Being a Parent in the Field: Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork 9783837648317, 9783839448311

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
On Being a Parent in the Field
Positionality, Similarity and Difference
Rethinking the Ethnographer
Unexpected Resonances
Circulating Family Images
Returning to the Field as a Mother
Producing Ethnographic Knowledge
Entangled Family
Falling in and out of Sync in Upland Laos
“We Will Go on Vacation, while You Work”
Bringing My Wife and Children to the Field
Constructing the Field
On Being a Father in the Field
Whisky, Kids and Sleepless Nights
Capturing Sounds
Shared Field, Divided Field
Afterword
Authors

Citation preview

Fabienne Braukmann, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher, Rosalie Stolz (eds.) Being a Parent in the Field

Culture and Social Practice

Fabienne Braukmann is a social anthropologist and PhD candidate at the University of Cologne. She has worked as a research fellow at the Asia Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, for the interdisciplinary DOBES Project Bayso/ Haro. Between 2012 and 2016, she was an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. She has conducted fieldwork in the Cook Islands and, since 2010, in southern Ethiopia. Her research interests include cultural forgetting and remembering, critical heritage studies, social change, ethnicity, minority studies, culture-environment adaptation, and culture and language documentation. Michaela Haug is Assistant Professor at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Senior Researcher at the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne. She focuses on human-environment relations, political, economic and social change, inequality and gender relations with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her current research project explores how different and partly contradicting visions of the future affect forest use changes in Indonesian Borneo. Recent publications include the article Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan: Challenging Power and Presenting Culture published in SOJOURN (2018) and a special issue on Translating Climate Change: Anthropology and the Travelling Idea of Climate Change in Sociologus, co-edited together with Sara de Wit and Arno Pascht (2018). Katja Metzmacher is studying Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She has conducted short fieldtrips in Tanzania, Namibia, and Uganda. Her bachelors thesis was about whether economic experiments are a valid way of studying fairness interculturally. In 2019, she published on research data management in the humanities. Rosalie Stolz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University. She obtained her PhD at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. In her ethnographic research she specialises in the topics of kinship, sociality and socio-economic change. She focuses on Southeast Asia, and Laos specifically. Her postdoctoral project investigates the transformation of houses in the uplands of northern Laos. In 2018, she published Spirits Follow the Words in Social Analysis; her article Making Aspirations Concrete? will appear in Ethnos.

Fabienne Braukmann, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher, Rosalie Stolz (eds.)

Being a Parent in the Field Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork

We thank the Financial Fund for the Implementation of the Statutory Equality Mandate, University of Cologne, which is the major sponsor of this book. At the University of Cologne we further thank the Global South Studies Centre, which financed the copy-editing of this volume, and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology for supporting the preparation of this publication.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover photo: Nigatu Dubale Teffera Proofread by Mary Chambers Typeset by Lea Fernengel and Katja Metzmacher Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4831-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4831-1 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839448311

Contents

Acknowledgements | 7 On Being a Parent in the Field Practical, Epistemological, Methodological and Ethical Implications of Accompanied Fieldwork

Rosalie Stolz, Katja Metzmacher, Michaela Haug, Fabienne Braukmann | 9

POSITIONALITY, SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE Rethinking the Ethnographer Reflections on Fieldwork with and without Family in Mexico and Namibia

Julia Pauli | 39 Unexpected Resonances Observations of an Expecting Ethnographer

Corinna A. Di Stefano | 61 Circulating Family Images Doing Fieldwork and Artwork with/about Family

Simone Pfeifer | 81 Returning to the Field as a Mother Reflections on Closeness and Difference in Long-Term Fieldwork

Michaela Haug | 101

PRODUCING ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE Entangled Family Parenting and Field Research in a Togolese Village

Tabea Häberlein | 127 Falling in and out of Sync in Upland Laos Relative Immersive Processes and Immersive Processes with Relatives in a Khmu Village

Rosalie Stolz | 145

“We Will Go on Vacation, while You Work” A View from a South African Playground on the Ambivalent Reception of the Sani Pass Infrastructure Project

Anne Turin | 165 Bringing My Wife and Children to the Field Methodological, Epistemological and Ethical Reflections

Leberecht Funk | 185

CONSTRUCTING THE FIELD On Being a Father in the Field Mobility, Distance and Closeness

Mario Krämer | 209 Whisky, Kids and Sleepless Nights The Challenge of Being a Mum, a Student and a Researcher

Tabea Schiefer | 223 Capturing Sounds Children’s Voices in the Field and how They Impact Our Research

Andrea Hollington | 243 Shared Field, Divided Field Expectations of an Anthropological Couple in Southeast Asia

Felix Girke | 259 Afterword From Tightrope Walks to Entangled Families

Erdmute Alber | 279 Authors | 287

Acknowledgements

The idea behind this volume was born in informal and recurrent conversations over the years in the hallways of the University of Cologne. While we shared our diverse experiences of parenting in the field during coffee breaks and other informal conversations, our passion grew for bringing the manifold implications of being a parent in the field to the more prominent place it deserves. We have been very happy to see that many colleagues shared our concern and we are grateful that our idea of bringing together several colleagues who had conducted fieldwork with family members for a workshop was met with support and endorsement. The workshop “Feldforschung und Familie. Herausforderungen und Implikationen des Elternseins im Feld” (Fieldwork and Family. Challenges and Implications of Being a Parent in the Field), held in June 2018 at the University of Cologne, was a wonderful experience of collegiality. Although many of the workshop participants became authors of this volume, some of them only enriched the workshop. We thus wish to explicitly acknowledge the presentations by Dennis Akena, Ute Dieckman, Katharina Diederichs, Martina Gockel, Carmen Ibáñez and Sandra Kurfürst, who presented, among them, some voices from the Global South and raised such important issues as the implications of being a single mother, working with sensory approaches, the conscious decision to leave children behind during research and the renegotiation of fatherhood and masculinity as a “native anthropologist” while conducting research at home. The presentations of two of the editors of the present volume have unfortunately not become part of this book due to other commitments: Fabienne Braukmann addressed the seldom reflected on topic of breastfeeding during fieldwork, as a conscious choice, thereby revealing the negotiable social norms of the Haro speaking community of South Ethiopia; and Katja Metzmacher explored the intricacies of conducting fieldwork in Uganda together with her anthropological partner, staying with their child in one of his family's homes, and being confronted with both local norms and her own ideas about gender roles, motherhood and becoming a wife.

8 | Acknowledgements

We also wish to express our gratitude to the representatives of the bodies and institutions in Germany and at the University of Cologne that are involved in the process of funding (accompanied) anthropological fieldwork: Ines Medved (DFG, German Research Foundation), Erdmute Alber (in her function as the spokesperson of a review board at the DFG), Michael Hillenblink (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service) and Sandra Staudenrausch (Research Management, University of Cologne), who participated in a plenary on the structural conditions of balancing fieldwork and family. We warmly thank the Fund for the Implementation of Gender Equality at the University of Cologne who was the main donor for our workshop. We further thank the Global South Studies Center and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, both at the University of Cologne, who also contributed financial and logistic support for our venue. The student assistants and the staff of the GSSC energetically supported the workshop and made sure that everyone felt well cared for. Thank you very much for your tireless efforts! Developing a book out of this inspiring workshop was a rewarding task. First of all, we wish to thank the contributors for their commitment, compliance with deadlines and procedures and the very productive exchange of ideas. It was a pleasure for us to help in bringing this publication to fruition. Along the way, we received steady and unfailing support from Mary Chambers, who proofread the whole manuscript and, in the pressing last phase, from Lea Fernengel, who formatted the manuscript. For many authors this was their first time publishing about their personal experiences of being a parent in the field. What started with a certain amount of reservation at first (can this be the stuff of an anthropological publication?), turned out to provoke new avenues of thought in the contributors’ own reflections on the field and on accompanied fieldwork. This volume aims to foster an already existing, although marginal, scholarly conversation on being a parent in the field in order to shed light on the importance of taking the social conditions under which fieldwork encounters with family evolve ethnographically and in analytically serious ways. By addressing not only the epistemic gains but also the challenges and miscellaneous implications of accompanied fieldwork, we explicitly address a remaining watershed in junior academic career trajectories: the point when young scholars, especially female scholars, become parents. The rich and reflexive accounts of this volume make visible some of the many ways in which ethnographers try to bring together both family and field. We would be delighted if this publication became a source of inspiration and encouragement.

On Being a Parent in the Field Practical, Epistemological, Methodological and Ethical Implications of Accompanied Fieldwork Rosalie Stolz, Katja Metzmacher, Michaela Haug and Fabienne Braukmann

The image of the “lonely anthropologist” (Gottlieb 1995), diving into foreign waters without any cultural baggage from home, continues to dog anthropology. However, accompanied fieldwork is as widely practised as it continues to be a surprisingly marginal topic within the discipline. The present volume, drawing on a rich and diverse set of ethnographic cases, aims to shed light on the noteworthy challenges and valuable implications of contemporary accompanied fieldwork. Researchers enter the field in a variety of company, including colleagues, research assistants, translators, friends and family members (cf. Cupples and Kindon 2003). This volume focuses on anthropologist parents who conduct fieldwork accompanied by their child(ren) and their partner or other family members, who often come along to help with childcare. The configurations of fieldworkers’ families in the field exhibit an enormous variety. As shown by the contributions to this volume, reflecting upon the family conditions1 under which fieldwork is conducted is far too valuable to leave it to conversations in the corridor. It is the stuff ethnographies are made from – even if mostly invisibly so. The presence of an anthropologist’s family members is often not guessable from the ethnographic account (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 3). In the

1

The authors of this volume stem from a binary gender background and were mainly socialised in Western Europe. We are aware of the fact that a more diverse authorship would have led to more insights and different results than those covered in the present volume. We encourage further reflections and publications around accompanied fieldwork by non-binary and diverse ethnographers in manifold research settings to enhance future learning in anthropology.

10 | Stolz, Metzmacher, Haug, Braukmann

acknowledgment section the reader might find hints at the anthropologists’ family (Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b: 1), although these are often added after the highlighting of the collegial and institutional support and the stressing of the adoptive and other close social relations to local interlocutors. While kin ties to the field seem to add to the fieldworker’s credibility, non-local kin ties obviously do not (Flinn 1998: 2). There is a concern that ethnographic data might either be compromised by the contingencies of the anthropologist’s personal social life or altogether “written on another page” (Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b: 3–4; Hollington this volume). Strikingly, reflections upon the fieldworker’s social identity, assumed to having a profound impact on the ethnographic process, are notably silent when it comes to the fieldworker’s family status (Sutton and Fernandez 1998: 111). A small niche of anthropological literature on accompanied fieldwork counters this silence, addressing the presence of children in the field (e.g. Butler and Turner 1987; Cassell 1987; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016a), the family dimension of anthropological research (Flinn, Marshall and Armstrong 1998) and the intertwinement of work and family life (Brown and Dreby 2013). Some anthropologists are also experimenting with new modes of depicting the fieldworker’s diverse impressions and the viewpoints of their various family members. Among these innovative “collaborative tales” (Gottlieb 1995: 23) are coauthored pieces either by parents and their children or by anthropologists and their (anthropologist) spouses (see also Klass and Klass 1987; Fluehr-Lobban and Lobban 1987; Nichter and Nichter 1987)2; coauthored pieces with different sections authored by family members (Gottlieb, Graham and Gottlieb-Graham 1998); single-authored pieces including accompanying children’s diary entries (Scheper-Hughes 1987); and special issues involving single-authored pieces written by family members cross-referring to each other (C. Sutton 1998; D. Sutton 1998). Similar creative solutions for monographs have yet to be established. Works reflecting on the implications and challenges of being a parent in academia more generally are currently attracting increasing attention, such as the accounts (very personal in parts) compiled by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant (2008), Narelle Lemon and Susanne Garvis (2014) and Mary Marotte, Paige Reynolds and Ralph Savarese (2010). Of particular interest are aspects of gender and academic structures in the humanities and social sciences. Recent accounts present personal experiences and practices in the different roles of being a mother and a researcher (Biller-Andorno et. al. 2005; Black and Garvis 2018; Evans and Grant 2008; Lemon and Garvis 2014; Marotte, Reynolds and Savarese 2010) or 2

See Felix Girke (this volume) for a more detailed elaboration on anthropological couples.

On Being a Parent in the Field | 11

analyse underlying power relations with regards to gender and the academic system (Pereira 2017; Murgia and Poggio 2019). Others explore the implications of femaleness and motherhood for research in specific fields of study (e.g. Brown and Casanova 2009; Porter and Schänzel 2018). Earlier or later in their careers many anthropologists have to set family and fieldwork in relation to each other; what might appear as a walk on a tightrope, when trying to balance long-term fieldwork, family life and academic schedules, is a challenge worth taking, as Erdmute Alber (2005) argued emphatically. There is a considerable diversity of answers to the important question of balancing family and fieldwork – in particular for female but increasingly also for male researchers (Brown and Dreby 2013: 8; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b: 8–10). Yet there remain gaps in counselling, methodological training, funding and institutional support that challenge young academics. In particular, the ethics of accompanied fieldwork occupies the minds of many affected researchers, and unsurprisingly, was of particular concern in the earlier publications on accompanied fieldwork (Alber 2005: 45; Butler and Turner 1987; Cassell 1987). Still, a more concerted effort of reflection and the development of institutional support structures is needed (Funk this volume; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 13; Scheper-Hughes 1987). Accompanied fieldwork provides a treasure of ethnographic insights, of reflections upon fieldwork and on the boundaries of the field. Even when the object of anthropological research appears to be disconnected from the fieldworker’s family situation, a closer examination often reveals its influence on the ethnographic process (Pauli this volume), the results of which have hitherto been largely unconsidered (Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b: 7–8). Beyond having a particular family status, bringing children to the field might put one’s cherished cultural relativistic attitudes to the test (Haug this volume; Leslie 1998: 52–56; D. Sutton 1998). According to which standards should one’s own children be treated? How do family routines and marital relations fit into field routines and local expectations of proper marital or parenting behaviour? Feelings of vulnerability might be exacerbated when children’s behaviour, the researcher’s parenting interventions and local but also collegial expectations are at odds (Di Stefano this volume; Linnekin 1998: 79–81; Nichter and Nichter 1987). Who it is that observes or is observed might be reversed – perhaps enhancing the feeling of shared humanity but possibly being alienating as well (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 6–11, 15). These configurations change with researchers’ life trajectories, as they and their children grow older (Sinclair 1998), with divorces, remarriages, deaths (Flinn 1998), as well as with the development of further kin ties to locals over a longer time span (Gordon 1998; Häberlein 2014 and this volume; Haug this volume). It is not always possible nor desirable to bring

12 | Stolz, Metzmacher, Haug, Braukmann

the whole family to the field, yet absent family members, as Simone Pfeifer (this volume) and Trisia Farrelly, Rochelle Stewart-Withers and Kelly Dombrowski (2014) make us aware, can exert their own presence in the field.

LOGISTICS OF ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK In order to reconcile fieldwork and family life, some anthropologist parents have shifted their research topics from faraway places to their own society in order to bring the two closer together (Gottlieb 2012; Rudd et al. 2008a), while others face the decision of whether to separate from their children for an extended period of time or to take them and other family members with them. This is no easy decision, as it involves highly emotional and challenging ethical concerns (see below), as well as a variety of practical considerations. Whether a parent feels that it is convenient to take children along or would prefer to leave them at home depends on the particular research location, locally available infrastructure, health and educational facilities, the duration of the stay, the age of the children, finances, childcare arrangements and last but not least on the network of people (partner, ex-partner, grandparents, etc.) they can rely on at home and abroad. All contributors to this volume have had the experience of conducting fieldwork with their child(ren), and some have also conducted fieldwork alone and with varying constellations of children of different ages and other family members over the course of their careers. All of them have found different and creative solutions to conducting accompanied fieldwork, varying according to the requirements of their field, their research topics, institutional and financial constraints and the needs of their children and family members. As is true for travelling with children in general, good preparation and planning can save a lot of trouble and alleviate anxieties (Blumenfield 2016: 185), while remaining flexible will save the day when carefully laid plans go off the rails (Barta et al. 2009: 7). Paul Starrs et al. note: “With family along, fieldwork is no longer just about the researcher and a cluster of cherished contacts – documents and archives, peoples and places, organizations and outlooks. Suddenly logistics become far more complex.” (2001: 75) Taking children to a well-known research location facilitates planning, but of course it is never possible to prepare for all contingencies. Conducting field research in faraway places requires not only the arranging of the necessary travel documents and visas for all accompanying family members, but also consultation with travel medicine specialists about the necessary immunisations and preventive medical care, with follow-up examinations possibly recommended upon return, a suitable travel health insurance that

On Being a Parent in the Field | 13

covers all family members, and maybe even emergency medical evacuation insurance, depending on the “remoteness” of the research site. Further health related preparations may include attending a paediatric first aid course, the compilation of a comprehensive travel first aid kit and appropriate gear, such as mosquito nets and child-sized life vests. Another major challenge is organising childcare and schooling. Accounts of anthropologists who took their children to the field (e.g. Cassell 1987; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b) reveal a great variety of caregivers in the field, including accompanying partners and relatives, full and part time nannies as well as local friends and relatives. Some researchers, such as Felix Girke (this volume), made use of local childcare facilities. Schooling options often depend on the children’s language skills and the availability and affordability of international schools. Several researchers have been hesitant to enroll their children in public schools, e.g. Mette Halskov Hansen in rural China (2016: 34), because of poor quality and/or divergent educational methods, and instead have preferred to homeschool their children (Blumenfield 2016: 190; Haug this volume). The ability to speak a locally used language is of great advantage, not only to make use of local daycare and schooling facilities, but also to support the independent undertakings of the accompanying partner or relatives. The social and professional background of the researcher’s partner/spouse, as well as their envisioned role during fieldwork, plays a decisive role from the planning stage onwards. Non-anthropologist accompanying partners have to find their own roles and tasks, such as technical and medical assistance, language teaching or diary writing, during fieldwork, alongside or overshadowed by the often-strenuous demands of childcare and adaptation to a perhaps unknown field (see the chapters by Funk, Krämer and Stolz in this volume). Researcher couples might profit from possible professional collaboration in the field, but might also need to demarcate their own autonomous fields of research (see the chapters by Girke and Pauli in this volume). As several examples have shown, the availability of transportation, either public or one’s own, and the resulting (im)mobilities (see the chapters by Haug, Krämer and Turin in this volume) can have a significant impact on field research, as can the particular housing situation. Living in one’s own flat in an urban environment (e.g. Pfeifer this volume), staying with a local (host) family (e.g. Shea 2016) or running one’s own household (e.g. Häberlein and Stolz’s chapters in this volume), all come with different implications and challenges.

14 | Stolz, Metzmacher, Haug, Braukmann

PRECARIOUS CAREERS AND FINANCING ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK Research funding, funding organisations’ policies and the researchers’ ability and willingness to use additional private funds significantly influence the logistics of doing accompanied fieldwork. Financial frameworks also significantly impact on the career prospects of junior anthropologists, especially women. Even though higher education policies and strategies envision gender equality at all levels of qualification, balancing a scientific career and family remains a major challenge and still presents a key barrier for female scholars to reaching the upper echelons of faculties and universities.3 Added to this, in social and cultural anthropology, young academics find themselves confronted with the demands of balancing longterm fieldwork, often abroad, and family planning – a challenge that also continues to impede female careers more often (Lynn, Howells and Stein 2018; Murgia and Poggio 2019; see Rudd et al. 2008a, 2008b for data on anthropologists at US universities). Due to a lack of information and of institutionalised family support, parent researchers often have to navigate hazy information on funding opportunities or might not make use of the full range of support they would be eligible for. In the long run, researchers who are not yet established, considering these options (see also Biller-Andorno et al. 2005), might postpone family planning, quit academia or, as a third option, switch “in and out” of academia, between secondary employment and academic positions (see Bueskens and Toffoletti 2018; Lemon and Garvis 2014). As Tami Blumenfield mentions, “The costs involved in bringing families along are often prohibitive”, and the additional expenditures, in particular international plane fares, require “extended family support or spousal subsidization” (2016: 189). However, this precariousness is not inevitable. A quick glimpse at other professions that involve long-term stays abroad highlights existing standards for the financial support of accompanying family members. For example, employees in the international development cooperation sector, as well as diplomats and other employees of the German Federal Foreign Office, are self-evidently accompanied by family members, for whom the coverage of expenses is the norm; these expenditures comprise lump sums for relocation,

3

Country reports and general publications proliferate; see, for instance, the CIRGE report for US universities (Rudd et al. 2008) and the report of the German Rector’s conference (2012) for German universities. Reports on specific universities can be found online, such as the report of the University of Cologne: https://gb.uni-koeln.de/e2106/e2113/ e26701/Gender_Datenreport2018_NEU_WEB_ger.pdf (last accessed May 8, 2019).

On Being a Parent in the Field | 15

school fees and allowances for accompanying partners and other family members. Additionally, the accompanying family members can seize the opportunity of being included in the preparations for an assignment abroad, often by taking a language course, intercultural training or other tailored courses. These efforts have grown out of the insight that the dissatisfaction of the accompanying partner is a major reason for premature terminations of assignments abroad, as demonstrated by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ).4 In contrast to these high standards, anthropologists are often required to justify their budgets for accompanied fieldwork to third-party donors or university administrators and are usually left to themselves to handle the task of preparing accompanying partners and children for living in their field sites. However, lack of preparation for encounters within an unfamiliar environment, feelings of isolation or the lack of a meaningful occupation can place a major burden on accompanying partners and can ultimately risk the well-being of the family as a whole. A small but not insignificant flagship of a German university administration that meets the needs of a parent researcher involves cases of travelling with a breastfed child: the reimbursement for accommodation and travels costs of a breastfeeding mother travelling on business (and an accompanying partner) is required by the federal state law on travel costs5 in Bremen, one of the 16 federal states of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is now applied by the University of Bremen and should be used as a guiding model for other university administrations in Germany. This can probably also provide an administrative case for a long-term research trip, which by law is to be considered as a business trip and requires a travel authorisation request to be approved for the university. Taking this practical example of a university adjusting to family needs as one step forward, perhaps the above-indicated guidelines for foreign officers and development workers could also apply to long-term fieldworkers and guide funding institutions in reworking their policies? Despite the great differences in the type and scope of the funding received by each of the contributors to this volume, they share in common the precarious burden of going abroad accompanied by family without a comfortable financial buffer. Having prioritised long-term fieldwork and taken up this financial risk paradoxically opens up the possibility of an academic career in the field of social anthropology, for which long-term fieldwork is seen as a key qualification. However, a variety of fieldwork-financing strategies, such as those stated further 4

https://www.giz.de/akademie/en/html/60441.html (last accessed April 10, 2019).

5

The full text is available here: https://www.transparenz.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php? gsid=bremen2014_tp.c.110562.de&asl=bremen203_tpgesetz.c.55340.de&template= 20_gp_ifg_meta_detail_d (last accessed March 5, 2019).

16 | Stolz, Metzmacher, Haug, Braukmann

below, are not considered in the regulations and financial policies of funding agencies. We are confident that pointing out structural gaps and barriers can help funding agencies to adapt their policies and improve their administrative guidelines according to the requirements and implications of accompanied long-term fieldwork. Besides the few existing grants6 for BA and MA anthropology students, the special situation of accompanied fieldwork is not acknowledged in the offer of student scholarships at all, even though, at this qualification level, students are the most vulnerable group in the academic hierarchy. When not conducting research under the umbrella of an already existing larger research project, as Anne Turin (this volume) managed to do, the availability of support programs for student researchers-cum-parents depends on the gender funds provided by a university. Trying to make use of those funds, Tabea Schiefer (this volume) saw herself confronted with the rejection of her applications, which were justified with the financial situation of her husband. Still eager to conduct fieldwork, Tabea Schiefer had no other solution than to cover her own and her child’s research expenditures in Scotland and Germany on a private basis. Other vulnerable groups of students, such as students with special needs, single parents, or students coming from the Global South, probably experience further obstacles and (im)possibilities of realising accompanied fieldwork. The research stays of PhD students take up to twelve months or longer and in general enjoy a relatively stable funding situation – at least regarding the fieldworker’s costs. Structural and financial support for accompanying children and/or partners varies greatly between different research projects and universities. It is noteworthy that there are third party donors which do not grant additional gender costs for PhD students within their gender equality policy. Hence, the willingness of financial administrators and principal investigators to shift financial items and material resources within the accountancy of research centres seems, de facto, to be of major relevance for funding outcomes. The contributors to this volume conducted field research under PhD scholarships (e.g. Hollington and Stolz this volume) or as (part-time) employees in a third-party funded project (e.g. Di Stefano, Funk and Pfeifer this volume). While Andrea Hollington and Simone Pfeifer paid family-related costs themselves during their PhD research, Leberecht Funk and 6

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), for instance, offers student scholarships for research and internships abroad that include lump sums for an accompanying partner and an allowance for childcare. BA and MA students, who receive a state loan under the Federal Training Assistance Act (BAföG), can apply for funds when going abroad during their studies. Here, the possibility of applying for special funds covering childcare fees in the country of destination is available.

On Being a Parent in the Field | 17

Rosalie Stolz received partial financial support for their accompanying family members. The observable differing practices in financial support for accompanied fieldwork at the PhD level should be taken as a wakeup call for mainstreaming structural imbalances and for institutionalizing equal support for accompanied long-term PhD fieldwork. The post-doctoral level is more comfortably equipped, with German public and private (non-profit) funding agencies7 providing post-doctoral researchers with additional gender equality funds and offering a range of financial family support for research stays abroad. These funds, depending on the third-party donor, cover travel costs for family member(s) to and/or within the country of research, visa fees, childcare and medical support. Occasionally, dual career opportunities are also part of the service.8 While Andrea Hollington was not granted additional funding for accompanied fieldwork expenses during her PhD research, at the postdoctoral stage, she received additional travel grants for her accompanying children. Another contributor to this volume with considerable fieldwork experience in Togo with different family constellations is Tabea Häberlein, whose expenses for the children’s travel costs, childcare fees and medical treatment were usually approved. Also funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Felix Girke was able to cover the costs related to taking his child on field research in Myanmar. For Mario Krämer, his conception of private and professional life implied a separation of his DFG grant – to be used solely for professional matters in Namibia and South Africa – from the expenses for his accompanying family members, which he covered by private means. While most of the stated examples relied on one donor, for Michaela Haug, a combination of funds from different sources enabled her family to accompany her on long-term fieldwork in Indonesian Borneo. As the contributions to this volume show, each long-term fieldwork project, each accompanying family member and each research location entails specific requirements. Anthropologists should not shy away from constantly searching for information on support and negotiating the possibilities for financing their fieldwork with family. Above all, universities and funding institutions should better reflect the fact that inherent in the anthropological discipline lies long-term fieldwork – a significant time span during an anthropologist’s career that a researcher might want, at some point, to balance with family life. This requires presumes solid and convenient funding structures, particularly in order to retain female careers in academia in balance with their male peers. 7

To name a few: the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Volkswagen Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

8

E.g. Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

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ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK AND THE PRODUCTION OF ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE Accompanied fieldwork impacts not only on the practical conditions of fieldwork, it also inadvertently leaves an imprint on the ethnographic encounter and the process of knowledge formation, as has been pointed out variously (e.g. Cassell 1987b: 169–170; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 4). However, it has not found its way into the prominent debates on ethnographic fieldwork methods and knowledge generation as a relational and affective process (Spencer and Davies 2010; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019). Likewise, elaborations and critiques of the concept of immersion into the field implicitly embark from the idea of the solitary fieldworker (Carsten 2012; Okely 2012; see also Stolz this volume). But what contributions can accompanied fieldwork actually make to the generation of ethnographic data? With a family in tow, daily life as a locally understandable and effective social unit allows the fieldworker to gain various first-hand experiences of the nittygritty of social life (see also Counts and Counts 1998). Rosalie Stolz (this volume) describes how living in a house in northern Laos paved the way for participating in and gaining insights into kin-based sociality. Feeling one’s way through accompanied fieldwork was a source of ethnographic knowledge of Tao children´s socialisation of a particular emotional repertoire for Leberecht Funk (this volume); witnessing how his children were subject to intensive teasing provided profound insights into the topic of his research. It is an anthropological truism that the fieldworker’s positionality shapes, yet does not determine, insights into and social interaction in the field (e.g. Okely 1992; Rosaldo 1989; Robertson 2002). Being a parent in the field, as this volume underlines, apparently heightens a reflexive awareness of the relational dimensions of ethnographic knowledge, for a variety of reasons (Flinn 1998; Haug and Stolz this volume). Being an understandable social person and becoming similar is stressed in various studies. Drawing on her long-term perspective on the different field sites of Mexico and Namibia, Julia Pauli (this volume) recapitulates how similarities and differences in family status influenced her research in both field sites: while in Namibia her being married was crucial for her access to certain wedding rituals, in Mexico her not yet being a mother affected her access to information surrounding birth and childcare. In her research on transnational families, Simone Pfeifer (this volume) traces (the limits of) her similarity to her female interlocutors who, like her, have to manage long-distance relationships. She reflects upon her absent/present family and the feelings of uneasiness this occasionally provoked – rendering her sensitive

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towards the pains and coping strategies of young Senegalese migrants. However, when the researcher enters the ethnographic scene, not only as a specific social persona on her/his own, but also together with the family, apparent similarities (e.g. the social status of being a parent) as well as obvious differences (e.g. social practices) may affect the encounter in both positive and negative ways. In that respect, experiences of discordance may also teach the ethnographer lessons about the sociality practised in the field. Particular family configurations might be at odds with local values that are therewith exposed as such. Forms of segregation might become visible through the forms of sociality that are not possible because of the ethnicity of the fieldworker’s companions, and their behavioural routines, as Anne Turin (this volume) worked out in the context of South Africa. Conflicting views on educating and caring for children might actualise vividly, and often harshly, ontological viewpoints on both sides, the local and the anthropologist’s (Funk this volume; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 8–11). Normative expectations of marital relations, in particular intimacy and proper conduct as wife/husband, might produce an incisively felt ethnographic knowledge. Over the long run, when repeatedly returning to the field with one’s children, fieldworkers and their local acquaintances might stress differences with more laxity, for different views cannot then easily compromise an already robust social relationship. Recapturing the experience of “growing up in the field” during several periods of research in Indonesian Borneo, Michaela Haug (this volume) shows how fieldwork can be an open-ended dialogue with acquaintances and family that allows the expression of discordant views. Finally, being a parent in the field can also prove to have no direct impact on (rapport with) interlocutors, or might even be an outright hindrance. Mariette van Tilburg (1998) describes how she realised a few months before her planned research on childlessness and infertility in Senegal that she was pregnant; considering that “[t]o focus on barren informants while I myself was pregnant would be a cruel mockery” (ibid: 179), she decided to change her topic accordingly. Joan Cassell nonchalantly mentions that since “studying up”, her family background was of no interest to her interlocutors and thus to her fieldwork anymore: “The surgeons I am now studying would be bored by my kids” (1987: 269). Felix Girke (this volume) also stresses that for his relationships with professional interlocutors in the field of cultural heritage in Yangon, his being a parent in the field was apparently neither of concern nor impact. Simone Pfeifer (this volume) mentions that while in Dakar her family ties were of much interest, among the Senegalese in Berlin they were not. These cases exemplify the continuous efforts to demarcate

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family and non-family spheres that underlie not only ethnographic accounts and fieldwork decisions but the social dynamics and encounters in the field as well. Do we tend, out of reflex, to associate family and accompanied fieldwork with sunshine and roses? Probably not, but stories of sunny days in the field correspond much better to the prevailing ideal of modern academic parents who are able to cope with double and triple loads – pursuing successful careers, being ambitious partners and caring fathers or mothers all at once. Positive stories are much easier to share than accounts of fears, exhaustion and the limitations experienced. However, focusing on the bright and enriching elements of accompanied fieldwork may not always have a motivating effect, but can also place a burden on young scholars who feel that they have to live up to such ideals (Schiefer this volume). Kinship also “carries ambivalent or negative qualities” (Carsten 2013: 246– 247). Ruptures during accompanied fieldwork might reveal our own conceptions of family life, parenting and partnership. As the strenuous phases of fieldwork can put one’s worst instincts on display, the same can hold true for family dynamics and mental health. While there are good reasons to keep darker episodes within one’s diary, the form a conflict takes, the way in which it is aggravated or resolved, provides glimpses into social lifeworlds (see Berger 2009). Given the current call for taking the researcher’s affects and the emotional dimensions of the fieldwork encounter seriously, as “epistemic affects” (Stodulka, Selim and Mattes 2018; see also Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019), here we could probably find many an untold story that it would be worthwhile to think about.

CONSTRUCTING THE FIELD IN ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK Ethnographers, whether accompanied or not, enter their “fields” as people with individual personalities, roles and identities. Private information about oneself is already hardly to be restrained in participatory research, and thus “disconnect[ing] our [family] lives to live our fieldwork” becomes even more impossible (Amit 2000: 15); parenthood is an important part of anthropologist parents’ lives and of their identity as researchers. As such, it can significantly influence the construction of the field and thereby also the production of ethnographic knowledge. Especially in the company of family members, an ethnographer might see her/himself confronted with the loss of “impression management” (cf. Linnekin 1998: 71– 83), which results even more in the (re)negotiations of “the field”. Parenthood can shape the field quite practically by determining one’s movements in the field (Krämer and Turin this volume), by opening up new sites of field research, such

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as playgrounds (Turin this volume; see also Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016) or by limiting one’s mobility (see Turin this volume; Cassell 1987). Tabea Schiefer, (this volume), for example describes how her research on whisky consumption in Germany and Scotland grew out of the wish to find a research site within Europe that would satisfy both family and academic needs. In anthropology, areas of study no longer tend to be perceived as sets of bound geographical and cultural boundaries but rather are thought of as permeable and flexible field sites (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). At these locations of contemporary ethnographic research, anthropologists more and more often study communities of practice rather than conceptualised cultural groups (see Amit 2000; Marcus and Okely 2007), thereby actualising the questions of the construction of the field and of its boundaries. Increasing communication technologies, for instance mobile phones and social media, manifest the unboundedness of fields and the continuity of participatory practice by the researcher and the researched, even when the researcher is physically absent from “the field” (Pelckmans 2009, Pfeifer this volume) or when fieldwork is conducted “at home” (Caputo 2000: 19–31). Accompanied fieldwork, specifically, shapes the boundaries of the field site in unanticipated ways. It is for this reason that an open reflection on accompanied fieldwork in anthropological writing (see also Hollington this volume on similar aspects for linguistic recordings) valuably adds to our analytical practice of constructing “our” fields and the multiple facets they can take – especially with family in tow. The professional and private interlinkages between ethnographers and their “fields” change over the course of long-term fieldwork, through the courses of our own private lives as well as through the ways fieldwork creates and reshapes personal bonds through constant returns to the field (Howell 2012; see Häberlein, Haug and Pauli this volume). Tabea Häberlein (this volume) shows how her family and field lives became increasingly entangled over the years, as she developed a research family in the field in rural northern Togo, brought her children along, fostered a young Togolese woman and became regarded as a grandmother. As the field is constantly reconstructed over time, its “personal, professional and fieldwork involvements of ethnographers are mutually constitutive” (Amit 2000: 11). In the broad sense, this involves reflecting on and making decisions about taking one’s children, partner or other family members to the field. Therefore, the construction of the field is not reduced to various actors and unexpected variables during the actual course of fieldwork, as alluded to above: constructing the field starts with the preparation of a certain research topic and, thereafter, with the practicalities of and preparation for fieldwork itself. This is why the ethnographer has to be regarded as “an even more agent in the construction of the field” (ibid: 13),

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who imagines, anticipates, designs and creates the field from her/his own personal background and professional perspective. With regard to fieldwork with family, during the initial phase of designing a research topic and the related fieldwork, a parent researcher can reflect upon different locations of “the field” suitable to family members. This could involve, for instance, decision-making and considerations that relate to the age of child(ren), the private or professional expectations of the partner, climate conditions and the infrastructure needed for the successful realisation of fieldwork, such as access to health care. It might be desirable, and in some settings feasible, to keep a private “family” sphere apart from the sphere of the “field”. Research by appointment and the availability of children’s daycare or suitable schools might allow for a continuation of family routines with the promise of comfort and safety for the fieldworker, and the company of family, while allowing time for undisturbed field research (Girke this volume). Mario Krämer (this volume) reflects upon the underlying conceptions that made him prefer to keep his own domestic sphere and the field spatially and theoretically distinct during his research on the struggle over neo-traditional authority in Southern Africa, only to realise that his family situation influenced his professional interaction with his assistants and colleagues. Where does the field end and where does the anthropologist’s own domain begin? Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber (2018) have argued recently for an analysis of the processes of “boundary making” that reproduce the contemporary divide between the knowledge domains of politics and kinship within anthropology. Another correlate of this is the divide between family and (field)work (Dreby and Brown 2013), which becomes particularly pertinent when considering the politics of writing: what belongs in the depiction of the field? That this “boundary work” (Thelen and Alber 2018) entails constant efforts of editing and cutting-out is highlighted in Andrea Hollington’s account (this volume) of the methodological practice of linguistics. When documenting and analysing spoken language sequences, audio-taped transcriptions are usually cleared of undesired voices. Reflecting upon her disciplinary reflex of filtering her own children’s voices on audiotapes as background noise, she realised that the boundary work invested in producing a corpus of language data that fits disciplinary ideologies might curtail the researcher’s understanding of actual language use. As the contributions to this volume highlight, acknowledging the presence of family members in the field and the ways in which they are (in)directly linked to the making of the field in ethnographic writing reveals fieldwork to be about “social experience”, rather than being a tale of “social isolation” (Amit 2000: 14–15).

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THE ETHICAL CHALLENGES OF ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK Being a parent in the field implies various highly emotional issues and ethical concerns, which are barely addressed in the large body of literature on good research practice, anthropological university education or in the ethical guidelines of major anthropological associations. The focus lies largely on encouraging a differentiated engagement with the ethical quandaries of fieldwork and the (potentially contradicting) relationships and responsibilities an ethnographer has towards his or her interlocutors, funders, employers and home or host governments, as well as towards wider society. Taking a family to the field provides not only the appealing spirit (at least to some) of heading into a shared adventure, it also implies exposing our children, partner or other family members to potential physical and emotional threats. Some of these might be quite obvious, like the risk of contracting malaria in the tropics or being confronted with traces of violence in post-conflict areas (which are thus easier to avoid, like e.g. by taking malaria prophylaxis or choosing a different field site), while others are rather oblique and as a consequence difficult to anticipate. Exposing one’s self to various kinds of risks is one thing, but exposing others, and especially the children for whom we are responsible, takes on an entirely different dimension, as “one can risk one’s ‘self’ more freely than one’s children” (Cassell 1987: 261). Several researchers have pointed out that together with our children, we bring our specific ideas concerning child rearing practices, security, health care, socialisation and education to the field and quickly reach the limits of cultural relativism when these are questioned (see Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b; Funk this volume; Glover 2016; Hansen 2016; Shea 2016). David Sutton, conducting research on the Greek island of Kalymnos together with his wife and their baby son, pointedly summarises his astonishment: “While the Kalymnians and I had agreed to disagree over many issues and to learn from each other, when it came to our children, suddenly both they and I were convinced that we had a monopoly on truth. Why was cultural tolerance, mine and theirs, suddenly in such short supply?” (1998: 127) Other researchers experienced the limits of practising cultural relativism when they realised how deeply their children had become socialised in the culture their parents had ventured out to study. Heather Young Leslie, conducting field research in Tonga, and Diane Michalski Turner (1987: 104), working in Fiji, both describe how they suffered “severe insecurity because of the loss of a shared cultural solidarity” (Young Leslie 1998: 54) with their daughters, and Heather Young Leslie even considered leaving her daughter behind in Tonga (ibid: 53).

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Weighing up whether to take children to the field or leave them behind, considerations might revolve around the emotional stress that a prolonged separation might have on the child(ren) as well as on the departing parent (Farelly, StewartWithers and Dombroski 2014; Goodenough 1998; Pfeifer this volume). European and Euro-American notions of motherhood make it much more difficult for mothers to leave their children behind than for fathers (Flinn 1998: 11). When taking children along to places considered “exotic” or “dangerous”, parents are confronted with being charged irresponsible, as experienced by Susan Frohlick (2002), who conducted research with two young children and her husband in a mountaineering base camp at the foot of Mount Everest. In particular, pregnant ethnographers might be confronted with heightened normative expectations and explicit criticisms for exposing themselves to fieldwork-associated risks (see Di Stefano this volume; Porter 2018). Heading off alone and leaving children behind, however, confronts women, particularly, with the allegation of being a “bad” mother, which can result in twofold emotional distress – that of being separated from her children, which may already involve feelings of guilt (Sutherland 2008), and additionally that of being subject to malicious judgements. Early accounts of taking children to the field are written with a daring undertone, like for instance the account of Harald Schultz (1961), who took his eightyear-old son to Brazil, or David Maybury-Lewis (1965), who took his baby son into the Amazonian rainforest. Encounters of the eight-year-old with piranhas and the life-threatening dysentery of the baby boy are described as dangers overcome which seem to belong to a proper adventure. Reading these writings more than 50 years later gives the impression that taking children along and exposing them to these dangers was considered an integral and rather unquestioned part of the rite de passage that makes up fieldwork and constitutes “the anthropologist as hero” (Sontag 1966). Or – as seems more likely – these early colleagues simply didn’t find it appropriate to share their inner conflicts and fears with their readership. Although challenges that have to be circumnavigated remain an inevitable part of fieldwork, anthropologists today are more sensitised to possible consequences and they seem to have a greater need for security (cf. Howell 2011). Health concerns are among the most pressing issues – especially for anthropologists who travel to places characterised by poor infrastructure, limited health care and a high risk of exposure to infectious diseases, as is typical for many rural areas in the Global South. Encounters with poisonous animals, household accidents and “simple” emergencies, such as appendicitis, can become life threatening because of the long distance to medical assistance. However, living in an urban environment also implies specific hazards, such as for example the increasing air pollution in Chinese cities (Blumenfield 2016: 188). Several anthropo–logists

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have described how their children not only lost a lot of their accustomed freedom, but also fell severely ill in mega cities like Bogota (Hugh-Jones 1998) and Delhi (Nichter and Nichter 1987), after enjoying relatively good health in the countryside. The psychological and emotional stress that results from living in a foreign lifeworld and being confronted with irritating behaviour or painful experiences is vividly described by Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s children, who struggled with the experience of extreme poverty when they accompanied their mother during her research in a Brazilian shanty town (Scheper-Hughes 1987). Leberecht Funk (this volume) describes how the unsettling experiences that his wife and children had resulted in feelings of guilt on the part of the anthropologist. Similar feelings have been reported by other ethnographers as well and range from “guilt at the thought of dragging a child to a possible hazardous and unhealthy field site for the sake of an anthropological career”, and “guilt at inabilities to control and socialize a child in the field” to “guilt at losing control and publicly yelling at a child” (Flinn 1998: 11). Conducting accompanied fieldwork is thus inextricably related to the crucial and not easily answered question of what we can expect our children, our partner or other relatives to bear. Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield even go a step further by asking whether we are violating children’s rights by engaging them in (field) work and making them – intentionally or not – “a form of research strategy, an instrument to accessibility or a tool to humanize relationships in the field.” (2016b: 4) Accounts of the effects of fieldwork on children vary greatly according to the research setting involved, the age of the children and their individual personalities. While some children have had deeply troubling experiences (Scheper-Hughes 1987; Fernandez 1987) others have wished to be more actively engaged in their parents’ research (Wiley 1987: 110), and yet others again have developed a deep personal attachment to the field sites of their parents (see the video account by Lydall et al. 1995; Flinn 1998: 14). Acknowledging that our children and other accompanying family members have not only an indirect impact on the insights we gain, e.g. by positioning us as parent or spouse, but also often actively contribute to the production of ethnographic knowledge, finally raises the important question of how to place them in our writing (Cornet and Blumenfield 2016b: 3). Without wishing to propagate a rigid normative framework for accompanied fieldwork, its ethical implications should nevertheless find entry into our discussions of research ethics and ethical guidelines. The silence that largely envelops accompanied fieldwork in official debates and that reduces it to intimate personal conversations makes it more difficult to anticipate and prepare for the challenges it implies. We hope that this edited volume contributes to placing the epistemological,

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methodological and ethical implications of accompanied fieldwork on a more central stage with regard to the supervision of students, exchanges between colleagues, and wider university structures, in order to strengthen financial and institutional support for it.

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK This edited volume moves beyond mere accounts of accompanied, ethnographic fieldwork and pinpoints implications for theoretical and methodological thinking. Aiming to present manifold perspectives we have integrated scholars from different career stages, including MA and PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and senior scholars. The chapters cover different fieldwork settings with different family constellation in rural and urban areas across different continents and various research topics. At the same time, we develop critical reflections on gender-biased academic realities by means of shedding light on the experiences and opportunities of funding accompanied fieldwork. Julia Pauli discusses categorial and biographical similarities and differences between the fieldworker and the field. Drawing on her own ethnographic experiences in Mexico and Namibia and her changing family status – from being a young researcher without offspring during her first fieldwork in Mexico to being in the field with her anthropologist husband and their daughter in Namibia and later again in Mexico – she describes how being similar or different in crucial categories with her interlocutors influenced and shaped her research and ethnographic reasoning in different ways. Based on her ethnographic analysis, she argues for a stronger consideration of what she terms family normativity, i.e. the values attached to particular family configurations in different societies. Corinna Di Stefano reflects upon the various expectations and reactions she saw herself confronted with due to her “bulging body” while conducting research during her pregnancy in the Lesser Antilles. In considering different resonances to her visible pregnancy, she shows that the family involvement projected on the researcher’s body is not always a door opener. Her interlocutors’ reactions, in particular, revealed the close connection between reproduction and migration decisions. The eventual threat of exposure to chlordecone, a teratogenic pesticide used in banana cultivation, made her aware of her privileges in the field.

