46.38, 46.39, 66, 230 mutuality 31, 46.33, 229-230 Nadel, S. 43.8, 242.2 Nader, L. 118.6 Nadig, M. 119, 125, 143.17 nalik- 219-221 Napolitano, M. 190 Nation 178 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 11, 28 Nayak, P. 142.8 needs, Malinowski's theory of 232 Nepal: NGOs 57-61, 74.3, 74.4 Never in Anger (Briggs) 45.28, 131 NGOs in Nepal 57-61, 74.3, 74.4 Nieuwenhuys, O. 177, 178 non-accidental inaccessibility: unconscious thoughts 212-213, 226 non-duality: Buddhist concept 146, 166.1 non-engagement: meditation technique 156-158, 160 Norris, C. 104, 105 Northern Ireland: Dutch migrants 76, 77-84, 87-89, 89-90, 91-92 noses, Euro-American: Filipino attitudes 172, 184-185, 186-187 Nugent, S. 105 Obeyesekere, G. 53, 143.16, 196, 235 object relations 213, 217, 221-222 objectification 20, 45.29, 126 objectivist epistomology 125-126 objectivity: fieldworker's journals 174-175 observation, relational 2, 30, 33 Ogden, T. 30 Okely, J. 44.11, 46.38, 49, 63-64, 108-109, 115

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process order, neighbourhood and domestic: Philippine purok 179, 180 Orellana, M. 177 Orissa: Gadaba 120-125, 127-129, 138-139, 142.5, 142.6 Ortner, S. 142.1 ostracization 132 Other, the: power against the self 197-203 otherness, sense of 65 Overing, J. 46.43 pain, meditation and 150, 151, 152, 155-156, 157, 158 parallel emotions 88, 98.19 Parin, P. 119 Parin-Matthèy, G. 119 participant experience: viability as methodology 125-139, 144145, 147 participant observation, deceitfulness of 104 participation aims 45.30, 124 meditation 144-171 observation of 3 Passeron, J. 56 paternalism: Philippines 178 pedagogy, authority of 56, 67-70 Pelto, G. 105 Pelto, P. 105 Peperzak, A. 202 perceptions fieldworkers’ 21, 46.38, 84 training 24 subjects’: fieldworker's status 128, 138 performance, fieldwork as 100, 101-106, 111, 112, 114, 115 permeability of self 201 "personal, the": feelings 63-65, 68 personal symbols 143.16 Pfeffer, G. 120, 142.8, 143.16 phantasies, fieldworkers' inner 107, 113, 114

255

phenomenology of emotion 208, 210 Philippines 172-194 Piddington, R. 43.8 Pinches, M. 178, 179, 180, 187 Pitt-Rivers, J. 43.8 pity 209, 220 Pleasure principle 211, 223 Polier, N. 109 politeness 79, 80, 87, 131 Pollock, J. 187 Pontalis, J-B. 214 positioned subject 137 power (see also powerlessness) Filipino response to EuroAmerican bodies 184 the Other against the self 197203 education dependent on 56, 6768 fieldworker's experience of 6162, 63, 65, 68, 69 and emotions 53 in ethnographic encounter 5 Powerdermaker, H. 237-238 powerlessness 201, 225, 226 practice, sense of 126-127, 130, 138 Pratt, M. 51 proclivity 19, 24, 29 professionalism, ideology of 51 psychic defence 21, 211-212, 216, 217, 221-222, 223 psychoanalysis anthropology, parallels with 204-228 fieldworkers' training and 218219 training in 107-108, 115 psychoanalytic psychotherapy 22 psychological and social phenomena: relationship 26, 217-226, 231-234, 236 psychological anthropology 8 psychologising discourse 53