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Simone Pfeifer conducted research with and without her husband and son in Dakar and Berlin. Inquiring into transnational media practices, Pfeifer focuses on her own media practices, including the use of Skype to communicate with her homebased family, that made the longing for absent family members and the condition of unstable WiFi a shared experience between her and many of her female interlocutors. In an artistic collaboration with her partner, both relate to a West African tradition of family images, creating a collage that brings the layers and dynamics of accompanied fieldwork to life. Their joint project is an example of an innovative form of ethnographic knowledge and art production into which the (non-)anthropologist spouse brings his perspective. In her contribution to this volume, Michaela Haug reflects on how the multiple elements of her identity, as well as different phases of parenthood, have influenced experiences of closeness and difference over the course of her long-term engagement with the Dayak Benuaq in Indonesian Borneo. Most accounts of growing into and growing up in the field are depicted as linear processes of steadily increasing closeness as initial differences and distance are successfully overcome. In contrast, she describes her experience of growing up in Dayak Benuaq society from an unmarried and childless undergraduate student into a married mid-level academic with three children as an uneven road which included rewarding highlights but also disconcerting ruptures. In her account of her long-term research in Togo, Tabea Häberlein describes how she became involved in various kin roles and how her German and Togolese families got increasingly entangled. Over the course of several research periods she became the social child of a Togolese family, the foster mother of a local child, a biological mother and a social grandmother. In her contribution to this volume she shows how growing into these different roles provided her with deep insights into the making of kin relationships and personhood. She argues that giving and receiving personhood, as a mother as well as a child, is a process of affiliation, driven by different kinds of social interaction. Rosalie Stolz reflects upon how the presence of her husband and son influenced their social becoming in the field and her grasp on kinship among the Khmu of northern Laos by discussing the processes of immersion from the perspective of her husband, her son and herself respectively; she traces how her being a socially mature woman impacted upon her kin positioning in the field, how her husband’s lay medical treatment of a local elder only seemed to provoke a conflict, and finally, how her son’s behaviour and the local expectations of children of his age

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were partially and tellingly at odds with each other. She uses the metaphor of “falling in and out of sync” in order to address the mutual attunement between the field and non-anthropological companions that builds on its own forms of resonance. Anne Turin mobilised her close but also extended family support in order to live in Himeville, South Africa to conduct research on the reception and impacts of the tarring of the Sani Pass, a road that stretches through the National Park. Turin discusses the practical but also the ethnographic implications of her fieldwork situation: the expectations of the accompanying adult carers of her daughter of what the stay in South Africa should feel like (as the suggestive title “We go on vacation while you work” indicates), and how her experiences at playgrounds with marked social segregation added to her insights on the controversial infrastructure project. In his account of his fieldwork among the Tao on the Taiwanese island of Lanyu, Leberecht Funk allows us intimate insights into the vicissitudes of living in a suspicious and timid social environment in which eye-contact and a wide range of other social behaviour are avoided for fear of omnipresent spirits. His research on children’s affective socialisation gained in complexity as well as in delicacy due to his first-hand observations of local children’s behaviour towards his sons. Funk traces his feelings of distress and guilt in order to shed light on the hardships of accompanying spouses and children, as well as on Tao values and emotions. Mario Krämer explores the compatibility and differentiation between family and professional life during 15 months of research in South Africa and Namibia with a family of five. He builds on Max Weber’s vision of “science as a vocation” to discuss the partially contradictory requirements of professional and private “vocations” in the sense of being responsible for caring for one’s family. His contribution shows how the presence of his family and his responsibilities as a father affected the methodological approach of his research, his movements and his position in the field, and eventually also the insights he gained into the development and change of neo-traditional authority in Southern Africa. Tabea Schiefer discusses her experiences as a student mother and researcher in higher education by taking insights from seminars to supervision. Rather than meeting the promoted ideal of fieldwork in a far away place, for her, a support structure that fit her ideals of family life was a major precondition for the choice of her fieldwork setting. Accompanied by her daughter, husband and sister-in-law,

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she reflects on how family support positively impacted on her sensory-ethnographic research among whisky consumers in Scotland and Germany. Andrea Hollington critically reflects on common practices of excluding sounds and voices during linguistic fieldwork and data processing with the aim of creating “academic” representative recordings. However, taking into account her own long-term anthropological linguistic fieldwork experiences in various African countries, she explores how the captured sounds and voices of her accompanying children have impacted on her field recordings. Therefore, she pleads for a widening of the linguistic perspective to an integrated analysis of polyphonic and multidimensional soundscapes and the contextualised environment of communicative situations. This timely approach incorporates the researcher and accompanying family members into the context of fieldwork and the creation of linguistic data. That a field can be divided while it is shared by a researcher couple accompanied by their son is shown by Felix Girke. Staying in Yangon, Myanmar, both Girke and his wife pursued their respective research agendas and shared the responsibility of childcare in what he calls “radical egalitarianism”. He reflects upon the rationales of their decision to keep their family life and fieldwork close yet separate, and relates them to the history of anthropological couples and the often conflicting implicit rules of anthropological careers. That the field indeed turned out to be divided is considered by Girke to be characteristic of his field of cultural heritage, whose cosmopolitan expert-interlocutors themselves strove to keep work and family life distinct. In her afterword, Erdmute Alber starts with a reflection upon her earlier usage of the image of walking on a tightrope when thinking about balancing life as a researcher and as a mother. Rather than walking alone on a tightrope, the endeavour of accompanied ethnographic fieldwork, she argues, is nothing other than the consistent implementation of the ethnographic method of participant observation. She stresses the relational character of fieldwork and the epistemic value of analysing the imprints of accompanied fieldwork on the research process. Against this backdrop, her remarks on the challenges of funding and supervising accompanied fieldwork provide food for thought. Taking up the notion of entangled families, Alber argues for a stronger consideration of the wider set of kin and quasi kin relations that extend beyond the primary kin of the fieldworker and cross-cut the boundaries of the field and home.

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REFERENCES Alber, Erdmute (2005): “Drahtseilakt? Plädoyer für ein Leben auf vielen Füßen.” In: Nikola Biller-Andorno/Anna-Karina Jakovljevic/Katharina Landfenster/Min Ae Lee-Kirsch (eds.), Karriere und Kind. Erfahrungsberichte von Wissenschaftlerinnen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 41–50. Amit, Vered (2000): Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London and New York: Routledge. Barta, Brigitte/Lobeck Kane, Katharina/Brash, Celeste/Thomas, Amelia/Choy, Monique/Miller, Korina/Burke, Fritz/Hindle, Charlotte/D´Arcy, Jayne (2009): Travel with Children, Footscray, Australia: Lonely Planet. Berger, Peter (2009): “Assessing the Relevance and Effects of ‘Key Emotional Episodes’ for the Fieldwork Process.” In: Berger Peter/Jeanne Berrenberg/Berit Fuhrmann/Jochen Seebode/Christian Strümpell (eds.), Feldforschung. Ethnologische Zugänge zu sozialen Wirklichkeiten/ Fieldwork. Social Realities in Anthropological Perspectives, Berlin: Weißensee, pp. 149–175. Biller-Andorno, Nikola/Jakovljevic, Anna-Karina/Landfester, Katharina/LeeKirsch, Min Ae (2005): Karriere und Kind, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Black, Alison L./Garvis, Susanne (2018): Lived Experiences of Women in Academia. Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, Milton: Routledge. Blumenfield, Tami (2016): “Special Considerations for Accompanied Fieldwork in China.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 185–194. Brown, Tamara Mose/Casanova, Erynn Masi de (2009): “Mothers in the field. How motherhood shapes fieldwork and researcher-subject relations.” In: Women´s Studies Quarterly 37/3–4, pp. 42–57. Brown, Tamara Mose/Dreby, Joanna (2013): Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bueskens, Petra/Toffoletti, Kim (2018): “Mothers, scholars and feminists. Inside and outside the Australian academic system.” In: Alison L. Black/Susanne Garvis (eds.), Lived Experiences of Women in Academia. Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, Milton: Routledge, pp. 13–22. Butler, Barbara/Turner, Diane Michalski (1987): Children and Anthropological Research, New York and London: Plenum Press. Caputo, Virginia (2000), “At ‘Home’ and ‘Away’. Reconfiguring the Field for Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology.” In: Vered Amit (ed.), Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 19–31.

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Carsten, Janet (2012): “Fieldwork Since the 1980s. Total Immersion and its Discontents.” In Richard Fardon/Olivia Harris/Trevor H. J. Marchand/Mark Nuttal/Chris Shore/Veronica Strang/Richard A. Wilson (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 7–21. Carsten, Janet (2013): “What kinship does — and how.” In: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3/2, pp. 245–251. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016a): Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People's Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016b): “Introduction. Anthropological Fieldwork and Families.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People's Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 1–17. Counts, David R./Counts, Dorothy A. (1998): “Fictive Families in the Field.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 142–153. Cupples, Julie/Kindon, Sara (2003): “Far from being ‘home alone’. The dynamics of accompanied fieldwork.” In: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24/2, pp. 211–228. Dreby, Joanna/Brown,Tamara Mose (2013): “Work and Home (Im)Balance. Finding Synergy through Ethnographic Fieldwork.” In: Tamara Mose Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 3–16. Evans, Elrena/Grant, Caroline (2008): Mama, PhD. Women write about motherhood and academic life, New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Farrelly, Trisia/Stewart-Withers, Rochelle/Dombroski, Kelly (2014): “‘Being There’. Mothering and Absence/Presence in the Field.” In: Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies 11/2, pp. 1–32. Fernandez, Renate (1987): “Children and Parents in the Field. Reciprocal Impacts.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 185–216. Flinn, Juliana (1998): “Introduction. The Family Dimension in Anthropological Fieldwork.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp. 1–21.

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Flinn, Juliana/Marshall, Leslie B./Armstrong, Jocelyn (1998): Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University Hawai’i Press. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn/Lobban, Richard (1987): “‘Drink from the Nile and You Shall Return’. Children and Fieldwork in Egypt and the Sudan.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 237–255. Frohlick, Susan (2002): “You Brought Your Baby to Base Camp? Families and Field Sites.” In: The Great Lakes Geographer 9/1, pp. 49–58. Glover, Denise (2016): “Viral Signs. Confronting Cultural Relativism with Children’s Health in the Field.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 87–100. Goodenough, Ruth G. (1998): “Fieldwork and a Family. Perspectives over Time.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 22–34. Gordon, Tamar (1998): “Border-crossing in Tonga. Marriage in the Field” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 130–141. Gottlieb, Alma (1995): “Beyond the Lonely Anthropologist. Collaboration in Research and Writing.” In: American Anthropologist 97/1, pp. 21–26. Gottlieb, Alma (2012): The Restless Anthropologist. New Fieldsites, New Visons, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gottlieb, Alma/Graham, Philip/Gottlieb-Graham, Nathaniel (1998): “Infants, Ancestors, and the Afterlife. Fieldwork's Family Values in Rural West Africa.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 121–126. Gupta, Akhil/Ferguson, James (1997): Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California Press. Häberlein, Tabea (2014): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhabe. Ein Plädoyer zur ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 127–154. Hansen, Mette H. (2016): “Between Norms and Science. What Kids Bring to the Field.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 19–40.

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Howell, Signe (2011): “Whatever Happened to the Spirit of Adventure.” In: Holger Jebens/Karl-Heinz Kohl (eds.), The End of Anthropology?, Wantage: Sean Kingston, pp. 139–154. Howell, Signe/Talle, Aud (2012): Returns to the field, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hugh-Jones, Christine (1998): “Children in the Amazon.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 27–64. Klass, Morton/Solomon Klass, Sheila (1987): “Birthing in the Bush. Participant Observation in Trinidad.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 121–147. Korpela, Mari/Hirvi, Laura/Tawah, Sanna (2016): “Not Alone. Doing Fieldwork in the Company of Family Members.” In: Suomen Antropologi 41/3, pp. 3– 20. Lemon, Narelle/Garvis, Susanne (2014): Being “In and Out”. Providing Voice to Early Career Women in Academia, Rotterdam: Sense. Linnekin, Jocelyn (1998): “Family and Other Uncontrollables. Impression Management in Accompanied Fieldwork.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 71–83. Lydall, Jean/Strecker, Kaira/Strecker, Ivo/Husmann, Rolf (1995): Sweet sorghum. An ethnographer's daughter remembers life in Hamar, Southern Ethiopia. Ethnographic video, Watertown, Massachusetts: Documentary Educational Resources. Lynn, Christopher D./Howells, Michaela E./Stein, Max J. (2018): “Family and the field. Expectations of a field-based research career affect researcher family planning decisions.” In: PLOS ONE 13/9, e0203500. Marcus, George E./Okely, Judith (2007): “How short can fieldwork be?” In: Social Anthropology 15/3, pp. 353–367. Marotte, Mary R./Reynolds, Paige/Savarese, Ralph (2010): Papa, PhD. Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Maybury-Lewis, David (1965): The Savage and the Innocent, Boston: Beacon Press. Murgia, Annalisa/Poggio, Barbara (2019): Gender and precarious research careers. A comparative analysis, London: Routledge. Nichter, Mimi/Nichter, Mark (1987): “A Tale of Simeon. Reflections on Raising a Child While Conducting Fieldwork in Rural South India.” In: Joan Cassell

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(ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 65–89. Okely, Judith (1992): “Anthropology and Autobiography. Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge.” In: Judith Okely/Helen Callaway (eds.), Anthropology and Autobiography, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–27. Okely, Judith (2012): Anthropological Practice. Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, Oxford: Berg. Pelckmans, Lotte (2009): “Phoning anthropologists. The Mobile Phone’s (Re-) Shaping of Anthropological Research.” In: Mirjam de Bruijn/Francis B. Nyamnjoh/Inge Brinkman (eds.), Mobile Phones. The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa, Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG, pp. 23–49. Pereira, Maria do Mar (2017): Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship. An Ethnography of Academia, New York: Routledge. Porter, Brooke A. (2018): “Early Motherhood and Research. From Bump to Baby in the Field.” In: Brooke Porter/Heike A. Schänzel (eds.), Femininities in the field. Tourism and transdisciplinary research, Bristol: Channel View, pp. 70– 85. Porter, Brooke A./Schänzel, Heike A. (2018): Femininities in the field. Tourism and transdisciplinary research, Bristol: Channel View. Robertson, Jennifer E. (2002): “Reflexivity Redux. A Pithy Polemic on ‘Positionality’.” In: Anthropological Quarterly 75/4, pp. 785–792. Rosaldo, Renato (1989): “Grief and Headhunter's Rage.” In: Renato Rosaldo (ed.), Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 1–21. Rudd, Elizabeth/Morrison, Emory/Picciano, Joseph/Nerad, Maresi (2008a): Social Science PhDs. Five+ Years Out. Anthropology Report. CIRGE Report 2008-01. CIRGE: Seattle. Available online at https://www.education.uw.edu/ cirge/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/anthro-final-03-11-08.pdf (last accessed July 6, 2019). Rudd, Elizabeth/Morrison, Emory/Picciano, Joseph/Nerad, Maresi (2008b): CIRGE Spotlight #1 on Doctoral Education: “Are Women and Men Finally on Equal Footing in Social Science Careers? Findings from Social Science PhDs. Five+ Years Out, Seattle: CIRGE. Available online at https://www.education.uw.edu/cirge/social-science-phds-five-years-out-anthropology-report/ (last accessed May 14, 2019). Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1987): “A Children’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Managing Culture-Shocked Children in the Field.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 217–236.

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Schultz, Harald (1961): “Blue Eyed Indian. A City Boy´s Sojourn with Primitive Tribesmen in Brazil.” In: The Journal of the National Geographic Society 120/1, pp. 65–90. Shea, Jeanne (2016): “Clean Your Plate and Don’t Be Polite. An American Mother’s Education in Early Childhood Parenting and Family Life in Shanghai China.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 41–68. Sinclair, Karen (1998): “Dancing to the Music of Time. Fieldwork with a Husband, a Daughter and a Cello.” In Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 110–129. Sontag, Susan (1966): “The Anthropologist as Hero.” In: Susan Sontag (ed.), Against Interpretation and other essays, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, pp. 69–81. Spencer, Dimitrina/Davies, James P. (2010): Anthropological Fieldwork. A Relational Process, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Starrs, Paul/Starrs, Carlin/Starrs, Genoa/Huntsinger, Lynn (2001): “Fieldwork…with Family.” In: Geographical Review 91/1–2, pp. 74–87. Stodulka, Thomas/Selim, Nasima/Mattes, Dominik (2018): “Affective Scholarship. Doing Anthropology with Epistemic Affects.” In: Ethos 46/4, pp. 519– 536. Stodulka, Thomas/Dinkelaker, Samia/Thajib, Ferdiansyah (2019): Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography, New York: Springer. Sutherland, Jean-Anne (2008): “Ideal Mama, Ideal Worker. Negotiating Guilt and Shame in Academe.” In: Caroline Grant/Elrena Evans (eds.), Mama Ph.D. Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 213–221. Sutton, Constance R. (1998): “‘Motherhood Is Powerful’. Embodied Knowledge from Evolving Field-Based Experiences.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 139–145. Sutton, David (1998): “‘He’s Too Cold!’ Children and the Limits of Culture on a Greek Island.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 127–138. Sutton, David/Fernandez, Renate (1998): “Introduction.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 111–117. Thelen, Tatjana/Alber, Erdmute (2018): “Reconnecting State and Kinship. Temporalities, Scales, Classifications.” In: Tatjana Thelen/Erdmute Alber (eds.), Reconnecting State and Kinship, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–35.

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Turner, Diane Michalski (1987): “What Happened when My Daugther Became a Fijian.” In: Barbara Butler/Diane Michalski Turner (eds.), Children and Anthropological Research, New York and London: Plenum Press, pp. 97–114. van Tilburg, Mariette (1998): “Interviews of the Unspoken. Incompatible Initiations in Senegal Fieldwork.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 177– 189. Wiley, Jonathan (1987): “Daddy’s little Wedges. On Being a Child in France.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 91–120. Young Leslie, Heather (1998): “The Anthropologist, The Mother, and The Crosscultured Child. Lessons on the Relativity of Cultural Relativity.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 45–59.

Positionality, Similarity and Difference

Rethinking the Ethnographer Reflections on Fieldwork with and without Family in Mexico and Namibia Julia Pauli

INTRODUCTION 1 In June 1996, I was invited to participate at a workshop on women’s health and contraceptive practices that was arranged by a regional Mexican health organization. I was excited about the invitation. My PhD research focused on family planning and cultures of reproduction and I hoped to gain new insights and make new acquaintances. About 15 women from various villages of the Valle de Solís in Central Mexico had gathered in the living room of Magdalena, a promotora de salud, a community health worker, in her mid-30s.2 The room hardly offered enough space for everyone to sit, but the women squeezed in. They greeted me with friendliness and smiles. I was seated close to a mother with a toddler. After some time, the toddler crawled into my lap and everyone laughed. Although the attention made me a bit nervous, I nevertheless felt pleased about the way things

1

Acknowledgement: Michael and Liliana Schnegg have been central to everything I discuss here. I am very thankful for their trust and support. I further thank my interlocutors in both field sites for the years of insights and help in my various projects. The German Science Foundation (DFG) has funded the projects, for which I am also very thankful. My gratitude also goes to Fabienne Braukmann, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher and Rosalie Stolz for inviting me to the workshop and for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2

To protect the privacy of my interlocutors, most names are pseudonyms. In some cases, however, an interlocutor agreed to be mentioned by his or her first name.

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developed. It seemed that the women liked me and that my fieldwork was going well. Magdalena was a talented speaker and the women listened attentively to her message that the small family lives better, la familia pequeña vive mejor. This slogan was the central statement of the national family planning campaign. Most women in the room were in their mid to late 20s, with a few women in their 30s. They were mothers of at least one, but more often several children. A discussion on the meaning of children for women emerged. Not everybody in the room agreed that small families are indeed a good idea. A mother of four said that only her children make her life meaningful. Then she turned to me and asked why I do not have any children. Another woman nodded and added that given my age this was really surprising. Until that moment, at the age of 26, I had not considered myself as very old for motherhood. I felt embarrassed and somehow caught red-handed. My initial enthusiasm about how dedicated and accepted I was as a fieldworker had completely evaporated. It was replaced by a feeling of isolation. I felt very different from the women in the room. Reflecting on the incident more than 22 years later, I better understand the two conflicting sets of normative expectations – the focused, dedicated researcher versus the socially embedded woman. The two social roles are part of larger normative orders. As a young PhD student, I had unconsciously accepted the norms associated with the figure of the “lone researcher” as my role model. This first role model is very prevalent in anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski describes in Argonauts of the Western Pacific how good fieldwork “consists mainly in cutting oneself off from the company of other white men and remaining in as close contact with the natives as possible, which really can only be achieved by camping right in their villages.” (1984 [1922]: 6) To illustrate this, a photograph of Bronislaw Malinowski’s tent amidst several “native” tents is shown. Erving Goffman’s posthumously published comments on how to conduct fieldwork come to very similar conclusions. Erving Goffman suggest that you should “remove yourself from all resources. One of the problems of going in with a spouse, of course, is that while you can get more material on members of the opposite sex (especially if you go in with a kid), it does give you a way out” (1989: 127; see also Spittler 2014). To avoid having any way out during fieldwork, Erving Goffman advises that “you should be in a position to cut yourself to the bone” (1980: 127). Bronislaw Malinowski and Erving Goffman both use the verb “to cut oneself” to describe how the fieldworker becomes a fieldworker. “To cut oneself” is not necessarily associated with immersing oneself into new social worlds. More commonly, it is associated with pain. This helps to explain why “good” fieldwork is so often constructed as a result of tremendous difficulties overcome. Juliana

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Flinn has critically commented on this perception: “Fieldworkers should spend a long time in the field, alone, and live in difficult circumstances. In fact, fieldwork that is too comfortable is less prestigious (and presumably produces less prestigious scholarship)” (1998: 17). The devaluing of certain types of fieldwork that do not match the image of the courageous (cut to the bone!) lone researcher is also observed by Joan Cassell. In her description of her Jamaican fieldwork at the end of the 1960s, Joan Cassell remarks: “A professor from the university drove me to Mango Ridge. He was a jovial, considerate man, who tried to allay my evident nervousness by teasing, telling me I was not going to be doing ‘real’ anthropology, since my food would come from the Kingston supermarket, and there was no savage ‘bush’” (1987: 6). But although the figure of the lone fieldworker is increasingly being questioned in anthropology (Alber 2005; Cassell 1987; Dürr and Sökefeld 2018; Flinn, Marshall and Armstrong 1998), the ideal nevertheless persists. Books on ethnographic fieldwork often place a lone fieldworker amidst his or her “field” on the cover (Robben and Sluka 2012), and many novice fieldworkers, like myself, still try to follow Bronislaw Malinowski’s and Erving Goffman’s advice. It is thus challenging to rethink the ethnographic encounter beyond the figure of the lone fieldworker. This leads me to the second social role I was confronted with at the incident in 1996, the socially embedded woman, often a mother. The rethinking of the ethnographer has to consider how the fieldworker is viewed when doing fieldwork. In the incident narrated above, the Mexican women arguably perceived me as rather different from themselves. In the most obvious way, I lacked what they had: a child. Having a child and doing fieldwork with my family would have made my life substantially more similar to theirs. Reflecting on the positionality of fieldwork, Margret Mead remarks: “Ideally a three-generation family, including children highly trained to understand what they are experiencing, would be the way to study culture” (1986: 321). She nevertheless continues that “such a method is neither practical, in terms of fieldwork personnel, nor tolerable in small communities” (ibid: 322). Implicitly, Margret Mead suggests that the establishment of similarities between the fieldworker and the “field” could lead to better ethnographic rapport and understanding. Not the lone fieldworker, cut to the bone and then ethnographically revived, but the socially embedded anthropologist with family should be the fieldwork ideal (Alber 2005). In my contribution I want to discuss how important similarities, but also differences, might be for fieldwork. Is it an advantage to have crucial social categories like gender, age and family status in common with the interlocutors? And how does difference influence the interactions between the fieldworker and the “field”? After introducing the two field sites where I have conducted fieldwork, Central

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Mexico and Northwest Namibia, I will first turn to how experiences of difference have influenced my fieldwork. I then reflect on the importance of similarity between myself and my interlocutors, also discussing how through fieldwork a researcher is often familiarised into the field, becoming more similar to her or his interlocutors in the process.

FIELDWORK IN MEXICO After a brief visit in 1995, I started my first year-long fieldwork in Pueblo Nuevo in June 1996.3 The village of Pueblo Nuevo is located in the valley of Solís and is part of the state Estado de México in the central highlands of Mexico (Pauli 2000). Over the last 80 years national and international migration have played an important role in transforming the economic foundations of the village from subsistence-oriented land cultivation of maize and beans into a mixed economy of remittances and agriculture. As figures from my two ethnographic censuses show, the number of households in the village has increased from 165 households in 1997 to 195 households in 2013 (Pauli 2013, 2015; Pauli and Bedorf 2016, 2018). There are hardly any families in Pueblo Nuevo that have not been affected by transnational migration. Almost half of all adult men (15 years and older) in 2013 had migrated to US destinations. The building of houses in estilo del norteño (Lopez 2015), North American style, is tightly connected to this tremendous increase in international, mainly male labour migration to the US. Pueblo Nuevo’s appearance has changed considerably from being a “traditionally looking” Mexican village characterised by one-story houses made from adobe bricks to a place filled with conspicuous but often uninhabited remittance houses, i.e. houses built with migrants’ remittances (Pauli and Bedorf 2018). Over the course of more than 20 years I have repeatedly returned to Pueblo Nuevo. Births of children, marriages, migrations, accidents and deaths were not only narrated to me. In some cases, they were also lived through together. Kirin Narayan has commented on this quality of long-term fieldwork: “Repeated returns to the field force an anthropologist to reconsider herself and her work not just from the perspective of the academy but also from that of the people she purports to represent” (1993: 677). While the topic of my first fieldwork for my PhD thesis

3

The 1995-1997 fieldwork was funded by the DFG (German Science Foundation) through the Leibniz award of my PhD supervisor Thomas Schweizer. Fieldwork in 2010 and 2013 was also funded by the DFG (grant SCHN 1103/3-1). This project was led by me and Michael Schnegg as joint principal investigators.

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(1996 to 1997) was child bearing and cultures of reproduction, in the 2000s I focused more on the middle phases of life and on migration to the USA. This refocus was also a consequence of the strong increase in transnational migration. Figure 1: Making tortillas in Pueblo Nuevo, March 2013.

© Julia Pauli

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Until the beginning of the 2000s, I conducted most of my fieldwork “alone”, but with sometimes extended visits by Michael Schnegg, my husband and fellow anthropologist. This changed in 2010. In 2002, our daughter Liliana was born. From 2003 onwards, Michael and I worked together in a new field site, Northwest Namibia. I will describe this fieldwork below. It took us until 2010 to return to Mexico and Pueblo Nuevo. During our return in 2010, we were accompanied not only by our eight-year-old daughter Liliana but also by our doctoral student Franziska Bedorf, funded by a DFG project that Michael and I were jointly heading. During previous visits and interactions, it had become more and more evident that migration had fundamentally altered kin and family relations in the transnational families on both sides of the border. How and where one should take care of ageing parents had become a pressing question. Migrants were unsure how to manage their own and their parents’ old age. Some migrants even considered not returning to Mexico at all. Franziska’s research focused on these complex negotiations of belonging. After a couple of months in the Mexican Valley of Solis, Franziska continued her fieldwork in Chicago (Bedorf 2018). In 2013, our most recent return to Pueblo Nuevo happened. This time our daughter and a Master’s student, Susanne Lea Radt, accompanied us into the field. While, during my year-long fieldwork in 1996-1997, I had stayed together with a Mexican researcher in a small apartment in a local health facility, during our joint fieldwork in 2000, 2001, 2010 and 2013 we stayed with the family of Lupe and Angela in Pueblo Nuevo.

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Figure 2: Playing soccer on the street in Pueblo Nuevo, March 2013.

© Julia Pauli

Although everything went well, I was troubled, especially by the two fieldwork stays with our daughter. Liliana very much enjoyed her Mexican stays. She particularly loved playing hide and seek with other children at night. She roamed the village and I had no clue where she was. This added to my constant worries about her safety and her health. Later I learned that her “brother” and her “sister”, the two children of the family we stayed with, had never left her alone, always running by her side. I was also very glad that I was not there alone with Liliana. Michael, much less worried than me, calmed me down and reassured me that everything was alright. My friend and comadre Angela was also empathetic to my feelings. In retrospect, doing fieldwork in Mexico with my family was much more fulfilling than “lone” research but sometimes also more stressful for me.

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FIELDWORK IN NAMIBIA In 2003, Michael and I started a joint research project in Fransfontein, Northwest Namibia.4 Fransfontein and its communal pastures are part of the Kunene-South district, a new administrative unit created after Namibia’s Independence in 1990. Before Independence, Fransfontein belonged to the “Damaraland”, one of the “homelands” established in Namibia during the late 1960s. The area is sparsely populated and arid. In 2004, 177 households were located in the community of Fransfontein. Another 161 households were located in the communal area surrounding Fransfontein. Despite post-Independence attempts to deconstruct the Apartheid construction of ethnicity, ethnicity in a rather reifying way remains a central topic in everyday life and political discourse. In our ethnographic census interviews, the majority of the population had no problems with labelling themselves ethnically. Most Fransfonteiners consider themselves as Damara (63 per cent), followed by Herero (13 per cent) and Nama (9 per cent). Damara and Nama share a common language, Khoekhoegowab (Pauli 2019; Schnegg 2016; Schnegg, Pauli and Greiner 2013). Wealth is very unevenly distributed and economic stratification is pronounced. Only a small group of people can be classified as wealthy, mainly better paid government employers and a few wealthy livestock owners (Schnegg 2009). The emergence of this indigenous elite is tightly interwoven with the establishment of the Damaraland (Pauli 2011, 2018, 2019; Pauli and Dawids 2017). Wealth is expressed in ownership of livestock and other property and status symbols such as vehicles, houses and expensive wedding celebrations. To get married has become so incredibly expensive in the last 30 years that today, only 30 per cent of the Fransfontein population 15 years and older has ever married and 85 per cent of all births take place out-of-wedlock (Pauli 2012, 2017, 2019).

4

The project was part of the interdisciplinary research project ACACIA (SFB 389), based at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, Germany and funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 2003-2007. Urban research in 2015 and 2016 in Namibia’s capital Windhoek was also funded by a research grant from the DFG (PA 848/31). This paragraph is a revised version of parts of Chapter 2 of Julia Pauli (2019).

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Figure 3: Liliana and her friends in Fransfontein, August 2006.

© Julia Pauli

At the start of our fieldwork in early June 2003, we did not know anybody in Fransfontein. Among the first people we met were Silvia and her almost threeyear-old grandson. The grandson and our one-year old daughter Liliana immediately started playing with each other. Silvia accompanied us to the local school and arranged for us to rent one of the empty wings of the hostel as accommodation. This accommodation offered us a good position from which to start our fieldwork and we stayed there for two months. The local nurse then offered us an alternative, a house with electricity and running water that was intended for the resident nurse but that she did not wish to use as she felt it was too run down. We lived there from mid-2003 until October 2004. During shorter periods of follow-up research in 2005 and 2006, we stayed in the house of a friend and his family who were living in Windhoek but owned a second home in Fransfontein. Compared to my Mexican fieldwork, which – as described above – I did mostly alone and with only a few visits from Michael, I felt emotionally much more at ease in Namibia. Loneliness and sickness were much less of a problem for me in Fransfontein. This emotional stability was the result of my family being present during the fieldwork. Another critical difference between the two

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experiences was that I had done my PhD research in Mexico with a very meagre budget, without transport or any other amenities, whereas we had sufficient funds in Namibia to buy a reliable four-wheel drive car for the project. The presence of our daughter Liliana underscored our adult status in Namibia. We were very lucky that in terms of health, everything went well during the research: there were no severe illnesses and the snakes and scorpions left us untouched. Yet, as with our stays with Liliana in Mexico in 2010 and 2013, especially at the outset of the research, I felt anxious and concerned about being in the field with my family. The following small episode gives an impression of my worries. Several weeks after moving to Fransfontein, we were visiting a family, sitting outside, chatting and enjoying refreshments. Liliana was playing in the sand with the other children. A man next to me was coughing insistently, looking thin and quite sick. When we walked back to the hostel wing, we discussed what might be wrong with him and Michael suspected that the man might have tuberculosis (TB). The next day Michael returned to the house and our host confirmed the suspicion: it was open TB, a highly contagious illness. Was Liliana in danger? We called various medical doctors and pediatricians who eventually calmed us down. Thus, although Liliana clearly felt very happy in Fransfontein, there were moments when I felt more uncertain. The presence of our daughter also sharpened our awareness of differences in socialisation norms and practices. This was especially evident regarding the rather common practice of corporal punishment. In contrast to my childrearing ideas and practices, many of our interlocutors perceived corporal punishment as an important way of educating children. I realised that my roles as mother and as researcher were coming into conflict with each other. Other anthropologists have reported comparable dilemmas (e.g. Flinn, Marshall and Armstrong 1998). It was not only the presence of our daughter that had influenced the research process. Michael also strongly inspired and influenced my research (see also Golde 1986). Our constant exchange of thoughts, observations and ideas was the most important input throughout our Namibian fieldwork. I believe that our exchange during our joint Namibian fieldwork was especially fruitful because we were in comparable social, academic and economic positions. During our Mexican research projects this was different. When I was doing my PhD research in Mexico in 1996-1997, Michael established some close relationships with several men in my research community. However, it was always evident to everybody that I was doing the research and that Michael was just visiting me. Similarly, when Michael did his PhD research in Tlaxcala, Mexico in 2000-2001 (several hours away from the community where I had done fieldwork), it was very difficult for me to accept that the community did not perceive me as a researcher but mainly as the wife. In

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Namibia, it was clear from the beginning that we were both researchers and that we were jointly engaged in the research. After having introduced the ethnographic and personal circumstances of my fieldwork in Mexico and in Namibia, I will now discuss how categorical differences and similarities between me and my interlocutors influenced the various ethnographic encounters. I will start with reflections on differences between fieldworker and field.

EXPERIENCES OF DIFFERENCE IN ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS To perceive oneself as different from others is an everyday experience. Categorical differences are multiple and the doing and undoing of differences is a complex and contingent social process (Hirschauer 2014). Among the most important social categories are gender, age, family status, class, religion, language and ethnicity. In situations of increased insecurity and vulnerability such as fieldwork, experiencing difference can be especially troubling. The incident I have narrated at the beginning of this paper has shown my irritation about being perceived as and feeling different from the Mexican women. Experiences of difference, however, do not necessarily lead to feelings of isolation or even exclusion. Perceived difference can also be used productively as a stimulus for learning and social exchange. To reduce the multiplicity of potential categories of difference involved during fieldwork I will only focus on my family status here. Not having borne a child and not being a mother clearly influenced my Mexican PhD research. Margaret Mead has observed for her fieldwork: “There were two major situations in which I found a biologically defined situation really constricting. The first was in Manus in 1928, when, because I had not yet borne a child, I was forbidden to see childbirth. The second was in Bali, where the beginning and end of life are sacred because they are closest to the fringes of the recurrent other world. (…) I was often debarred from ceremonies at which only girls and older women were permitted.” (1986: 321) Similarly, many of my female interlocutors in 1996 and 1997 were more interested in understanding why, despite my age, I was not a mother, than in providing me with deep insights into their pregnancies and births, letting alone inviting me to observe a birth. Thus, while it was difficult for me to understand pregnancy and giving birth, it was no problem having long and in-depth conversations on the use of different types of contraception. In this respect, I was not perceived as different but as similar. My interlocutors asked me as many questions on the topics of sexuality, intimacy, love and

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contraception as I asked them (see Spronk 2012 for comparable observations). There was the widespread perception that pregnancy and especially childbirth are events one can hardly narrate but has to experience. Only those with the experience could then discuss the experience. When I returned in 2010 with my daughter, several women became much more open on the issue of giving birth, asking me detailed questions about how this is practised in Germany and willingly sharing their own experiences. During our Namibian fieldwork, my family situation was very different from my Mexican PhD research experience. While in Mexico there had been constant questioning about my childlessness in 1996 and 1997, and then later, in 2010, approval of me having finally become a mother, our Namibian interlocutors were not very interested in our reproductive behaviour and family planning and hardly commented on it. In searching for an explanation of these different evaluations of family norms and structures I came across the concept of family normativity. This concept is inspired by the more widespread concept of heteronormativity (Joyce 2015). Like heteronormativity, family normativity highlights how specific family structures are socially more valued than others. An example of family normativity is the widespread valuation of the nuclear family and the devaluation of singlehood, especially of women, in many “Western” societies (Allerton 2007). If women live alone and also raise their children outside of the ideal of the nuclear family, their family practices are very often stigmatized and perceived as normative deviations. Nevertheless, while in some societies family norms can be rather strict, focusing on one idealized type of family, e.g. the nuclear family, other societies are much more flexible, allowing for many, even conflicting family types and norms. In the Mexican setting, people expressed rather restrictive family ideals and a high level of family normativity. Although variations did exist, there was nevertheless an idealised cycle of the domestic group and family (Pauli 2002, 2007b). Deviations from this model were not easily tolerated. In contrast, intimate and family constellations in Namibia were highly volatile and flexible. Family normativity was not very pronounced, as a brief excerpt from my field notes indicates: “I have no clue how to classify marriage here. All anthropological categories seem to exist and mingle. I also do not understand if there is any form of idealised partnership and family model. Vanessa once commented that she would like to have a partner and children. Maybe this is influenced by TV serials such as ‘Generations’ and ‘The bold and the beautiful’? Today, John was annoyed by C., one of the village headmen, who is also working as marriage counselor. John thought that the headman’s marriage counselling was absurd as the headman had ‘a mess’ in

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his own household: a ‘legitimate wife’ in Windhoek plus five to six adult children, several further children out-of-wedlock and most recently a young women (in her early 30s) with whom he lives together and has a five year old daughter” (August 19, 2003, translation from German into English by the author). Low levels of family normativity and great flexibility in accepting various family constellations was later also reported by our PhD students, especially Martina Gockel-Frank and Theresa Linke. Hence, while for my Namibian research it did not greatly matter that I had brought along my daughter, other categories of differences, especially indicators of class, strongly influenced the research process. Being similar to my interlocutors in terms of my marital status was essential for understanding how marriage transformations and class formations had intertwined in Namibia in the last 60 years (Pauli 2019). I will thus now turn to questions of similarity in the ethnographic encounter.

EXPERIENCES OF SIMILARITY IN ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS In both field sites, perceptions of categorical, biographic and experiential similarity between myself and my interlocutors were of crucial importance for my ethnographic endeavor. Other anthropologists have equally stressed how important some form of common ground has been for their in-depth understanding. Renato Rosaldo was only able to understand the grief of the Ilongot headhunters after suffering the death of his wife and fellow anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo in 1981 during fieldwork in the Philippines (Rosaldo 1984). Until then, Renato Rosaldo reflects, “my life experience had not as yet provided the means to imagine the rage that can come with devastating loss” (1984: 179). Researching kinship and care among marginalised Afro-American families in a US-American city in the 1960s and 1970s, Carol Stack describes how central her motherhood and the presence of her son were for her understanding of survival strategies among her female interlocutors. Only when Carol Stack started to participate in the exchange networks, including “exchanging” her son, did people open up to her: “People began accepting my trust and respect when I trusted my son with them” (1970: 29). During my Namibian fieldwork it was not my motherhood but my marriage that helped to create similarity between myself and my interlocutors. In Namibia, marriage has turned into an indicator of upper middle-class status. Although many people aspire to marry, only a few people are economically able to do so (Pauli 2019). Married people are treated with special respect and central rituals are

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restricted to married people (Pauli 2011, 2018; Pauli and Dawids 2017). How marital status can function as a way of producing distinction and exclusion has also been described by Pierre Bourdieu (2008). In his work on the bachelors of Béarn, a rural community in the French Pyrenees, Pierre Bourdieu showed how urbanisation and individualisation in French society have increased the difficulties of rural men who wished to marry. A key scene in his analysis is a Christmas ball at which a rather large crowd of bachelors stands on the fringe to watch the guests dancing, flirting and joyously celebrating. Pierre Bourdieu’s description exhibits some remarkable similarities with a scene Michael and I observed during a wedding ceremony in Fransfontein in the summer of 2005 (Pauli 2011, 2014). A crowd of people had gathered in front of the barred windows of the bride’s parental home, eagerly trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside. Seeing the crowd, I wondered whether something might have happened - perhaps a conflict between the two kin groups involved in the marriage? But then a woman at the back of the crowd explained that they just wanted to watch the married people inside the house celebrating the final asking-out of the bride. Only married people were allowed to attend this part of the ceremony and they received wedding cake and meat, served by the bride. As in France, the unmarried Fransfontein crowd watching the wedding of an elite couple visibly demonstrated their own exclusion: “they are and they know they are ‘unmarriageable’” (Bourdieu 2008: 82). In both Béarn and Fransfontein, elite celebrations exhibit the boundaries between the different classes. Thus, when, at one of the first weddings Michael and I attended during our fieldwork in Fransfontein, the bride’s mother passed me a piece of the wedding cake, saying “only the married people eat the cake”, I realised how crucial my marital status was for my understanding of weddings and marriages in Namibia. Had I not been married I would probably not have been able to participate to such an extent in the celebrations and events. One could argue that class status could have compensated for being unmarried. However, in an interview, Mona, a female teacher, bitterly complained that despite her class status – being part of the local elite – she was not allowed to participate in some of the rituals reserved for married people (Pauli 2011). In conclusion, my marital status and thus my similarity to other locals who were married enabled a more comprehensive understanding of marriage rituals and perceptions of married people. Conversely, given the diversity in family arrangements I have described above, I do not think that being married created more distance in my interactions with unmarried people. It was neither of special value that we were a nuclear family – as had been the case in Mexico, where people had commented positively on this – nor was it a hindrance. It was just the family arrangement we happened to live in.

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Reflecting on my fieldwork in Mexico, it was probably my unexpected similarity with the nuera, the daughter-in-law, which had a decisive effect on my ethnographic understanding. Before going to the field, I had engaged with the literature on declining fertility and its causes. As soon as I started fieldwork in 1996, I clearly saw that the social networks women were embedded in had a strong effect on their reproductive decision making, a factor largely overlooked in the literature. At the beginning of their conjugal relationships, most women moved into the house of their mother-in-law and stayed there until the couple had raised enough money to build a house on their own. I have written extensively on the suffering of the daughter-in-law in her mother-in-law’s house (Pauli 2000, 2002, 2007a, 2008, 2015). Being so alone and isolated was a very strong incentive for a daughter-in-law to get pregnant. Because of my age and, despite Michael’s extended visits, also my loneliness during fieldwork, many daughters-in-law perceived me as similar to themselves. They opened up to me, telling me about their suffering but also about their plans to escape from it through the building of a house of their own (Pauli 2008). Had I been an older woman with children on her own, I would probably have missed this perspective and its relevance for my research question. Thus, in Mexico and Namibia, being similar in crucial categories and biographical experiences influenced the direction of my ethnographic endeavor and the way my ethnographic reasoning developed. I want to conclude my reflections on similarities and differences between the fieldworker and the “field” with a discussion of becoming more similar during fieldwork.

BECOMING SIMILAR DURING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTER Many fieldworkers can tell stories about how they became kin with their key interlocutors. Becoming kin and family is one of the most effective ways to resolve uncomfortable differences and create similarity. In many social settings, to be alone is considered inappropriate (Allerton 2007). In the field, concepts of personhood might stress social embeddedness, as Juliana Flinn has observed: “The solitary ethnographer model suits the Western notion of the person, yet many of the peoples anthropologists work with have “sociocentric” views of the person, and they interpret fieldworkers accordingly” (1998: 10). The lone status of a fieldworker can even be perceived as a social disturbance that the “field” somehow has to deal with. There exist multiple ways of creating relatedness and kinship between “field” and fieldworker (Carsten 2000). Different forms of adoption are common (Häberlein 2014, this volume).

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In Mexico, one of the most widespread forms of doing kinship is the institution of compadrazgo, ritual kinship (Schnegg 2005). Compadrazgo rituals create kinship between two persons or two couples through the joint care and obligation for another person or object. The most known form of compadrazgo is godparenthood. Through baptism, two couples become compadres. They address each other as comadres (women) and compadres (men). Compadrazgo established through baptism is especially binding and long-term. Less important forms of compadrazgo also exist (Schnegg 2006). One may ask someone to become compadre or comadre for the inauguration of a house or the celebration of a quinceañera, the 15th birthday of a daughter. In Pueblo Nuevo, our hosts and friends Angel and Lupe waited until the end of my first fieldwork year before they asked Michael and me in June 1997 to become their compadres. Before they asked us, there had been multiple exchanges that had increasingly drawn us closer together. Now their daughter’s first communion was approaching. After baptism, the first communion is considered the most important compadrazgo in Pueblo Nuevo. We felt honored to become compadres for her first communion and happily agreed. During the celebration, our new compadres stressed that now we are family. Before, we had only been on our way towards kinship. Like our compadres we now had the obligation of caring for their daughter. We were thus structurally similar. How important was my family status to becoming kin? I believe that because we were not yet parents in 1996 and 1997, it took Angela and Lupe a longer time to choose us as compadres. Not seeing us as parents and not being similar to us in that respect, they were more sceptical about our qualities as compadres. I am certain that had I been without Michael, the scepticism would have been even greater. Thus, in some cases the lone researcher may appear socially so needy that this may speed up his or her social integration into the field community. However, in our case, it led to a certain reluctance that had to be overcome. Building on Georg Simmel’s work, Gerd Spittler has recently suggested considering the fieldworker as a “wanderer”, someone who comes today and leaves tomorrow (Spittler 2014: 227). Yet if one takes into account that becoming kin is a rather common practice in many ethnographic encounters, one wonders if the wanderer is really the right figure to describe the fieldworker. The fieldworker comes and goes – but unlike most wanderers also returns. The return of the fieldworker is connected to his and her social becoming in the field and the long-term consequences that result from it.

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CONCLUSION This paper has discussed categorical and biographical similarities and differences between the fieldworker and the field. Realising that there are multiple categories of differences and similarities between fieldworker and field, here I have focused on family status. While the figure of the lone fieldworker is still very much valued and prevalent in anthropology, a rethinking of the lone researcher ideal has emerged. One of the reasons for this reconfiguration of fieldwork roles stems from the fact that more anthropologists are doing fieldwork with their families and then also writing about it (Behar 1993; Gottlieb, Graham and Gottlieb-Graham 1998; Guttman 1996). Although several anthropologists, like Margaret Mead, early on commented on the value of doing family fieldwork, scepticism nevertheless prevails in anthropology. It will still take some time before fieldwork with family is considered as valuable as fieldwork without family. Joan Cassell (1987: 258) has observed that having one’s own children in the field makes it more difficult for the researcher to hold back personal information. This has positive but also negative corollaries. As I have shown for my Mexican fieldwork, on the one hand a socially embedded researcher is more likely to be perceived as a “normal” human being by the community he or she studies (Flinn 1998: 9), a status the lone researcher might have difficulties obtaining. This can also have important consequences for the research and the ethnographic knowledge acquired. Yet, on the other hand, the worries that the researcher will experience in relation to health and security, especially of smaller children, lead to additional stress and tension. A question not tackled here concerns the relevance of a fieldworker’s family for different research topics. All my research questions have been in one way or another concerned with issues of kinship, gender and family. Had I researched a different, non-family and non-kinship topic, the normalisation my family provided for me as a fieldworker might not have been as important. Thus, although I believe that doing fieldwork with one’s family is also an advantage for non-kinship topics, research focusing on kinship, gender and relatedness clearly profits from going into the field with one’s family.

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Min Ae Lee-Kirsch (eds.), Karriere und Kind. Erfahrungsberichte von Wissenschaftlerinnen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 41–50. Allerton, Catherine (2007): “What does it mean to be alone?” In: Rita Astuti/Jonathan Parry/Charles Stafford (eds.), Questions of Anthropology, Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–28. Bedorf, Franziska (2018): Sweet Home Chicago? Mexican Migration and the Question of Belonging and Return, Bielefeld: transcript. Behar, Ruth (1993): Translated woman. Crossing the border with Esperanza’s story, Boston: Beacon Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2008): The Bachelorsʼ Ball, Cambridge: Polity Press. Carsten, Janet (2000): Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dürr, Eveline/Sökefeld, Martin (2018): “Zeit im Feld. Feldforschung als Paradigma und als Praxis.” In: Philipp Zehmisch/Ursula Münster/Jens Zickgraf/Claudia Lang (eds.), Soziale Ästhetik, Atmosphäre, Medialität, Berlin: Lit, pp. 229–238. Flinn, Juliana (1998): “Introduction. The Family Dimension in Anthropological Fieldwork.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Flinn, Juliana/Marshall, Leslie B./Armstrong, Jocelyn (1998): Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Goffman, Erving (1989): “On Fieldwork.” In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18/2, pp. 123–132. Golde, Peggy (1986): Women in the field. Anthropological experiences, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Gottlieb, Alma/Graham, Philip/Gottlieb-Graham, Nathaniel (1998): “Infants, ancestors, and the afterlife. Fieldwork’s family values in rural West Africa.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 121–126. Guttman, Matthew (1996): The meanings of macho. Being a man in Mexico City, Berkeley: University of California Press. Häberlein, Tabea (2014): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhabe. Ein Plädoyer zur ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp.127–154. Hirschauer, Stefan (2014): “Un/doing Differences. Die Kontingenz sozialer Zugehörigkeiten.” In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 43/3, pp. 170–191.

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Joyce, Rosemary A. (2015): “Heteronormativity.” In: Patricia Wehelehan/Anne Bolin (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–3. Lopez, Sarah Lynn (2015): The Remittance Landscape. Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1984 [1922]): Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Mead, Margaret (1986): “Field Work in the Pacific Islands, 1925-1967.” In: Peggy Golde (ed.), Women in the Field, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 293–332. Narayan, Kirin (1993): “how Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” In: American Anthropologist 95/3, pp. 671–686. Pauli, Julia (2000): Das geplante Kind. Demographischer, wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Wandel in einer mexikanischen Gemeinde, Hamburg: Lit. Pauli, Julia (2002): “Residencia posmarital y migración. Un estudio de caso de grupos domésticos en el Valle de Solís, Estado de México.” In: Papeles de Población 34, pp. 191–219. Pauli, Julia (2007a): “‘Que vivan mejor aparte’. Migración, estructura familiar y género en una comunidad del México central.” In: David Robichaux (ed.), Familias mexicanas en transición. Unas miradas antropológicas, Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, pp. 87–116. Pauli, Julia (2007b): “Zwölf-Monats-Schwangerschaften. Internationale Migration, reproduktive Konflikte und weibliche Autonomie in einer zentralmexikanischen Gemeinde.” In: Tsantsa. Zeitschrift der schweizerischen ethnologischen Gesellschaft 12, pp. 71–81. Pauli, Julia (2008): “A house of one’s own. Gender, migration and residence in rural Mexico.” In: American Ethnologist 35/1, pp. 171–187. Pauli, Julia (2011): “Celebrating Distinctions. Common and Conspicuous Weddings in Rural Namibia.” In: Ethnology 50/2, pp. 153–67. Pauli, Julia (2012): “Creating Illegitimacy. Negotiating Relations and Reproduction within Christian Contexts in Northwest Namibia.” In: Journal of Religion in Africa 4, pp. 408–432. Pauli, Julia (2013): “‘Sharing Made Us Sisters’. Sisterhood, Migration and Household Dynamics in Mexico and Namibia.” In: Erdmute Alber/Cati Coe/Tatjana Thelen (eds.), The Anthropology of Sibling Relations, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–50. Pauli, Julia (2014): “Was bedeutet Heirat, wenn nur noch wenige heiraten? Zum Wandel von Heirats- und Konsumpraktiken in Namibia.” In: Gender. Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft 2/14, pp. 70–84.

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Pauli, Julia (2015): “Gebauter Lebenssinn. Häuser in transnationalen mexikanischen Familien.” In: Sociologus 65/2, pp. 153–176. Pauli, Julia (2017): “The Key to Fertility. Generation, Reproduction and Elite Formation in a Namibian Community.” In: Philip Kreager/Astrid Bochow (eds.), Fertility, Conjuncture, Difference. Anthropological Approaches to the Heterogeneity of Modern Fertility Declines, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 43–71. Pauli, Julia (2018): “Pathways into the middle. Rites of passage and emerging middle classes in Namibia.” In: Lena Kroeker/David O´Kane/Tabea Scharrer (eds.), Middle Classes in Africa. Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges, New York: Palgrave. pp. 249–272. Pauli, Julia (2019): The Decline of Marriage in Namibia. Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community, Bielefeld: transcript. Pauli, Julia/Bedorf, Franziska (2016): “From Ultiomogenitur to Senior Club. Negotiating Certainties and Uncertainties of Growing Older between Rural Mexiko and Urban Chicago.” In: Astrid Wonneberger/Mijal GandelsmanTrier/Hauke Dorsch (eds.), Migration, Networks, Skills. Anthropological Perspectives on Mobility and Transformation, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 47–66. Pauli, Julia/Bedorf, Franziska (2018): “Retiring Home? House Construction, Age Inscriptions, and the Building of Belonging among Mexican Migrants and their Families in Chicago and Rural Mexico.” In: Anthropology & Aging 39/1, pp. 48–65. Pauli, Julia/Dawids, Francois (2017): “The struggle for marriage. Elite and nonelite weddings in rural Namibian community.” In: Anthropology Southern Africa 40/1, pp. 15–28. Robben, Antonius C. G. M/Sluka, Jeffrey A. (2012): Ethnographic Fieldwork, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. Rosaldo, Renato (1984): “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. On the Cultural Force of Emotions.” In: Edward M. Bruner (ed.), Text, Play, and Story. The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, pp. 178–195. Schnegg, Michael (2005): Das Fiesta Netzwerk. Soziale Organisation einer mexikanischen Gemeinde 1679-2001, Hamburg: Lit. Schnegg, Michael (2006): “Compadres familiares. Das Verhältnis von compadrazgo und Verwandtschaft in Tlaxcala, Mexiko.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 131, pp. 91–109. Schnegg, Michael (2009): “It’s the combination that counts. Diversification of pastoral livelihoods in Northwest Namibia.” In: Clemens Greiner/Waltraud Kokot (eds.), Networks, Resources and Economic Action, Berlin: Reimer, pp. 229–249.

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Schnegg, Michael (2016): “Collective Foods. Situating Food on the Continuum of Private-Common Property Regimes.” In: Current Anthropology 57/5, pp. 683–689. Schnegg, Michael/Pauli, Julia/Greiner, Clemens (2013): “Pastoral Belonging. Causes and Consequences of Part-Time Pastoralism in Northwestern Namibia.” In: Michael Bollig/Michael Schnegg/Hans-Peter Wotzka (eds.), Pastoralism in Africa. Past, Present, and Future, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 341-362. Spittler, Gerd (2014): “Dichte Teilnahme und darüber hinaus.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 207–230. Spronk, Rachel (2012): Ambiguous Pleasures. Sexuality and Middle Class SelfPerceptions in Nairobi, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Stack, Carol (1970): All our kin, New York: Basic Books.

Unexpected Resonances Observations of an Expecting Ethnographer Corinna A. Di Stefano

In this chapter, I reflect on a fieldwork stay that took place between October 2015 and January 2016 in the framework of my PhD project in Social Anthropology. My study on human mobilities and border practices in the Lesser Antilles emerged from my interest in the “integral but invisibilized” parts of Europe (Boatcâ 2019), to be more precise, the Caribbean EU outermost regions. I conducted ethnographic research in the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as in the intermediate neighbouring small island state of the Commonwealth of Dominica, which is bordered only by French or EU territories. Although I used to move around and between the islands, I was mainly based in the central cities of the French islands, Pointe-à-Pitre and Fort-de-France. In the following I will share some observations that came up during the second of my three field stays, which roughly coincided with the second trimester of my first pregnancy. In this period, I was employed in a part-time PhD position and enjoyed the privilege of being part of a well-positioned graduate school. At my university, which has received various awards for being an extraordinarily family friendly employer, I felt that the decision to become a parent as a PhD candidate was neither a worry nor a surprise. Carefree, I decided to depart on two coexisting journeys: fieldwork and pregnancy. At the moment of departure and still invisibly pregnant, I was not yet tuned into the new social persona I would soon come to embody. Very convinced of the ordinariness of gestation, I entered fieldwork and pregnancy in a serene mood, without having reflected too much on their possible interplay. In fact, some colleagues reminded me beforehand, with secretive smiles, that my “status change” might be a very promising condition for rapport building in the field. I only took note of it with a shrug. Based on my first impressions, but without having done any research on reproduction-related issues, I felt that in the sites and circles where

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I planned to continue my research, pregnancy and motherhood did not bring about any kind of sensation, prestige or extra recognition for the women I had talked to so far. At first glance, for many of my interlocutors that had migrated to Guadeloupe and Martinique from other Caribbean islands, motherhood seemed to rather compound their existing struggles. I planned my stay based on the simple assumption that a bulging body merely meant bulging health management and insurance expenses. However, my assumptions were wrong. Over the course of fieldwork, my body became the body of an evident motherto-be and, gradually, a conversational topic for my contacts. So being pregnant and immediately being understood as an expecting woman, started to mould the progress of my fieldwork. In light of my experience of three different fieldwork stays within this project – unaccompanied, unaccompanied but becoming visibly pregnant, and accompanied by a toddler – I hope to analyse how pregnancy shaped what we, anthropologists, use to call the “field”, as well as its relationships to “home”, in their tangled, interwoven existences. Specifically, once I announced my pregnancy, my family and friends, colleagues and employer, my gynaecologist and insurance provider all developed a sudden and hitherto unknown interest in my working conditions abroad and keeping in close contact. In comparison to my other stays and absences, I had to listen to very different accounts, including those I was not necessarily asking for. Both at “home” and in the “field”, pregnancy called for responses which reflected normative ideas of reproduction-related issues. There were also some portions of “home” I was carrying with me in the sense of internalised values and ideals, which not only came to light but also occasionally changed my research behaviour. Now, confronted for the first time with the early symptoms of motherly guilt, some environments kept me from being a focused participant observer and ethnographer (cf. Norander 2017: 349; Frohlick 2002: 49). For the time being, smoky bars with loud music where I had thought I would build rapport with migrant sex workers, and sailing boats on choppy seas on which I wanted to observe how border practices are manifested on the sea were deleted from the list of potential observation sites. Before I further address how the dynamics of doing fieldwork while pregnant developed, I want to consider the question as to why the implications and impacts of a pregnant ethnographer’s embodiment during fieldwork are so seldom mentioned, with the aim of positioning it in a broader context. After my field stay, I noticed the scarcity in ethnographic literature, or in qualitative research publications more generally, which reflect on the interplay between a researcher’s pregnancy and fieldwork.1 In the few cases that did exist, the researcher’s inquiries 1

However, in the last few years there have been an increasing number of publications on the matter. That I came across them is also thanks to attentive colleagues, who have

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were usually closely related to questions of reproduction, parenthood, working mothers or child-rearing, and therefore seem to have intercommunicated fruitfully with the researcher’s own gestational and parental status (Brown and Casanova 2009; Reich 2003; Schrijvers 1993). The question of how the ethnographer’s gender, besides many other meaningful social categorisations, impacts field relations and access has been written about often (Loftsdóttir 2002; Warren and Hackney 2000; Bell, Caplan and Karim 1993; Golde 1986; Mead 1970, quoted in Cesara 1982: 108). It has also been explicitly discussed how much we are able and willing to strategically deploy gender within the social scripts provided by the field setting in order to successfully conduct research (Mazzei and O’Brien 2008). Considering pregnancy as a “clear reminder of being gendered” (Reich 2003: 355), this question can also be posed in regard to the ethnographer’s visible pregnancy. Many authors report that their social repositioning as pregnant or parent changed rapport building in their research settings, mostly for the better. Motherhood or immanent motherhood provided a closer connection with the subjects and a degree of credibility many authors found noteworthy (Cornet 2013; Brown and Casanova 2009; Reich 2003; Schrijvers 1993). Since some authors did not leave their homes for conducting research during pregnancy, and some chose well-known places as their research sites (Kannen 2013; Brown and Casanova 2009; Reich 2003), they did not address the concerns and considerations I had as a solo ethnographer, embodied in, at least initially, markedly unfamiliar environments geographically far away from home. Other authors, to whom I could better relate in this regard, lived with their spouses abroad and experienced their fieldwork as partly accompanied. However, both took a leave from fieldwork because they found pregnancy incompatible with their specific research sites (Porter 2018; Cornet 2013). Besides these accounts, I found personal reviews of fieldwork material and experiences, in which authors reflect on the question of why they felt “fears of writing vulnerably” (Norander 2017: 347 referring to Behar [1996] 2008; cf. Porter 2018), and at first did not take the impact of their pregnancies into considerations. My aim is to contribute to these texts that reflect on the impact of pregnancies on qualitative research processes and results. Deviating a bit from the implications and challenges of being a parent in the field and conducting research alongside leading a corporeal family life, my case is rather about becoming a parent while conducting fieldwork, with an externally imagined future family projected on the pregnant ethnographer’s body.

sent me whatever has crossed their paths in relation to pregnancy in the field. Many thanks go to Fabienne Braukmann, Hendrikje Grunow and Stephanie Salzhuber for referring me to relevant literature and giving me helpful feedback on this text.

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SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ETHNOGRAPHIC EMBODIMENT OF PREGNANT RESEARCHERS Due to my research topic and the use of mobile methods, I could not help but realise the “embodied nature of fieldwork” (Coffey 1999: 75) from early on. In the words of Erving Goffman, my border-crossing body became the “consequential equipment” for fieldwork on human mobilities (1967: 167, quoted in Williams and Bendelow 1998: 57). The first-hand experience of moving my body through the Lesser Antilles automatically became an important reference point for my ethnographic observations. Moreover, in exceptional bodily states, e.g. as in the case of a “disorder” such as illness (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 82, quoted in Mullin 2005: 50) or pregnancy, humans are “very insistently reminded that they are bodies” (Mullin 2005: 19). Sensitised by experiencing unknown physical limitations and a new bodily awareness, I started to notice and consider the rather inconspicuous movements of pregnant, disabled, injured and ill bodies in the Lesser Antilles, a perspective that led me to discover new facets of the border regimes I had been studying. In contrast to the wide range of literature that addresses embodiment in ethnographic fieldwork (cf. Coffey 1999; Monaghan 2006), reflections on the embodiment of the pregnant ethnographer and its influence on knowledge-production processes in the field are scarce. On the one hand, I assume that the idea of ethnography as a lone, “masculinist” and “disembodied practice”, so aptly broken down by Susan E. Frohlick (2002: 50), still powerfully characterises the understanding of what the “proper” ways of doing and writing ethnography are. Consciously or unconsciously, this might influence how ethnographers aim to conduct and eventually represent their fieldwork and research results (cf. Porter 2018; Norander 2017; Wolf 1996; Bell, Caplan and Karim 1993). On the other hand, there also exist very concrete personal, structural, financial, health-, career- and field site-related reasons for those ethnographers with the desire to have children to strategically prevent a pregnancy when they still have fieldwork to do (cf. Reich 2003; Gottlieb 1995), or to postpone field stays when pregnant (Porter 2018; Cornet 2013). Beyond the structural challenges, and very related to the issue of inescapable embodiment in ethnographic fieldwork, is the fear that an unruly pregnant body could potentially yank us back from our immersion in the field (cf. Porter 2018: 70; Grace 2016: 90; Han 2013: 18; Reich 2003: 363). Bodily phenomena, e.g. nausea, heartburn, swollen legs, fatigue, excessive salivation, sensitivity to odours and urinary urgency are considered common during pregnancy, but imagined or experienced as potentially embarrassing when they are embodied in the field.

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Brooke A. Porter vividly describes how her morning sickness during the first trimester frequently intruded on her interviews and led to an early but very well received coming-out as a mother-to-be in her field site, where people had already started to worry about her childlessness (2018: 70). Besides, the pathologisation of pregnancy that exists in many Western and Westernised societies (cf. e.g. Gottlieb 1995) might also have an effect. The “medical gaze” (Foucault 1963; for pregnancy, see Trakas 2009: 53, 61; Shaw 2012: 111–112; Cummins 2014: 34– 35) that diagnosed the woman as pregnant subsequently registers even the healthy expecting body into a fixed obstetrical prenatal “illness management” schedule that one is expected to stick to (Katz Rothmann 2010: 50). Not all of our field sites allow us to stick to this schedule if we wish to do so, nor do all of them provide basic medical health care structures that are necessary in case of emergency. However, there are many other social or “cultural scripts” and roles that influence the ethnographer’s performance, practices and decisions surrounding her pregnant body (cf. Trakas 2009: 62; Miller 2007: 27; Abu-Lughod 1995: 340). Another example that came up in my fieldwork planning, through reading the – mostly quite heteronormative – pregnancy guidebooks and blogs, is the historically rather young ideal of the pregnant couple. This ideal involves the active experience of pregnancy for both parents-to-be, e.g. by taking a birthing class together (Barcellos Rezende 2011). In our case, this was not an option, but these “scripts” frequently recurred in the reactions of people at home, who asked me suggestive questions like “And the father?”, or “Don’t you find it sad to be separated in this important life stage?” (field notes, October 2015). The diverse variables I mentioned without intending to be exhaustive show that there are probably good reasons why the impact of pregnancy on research is seldom analysed, and why the embodiment of pregnant ethnographers in fieldwork itself may also be rare. According to the differing specific circumstances and imponderables of our field sites, pregnancy and ethnographic fieldwork can even be evaluated as “arch enemies” (Porter 2018: 75; cf. Cornet 2013: 84). Apart of the impossibility of generalising individual evaluations, it becomes clear that carrying a bulging belly is an “outward gendered affect”, and therewith brings “an observable bias in the research process” and elsewhere (Porter 2018: 74).

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SOCIAL REPOSITIONING AS A PREGNANT WOMAN Verónica2 is a self-aware single woman from South America who has lived and worked as a social assistant in the French Antilles for decades. It is not our first encounter, but it is the first encounter I record us. I cannot exactly retrace how our conversation about immigrant sex workers so abruptly turns into the intimate revelation of Veronica’s personal reproduction decisions. When she tells me that she has very resolutely decided not to start a family, and why, her gaze follows my hand, reflexively stroking my belly that has been repeatedly kicked from the inside a moment ago. The usual foetus workout still remains the unusual feeling of another body residing in mine. Finishing her explanation before turning back to the thread of our conversation, she tells me with rolling eyes that in her surroundings, motherhood is generally expected as default, “so to say, an universal experience”. (fieldnotes, January 2016) Indeed, almost all of my female contacts from the Dominican Republic were mothers, and many of them struggled through life alone. Hoping for a better future, they came to Guadeloupe or Martinique for work in order to send home some Euros to feed the children that they had left with their relatives or neighbours. The condition of being a mother (or pregnant) and away from home at the same time was an integral part of their life worlds, so there, my condition was too ordinary to provoke probing questions, comments or critique. Rosa, a woman from Santo Domingo who kept herself above water as a sporadic cook and was supported by a French admirer who paid her rent, once even drew close parallels between herself and me, reflecting on our previous reproduction and mobility decisions: “I was just like you. I just left home and husband when I was already pregnant, to come to Guadeloupe, for work” (field notes, January 2018). Although we evidently had very different restraints, at this moment she still decided to emphasise our similarity, “invoking a common source of situated knowledge” (Reich 2003: 358): We had both made use of our agency to decide where to go and whom to leave behind, against all of the possible judgements of people back home, where we had both occasionally been called “crazy”, “amazingly bold” or “brave” (field notes, January 2018). Some immigrants from the Commonwealth of Dominica led, what some called “a settled life”, in the sense of possessing a legal residence status and enjoying a stable income and family life when I encountered them in Guadeloupe. However, some of them also had gone through episodes of life when work-related mobility led them to be separated from their closest family members. Even those who

2

All names have been changed by the author.

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represented very conservative Baptist world views and high ideals of a traditional family life eventually accepted the separation from my “aspiring husband” once they had ascertained that he fulfilled his role as a “main family provider” in a “decent and serious relationship” (field notes, December 2015). While being repositioned as pregnant made me “more ordinary” in some of my research contexts, in others, my pregnant state set new standards with regard to my contacts’ expectations of me as woman and life partner; it also heightened people’s interest in my future family planning, which had never played a role before in the ways I was received. Looking back on my field notes, during my first research stay I must have been seen as an enigmatic and distant professional researcher whose background was difficult to grasp or identify with. As an obvious mother-to-be during the second stay, my contacts were able to place me in a much more tangible social category they could relate to easier. In contrast to the other stays, I found that I was not perceived as a mere researcher, but more as a person who is a researcher but also embodies other roles. The larger my belly grew, the easier the initial small talk became; and my interlocutors felt fewer inhibitions with regard to posing questions about my personal life (fieldnotes, December 2015). Pregnancy powerfully removed the halo of officialness and formality, and relaxed the sometimes awkward atmosphere of interviewer-interviewee encounters. Like Jennifer A. Reich (2003: 357), I observed that as a researcher and a pregnant woman, I was not considered intimidating or threatening, and how the impending and visibly present “motherhood humanizes the researcher” (Birmingham 2004: 101). Yet my imminent motherhood also “conflicted” with other externally ascribed categories, like supposedly being a travelling, lonesome, single woman in search of male company. The coincidence of getting to know Jacques and his friends, occupied in tourism, transportation and port sites, quite early in my research stay seemed to open up a new horizon of contacts and rich participant observation for me. Eager to explain my project to them in more detail, it was a stroke of luck to get invited to meet them at a weekend get-together with their friends. Recently arrived, I found myself chatting with one of them while the others were still busy welcoming people. After he had related a funny story about his three year old daughter, I ingeniously told him that I was expecting a girl, too, and that I could not wait to see her at that age. This was indeed a moment pregnant with meaning. As soon as the “good news” of my yet unnoticed pregnancy was whispered to the others, I noticed another type of change in the atmosphere (field notes, October 2015). According to the feminist phenomenologist Iris Young (1984: 52–53), the “pregnant woman may find herself desexualized by others”, and liberated from the “sexually objectifying male gaze” (Johnson 2010: 250; cf. Reich 2003: 362).

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Indeed, for my highly promising new contacts, the fact that I was pregnant apparently took away all the charm and appeal of conversing with me. As it was still in the very early stages of rapport building, I never saw or heard from these potential informants again, as much as I tried to make contact with them. In this very moment I was probably liberated of the sexually objectifying male gaze, but with the consequence that I, as a female professional and human being, was no longer seen at all. A closely related observation with very different implications was that I experienced a sort of protection in public spaces: the more my pregnancy became visible, the less street harassment I experienced. As a weird consequence, my visibly pregnant body allowed me to enter some ill-reputed urban zones in the late evenings without being afraid or feeling vulnerable. But being repositioned as pregnant also meant that protection seemed to multiply. Once in a while, a sort of social shepherd would appear who successfully cut me off from situations of participant observation. Hélène, a local friend and informal assistant, called me one morning to tell me that she attended a meeting of local feminists on migration-related issues and sex work the evening before, having heard about it and spontaneously decided to participate. In reaction to my puzzled silence, as I wondered why she had not invited me, she cheerfully added, “My dear, I did not want to bother you that late, pregnant ladies should rest in the evenings!” (field notes, January 2016). As in this specific case, I was occasionally assumed to be more of a pregnant woman than a professional researcher. When important gate keepers and informants made decisions over my head, taking their pregnancy-related beliefs and ideals to be more commanding than what I had communicated that my interests and aims as an ethnographer were, I had to carefully renegotiate my position.

THE PREGNANT BELLY AS AN INDEPENDENT INVITATION FOR RESPONSE Ana is already calling me from outside. I am glad to see her again right at the beginning of my stay in Guadeloupe and continue our conversations. Once she arrives at the house of our mutual friend, she greets me warmly, “ça va, chérie?”, and glances at my – still quite unsuspicious – belly for just a little too long. I instantly know she has already taken note of my pregnancy. I smile at her and nod to confirm her observation. Raising her eyebrows, she cuts straight to the point, addressing me now in her mother tongue, the colloquial Spanish of the marginalised streets of Santo Domingo: “But the father, he is French, right?” (fieldnotes, November 2015)

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Ana is a 44-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic, who arrived in Guadeloupe for “decent work”, as she put it, but ended up doing sex work, finding herself struggling to learn French and lacking opportunities for work (field notes, February 2015). In Guadeloupe, even the local French population is suffering from extremely high unemployment rates, social grievances and extraordinarily high living costs (Bonilla 2015). Three of Ana’s four children lived with her sister in Santo Domingo; only her youngest child had been born and lived with her in Guadeloupe. While she did not know much about my personal background yet, she knew about my project and that I was in Guadeloupe for work reasons, and that I was not French either. I was surprised by her immediate question following the discovery of my pregnancy, but only in retrospect would I understand how revealing her point of interest was. A few weeks later I got lost on my way to the diplomatic mission of the Commonwealth of Dominica in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. I entered a small restaurant, where all the snacks bore Spanish names and the national colours of the Dominican Republic and loud Merengue rhythms dominated the room. There I met Raúl for the first time, a boyish polyglot in his 40s, son of a woman from Santo Domingo and a French father, who politely offered to guide me to the diplomatic mission himself. Only when we left the place did he notice my pregnancy. After a short chat about his children and his pregnant wife from Santo Domingo, who had joined him in Point-à-Pitre a year ago, he asked me quite directly: “So tell me, why don’t you give birth here in Guadeloupe! The child will get French citizenship and voilà: you can stay here as long as you want!” (field notes, November 2015). The reactions of Ana and Raúl to my pregnant belly, neither of them aware of my EU citizenship, made me realise that reproduction could have a specific position in the context of migration and (im)mobilities in the French Antilles. Up to the moment when my pregnancy became visible, nobody had ever indicated to me the close relationship between having a baby with a French citizen or giving birth on French territory, and the legal right to stay on the island. Indeed, according to the applied ius sanguinis principle, when one official parent has French citizenship, the non-French parent of a French child has the right to obtain the legal right to stay in French territory until the child is an adult if the person can prove that they care for the child. Furthermore, according to an adapted form of the ius soli principle, all children who were born, raised and educated on French territory have the right to claim French nationality when they reach a certain age, independent of the parent’s citizenship.3 Prior to the telling encounters with Ana and Raúl, I had overlooked the fact that for many of my contacts having a child legalised their 3

Cf. https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/services-aux-citoyens/etat-civil-et-nationalite-fr ancaise/nationalite-francaise/ (last accessed May 5, 2018).

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residency on the EU islands and thereby also facilitated their mobility between their home island and Guadeloupe. In general, at least with regard to the so-called Western world, many authors report the observation that a pregnant belly easily barges into conversations. Pregnant woman are approached with unsolicited advices and share stories and opinions about pregnancy and birth without the pregnant individual necessarily having asked to hear them (cf. Cummins 2014: 33–34; Han 2013: 109; Brown and Casanova 2009: 49; Mullin 2005: 40 and 2002: 38; Birmingham 2004: 105). Jennifer A. Reich reflects on how, as a pregnant woman, she “felt irritated by people’s willingness to boldly speak their mind. Yet as a sociologist, these comments represented a high level of disclosure and source of rich data.” (2003: 357) Indeed, many of my contacts digressed from our topic of conversation in response to my pregnancy and unexpectedly talked about private aspects of their lives. Without me asking, they revealed the meanings of pregnancy and parenthood within their specific life worlds and biographies. Verónica’s revealing her reproductive decisions, as reflected in the first vignette, was only one of many examples in the interviews from my second field stay in which my visible pregnancy seemed to have intruded into the thoughts of my conversation partners. Their accounts showed how decisions regarding reproduction, childcare and family life, on the one hand, and those regarding migration and mobility, on the other hand, were not only closely interrelated in their narratives, but sometimes strategically interlinked.

NEW VULNERABILITY AND AWARENESS OF PRIVILEGE I must look as if I am stuck to the sofa bed that is located in the modest apartment I rented in Godissard, a suburb of Fort-de-France. Aware of the importance of not getting dengue fever a second time (which generally turns out to be a haemorrhagic version of the illness, and is therefore quite unfavourable during pregnancy), I am sitting under an impregnated mosquito net. I have spent the whole morning there reading research papers nonstop. Research papers from journals called “Revue d’épidémiologie et de santé publique”, “Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology” and “NeuroToxicology”, where I found the most striking text on the consequences of gestational and neonatal exposure to chlordecone for infant development. As I had already learned a few days before from paediatricians and gynaecologists interviewed on a local TV show my landlady was watching, chlordecone is “a persistent organochlorine pesticide that was used in the French West Indies until the early 1990s for banana weevil borer control” (Boucher et al. 2013: 162). “Until 2002, and illegally!” – I inwardly correct the information given in the

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abstract with my already acquired knowledge on the case.4 (fieldnotes, October 2015) Whether these processes are considered separately or as happening simultaneously, it is in the nature of things that we only gradually obtain knowledge about a certain field site, as well as about the development of gestation. But knowledge is neither a linear nor an accumulative process, as Verena Stolcke (2000: 26) once remarked, but rather is accidental and coincidental, which was exactly how I found out about the pesticide contamination of the French Antilles. According to natural scientific findings, the whole local nutrition chain on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique is highly affected by chlordecone contamination. During pregnancy, the pesticide that is accumulated in the local food and consumed by the mother passes through the placental barrier. The prenatal exposure to contaminated food intake, as well as subsequent nursing, can potentially cause certain impairments in the child. The papers I read reported a higher rate of pre-term births, delayed visual recognition memory and information processing. Especially among boys, “higher chlordecone concentrations in cord blood were associated with poorer fine motor scores” (Boucher et al. 2013: 166; cf. Guldner et al. 2010). Confronted with a vulnerability that is so specific to health in pregnancy and the development of the foetus, I hesitated to decide what this new knowledge could imply for my field stay. I allowed myself to diverge into research papers and press articles, and conversed with pesticide experts, my midwives back in Germany, and local mothers and gynaecologists. Once I started to pose questions in situ, I came across very differing narratives and statements on the case, from the total denial of the chordecone contamination, to others who assumed it to be the truth (fieldnotes, November 2015). The reactions of the latter were diverse: I listened to downplaying, resignation, black humour, anger, or even personal involvement. A young woman broke down in tears because her father was suffering from prostate cancer, which is among the most typical long-term consequences of chlordecone exposure in men (Multigner et al. 2010). However, most of the local contacts I talked to did not want to believe in the negative consequences for pregnancy health and child development described in the scientific papers, and considered my concerns to be exaggerated (fieldnotes, November 2015). Ethnographers adapt to a wide range of new and unfamiliar conditions. Still, how they conceptualise, perceive or describe the riskiness of these circumstances is as individual as the field site itself (cf. Stewart et al. 2009: 200). In the case of 4

Cf. e.g. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article183253826/Guadeloupe-und-Martinique -Das-verseuchte-Paradies.html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2007/09/ 070917_frenchcaribbean.shtml (last accessed July 7, 2018).

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the academic context in which I was moving, it is mostly the ethnographers themselves who are responsible for assessing the risks of their research, and from there, making their decisions. However, roaming through the world as an ethnographer with a foetus inside adds another dimension. Better known through more salient and long-lasting debates on foetal rights, abortion and reproductive technologies (cf. e.g. Duden 1993; Morgan and Michaels 1999), the responsibility for and the ability to make decisions for the unborn is contested and can be claimed not only by the mother-to-be herself, but also by others. There are multiple socially established and interconnected rules and practices that exercise their power to define what is considered risky for a pregnant body, and to regulate its relation to the state, the employer and the medical system. In a recent blog entry titled “Pregnant or fieldworker; should ‘all foreseeable risks’ be avoided in the field?” (The New Ethnographer 2018), Emmanuelle Roth, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, vividly shows how her pregnancy, from the perspective of her home institution, “reconfigured [the] risk landscape” of her ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea, where she planned to work on the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak. In her field site, “pregnancy and fieldwork had been declared incompatible” by her employer. Understanding “anthropology as a holistic commitment”, she “fought hard for a couple of weeks” until she eventually obeyed the demands from Cambridge and flew home (ibid). In contrast to the case of Emmanuelle Roth, the feedback that reached me from my university once I had shared the information about the chlordecone contamination of my field site reflected openness to me making my own decision. Although the coordination team and the directors of my graduate program, as well as the medical officer, shared their very differing personal views with me when asked to do so, they still did not pressure me in any direction. It was clearly communicated to me that I had the choice to stay as planned, take the next flight home, change my base to Dominica or shorten my stay. In other contexts, however, the conviction was more explicitly pointed out to me that nothing was more important than my “job” as a mother-to-be, being “the best possible vessel for the unborn” (field notes, November 2015; cf. Mullin 2002: 39). When I revealed my situation to one of my long-standing friends, she reproachfully asked me to fly home and finally “allow” myself “to be a mother and take on responsibility for this unborn innocent child”. Learning my first lessons on the judgmental and morally loaded spaces in which mothers have to operate, I noticed how my decisions with regard to my not-yet-born child had already started to shape and define my relationships both within the “field” and at “home”. As soon as I figured out how to avoid chlordecone exposure, I decided to stay as long as I had enough money. Imported food on the French Antilles is highly

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expensive and running out of money was a real possibility since food expenses could not be claimed as travelling expenses. Besides the mere economic considerations, this situation had a considerable impact on the methodological fieldwork proceeding. Avoiding local food as much as possible influenced the way I approached the field, as it meant restricting food intake with my contacts in restaurants or in their homes. I always “knew” but had never really understood what an enormous influence food intake has for the development of social relations, until it considerably hindered rapport building. Fortunately, it turned out that my alternative ways were fruitful for my research: I purposefully accompanied my contacts only in between mealtimes, which was mostly when they were en route on bus or ferry rides, or in my rental car. I travelled with them on and between the islands, e.g. to get them to their appointments, and my participant observation, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews increasingly took place during a “go-along” or “ride-along” (Kusenbach 2016), and our “corporeal travel” (Büscher, Urry and Witchger 2011). The realignment of methods came along at the same time as the realignment of my thesis inquiries. Waiving privilege, or acting as if that is possible, seems to be part of the ethnographer’s standard technique in the field, according to Erving Goffman’s statement that “although, in fact, you can leave at any time, you act as if you can’t and you try to accept all of the desirable and undesirable things that are a feature of their [the research subjects] life.” (1989: 125) However, I was aware that due to my pregnant status I had the option to escape the contaminated field site, the ordinary condition of local pregnant women, at any moment. It would possibly even be positively endorsed and met with understanding. Never before had my “unearned advantages” (Kannen 2013: 179) and the “power differentials” (Wolf 1996: 35) in the field been so immediate to me. As a consequence, the focus of my inquiries changed, leading me to integrate a critical examination of privileged mobilities into my research.

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CONCLUSIONS With the help of different perspectives on my research processes, this chapter analyses how my pregnant embodiment shaped my second fieldwork stay in many ways and aims to trace how my situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) came to be. These experiences and observations are of course positioned and influenced by specific privileges I enjoy, unlike colleagues for whom the mere theoretical consideration of pregnancy at this stage of an academic career is neither a self-evident nor a conceivable option. Three of many tightly interrelated aspects that I understand as resonances to my pregnancy have had the greatest impact on the ethnographic process. Firstly, becoming visibly pregnant led to a social repositioning of my persona. William L. Rodman reminds us that “[w]e are not just observers observed; we are interpreters interpreted” (1993: 189), and how the field constructs the ethnographer’s personhood shapes the paths they will go. The fact that I was recategorised as a mother-to-be had an effect on who I did and did not come to know (better) and influenced the directions in which my fieldwork advanced in unexpected ways. Moreover, my pregnant belly functioned as a projection surface for my social contexts and roles that helped my counterparts relate to me and make sense of me. In some contexts I felt I gained more credibility; I now belonged to the much more tangible category of a mother-to-be, a representative of my family’s values, an adult woman assumed to have responsibilities beyond research, and exposed to being measured in terms of having a “reputable standing”. In other contexts, especially when I met mothers from the Dominican Republic, pregnancy relocated my “self” into another norm, both in the sense of the normalcy of motherhood as well as in the sense of simultaneously experiencing motherhood and separateness from husband and family. A foreign working mother (-to-be) around the age of 30 with the child’s father physically absent was not at all suspicious, but instead invoked assumptions of similar experiences and conversational points of departure. My visible pregnancy not only humanised the field situations, but also seemed to function as an independent invitation for response that made people formulate their beliefs and normative expectations in regard to pregnant women and motherhood and spontaneously speak their minds about their own reproductive decisions, pregnancies, birthing and child rearing ideologies. In this way, being pregnant in my specific field site, where I was trying to understand human mobilities and border manifestations, I also became aware of the reproduction-related aspects that influence the border regimes immigrants experienced. While to some extent the pregnant ethnographer’s body has the potential to become an ideal “entry point” into the field (Kosut and Moore 2010: 2), in other social constellations in

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the field pregnancy can also painfully hinder rapport and research, and keeps the ethnographer busy searching for creative solutions to her pregnancy-related limitations, exclusions and to being patronised. Eventually, my heightened vulnerability as a pregnant woman raised my awareness of my privileges as an ethnographer who was voluntarily embodied in fieldwork, able to leave at any time. The chlordecone contamination of the French Antilles had a considerable impact on the research methods and the research’s focus. Tracing the ethnographic process, rereading and relistening to the material and impressions I gathered, the peak of changes within my ethnographic research project occurred during the second field stay simply cannot be explained without mentioning the resonances to me embodying a mother-to-be. Yet, by openly addressing the impact of one’s pregnancy on the fieldwork process, one risks being accused of literal “navel-gazing” (Okely 1992: 2), as it disrespects the boundaries between private and academic life, body and mind, home and field, ivory tower desktop work and fieldwork, living one’s privileges and pretending not to have them. But by the means of a growing belly, an expectant ethnographer is unavoidably carrying around with her a visible part of her private life that immediately and inevitably barges in the research process, breaking down all of these supposed dichotomies.

REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, Lila (1995): “A Tale of Two Pregnancies.” In: Ruth Behar/Deborah A. Gordon (eds.), Women writing culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 339–349. Barcellos Rezende, Claudia (2011): “The Experience of Pregnancy. Subjectivity and social relations.” In: Vibrant 8/2, pp. 529–549. Behar, Ruth (2008 [1996]): The vulnerable observer. Anthropology that breaks your heart, Boston: Beacon Press. Bell, Diane/Caplan, Pat/Karim, Wazir Jahan (1993): Gendered fields. Women, men and ethnography, London: Routledge. Birmingham, Elizabeth (2004): “Another Fine Mess. The Pregnant Body and the Discipline of the Line.” In: Writing on the Edge 14/2, pp. 95–109. Boatcâ, Manuela (2019): “Forgotten Europes. Rethinking Regional Entanglements from the Caribbean.” In: Heriberto Cairo Carou/Breno M. Bringel (eds.), Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations. Interregionalism

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and Transnationalism between Latin America and Europe, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 89–110. Bonilla, Yarimar (2015): Non-sovereign futures. French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boucher, Olivier/Simard, Marie-Noëlle/Muckle, Gina/Rouget, Florence/Kadhel, Philippe/Bataille, Henri/Chajès, Véronique/Dallaire, Renée/Monfort, Christine/Thomé, Jean-Pierre/Multigner, Luc/Cordier, Sylvaine (2013): “Exposure to an organochlorine pesticide (chlordecone) and development of 18-monthold infants.” In: Neurotoxicology 35, pp. 162–168. Brown, Tamara Mose/Casanova, Erynn Masi de (2009): “Mothers in the Field. How Motherhood Shapes Fieldwork and Reseacher-Subject Relations.” In: Women’s Studies Quarterly 37/3–4, pp. 42–57. Büscher, Monika/Urry, John/Witchger, Katian (2011): Mobile methods, London and New York: Routledge. Cesara, Manda (1982): Reflections of a woman anthropologist. No hiding place, London: Academic Press. Coffey, Amanda (1999): The ethnographic self. Fieldwork and the representation of identity, London: SAGE. Cornet, Candice (2013): “The Fun and Games of Taking Children to the Field in Guizhou, China.” In: Sarah Turner (ed.), Red Stamps and Gold Stars. Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 80–99. Cummins, Molly Wiant (2014): “Reproductive Surveillance. The Making of Pregnant Docile Bodies.” In: Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research 13, pp. 33–51. Duden, Barbara (1993): Disembodying women. Perspectives on pregnancy and the unborn, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel (2016 [1963]): Die Geburt der Klinik. Eine Archäologie des ärztlichen Blickes, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Frohlick, Susan E. (2002): “‘You Brought Your Baby to Base Camp?’ Families and Field Sites.” In: The Great Lakes Geographer 9/1, pp. 49–58. Goffman, Erving (1967 [1963]): Stigma. Über die Techniken der Bewältigung beschädigter Identität, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Goffman, Erving (1989): “On Fieldwork.” In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18/2, pp. 123–132. Golde, Peggy (1986): Women in the field. Anthropological Experiences, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gottlieb, Alma (1995): “The anthropologist as mother. Reflections on childbirth observed and childbirth experienced.” In: Anthropology Today 11/3, pp. 10– 14.

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Grace, Samantha (2016): “Changing how? Concerns of a Pregnant Anthropologist.” In: Arizona Anthropologist 27, pp. 90–93. Guldner, Laurence/Multigner, Luc/Héraud, Fanny/Monfort, Christine/Thomé, Jean Pierre/Giusti, Arnaud/Kadhel, Philippe/Cordier, Sylvaine (2010): “Pesticide exposure of pregnant women in Guadeloupe. Ability of a food frequency questionnaire to estimate blood concentration of chlordecone.” In: Environmental research 110/2, pp. 146–151. Han, Sallie (2013): Pregnancy in Practice. Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary US, New York: Berghahn Books. Haraway, Donna (1988): “Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Feminist Studies 14/3, pp. 575–599. Johnson, Sally (2010): “II. Discursive Constructions of the Pregnant Body. Conforming to or Resisting Body Ideals?” In: Feminism & Psychology 20/2, pp. 249–254. Kannen, Victoria (2013): “Pregnant, privileged and PhDing. Exploring embodiments in qualitative research.” In: Journal of Gender Studies 22/2, pp. 178– 191. Katz Rothmann, Barbara (2010): “Laboring Now. Current Cultural Constructions of Pregnancy, Birth and Mothering.” In: Lisa Jean Moore/Mary Kosut (eds.), The Body Reader. Essential Social and Cultural Readings, New York: New York University Press, pp. 48–65. Kosut, Mary/ Moore, Lisa Jean (2010): “Introduction. Not Just the Reflexive Reflex. Flesh and Bone in the Social Sciences.” In: Lisa Jean Moore/Mary Kosut (eds.), The Body Reader. Essential Social and Cultural Readings, New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–26. Kusenbach, Margarethe (2016): “Street Phenomenology.” In: Ethnography 4/3, pp. 455–485. Loftsdóttir, Kristín (2002): “Never forgetting? Gender and racial-ethnic identity during fieldwork.” In: Social Anthropology 10/3, pp. 303–317. Mazzei, Julie/O’Brien, Erin E. (2008): “You Got It, So When Do You Flaunt It?” In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38/3, pp. 358–383. Mead, Margaret (1970): “Field Work in the Pacific Islands, 1925-1967.” In: Peggy Golde (ed.), Women in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, pp. 292–331. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962): The Phenomenology of Perception, New Jersey: Routledge. Miller, Tina (2007): Making sense of motherhood. A narrative approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Monaghan, Lee F. (2006): “Fieldwork and the Body. Reflections on an Embodied Ethnography.” In: Dick Hobb/Richard Wright (eds.), The SAGE handbook of fieldwork, London: SAGE, pp. 225–241. Morgan, Lynn M./Michaels, Meredith Wilson (1999): Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mullin, Amy (2002): “Pregnant bodies, pregnant minds.” In: Feminist Theory 3/1, pp. 27–44. Mullin, Amy (2005): Reconceiving pregnancy and childcare. Ethics, experience, and reproductive labor. New York: Cambridge University Press. Multigner, Luc/Ndong, Jean Rodrigue/Giusti, Arnaud/Romana, Marc/DelacroixMaillard, Helene/Cordier, Sylvaine/Jégou, Bernard/Thomé, Jean Pierre/Blanchet, Pascal (2010): “Chlordecone exposure and risk of prostate cancer.” In: Journal of clinical oncology: official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology 28/21, pp. 3457–3462. Norander, Stephanie (2017): “Embodied moments. Revisiting the field and writing vulnerably.” In: Journal of Applied Communication Research 45/3, pp. 346–351. Okely, Judith (1992): “Anthropology and autobiography. Participatory experience and embodied knowledge.” In: Judith Okely/Helen Callaway (eds.), Anthropology and autobiography, London: Routledge, pp. 1–28. Porter, Brooke A. (2018): “Early Motherhood and Research. From Bump to Baby in the Field Philippines.” In: Brooke A. Porter/Heike A. Schänzel (eds.), Femininities in the field. Tourism and transdisciplinary research, Bristol: Channel View, pp. 70–85. Reich, Jennifer A. (2003): “Pregnant with Possibility. Reflections on Embodiment, Access, and Inclusion in Field Research.” In: Qualitative Sociology 26/3, pp. 351–367. Rodman, William L. (1993): “When Questions Are Answers. The Message of Anthropology according to the People of Ambae.” In: Paul J. Benson (ed.), Anthropology and Literature, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 173–191. Roth, Emmanuelle (2018): “Pregnant or fieldworker. Should ‘all foreseeable risks’ be avoided in the field?” In: The New Ethnographer. Available online on https://thenewethnographer.org/2018/04/25/pregnant-or-fieldworkershould-all-foreseeable-risks-be-avoided-in-the-field/. (last accessed May 5, 2018). Schrijvers, Joke (1993): “Motherhood experienced and conceptualised. Changing images in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.” In: Diane Bell/Pat Caplan/Wazir Jahan Karim (eds.), Gendered fields. Women, men and ethnography, London: Routledge, pp. 143–158.