256 psychologism 233 psychology: relationship to sociology 231-232 psychotherapy inclusion 22 Gestalt 22 personal: fieldworkers 217 training in anthropology and 22-23, 43.9 group analysis 112 versus anthropology 23 purification rituals 203, 225 puroks 174, 179-184, 194.3 qi 150, 151-152, 154-156, 159, 166.3 Quinn Patton, M. 235 Rabinow, P. 4, 5 race: hospital staff 103-104 racism: Philippines 187-188 Radcliffe-Brown, A. 111, 232 radical empiricism 8, 20, 42.4, 42.5, 111-112, 113, 114-115, 195, 196 Rafael, V. 178, 184 rage 133-136 Ramirez, M. 96.6 Rappaport, N. 31, 32, 47.43 Rapport, N. 67, 76, 96.4 rationality 197 disembodied 25 raw moments 18-19 Reality principle 223 Reddy, W. 12, 52, 53-54, 55 reductionism: psychoanalytic anthropology 243.3 Reed-Danahay, D. 48, 49 reflection, relational 2, 30, 33, 46.40 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Rabinow) 4 reflexivity, emotional importance of 2, 15-16, 21, 110-113, 114-115, 125, 145

Index training 22-24 criticisms of 108-109 intricacy of 32-33 refuge, emotional 54 relatedness 5, 7, 25-32, 208-209 cultural variations 11 field as capacity for 26-32 understanding of embodied experiences 16-17, 25-34, 147 relating, modes of 29-31 relational feminist notion 46.38 epistomology: definition in fieldwork 25, 47.47 observation 2, 30, 33 reflection 2, 30, 33, 46.40 understanding 23-29 relations, interpersonal: cultural differences 133 relations between things 25, 234, 238 relationship forming: fieldwork 109 Research Methods in Anthropology (Bernard) 108 research, covert 104-105, 118.3 restraint, emotional 131-133, 137, 219-221 Rethinking University Teaching (Laurillard) 56 Richards, A. 232 ritual purification 203 Rivers, W. 232, 242.2 Robben, A. 45.25, 230 Robertson, J. 185 Rogers, M. 190 Rorty, R. 195 Rosaldo, M. 45.29, 53, 133 Rosaldo, R. 18, 19-20, 31, 44.11, 44.17, 45.25, 45.28, 46.38, 85, 120, 133-138, 139, 143.15, 230 Roseberry, W. 109 Rosenhan, D. 118.3 Roth, J. 105 Rowbottom, I. 177

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process Russia: magic and healing 197-203, 224-226 Ryan, L. 98.20, 98.21, 98.23 Said, Edward 63 Sandler, J. 212, 214, 228.4 sanitation: Philippine purok 180 Sargent, C. 177, 178 Sartre, Jean-Paul 200 Scheper-Hughes, N. 177, 178, 183, 184, 187, 189 Schindlbeck, I. 143.13 Schwalbe, M. 45.22 Schwartsmann, H. 177 Segal, H. 228.2 self, sense of 16, 21, 52, 209-210, 218 self and the field 4, 5, 10, 25, 26-8, 65, 111, 113, 195-6, 240 self and society: mutuality 31, 46.33, 229-230 self-cultivation: Buddhist technique 160, 162, 163 self-interpretation 206-210, 211226 Seligman, C. 107, 232 seminars: emotional style 63, 64, 65 sense of practice 126-127, 130, 138 of self 16, 21, 52, 209-210, 218 senses, fieldworkers’: training 24 sensibility 197 sensitivity 24, 156 sentiments 59-61, 174, 243 Shaffir, W. 235 shame 129-130 Shokeid, M. 122-123 Shore, C. 6, 13-14, 46.40, 109 sibling relationships 123-124, 127 silence 28, 54 Buddhist retreat 147, 148, 150, 151 Sinclair, S. 237 Sinterklaasfeest 82-84, 88, 98.17 Skrbiš, Z. 96.6, 98.20

257

Sluka, J. 45.25, 230 Smith, L. 11, 43.10 social and individual: Durkheimian divide 6, 231-234 social and psychological phenomena: relationship 26, 217-226, 231-234, 236 Social Anthropology in Perspective (Lewis) 107 social learning 144 socialisation: linguistic behaviour 206, 208, 210 sociality, ethnographic: definition 30 society and self: mutuality 229-230 sociology: relationship to psychology 231-232 Sökefeld, M. 176 space in fieldwork 26-28, 30-31, 66 fuzziness 75, 90 Spencer, D. 8, 10, 11, 14, 20, 29, 42.5, 44.17, 45.25, 46.38, 52, 70, 113, 230, 237, 238 Spencer, J. 67, 174-175, 189 spirits, world of 196 Spiro, M. 242.2 spontaneity 44.20, 130, 138 Staggenborg, S. 235 states of being 7-8, 44.13 Stebbins, R. 235 Steinberg, R. 12 Stern, D. 44.13 Stoljar, C. 9-10, 46.38 Stoller, P. 44.11, 230 Strachey, J. 212 Strathern, M. 12, 25 stupidity: Buddhist concept 167.7 styles of behaviour 124 subject, positioned 137 subjection of fieldworker by the Other 197-203 subjectivist epistomology 125-126 subjectivity 22, 30, 45.27, 202 anthropologists' training and 33, 236-239