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Shaw, Jennifer (2012): “The Birth of the Clinic and the Advent of Reproduction. Pregnancy, Pathology and the Medical Gaze in Modernity.” In: Body & Society 18/2, pp. 110–138. Stewart, Karen A./Hess, Aaron/Tracy, Sarah J./Goodall Jr., H. L. (2009): “Chapter 9. Risky Research. Investigating the ‘Perils’ of Ethnography.” In: Norman K. Denzin/Michael D. Giardina (eds.), Qualitative inquiry and social justice. Toward a politics of hope, Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, pp. 198– 216. Stolcke, Verena (2000): “¿Es el sexo para el género lo que la raza para la etnicidad… y la naturaleza para la sociedad?” In: Política y Cultura 14, pp. 25–60. Trakas, Deanna J. (2009): “The belly beautiful. Unveiling the pregnant body.” In: Medische Antropologie 21/1, pp. 53–73. Warren, Carol A. B./Hackney, Jennifer Kay (2000 [1988]): Gender issues in field research, London: SAGE. Williams, Simon J./Bendelow, Gillian (1998): The Lived Body. Sociological Themes. Embodied Issues, London and New York: Routledge. Wolf, Diane L. (1996): “Chapter 1. Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork.” In: Diane L. Wolf (ed.), Feminist dilemmas in fieldwork, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, pp. 1–55. Young, Iris Marion (1984): “Pregnant Embodiment. Subjectivity and Alienation.” In: The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9/1, pp. 45–62.

Circulating Family Images Doing Fieldwork and Artwork with/about Family Simone Pfeifer

In preparation for my first ethnographic fieldwork encounter on the Island of Gozo (Malta) in 2003, as one of a group of students from the University of Cologne, I was advised to bring with me photographs of my family and everyday life in Germany to introduce myself to my interlocutors and give them a sense of who I was. The printed images I took showed my parents, my brother and some images of important sites in Cologne. People on Gozo politely viewed the images but did not seem particularly interested in learning more about the people depicted, especially as they were not related to my research focus on a patron saint’s festival and its online repercussions. Things proved very different on my first fieldwork trip to Dakar, as part of my PhD fieldwork on media practices and the configurations of transnational social relationships facilitated by online media. I had started my fieldwork in Berlin, where some of my Berlin interlocutors had put me in touch with their parents, siblings and friends in Dakar. My central focus was on the ageand gender-specific ways that transnational media spaces were appropriated among families and friends and the status of visuality within such spaces. Yet it was not only the region, my topic and my research questions that had changed since 2003 and were now related in particular ways to image practices and family relations; it was also the content of the images I brought with me. As on the previous occasion, I showed printed images of my parents, but what aroused more interest from my interlocutors were images that also depicted my partner and then 18-month-old son in Germany.

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Figure 1: Cultural appropriation and the family of three.

© Simone Pfeifer

When I first showed the images to the mother of my host family in Dakar, she was quick to remark on the cuteness of my son. She didn’t give me the images back immediately, but handed them around to show other members of the family and people living in the house, commenting on my partner – as my “husband” – and my son. As she looked at and responded to the images, she also eased my sense of longing for my close family – feelings that I would later discuss in more detail with various interlocutors. Her view of those images, and of others I brought subsequently, changed when I returned a year later for a longer stay with my partner and son, and again for a short follow-up visit another time on my own. In this contribution, I reflect on the interrelated experiences of doing fieldwork with and without a partner and child, and on a collaborative artistic and media anthropological project that also dealt with our own positionality as a family in the field.1 While a small but growing body of literature has focused on the role of children in the field (e. g. Cassell 2010; Cornet and Bumenfield 2016) and sometimes their absence (Farrelly, Stewart-Withers and Dombroski 2014), few have 1

I am especially grateful to my partner and son, as well as to my interlocutors in Berlin and Dakar, without whom this research would not have been possible. Additionally, I want to thank the editors for their insightful comments and very helpful feedback on the draft of this contribution and Pip Hare for her editorial advice.

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focused on the “collaboration in research and writing” (Gottlieb 1995) of their professional and private intimate partners, and when they have, both parties have usually been anthropologists. As yet, very little work has been done to reflect on the influence and collaboration of non-anthropological partners in research and writing. Furthermore, recent developments brought by digital media, which supposedly make it easier to stay in touch and maintain intimate family relations during and after fieldwork have only rarely been considered in discussions on anthropological practice. The presence (or absence) of partners and other family members within images, as well as on online social networking sites like Facebook and Skype, has been one of the foci of my doctoral research (Pfeifer 2019). I take observations on different forms of presence in images as a starting point to reflect on my own culturally-specific media practices as a means of maintaining contact with my partner and child, and contrast them with notions of mediating absence and presence in the transnational social relationships of my interlocutors. Absence and presence in images are constructed by means of representation, montage and collage, and they demonstrate the fundamental significance of images – and sometimes their absence – during processes of migration and in everyday life in transnational settings (see, for example, McKay 2008; Kea 2017). Images of absent people travel with people, become digital and mobile and create gendered spaces of mobility and immobility that are sometimes referred to as (mediated) copresence (see Baldassar et al. 2016). Additionally, in making and circulating these images, diverse notions of family and transnational families (Charsley 2012) are constructed that are not only shaped by global image practices and aesthetics but also by varying ideologies of what a family is or should be (see Figure 2). The collaborative artistic and media anthropological project that came out of my shared engagement with my partner and son during the fieldwork period was a way of reflecting upon our own positionality in the field through family portraits. Reflecting on the absence of family during fieldwork (Farrelly, Stewart-Withers and Dombroski 2014) and taking the media practices of “making present” at face value, this contribution aims to expand on the methodology of multi-sited ethnography (see Marcus 1995; Falzon 2009; Coleman and Hellermann 2011) by considering how “multi-sited media ethnography” mediates the field in various ways that are not necessarily dependent on “physical presence”.

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Figure 2: What is a family image?

© Copyright (in order of images right to left, top to bottom): Khady Pene, Simone Pfeifer (4 images), unknown photographer: Saint-Louis du Sénégal, ca. 1915-1930 / courtesy REVUE NOIRE2, Abdoul Karim, Simone Pfeifer and Ulf Neumann 2

This image, like other portraits from the same series, is published in different collections with varying reported dates of origin. The art publisher Revue Noire offers the image for sale for about 600 Euros and dates it to 1915. Jean Louis Pivin and Pasqual Martin

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ABSENCE AND PRESENCE IN (TRANSNATIONAL) IMAGE CIRCULATION Recent research on transnational families has often focused on how close family members relate to one another across geographical distance and create copresent transnational families3 through “new media”4 (Baldassar 2008; Baldassar et al. 2016; Madianou 2016; Madianou and Miller 2012). An emphasis on webcams and migration tends to lead to the assumption that technology facilitates feelings of proximity, copresence and synchronicity (Köhn 2016: 131; Madianou and Miller 2012). Some researchers investigate the topic through audio-visual explorations of how the platform Skype is used to produce a sense of coresidence and intimacy (Köhn 2014). According to these accounts, the possibility of constant contact enables a sense of social closeness, although some also postulate that exaggerated expectations may exacerbate conflicts (for example, Tazanu 2012; Cole 2014). Beyond stressing the significance of images in the construction of transnational families, little has been said about the particular role of images, especially family images, in the constitution of such (temporary) transnational families, nor about the emotional capacity of images or the importance of visuality 5 in maintaining emotional and social closeness.

Saint Leon (2003: 40) mention the same publication date. Jennifer Bajorek (2010: 438) argues for a publication date in the 1930s with reference to her source, the El Hadji Adama Sylla collection. Other images from the same series are also dated to the 1930s (Chapuis 1999: 55). 3

The classic and very broad definition by Deborah Brycson and Ulla Vuorela can be applied here: “‘Transnational families’ are defined here as families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely ‘familyhood’, even across national borders” (2002: 3).

4

Following Charles Hirschkind, Maria José A. de Abreu and Carlo Caduff (2017) I choose to use the term “new media” not to refer to a stable entity or device, but as a relative concept: “new” always relates to existing media technologies and mediates future aspirations. “This means that the question of new media centers not on technological things that can be isolated as distinct entities but on relationships among media practices and processes of mediation.” (2017: 4–5)

5

The term “visuality” incorporates the assumption that what we see is informed by different historical, cultural and social influences and is not simply defined by what a human eye is biologically capable of discerning (Rose 2011: 3). See Hal Foster (1998) for

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Family images, printed as hard copies or presented digitally on social media 6, are indispensable in the everyday lives of (transnational) families of anthropologists and their interlocutors alike. While they may be shaped by socio-cultural variations, for example, in their aesthetic forms or the normative frames they operate within, they always serve to construct a sense of being together and belonging, showing ourselves and others how we situate ourselves within our social relationships. And yet, anthropologists rarely reflect on the images they take with them, show and talk about during fieldwork. As early as 2002, Mary Bouquet pointed out how the process of “kinning” is crafted through photography and the image-text configurations in publications. Family photos encapsulate what are sometimes Eurocentric norms, from the classic nuclear two-generation family to the extended family, which are both relevant in different African contexts (Alber and Bochow 2006: 52). Some of my Senegalese interlocutors in Dakar lived in extended family households, others in two-generation families in flats or rented rooms. The romanticised ideal of a couple living together existed alongside the cherishing of extended family ties. In my own photographic practices during my first fieldwork stay in Dakar, large group portraits comprised the majority of the family images I took of participants, but couples and two-generation families came to prevail during my second and third stays (see Figure 2). This change in photographic practices corresponded to the images that people displayed of themselves, including on Facebook, and their instructions regarding how I should photograph them. It is also important to stress the historical dimension of photography and family portraits in Senegal. Even before digital photography took over, analogue images circulated from one household to another as printed and framed images. The practice of xoymet7 as part of weddings in Saint Louis in the 1940s and 1950s is notable: on their wedding night, it was customary for women from well-off backgrounds to decorate the houses or rooms of their newly-wed husbands with portraits of their absent families, to make them present for their new families and show the richness of their social relationships (Mustafa 2002: 176; Kemp 2008: 70–71). Furthermore, analogue studio photographs were regularly produced to be sent to distant relatives and friends, and collages and manual cuttings and a detailed analysis of vision and visuality and Nicholas Mirzoeff (2006) for a reappraisal and history of the term. 6

Here I use the term “social media” in the narrow sense of online social networks (boyd and Ellison 2007), although I acknowledge that the circulation of (analogue) images as gifts can also be understood as “social” media (see, for example, Paßmann 2018).

7

In Wolof, xoymet means to let someone see or detect something that is intimate, such as an underskirt (Diouf 2003: 393).

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clippings were frequently used to create relationships between (absent) people, who were thus made “present” as an attribute of one’s personality (see, for example, Buckley 2000). Recent scholarship on “the anthropology of absence” has suggested that “absence has a materiality and an agency which exists in spaces where sociality is performed and which augment daily practices and experiences” (Farrelly, StewartWithers and Dombroski 2014: 3; see also Bille, Hastrup and Soerensen 2010). The materiality ascribed to “absent presence” or “present absence” acknowledges the effects of absent persons and things on everyday social relationships, which only become meaningful if the absence is “performed, textured and materialised through relations and processes” (Meyer 2012: 107). Absence and presence are thus not seen as polar opposites but as interlinked – absence matters and is brought into being through different kinds of media practices (see Dang-Anh et al. 2017; Schüttpelz 2016: 4) such as photographic montage, as described above. In this contribution, I bring an investigation of absence and presence in transnational families together with a reflection on the visual, to explore the kinds of transnational families and family relationships these circulating images (re)produce. What different norms of family (relationships) lie behind these images and how are visual normativities related to everyday family practices in transnational settings?

FIELDWORK WITH AND WITHOUT PARTNER AND CHILD: MANAGING AND BALANCING FAMILY LIFE AND FIELDWORK IN DAKAR (AND BERLIN) “Why don’t you take your son with you?” and “It would open new domains for your research” were some of the suggestions I heard as I prepared for the first fieldwork of my PhD research on media practices and transnational social relationships in Dakar and Berlin in 2011. My senior anthropologists were referring to the many ways in which children, and to a much lesser degree, partners, can be door-openers in the field (see, among others, Poveda 2009; Roost Vischer 1997). This proved true for my own fieldwork in numerous ways. Through my son, I encountered other Senegalese women as mothers; as a fellow mother, I was asked for my opinion and advice in questions concerning child care and education in Berlin, and was invited to take part in activities that were only open to married woman and mothers. Through my partner, I was able to add male perspectives to my ethnography, because he was invited into the male circles that women are generally excluded from. Additionally, his views as an artist on the social relationships and on Dakar itself expanded my own knowledge of urban and social

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landscapes in the city. Most importantly, as we participated in many activities, as well as sharing everyday life together during our four-month stay, I was extremely glad to be able to discuss and reflect upon my ethnographic encounters with my partner and draw upon his valuable views and perspectives. Nonetheless, managing and balancing family life and fieldwork was at times challenging, if not overwhelming. I had to weigh up invitations and opportunities against my sense of obligation and responsibility for my child and partner; for their security, health and well-being. In Berlin, my son and partner had often accompanied me on shorter and up to two-month long fieldwork trips. They were not expected to be at my side when I accepted invitations or attended events, but they were warmly welcomed when they did come. For my interlocutors, life in Berlin was “busy”, taken up with long working hours and getting on with everyday routines, bureaucracy and long winters. In many ways, my fieldwork schedule was similar to their daily routines, and I tried to be efficient with the time people allowed me to take part in their lives. Also, since the fieldwork periods in Berlin were shorter, my longing for my partner and child was never as present as it was during my longer solitary stays in Dakar. By contrast, in Dakar both my partner and child were an important part of my research and were significant as social persons there. For many people whom I encountered with my family in Dakar, my son and partner made me a “full” person with specific roles and obligations assumed to be similar to those in their own lives. As a “wife” or “mother”, people could more easily relate to me and my position, and they also expected my partner and son to take part in celebrations, family events and other more everyday occasions. We often invited visitors to our rented apartment. Our presence during visits and at weddings or baptisms was documented in mobile phone images, and as a family unit we were present among the images circulated locally. On one occasion, a distant relative of a friend of mine took an image of my son after a meal with her mobile phone, saying: “I have to send this to my friend, she will be astonished to see who I had lunch with today.” Often, people grabbed our son, lifted him up and asked us to take a photograph – mostly to the discomfort of our son, who felt uneasy with this physical closeness. When my partner intervened on such occasions because he felt that the culturally appropriate behaviour towards small children was too much for our son, they usually replied with a smile: “He’s naughty” (dafa rew). While this reminded us that we as parents and son did not conform to local norms of behaviour, at least the posed portraits taken on other occasions seemed to fit with certain ideas of how a (European) family should look, or how a fair-skinned child could add to one’s own portrait. Some of the images people took of us and our son at events like weddings

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found their way into analogue albums, or digital albums on Facebook, becoming part of archives of family images, sometimes without our knowledge. Even though my partner took care of our son during my fieldwork activities, we tried to share the responsibility and also initially looked for childcare institutions. Our budget was quite tight. Although my flight, accommodation and all my expenses could be covered by the funding I had received,8 my partner, as a selfemployed artist, had taken unpaid leave to accompany me and our son for four months. Hence, our search for childcare was strongly influenced by cost – we couldn’t afford the international childcare institution nearby but were instead looking into more local and cheaper options in the popular quarters that some of my interlocutors from Berlin and Dakar had suggested. As childcare in Dakar has been highly influenced by the French education system, my son, who was used to playbased learning in Germany, found it difficult to adapt to the strict learning atmosphere of the nursery. Ultimately, he never fully accepted the nursery and after some weeks we decided not to push him to go there anymore. That it became my partner’s primary role to care for our child was generally received with disbelief or ignored. Usually, people only addressed me to inquire about educational issues or concerns relating to our son. Many approached my husband as the head of the household, and could not imagine why he had to consult his “wife” about decisions like whether to go out for dinner. Health and security issues were a second concern that we struggled with during our stay in Dakar. Many anthropologists who work in West Africa, and especially in more rural areas, nostalgically tell stories about various health problems during their field stays, such as malaria, dengue fever, or losing a tooth. When it came to our son, these “ethnographic tales” lost the character of a jolly adventure and became real worries. This also applied to the dangers of traffic and public transport in Dakar (for example, there are often accidents with the car rapide or ndiaga ndiaye) and the violent pre-election protests against the former president Abdoulaye Wade. Situations that we would have considered fairly secure for ourselves as adults aroused our fear and uncertainty when it came to our son’s safety.

8

I’m thankful that the project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to cover my expenses during fieldwork. Unfortunately, this did not include any expenses for travel, accommodation or additional costs like health insurance for my partner and son.

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LONGING TO BE TOGETHER? CONNECTING THROUGH MOBILE PHONE (IMAGES) AND SKYPE Figure 3: Relating and connecting.

© Simone Pfeifer

Many of my interlocutors in both Dakar and Berlin explained to me that the worst aspect of transnational marriages or partnerships was the lack of physical and embodied closeness and everyday routines, and second to that, (the fear of) losing monetary remittances – which exacerbated fears of infidelity. I could relate very well to the first point, especially during my solitary stays. I needed not only the images that I had taken with me of my partner and son, as mentioned in the introduction, but also the everyday snaps and texts my partner sent me on a regular basis, to help me to sustain a feeling of relatedness. Through the affective dimensions of the images I could partly compensate for the physical distance. When talking to other women in Dakar about my feelings relating to the (still) images, they usually nodded in understanding. Yet when they showed me the images that were important to them, they were quite different from mine in particular ways. Their images tended to be posed portraits, taken explicitly for the purpose of sending to another person, whereas the images I had were impromptu snapshots of everyday situations.

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Regarding the second point, for most of my interlocutors, it was not just the embodied sense of longing for their partners, but the daily struggle to get through everyday life without them that they found hard. In addition, many men and women I spoke to feared infidelity. While many women in Dakar silently accepted their husbands’ having other partners, especially when receiving financial remittances, men would not tolerate infidelity on behalf of their wives (see Hannaford 2014, 2017). Many transnational spouses, men and women alike, referred to the notion of love to explain how they managed to maintain their long-distance relationships over prolonged periods of time. “Distance doesn’t matter, if you love your husband. When I listen to him, everything is OK. I understand him, we talk through Skype, we see each other the whole time. [...] We see each other every day. We talk, he loves me and I love him. That’s it, that’s everything. That is love. You accept everything if you love him.” (Adama, February 25, 2013) At the time of our encounter in Dakar, Adama had been married for three years to a husband who lived in the USA. I could easily relate to Adama’s description of her experience of everyday “audio-visual” copresence via Skype. Like Adama and others, my family and I developed games and routines that enabled us to build a transnational everyday living atmosphere, for example, by eating together live on screen or playing hide and seek with my son. Yet this regular contact was often disrupted by our daily routines, movements and technological failures. I had to invest time and effort to stay connected: for weeks, power was unreliable in the popular quarter I was living in, or the connection at the cyber (internet café) was down, or the mobile phone internet connection was weak. Sometimes I was able to tap into a neighbour’s free Wi-Fi with my computer. But that network was only accessible from one particular and very exposed place in the house, where I and my Skype screen were visible and audible to everyone around. It was only the German language that granted us a bit of privacy. Additionally, like some of my older female interlocutors in Dakar, I found that the pixelated and intermittent Skype transmission often only increased my longing for the persons on the other side; the distorted images and the gaze that never quite seemed to meet my own seemed to intensify the sense of distance between our bodies. Heike Drotbohm proposed contrasting the term “connectivity” with that of “relatedness”, arguing that it focuses “less on the qualitative characteristics of social relations but deals rather with technical linkages between different places.” (2009: 145) Yet the technical infrastructures that shape the ways our interlocutors and we as anthropologists are able to connect with our partners become inseparable from the qualitative characteristics of social relationships and the particular visualities that emphasise different normative, moral, and emotional aspects of these relationships.

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Compared to that of my interlocutors, my own – temporary and privileged – transnational relationship was less bound up with financial remittances and the fear of infidelity. Unlike Adama, I did not feel I could “accept everything”, but had very specific ideas about how often I wanted to connect with my partner (and son), for example, or more generally, how long I was willing to lead a long-distance relationship for. My expectations and conditions differed starkly from those of many of my interlocutors, some of whom lived with uncertain residence status and permanent long-distance relationships. Most were obliged to accept spending longer periods apart from their husbands or wives than they had originally anticipated, and this often also meant fewer phone calls, lower remittances and changes in the sense of emotional closeness or distance. Yet it was not only geographical distance that resulted in social distance. More significant for perceived social proximity were monetary remittances and the commitment to keeping in touch through images, texts and (Skype) calls. While many women I spoke to accepted being separated from their partners for prolonged periods, they would do anything they could to avoid being separated from their small children. Like the host mother of the house I was living in, many women expressed their pity for me being separate from my then 18-month-old son, even though separation was valued as an important form of education for children (Gasparetti 2011: 111), particularly for families or mothers who were in rather desperate situations, for example who could not afford to raise their children, or people with older children who sent them to other family members to be educated and not to be spoiled by the Western way of life (Riccio 2008; Whitehouse 2009). Significantly, the absence or presence of children was not reflected in images in the same way that partners’ absence was. There were fewer occasions when one would take along the image of a child, and children’s images were not usually inserted into montages or collages.

COLLABORATIVE ARTISTIC AND MEDIA ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROJECTS As a way of reflecting on our shared experiences of fieldwork in Dakar and Berlin and our efforts to stay connected, my partner and I developed the photo installation “To declare one’s hand: pictures on the table, pictures on the move”. The starting point of the visual dialogue and the artistic-anthropological cooperation was our two archives of found and private images and fieldwork material. As in a card game, the two collaborators took turns to place one image after the other on the table, arrange them, cut them and reassemble them. By photographing the stages

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of the process, we were able to record the manipulation of images, the inter-relating of the photographs on the surface of a table, the associations and judgements made. Collage, assemblage and the animated GIF format9 allowed us to reveal the inherent mobility and belonging in still photographs, developing a critical and reflexive visual perspective. GIFs are short, looping, mainly silent moving images that are widely shared as humorous or nonsensical comments in digital environments. My interlocutors often used short GIFs to post humorous comments in response to others’ statements or images on Facebook; sometimes GIFs of themselves were used as profile images. Our photo installation included the looping GIFs on one or two screens, with printed photographs of the process and stills of the GIFs laid out on a table (Figure 4). Appropriated for our artwork, still images as condensed cultural products and finished entities entered into relationships with one another and became charged with new meanings through montage and movement. Our own experience of being a family in the field and being separated fed into the arrangement and the montage. The aesthetic of the table-top photography and the cutting and assembling of images and their movement was inspired by and reenacted some of the photographic practices of my interlocutors, who inserted images of absent persons into photo albums to create new meanings and relationships, for example, by inserting images of absent guests into a wedding album.10 By incorporating our own family images in the montage of GIFs, we reflected visually on our own positioning and ideas as a (temporary) transnational family, which in our case centred on the nuclear family of couple and child. Both the cutting and assembling of our own images and the GIF format demonstrate how coresidence and intimacy (Köhn 2014) relate to specific historically bound ideas about what a family is or should be and how it is depicted in images. The ideal of the close family, comprising parents and children, living together in one location, is part of European family norms. The copresence that is constructed through the montages and the animation of the images also relates global image repertoires to the migratory experience of using online social media to maintain contact with socially close friends and family members. Yet the edges of the cut-outs and the irregular movement of the GIF

9

The Graphic Interchange Format is a standard for encoding and decoding digital data and is widely used to share short, looping moving images online (Eppink 2014: 298).

10 For a detailed account of absence and the strategies of making present of transnational close families and friends, see Simone Pfeifer 2019 (especially chapter 5). I am grateful to Khady and her family who allowed me to use their images in our artwork and publications.

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leave a sense of longing that was only eased by the repetitive loops of everyday communication. Figure 4: Collaborative artistic and media anthropological work.

© Ulf Neumann and Simone Pfeifer

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CONCLUSION: “SCISSORS FOR SEEING” “In The Gambia by contrast, the sound of a camera shutter making its slice sounds more like the snip of scissors, cutting out people, clarifying their edges, and making them cutting edge. Cameras, in The Gambia, are scissors for seeing.” (Buckley 2000: 72) This statement in Liam Buckley’s article on “Self and Accessory in Gambian Studio Photography” succinctly captures the interplay of tailoring, photography, and manual editing, attributing, and accessorising that go into portraying a person in portrait photography in The Gambia. Similarly, the manipulation and montage of the images in our own collaborative work produces an aesthetic of attributing and relating the experiences and images that we made during fieldwork to those of our interlocutors. Figure 5: Scissors for Seeing.

© Ulf Neumann

Through our collaborative reflective installation, we extended our ethnographic and artistic work on the body and the image. Collage and assemblage make visible and accountable our own positionality as a nuclear family as well as, in my case, as a White academic woman relating to European norms of what it means to be a family and how to circulate family images. We chose the jolting, compressed GIF

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format as a way of alluding to social media practices and the moving still images that bring together transnational families in particular ways with particular aesthetics: always leaving gaps between images and emphasising the parts of life that are missed out on. Additionally, our collaborative work and our experiences of being together and not together in the field demonstrate how the close family – partner and children – is inevitably part of anthropologists’ encounters in the field, their reflections and their ethnographic outputs. The classic ethnographic field loses its demarcations when research is about the circulation of family images, but also when the field is entered as a family both physically and via mediatised formats. It is important to note that it is not only the absence of children (Farrelly, Stewart-Withers and Dombroski 2014) but also the presence and absence of nonanthropological partners that has an impact on anthropologists’ work; in my case, the collaborative work of a media anthropologist and an artist also had an impact. The collaborative artistic and media anthropological work that came out of our shared engagement with the field reflects on the circulation of family images and the fluidity of how absent people can be made present. The culturally specific norms of family (relationships) that inform media usage – depictions of the couple, the nuclear, or the extended family, or decisions regarding with whom, how and how often to stay connected via Skype – relate in particular ways to everyday family practices in transnational settings. Both the different forms of visualities in the photographic montages created by couples and the ways people communicate via Skype convey culturally specific notions of presence and absence. At the same time, the use or rejection of different forms of communication media is closely tied in with financial remittances and perceived social and emotional proximity. Staying “connected” and “related” (Drotbohm 2009) are in this sense closely interlinked. My own and my interlocutors’ experiences point to how technical infrastructures interrelate with normative, moral and emotional aspects in particular ways. Forms of connected visuality, either via Skype, or created by inserting and montaging images, vary substantially, reflecting the particular feelings of social proximity or ways of dealing with transnational everyday life of the people who create them.

REFERENCES Alber, Erdmute/Bochow, Astrid (2006): “Familienwandel in Afrika. Ein Forschungsüberblick.” In: Paideuma 52, pp. 227–250.

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Bajorek, Jennifer (2010): “Of Jumbled Valises and Civil Society. Photography and Political Imagination in Senegal.” In: History & Anthropology 4, pp. 431– 452. Baldassar, Loretta (2008): “Missing Kin and Longing to Be Together. Emotions and the Construction of Co-Presence in Transnational Relationships.” In: Journal of Intercultural Studies 29/3, pp. 247–266. Baldassar, Loretta/Nedelcu, Mihaela/Merla, Laura/Wilding, Raelene (2016): “ICT-Based Co-Presence in Transnational Families and Communities. Challenging the Premise of Face-to-Face Proximity in Sustaining Relationships.” In: Global Networks 16/2, pp. 133–144. Bille, Mikkel/Hastrup, Frida/Soerensen, Tim Flohr (2010): An Anthropology of Absence. Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, New York: Springer. Bouquet, Mary (2002): “Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology.” In: Sarah Franklin/Susan McKinnon (eds.), Relative Values. Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 85–115. boyd, danah m./Ellison, Nicole B. (2007): “Social Network Sites. Definition, History, and Scholarship.” In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13/1, pp. 210–230. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101. 2007.00393.x. Bryceson, Deborah/Vuorela, Ulla (2002): “Transnational Families in the TwentyFirst Century.” In: Deborah Bryceson/Ulla Vuorela (eds.), The Transnational Family. New European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford and Malden: Berg, pp. 3–30. Buckley, Liam (2000): “Self and Accessory in Gambian Studio Photography.” In: Visual Anthropology Review 16/2, pp. 71–91. Cassell, Joan (2010): Children In The Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chapuis, Frédérique (1999): “The Pioneers of St Louis.” In: Revue Noire (ed.), Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, Paris: Revue Noire, pp. 49–63. Charsley, Katharine (2012) “Transnational Marriage.” In: Katherine Charsley (ed.), Transnational Marriage. New Perspectives from Europe and Beyond, New York and London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, pp. 3–22. Cole, Jennifer (2014): “The Télèphone Malgache. Transnational Gossip and Social Transformation Among Malagasy Marriage Migrants in France.” In: American Ethnologist 41/2, pp. 276–289. Coleman, Simon/von Hellermann, Pauline (2011): Multi-Sited Ethnography. Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods, London and New York: Routledge.

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Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016): Doing Fieldwork in China ... with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Dang-Anh, Mark/Pfeifer, Simone/Reisner, Clemens/Villioth, Lisa (2017): “Medienpraktiken. Situieren, Erforschen Reflektieren. Eine Einleitung.” In: Navigationen: Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften 17/1, pp. 7–36. Diouf, Jean Léopold (2003): Dictionnaire Wolof-Français et Français-Wolof, Paris: Karthala Editions. Drotbohm, Heike (2009): “Horizons of Long-Distance Intimacies. Reciprocity, Contribution and Disjuncture in Cape Verde.” In: The History of the Family 14/2, pp. 132–149. Eppink, Jason (2014): “A Brief History of the GIF (so Far).” In: Journal of Visual Culture 13/3, pp. 298–306. Falzon, Mark-Anthony (2009): Multi-Sited Ethnography. Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research, Aldershot: Ashgate Farrelly, Trisia/Stewart-Withers, Rochelle/Dombroski, Kelly (2014): “‘Being There’. Mothering and Absence/Presence in the Field.” In: Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 11/2, pp. 25–56. Foster, Hal, (1998): Vision and Visuality, New York: The New Press. Gasparetti, Fedora (2011): “Relying on Teranga. Senegalese Migrants to Italy and Their Children Left Behind.” In: Autrepart 57–58, pp. 215–232. Available online at https://doi.org/10.3917/autr.057.0215. Gottlieb, Alma (1995): “Beyond the Lonely Anthropologist. Collaboration in Research and Writing.” In: American Anthropologist 97/1, pp. 21–26. Hannaford, Dinah (2014): “Technologies of the Spouse. Intimate Surveillance in Senegalese Transnational Marriages.” In: Global Networks 15/1, pp. 43–59. Hannaford, Dinah (2017): Marriage Without Borders. Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hirschkind, Charles/José A. de Abreu, Maria/Caduff, Carlo (2017): “New Media, New Publics? An Introduction to Supplement 15.” In: Current Anthropology 58/S15, pp. 3–12. Kea, Pamela (2017): “Photography, Care and the Visual Economy of Gambian Transatlantic Kinship Relations.” In: Journal of Material Culture 22/1, pp. 51– 71. Kemp, Joshua (2008): The World and the Local Canvas. Visuality and Empowerment in Dakar, Senegal, Los Angeles: University of California. Köhn, Steffen (2014): Intimate Distance, 17 min. Köhn, Steffen (2016): Mediating Mobility. Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Madianou, Mirca (2016): “Ambient Co-Presence. Transnational Family Practices in Polymedia Environments.” In: Global Networks 16/2, pp. 183–201. Madianou, Mirca/Miller, Daniel (2012): Migration and New Media. Transnational Families and Polymedia, London: Routledge. Marcus, George E. (1995): “Ethnography in/of the World System. The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 95117. McKay, Deirdre (2008): “Ghosts of Futures Present. Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive.” In: Visual Anthropology 21/4, pp. 381–392. Meyer, Morgan (2012): “Placing and Tracing Absence. A Material Culture of the Immaterial.” In: Journal of Material Culture 17/1, pp. 103–110. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2006): “On Visuality.” In: Journal of Visual Culture 5/1, pp. 53–79. Mustafa, Hudita Nura (2002): “Portraits of Modernity. Fashioning Selves in Dakarois Popular Photography.” In: Paul Stuart Landau/Deborah D. Kaspin (eds.), Images and Empires. Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 231–247. Paßmann, Johannes (2018): Die soziale Logik des Likes. Eine Twitter-Ethnografie, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Pfeifer, Simone (2020): Social Media im transnationalen Alltag. Zur medialen Ausgestaltung sozialer Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Senegal, Bielefeld: transcript. Pivin, Jean Loup/Saint Leon, Pascal Martin (2003): “Les précurseurs.” In: AnneMarie Bouttiaux/Alain D’Hooghe/Jean Loup Pivin/Pascal Martin Saint Leon (eds.), L’Afrique par elle-même. Un siècle de photographie africaine, Paris: Revue Noire, pp. 24–60. Poveda, David (2009): “Parent and Ethnographer of Other Children.” In: Anthropology Matters 11/1, pp. 1–10. Available online at https://www.anthropologymatters.com/index.php/anth_matters/article/view/26 (last accessed March 13, 2019). Riccio, Bruno (2008): “Les migrants sénégalais en Italie. Réseaux, insertion et potentiel de co-développement.” In: Momar-Coumba Diop (ed.), Le Sénégal des migrations. Mobilités, identités et sociétés, Paris: Karthala Editions, pp. 69–104. Roost Vischer, Lilo (1997): “Mütter zwischen Herd und Markt. Das Verhältnis von Mutterschaft, sozialer Elternschaft und Frauenarbeit bei den Moose (Mossi) in Ouagadougou/Burkina Faso. ” In: Basler Beiträge zur Ethnologie Vol. 38, Basel: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum der Kulturen.

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Rose, Gillian (2011): Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, Los Angeles: Sage. Schüttpelz, Erhard (2016): “Infrastrukturelle Medien und öffentliche Medien.” In: Media in Action 0 (Pre-Publication). Tazanu, Primus Mbeanwoah (2012): Being Available and Reachable. New Media and Cameroonian Transnational Sociality, Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research. Whitehouse, Bruce (2009): “Transnational Childrearing and the Preservation of Transnational Identity in Brazzaville, Congo.” In: Global Networks 9/1, pp. 82–99.

Returning to the Field as a Mother Reflections on Closeness and Difference in Long-Term Fieldwork Michaela Haug

During my most recent research I was conducting fieldwork with a family of five and was thus as busy as I was at home, reconciling my responsibilities as researcher, partner and mother. In one of the few moments that I could indulge myself in self-reflective diary writing I noted: “I still feel close to the people – maybe even closer – although I feel more different” (Journal Entry, September 1, 2016). This short note exemplifies that the Dayak Benuaq villages in Indonesian Borneo, where I have been working for nearly 20 years now, have become an important place of social and emotional belonging for me. But the short note also reflects a development which might seem contradictory at first glance: increasing closeness despite greater difference. This stands in contrast to the common narrative of the anthropologist who comes to the field as a stranger and then, by overcoming initial difference and distance, builds rapport and develops an increasing closeness to the people he or she learns from, over the course of repeated returns to field (cf. Howell and Talle 2012a). Drawing on my experience of long-term fieldwork among the Dayak Benuaq, and particularly on my experience of returning to the field as a mother, I question this dominant narrative, which presents the overcoming of difference and distance as a linear process. Instead, I argue that it goes through various phases and can be characterised by intense moments of coalescence as well as ruptures. Over the course of the years I have conducted fieldwork alone, with my husband and with children of different ages. In this chapter I draw on three periods of field research to lay out my argument. The first encompasses my PhD research, which was conducted alone over 22 months between 2004 and 2007; the second comprises a two month stay in spring 2009, which I conducted together with my

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husband and our daughter, who at that time was seven months old; and the third stretches over eight months between summer 2016 and spring 2017, together with my husband and our children, who were then eight, six and three years old. During each of these research stays my positionality within Dayak Benuaq society changed, and so have my feelings of closeness and difference. In the following I reflect on the implications of long-term research and the importance of various kinds of similarities that can be shared between fieldworkers and their interlocutors to overcome differences and distance within the ethnographic encounter. I further explore how the multiple elements of my identity, as well as different phases of parenthood, have influenced experiences of closeness and difference over the course of my long-term engagement with the Dayak Benuaq.

CONDUCTING LONG-TERM RESEARCH AMONG THE DAYAK BENUAQ The Benuaq represent one of the various indigenous groups of Borneo, which are commonly referred to as Dayak. Most Dayak Benuaq live in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan and practise an extended subsistence economy, which is characterised by a combination of subsistence strategies and a variety of other economic activities that are integrated into the surrounding market economy (see Gönner 2002). Historically, this combined economic strategy has grown out of the trade in forest products, which has linked the Dayak Benuaq to international trading networks for several centuries (e.g. Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995; Padoch and Peluso 1996; Wadley 2005). Like many other indigenous groups throughout the forested (up)lands of Southeast Asia, the Dayak Benuaq are currently experiencing rapid and profound change as the increasing integration of even small communities into capitalist economies, the expansion of state control, the ambitious plans of national and local governments to boost economic growth through natural resource extraction, as well as the increasing commodification of land and other natural resources, accelerate environmental, economic and social transformations all over the region. The dynamics and impacts of these changes and how the Dayak Benuaq engage in governing, shaping, manipulating and resisting the processes that are transforming their environment and their societies alike are central to my research. My relationship with the Dayak Benuaq started in 2000 and intensified in 2001 when I conducted three months of field research for my Master’s thesis (Haug 2002) in East Kalimantan. I began to learn about their perception of the natural environment, practices of customary land tenure and struggles for the acknowl-

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edgement of customary rights (Bullinger and Haug 2012; Haug 2014a, 2014b, 2018). The downfall of the Indonesian President Suharto in 1999 and the subsequent political reform process, which turned Indonesia from a highly centralised state into one of the most decentralised states in the world (Ziegenhain 2017) had significant impacts for the political landscape of Indonesian Borneo and its indigenous population. After having experienced systematic economic, political and social marginalisation during the 32 years of Suharto’s reign (see Duncan 2004; Duile 2017), Dayak groups gained new political self-determination through regional autonomy. Taking the Dayak Benuaq as an example, my PhD research explored the impacts of these tremendous political changes in East Kalimantan (Haug 2010) and opened the door for a broader perspective on changing centreperiphery relations in Indonesia (Haug, Rössler and Grumblies 2017). My research further revealed how economic changes and intensified resource extraction led to increasing conflicts (Haug 2014a, 2014b) and new inequalities (Haug 2014c, 2017a). My recent post-doctoral research on “gender, (in)equality and economic change” was set up in response to these findings and attempts to understand how inequalities are (re)produced along various categories of social differentiation within Dayak Benuaq society in the context of the current rapid economic change.

IMPLICATIONS OF LONG-TERM RESEARCH Compared to researchers like Terence Turner (2012), who studied the Kayapo in Brazil for 45 years, or Elizabeth Colson (1984, 2010), who repeatedly returned for over half a century to Zambia, my engagement with the Dayak Benuaq still seems relatively short. But nevertheless it has already allowed me to place particular events in a broader context and to gain a cumulative and more profound understanding of continuity and change in Dayak society (cf. Arenz et al. 2017). Highlighting the advantages of long-term anthropological engagement, Signe Howell and Aud Talle (2012b) emphasise this processual dimension of long-term research. They distinguish between restudies, which mainly constitute of a single return visit to a previous research site, and repeated returns to the field, which they call “multitemporal fieldwork” (ibid: 2). “The restudy type of research, which could be termed comparison of times […] leaves a long time gap with little or no observational knowledge of what has been taking place in the community between field visits. Multitemporal fieldwork, by contrast, gives rise to a more processual understanding – a description through time – in which one is enabled to witness

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the many events that provoke change or resistance to change, as well as the false starts, as it were, of change.” (ibid: 12, emphasis added)

Conducting long-term research not only refines and broadens the lens of observation; it also enables a growing closeness between the anthropologist and the people he or she learns from, as “continuous engagement with the field means involvement in others’ destinies” (ibid: 5). Like many other anthropologists, I have become kin to several Dayak Benuaq families over the course of my research. I have been able to accompany individual people and households through highs and lows, share central events in their lives and witness how the life paths of the primary school children to whom I taught English during my first research stay developed. I share such a personal connection, for example, with Rugatn, who stood out as a very bright and talented pupil in my evening English course and who later became one of the first adolescents from his village to enrol at a university in the provincial capital. During my most recent stay in East Kalimantan I was able to meet his fiancé, attend his graduation ceremony and integrate him as a research assistant in my project. However, long-term researchers do not only grow into the communities they continuously return to, they also grow up in them. As Signe Howell and Aud Talle remind us: “Not only do the communities we study change over time, responding to internal and external developments and challenges, but the anthropologists as individuals equally change” (2012b: 15). And as field researchers develop within their own lives, their positionality within the groups they study changes. Piers Vitebsky, for example, describes how he “graduated from ubbang (little brother) to jojo (grandfather or ancestor)” (2012: 184) among the Sora in India, while Tabea Häberlein (this volume) explores how she changed from a daughter into a mother and finally into a grandmother during her research in Togo. Associated with such shifting positionalities are, amongst other things, increasing social status, access to different kinds of knowledge and also an increase in expectations and responsibilities (cf. Knauft 2012). However, for the most part, accounts of growing into and growing up in the field are depicted as linear processes of steadily increasing closeness as initial difference and distance is successfully overcome. In contrast, I experienced my growing up in the field from an unmarried and childless undergraduate student into a married mid-level academic with three children as an uneven road which included rewarding highlights but also disconcerting ruptures.

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REFLECTIONS ON SIMILARITY AND THE INTERPLAY OF MULTIPLE CATEGORIES OF DIFFERENTIATION Before I lay out my experiences during the three selected periods of field research in more detail, I want to prepend some considerations about different kinds of similarities that shape and are shaped in the ethnographic encounter. The process of self-immersion, which lies at the heart of anthropological fieldwork (Dreby and Brown 2013: 5), requires anthropologists to adapt to the way of life of the group they study, to learn the local language as well as rules of courtesy and appropriate behaviour, in order to become “just one of them” (Hauser-Schäublin 2008: 42, author’s translation). It has been shown that social closeness (Spittler 2001) and various forms of personal involvement (e.g. Häberlein 2014; Stodulka 2014; Schröder 2014) contribute significantly to the production of ethnographic knowledge. However, the ability and the readiness to engage in other peoples’ lives is not something that simply follows our will (Hauser-Schäublin 2008: 42). As Rosalie Stolz reminds us in her contribution to this volume, we not only immerse ourselves – we are also being immersed. A common practice for immersing the researcher and creating similarity is to make the anthropologist kin. This can take on various forms and can include, for example, becoming a foster daughter (e.g. Carsten 2012; Häberlein 2014), a daughter-in-law (Gordon 1998; Singh 2016), a brother (Schröder 2014), a foster mother (Häberlein this volume) or a compadre (Pauli this volume). While some of these familial relations remain rather informal, others become formalised, ritualised or legalised in different ways. Anthropologists thus do not only “become as close as possible to being a member” (Dreby and Brown 2013: 5) of the group they study. Many of us do become actual members of the groups we work with – some for a certain period of time and others once and for all, although we are often distinguished by the rather unique position of simultaneously being an “insider” and an “outsider” (cf. Narayan 1993). Personal and categorical similarities between the researcher and his or her interlocutors are considered to contribute to gaining access, establishing rapport and enhancing the validity of information (Hurtado 1994). Myra Sabir and Karl Pillemer, for example, show that experiential similarities – defined as having shared or currently sharing a similar experience – between researcher and respondents have been crucial for improving recruitment and retention results in research on health issues among older African Americans in the US (Sabir and Pillemer 2014). This is reminiscent of Julia Pauli’s account (this volume) of how, based on the (perceived) shared experience of loneliness during her research in Mexico, many daughters-in-law opened up to her. Mario Krämer (this volume) shows how the shared experience of fatherhood deepened his bond with his research assistant,

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while the loss of this shared experience – when his research assistant lost his child – led to a temporary rupture in their relationship. Signe Howell and Aud Talle further emphasise how biographical similarities can be created in long-term fieldwork by the experience of going together through similar steps in the lifecycle: “We become older, we go through a range of rites of passage […] and in most cases we become parents. In this way our lives parallel those of our friends and informants from our initial fieldwork” (2012b: 15). However, most attention has been paid to categorical similarities based on race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, and more infrequently also religion and political affiliations, and how they intersect. As we all possess complex and shifting identities “in which multiple countries, regions, religions, and classes may come together” (Narayan 1993: 673), one aspect may create a similarity in a specific context while another may not. My Indonesian colleague Daisy Simandjuntak, for example, who has conducted research on political elites in Northern Sumatra as a “native anthropologist”, describes how she has been often considered as “similar” by her interlocutors because of her fellow Indonesian identity, while she was distanced at the same time by differences based on age, gender, or education (Simandjuntak and Haug 2014: 71). However, social categories of differentiation are not only contingent, they also possess different qualities. While some, such as race or gender, (most often) remain constant over the course of our lives, others can and do change, like age or class affiliation. While some are linked to our bodies and are easily visible, others can be disguised or consciously displayed (Hirschauer 2014: 171). In the following account, I reflect on how gender, age and family status, education and my identity as a white European have influenced, referring to Pat Caplan (1993: 178), who I have been and currently am in the eyes of the Dayak Benuaq, and how the different elements of my identity – sometimes mutually reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other – have contributed to the doing and undoing of differences.

BECOMING A DAUGHTER AND DAUGHTER-IN-LAW: OVERCOMING DIFFERENCE AND GROWING CLOSENESS During my Master’s research in 2001 I spent three months in the Dayak Benuaq village Engkuni Pasek, together with my friend and colleague Oliver Venz (2012), who studies the autochthonous religion of the Dayak Benuaq. Although we pursued different research agendas, we were accommodated together by a series of different host families over the course of our stay and each of us was adopted into

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one of them. As I have shown above, this kind of integration is not uncommon. However, the fact that we have been made kin to different families shows that the adoption of a researcher does not just serve the purpose of dissolving inappropriate solitude (cf. Allerton 2013; Flinn 1998) but that it also involves personal sympathies and affection: while Oliver was adopted by the family where he had felt most comfortable, I too was adopted by the family where I had felt most at home during our stay. Among the Dayak Benuaq, two practices of “adoption” exist. The first is called ngangkatn and denotes the establishment of a familial bond with a person to whom one is not yet related through kinship. This familial bond often grows out of mutual liking or from special circumstances. For example, a Dayak Benuaq man who had lived in several villages during his search for wage labour told me that he had become the adopted son of a couple with whom he stayed for some while, as he started to feel that they were like a second mother and father to him. When he was staying in another place, he became the adopted brother of a young woman whom he saved from drowning. The second practice, called ngamu, denotes the establishment of a new kind of relationship to a person to whom one is already related through kinship. This is the case, for example, when a couple is childless and adopts the child of a close relative in order to gain the socially important status of parenthood and later on grandparenthood. While ngangkatn does not require any formalisation, ngamu needs to be affirmed by a ritual. The Indonesian term for an adopted child (anak angkat) does not capture these subtle differences and is used for various practices of adoption and child circulation throughout the archipelago (cf. Schröder-Butterfill 2004; Newberry 2014). Becoming part of Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah’s family through the practice of ngangkatn provided me not only with warm-hearted and caring parents, but also with three sisters and two brothers, and made me an aunt to eight nephews and five nieces. In 2004 my PhD research1 brought me back to East Kalimantan. As Engkuni Pasek qualified as one of my overall three research sites I could return to Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah and make their house my home base through the whole of my PhD research. During this time our relationship grew even closer and eventually began to incorporate my German parents, in the form of a lively letter exchange. Interactions between the biological parents at home and the adoptive 1

My PhD research was an integral part of the interdisciplinary research project “Making Local Government more Responsive to the Poor: Developing Indicators and Tools to Support Sustainable Livelihood under Decentralization”, carried out by the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in cooperation with the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

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parents in the field is also described by Romana Büchel (2001) and Tabea Häberlein (this volume). However, in contrast to these cases, my parents were unfortunately never able to realise their often anticipated visit to Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah, but they continued to exchange letters with my adoptive parents until letter writing was replaced more recently by smartphone video calls. During my PhD research I expanded my activities from Engkuni Pasek, where many villagers combine rubber tapping with wage work, to include two further Dayak Benuaq villages, which differ in the availability of natural resources and major livelihood strategies. I first moved to Jontai, where large areas of primary and secondary forest enable a strong subsistence economy, and then to Muara Nayan, where the largely degraded environment and current village life are dominated by the palm oil industry. In Jontai and Muara Nayan, I also stayed with local families and was adopted (ngangkatn) by my host parents there. In all three villages I was thus socially placed in the role of an adoptive “daughter”. In contrast to Janet Carsten, who relates her experience of being integrated as foster daughter into a Malay family to feelings of “being taken over and controlled” (1997: 5), I enjoyed the feeling of belonging and being taken care of which resulted from my adoptions. My social positioning as “daughter” and my young age generated a cordial teacher-student-like relationship with many village elders and religious specialists. This provided me with a personal closeness to important local personalities and reflected the admiration and respect for the elderly which is appropriate among the Dayak Benuaq (Simandjuntak and Haug 2014: 86). However, I seldom experienced the limitations that would be associated with young age among the Benuaq, as the relatively high social status associated with (university) education and with being a white European (see also below) granted me more freedom than an average Dayak Benuaq daughter would have enjoyed. Gender relations among the Dayak Benuaq are characterised by a far-reaching gender equality (Haug 2017b), which downsized the importance of my gender for gaining access to particular respondents or information. I have never experienced any restrictions based on my female identity, have always been allowed into male and female domains, and can freely talk with men and women — alone or in groups. This stands in a clear contrast to experiences that I have had in other parts of Indonesia, where gender inequalities are much more prevalent, partly because they are strongly influenced by Muslim norms and values. What mattered a lot was my identity as a white European, referred to as orang bule2 throughout Indonesia, and who – at least in rural areas – are commonly associated with economic wealth, images of “modernity” and, in my case – pursuing 2

A comprehensive analysis of the expression orang bule and its positive and negative connotations is provided by Anne-Meike Fechter (2005).

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and eventually receiving a PhD – also with higher education. The resulting relatively high social status provided me with valuable access to local elites and endowed me with respect in situations where my young age would not necessarily have done so. However, being an orang bule and a PhD student made me very different from my rural and, according to official data, “poor” Dayak Benuaq interlocutors (Haug 2010: 138). When I first arrived in East Kalimantan, only one of my research sites was connected to electricity, and all of them were characterised by a lack of infrastructure, the absence of public transportation, little access to health care and higher education and no mobile phone reception. To use Anna Tsing’s often cited phrase, my research locations were (and to some extent still remain) “out-of-the-way-places” (Tsing 1993). Within Indonesia, indigenous groups like the Dayak Benuaq have often been depicted as the backward and uncivilised “other”, in contrast to national visions of progress and modernity, and as a result have been subject to various kinds of assimilation policies and derogatory attitudes (cf. Li 1999; Maunati 2004). Creating similarities by adapting to the Dayak Benuaq way of life, including learning Bahasa Benuaq in addition to my Indonesian language skills, participating in everyday work and village sociality, were thus of special importance to me. My daily life in all three villages included bathing in the river, washing the dishes and my clothes, learning to cook with a wood fire, helping with activities such as rubber tapping, sowing and harvesting rice and regularly attending meetings and rituals. During my PhD research I also met my future husband and we got married during the final stage of my research project. Marrying into a Dayak Benuaq family presented a further step of immersion into the local community and entailed a new positioning as a married woman. The moments when I asked Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah to act as my parents in our upcoming engagement ritual and they solemnly agreed to do so, and then the performance of the ritual itself, constitute moments of strong coalescence for me. By this I mean that they were pivotal moments, and sharing these experiences with them created a new sense of belonging, or intensified an already existing one. My Jontai and Muara Nayan parents were also invited to the engagement ritual. After initial worries that they might feel offended that I had asked Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah to act as my parents and not them, I quickly realised that they had not expected me to do so. They acknowledged my already deeper relationship to my Engkuni Pasek parents and seemed to view my adoption into their families as more informal and less binding. All in all, my PhD research phase was characterised by an increasing immersion in Dayak Benuaq society and increasingly formalised and ritualised familial relations.

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RETURNING TO THE FIELD AS A MOTHER: FEELING DIFFERENT AND DISTANT Having settled in Germany after the completion of my PhD, my husband and I returned to East Kalimantan with our seven month old daughter in 2009. Like others who took small children to faraway places (e.g. Hugh-Jones 1987; Nichter and Nichter 1987), we worried about the related risks. However, we never questioned whether we would take her with us, as we thought it a good chance to introduce her to her Dayak Benuaq families. I countered my fears by busying myself with the preparations that I considered necessary, including a course on first aid for children. Our two month stay was privately funded and centred on the performance and documentation of quite a large and rather seldom performed death ritual (kenyau) in the household of my parents-in-law. These rituals are carried out to enhance the status of the deceased in the afterlife. Depending on the wealth of the family, oblations are made in the form of plants, chickens, pigs and sometimes even a water buffalo. A kenyau can last three, five, seven or nine days, or alternatively a multiple of these days, with activities and recitations going on 24 hours a day. As my husband’s participation was required during most parts of the ritual, we agreed that I would do most of the childcare, while taking part in the crucial parts of the kenyau and conducting follow up interviews to deepen my understanding of the ritual. Returning as mother and father, we were greeted with great joy and our daughter received much attention and affection. With our first child we grew into the much appreciated status of parenthood. We are now no longer called by our given names but instead, following the practice of referring to parents by the name of their first child, as mother and father of Iyang.3 However, despite our warm welcome this stay came to represent a deep rupture for me that was accompanied by intense feelings of difference and distance. Originally, we had planned to stay in the household of my parents-in-law where the ritual was to be performed. However, on our arrival, one household member had just been diagnosed with open tuberculosis (TB). As TB constitutes a severe threat for infants we decided that despite the immediate start of medical treatment it would be safer to stay at the house of my husband’s sister, who lives close by. My husband’s family understood the risk that TB presented to our daughter and accepted our relocation as an inconvenient but necessary step. However, as biomedical knowledge about the transmission of diseases is rather limited, some villagers could not easily comprehend why we did not stay with my parents-in-

3

Iyang is a term of affection used for female children.

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law, and our TB-infected relative was asked over and over again why she would not cuddle our daughter. The performance of a large death ritual like a kenyau is a very busy and lively event with various activities going on around the clock; it attracts many guests, some of whom stay in the village until the completion of the ritual. The house of my parents-in-law was thus soon filled with villagers and guests from neighbouring settlements and a babble of voices blended with recitations, the occasional play of gongs and the dense smoke of cigarettes, wood fire and the burning of essences. This was an atmosphere that I had enjoyed dozens of times, appreciating the exchange of the latest gossip in the kitchen, listening to the chanting shamans and chatting the night away. With our daughter, however, I could only make short visits to the ritual. She enjoyed the great attention that she received and did not mind being handed around – but after one or two hours she had enough. She became cranky and tired of so much noise, smells and new impressions that I went next door with her where she could rest quietly with me. People kept asking me why I would not put her to sleep amid the crowd as other Dayak Benuaq mothers did. But I couldn’t, because our daughter was not used to sleeping in a noisy surrounding and I didn’t want her to, because I considered it unhealthy for her to sleep in the thick smoky air. So I found myself, for most of the time during the ritual, next door – alone with our daughter. From the veranda of my sister-in-law’s house I could hear the soundscape of the ritual, watch people gathering in front of the house and hear the murmur of their talk, interrupted by occasional laughter, and I felt excluded. While the others where inside attending the ritual, I was outside. Children are often described as a “door opener”, providing anthropologists with access (e.g. Smithsimon 2013; Stack 1974; Schrijvers 1993; McGrath 1998; Sinclair 1998; Price 2001). This is probably true in a situation where a researcher is new to the field and where the shared experience of parenthood is crucial to building rapport (e.g. Brown and Casanova 2009). In my situation of returning to a field where I already felt familiar, our daughter did not serve as a “door opener”, but rather made me – in a very literal sense – close doors. After the ritual, I hoped the situation would improve. It did in some ways, but I continued to experience new limitations. The time available to me for conducting interviews was for example significantly reduced, as simple tasks like doing the washing or preparing purees for an infant without the amenities of a washing machine or an electric stove took at least three times as long as at home. Visits to friends and former interlocutors were also not as easy going as usual. Nearly everyone asked me why I had “withdrawn myself” during the ritual – a question that made me feel even more odd as I was unable to provide a satisfactory answer.

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Having somehow circumnavigated this question, most conversations continued to centre on our child rather than proceed to the topics that I had aimed to address, and sooner or later we would end up discussing differences in child rearing practices. Interestingly, I was not lectured on proper Dayak Benuaq behaviour, as, for example, experienced by David Sutton (1998) when he did research on the Greek island of Kalymnos accompanied by his wife and his baby son. Instead, I was confronted with manifold questions and I had to explain what felt like several hundred times why our daughter had not had her ear lobes pierced, why she was not accustomed to sleeping in a crowded environment, why I preferred feeding her carrot puree instead of rice porridge, and why I considered pinching a small child on the cheek not as a sign of affection but rather as an offensive or punishing act. Had I been conducting research on child rearing practices, these talks would have been an invaluable treasure trove, but being eager to learn about the kenyau and about economic and environmental changes that occurred since my last stay, I experienced these questions instead as distracting. And even worse, they made me realise how different I was and that I – at least in some points – wanted to be different. As the undoing of difference by adapting to the Dayak Benuaq way of life had so far dominated my engagement in village sociality, insisting and cherishing difference felt odd and unfamiliar to me. However, my experience resonates with the accounts of several anthropologists, who realised that their ability and willingness to adapt came to an end when it concerned their children (cf. Sutton 1998; Cornet 2013; Glover 2016; Hansen 2016). I also suffered from extremely limited mobility, as the only means of transportation available were motorbikes – and I did not want to take an infant on a motorbike. So, apart from a three day visit to Kakah Jameh and Itaq Binah’s house in Engkuni Pasek, for which we arranged a car, I was suddenly bound to the village. Several motorbikes and scooters were available for us to borrow but I did not want to expose our daughter to a risky ride over unsurfaced muddy roads – a risk that I had repeatedly and light-heartedly exposed myself to on countless occasions. But as Joan Cassell has rightly pointed out, “one can risk one’s ‘self’ more freely than one’s children” (1987: 161). My husband respected my position but I encouraged him to take a motorbike to visit friends and relatives in neighbouring villages as I knew how much he wanted to see them again. Being aware of my problem, several people offered to take care of our daughter so that my husband and I could head off together. But because I was still breastfeeding and travelling on muddy dirt roads during the rainy season takes a long time, I refused these kind offers. So here I was again feeling left behind, oddly strange in a place that I had thought of as home, and different among people I had felt so close to before. It took a fair number of pages in my field diary and several long conversations with my husband

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to understand what had caused my “estrangement” and what lessons we could take home from this experience, both as a family and I in particular as a self-reflective ethnographer.

RETURNING AS A FAMILY OF FIVE: FEELING CLOSE DESPITE DIFFERENCE In mid-2016 we returned to East Kalimantan for my post-doctoral research project – now as a family of five. The research was funded by a travel grant from the FritzThyssen Stiftung. This included transportation costs which covered my flight and the rental of a four-wheel drive car, as well as a monthly allowance which enabled us to cover “children-related” expenses in a very flexible way. The gender fund at the Global South Studies Center (GSSC), University of Cologne, where I am affiliated as a Senior Researcher, covered the flights for the children. What remained to be paid for privately were my husband’s flight and our vaccination costs. The latter should not be underestimated, as the comprehensive immunisations, amongst others against rabies and Japanese encephalitis, for five people amounted nearly 2000€. Fortunately, I felt financially well supported and able to bear the remaining costs; but I want to emphasise here that the ability to shoulder such costs depends a lot on the type of employment one has during fieldwork and that they can place an extreme burden especially on young researchers at an early stage of their career. During this stay I focused on collecting data while my husband, with the support of our extended family, took care of our children. Renate Fernandez, who has conducted fieldwork in Spain with three children of different ages, remarks on how she could engage in much more productive fieldwork as her children grew older (1987: 214). Having no infant with us anymore, and being instead accompanied by three quite self-reliant kids, who required no specific cooking, who could communicate all of their needs in Indonesian (and to some extent also in the Benuaq language) and who enjoyed spending time with their local relatives, provided me and my husband with a large support network and restored the flexibility and mobility that I needed for my research. Taking older children abroad brings with it new challenges and responsibilities. During this stay I had, for example, to home-school our eldest daughter in order to keep up with the German curriculum. However, we were able to integrate our home-schooling sessions flexibly into our everyday life in the village. Our family life at this time was also helped by the high flexibility of gender roles among the Dayak Benuaq. While the tasks and responsibilities of men and

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women are clearly defined on an ideational level and often followed in rituals, they vary greatly in everyday practice. This is in line with the high value placed on individual autonomy (Haug 2017b: 37). Conducting fieldwork with my family contributed greatly to my understanding of Dayak Benuaq gender relations. I am convinced, for example, that my awareness of the great flexibility of gender roles came from the freedom we experienced ourselves in arranging our responsibilities. Conversations with my interlocutors still often start or end with talk about our children. But meanwhile the necessity to explain differences in childrearing practices has given way to a mutual interest in exchanging the latest news about our children’s achievements, the latest tricks they have played on us, or school issues. And on the rare occasions where I was confronted with intense inquiries into divergent child rearing practices, I could now provide details with ease, feeling much more confident than I had as an inexperienced mother during our stay in 2009. Our child rearing practices are influenced by Western European as well as by Dayak Benuaq norms and values. During our stay in East Kalimantan we expected our children to learn and follow local rules of courtesy, such as addressing older family members properly, walking around a circle of sitting adults instead of simply walking through, and sharing their toys with other children. But at the same time we educate them differently – at least in some aspects. We do not allow them to go swimming in the river alone and do not mind being the only parents who accompany their children for a swim, we do not expect them to fulfil the same amount of household chores that Dayak Benuaq children have to fulfil at similar ages, and our daughters’ ear lobes are still not pierced. While I was collecting data in Jontai and Engkuni Pasek, we lived in the house of my (by then deceased) parents-in-law. Having always previously been integrated into the household of my adopted parents or my parents-in-law, we now headed our own household, which was closely intertwined with the household of my husband’s sister next door, and together sometimes contained up to 16 people.4 After cooking for ourselves during the first weeks of our stay and perceiving it as extremely time consuming, an arrangement fell into place which satisfied not only us but our “extended household”. We started buying food for everyone and my sister-in-law and her daughter would cook for all. Eating together was more fun anyway and the new arrangement provided me with valuable time for taking down notes while my husband could devote more time to doing things that would delight our children, like building a treehouse in front of our house, or carrying out refurbishment work at both houses. 4

Households can be quite fluid units among the Dayak Benuaq and often vary in size, as some family members might temporarily stay in their field homes, close to their rice fields, or migrate for wage work.

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To conduct research in Muara Nayan, we had to move and stay there for a couple of weeks with my local adoptive family. We travelled to Muara Nayan as a group comprising the five of us and Rugatn, who became my field assistant for data collection in Muara Nayan, his fiancé, who did not want to be separated from him for even a short period of time, and his best friend, who was also eager to gain some research experience. During our stay in Muara Nayan, I thus had two Dayak law students who were helping me to conduct household interviews and several people who could help with childcare – particularly my husband, my adoptive mother and the fiancé of my field assistant. This embeddedness came with many advantages, but also with social, emotional and financial obligations. The latter not only included the living costs for all eight of us during our stay in Muara Nayan, and adequate payment for the two students who assisted me, but also covering the hospital costs for Rugatn’s fiancé, who was injured (luckily only slightly) in a motorbike accident on our way back home. During this stay my husband and I were thus not only leading a household, we shared the responsibility for an extended family and temporarily for accompanying research assistants and their family members as well. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Richard Lobban (1987) describe how they were eager to do all of the cooking, washing and housecleaning by themselves during their initial fieldwork in Africa, in order to avoid being considered elitist, and how they finally delegated more and more tasks during subsequent stays with their two children in order to balance family and research tasks. In a similar vein, we did not prepare our own meals this time and we shirked washing by making use of the newly opened laundry service in the regency’s capital as often as possible. As a young researcher I felt rather uncomfortable with the relatively high status associated with my education and with my identity as orang bule, and I did my best to undo the differences that resulted from it. Having grown into my field and grown up in it, I am now much more able to accept and identify with this role. On the other hand, my position as a university scholar has been relativised by the fact that meanwhile several young Dayak Benuaq are attending university due to increasing access to formal education, and some individuals have made extraordinary careers in business and politics. Being aware of many differences undone and some that will remain, I do not feel that I have to adapt to village life down to the ground anymore in order to prove that I am “one of them”. Of course, I continue to respect local norms and values and engage in everyday sociality, but I have realised that being different in some aspects does not undo the closeness which has grown up over the years. Bruce Knauft compares the long-returning ethnographer with “the growing number of diasporic returnees around the world who come home sporadically from points distant” (2012: 257). Maybe that comes close

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to describing my role as a researcher who has become part of several Dayak Benuaq families and started her own bi-national family, with roots in Germany and Indonesia?

CONCLUDING REMARKS Anthropological fieldwork is always a balancing act between closeness and distance (cf. Hauser-Schäublin 2008; Spittler 2014). As much as a field researcher needs “to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched”, he or she needs to distance him- or herself “to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data” (de Jong, Kamsteeg and Ybema 2013: 168). Whereas some researchers have reflected on strategies of distancing (e.g. de Jong, Kamsteeg and Ybema 2013; Ybema and Kamsteeg 2009), many more anthropologists have described and reflected upon the process of overcoming distance and difference – as I have done in this chapter. However, in contrast to the common image, I have presented this process as a non-linear trajectory. To illustrate different phases and intense moments of coalescence as well as ruptures, I have drawn on three different periods of field research among the Dayak Benuaq in East Kalimantan. While my PhD research followed the classical path of immersing oneself and increasingly being immersed in the society one studies, my first return to the field as mother confronted me with feelings of distance and difference in previously unknown intensities. My most recent stay was again characterised by the experience of an overall increased closeness, despite some now much more consciously lived and articulated differences. Over the years, various kinds of similarities – based on categories of social differentiation, common experiences, the establishment of familial relations and my adaptation to the Dayak Benuaq way of life – shaped and were shaped by my encounters in the field. I have shown how my gender, age and family status, my education and my identity as a white European have contributed in different ways to the doing and undoing of differences. Particular aspects of my identity came to the fore in different contexts and at different moments in my research. These have sometimes reinforced and at other times contradicted each other, exemplifying the “complex empirical interplay of different categories of differentiation” (Hirschauer 2014: 181, author’s translation). I have also shown how different phases of parenthood and the changing ages of our children have influenced the undoing and doing of differences. While children often serve as door openers in situations where a researcher is entering into a new field, they do not necessarily do so in a familiar environment (cf. Fluehr-

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Lobban and Lobban 1987). In my case, becoming a parent made me grow up to adulthood in Dayak Benuaq society, but it simultaneously also challenged me to confront and embrace differences in a new way. While adapting to the Dayak Benuaq way of life had been an important way of creating similarity during my early fieldwork, becoming a parent disclosed the limits of this endeavour. However, the close relations and familial connections that have grown over the years and that have been deepened by moments of coalescence and joint experiences of joy and sorrow can bear some dissent and differences. This is how I came to conclude, in my journal entry cited at the beginning of this chapter, that I still feel close to the villagers of Engkuni Pasek, Jontai and Muara Nayan, maybe even closer, although I have become more aware of and even cherish some differences.

REFERENCES Allerton, Catherine (2013): Potent Landscapes. Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Arenz, Cathrin/Haug, Michaela/Seitz, Stefan/Venz, Oliver (2017): Continuity under Change in Dayak Society, Wiesbaden: Springer. Brookfield, Harold/Potter, Lesley/Byron, Yvonne (1995): In Place of the Forest. Environmental and Socio-economic Transformation in Borneo and the Eastern Malay Peninsular, Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Brown, Tamara Mose/Casanova, Erynn Masi de (2009): “Mothers in the Field. How Motherhood Shapes Fieldwork and Researcher-Subject Relation.” In: Women’s Studies Quarterly 37/3–4, pp. 42–57. Büchel, Romana (2001): “Mama Mia – mia Mama.” In: Charlotte Beck/Romana Büchel/Michele Galizia/Simone Prodolliet/Jürg Schneider/Heinzpeter Znoj (eds.), Fremde Freunde. Gewährsleute der Ethnologie, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, pp. 92–106. Bullinger, Cathrin/Haug, Michaela (2012): “In and Out of the Forest. Decentralisation and Recentralisation of Forest Governance in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.” In: Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS) 5/2, pp. 243– 262. Caplan, Pat (1993): “Learning Gender. Fieldwork in a Tanzanian Coastal Village, 1965-85.” In: Diane Bell/Pat Caplan/Wazir-Jahan Karim (eds.), Gendered Fields. Women, Men and Ethnography, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 168–181. Carsten, Janet (1997): The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Carsten, Janet (2012): “Fieldwork Since the 1980s. Total Immersion and its Discontents.” In: Richard Fardon/Olivia Harris/Trevor H.J. Marchand/Mark Nuttal/Chris Shore/Veronica Strang/Richard A. Wilson (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 7–21. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Colson, Elizabeth (1984): “The reordering of experience. The anthropological Involvement with time.” In: Journal of Anthropological Research 40/1, pp. 1– 13. Colson, Elizabeth (2010): “The Social History of an Epidemic. HIV/AIDS in Gwembe Valley, Zambia, 1980-2004.” In: Ute Luig/Hansjörg Dilger (eds.), Morality, Hope and Grief. Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, London: Berghahn Books, pp. 127–147. Cornet, Candice (2013): “The Fun and Games of Taking Children to the Field in Guizhou, China.” In: Sarah Turner (ed.), Red Stamps and Gold Stars. Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 80–99. de Jong, Machteld/Kamsteeg, Frans/Ybema, Sierk (2013): “Ethnographic strategies for making the familiar strange. Struggling with ‘distance’ and ‘immersion’ among Moroccan-Dutch students.” In: Journal of Business Anthropology 2/2, pp. 168–186. Dreby, Joanna/Brown, Tamara Mose (2013): “Work and Home (Im)Balance. Finding Synergy through ethnographic Fieldwork.” In: Tamara Mose Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnogrpahy, Philadephia: Temple University Press, pp. 3–16. Duile, Timo (2017): “Being Dayak in West Kalimantan. Constructing Indigenous Identity as a Political and Cultural Resource.” In: Cathrin Arenz/Michaela Haug/Stefan Seitz/Oliver Venz (eds.), Continuity under Change in Dayak Societies, Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 123–140. Duncan, Christopher R. (2004): “From Development to Empowerment. Changing Indonesian Government Policies toward Indigenous Minorities.” In: Christopher R. Duncan (ed.), Civilizing the Margins. Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 86–115. Fechter, Anne-Meike (2005): “The ‘Other’ stares back. Experiencing whiteness in Jakarta.” In: Ethnography 6/1, pp. 87–103. Fernandez, Renate (1987): “Children and Parents in the Field. Reciprocal Impacts.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 185–216.

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Flinn, Juliana (1998): “Introduction. The Family Dimension in Anthropologial fieldwork.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructiong New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 1–21. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn/Lobban, Richard (1987): “‘Drink from the Nile and You Shall Return’. Children and Fieldwork in Egypt and the Sudan.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 237–255. Glover, Denise (2016): “Viral Signs. Confronting Cultural Relativism with Children´s Health in the Field.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People´s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 87–100. Gönner, Christian (2002): A Forest Tribe of Borneo. Resource Use among the Dayak Benuaq, New Delhi: D.K. Printworld. Gordon, Tamar (1998): “Border-crossing in Tonga. Marriage in the Field.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 130–141. Häberlein, Tabea (2014): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhabe. Ein Plädoyer zur ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 127–154. Hansen, Mette H. (2016): “Between Norms and Science. What Kids Bring to the Field.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People´s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 19–40. Haug, Michaela (2002): Ressourcenwahrnehmung und Bodenrecht der Dayak Benuaq in Ost Kalimantan, Indonesien. Ein Fallbeispiel aus Engkuni Pasek: University of Cologne, unpublished Master’s thesis. Haug, Michaela (2010): Poverty and Decentralisation in East Kalimantan. The Impact of Regional Autonomy on Dayak Benuaq Wellbeing, Freiburg: Centaurus. Haug, Michaela (2014a): “Resistance, Ritual Purification and Mediation. Tracing a Dayak Community’s Sixteen-Year Search for Justice in East Kalimantan.” In: The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 15/4, pp. 357–375. Haug, Michaela (2014b): “Disputed Normativities and the Logging Boom in Kutai Barat. Local Dynamics During the Initial Phase of Regional Autonomy in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.” In: Paideuma 60, pp. 89–113. Haug, Michaela (2014c): “What Makes a Good Life? Emic Concepts of ‘Wellbeing’ and ‘Illbeing’ among the Dayak Benuaq in East-Kalimantan, Indonesia.”

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In: Thomas Stodulka/Birgitt Röttger-Rössler (eds.), Feelings at the Margins. Dealing with Violence, Stigma and Isolation in Indonesia, Frankfurt and New York: Campus, pp. 30–52. Haug, Michaela (2017a): “Rich Regency – Prosperous People? Decentralisation, Marginality and Remoteness in East Kalimantan.” In: Michaela Haug/Martin Rössler/Anna-Teresa Grumblies (eds.), Rethinking Power Relations in Indonesia. Transforming the Margins, London: Routledge, pp. 132–149. Haug, Michaela (2017b): “Men, Women and Environmental Change. The Gendered Face of Development in Kalimantan, Indonesia.” In: Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS) 10/1, pp. 29–46. Haug, Michaela (2018): “Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan. Challenging Power and Presenting Culture.” In: SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 33/2, pp. 341–361. Haug, Michaela/Rössler, Martin/Grumblies, Anna-Teresa (2017): Rethinking Power Relations in Indonesia. Transforming the Margins, London: Routledge. Hauser-Schäublin, Brigitta (2008): “Teilnehmede Beobachtung.” In: Bettina Beer (ed.), Methoden der Feldforschung, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, pp. 37–58. Hirschauer, Stefan (2014): “Un/doing Differences. The Contingency of Social Belonging.” In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 43/3, pp. 170–191. Howell, Signe/Talle, Aud (2012a): Returns to the Field. Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Howell, Signe/Talle, Aud (2012b): “Introduction.” In: Signe Howell/Aud Talle (eds.), Returns to the Field. Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–22. Hugh-Jones, Christine (1987): “Children in the Amazon.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 27–64. Hurtado, Aída (1994): “Does Similarity Breed Respect. Interviewer Evaluations of Mexican-Descent Respondents in a Bilingual Survey.” In: The Public Opinion Quarterly 58/1, pp. 77–95. Knauft, Bruce (2012): “Afterword. Reflecting on Returns to the Field.” In: Signe Howell/Aud Talle (eds.), Returns to the Field. Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 250–260. Li, Tania (1999): “Marginality, Power and Production. Analysing Upland Transformations.” In: Tania Li (ed.), Transforming the Indonesian Uplands. Marginality. Power, and Production, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, pp. 1–45. Maunati, Yekti (2004): Identitas Dayak. Komodifikasi dan Politik Kebudayaan, Yogyakarta: LKIS.

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McGrath, Barbara Burns (1998): “Through the Eyes of a Child. A Gaze More Pure?” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marhsall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp.60–70. Narayan, Kirin (1993): “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” In: American Anthropologist 95/3, pp. 671–686. Newberry, Jan (2014): “Class Mobil. Circulation of Children in the Making of Middle Indonesia.” In: Gerry van Klinken/Ward Berenschot (eds.), In Search of Middle Indonesia. Middle Classes in Provincial Towns, Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 69–88. Nichter, Mimi/Nichter, Mark (1987): “A Tale of Simeon. Reflections on Raising a Child While Conductiong Fieldwork in Rural South India.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 65–89. Padoch, Christine/Peluso, Nancy L. (1996): Borneo in Transition. People, Forests, Conservation, and Development, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Price, Marie D. (2001): “The kindness of strangers.” In: Geographical Review 91/1–2, pp. 143–150. Sabir, Myra/Pillemer, Karl (2014): “An intensely sympathetic awareness. Experiential similarity and cultural norms as means for gaining older African Americans’ trust of scientific research.” In: Journal of Aging Studies 29, pp. 142– 149. Schrijvers, Joke (1993): „Motherhood experienced and conceptualised. Changing images in Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.” In: Diane Bell/Pat Caplan/Wazir Jahan Karim (eds.), Gendered fields. Women, men and ethnography, London: Routledge, pp. 143–158. Schröder, Philipp (2014): “Der deutsche Bruder in unserem Hof. Respekt, Solidarität und ‘distanzierbare Nähe’ als Aspekte meiner Verortung in einer Nachbarschaftsgemeinschaft kirgisischer Männer.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 155– 178. Schröder-Butterfill, Elisabeth (2004): “Adoption, Patronage and Charity. Arrangements for the Elederly without Children in East Java.” In: Philip Kreager/Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill (eds.), Aging without Children. European and Asian Perspectives, New York: Berghahn, pp. 106–146. Simandjuntak, Deasy/Haug, Michaela (2014): “Doing Anthropological Fieldwork with Southeast Asian Characteristics? Identity and Adaptation in the Field.” In: Mikko Huotari/Jürgen Rüland/Judith Schlehe (eds.), Methodology and Research Practice in Southeast Asian Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 67–90.

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(eds.), Rethinking Power Relations in Indonesia. Transforming the Margins, London: Routledge, pp. 29–42.

Producing Ethnographic Knowledge

Entangled Family Parenting and Field Research in a Togolese Village Tabea Häberlein

INTRODUCTION BECOMING A RESEARCH FAMILY IN THE FIELD My older daughter Jolina1 usually likes to be alone in her room. After a school day, followed by day nursery, she enjoys listening to audio books and painting. In August 2017, we went to Togo once again, this time for five weeks. We were living in Asséré, my research village in northern Togo, which I have visited regularly since 2006.2 We also spent time in Pagouda, the nearby district town. We were embedded in family relationships at both locations: in Asséré we are part of the Mahessi kin-group, while in Pagouda we stay as guests close to the family in the Solitoke compound; this is the family of my former field assistant and later colleague Essoham Solitoke. His younger sister, Gado Solitoke, who had cared for Jolina when she was a baby in 2009, now has two children of her own (six and three years old in August 2017). She came to stay with us in Asséré, together with 1

All names of minor children are changed, as well as for adults on request.

2

Before travelling with my children, I went for research alone, spending one year in the area. After giving birth to my first daughter in 2009, I did a number of fieldtrips together with my baby/toddler, and my partner visited us once for three weeks during this period; when she was four years old I travelled with her godmother, who came to help; later I conducted research once with my two children, and for two short visits (not more than three weeks) I went alone. In sum, Jolina accompanied me on five fieldtrips to Togo and Benin, beginning at the age of three months (for a ten week trip), later at eight months (for two weeks), 14 months (for ten weeks), four years (for seven weeks), and at the age of eight years in 2017 (for five weeks). Her younger sister Linnea went to Togo only once, for five weeks when she was two years old.

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her children, as she had done before, to take care of the household (especially to cook and to wash) and to provide care for our children. Since I conduct research together with my children, I am no longer a single person in the field, but have become the head of a mobile research household, which at these times includes many different persons, such as a field assistant, the nanny with her own children, and last but not least my own children - I call this group of people our research family. The heart of our research family in 2017 was Gado and me, two mothers with four children between us. This time, our research family grew by two more people over time: my foster daughter Lélén came along with her two-week old baby to spend her postnatal convalescence with me. She could have traveled to her biological mother but chose my closeness for this special time. In addition, many other children lived immediately around our own research family – the numerous children of my six so-called brothers from the adjacent farmsteads in the village of Asséré, and the grandchildren of Nana Solitoke (the mother from Gado and Essoham) in the small town of Pagouda. In short, my older daughter would go racing out of the house in the mornings, looking for playmates and working partners and was not seen again for the rest of the day again. She fetched water, swept our and other farmyards, harvested the last mangos from the trees, grilled fresh maize on the stove, drove the hens into the barn in the evening, played the memory game for hours or painted new copies of the cards that were constantly going missing – or roamed with the other children around the village. She came home when she was hungry or when I urged her to look after her younger sister (two years old at the time) or Lélén’s baby. At night, the three of us slept under a mosquito net, my foster daughter Lélén with her baby next door and Gado with her two children in the hut next to us. When we were back in Germany, Jolina did not want to spend time on her own anymore. She was still busy and still enjoyed doing the things she had always liked to do, like reading and painting, but she did not want to be by herself anymore. She asked if we could move her little sister’s bed into her room. I asked her why she had changed. Jolina explained to me that she is not used to being alone anymore. She would even be afraid to sleep alone in her room. She had never been alone in Togo, not during the day nor at nighttime, whereas it was too quiet and lonely in her room back in Germany. She said she had to get used to it again. Through my daughter Jolina, I understood for the first time the loneliness that may affect people from many different social contexts when they first come to live in Europe. Being alone can, as my daughter’s example shows, be learned and unlearned. Children may have the ability to adapt to different forms of sociality in different contexts, such as at home or in the field. In sum, I would agree with the conclusions of Christopher D. Lynn, Michaela E. Howells and Max J. Stein, who

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say, concerning anthropologists in North America: “The majority of those who had taken their kids to the field reported it as a good experience for the children (87 per cent), though half (51 per cent) also reported that it made fieldwork more difficult” (2018: Seitenzahl fehlt). On the one hand I experienced the ability of my German family, and especially my children, to adapt easily to the research context. On the other hand, social involvements and interactions become much more multiple (and sometimes more confusing), when more social actors have to be integrated socially in the field of research. This chapter is about the ways in which I learned to deal with different forms of sociality through becoming and being a mother in the field context. When thinking of being a parent in a context of ethnographic field research, one quickly comes to the idea of the researcher who brings her children to a foreign context. But it is also possible vice versa –one might become a mother by fostering a child in the research context itself. Further, one can be fostered oneself as a social child in the local context. I experienced all three situations and will in the following unravel the interconnectedness of understandings of becoming a child, a foster mother, a biological mother and a social grandmother, all in the research context. Signe Howell (2006) described three ways of kinning in transnational adoption. The three ways she mentions are kinning by nature (through blood, genetics, birth), kinning by nurture (such as through shared food and care), and kinning by law (through legal transactions). All three ways are incorporated into biological parent-child relationships; adoption refers only to the latter two. In my research context, people put adoption on a level with “giving away” a child to somebody else and in this way abandoning the child. They explained to me that they would not act in this way. Instead, they might send a child temporarily to someone else in the sense of “lending”. According to this local distinction and my own experiences, which do not fit Western definitions of adoption, I prefer to speak about child fostering, meaning (temporarily) caring for a child in the sense of Signe Howell’s kinning by nurture.3 In this chapter, I want to go one step further and explore the social impact of kinning, which in my interpretation means the giving and receiving of social personhood. Through my experiences, I gained fruitful new insights into the making of kin relationships and personhood. I understand personhood with Michael Lambek in “the sense that the social is also the interpersonal; persons are only persons in the context of and in relation to other persons. […] in other words, interaction, 3

For further explanation of conceptions and examples of child fostering in West Africa see Erdmute Alber, Jeannett Martin and Catrien Notermans (2013) and Erdmute Alber (2018). For definitions of parenthood and parenting roles in West Africa, see Esther Goody (2013).

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especially mutual acknowledgement, is central to personhood” (2015: 303, original emphasis). I show in the following, with a focus on those “mutual acknowledgements” in kin based relationships, the ways in which my filial and parenting roles in the field were based on concrete actions and resulted in assuring personhood to myself and to my children. Not being kinned as a relative would mean not receiving social personhood, with the exception of being acknowledged as a guest in the local society of Asséré. As a guest, one is not able to interact as a member in family settings.4 Constituting personhood through social interaction can be defined as a universal “experience of the subject in its various modalities and in a variety of settings” (Jackson and Karp 1990: 27, original emphasis). The experience of being parented and parenting in my research setting retraces processes of social positioning, emerging and reconfiguring personhood (for other experiences of ethnographical learning through involvement, see Häberlein 2014). In this chapter, I argue that giving and receiving personhood, as a mother as well as a child, is a process of affiliation, mainly driven by the social interactions of parenting (Goody 2013) and kinning (Howell 2006). As a result, personhood enables an individual to act as a persona in a social context, including the freedom and duties belonging to this social status in a given cultural setting. In contrast, an individual, being neglected or even de-kinned by its social surrounding, may be unable to acquire the social status of an adult, a free or honorable person (see Häberlein 2016: 233-237 for the social process of de-kinning). Giving and receiving personhood in the sense of Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp (1990) would mean a mutual process of negotiation and attribution in the social network of relationships, even in the context of participant observation. In sum, doing field research with children, especially in sectors of kinship studies, is a challenge with social implications. These implications can contribute to developing an understanding of the field on a different level. Through field trips spread over more than ten years, in which I first went alone, then with one child and finally with two, I consolidated the family relationships between my German family and our social relatives in the Togolese village.5 The topic of this chapter 4

Nevertheless, there are lots of different status positions of social decent, age and gender in Kabre society, resulting in different opportunities for interaction over the course of a person’s life. I come to this later in the text.

5

Concerning the compatibility of family and field research through my employers and funders, my case was treated in the following way: flight tickets, the cost of the local nanny/housemaid and medical treatment (vaccinations, malaria prophylaxis, overseas health insurance) for the children were expenses that were covered in four of the five field trips through the research project (German Research Foundation) in which I was employed. Extra funds were applied for and gratefully received. Travel expenses for

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is the role of the children and my own growth into motherhood and becoming a grandmother through parenting during the research process.

SETTING THE COURSE FOR KIN RELATED INVOLVEMENT IN THE FIELD Kin related involvement does not just happen in the field. It is, as I understand it retrospectively, an opportunity to domesticate somebody else – or, to express it more pleasantly: to integrate or incorporate (Carsten 1997) somebody. For that to happen, the person concerned must realize the assigned role (which may later on be kin based) and be willing to accept it. The offer and acceptance of a social role are mutual decision-making processes in the arising relational structure (cf. Weiss 1994). This firstly requires time and secondly has consequences for all of the persons involved that may not be foreseeable – including previously unknown responsibilities and contested decision-making. Both may occur in a research setting that can develop over several years. My Role as a Daughter In my case, I started conducting research as a PhD student in the year 2006. Over the years 2007 to 2008 I spent a total of one year in Togo, especially in Asséré, conducting ethnographic research on the issue of intergenerational relationships (see Häberlein 2014, 2016). The topic itself offers the opportunity for the researcher to be integrated into the prevalent regime of age-groups with their specified and assigned roles in Kabre society. This process was strengthened through the visit of my father to the field in 2007, and the resulting friendship between my biological father and my host father Simkoma in Asséré. Both men understood each other in their mutual fatherly roles. Simkoma accepted official responsibility for me as his foster daughter in Togo and thereby accorded me membership of his kin group, ensuring that my daily needs were met. In return, in 2009 my father paid the apprenticeship fees for one of Simkoma’s sons to become a driver. Since

other caring persons from Germany, like the children’s father and godmother were not covered. When I travelled as a lecturer guiding the group of students, the expenses for my child were covered by the University of Bayreuth, through the so-called overheads of the same research project. Applications to the Women’s Office and the Association of the University could not be approved because the Bavarian law for travel expenses prohibits the absorption of travel expenses for relatives of employees.

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then, both of my fathers have been writing letters to each other that they send through me. As a woman travelling alone, I was first classified as the “first son” of my German father but integrated as a sister into a line of brothers, Simkoma’s children. I was invited to sacrifice hens under the fetish for blessings – which women usually do not do. In the course of growing into social adulthood Simkona’s family provided me with some ground in Asséré, so that I was able to build my own farmstead (for details see Häberlein 2014). Normally only sons are given that honour. I accepted the offer and since then I have owned a homestead in Asséré. It was completed (as a habitable shell) when my later husband visited us at the end of 2007. It has been useful as an infrastructure for a research project that began in 2009, and I did all my research stays there with my first daughter, born in 2009. Through the birth and presence of my little daughter, my own status in the village as well as others’ rights and duties in regard to me began to change. First of all, fetish sacrifices were made in my behalf and in terms of the local cosmologic ideas there was no longer any need for me to kill any hens for fetish sacrifice and subsequent food myself. Being one step further along the life cycle, now in the status position of a woman having given birth to a child, I am no longer asked to take any creature’s life. My brothers are now in charge of doing it. Secondly, my brothers teased me, the “mother” of my biological child, as a girl who got pregnant without a steady connection to a man. This lasted until my husband visited us for three weeks in Asséré in 2009; from then on he was taken up as a son-in-law/brother-in-law. The role of being a son/brother-in-law is not entirely agreeable in this community, because of food and behavioral restrictions as well as being exposed to persistent teasing. My husband did not feel comfortable with this attributed role, whereas my children and I always very much appreciated the roles given to us. Nevertheless, he established some proper friendship relationships in the village besides my own relationships. Thirdly, it was only now that the women in Asséré accepted me as one of their own. They appreciated that I was breastfeeding my three-month-old daughter on our first trip in the year 2009 and asked carefully whether it is true that white babies are fed with the bottle and have to sleep alone in a room. I explained to them that this is also possible, but that not all parents act this way. At that time a young woman looked at me horrified and countered in an unusual direct way: “For a baby it is torture to sleep by its own!” Her dismay was like a piece of puzzle in my understanding of socialization and personhood. In a social surrounding, where there is always somebody around, one would rarely have the opportunity to learn to be alone. Even worse, being left alone could mean abandonment, as I will explain later.