258 fieldworkers' 2, 5, 6, 18, 20, 22, 23, 42.5, 45.29, 113, 196, 229-243 definitions of 29 hidden or suppressed 68, 69, 234-236 informed 33 neglect of 7, 236-239 political 9, 22 Subjectivity, Ethnographic Investigations (Biehl, Good and Kleinman) 8-9 Sullivan, H. 22 suppression of emotions 51, 52, 6265 Svašek, M. 11, 14-15, 27, 44.16, 44.17, 46.31, 75-76, 77, 85, 88, 96.3, 96.4, 97.10, 98.20, 98.23, 99.25 symbols, personal 143.16 Taiwan: Buddhist meditation 144171 Taussig, M. 196 Taylor, C. 206-207 Teaching Anthropology Today (Conference, Oxford, 2008) 46.37 teaching: fieldwork see training: fieldwork Tedlock, B. 3, 43.6, 44.11, 46.38 Theis, J. 177 theorizing: awareness of limits 126 Theory of Practice (Bourdieu) 137 theses v field notes: emotional repositioning 56-61 Things as They Are (Jackson) 42.2 third position ("The Third") 22, 3031 space 189-190, 240 threat 225 Tibet 129-130, 138 time in fieldwork 28-29, 66, 96.2 fuzziness 75, 88, 90, 91 Tonkin, E. 84, 147

Index total social fact 143.17 totalization 197-198 traditional empiricism 1, 42.1, 234236, 238-239 training: fieldwork 1-2, 13-14, 22-24, 27, 33, 67-68, 84, 106-109, 236-239 emotional apprenticeship 48-74 empathy 85-86 psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy 43.9, 119, 217-218 of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists 223, 46.34 transference 8, 115, 119 analysis 212-213 Transnational Families, Emotions and Belonging (Conference, Belfast, 2007) 44.16, 89 Trawick, M. 28 trilogic encounter 189 truth: intersubjective creation 6 truths, experiential 19 Tudor, T. 191 Tuhami (Crapanzano) 4 Turkel, A. 190 Turner, V. 147, 232, 242.2 unconscious see accidental inaccessibility: unconscious thoughts; dynamic unconscious; non-accidental inaccessibility: unconscious thoughts understanding emotional, failure of 133 feeling and: knowledge 125, 136, 196 humanistic 31-32, 90 relational 23-29 unification: psychoanalytic anthropology 243.3 United States: intervention in Philippines 178, 187 universalism 135-136, 139

Anthropological Fieldwork: A Relational Process Unmaking the Third World (Escobar) 62 Utkuhiksalingmiut 131-133, 137, 138 van Meijl, T. 76 Vaughan, C. 178, 184 VIDEA 187 violence: Middle Indian tribal societies 142.8 vulnerability 27, 33, 59, 201, 215 in knowing 3, 7 Walsh, S. 200 Walton, S. 45.28 Watson, C. 6, 7, 23, 44.11 Ways of Knowing (Harris) 9 Wellin, C. 13 Wengle, J. 230 West, P. 30-31 Wharton, A. 12-13 Where do all the Anthropologists go? (Spencer, Jepson and Mills) 67

259

White, G. 10-11 Whitehouse, H. 7, 9 Wikan, U. 53, 55, 80, 85 Willersley, R. 25, 47.47, 47.48 Winnicott, D. 228.3 witchcraft 144 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 205-206, 207, 208, 220 Wolf, D. 46.38 Wollheim, R. 210, 223 work practices, capitalist, and emotions 11-12, 44.21 writing 7-8, 32, 43.21, 46.40, 4865, 68, 111, 175, 196 Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus) 4-5 Wulff, H. 10-11 Yanomamö 84-85 Young, D. 44.11, 160, 196 Yu, S. 18, 28, 167.8 Zinser, H. 119