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Fourthly, one wife of my host father, who unfortunately was childless, was always attracted to Jolina. She offered to me to take on the role of her grandmother, so that I could fulfill my tasks undisturbed. She said that she would always look after her – I could even leave her permanently if I wanted to – she would always assume responsibility for Jolina. Actually, her offer would usually have been made by my host mother, but she never got to know my baby, because she passed away in 2008. As I had chosen Gado as a nanny to care for the child in my absence, the wife of my host father at least came regularly in the evening, helping to bath Jolina. Last but not least, both of my daughters have been accepted as granddaughters by Simkoma and blessed under the family fetish, so that they both have local names: Jolina is called Teoubelou (girl of the rain) and Linnéa Essoessina (help us God). The well-being of my children is part of the spiritual responsibility of the Mahessi kin-group. They regularly do blessings for my children, my husband and me. My house is my responsibility and resource during field trips, and is looked after by my brothers in Asséré during my absence. In times of quarrels in the main compound, some of the family have slept in my house, while during times of festivities, they use my compound to receive visitors. Jolina received much praise for her behaviour on the fieldtrip at the age of eight in 2017. She was said not to behave arrogantly like other white children whom people had met, she ate everything, and she was never afraid of being in contact with either people or animals. People recognized that she knew how to participate, to communicate without language and to make herself useful (cf. Lydall 1993 on the social life of her daughter Rosie in the field). Four years ago, the whole village came running because Jolina was hollering. People thought she had been bitten by a snake, but she had just lost a card game (there is a similar account in Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016). People said they were curious about what kind of person my little daughter will grow up to be. They see the character of a person as being given by God and not shaped by social learning from other humans, like parents (see also descriptions in Piot 1999, Gottlieb 1998 and Riesman 1990 on this idea). This is indeed another idea of personhood, that is shaped not only by normative societal roles on the one hand and individual positioning on the other (see Fortes 1973: 287), but by the person as a spiritual being (Riesman 1990). Nevertheless, in the following I focus on the perspective of making personhood through social interaction. The visits from my father and husband from Germany, as well as bringing my children with me, helped to define my social position in the field (see Lydall 1998). Through the involvement of each single person from my German kin group in the research site Asséré, more network relationships were configured. With

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each additional person and every ascribed role – and role acceptance – the network of relationships consolidates further in a temporal dimension. In the process, my German as well as my Togolese family became first “extended” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 9), then more and more entangled. While my biological father and host father Simkoma are opposites in their fatherly roles, my German father is becoming increasingly willing to fulfill the parental role of financing the vocational training of one of my Togolese “brothers”. The latter therefore sees me as his sister and has taken on the social responsibility as the so-called “mother’s brother” (see below) of my children. As “sister” of my Togolese brothers and foster daughter of Simkoma, I felt responsible to contribute financially to cover Simkoma’s medical treatment in hospital in 2015 and 2018 and subsequently contributed to his funeral (in the form of paying for the casket) in February 2018. In 2019, I went personally to Asséré for the funeral ceremony, having been involved in the organizational and financial tasks together with my brothers. If one understands the kin group as a set of persons with whom one has built up and maintained relationships in varying degrees of intensity (Carsten 2000), my relationships with my brothers in Asséré are characterized through very different degrees of closeness and distance. With this I am no different from other members of the kin group Mahessi – the closeness of my relationship to my various brothers always depends on the need at the time, the current housing situation, migratory decisions, and also on temporarily changing sympathies between individuals. My Role as a Mother In fact, before my first daughter was born in 2009, I had already taken on my first parental role in Asséré. At the end of 2007 I assumed the responsibility for a foster child of another family living in the neighborhood of Asséré. Through occasional meetings in the village I became friends with Lélén, who has been passing by ever since and giving me small presents (water, fruits from the bush or straw she had cut to thatch my hut). Lélén has a biological mother, but her father is said to be “unknown”. In West Africa, the biological father transmits to his children their descent and ancestry and is responsible for providing them with shelter, sustenance and, from the sixth year on, for educational decisions; Lélén’s father – and therefore her descent – were unknown to her for a long time. It was only when she was in her early 20s that she got to know some of her fathers’ relatives. Her biological father had lived an unsettled life and was already dead by then. Neither her father nor his relatives had been engaged in her wellbeing since her birth. As a result, she had no financial support, nor ancestral belonging. In fact, she had an

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untenable position, without belonging to her father’s kin group – a very weak status of personhood. When Lélén was ten, her mother got divorced from her second husband and wanted to place Lélén with relatives to avoid burdening her new husband with the children from her previous marriages. To explain this: in normal levels of social obligation in West Africa, a stepfather is completely irrelevant for previous children of his wife, and consequently Lélén’s stepfather never took responsibility for her. Instead, her mother asked for care, home and belonging for Lélén. The foster father that she chose is a maternal relative to Lélén, so he belongs to the category “mother’s brother”, i.e. the maternal relatives of her biological mother. The mother’s brother (as a person and as part of the family lineage) is important for a person’s spiritual protection in West Africa, especially in Asséré. He has an ambiguous social position, as he can provide a place of retreat for his sister and her children in times of crisis, while also exercising power of control over his “sister’s” children (see also Radcliffe-Brown 1924; Goody 1959; Bloch and Sperber 2002). Charles Piot (1996) described how, during the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the mother’s brother in Kabre society even had the right to sell his sisters’ children as slaves. In my role as Lelen’s foster mother, I first paid school fees for her, that the foster family could not afford. Thereafter, I realized that Lélén was being physically and emotionally abused. In the compound of her foster family, she was burdened with herding the cattle, a work that is usually done by male adults in the Kabre area. While herding the cattle during the day, or when she made a mistake, she got nothing to eat; when the cattle grazed on the neighbours’ fields, she was beaten; spending a long time in the bush, she was exposed to the wild spirits of the bush. Shortly before I left in the year 2008, she explained to me in tears that she wanted to be hosted elsewhere. My then field assistant and I managed to arrange to be hosted at the home of the Solitoke family in the nearby district town. Before Lélén arrived, the Solitoke family were already accommodating other children, which in Germany would have been provided for by the youth welfare service in similar difficult circumstances. Unfortunately, this solution did not help after a while, because they could not free Lélén from the influence of her former foster family in Asséré. The common local topos calls it witchcraft. The former foster father was accused of being a sorcerer, a status position that was not contradictory with his role as head of the quarter in the village of Asséré. The problem was that Lélén was attributed the ability to be accessible to special spiritual beings, whom her foster father from Asséré sent to her from a distance, to get access to her new living environment in order to cause damage. One person said that she got this special ability during her long lonely stays in the bush while herding the

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cattle. People in the village showed me that further commitment from me was necessary to keep her alive. They explained to me that if I returned her to her former foster family at this point, she would fall ill. Because she was still a child, she could not resist the spiritual attacks of her foster father and she would be abused as a medium for his magic interests. Against the will of her foster father, who wanted her to return, I took the decision to keep on assuming responsibility for her. In 2009, Lélén was exorcized. This was quite a difficult decision for my husband and me, because we were afraid of traumatizing her with the treatment. Only after having understood that everybody – including Lélén herself – strongly believed that only this kind of treatment would allow her to be liberated from her foster father’s influence, did we agree to it. Afterwards she was brought to a local healer until we found her a place in a home for parentless children, in a city 30 km away. There she spent five years, went to school and completed the training to become a tailor. Her contact with the village of Asséré, with her local foster family, and with her biological mother were cut off for this period of time. Avoidance (due to temporary absence) as a mode of dealing with relational conflicts and of evading accusations of witchcraft is an appropriate resource (see Alber 2004; Häberlein 2007; Kroeker 2014). It does not matter how great the physical distance is, but rather how long and intensive the personal absence is, for example, whether or not one takes part (e.g. through communication or financial support) in other people’s lives, in spite of the physical distance. My field assistant, I and my husband, and our daughter Jolina have been Lélén’s only “relatives” through this time. In and around Asséré this case was known and everybody asked me where “my child” was and how she was doing. Her former foster father and his son did not agree to me removing her from their sphere of influence. I had to cancel my previously established research contact with them and continued only with courtesy visits. Indeed, at times I was scared because they made accusations that I had stolen their child. Other people from Asséré, however, were grateful to me for “saving her life”. After some years, Lélén’s biological mother also visited me to ask me to carry on caring for her child as a mother as well, because she was not able to do so.

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Figure 4: Caring for Lélén – protagonists and timeline.

Caring for Lélén meant that I had to give up my more or less neutral position as a researcher in Asséré, because I was now responsible for taking contested decisions over a minor person who now more and more belonged to me. At first, I felt happily domesticated in the local context, then I felt burdened by being forced to take responsibility in conflicting situations. Gradually I got used to this process, becoming a mother and decision maker for Lélén, which I could not have foreseen

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before. Lots of discussions and counselling with my husband, my field assistant, the Solitoke family and my host father helped me to proceed in this way to care for Lélén. With time I felt confident to resist and take action in the still conflicting relations with Lélén’s foster family in Asséré. In the end, I learnt how to act in very difficult kin-related settings, including cases of witchcraft, through all this engagement – but it did take time. Lélén transformed through our commitment from a marginalized, malnourished working child to a social person of value. As a child without kin-related advocates from her fathers’ side, Lélén was in a position of vulnerable status. Her biological mother, who always visited me during my stays in Asséré, was hoping that her foster father would have given her the status of a “child of” a socially accepted person. Through his abuse of Lélén, he made her into a lonely cowgirl, a child of the bush, leaving her with no social belonging in the status of a nonpersona. My hybrid status as a white foreign woman, but also as an inhabitant of Asséré, helped to define her socially as a child of Anansara Belou (my local name). Through me she still gained no male ancestry, but at least she obtained a reliable belonging, while her biological mother hoped that I would go one step further and take her to Germany. She was disappointed that I did not, which led me to feel some resentment. Indeed, my husband and I did discuss adopting Lélén legally as well, but we saw that we would not have the ability to do so because our financial and legal means were limited at the time. Nevertheless, Lélén and I continued calling each other weekly and over several years. She let me take part in her life very intensely and told me all about her teaching, her friends and her love affairs. She would always ask for my opinion. While her relationship with her chosen husband has been seen critically by both the Solitoke family and by me, she became pregnant and gave birth to her first child in July 2017. My Role as a Grandmother At the end of July 2017, my children and I went back to Asséré, together with Lélén, her husband and her baby. After nine years of absence, it was time to visit her former foster family in the village and to reintegrate her socially. Now, as a young wife and mother, she needed a social ancestry as evidence of her maturity, particularly as there had been difficulties before. In times of marital conflict, a married woman can return to her father or her brother(s) in her ancestral homestead. There she stays until her husband comes to take her home again. This process is shameful for the husband, because once arrived at his in-laws’, he is questioned about why his wife does not want to return to him anymore. Such discussions sometimes take days, and in the end the husband has to give local beer to his

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in-laws to excuse his negative behaviour with regard to his wife. This kind of social insurance would only work for a woman if her relatives had already been informed and accepted that she is married and has a child. This was needed for Lélén, also in order to show to her husband that she is not a single person but a person with origins, ancestry and belonging. As her fathers’ relatives were still not available, with her biological mother’s agreement, her foster father in Asséré again took on the role of her family of origin. Now my only task was to bring her back to Asséré to show what had become of her. At the same time, the fact that she had become pregnant so quickly, without first introducing her husband to the community, could again have led to rejection. The young man was on trial and her foster family wanted to blame me for the fact that the couple had not been married properly before the birth of the child. We had to answer for that to her biological mother and her foster father. This lasted over several weeks. My older brother explained to me that he sees this as the biggest advantage of being grown up and reaching the life stage of adulthood: one can operate in negotiations by oneself, and he celebrates inwardly when he makes it through difficult negotiations and has spoken well and smartly. I on the contrary found these grueling negotiations a great strain, but was praised by “my own people” every time I succeeded in making a smart move in the line of argumentation. During a number of the negotiations, I was nevertheless much supported by two of my brothers. In the end, the new couple was approved, Lélén’s belonging to the kin group was confirmed and her first child was blessed and accepted by her foster father. It was a hard journey, but absolutely necessary for her to be legitimized as a wife, mother and kin member of the village. Now she will be able to ask for help for herself and her children in case of any troubles. As a researcher, I learnt how to deal in familial conflicts as an adult person. Being integrated in my own sibling group enabled me to negotiate further belonging for my grown-up child Lélén. Testimony through companionship and social integration within biographical decision-making processes are essential elements in the creation and consolidation of the personal legitimacy of a social being. This process means, in other words, receiving personhood. These changes in the life course of Lélén also had effects on me and on both of my biological daughters, Jolina and Linnéa. In August 2017, not only was Lélén given a new status position with our help, but we also were newly socially defined. I myself became a grandmother during this field trip. Responsible for both of my own children (eight and two years old at the time), and for the two children of my household help Gado (six and three years old at the time), and for Lélén with her newborn, we spent the whole of August 2017 in Asséré. It was now my job as a grandmother, and also Jolina’s task as Lélén’s little sister, to look after the baby

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while her mother was showering, doing laundry or fetching water. I admired Jolina’s equanimity and dedication about holding Lélén’s baby or reading in German for her little sister Linnéa. Doing so, she supported me, so that I was able to conduct interviews. At night if the baby was crying, it was my task to calm Lélén, rubbing lavender and caraway oil on her stomach and feeds and giving her strengthening homeopathic powders to help with her convalescence after the birth. I was glad that I did not have to deal with heavier health-related issues on her or any of the children. This form of participant observation more or less tied me to the farmstead during the field trip. Instead, we were constantly visited, but it was a logistical and organizational tour de force to visit other farmsteads and see the remotest people. However, I was the only one who was worried about that. People explained to me that I now have the social position of a grandmother, and it is not my job to make visits, but to receive guests (cf. Notermans 2004 for the tasks and changing status of becoming a grandmother in Cameroon). Because of my restricted movements, I conducted interviews in my own homestead, doing research without making observations far from my own compound. In 2019, when only Lélén and her toddler were with me, I was again much more flexible. Lélén then stayed in my homestead while I went off to make visits – a position that again emphasized her belonging to me.

CONCLUSION: SOCIAL ROLES AND INTERACTIONS DURING THE (FIELD) LIFE COURSE On the way through social interactions there always are decisions that are taken by oneself or others. As Florence Weiss (1994) describes, there is a mutual process of demanding and accepting social relations. In my case all my obligations were legitimized morally, not in law. As Simkoma’s foster daughter, I was asked for advice and financial contributions by my social brothers when our father fell ill, and when he finally died in 2018. As Lélén’s foster mother, I did not have any legal power of attorney over her, so it was not possible to take her to Germany. But here again, I was included in every decision-making process concerning her future, even at a distance. I financed her living in the children’s home by paying the annual fees, and I continued to support her financially during her time as a bachelorette in the city, paying the rent for her room, plus the basic equipment of furniture, cookware and a sewing machine. Since her marriage her husband is responsible for the finance and I am simply the insurance in case of a crisis. As a researcher I went through the following social roles in Asséré (see Epple 2013 for a similar account of socialization in the Hamar society of Ethiopia): at

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first, I was seen as the “first born son” of my German father (as a female person travelling alone), later on as a domesticated and integrated “foster daughter” of Simkoma. Then, in 2007, when I was engaged with the renovation of the access road to Asséré, I was treated as a “wife” of my social father Simkoma. As a foster mother of Lélén, I retained a hybrid role as a “white woman”, much like the role of a caring “father”, being responsible for her education, accommodation and nutrition. Finally, Lélén gave me the status of a “grandmother” in 2017. As Marilyn Strathern (1995) argues, gender and social roles are defined according to quality scales that go by actions and relationships. One has to grow into being a parent or grandparent, as my story with Lélén tells. Michael Lambek argues, regarding researching the field of shamanism: “In learning the techniques of the shaman and in performing as if one were a shaman – thus insincerely or without conviction – one eventually surprises oneself by becoming a shaman, by realizing oneself as one, by discovering that one is a shaman. Shamanistic performance becomes serious” (2015: 181–182, original emphasis). In analogy, in the field of intergenerational relationships, my relationship to Lélén was firstly a personal engagement, that transformed into me becoming and finally being a mother. On a methodological level and then more as a research finding, I want to point to participant observation in social (and kin related) contexts as being characterized by a multiplicity of relationships. In this chapter, I have exemplified my roles as daughter, mother and grandmother, in the field as well as within my German family. It is important to know that every life decision has an impact on the other people in the social (kin-related) network and that the social repositioning thus goes on again and again (Alber 2016). Only in a research setting that continues over a long period is it possible to understand this as a process. Over the years, the relationships I studied and at the same time lived in became more and more complex. That is why I speak about my entangled family. In this sense, Mari Korpela also suggests: “Private and professional lives are thus very much entangled and this has significant consequences, not only for the ethnographer but for accompanying family members, which extend beyond the end of the research project itself” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 14). Asséré and its inhabitants, who are in a way related to us, are still an often discussed topic in my family, both in Togo and in Germany. In my experience, one needs to endure conflicts and learn to handle them. It can also be exhausting to become part of the entanglements that arise through different loyalties, competitions, kinship relations and overlapping lines of conflict in a village community. When am I researching? When am I simply an aggrieved individual? Nevertheless, this entanglement teaches one how to creatively and adequately handle social inequalities, to choose one’s words cleverly and to understand how social movement space for “relatives” can be negotiated. I

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was constantly accompanied through situations of conflict by some of my brothers, who for example assisted me in my social interactions with Lélén’s rhetorically skillful foster father. The challenge was to keep Lélén and her biological mother away from the foster father, for their wellbeing, without losing their membership of his kin group. I have learnt that testimony and social integration within biographical decision-making processes are essential elements in the creation and consolidation of personal legitimacy as a social being. I temporarily chose avoidance for Lélén as a means of dealing with her transgressive foster family and for evading accusations of witchcraft. I had the opportunity to gain deep insights into the concrete negotiation processes of kinship and conflicts through these intensive kin-based relationships, as Simkoma’s social daughter and therefore as sister of my brothers in Asséré, as well as through being Lélén’s social mother. I learned to understand personhood through interactions with my kin group in Asséré, as a network of shared responsibility for children, for elders and siblings. I experienced the adjective “shared” as being constantly in process. Giving personhood and social status, I experienced in the local context as the right and duty of social adulthood. Receiving personhood means, in contrast, being accepted into a specific status position, even for and by minor persons like children. As a socially incorporated researcher over several years in Asséré, I passed through different status positions. In this way, I would conclude, a human’s life cycle is deeply embedded into processes of giving and receiving personhood.

REFERENCES Alber, Erdmute (2004): “Meidung als Modus des Umgangs mit Konflikten.” In: Julia Eckert (ed.), Anthropologie der Konflikte. Georg Elwerts konflikttheoretische Thesen in der Diskussion, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 169–185. Alber, Erdmute (2016): “Vital conjunctures and the negotiation of future. Rural girls between urban middle class households and early marriage.” In: Nadine Sieveking (ed.), Vital conjunctures. Gender in times of uncertainty, Leipzig and Halle: DFG SPP 1448 Working Paper Series No. 18, pp. 17–27. Alber, Erdmute (2018): Transfers of Belonging. Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century, Leiden: Brill. Alber, Erdmute/Martin, Jeannett/Notermans, Catrien (2013): Child Fostering in West Africa. New Perspectives on Theory and Practices, Leiden: Brill.

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Bloch, Maurice/Sperber, Dan (2002): “Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions. The Mother’s Brother Controversy Reconsidered.” In: Current Anthropology 43/5, pp. 723–748. Carsten, Janet (1997): The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Carsten, Janet (2000): Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epple, Susanne (2013): “Role play in the field.” In: Ivo Strecker/Shauna La Tosky (eds.), Writing in the field. Festschrift for Stephen Tyler, Berlin: Lit, pp. 39– 50. Fortes, Meyer (1973): “On the Concept of the Person among the Tallensi.” In: Germaine Dieterlen (ed.), La Notion de la Personne en Afrique Noire, Paris: Edition de Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, pp. 283–319. Goody, Esther (2013): “A framework for the analysis of parent roles.” In: Erdmute Alber/Jeannett Martin/Catrien Notermans (eds.), Child Fostering in West Africa. New Perspectives on Theory and Practices, Leiden: Brill, pp. 21–59. Goody, Jack (1959): “The Mother’s Brother and the Sister’s Son in West Africa.” In: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 89, pp. 61–88. Gottlieb, Alma (1998): “Do infants have religion?” In: American Anthropologist 100/1, pp. 122–135. Häberlein, Tabea (2007): “Das abgewandte Gesicht. Konflikt und Meidung in Zuunchangai Sum (Mongolei).” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 132/2, pp. 287– 314. Häberlein, Tabea (2014): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhab. Ein Plädoyer zur ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 127–154. Häberlein, Tabea (2016): Generationenbande. Ordnung, Praxis und Geschichte der Generationenbeziehungen bei den Lama (Kabɩye) im nördlichen Togo, Berlin: Lit. Howell, Signe (2006): The Kinning of Foreigners. Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jackson, Michael/Karp, Ivan (1990): “Introduction.” In: Michael Jackson/Ivan Karp (eds.), Personhood and Agency. The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 14, Stockholm: Almquist & Wicksell, pp. 15–30. Korpela, Mari/Hirvi, Laura/Tawah, Sanna (2016): “Not alone. Doing fieldwork in the company of family members.” In: Suomen Antropologi 41/3, pp. 3–20. Kroeker, Lena (2014): “Meidung als Alltagshandlung in langfristigen Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen. Schwangere Frauen mit HIV/AIDS und ihre Kommu–

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nikation in asymmetrischen Machtverhältnissen.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 139, pp. 179–198. Lambek, Michael (2015): The ethical condition. Essays on action, person and value, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lydall, Jean (1993): “Versöhnte Kontraste. Mit meinen Kindern bei den Hamar Äthiopiens.” In: Marie-José van de Loo/Margarete Reinhart (eds.), Kinder. Ethnologische Forschungen in fünf Kontinenten, München: Trickster, pp. 18– 44. Lydall, Jean (1998): “From being ‘other’ to being ‘mother’. An ethnographer’s experience of otherness.” In: Paideuma 44, pp. 69–75. Lynn Christopher D./Howells, Michaela E./Stein, Max J. (2018): “Family and the field. Expectations of a field-based research career affect researcher family planning decisions.” In: PLOS ONE 13/9: e0203500. Notermans, Catrien (2004): “Sharing home, food, and bed. Paths of grandmotherhood in east Cameroon.” In: Africa 74/1, pp. 6–27. Piot, Charles (1996): “Of slaves and the gift. Kabre sale of kin during the era of the slave trade.” In: Journal of African History 37, pp. 31–49. Piot, Charles (1999): Remotely Global. Village Modernity in West Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. (1924): “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa.” In: South African Journal of Science 21, pp. 542–555. Riesman, Paul (1990): “The Formation of Personality in Fulani Ethnopsychology.” In: Michael Jackson/Ivan Karp (eds.), Personhood and Agency. The Experience of Self and Other in African Cultures. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 14, Stockholm: Almquist & Wicksell, pp. 169–190. Strathern, Marilyn (1995): “Gender. Division or Comparison?” In: Nickie Charles/Felicia Hughes-Freeland (eds.), Practising Geminism. Identity, Difference, Power, London: Routledge, pp. 42–63. Weiss, Florence (1994): “Die Beziehung als Kontext der Datengewinnung. Ethnopsychoanalytische Gesichtspunkte im Forschungsprozess.” In: Gregor Spuhler (ed.), Vielstimmiges Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Oral History, Zürich: Chronos, pp. 23–47.

Falling in and out of Sync in Upland Laos Relative Immersive Processes and Immersive Processes with Relatives in a Khmu Village Rosalie Stolz

This chapter1 turns attention to the ways in which processes of immersion, celebrated as the “hallmark of the discipline” (Okely 2012: 2), are productively shaped by the fieldworker’s companions and interlocutors in the field, and thus influence the production of ethnographic knowledge. Far from a linear progression, immersive processes in the field are shown to be relative to the social encounter, on the one hand, and to the accompanying relatives, on the other. Given that fieldwork situations are inherently relational, analytical reflection on the many sources and facets of immersion is thus far a largely underused source of ethnographic knowledge (Häberlein 2014). The form that the incorporation into the field – in the conditions of accompanied fieldwork – takes can provide insights into a broad range of ethnographic phenomena. In order to consider the analytical benefits of reflecting upon the impact of the anthropologist’s accompanying family members upon immersive processes and, thereby, upon ethnographic insights, I will draw on selected cases from my fieldwork on kinship and sociality among the Khmu Yuan in northern Laos2; our semi-inclusion into a local kin group, my husband’s 1

My warm thanks go to my coeditors, Fabienne Braukmann, Katja Metzmacher and Michaela Haug, for their close reading and their valuable comments on the first draft. I am also indebted to Paul-David Lutz, who has contributed insightful remarks and questions that were ethnographically to the point and informed by his own recent research in a Khmu village.

2

Fieldwork was made possible by a full PhD scholarship and additional support granted by the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities Cologne. The monthly stipend allowed us to live in northern Laos, while ongoing expenses in Germany were covered

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discordant view on gifting and, finally, our son’s non-age-typical behaviour will highlight the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork as what Laura Messeri, in her exploration of (physical) resonance, calls “falling in and out of sync” (2017: 133).

CONSPICUOUS IMMERSION AND ACCOMPANIED FIELDWORK In her retrospective account of fieldwork trends since the 1980s, Janet Carsten gave voice to concerns about the changing conditions of fieldwork, most notably the increase of multi-sited studies in urban settings, and their implications for the process of immersion: “I suggest that there is a strong connection between the village study and the idea of fieldwork as total immersion – and this may also be what underlies the professional concern about fieldwork. I would not argue that something like total immersion, or at least ‘thick fieldwork’, can only be achieved in a small community, but rather that full participation for a year or more in village life is likely to result in a more all-round knowledge of at least some of its inhabitants and their preoccupations (and probably with less active initiative required from the ethnographer) than the same amount of time based in an urban setting or moving between sites to study a particular institutional nexus or set of activities.” (2012: 11–12, original emphasis)

Janet Carsten presents “total immersion”, a term that is notoriously difficult to pin down, by way of expressions that point to its holistic nature as entailing “full participation for a year of more” leading to “more all-round knowledge” (2012: 11– 12, emphasis added). Judith Okely also uses the word “total” in order to emphasize the all-encompassing experience of immersing oneself into the field: “Long-term immersion through fieldwork is generally a total experience, demanding all of the anthropologist’s resources; intellectual, physical, emotional, political and intuitive. The experience involves so much of the self that it is impossible to reflect upon it fully by extracting that self.” (1992: 8) This immersion of the self also includes “the more intangible inner experience”, including sensual and bodily experiences (ibid: 15). Yet who exactly is that anthropological self? While some implications of the common anthropological imaginary of “immersion” have been criticized, most

by private savings. My husband took unpaid parental leave for one year to accompany me to the field site and take care of our son.

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notably its tendency to reify the fiction of a naturally bounded field (Amit 2000: 6) or its impreciseness that obscures how boundaries are made or crossed (Helmreich 2007: 631), the multiple social roles and companions of the fieldworker-self have received less scholarly attention. It is a truism to state that immersion comprises not only of what the anthropologist does or attempts to do (“to immerse oneself”) but is also what is done to the anthropologist (“becoming immersed”). It is the latter, the “incorporation”, to which, as Janet Carsten (1997) has shown, the fieldworker needs to be receptive, or better, submissive. Her experience of living in a Malay house, described in an affectionate and lively manner, is, as she states right on the first page of the introduction to her monograph “accompanied still today by a more unnerving and powerful sensation of claustrophobia and intrusion […] it was a feeling of being taken over and controlled. ” (ibid: 1) Retrospectively, Janet Carsten reflects: “I have come to understand the sense of lack of control which characterized my own experience of life as a foster daughter as part of a more general process of ‘coercive incorporation’ through which outsiders of diverse origins are transformed into kin who are thought of as essentially similar.” (ibid: 5) Her own experience of becoming immersed, according to Janet Carsten, “revealed something about the processes I was analysing” (ibid: 275). By becoming a foster daughter, performing the local work actions, sharing in the daily meals, and actively partaking in everyday sociality, she began to understand the power of incorporative processes that lie at the heart of Malay relatedness and sociality on Langkawi Island. Interestingly, and this pertains to Janet Carsten’s work as well, kin ties that are produced in the field, the affiliations and affective ties to local interlocutors, are frequently mentioned in ethnographic accounts. The openness with which quasikin ties to locals are highlighted, partly as what could be called “conspicuous immersion”, is the more striking given the “silence on parenting in the field” (Dreby and Brown 2013: 10). It has been variously pointed out (Dreby and Brown 2013; Gottlieb 1995: 22; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 3) that there is a discrepancy between the foregrounding of fictive kin and other ties to interlocutors in the field that might enhance the credibility of the fieldworker and her account on the one hand, and the compartmentalizing of the fieldworker’s other personal relationships in the most private parts of the acknowledgement section on the other. With time and repeated returns to the field, both the kin at home and in the field (if this boundary makes sense) might become intertwined (see, for instance Alber 2013; Häberlein 2014). However, the ways in which being accompanied by one’s family changes the trajectories of immersive ethnographic processes warrants reflection upon the production of ethnographic knowledge. This might be particularly pertinent for the study of kinship.

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In 2014, my husband, my then almost-three-year-old son and I departed for a one-year stay in a Khmu village in the uplands of the northwestern Lao province of Luang Namtha to conduct my PhD research on kinship and sociality. The Khmu are Mon-Khmer speakers who reside mainly in the uplands of northern Laos. They understand themselves to be first and foremost shifting cultivators, yet have a portfolio of diverse economic activities, including cash crop production, searching for non-timber forest products, and temporary labour migration to lowland cities (Évrard 2006; Stolz 2017). Nevertheless, much of everyday sociality is centred on the village and the surrounding historically and spiritually “thick” landscape of fields and forest. Regarding kinship among the Khmu, but also neighbouring groups such as the Rmeet (Sprenger 2006), it has been emphasized so far that patrilineal descent, houses, and most notably, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage structure the local system of kinship (Lindell, Samuelsson and Tayanin 1979). My research started from the question of what this blend of anthropological kinship jargon refers to, with an emphasis on local practices and conceptions, asking the admittedly broad question “How is kinship lived among the Khmu?” Instead of providing a more or less comprehensive answer, which will be attempted elsewhere (Stolz n.d.), the relevant background will be provided in bits and pieces throughout the presentation of the following vignettes.

BECOMING A HOUSE AND TAKING A STANCE Where to house us was the most pressing question for the village headman Ta Man3, during our first encounter in August 2013. We met in his house, a wooden house on stilts, in the upland village of Kung Pliya in the northwestern Laotian province of Luang Namtha. This first meeting, during an exploratory research stay on which I had embarked alone, was meant to forge contacts and carefully introduce my research plans. We sat on a Thai plastic carpet facing the wall, along which the sleeping mats of the absent house occupants were rolled. There were many issues which I anticipated the village head could legitimately raise: he could inquire into my credibility as foreigner, the authenticity of the research permits and the burdens that the presence of a foreign researcher could cause. My previous experience with navigating the state bureaucracy, as well as accounts of the “research dilemmas” in post-socialist Laos which I had read, raised my awareness of possible sensitive issues (see, for instance, Petit 2013; Turner 2013). Despite of

3

All names, except our own, are changed.

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this, and to my great puzzlement, the most debated topic was the question of shelter: where could we be housed? We could neither be invited into a house to live with a local host, for I was accompanied by my husband and my son, nor could we reside in any other house except for a “workhouse” (which I did not grasp at that time). The same afternoon, I was led to a small house, apparently a workhouse, and took a picture in order to present my family with an image of what our home in the uplands of northern Laos would look like. Figure 1: The workhouse before we moved in. This picture was taken after the first meeting with the village head.

© Rosalie Stolz

While, at that time, I was amazed at how quickly the planned move into the village was accepted and tied to the seemingly difficult question of housing, retrospectively, the problem that was paramount to the headman seemed obvious to me: as a couple with a child we were a locally meaningful unit, the “house group” – there is no Khmu counterpart to what we call family. Only a suitable roof was missing to complete this status. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Khmu houses are more than mere architecture, but are associated with a kin group, constitute a social and economic unit, and are considered to be the abode of house spirits (Évrard 2006:

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122–132, 174–181; Stolz 2017: 56–84; Tayanin 1994: 28–37; for other Southeast Asian contexts see Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Sparkes and Howell 2003; Waterson 2009 [1990]). Like any other tutelary spirit, house spirits act as supervisors and benefactors yet might also sanction behavioural transgressions harshly (Stolz 2018). The house spirits have a strict point of view on which souls belong to a house, and they even dispose of “surplus souls” that, from their perspective, do not belong. Accordingly, the social rules of residence are in fact spirit rules. Ritual prohibitions regarding coresidence and sociality in houses are, thus, salient issues – constraining but also enabling social interaction and movement within houses. Entering another house just for the pleasure of it is highly uncommon except among closely related house groups. This is not to say that the Khmu are unsociable, it is only that the houses are not the proper place for some kinds of interaction. Here enter the workhouses; these comparatively smaller and lower buildings, called cɔɔŋ4, often including a small smithery and a low bench to the front, are the main locale of village sociality. Here the neighbours gathered to handicrafts and chat in the evenings or early mornings. Furthermore, many parts of rituals can only be conducted at workhouses, and certain foods – generally depending on taboos – should only be processed and consumed there. For outsiders, the workhouses are the places at which to stay; mobile vendors might stay for a couple of days and present their wares, and itinerant doctors might offer treatment there. Obviously, as we were outsiders, a workhouse was the proper place for us to stay. The workhouse we moved into was 16 metres squared and was set right in the midst of a neighbourhood, “embraced” by other houses. Located close to the crossing of several footpaths and an open space, it allowed us to watch passers-by. Fortunately, it remained the social hotspot of the village quarter after we had moved in. On “village taboo” (cri kuŋ) days, during which leaving the village is ritually prohibited, our workhouse was so well frequented that in order to descend from the house we had to slip between numerous persons sitting on our staircase. Needless to say, retreating was rarely possible and we could be observed pretty well, particularly because the size of the cracks between the boards of the timber walls allowed glimpses into our interior and let sounds diffuse easily – which was, of course, welcome given the fact that “good walls make bad neighbours”, as Christine Helliwell (1992) put it. As the public figures that we were at the beginning, particularly thrilling and frightening to the children, our house was often crowded with children – and not only to the amusement of our son.

4

Italicized terms are, if not specified otherwise, Khmu Yuan terms. The transcription of Khmu terms largely follows the one proposed by Jan-Olof Svantesson et al. (2014).

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Our son, Anton, was widely called Aay Ton or variants thereof, and we became referred to by the teknonyms Ma and Yoŋ Aay Ton, the mother and father of Aay Ton. Following the local habit of naming houses after the first born (female or male) of the current child generation, what initially had been a workhouse became increasingly referred to as “the house of Aay Ton” (kaaŋ Aay Ton). After we had developed a more nuanced understanding of who is related to whom in which ways, we began subtly to be treated, only half-in-jest, as a further house unit of a local kin group. Although we never truly entered the kin group of Ya Sii Hak, our initial host’s kin group, in the full sense of the term5, many (though surely not all) of the consequences of being part of a local kin group became a lived and felt experience for us. Later on, I began to apply kin terms to others and was also addressed with kin terms. At a moment in time that was hard to discern retrospectively, knowing about and becoming involved in kin matters mutually enforced one another. We became a wife-taking house to some and a wife-giving house to others. “Becoming a house” is thereby meant literally, as the social house group and the physical container are denoted by the same term for house, kaaŋ (see also Sprenger 2006: 80). While houses are named after children and it is the presence of children that makes a house “lively” and enjoyable to live in (Allerton 2013: 54–55), it is with increasing age that adults, and even more so elderly people, are associated with the houses in which they live. In the context of rituals, feasts, and cooperative work, adults are perceived and act as representatives of their houses. They are less free to enter other houses and have to keep in mind their responsibilities, their relative relations vis-a-vis other houses and their own house’s agenda. Obviously, there were many potential pitfalls for me, that our close neighbours and close kin group members tried to prevent me from getting into by providing what felt like an endless stream of well-meaning advice and demands. Attending rituals, I was seen as a representative of our house and kin group. This enabled me not only to attend particular rituals (and at times restricted me from visiting others), but it also brought some expectations with it, among which is kəh, the offering of gifts of liquor. Almost all rituals entail elements of ritualized drinking: alcohol, notably liquor and rice wine from the jar, mediate social relationships and contribute to the efficacy of rituals. During rituals that involve the interaction of wife-givers and wife-takers6 (and also in most other rituals), offering

5

Ritual integrations into kin groups are an established local means of becoming kin among the Khmu (see Stolz 2017).

6

Among the Khmu, kin are differentiated into three kinds from the perspective of an ego: those who belong to one’s own kin group (taay-hɛɛm), the wife-givers (eem) and wife-

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gifts of liquor proceeds according to a loose protocol: a host will honour his wifegivers with two glasses of rice whiskey. Yet he will not hand out these gifts himself; it is his close wife-taker’s7 task to offer these fluid gifts, as the supporter and mediator on behalf of his wife-giver’s house. Offering this gift is also a gesture of respect: it entails the polite address of the wife-givers, accompanied by a slight bow from the upper part of the body. It was this task of mediating by giving gifts of alcohol that was at the beginning often assigned to me. This kind of apprenticeship was at first challenging as it required me to remember the names and add the right terms of address – the latter not from the host’s but my kin group’s stance.8 I was fearful of making mistakes, as this proceeded in busy and crowded ritual situations and under the condition of becoming inebriated myself as gifts of liquor are often reciprocated symmetrically – reminiscent of Magnus Fiskesjö’s (2010) coinage of “participant intoxication”. This becoming familiar with the facts of inter-house kin ties and house-groups turned out to be, in fact, learning by drinking. It shaped my conception of Khmu kinship as something that cannot be grasped from a bird’s eye view and only reveals its nature from an “involved perspective” (Stolz 2017: 138). Being relatively positioned, we were increasingly responsible for showing up at rituals and work events. At the same time, as we gradually became knowledgeable, the degree of supervision and social control decreased. With time, I came to develop a sense of embarrassment towards strangers entering the village and towards our wife-givers. Walking into the neighbourhood where many of our wife-givers resided was always an embarrassing but also thrilling journey. In fact, the odd mixture of diplomatic but also teasing speech during encounters with wife-givers in the open spaces and workhouses, and the many gifts of squirrels with which I returned to my home neighbourhood, characterized my impressions of kin-based sociality among asymmetrically related kin in the village. The remaining doubts I had about my feelings of embarrassment – was it just an illusion or an indicator of personal distress? – were dispelled when Ma Sen, a middle-aged woman who was usually far from showing embarrassment and restraint in casual interaction, and who always pretended that visiting a wife-giver’s takers (khəəy). The ties between wife-givers and wife-takers are asymmetrical in the sense that in socio-ritual terms, wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. 7

The “close wife-taker” (khəəy les) is ideally the ce (the classificatory sister’s son) or the person who comes closest to this position.

8

The hierarchy between wife-givers and wife-takers is intransitive, meaning that one’s wife-givers’ wife-givers might be among one’s wife-takers (see also Sprenger 2010). Adults are very knowledgeable in this regard: they know the relative kin status of any house to any other house in the village.

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house is simply a natural thing to do, made much ado when she took me with her on one of her rare visits to her closely related wife-giver’s house. She changed her clothes for this occasion, hurried down the path and entered the house as shy as she was excited. This and other observations allowed me to comprehend that embarrassment plays a major role in situations marked by difference, as is the case in encounters between wife-givers and wife-takers. The term pŋka (also coupled with raam) is an established topos in the repertoire of traditional trnəəm songs that allude to the embarrassment wife-givers and wife-takers feel for each other (see, for instance, Lundström and Tayanin 2006: 192). Usually learned during childhood, it could be called a “socializing emotion” (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015); the accusation of failing to show embarrassment has a vital socio-moral side to it: to not feel embarrassed, also put as to “not fear others”, is highly disapproved of (Stolz 2017: 230–231). This “emotional attunement” was part of our immersion process in the field – relative to how our life as a family in the field was formed.

DISSONANT VIEWS AND RESONANCE House units are not unanimous, harmonious wholes but consist of house-group members who might at times have different opinions on house-group decisions and inter-house relations. In-marrying wives, in particular, might have their former, pre-marriage, kin ties and solidarities in mind. A case of differing views that ensued in our house provided me with further food for thought. This was the case of Ta Khwaay. Ta Khwaay, an elderly man who was still actively hunting, gathering and helping in the fields, injured his foot when he was walking through the forest at the end of July 2014. As his wound did not heal, his sons’ wife visited us in order to ask whether we had any remedies for his wound. Yoŋ Aay Ton, ever content to be needed, packed a bag with tape and antiseptics and came with me to visit the elderly man. His wound certainly needed attention, and frequent redressing. In the meantime, during our fieldwork, Yoŋ Aay Ton had become a specialist in treating smaller wounds. His robust and continually restocked supply of wound dressings and medicines against pains, fever, infections, and coughs, ointments for wounds and for muscle relaxation became a viable alternative to the costly remedies the appointed village doctor had on offer. Not only was taking care of wounds a meaningful activity for my husband but also a welcome distraction in his daily schedule of looking after our toddler and house. After several days of care, the wound improved substantially. Meanwhile, our neighbours and members of our kin group verbalized their concerns: I should tell Yoŋ Aay Ton that he should stop going and

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offering his precious materials for free to this man, who was only distantly related. Ma Sen, a closely related, neighbouring woman, was particularly explicit, asking whether we had ever seen anything in return? What would our kin, our neighbours, our close wife-givers and wife-takers think of it? I replied to Ma Sen that Yoŋ Aay Ton felt compassion for this old man as he could not move. To Ma Sen, this explanation was ridiculous: “Compassion? For whom? Ta Khwaay, he has his own lot.” Aware of the significant role that talk and gossip play in shaping public opinion and reinterpreting the social state of affairs, I was alarmed. When even Ma Hak entered our house (which she almost never did due to the above-mentioned restrictions), obviously coming in her role as a wife-taker, I anticipated a social conflict: wife-takers function as mediators not only in rituals, as described above, but also during conflicts, among which are those within house and kin groups. After a bit of small talk Ma Hak came to the point, beginning with the already well-known onset of “tell him”: I should tell Yoŋ Aay Ton that he should stop treating Ta Khwaay, and so on. I was drawn into the unfortunate role of a messenger: given that my husband was convinced that he had not only the means to successfully treat this old man but also that he regarded this to be a moral imperative, persuading him to quit supporting the old man was a task doomed to failure. This was just another instance of restrictions on and demands on our behaviour and decision-making. Taboos restricted our possibility of occasionally leaving the village; any of our movements within the village or in the fields were noticed and often also commented upon – and of course, each person had, depending on her relative kin position, her own ideas about it. One of the key challenges of diplomacy, faced by locals alike, was navigating around this as elegantly as possible. While for me, as an anthropologist, my eagerness to adapt was tied to my eagerness to learn as part of a long-term fieldwork project, for my husband the manifold interventions were simply what they were, an annoyance. But there was more to it than this. What was upheld by Ma Sen was the need to think about close kin and neighbours first, of those who have given to us. In fact, transactions are, even when they are not duly noted down (as they are during larger rituals), quite well remembered and third parties are often well informed even over small instances of gifting. While, among close kin of the same kin group, the ideal of sharing prevails, the asymmetrical ties between wife-givers and wife-takers are expressed and produced through gifting. Yoŋ Aay Ton’s caring acts towards Ta Khwaay resembled an act of sharing that did not seem appropriate in this case, due to the distant wifetaking relationship to the latter’s house and some shadowy aspects of the recent history of the relationships between a house of our kin group and theirs (a

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witchcraft accusation of which I was not aware at that time). From Yoŋ Aay Ton’s perspective, the local social logic of gifting/sharing was confronted uneasily with the question of compassion: compassion was to be felt towards the needy irrespective of kin status. Seen from this angle, Ta Khwaay was not first of all a wifetaker to us but an elderly man whose descendants were not able or willing to care for him. Yoŋ Aay Ton also presented this argument to our neighbours, explaining his point of view and expressing his sense of obligation. Although this was a rather odd attitude to others, this story’s irony is that nothing ever happened. Ta Khwaay’s foot wound healed soon afterwards, and the visits to dress it came to an end. The question for me was why Yoŋ Aay Ton was not made as accountable as me in the daily navigating of social ties. An important aspect is that he was not fully aware of the relative kin status of this old man and its implications. Knowledge about kin ties, and their implications in connection with developing the skills of kin relating, is a precondition for reenacting those kin ties. With regard to both kinship and spiritual matters, avoiding knowledge means avoiding submitting to its content (Chua 2009; Stolz 2018). However, it was not only on grounds of his different level of knowledge about kin matters, that my husband’s behaviour was accounted for differently; his personal relations to his acquaintances, and his occasional not suspending judgement9, also had a profound effect. When, in the early days of fieldwork we were still struggling to keep faces apart, our interlocutors already had a fine grasp of us; they could easily observe us and see how we behaved in the constraints of the early days, adapting to a completely different social environment with a strong-willed three-year-old. All differences aside, with time the sense of what Unni Wikan (1992) has called “resonance” arose, a feeling for one another and a mutual attunement. His advantage as a non-anthropologist was that he did not struggle with shedding “the stifling preconception that can be a stumbling block along the way: that others are essentially different from us, to be understood only by means of their ʻcultureʼ; and that their words bespeak different life worlds.” (ibid: 471) Appreciated for being undisguised and wholehearted, my husband could choose not to follow the opinions 9

The question of suspending judgement or not looms large in the literature on accompanied fieldwork. Barbara B. McGrath (1998: 66) remarks that the ideal of suspending judgment might betray attempts to establish ties of mutual commitment to acquaintances in the field and is not likely shared by accompanying children (or other family members) anyway. See also David Sutton’s (1998) illuminating reflection on admitting judging while in Greece with his wife and child. When it came to his son’s diet and health, both he and his Greek interlocutors exhibited a notable stubbornness, which they worked out, however, in dialogue (McGrath 1998: 136).

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and concerns raised by some. In his well-kept diary, he jotted down my comment that he “can get away with almost anything”. This being my first fieldwork among the Khmu, I was strictly focused on understanding what went on, rarely comfortable enough to offer my own interpretations, voicing opinions but always reflecting and watching while interacting. While I was involved in ways which made me comparatively more responsible and positioned, the ways in which Yoŋ Aay Ton was incorporated were often based on interpersonal resonances and shared experiences.

THE TEASING LESSONS I always assumed that the local adage “children know nothing” (kᴐᴐn ñɛ pəə nɨŋ məh) was used to shield them from spirit intervention: by publicly claiming children’s lack of knowledge about spirit matters and ritual prohibitions, the children are supposed not to be held accountable for taboo transgressions by the ever-listening spirits (Stolz 2018). Only later did I understand that this saying was likewise applied to avert social harm to the children’s caretakers: children do not know the codes of kinship conduct properly; they might stumble across the middle of a circle of sitting adults; they might not apply the right term of address or might enter other houses indiscriminately – which adult villagers almost never do. I found myself using this saying on several occasions when I was embarrassed and felt the need to apologize. While many aspects of fieldwork, including the anthropologist’s own affects and engagement, can by and large be managed by the anthropologist (prominently described as “impression management” in ethnographic fieldwork by Gerald D. Berreman 1972 [1963]), the experiences and ways of engagement of small children, in particular, are often beyond the control of the anthropologist parent. Sanna Tawah (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 9) vividly describes her sense of exposure when visiting Cameroonian markets with her small son, where the trader’s curiosity and their attempts at pinching him caused him to show defensive reactions not deemed proper for the son of his Cameroonian father – a situation to which I could spontaneously add all sorts of personal memories. Though babies can scream relentlessly, both young and older children’s repertoires of what could be understood as misbehaviour is much wider and might cause concern for the observed fieldworker-parent (Linnekin 1998; Shea 2016; Sinclair 1998). The many stressful situations, most of which my husband had to deal with, presented for me a puzzle: what was it that triggered my son’s resistance? Our son was not happy about his lack of privacy and control over the social proceedings in

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which he was more patient than agent. The other point, on which I wish to restrict my guesswork, is the contingent incongruity between my son’s age and his behaviour; though still only three years of age, his behaviour was more in accordance with the local children of primary school age. The school boys he befriended regarded him as a minor and behaved towards him with the mixture of comforting and teasing that accompanies behaviour towards toddlers. In fact, it was this “misfit” that brought the differences in the social behaviour of children, depending on age, to my attention. Although the term for children, kᴐᴐn ñɛ, does not distinguish children of a few months from children of ten years of age 10, there are major difference in expectations of children’s conduct. Small children are usually kept close to their caretakers: bodily contact is frequent and children of Aay Ton’s age are still regularly breastfed and carried in slings by their parents, their father’s parents or elder siblings. When it is inconvenient to take them to the fields or the forest, and if there is the luxury of a paternal grandparent available, small children spend their days in the village with their elders, staying at the house except for occasional strolls to adjacent workhouses – a contrast to the Beng babies, who roam around for hours unsupervised, as described by Alma Gottlieb (Gottlieb, Graham and Gottlieb-Graham 1998: 123). As their primary playmates are other children, not adults, the small children of our neighbourhood are used to stunningly plain routines during schooldays. It is the older children, already capable of handling tools, who go with peers to search for wild vegetables, to hunt and to fish. They move around more freely and follow their own agendas. Children close to adolescence are supposed to look after and cope with smaller siblings and children. They are skilled in distracting angry minors and keeping them amused and also getting their own share of amusement – for instance through teasing them. Teasing is an established part of the major-minor interactional repertoire. Less humiliating than in the Tao case presented by Leberecht Funk (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015: 207; see also Funk this volume), the continuum of teasing ranges from slight cases of deception to more humiliating forms of teasing. One of the ubiquitous and sympathetic forms is the mocked demand “share your food with me” (phan o pə mah), which is not meant to train children to share but rather to successfully conceal what they have in order not to share it. Another form is deceptive and provocative remarks, such as pretending that a child’s mother will not come back from wage work in the district town and has left her child behind. In one case I observed other by-standing women suggest that the three-year-old girl in question should respond by stating that her mother was at the market buying her 10 Depending on necessity, developmental differences are communicated with reference to height, concrete age in years, and the ability to speak or to walk.

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sweets. The girl sat quietly, exhibiting an admirable degree of equanimity; she had obviously learned the lesson that Aay Ton had not yet understood. Aay Ton, who felt attracted to the children of primary school age, because they shared his ambitions and strivings for activity, was often subject to their keeping him comfortable and safe but also to their teasing him. He was easily provoked by teasing remarks made by adults and elder children which, needless to say, fuelled further teasing, in a vicious circle. Elsewhere (Stolz 2017: 92–94), I have argued that local forms of teasing raise the children’s awareness of the social skills of acting with restraint, showing self-irony and acting under the condition of social difference. Another lesson is that it is better not to take propositions at face value and perhaps better to avoid adults entirely. The degree of independence that he displayed on his return from the field, both from other children and from adult caretakers, made me wonder whether, in the end, he had begun to learn the teasing lesson.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION: INCORPORATION, RESONANCE AND DISCREPANCY One of the methodological implications of accompanied fieldwork might be that immersion is not a unilinear process that a solitary ethnographer-self goes through, which is why I have resorted to using the plural, “immersive processes”. Reflecting upon selected dimensions of the immersive processes that were key to my accompanied fieldwork in northern Laos, I chose three examples: firstly, the meaningful modes of social becoming; secondly, the baseline, and rarely conscious processes of mutual human attunement and resonance (despite difference); and, thirdly, the contingent circumstances that might also determine the limits of immersion. The first example, of becoming a house, comes closest to our common imaginary of immersion as a linear trajectory of gradually increasing immersion. However, it departs from it in that it does not begin from a single anthropologist, leaving her cultural and social baggage behind and becoming modelled and shaped according to local expectations of a female person of a particular social age. Instead, it embarked from the condition of arriving as a social unit in need of incorporation, or, more fittingly, a house waiting to be roofed over. The incorporative processes of becoming a house, in which we were more patients than agents, showed me the relevance of the institution of the house, and involved me in kin ties in ways that restricted my knowledge of other phenomenal fields but enabled me to grasp the complex view on kinship. Processes of becoming are indeed vital for locals themselves. To echo Konstantinos Retsikas, “Becoming-kin is both

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facilitated by and based on becoming of place: place is immanent in sociality.” (2012: 19) These places of kinship among the Khmu are part of a social topography characterized by a productive and life-enabling socio-ritual hierarchy. Furthermore, as has been pointed out with our becoming Ma and Yong Aay Ton, becoming kin was a pre-requisite for becoming persons in the full sense of the term. Its transformative power was hinted at by the example of the affective attunement to social difference, that is, the inescapable feeling of embarrassment that befell me each time I hosted our wife-givers or crossed their neighbourhood. The second example highlights that as well as relative positionality, through a process of longer-term involvement in the field, the anthropologist gets to know at least her regular interlocutors fairly well, perhaps making friends in the field, but that this is also the case the other way around: the interlocutors, in their own familiar surroundings, derive a thorough sense of the anthropologist’s and her companions’ temperaments and personalities. Beyond that, there is a level of attunement and “empathic vibrations” (Messeri 2017: 133). Unni Wikan’s (1992) concept of “resonance” was applied in order to approach this level, which is characterized by both its elusiveness and its powerful immediacy. It is perhaps its immediacy and inevitability that lends itself towards metaphors originating from physics. By drawing on her experience among planetary scientists, Laura Messeri poignantly describes the (physical) process of resonance: “Resonant objects act over a distance, exerting pulls on one another, making objects in different states move in the same way while remaining physically separated. When objects achieve resonance, they fall in sync.” (2017: 133) “Falling in sync”, while simultaneously being more or less separated in terms of space, culture, biographical experience, language or other parameters, speaks perhaps particularly well to the experiences of non-anthropologists accompanying ethnographers into the field. The efficacy of resonance points to the baseline of common being (possibly crosscutting species boundaries) which sows the seeds for mutual understanding and trust, and enables ethnographic encounters to take place in the first place. The third example, of the “misfit” of Aay Tonʼs behaviour into local patterns of sociality on the grounds of age and local “development theories”, bears resemblance to the first example in that it was presented as having contributed to illuminating age-related aspects of sociality that might have slipped my grasp had I not seen the ways in which my son was teased. Furthermore, it points to the contingency of being; the mismatch between the local categories and expectations of toddlers and the strivings and routines of my son was plain fact and could not be easily ignored. It continued to challenge both him and my husband as his primary caretaker. There are limits to immersion and they might take different guises, depending on age, for instance.

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To return to the metaphor of “falling into sync”, accompanied fieldwork is perhaps more likely to render visible the dynamics of falling both in and out of sync that shape living (family lives) in the field. Through bringing further persons to the field, other vantage points and modes of interaction, mostly beyond the fieldworker’s control, become part of the immersive processes as well. By highlighting the case of a disagreement, which had consequences that failed to appear, I have shown how the immersive processes of my accompanying non-anthropologist husband were different from, though no less intensive than mine in being based in particular on inter-subjective “resonance”. With the number of accompanying family members, contingencies during fieldwork are multiplied, as are the number of possible encounters and insights.

REFERENCES Alber, Erdmute (2013): “Within the Thicket of Intergenerational Sibling Relations. A Case Study from Northern Benin.” In: Erdmute Alber/Cati Coe/Tatjana Thelen (eds.), The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 73–96. Allerton, Catherine (2013): Potent Landscapes. Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Amit, Vered (2000): “Introduction. Constructing the Field.” In: Vered Amit (ed.), Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–18. Berreman, Gerald D. (1972 [1963]): “Prologue. Behind Many Masks, Ethnography and Impression Managament.” In: Gerald D. Berreman (ed.), Hindus of the Himalayas. Ethnography and Change, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. xvii–lvii. Carsten, Janet (1997): The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carsten, Janet (2012): “Fieldwork Since the 1980s. Total Immersion and its Discontents.” In: Richard Fardon/Olivia Harris/Trevor H. J. Marchand/Mark Nuttal/Chris Shore/Veronica Strang/Richard A. Wilson (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 7–21. Carsten, Janet/Hugh-Jones, Stephen (1995): About the House. Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Chua, Liana (2009): “To Know of Not to Know? Practices of Knowledge and Ignorance among Bidayuhs in an ʻImpurelyʼ Christian World.” In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15/2, pp. 332–348.

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Dreby, Joanna/Brown, Tamara Mose (2013): “Work and Home (Im)Balance. Finding Synergy through Ethnographic Fieldwork.” In: Tamara Mose Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 10–16. Évrard, Olivier (2006): Chroniques des Cendres. Anthropologie des Sociétés Khmou et Dynamiques Interethniques du Nord-Laos, Paris: IRD Éditions. Fiskesjö, Magnus (2010): “Participant Intoxication and Self-Other Dynamics in the Wa Context.” In: The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11/2, pp. 111– 127. Gottlieb, Alma (1995): “Beyond the Lonely Anthropologist. Collaboration in Research and Writing.” In: American Anthropologist 97/1, pp. 21–26. Gottlieb, Alma/Graham, Philip/Gottlieb-Graham, Nathaniel (1998): “Infants, Ancestors, and the Afterlife. Fieldwork’s Family Values in Rural West Africa.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 121–126. Häberlein, Tabea (2014): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhabe. Ein Plädoyer zur ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 127–154. Helliwell, Christine (1992): “Good Walls Make Bad Neighbours. The Dayak Longhouse as a Community of Voices.” In: Oceania 62/3, pp. 179–193. Helmreich, Stefan (2007): “An Anthropologist Underwater. Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” In: American Ethnologist 34/4, pp. 621–641. Korpela, Mari/Hirvi, Laura/Tawah, Sanna (2016): “Not Alone. Doing Fieldwork in the Company of Family Members.” In: Suomen Antropologi 41/3, pp. 3– 20. Lindell, Kristina/Samuelsson, Rolf/Tayanin, Damrong (1979): “Kinship and Marriage in Northern Kammu Villages. The Kinship Model.” In: Sociologus 29/1, pp. 60–84. Linnekin, Jocelyn (1998): “Family and Other Uncontrollables. Impression Management in Accompanied Fieldwork” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 71–83. Lundström, Håkan/Tayanin, Damrong (2006): Kammu Songs. The Songs of Kam Raw, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. McGrath, Barbara Burns (1998): “Through the Eyes of a Child. A Gaze More Pure?” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 60–70.

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Messeri, Laura (2017): “Resonant Worlds. Cultivating Proximal Encounters in Planetary Science.” In: American Ethnologist 44/1, pp. 131–142. Okely, Judith (1992): “Anthropology and Autobiography. Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge.” In: Judith Okely/Helen Callaway (eds.), Anthropology and Autobiography, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–27. Okely, Judith (2012): Anthropological Practice. Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method, Oxford: Berg. Petit, Pierre (2013): “The Backstage of Ethnography as Ethnography of the State. Coping with Officials in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” In: Sarah Turner (ed.), Red Stamps and Gold Stars. Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 143–164. Retsikas, Konstantinos (2012): Becoming. An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java, New York: Anthem Press. Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt/Scheidecker, Gabriel/Funk, Leberecht/Holodynski, Manfred (2015): “Learning (by) Feeling. A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Socialization and Development of Emotions.” In: Ethos 43/2, pp.187–220. Shea, Jeanne L. (2016): “Clean Your Plate and Don’t Be Polite. An American Mother’s Education in Early Childhood Parenting and Family Life in Shanghai, China” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 41–68. Sinclair, Karen (1998): “Dancing to the Music of Time. Fieldwork with a Husband, a Daughter and a Cello” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie B. Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 110–129. Sparkes, Stephen/Howell, Signe (2003): The House in Southeast Asia. A Changing Social, Economic and Political Domain, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Sprenger, Guido (2006): Die Männer, die den Geldbaum fällten. Konzepte von Austausch und Gesellschaft bei den Rmeet von Takheung, Laos, Berlin: Lit. Sprenger, Guido (2010): “From Power to Value. Ranked Titles in an Egalitarian Society, Laos.” In: Journal of Asian Studies 69/2, pp. 403–425. Stolz, Rosalie (n.d.): The Efficacy of Living Kinship. Book manuscript. Stolz, Rosalie (2017): Fear the Spirits, Love Each Other. Kinship and Sociality Among the Khmu Yuan of Northern Laos: University of Cologne, unpublished PhD thesis. Stolz, Rosalie (2018): “ʻSpirits Follow the Wordsʼ. Stories as Spirit Traces among the Khmu of Northern Laos.” In: Social Analysis 62/3, pp. 109–127. Sutton, David (1998): “‘He’s Too Cold!’ Children and the Limits of Culture on a Greek Island.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 127–138.

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Svantesson, Jan-Olof/Ràw, Kàm/Lindell, Kristina/Lundström, Håkan (2014): Dictionary of Kammu Yùan Language and Culture, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Tayanin, Damrong (1994): Being Kammu. My Village, my Life, Ithaca. Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University. Turner, Sarah (2013): “Dilemmas and Detours. ‘Fieldwork with Ethnic Minorities in Upland Southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos.’” In: Sarah Turner (ed.), Red Stamps and Gold Stars. Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia, Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 1–21. Waterson, Roxana (2009 [1990]): The Living House. An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia, Vermont: Tuttle. Wikan, Unni (1992): “Beyond the Words. The Power of Resonance.” In: American Ethnologist 19/3, pp. 460–482.

“We Will Go on Vacation, while You Work” A View from a South African Playground on the Ambivalent Reception of the Sani Pass Infrastructure Project Anne Turin

INTRODUCTION The research on which my extended family embarked in the South African countryside turned out not to be the recreational event it was expected to be by my nonanthropological companions. During my MA fieldwork on the impact of a road construction project on everyday lives in two local communities, I, a female anthropologist, was accompanied by my 20-month-old daughter, my husband, my mother and my aunt. The accompanying care-givers allowed me to carry out fieldwork in the company of my daughter and to conduct interviews undisturbed. Nevertheless, our experiences throughout this extended family fieldwork project included unexpected limitations but also sources of insight. My accompanying family members imagined their stay in South Africa to be a recreational, touristic endeavor. During the field stay our different expectations clashed and we struggled with the resulting tensions within my family and with the local community. I felt that I was dependent on the goodwill and cooperativeness of my companions for the care of my daughter, and I noticed the related restrictions in terms of time for research and access to the local community. Despite these limitations, our family life allowed us to explore and understand my field more deeply, and to view it from many angles; it made me aware of socio-spatial distances and local specifics of the continuing legacy of apartheid, which can be seen, for instance, in a daily life segregated by far distances between places of regular commute making having a means of transport crucial, enhanced by the segregated use of leisure places and which also has a decisive influence on the attitudes of local inhabitants towards the road construction project.

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DOING ETHNOGRAPHY WITH FAMILY RESTRICTIONS THE OVERCOMING OF AN APPARENT CONTRADICTION So, what does it mean for a researcher to construct “his field” with his family? Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997) made an important contribution to the self-reflexive critique of the ethnographic genre (Geertz 2017 [1973]; Marcus and Clifford 2010 [1986]) by focusing on the construction of “the field”. They concentrated on how the centrality of fieldwork and participant observation in our discipline has led to “the construction of a normative anthropological subject” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 11–12), which is subliminally guided by the archetype of the lone, white, male Euro-American middle-class anthropologist. Maybe it is precisely because of these subliminally continuing conceptions of what it means to do “real anthropology” that so few anthropologists show the external influences on their work, such as the adaptation of the research project to scholarship applications, the participation of co-researchers, the help of chance acquaintances or the support of family members who accompany the researcher on the field trip. There is obviously an anxiety about losing professional credibility if one writes explicitly about the influence of the family entourage (or other people’s support) on the research process (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 8). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson expose two other excesses that are a consequence of the anthropological centrality of fieldwork and participant observation and which need a critical review for a better methodological and epistemological outcome: “first, the radical separation of ‘the field’ from ‘home’, and the related creation of a hierarchy of purity of field sites; second, the valorization of certain kinds of knowledge to the exclusion of other kinds” (1997: 12). While my field site may seem remote enough in terms of its distance from the nearest city (cf. ibid: 13), the apartheid history and the sharp income differences in South Africa, together with the local tourism industry, have resulted in different social-infrastructural spaces, with western-style infrastructure reserved for those who can afford it. In addition to nature walks in the immediate vicinity of our residence, my family members in particular visited these “western-style places”. By seeking to spend their time as pleasantly as possible, they made their own encounters with the local community and with invisible racist entry restrictions to some of these spaces. Due to their liminal status as being foreign, and also due to the special composition of diverse social roles, my family members were sometimes allowed to transcend the social barriers that surround especially those spaces that are still used in racially segregated ways (cf. Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 11). Of course, I sometimes accompanied them, but if they had gone alone, they told me

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in the evening of their experiences. How could I have ignored this knowledge for my research, and for what reason? Although my plan was to keep work and private time separate, the whole research situation changed due to the presence of my family. I paid far more attention to organization, especially travel conditions and our accommodation, than I would have done if I had gone alone. What came out was a different setting for my research, not least because I chose a different place of residence, but also because of the demands and actions of my family members. In order to meet the requirements of my family, I did “ethnology by appointment”. Interestingly, this was also required by the local circumstances of my field site, where I was constantly required to commute between the workplaces in the business area and the houses in the residential area. However, “working” and “private/family” time became more and more intermingled (cf. Brown and Dreby 2013) and I tried to make the best of it and kept collecting data. Mari Korpela, Laura Hirvi and Sanna Tawah have shown that not only are the home and field mixed up by taking the family along (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 12–15), not only do children direct researchers’ actions in the field and the family find their own ways of adjusting to the fieldwork situation – but accompanying family members also “play a significant role in the knowledge production process” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 5). During field work our own routines encounter the everyday practices of our chosen “field” and often it is especially the interactions between these practices that lead our data gathering. As the family entourage brings with it a broadening of the social roles in which the field is entered, and therefore different routines that lead to different encounters, interactions and perspectives (not least because family members often enter the field with different objectives [ibid: 15]), their presence “affect[s] the data collection process and also the data itself” (ibid: 4). Although I agree with these authors that no factor can be trivialized as unscientific as it influences the research process (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 4), I want to concentrate here on the “interlocking of multiple social-political sites and locations” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 37) – based on Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” (1988) – because the company of my family members took me to places I would not have gone to without them (cf. Ghodsee 2009: 4; Katz Rothman 2013: 20; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 6–7). Being taken to places like this was of special importance for me because of my topic of infrastructure, which required me to get to know the racially segregated spaces that are so typical of South Africa, but which are no longer marked by signs or other references but by continuing social practices. To enter the field as an extended family also required significantly increased organization and financial expenditure. Nevertheless, I would sum up that the greater knowledge gained was worth the trouble and the

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additional expenditure. In this vein I want to contribute to the ongoing methodological discussion on the diversity of ethnological fieldwork procedures (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 18 and 35–40; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 5).

OUR WAY TO THE SANI PASS When I attended a research class about the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) world heritage at the University of Cologne that comprised the opportunity and (most importantly) financial support in the form of a grant based on the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scales for field trips to South Africa, it was clear that I wanted to take advantage and expand my experience abroad. However, my main concern was how to take my little daughter and meet her needs. One year earlier, my husband, our daughter and I had been in Stellenbosch and Cape Town to explore research possibilities as a family there. Although this was prematurely ended by the enormous Cape fires in 2015, there were two lessons for us – the next field site should be in the countryside as we expected to find more opportunities there to move around freely with a toddler and for the non-researching partner to spend the time more pleasantly, and that it would require an enormous amount of organizational and financial effort (Cornet and Blumenfield 2016: 2). In addition to the funding awarded, I successfully applied for a scholarship from the International Office of the university especially designed to make studying or researching abroad easier for students with children. This scholarship provided a lump sum of 1000€, so that the costs of my husband and my daughter could be covered to a certain extent. Unfortunately, my husband was unable to take enough time off from work, so I asked my mother to take over the baby sitting when he left. My mother didn’t want to come alone, so she asked her sister to accompany her. While we managed to cover our expenses as a nuclear family with the two grants to a certain extent, the travel expenses of my mother and my aunt had completely to be funded privately. The university research class was centered around research on UNESCO world heritage areas. I chose the Himeville-Underberg region, and to investigate the major infrastructure project of tarring the Sani Pass road, which crosses the UNESCO world heritage Maloti-Drakensberg National Park. My family knew this lovely rural area from previous visits and I expected to benefit from contacts already made there. The Sani Pass is a mountainous rough road in South Africa with no hard surface and is only accessible with four-wheel drive vehicles, so far mainly used for adventure tourism and sport. It is the only road connection between KwaZulu-

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Natal and Lesotho. Since Lesotho had tarred the connecting road with the help of Chinese construction companies and the two countries had agreed that the tarring of the Sani Pass would bring an economic boost to the region, the chief director of Integrated Environmental Authorisations of the South African Department of Environmental Affairs had decided in 2013 on an upgrade of the Sani Pass, which would have resulted in a regravelling of the road (among other measures; Dept. of Environmental Affairs 2013). In 2014 the South African Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs (Dept. of Environmental Affairs 2014) upheld an appeal of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport and Ezemvelo KZN (KwaZulu-Natal) Wildlife against this decision, and finally authorized the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport to upgrade the Sani Pass with a hardened surface (among other measures; it still has to be decided whether it will be concrete, asphalt or another material, due to the harsh weather conditions). However, this measure is highly controversial among the local residents on the South African side, who see not only the environment but also their subsistence endangered as most of them directly or indirectly depend on income from tourism.1 In spring 2016, the initial work on this infrastructure project started and we spent two months in the closely involved and interconnected villages of Himeville and Underberg, on the border of Lesotho. While my husband and my daughter flew from Johannesburg to Pietermaritzburg in order to shorten the travel time to Underberg to around six hours, I went there by car to take our luggage with me. In order to arrange accommodation that suited the needs of my daughter, but even more so the needs of my mother and my aunt, we booked in advance a small house on the outskirts of Underberg. That turned out to be a big mistake. When we arrived, the owners were abroad and therefore had not noticed water damage in the bathroom and the adjoining bedrooms. Since the mold had already spread and nobody was available to deal with it, we had to move and look for new accommodation immediately. A contact from previous visits helped us to find a house right in the middle of Himeville, which had even more space than we needed. Although it was a bit expensive, my husband and I felt under pressure, not only due to the shortage of time and the difficulty of finding accommodation that was still available, as our stay included the busy Easter weekend; we also felt obliged to offer my mother and my aunt comfortable

1

For more information on the Maloti-Drakensberg Park, see http://whc.unesco.org/ en/list/985 (last accessed September 7, 2016); to get a brief impression of the local controversy see the comments of Aldo Berruti (https://www.umzimkuluriverlodge.com/ blog/post/update-on-the-sani-pass-road-construction/) or of Russell Suchet (http:// www.sanilodge.co.za/DAsani.htm) (both last accessed March 17, 2019).

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accommodation in order to make their stay pleasant (cf. Cornet and Blumenfield 2016: 5).

ACCESSING A SEGREGATED FIELD Most of the shops and offices are located in Underberg, while business owners live in Himeville and the surrounding area; there is constant commuting between these places. Apartheid-based segregation of residential areas for “black” and “white” South Africans is still prevalent here.2 Underberg and Himeville are the only large border settlements with modern infrastructure, and their inhabitants are overwhelmingly white (see KwaSani Municipality 2016: 32 and 101–102). While business owners are predominantly white, workers are mainly Africans and live in the surrounding area (KwaSani Municipality 2016: 27, 36; Turin 2016: 9). 3 I had initially chosen Underberg as our place of residence in order to be close to the offices of the local tour companies. Due to the already short time span for my field research, additionally tightened due to my being accompanied by my family, I chose to use problem-centred and biographical interviews of experts to acquire information quickly (Meuser and Nagel 2009: 465–479; Schlehe 2008: 125–129). I focused on the local tour providers as experts on the Sani Pass excursions and usage. However, it turned out that the unintended move to Himeville allowed me deeper insights into the local society than would have been possible from Underberg. On the other hand, our move restricted my research in terms of contact and access to the African community, which would have been difficult anyway as a white family (cf. Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 9), as well as with intermittent possible language difficulties, as some members of the community

2

Despite the enormously racist content of the terms “white” and “black”, I use them here as they continue to prevail in political-social as well as in everyday language usage in South Africa (on the history of these categorizations, their political construction during the apartheid and their codification in the everyday discourse, as well as the perpetuated use of the terms even after the end of the apartheid, see Posel 2001a, 2001b). Like Deborah Posel, I also use the term “African” in the following.

3

The Municipality report for the year 2016 (based on statistic data from 2011) states: “Underberg and Himeville towns are the only formal urbanised nodes and house all formal (first economy) economic activities within the municipality. The areas surrounding these towns is [sic] characterised as large, tribal areas with an informal settlements [sic] pattern. These areas are completely reliant on Underberg for employment, goods and services” (KwaSani Municipality 2016: 36).

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only speak IziZulu. To overcome this imbalance, I conducted especially extensive interviews whenever I could talk to a member of the black community, such as for example the tour guides who work for the tour operators, and some of the hotel managers and staff; the mayor also gave me a precious insight into the village communities outside the two nodal points of Underberg and Himeville (Turin 2016: 7). Unfortunately, my access to the African community continued to be difficult, especially with regard to women and people outside the tourism sector (Turin 2016: 10; see also below). The move to Himeville also restricted the movements of my family, because without any public transport we were all reliant on our rental car to do everyday shopping or to make trips to the surrounding areas. Contact with people was always easy in the company of my daughter; without my daughter, I was only a white woman from a distant country that most of the South Africans I met had no personal knowledge about. But regardless of the color, economic and social position of the people we met, my daughter made me first of all a working mother, whose living situation was comprehensible to my interlocutors. My family members also found contact easy, as being in a company of a child highlights our shared humanity (Flinn 1998: 16; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 15). Conversation topics about everyday concerns such as the weather, “Where are you going?”, “Yes, you can pet the dog” and the like abound where there are children or family around.

FAMILY LIFE DURING FIELD RESEARCH “WE GO ON VACATION WHILE YOU WORK” The plan was that my husband and then my mother would take care of my daughter while I would do my field research. Although my daughter was used to spending some hours with my husband, and even more with my mother, this plan proved elusive. In the beginning she had to get used to the new environment, and I was, admittedly, reluctant to leave her for the first time. After we had settled into our accommodation, we all met my contact persons from previous visits together, we asked at the mayor’s office and the tourist office for information, and we contacted my first interlocutors in their tour operator offices. As already mentioned, the presence of my daughter made these contacts very easy and cordial. However, when it came to the scheduled interviews, I left my daughter with her father, because she would certainly not have the patience for hours of conversation about a road project. At home in Germany, whenever I left her with my husband, I always prepared our family backpack with her nappies, snacks, favorite toy, spare clothes,

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sun cream and so on, just as I would always check her outfit to make sure it suited the weather and purpose. By changing our roles abroad, I expected my husband to take over these tasks, but it turned out that he had a lot of questions and it took some time before this went smoothly. I found this stressful because the mental load left me worrying during interviews about how my daughter and my husband were doing. When my mother and my aunt arrived five days before my husband had to leave, we as the nuclear family had just got used to the situation in the field. During the second half of my stay the child care situation went better, not least because my daughter and her grandmother were more used to spending a whole day together. However, the situation between us adults became more strained. All of my adult family members sooner or later became bored. While this happened to my husband just when it was time for him to leave anyway, my mother and my aunt were soon frustrated when they realized the limitations on their movements. Leisure facilities in the area are not that bad, especially not for a 20-monthold infant. First of all, the natural environment is stunning, with the giant MalotiDrakensberg National Park at hand. Hiking, birding, fly fishing, biking and horse riding are the main activities on offer. You can also visit an 18th century church, a cheese dairy, a winery, a farm stall, and a country café with petting zoo and play area. Underberg has some little shops and fast food restaurants. You can also go to a handful of tourism resorts, which range from an eco-tourism backpackers’ lodge to big hotels, all of them having restaurants, play areas, swimming pools, and animals to watch and usually to pet. But these places are far apart from each other and from the villages, so you need to be motorized to reach them. Certainly, they are designed either for western tourists or for the wealthier white families in the area.

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Figure 5: “A map of Underberg and Himeville and other important stuff.” This map shows the main leisure activities on offer in the region - and that it is designed for western-wealthy tourists. Even though it is not scaled, you get an impression of the distances.

© Photo taken by Anne Turin.

My family most enjoyed being together and doing car trips in the area, as all my family members found it more exhausting to spend time with my daughter only around the house – more exhausting than they had expected anyway, especially since there were few leisure activities close by. My mother had expected her sister

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to help her with the babysitting. Until then, my aunt had had only sporadic contact with my daughter and it turned out that the two did not get along well together. Also, my aunt’s views on education differed from both my own and my mother’s views. Therefore, the situation became increasingly tense. I felt obliged to occasionally grant both a rest by taking care of my daughter myself and by organizing trips to the above-mentioned (western-style) leisure areas, for which the car was needed. Since neither my mother nor my aunt dared to drive themselves in South Africa, they also needed me to drive them there. Yet, as soon as I took the car to meet informants, my mother and my aunt felt bored and “trapped”. Over time, the tensions between us adults were sharpened due to our proximity – and a whole week of strong rain, forcing us to stay in the house most of the time, with two days of no electricity, did not make it better. I remember the constant questions about when I would be back, which resembled a return to my childhood days. Our stay corresponded to the busiest tourist season in the year in the region, so it was often hard to make appointments with my informants. It was even more difficult to invite local people to establish closer contact, as they were just too busy to meet privately. Only towards the end of our stay, we managed to meet once with a driver’s family for an afternoon-tea and another time with a business couple for a braai.4 In order to pacify my mother and my aunt, I tried to shorten the time I needed on my own to do my research as much as I could and to make the best of the situation. Luckily, I was able to use our trips to the resorts to talk to the managers about the infrastructure project while my family enjoyed the local amenities.

MORAL DILEMMAS AND NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE SEGREGATED COMMUNITY When my family urged me more and more to take them to the western-style leisure places, I started to think about what these workplaces, far from each other and from the settlements, mean for the daily life of the local population and their attitudes towards road construction. While we met only tourists around the tourist resorts and hotels, we met wealthier white families in the farmstall cafés and, after a brief chat about my child and our stay, almost always entered into a conversation about the road project, about which everybody was concerned. As already mentioned, being a white family was a particular impediment when it came to contact

4

A braai is a typical Southern African ritualized barbecue which is closely linked with friendship and gender norms of masculinity.

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with black families and women outside the tourism sector. Our chosen residence place in Himeville made that even worse (cf. Hauser-Schäublin 2008: 47). In Himeville, my family could enjoy long walks in the surrounding nature reserve, and visit one pub, one café, a tennis club (the café and the tennis club both also have a little playground alongside), and a big playground and soccer field. The latter turned out to be most controversial, as a compilation of my field book entries should show: We lived in an old house in the richer part of Himeville. At one end of the village, there is a big playground neighboring a soccer field. In the specific manner in which the village has been laid out, this pleasure and sports area functions as a kind of buffer zone between the richer part and the residential area of (still today) mainly white families, and the poorer part on the outskirts where most of the African families live in typical government low cost houses. On every trip to the business town of Underberg I passed this recreation area and I never saw any white person there. The first time my husband and my daughter came to play in the playground, a group of African male teenagers unambiguously told them to leave: “Hey man, you have your own playground over there (two of the teenagers pointed their fingers in the direction of a smaller one in the village centre beside the church and café). Go there, this is not for you!” On our next trip, all three of us together, we met six African women who eyed us suspiciously and a group of African children who watched us curiously. My daughter immediately ran to a rotating carousel on which two of the kids were already playing. In order to let those on the carousel platform rotate, one person has to run around on the outside to push – an exhausting activity at almost 40 degrees in the shade. I took on this task and asked every kid to hop on. The women answered this gesture with an instant change of mood and a nodding greeting towards my husband and me, although they still kept their distance. Their children instead looked for closeness with my daughter and apparently played with her casually. This pattern was repeated on the next trips to the playground. When my mother and my aunt accompanied my daughter most of the women showed respect to the elderly; they became more open and active and even helped my daughter to seesaw. But this time too there was no conversation – presumably because neither side was interested. When I asked my mother and my aunt later about their playground visit, they told me: “Oh dear, we simply didn’t think about talking to the women. We did not know it would be important for you.” Once we three women and my daughter were at the little tennis club play area in Himeville, which was always empty but was closer to our residence than the big playground, a group of African children passed by, with whom my daughter had played before. We asked them to come over, but their faces turned almost

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shocked and all of them shook their heads vigorously. Evidently, we had moved across socio-spatial boundaries that are no longer marked by signs but by persisting practices. It was shocking for me to see how much the spatial segregation from the apartheid period still continues more than 20 years after its ending – a circumstance I wouldn’t have realized so much without these playground visits, which none of us would have done without the presence of my child (see also Turin 2016: 10). Figure 6: Own picture taken at the big playground, March 28, 2016. Showing my daughter and two African kids on the carousel while I run around to get it rotating.

© Anne Turin

While the first contact situation described could have happened during a holiday trip as well, what came after was a development of interrelations that only comes with repeated visits and contacts over time. Although the African women we met on the playground always kept their distance, they nevertheless accepted our attendance by their nodding greetings and let their children play with us. If we met one of them alone in the village, she responded our greeting. One of them even waved her hand. It seemed that they just didn’t want to talk to us at this stage. When my husband and I tried to start a

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conversation with them, they simply passed by. White elderly people warned us and said it would be better not to use that playground: “It’s not well maintained.” When my husband, my mother and my aunt agreed to accompany me on this trip in order to look after my daughter, all of them thought about their stay in terms of going on vacation. None of them anticipated this development of interrelations/interpersonal contact situations which would go together with everyday life. But it turned out that they couldn’t just holiday. They had to deal with the local norms, values and everyday practices. Maybe they couldn’t find their standing there in this short period, and they didn’t need to, but they all found themselves in moral dilemmas regarding whether they should adhere to the dominant social pattern of racially segregated leisure activities and only attend those places that are deemed suitable for white people according to local customs. Without my extended family I would probably have focused on the economic restrictions of this sharp spatial segregation between work and life and, even more important, between black and white and the divergent social classes. The additional perspectives of my family members showed that there really was no public life in which everybody could easily partake, therefore revealing the social and everyday dimensions of the spatial segregation, and likewise of the existing infrastructure. During our stay, there was Easter, with a “communal” egg hunt, a flea market in Underberg and a country market with art paintings in Himeville that were almost exclusively attended by white people. And so were the tennis, polo and golf places at the Country Club or elsewhere in Underberg and Himeville. African people met on the soccer and recreational area on the outskirts near the little government houses to play soccer or to sit together with their friends and families. Many African families also live in the more distant villages without access to western infrastructure, where having a means of transport is ever more crucial simply to moving between here and there. I observed that particularly in the rural Himeville-Underberg region, where the nearest city (Pietermaritzburg) is about a two hours car drive away, Africans and whites not only live secluded from one another, but seem to meet only in the economic realm. The Sani Pass tourism typifies this economically strained situation, especially since the tourism sector is the second biggest economic sector in the area (KwaSani Municipality 2016: 8; ADEC Ltd. 2009). There was only one African tour operator, who was struggling to establish his business, as he had just started with one four-wheel drive vehicle, among five bigger companies in white ownership with on average five or six permanently appointed predominantly African drivers, as well as a handful of additional drivers on demand; there were also three white couples who offered the tours as a secondary occupation. The need for a four-wheel drive vehicle to be able to offer the famous Sani Pass tours is a serious financial hurdle to starting

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one’s own business in the local tourism sector. Yet, for western tourists, the rough road condition of the Pass is essential for their overall expedition feeling of a sense of adventure (Turin 2016: 20–22). Therefore, on the one hand, the Sani Pass tourism seems to continue the perpetuation of economic inequality, among other reasons because of the existing financial barriers to entry. And from this point of view, the road expansion seems to be a chance to reduce these barriers. But on the other hand, without going beyond the scope of this article by executing several scenarios, there are a variety of risks that may arise – like for example a possible acquisition of tourism businesses by larger companies from Durban, which, thanks to the faster access to the Sani pass summit that would be made possible by the extension, could then bring day trippers from more touristy places to “pass through” in one day. The biggest question is how attractive the Sani Pass will still be for tourists after its expansion, and how to bring them to stay in the region. In the end, local inhabitants, irrespective of whether they are white or black, might lose more than they could win (see ADEC Ltd. 2009; Turin 2016). The same applies to their Lesothan neighbors, whose government has vigorously called for the road expansion to comply with the intergovernmental agreement to promote economic growth (see Dept. of Transport 2012: 3). An increase in trade and tourism is possible, especially for the wider regions, but at the expense of local residents. Therefore, the infrastructure project impinges on a socially and economically very strained situation and triggers, among those who are affected, many hopes but also many fears (Dept. of Transport 2012; see especially the comments of ‘Interested and Affected Parties’ in Appendix D7). Infrastructure exists as a connection point in the triangular constellation of politics, technology and society and therefore manifests the inherent power relations by organizing the social life of people in their context (Larkin 2013; for the South African context see von Schnitzler 2013; for roads see Harvey and Knox 2015). This everyday effect resonates in local peoples’ opinions of new infrastructure projects, in this case the expansion of the Sani Pass. An exploration of the field with various social roles seems conducive to the discovery and understanding of these inherent power constellations.

CONCLUSION On the one hand, I separated my research work from my family life. When I went to interviews or on day trips up the pass, with the exception of one tour I usually went alone. My family members were therefore able to take holidays at times, but without transport, they found fewer leisure activities than they had expected and

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began to take over my time, increasingly wanting to keep on jaunting while I struggled to keep enough free time for scheduled interviews. This reliance on the car wasn’t easy to handle. It seemed to me that my mother and my aunt were at times unable to cope with our unaccustomed closeness and their restricted mobility. My daughter, however, enjoyed her stay untroubled by these tensions. The encounters on the playground brought the moral dilemma of how to position ourselves in face of blatant inequalities. Unavoidably, being a white family in Himeville had impeded our contact with black families. On the other hand, there were insights I wouldn’t have had without the presence of my family. Without my daughter, the playgrounds would not have caught our attention and so I would have missed the racially segregated usage of these places (cf. Katz Rothman 2013: 20; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 7–8). Because my family members were just looking for amusing leisure time activities, we noticed that there was no public life on the spot. It was my mother’s and aunt’s sense of being caught in one place, knowing that without transport they physically wouldn’t be able to get to the supermarket just 6 km away, or to the desired destination of a tourist resort some 25 km away, that made me aware of the necessity of being mobile in order to earn a living in the context of highly unequal employment structures. The experience of social restrictions in everyday practices and movements enabled me to contextualize and better understand the hopes and wishes of the local people, but also their worries and fears regarding the infrastructure project. Although very few local people use the Pass on a regular basis or at all, most of the local inhabitants rely more or less directly on the attractiveness of the Sani Pass for tourists, as the tourism sector is the second biggest economic sector in the area (KwaSani Municipality 2016: 8; ADEC Ltd. 2009). Because for western tourists the rough road condition of the Pass is essential for their overall feeling of a sense of adventure in the expedition (Turin 2016: 20–22), it is assumed that the tarring of the road will be a major slump for the local tourism industry (ADEC Ltd. 2009: 64; Dept. of Transport 2012: 120–139). So most business owners are against the road expansion. Meanwhile, poorer people, by way of contrast, are busy struggling with the daily commute on other roads. Yet all local attitudes towards the construction project are shaped by a continuing legacy of segregation that infuses contemporary everyday life as well as by a history of conflicts with the Basotho neighbors to whom the Pass connects them. Beyond its historical and economic dimensions, the encounters of my family revealed to me the less tangible yet pervasive experiential dimensions of socio-spatial segregation, particularly those maintained by the existing infrastructure. The dispute over the road construction project is, in fact, a placeholder for the struggle to overcome the inherent

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local power relations, laden with emotions, old injuries, daily struggles and feelings of being trapped. It is worthwhile to reflect on our own social role and the concomitant conditions for entering and exploring the field (Brown and Dreby 2013). Especially because field research is somehow “designed” to generate data through partaking in everyday life (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 32) and because the kind of knowledge produced depends to a certain extent on the knower’s location and life experience (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 35), to do field research with our child(ren) and/or family is likely to expand the range of our awareness of everyday life conditions, while restricting our involvement and attention at other times (Katz Rothman 2013: 18; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016). Family members who accompany the field researcher can contribute valuable perspectives due to their different social roles and objectives (Brown and Dreby 2013: 7; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 11, 15) – or “different locations” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 35–40). At first glance, investigations of infrastructure may seem to have little to do with ethnology and even less with reflecting on research with or without family members. Yet quite a few ethnological contributions have already shown how much ethnological methods are suitable for demonstrating the relational construction of infrastructure (Larkin 2013). The presence of my child and my family had organizational effects, especially, leading to the limitations of my research described – but my contribution illustrates how the penetration of the field with various social roles is conducive to revealing the inherent power relations in the triangular constellation of politics, technology and society. Therefore, doing ethnological research with family members, and reflecting on this, is worthwhile even if the research topic seems rather technical at first glance.

REFERENCES ADEC (African Development Economic Consultants) Ltd. 2009. “Assessment Report: Economic Impacts.” In: Dept. of Transport. 2012. Environmental Impact Assessment for the Proposed Upgrade of the Sani Pass Road (P318): Phase 2: Final Report. Westville: GIBB Ltd, Appendix E5. Berruti, Aldo (2018): “Update on the Sani Pass Road Construction.” Available online at https://www.umzimkuluriverlodge.com/blog/post/update-on-thesani-pass-road-construction/ (last accessed March 17, 2019). Brown, Tamara Mose/Dreby, Joanna (2013): “Work and Home (Im)Balance. Finding Synergy through Ethnographic Fieldwork.” In: Tamara Mose

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Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 3–16. Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016): “Introduction. Anthropological Fieldwork and Families.” In: Candice Cornet/Tami Blumenfield (eds.), China and Beyond in Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 1–17. Dept. of Environmental Affairs (2013): Environmental Authorisation in Terms of Regulation 37 of the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations, 2006: Upgrade of Sani Pass Road (P318) Phase 2 Project. Authorisation register number: 12/12/20/1184; NEAS reference number: DEAT/EIA/2699/2008. Mr Mark Gordon, Chief Director, Integrated Environmental Authorisations, Department of Environmental Affairs, 02. July 2013. Dept. of Environmental Affairs (2014): Appeal Decision: Appeal Against the Environmental Authroisation Granted to KwaZulu-Natal Department of Transport For the Proposed Upgrade of the Sani Pass Road, Within the KwaZulu-Natal Province. Reference: LSA 126947. Mrs B E Molewa, MP, Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs, 13. May 2014. Dept. of Transport (2012): Environmental Impact Assessment for the Proposed Upgrade of the Sani Pass Road (P318): Phase 2: Final Report. Westville: GIBB Ltd. Flinn, Juliana (1998): “Introduction. The Family Dimension in Anthropological Fieldwork.” In: Juliana Flinn/Leslie Marshall/Jocelyn Armstrong (eds.), Fieldwork and Families. Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 1–21. Geertz, Clifford (2017 [1973]): The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Ghodsee, Kristen (2009): “Single Parenting in the Field.” In: Anthropology News 50/7, pp. 3–4. Gupta, Akhil/Ferguson, James (1997): “Discipline and Practice. ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” In: Akhil Gupta/James Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley, London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 1–46. Haraway, Donna (1988): “Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Feminist Studies 14/3, pp. 575–599. Harvey, Penny/Knox, Hannah (2015): Roads. An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press.

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Hauser-Schäublin, Brigitta (2008): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung.” In: Bettina Beer (ed.), Methoden ethnologischer Feldforschung, Berlin: Reimer, pp. 37– 58. Katz Rothman, Barbara (2013): “Theorizing the Field. Beyond Blurred Boundaries and into the Thick of Things.” In: Tamara Mose Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 17–28. Korpela, Mari/Hirvi, Laura/Tawah, Sanna (2016): “Not Alone. Doing Fieldwork in the Company of Family Members.” In: Suomen Anthropologi 41/3, pp. 3– 20. KwaSani Municipality (2016): “Integrated Development Plan 2015/2016. Final Report. IDP Manager.” In: KwaSani Municipality: Himeville. Larkin, Brian (2013): “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 42, pp. 327–343. Marcus, George/Clifford, James (2010 [1986]): Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Meuser, Michael/Nagel, Ulrike (2009): “Das Experteninterview — konzeptionelle Grundlagen und methodische Anlage.” In: Susanne Pickel/Gert Pickel/HansJoachim Lauth/Detlef Jahn (eds.), Methoden der vergleichenden Politik- und Sozialwissenschaft. Neue Entwicklungen und Anwendungen, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 465–479. N., n.. n.d.. Maloti-Drakensberg Park. UNESCO website, online source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/985 (last visited 7.09.2016). Posel, Deborah (2001a): “What’s in a Name? Racial Categorisations Under Apartheid and Their Afterlife.” In: Transformation 47, pp. 50–74. Available online at http://pdfproc.lib.msu.edu/?file=/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/transfor mation/tran047/tran047005.pdf (last accessed May 19, 2019). Posel, Deborah (2001b): “Race as Common Sense. Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa.” In: African Studies Review 44/2, pp. 87–113. Schlehe, Judith (2008): “Formen qualitativer ethnografischer Interviews.” In Bettina Beer (ed.), Methoden ethnologischer Feldforschung, Berlin: Reimer, pp. 119–142. Suchet, Russell: Controversy over the Future of the Road. Available online at http://www.sanilodge.co.za/DAsani.htm (last accessed March 17, 2019). Turin, Anne (2016): Vom Abenteuer-Gebirgspass zur Bergautobahn. Was bedeutet die Sani Pass Teerung für den Tourismus im südlichen Teil des südafrikanisch-lesothischen Maloti-Drakensberg Nationalparks? Available online at http://welterbe.uni-koeln.de/sites/default/files/berichte/Forschungsbericht_A_Turin.pdf (last accessed March 17, 2019).

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von Schnitzler, Antina (2013): “Traveling Technologies. Infrastructure, Ethical Regimes, and the Materiality of Politics in South Africa.” In: Cultural Anthropology 28/4, pp. 670–693.

Bringing My Wife and Children to the Field Methodological, Epistemological, and Ethical Reflections Leberecht Funk

This paper reflects upon my experience of bringing my wife and children to the Taiwanese island of Lanyu, where I conducted field research among the local Tao people in January and February 2010 and from October 2010 until August 2011. The topic of my research was the socialization of emotions. I was interested in how local children learned the emotional repertoire of their society and which socializing practices were used by their caregivers.1 During the first eight months of the second period my wife and our two sons, then aged five and one and a half years, stayed together with me in a village of approximately 350 inhabitants.2 In various ways, the months we spent together in the field were among the most intense and challenging times in my life. I still don’t like to talk about some of the things that happened to us as a family during fieldwork, because these memories evoke unpleasant feelings of shame, guilt, and helplessness within me. However, I think it is necessary to have discussions about the more “private” aspects of fieldwork, as they are part and parcel of the research process.3 1

My research among the Tao was part of the research project “Socialization and Ontogeny of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Perspective” (2009-2014) that was cofunded by the German Research Foundation and located in the cluster of excellence “Language of emotion” at the Free University of Berlin. The project was led by Birgitt RöttgerRössler (social and cultural anthropology) from the Free University of Berlin, and Manfred Holodynski (developmental psychology) from the University of Münster.

2

It was impossible to do an exact village census as many inhabitants lived part of the time in Taiwan for reasons of work and study.

3

In my PhD thesis (2019) I reflect on these issues at length. For an outside perspective on my emotional and affective state during field work, see Birgitt Röttger-Rössler, interviewed by Thomas Stodulka (2019: 190).

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There have been several “turns” within the social sciences over the last decades; it all started with what was labelled the “subjective turn”, a philosophical movement that opened our eyes towards research as an intersubjective process in which not only were age, gender, sexuality, race, and family status (to name only a few) identified as important personal attributes that strongly influence how others see us, but also more internal aspects of ourselves, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires. The insights from these debates have led to an increased reflection on the positionality of the researcher. While, nowadays, critical selfscreenings have a solid space within most ethnographical accounts, they nevertheless tend to focus on the researcher’s own person (or self), but omit important others like partners, lovers, and children, with whom the researcher might have intensive affective bonds. It obviously does influence the field process if an aged parent passes away back at home, a partner leaves, or the researcher’s children suffer while being in the field. I will first introduce my research interests and methodology as they relate to the topic of this paper. I will then give a brief overview of the Tao people, who are of Austronesian origin and have been living on Lanyu for many centuries. Next, I will describe the place where my family and I stayed on Lanyu and my family’s situation while I was conducting fieldwork. I go on to describe three different parallel worlds I and my family members lived in during our stay on the island. After this I will be in a position to engage in methodological, epistemological, and ethical reflections on my wife’s and our children’s involvement in the research process.

RESEARCH INTERESTS AND METHODOLOGY The situation during fieldwork was special in that not only did my wife and children accompany me to the field, but that also my academic interests, as well as many of my private concerns, circulated day and night around children’s lives. My research was situated at the interface between social and cultural anthropology and developmental psychology. Although never trained as a psychologist, I was familiar with the literature on children’s emotional development, which mainly focused on examples from North Atlantic cultures, but made very little reference to the socialization of emotions in other regions of the world. In order to collect data on the emotional development of Tao children, I had to systematically observe emotional episodes, interactional patterns between local children and their caregivers, and shifting care-giving arrangements. I carried out interviews about local parental ethnotheories of child-rearing and conducted a survey about the culture-specific

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meanings of local emotion terms.4 After a few months in the field I gained a basic understanding of the Tao’s views on personhood and cosmology, which were very different from “Western” assumptions (see below). Our eldest son’s attendance at the local pre-school enabled me to interact freely with many young children from this group, who were aged between 4 and 6 years. Many of my insights about Tao children’s socialization and emotional development stem from interactions with these pre-schoolers.

THE TAO PEOPLE The Tao (also called Yami) are a group of approximately 4500 people who share many cultural characteristics with the inhabitants of the Philippine Batan islands, from where their ancestors originally migrated to Lanyu. Due to the Japanese colonial isolation policy5 the Tao only came in close contact with Chinese and Western civilization in the second half of the 20th century. Many features of their traditional culture are still very much alive, especially among elder residents. The younger generation, however, which was socialized in the Taiwanese national school system, is more oriented towards Taiwanese mainstream culture. Today, people younger than 40 are more fluent in Chinese than in their traditional language. Tao society is made up of antagonistic groups with marked age hierarchies. Younger persons have to be silent in the present of elders; under no circumstances are they allowed to answer back or show any signs of “anger” (somozi). People spend their lives in egalitarian age-sets, and feel emotionally attached to their siblings, cousins, and same-sex friends. For the Tao it is of utmost importance to work diligently to produce enough food to engage in the food exchange system. Those who are able to give fish and taro to many different households gain status

4

I was only able to conduct interviews in the local language cirisiring no tao thanks to the help of my field assistants Xie Laiyu and Huang Yingzhen.

5

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Japanese anthropologists wanted to find the origin of the Japanese race – a topic they took on from the European and American evolutionary discourses of that time. Soon after the Japanese erected a police station on Lanyu in 1896, they declared the island as an anthropological reservation. The isolation policy enabled Japanese anthropologists to study the “connection between the island’s living fossils, the Aborigines, and Japan’s prehistoric inhabitants” without any outside interferences (Barclay 2001: 134).

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in Tao society; in cases of conflict they have a large fellowship behind them to defend their interests. The Tao have a dual world view: they differentiate between a visual and tactile world of “human beings”6 and a supranatural world of invisible spirits who possess suprahuman abilities to hear and smell. The Tao have to be careful that these two coexisting worlds do not overlap, as the intrusion of the residents of one world into the other may lead to human “soul loss” (somalap so pahad). Without the “soul” (pahad), the “bodily self” (kataotao) of the Tao is in danger as it cannot protect itself from the attacks of “malicious spirits” (anito).7 A person inevitably becomes ill and eventually dies if the roaming “soul” doesn’t manage to reattach itself to the “human body”.8 Culturally specific coping strategies are necessary to ward off the anito, who are believed to reside in the areas surrounding the village. By avoiding speech acts the Tao make sure that the anito cannot overhear human conversation and thus do not know the whereabouts of people (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015; Funk 2014, 2019).9

CHOOSING AND STAYING IN A VILLAGE During my brief stay on Lanyu in early 2010 I considered whether the island was a suitable place for conducting research and bringing my wife and especially our children to the field site.10 It was a difficult decision. I had never done fieldwork before, since my M.A. thesis was about a cultural comparison from a theoretical perspective. My wife did not have much experience of travelling abroad; apart

6

The ethnic group name Tao actually means “human being”.

7

For malicious (or ambiguous) spirits that are known throughout the region see James N. McHugh 1955; Zeus A. Salazar 1968; Hans Fischer 1965; Florentino H. Hornedo 1980; Rainer Neu 1997; Virgil Mayor Apostol 2010; Hitoshi Yamada 2002.

8

The idea of soul loss occurs in many Southeast Asian (e.g. H. Geertz 1961; Nicolaisen 1988; Roseman 1990; Howell 1989) as well as East Asian (e.g. Stafford 1995; Furth 1987; Ahern 1975) societies.

9

For those further interested in the sociocultural life of the Tao I recommend the following PhD theses: Guanghong Yu 1991; Hsin-chieh Kao 2012; Wei-Ya Lin 2015. Unfortunately there are not many publications about the Tao in English.

10 In my research group it was seen as an advantage to conduct fieldwork together with my family as it was assumed that this situation would lead to more interactions with Tao children and their caregivers. As I will show in the following, this was indeed the case.

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from staying in the US for a year, and a brief visit to Israel/ Palestine, she hadn’t seen any countries outside Europe. However, we had talked many times about living in a different place together with our kids before the eldest one was sent to school. This seemed to be our great chance to put this dream into practice. It was also a great opportunity for me as an anthropologist to do my PhD. In the end I chose a village on the East coast as the place for my field research. This part of the island was less sinicized and therefore more “traditional” than the communities on the West coast, where tourists arrived on Lanyu through the harbour and airport. Besides that, there was a naturally protected area for bathing and swimming on the village waterfront. I imagined that our children would play here during our stay on the island. I managed to organize an apartment close to the “boat landing-place” (vanwa) that was suitable for a family of four. When we arrived in the village in October 2010 the tourist season was already over. In the morning many villagers left for their fields, which were situated around the settlement and reached up to the rain forest up in the mountains. Weather permitting, men went fishing. At low tide women were searching for shellfish. Most households produced their own food. Children attended school and spent the late afternoons and evenings playing on the streets. After a few weeks the winter rains started, and social life was almost banned from the streets. (It was therefore not a good time for research.) From April onwards, when the weather was getting steadily better, people spent their evenings sitting on the tagakal – a local type of elevated roofed platform – or dining in front of their houses. From June to August – the peak of the tourist season – local residents set up a night market on the parking lot in front of the vanwa to sell food produce and handicraft products to the Taiwanese visitors. In the 1970s and 1980s the Taiwanese government had torn down almost all of the “traditional buildings” (vahey), replacing them with narrow clusters of cheap concrete houses without asking for the consent of the villagers. The alleyways of the village are not a public space as such, as they are used by Tao families as outdoor living rooms. People will not go through these alleys without proper reason, but walk on the main streets or little pathways in the vicinity of the village. Villagers are generally friendly. Most of them, however, do not like to interact with strangers, as they feel more comfortable among relatives and the same-sex members of their age groups.

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FEELINGS OF NARROWNESS Today I think that Lanyu is a nice place to visit but that it is difficult for “outsiders” (dehdeh) to stay there for a long time. Staying there means accepting the villagers’ cultural world view and behaving accordingly. For example, it is “taboo” (makanyo) to visit certain areas in the vicinity of the village as these are the places where the anito are supposed to dwell. If someone goes there the anito will attach themselves to the “bodily self” of that person, who will thereby be responsible for bringing “evil things” (maraht ta vazvazey) back to the village and thus doing harm to his fellow residents. Breaking the “taboos” is a highly immoral behaviour and leads to social ostracism. One of the many problems we had to face was that nobody told us when we did something wrong, so we had to learn everything the hard way. In Tao society, land is very scarce. People cannot buy land, they can only inherit fields and building sites for houses from their parents. There is no concept for the integration of “outsiders”, apart from marriage with a Tao. Without land, and lacking the ability to fish, “outsiders” cannot take part in food exchanges. While “outsiders” may enjoy a special status as “friends” (kagagan) and guests (especially when they have come from far away), they are nevertheless, from a local perspective, “useless persons” (abo so ngangayan na tao; lit.: “persons, who don’t go anywhere [in order to work]”). Lanyu is a volcanic island with inaccessible mountainous forests in its interior parts. The only places where humans can settle are along a narrow coastal strip. Tao villages consist of narrow clusters of concrete houses with small lanes in between them. People normally pay attention to every step their covillagers take. This situation was quite unusual for us as we were used to living in an anonymous big city in which most interactions were between complete strangers. Since many areas around the village were deemed unsafe for socio-cultural reasons, our everyday activity radius was rather small. We could move freely on the island’s circular road and roam about the village and its adjacent areas – all in all an area of approximately four soccer fields. Because of this spatial restriction I had a feeling of narrowness while living on the island (and I think my wife shared this feeling with me). At some point during my research, I came up with the inner picture of living on a drilling rig somewhere in the North Sea: surrounded by an hostile environment and incapable of escaping the social situation.

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JIOZAYAN BEHAVIOUR AND MY STRONG EXPOSURE TO “SHAME” It was very difficult to integrate into the local community. Many people avoided eye contact with us; they treated us as if we weren’t there. With others we had friendly interactions, but it happened many times that they wouldn’t know us the next time we saw them. Many times, my wife and I tried to make some sense out of the different moods and behavioural styles of the Tao towards us. At least we both had the same impressions and were thus able to mutually confirm that we weren’t imagining this problem.11 The effects of being constantly “overlooked” or even “ignored” (jiozayan) by many Tao cannot be underestimated. It gave us feelings of insecurity and had a negative effect on our self-confidence. The jiozayan behaviour of the Tao puzzled me so much that I developed an ambition to find explanations for it. I have come to the conclusion that it is a highly complex matter. For one thing, jiozayan is an expression of “contempt” (ikaoya); people have to “look away” whenever others misbehave to demonstrate their own “moral righteousness” (apiya so nakenakem). However, in these situations they also “avoid eye-contact” (jiozayan) to ward off the “evil” (marahet) that will otherwise enter through their eyes and ears into their “bodily selves”. Once “contaminating influences” (matuying) have reached their “deep insides” (onowned), they will stay there and try to do harm to their “bodies”. When people (especially men) go to their fields or to the coast to engage in subsistence activities they have an energetic style of walking and are very determined-looking. They have a “fierce” (masozi) appearance and demonstrate their “strength” (moyat) to keep the anito at bay. In this concentrated mode they will only briefly nod at close relatives but generally not look at unrelated others. For “outsiders” this kind of defence strategy is hard to understand as the Tao do not talk about it. Still another explanation for jiozayan behaviour is the low status and self-esteem of a person. Those who do not have many relatives do not have anything to say in the village. The same applies to persons who are perceived as “lazy” (malma). Alcohol can significantly change the mood of a person; some Tao who

11 During the course of our field stay I talked with a few other visiting persons from Western countries about this issue. Among them was a young Canadian man who had spent almost a year on Lanyu. They all agreed that the local patterns of attention and avoidance were highly culture-specific and for them mostly incomprehensible.

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never dared even to look at us became quite talkative once they had had enough drinks.12 Besides that, for many older Tao the phases of the “decrescent moon” (ni masazi do vehan) are “anxiety” (maniahey)-inducing as during these times the anito gain considerable influence. While some people prefer to stay at home, others continue with their daily activities. However, they are less extroverted than usual and therefore might “not look at” unrelated people when passing by. I never experienced so much “shame” (masnek) in my life as was the case during fieldwork. It crept into my body and made me walk with a bent back sometimes. I felt “ashamed” of almost everything: my “uselessness”; my inability to integrate into Tao society; my failure in my relationship with my wife (see below); my limited Chinese language skills; me being already 38 years old and not yet having obtained my PhD; my doubts about being a good father; my inability to be always in a “gentle mood” (apiya so onowned) (as was required among the Tao). Feelings of “shame” stuck with me even after I had returned home. I developed the problem of not being able to look into other people’s eyes. It took a few years for these symptoms to slowly disappear, or at least to become less intense. Today I think that I have a personal disposition for “shame” that was intensified while I was in the field. The contact with the Tao’s culture, in which “anxiety” and “shame” play a leading role as moral emotions (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015; Funk 2019) obviously had a triggering influence upon me.13

12 Alcohol was only introduced to Lanyu in the 1960s when the first generation of Tao migrant workers returned from Taiwan. During Japanese colonial times it was prohibited to sell alcohol to the Tao. Today many Tao have adopted the habit of drinking. Alcohol abuse is responsible for a great deal of social suffering. 13 It is important to note that although I was prone to feelings of “shame” while in the field, this was by no means a continuous state. At times I felt at peace with myself and saw our stay on the island in a positive light. I was excited about my field work as I gained important insights into the Tao’s cultural system, which was still deeply embedded in an animist framework. My wife and I enjoyed the beauty of the island, and many times we watched the sun slowly dipping down into the sea while sitting on the roof of our house. I will never forget how we built a cabin at the beach, together with our kids, from alluvial wood and other waste materials. Weather permitting, we went bathing and climbed the rocks along the coastline. Sometimes we were invited for dinner or took part in village festivals and church events. In these situations, there was happiness and laughter.

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MOCKING, HARASSING, AND TEASING OF OUR CHILDREN One thing that was hard to bear was the fact that our children were subjected to constant mocking, harassing and teasing by local Tao children (and occasionally also adults).14 From the age of three and a half onwards, Tao children spend most of their time in autonomous peer groups. Often, they come home only for meals and have very few restrictions on their own activities by caregivers. Although the bad treatment of our children lessened over time, it remained an ongoing problem throughout our stay. The strategies that were used to “irritate” (pasozi) our children differed according to their developmental age. Because of his young age our younger son was considered as “sweet” (可愛 ke’ai) by everyone in the village. In Tao (as well as Han Chinese) culture the notion of “sweetness” is connected to an innocent babyish state. The fact that they do not know “shame” yet, for example, causes people to think of babies as “sweet”. For the Tao it is an “amusing pastime” (apiya piyalalam) to “tease” (gamoen) babies and toddlers in various ways. They are quite creative in inventing social dramas in which they lead young children to their cognitive limits. When young children show off their confused and “sweet” babyishness, everyone usually “laughs” (maznga) (for a similar case among the North Canadian Iñupiat, see Briggs 1998). Tao children and adults alike pinched the legs of our youngest son (even when he was in his mother’s arms), pulled out his pacifier, pretended to keep his toys, and threatened him with crabs which they held in front of his face. Older children blocked his way and stretched out their arms to catch him. More than once did they totally confuse him with “fake crying behaviour” (假哭 jiaku) that was suddenly interrupted by “laughing”. They also smeared slimy seaweed on his naked toes, frightened him by pushing him rather violently in his push chair, or repeatedly touched his body even though he didn’t want it. Once a group of children frightened him by blowing so many soap bubbles at him that he almost disappeared in the mist.

14 For an account of being with culture-shocked children in the field, see Nancy ScheperHughes (1987).

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Figure 7: “My youngest son is playing at the ‘boat landing place’ (vanwa) together with a five year old Tao child, who is teasing him by holding his toy out of reach.”

© Leberecht Funk

When he was treated in these ways he usually got “angry” (somozi) or started to “cry” (amlavi), but his reactions only led to more intense mocking and teasing. A ten-year-old Tao girl once told me: “Uncle, he is cutest when he cries.” After some

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time in the field he learned to bear these treatments with fewer protests. His behaviour was now similar to that of Tao children, who endure mocking and harassment by staying emotionally “calm” (mahanang) and “avoiding eye-contact” (jiozayan). Whenever our eldest son did something “abnormal” – regardless of whether he stumbled, mispronounced a Chinese word or didn’t succeed in performing a task – Tao children of his age or slightly older would “laugh” at him. Just as was the case with his brother, they often mocked him until he became “angry” or started to “cry” – which for them was reason enough to continue “laughing”. One of the first things Tao children learn is to hide their “aggressive traits” (marahet so ononwed) in their “deep insides”. In Tao society someone who acts aggressively is committing a moral transgression. “Laughter” is a strategy to defend the human community from “evil influences” like the anito. On other occasions our eldest son was treated by the local children in much nicer ways. For example, they greeted him in the streets and shared their sweets and snacks with him. Sometimes he happily roamed the village together with them. My wife and I hoped then that he had finally succeeded in making friends; but each time he came back home shortly afterwards because his friends had suddenly run off and left him behind.15 Our eldest son started attending the village preschool, from November 2010 until the end of his stay. Although the two Chinese teachers did their best to prohibit mocking behaviour in the school grounds, they couldn’t avoid its subtler forms.16 They did everything in their power to create a safe space for our son. Unfortunately, his integration in the preschool class failed. He didn’t take part in class activities and preferred to sit at a table on his own where he drew pictures or made clay figures.17 After a maximum of two or three hours he returned home. On the first occasion when my son and I went to preschool an old lady from the village had warned me: “They will beat him up!”

15 In Tao society there is no ritual of leave-taking; if people feel that a conversation is finished, they just walk off. Among Tao children, running away is a fairly common way to end a game. It is not necessarily a negative evaluation. 16 When a child was reading a book, other children would come closer and closer until it was no longer possible to turn the pages. Children with a lower status had to watch their shoes carefully, as their peers tried to hide them in places where they wouldn’t find them. 17 He mostly drew men fighting with swords and sharks and other dangerous fish. The shapes he modelled were mostly knives. I think he was in an alarmed state and was trying to defend himself against something.

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Almost every day we had groups of children coming to our place. Although they asked to see our son, they obviously had an interest in our toys as well.18 During these visits I learned a lot about children’s interaction within peer groups. For Tao children it is incomprehensible why they should be left out if others have access to common resources. In their view, peers are equals who need to share their benefits. Therefore, we couldn’t let in only a few kids (which would have been good for our son), since those who were refused admittance would “feel bad in their insides” (marahet so onowned) and turn against their luckier fellows once they reappeared on the street. Letting them all in wasn’t a good idea either because being in a larger group made them feel “strong” (moyat) and they would suddenly overcome their “timidity” and “shyness” (kanig). In these situations they would run around our flat like wild and raid our food supplies without asking. It was difficult to create an atmosphere at home in which our eldest son could feel comfortable and play with Tao children. In Berlin, where he had grown up, he was used to engaging in dyadic play with one close friend at a time. He was not used to playing in a larger group of children (as is common among the Tao) and had problems adapting to the local ways.

LIVING IN THREE PARALLEL WORLDS During my fieldwork we found ourselves living in different parallel worlds at the same time. I will call these worlds 1. “our ideal life in Berlin”; 2. “our family life in the village”; and 3. “my adaption to the Tao’s way of living.” While the first two worlds were shared by all of us, the third world was a realm I mostly explored by myself. In our flat in the village my wife and I tried to give our children emotional comfort according to the German middle class standards that we had learned at home and affectively embodied during our own socialization. We read books to our children, played games with them and responded to them whenever they said or did something. However, the reality of our family life had to be somewhat altered to local standards. In Tao culture, for instance, children need to be “quiet”; they are not supposed to “scream” or “cry very loud” (amlolos; valvalakan). Someone who behaves in these ways runs the risk of the anito doing harm to his or her “bodily self”, as the “soul” (like all spiritual beings or entities) is offended

18 By German middle class standards we had only a very few items to play with, but for Tao children (whose parents don’t usually bother much about toys) it must have been like paradise.

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by loud noises and “flies away” (somalap). During “Flying Fish season” (rayon)19, in which men catch the holy swarm fish that serves as a staple food among the Tao, it is “taboo” (makanyo) to produce any loud noises or to make use of “dirty language” (marahet ta cirisiring). Otherwise the fish will be offended and not come back to the island’s shores the following year.20 For very serious reasons we had to somehow avoid our children becoming either “angry” or “crying” – which was particularly difficult, as they were used to expressing their emotions rather freely. We had to pacify our children with sweets, a method that is also used by the Tao. During fieldwork I slowly became more aware of the cultural system of the Tao. I learned that in their world almost everything is entangled with cosmological forces. The ancestors of the Tao had invented an all-encompassing web of analogical and metaphorical meaning. The behavioural etiquette is very strict; people need to behave in proper human ways to avoid the “anger” of spiritual beings. A wrong word can have fatal consequences. For “outsiders” it is difficult to gain an understanding of these connections, as nobody talks about them and it is not common to interfere with the affairs of others. Misbehaviour is rarely corrected, at least not in direct ways. (People will avoid looking at you but not necessarily say anything.)21 Unfortunately, my growing awareness of and adaption to the Tao’s way of living wasn’t shared by my wife, at least not to the same extent. She was mainly interested in the well-being of our children, who were often mocked and harassed, and – quite understandably – didn’t have the capacities to further and further explore the emic perspective of the Tao. Although we talked about my preliminary research results, she had often just had enough of it and preferred to stop our discussions at certain points. Due to a lesser degree of exposure to the Tao world, my wife didn’t change as much as I did during fieldwork. My rather strong proneness to “shame” caused me to do many things in a similar fashion to the Tao, because I was trying to fit in and 19 The “Flying Fish season” roughly coincides with what we call “spring”. 20 Another situation in which everyone has to be “quiet” is when people eat their meals. If anyone quarrels during meal times all foodstuffs are deemed to be contaminated and have to be thrown away. 21 The survey my assistants and I conducted about local emotion terms provided great insight into the ethnopsychology of the Tao. We asked informants to tell us emotional stories using a particular emotion word, so we could grasp the culture-specific connotations of the term. In doing so we touched on many subjects we would otherwise never have talked about. It was mostly through this unique method that I enhanced my understanding of Tao society and culture.

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didn’t want to offend people. I found myself betwixt and between the positions of my own society and the cultural standards of the Tao. My intense preoccupation with the Tao had significantly changed some of my views. For instance, I developed a different perspective on child rearing and suddenly realized that the contemporary German middle class style was far from “normal” but – in my opinion at least – a rather extreme case of child-centredness. (This is not to say that I became a proponent of the sometimes rather harsh unidirectional and adult-centred socialization strategies and educational methods of the Tao.) I write about these different parallel worlds and how we perceived them because they demonstrate quite well how tensions were generated between me and my family. I somehow noticed that my attitudes were changing, but I couldn’t help it. It was just happening to me. During our stay on Lanyu my wife said repeatedly that she felt very miserable, that she was more unhappy than she had ever been before in her life. She was suffering from severe back pains; once she couldn’t get up for a whole week. She took care of our children when I was organizing fieldwork, but besides that she didn’t have much of a life on her own. Our idea that she could teach English to Tao children was never put into practice. There was no other role for her than being a “good mother.” She had only very few interactions with local villagers. Several times she wanted to take the children and return home. The first time she said so was about one month after our arrival. I tried to convince her to stay as we had not been in the field for very long yet. The situation was complicated: if they had left earlier this meant that I wouldn’t have seen my children for quite a long time and my wife would have had the burden of taking care for them alone (unless I cancelled my research and followed them home). After two or three deadlines for decision-making had gone by, she finally left for Berlin in May 2011, together with our kids. During our field stay she had separated from me – something I completely ignored as I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was left behind on Lanyu not knowing what the future would bring. After my return from fieldwork in the end of August 2011 we decided to carry on with our relationship. One reason for our decision was the fact that our children were still very young at this time. We finally split in 2014. The reasons for our failure cannot be reduced to our stay on Lanyu. But the time we spent in the field definitely had something to do with it. There was one big structural problem with my research on Lanyu. I was the only one in my family to speak Chinese; therefore, most things that needed to be organized had to be done by me. Before we left home, we were optimistic about my wife learning some basic Chinese in order to communicate with the people in the field. We thought that our eldest son would pick up the language as he played

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with the local children. (We didn’t bother too much about the little one who had not yet started to speak.) In both cases we were mistaken. My wife was busy with the children and in the evenings she was too tired to learn more than a few Chinese words and phrases. Our eldest son learned to count in Chinese and to speak a few more words, but nothing more. I was close to exhaustion. Because of the belief in malicious anito spirits, interviewing was incredibly difficult. It was impossible to make appointments with informants as they didn’t want the anito to learn about their plans. If pressed they would say “yes” to anything, but would not be at home at the times they had told me. Everything had to be organized in very spontaneous ways. Also, I had never thought that doing fieldwork would require so many hours of writing. I was staying up until late at night, filling the pages of my field diary and transcribing interviews. I think that my intense preoccupation with fieldwork was in itself a strategy for coping with the situation in the field. My research activities helped me to structure my day and to be too busy to feel the potentially dangerous and disrupting emotions around me.

METHODOLOGICAL, EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS Bringing my wife and children to the field had many methodological advantages. In Tao society, people only reach full personhood after they have produced their own children. Therefore, having the status of “mother” (sinan) and “father” (siaman) put my wife and me in better positions to interact with people during our stay on Lanyu. Without my wife and our children, I would have had the status of a “child” (kanakan) and would probably not have been able to participate in certain events or to talk about certain subjects with Tao “elders” (rarakeh). When my family was staying with me in the field, villagers would care for my wife and children. They would tell me not to get drunk because everyone would “feel sorry” (mangasi) for the children of a drunkard. I only started drinking beer with bachelors after my family had left the island. Hanging out with different people at different times helped me to understand different perspectives. My children served in many ways as “gate openers for fieldwork” (see also Lauser 1994). When I took walks with my younger son in the village, it was an opportunity to get to know many people. They would usually say “Younger brother is so cute” and then ask for his age. From there it was easy to start a conversation. When he was playing on the street, I had an excuse for just standing in front of the house and “doing nothing”.

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Without my children it would have been much more difficult to build up a relationship with other children and their caregivers in the village. I became friends with many of the preschool children who belonged to my elder son’s peer group. I acted as a translator in the preschool, as well as whenever the local children and my son couldn’t communicate well enough in sign language. In the course of one year I had observed and systematically protocolled many emotional episodes between them and developed a basic understanding of the socialization of emotion among Tao children. I have already hinted at the problem of creating a safe space for my children while at the same time conducting research about local children’s emotional behaviour. It was impossible to separate my private concerns from my academic interests, as they constantly intermingled. It was only in the field that I realized that I was using my children as representatives of a model-like Western pathway of emotional development, which I was contrasting with the socialization of emotions among the Tao. At first this happened in rather implicit ways. I lacked conscious awareness about what I was doing. Of course, I knew that the comparison of the local culture with the researcher’s original culture is something inherent in all field research (whether it is acknowledged by the researcher or not), but in my mind this somehow didn’t apply to the relationship between me and my children. Only as I started to record emotional episodes between Tao children and my own children did I begin to realise that I was actually using my children as “research objects”. There was no easy way out of this situation. I couldn’t just stop taking notice of what my children were doing in a given moment. If I cast a light on my research activity (and ignore this ethical problem for a moment) I can only say that my research benefited greatly from the comparisons between the emotional reactions of my own children and those of Tao children. It enabled me to formulate hypotheses about the Tao’s culture-specific deviations from the developmental psychological model of (Western) children’s emotional development, which I tried to verify (or falsify) by further systematic observations of emotional episodes. I am sure that many behavioural patterns among Tao children and between Tao children and their caregivers would have escaped my attention if I hadn’t brought my children to the field. To give but one example, I came to notice that Tao children, when they hurt themselves (unlike German middle class children), were not comforted immediately afterwards by their caregivers. From about three years onward they would usually wait until their children had regained a state of “calmness” (mahanang). This was seen as a prerequisite for their children to be able to come to them and sit on their laps, where they were finally caressed and “advised” (nanaon) on how

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to avoid injuries and mishaps in the future. In contrast, our children (or German middle class children in general) would immediately be picked up by their parents when they fell down and started to “cry”, and there would be immediate giving of comfort. While in the Tao case children are the ones who are supposed to act in these situations, in the German case it is the other way around. I felt guilty about “misusing” my children as “research objects”. I lacked a mental schema for how to deal with this ethical problem. The conflict between the well-being of my children and my academic interests was almost unbearable when our children were mocked, harassed and teased by Tao children (and occasionally also adults). Of course, I did do everything to protect my sons from these negative treatments, but how was I supposed to determine when to take action in a given situation? When, let’s say, a Tao child was approaching my little son with a crab in her hand and holding it in front of his face in order to scare him, when was the exact moment that I should put a stop to this kind of behaviour? I’m not talking here about minutes or seconds, but milliseconds. Each millisecond the situation endured was bad for my child but good for my research.

FINAL COMMENT Before I left Germany to do research on Lanyu, I wasn’t aware that there were publications within anthropology about the problem of bringing children to the field (e.g. Cassell 1987). However, I’m not sure if reading this literature would have prepared me better for the difficulties that were awaiting us in my field research site. Each sociocultural setting is unique, and it is very hard to formulate general suggestions that fit all situations. Researchers and their children and wives or husbands are unique personalities as well. What would be a good solution in a given situation for one child might not necessarily be an option for another child with a different psychological dispositions and physical necessities. There are dangers in the field that are known in advance (e.g. poor medical standards, civil wars, high crime rates, environmental pollution) and that can thus be dealt with accordingly, at least to a certain degree. What cannot be known in advance, however, are what I label “cultural dangers”. If it is one’s first time staying at a new research site that is known only from books and other media, but not from personal experiences, one is not able to foresee what intercultural problems might arise when staying there for a longer period of time. Obviously, my brief stay on Lanyu in early 2010 didn’t prepare me well enough to understand that Tao children (and occasionally Tao adults) would harass and tease my children while

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I was in the field with them. Nor did I anticipate that my wife and I would have such a difficult time integrating into the local society. I don’t think that it is possible to write a manual with ethical guidelines about bringing children (and other family members) to research areas, because field sites are just too different to come up with general directives that would fit all possible scenarios. In the end it will be the responsibility of researchers to decide whether bringing children, partners, lovers, or friends to a specific research area is a good idea or not. I recommend that future researchers should organize long-term field stays together with their children and spouses only on the basis of previous experiences (work-related or other) in the communities they study. It might also help their decision-making if colleagues familiar with these places give their advice. However, as I experienced myself, it is highly risky to bring dependent others to field research sites that are not previously known either to the researcher or to their academic supervisors. Of course, there might be a positive outcome, but it cannot be taken for granted. If I had to choose again whether or not to bring my wife and children to Lanyu in order to conduct research, I would, from today’s perspective, refrain from doing so. The field has a strong affective influence upon researchers and the people that accompany them (Liebal et al. 2019). We have to keep in mind that the Western idea of the person as unique, independent, and stable is a cultural construction that does not allow for modifications and changes (Mauss 1985; C. Geertz 1973). We all leave the field in a different state than we enter it. The changes we undergo while in the field range from getting new ideas (e.g. about educating children) to potentially traumatic experiences (e.g. being exposed to strong feelings of “shame”). Our capacities for change affect not only ourselves but also the relationships we have with our children and partners. In spite of these problems, bringing spouses and children to the field has many advantages. For one thing, it is a practical solution for researchers who need to balance work demands and family life. Fieldwork experiences together with family members can also be mutually enriching, as they enable us to experience different things, meet interesting people and explore new ways of living. Many research projects will benefit from the fact that the researcher does not live as a single person in the field but as someone who is part of a social group. As I have shown in my paper, there are methodological advantages to bringing spouses and children to field sites: children may serve as “gate openers” to local communities and spouses may inform the researcher about what it is like (and what it feels like) to be a member of the opposite sex in the place of research. In many societies worldwide, parenthood marks a higher social status. People become “full persons” by having children of their own. Depending on the subject of research, a higher

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social status may help the researcher to interact with more respected members of the local community. Living daily life together with family members reduces the distance between the locals and ourselves as we engage in similar activities (e.g. cooking, washing cloths, worrying about sick children). In short, it makes us more “normal”. It turns us into people who share the same problems (Dannenberg 2019). Bringing important others to the field site may also have a positive impact on developing a deeper understanding about many sociocultural issues. I gained a lot of insight into the socialization of emotions by (implicitly and explicitly) comparing the behaviour of my own children with that of the Tao children. Family members do not just accompany researchers to field sites; they become part and parcel of the research process. Living together with husbands or wives and children in local communities leads to a plurality of situations that enable cultural comparisons. It could therefore be seen as a “research method” – even though such a method has to be carefully counterchecked by ethical considerations.

REFERENCES Ahern, Emily M. (1975): “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women.” In: Margery Wolf/Roxane Witke (eds.), Women in Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 193–214. Apostol, Virgil Mayor (2010): Way of the Ancient Healer. Sacred Teachings from the Philippine Ancestral Traditions, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Barclay, Paul D. (2001): “An Historian among the Anthropologists. The Inō Kanori Revival and the Legacy of Japanese Colonial Ethnography in Taiwan.” In: Japanese Studies 21/2, pp. 117–136. Briggs, Jean L. (1998): Inuit Morality Play. The Emotional Education of a ThreeYear-Old, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dannenberg, Janina (2019): “‘Normality’ Revisited. Fieldwork and Family.” In: Thomas Stodulka/Samia Dinkelaker/Ferdiansyah Thajib (eds.), Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography, New York: Springer, pp. 167–179. Fischer, Hans (1965): Studien über Seelenvorstellungen in Ozeanien, München: Klaus Renner. Funk, Leberecht (2014): “Entanglements between Tao People and Anito on Lanyu Island, Taiwan.” In: Yasmine Musharbash/Geir-Henning Presterudstuen

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(eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143–157. Funk, Leberecht (2019): Gesellschaft, Kosmologie und Sozialisation von Emotionen bei den Tao in Taiwan: Freie Universität Berlin, PhD thesis. Furth, Charlotte (1987): “Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch’ing Dynasty China.” In: The Journal of Asian Studies 46/1, pp. 7–35. Geertz, Clifford (1973): The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Hildred (1961): The Javanese Family. A Study of Kinship and Socialization, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Hornedo, Florentino H. (1980): “The World and the Ways of the Ivatan Añito.” In: Philippine Studies 28/1, pp. 21–58. Howell, Signe (1989): Society and Cosmos. Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kao, Hsin-chieh (2012): Labour, Life, and Language. Personhood and Relations among the Yami of Lanyu: University of St. Andrews, PhD thesis. Lauser, Andrea (1994): “Die Geschwisterschaft als soziales Netz. Zur tayarian („Geschwisterbande“) bei den Mangyan Malulas (Mindoro/ Philippinen).” In: Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 6, pp. 71–96. Liebal, Katja/Lubrich, Oliver/Stodulka, Thomas (2019): Emotionen im Feld. Gespräche zur Ethnographie, Primatologie und Reiseliteratur, Bielefeld: transcript. Lin, Wei-Ya (2015): Musik im Leben der Tao (taiwanesische Volksgruppe). Tradition und Innovation: Universität für Volksmusikforschung und Ethnomusikologie Wien, PhD thesis. Mauss, Marcel (1985): “A Category of the Human Mind. The Notion of Person. The Notion of Self.” In: Michael Carrithers/Steven Collins/Steven Lukes (eds.), The Category of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25. McHugh, James N. (1955): Hantu Hantu. An Account of Ghost Belief in Modern Malaya, London: Hazell, Watson & Viney. Neu, Rainer (1997): Die lebenden Toten und der tote Gott. Tod und Jenseitsvorstellungen in den Philippinen, Münster: LIT. Nicolaisen, Ida (1988): “Concepts of Learning among the Punan Bah of Sarawak.” In: Gustav Jahuda/Ioan M. Lewis (eds.), Acquiring Culture. Cross Cultural Studies in Child Development, London: Croom Helm, pp. 193–221. Roseman, Marina (1990): “Head, Heart, and Shadow. The Structure of the Self, the Emotional World, and Ritual Performance among Senoi Temiar.” In: Ethos 18/3, pp. 227–250.

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Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt/Scheidecker, Gabriel/Funk, Leberecht/Holodynski, Manfred (2015): “Learning (by) feeling. A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Socialization and Development of Emotions.” In: Ethos 43/2, pp. 187–220. Röttger-Rössler, Birgitt/Stodulka, Thomas (2019): “‘Begegnungsglück’. Feldforschung als zwischenmenschliche Bereicherung” In: Katja Liebal/Oliver Lubrich/Thomas Stodulka (eds.), Emotionen im Feld. Gespräche zur Ethnographie, Primatologie und Reiseliteratur, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 179–205. Salazar, Zeus A. (1968): Le concept AC* ànitù dans le monde austronésien: vers l’étitude comparative des religions ethniques austronésiennes, Paris: Université de Paris, PhD thesis. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1987): “A Children’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Managing Culture-Shocked Children in the Field.” In: Joan Cassell (ed.), Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 217–236. Stafford, Charles (1995): The Roads of Chinese Childhood. Learning and Identification in Angang, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yamada, Hitoshi (2002): Religiös-mythologische Vorstellungen bei den austronesischen Völkern Taiwans. Ein Beitrag zur Ethnologie Ost- und Südostasiens: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, PhD thesis. Yu, Guanghong (1991): Ritual, Society, and Culture among the Yami: University of Michigan, PhD thesis.

Constructing the Field

On Being a Father in the Field Mobility, Distance and Closeness Mario Krämer

In this chapter, I discuss my experiences of conducting ethnographic fieldwork accompanied by my family. More precisely, I reflect on the problem of balancing in-depth and extended field research with my role as the father of a family with three small children. There has been much talk about the tensions between work and family in recent years and this debate often focuses on mothers and less on fathers (see Dreby and Brown 2013: 4–5). From my personal experiences as a father, the demands of balancing the two spheres are considerable in everyday academic life and increase even more during fieldwork. Hence, this chapter is concerned with the problems of being a father in the field, but also with the unexpected encounters and chances that arise when taking one’s family along on an 18-month research trip. In my work as an academic I see myself as situated in a constant negotiating process between what Max Weber (1917/1919) 100 years ago famously called “science as a vocation”, and my personal responsibility as the father of a family. In his dramatic lecture to young (and exclusively male) German students towards the end of the First World War, Max Weber deals, first, with the material conditions of the academic profession. He argues that German academia is in the process of “Americanizing”, and he diagnoses a quasi-proletarian precarious existence of university assistants – a topic that has gained renewed relevance and is hotly debated in contemporary academia. Max Weber then turns to the “inner vocation” of (social) science and outlines in dramatic prose how the academic profession is characterized by the strictest specialization; by the need to have a closed mind and to completely focus on one’s own research idea; and by the enormous passion to achieve something once, and never again in a lifetime, something that may stay. The fate of science is, however, that nothing remains forever – each and every finding is refuted sooner or later by new research. So why are we still doing

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it? According to Max Weber, the disenchantment of the world is at stake and each and every small step in (social) science contributes to it. At the end of the day, each individual researcher must account to himself for the meaning of his (or her) own conduct. Eventually, Max Weber appeals to the students “to work and meet the demands of the day” and “to find and obey the demon who holds the threads of their lives” (Weber 1917/1919: 23; translation of the author). I first read Max Weber’s lecture during my undergraduate studies in the late 1990s, and like many of those who attended the lecture back in 1917, I was enthralled by Max Weber’s prose and clarity. Moreover, his insistence on an inherent meaning of (social) science despite the fleetingness of all scientific findings is an important antithesis to the relentless neoliberal conversion of academia into just another kind of service industry that predominates at present. However, when I reread “Science as a vocation” at the beginning of my post-doctoral fieldwork in 2007, I was struck by the fact that while referring to decent personal behaviour at several points in the text, Max Weber did not mention the relationship between professional and private “vocation” in the sense of being responsible for caring for one’s family. Max Weber is certainly not the only author who excluded private and family matters in his writing: our family members often remain unmentioned in our publications – apart from a brief and kind acknowledgement in the prefaces of our books. But what I realized in the field was that Weber’s notion of “science as a vocation” is an ideal which lost some of its appeal during the specific constellation of fieldwork I encountered. “To have a closed mind”, “to completely focus” on my research idea and to show an “enormous passion to achieve something for once and never again” was hard to accomplish in a situation in which I constantly travelled between two different social worlds which made very different demands on me. What had changed compared with my (under)graduate studies was that I had become a husband and father of two small children in the meantime, which made my second extended fieldwork a very different project from my first one-year field research as a single young man (from January 2001 until January 2002 in KwaZulu-Natal; see Krämer 2007, 2020b). I do not focus on the effects of fieldwork on our family dynamics in the following; this is my way of drawing an “artificial” boundary between the “professional” and the “private”, between fieldwork and family life (see Dreby and Brown 2013: 5). Rather, my paper investigates how the presence of my family in “the field” and my responsibility for caring for my family members affected my methodological approach, the construction of the field and my position in it, and eventually the findings of my research (see Downey 2013). In doing this, I focus on three characteristics: mobility, distance and closeness.

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FIELDWORK WITH FAMILY COMMUTING TO THE FIELD My post-doctoral research project explored the academic and public debate on the struggle over neotraditional authority in Namibia and South Africa (see Krämer 2016, 2018, 2020a).1 While the regional focus was on the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, the study also included a comparative view on neotraditional authority in Namibia, which is also the main regional focus of this paper. The study in general aimed to address three main questions: What is the meaning and significance of neotraditional authority in Southern Africa at present? How powerful are neotraditional leaders and to what extent are they legitimized? And what does this mean for democracy more broadly? One main objective of my field research was to combine local and (trans)national perspectives on the struggle over neotraditional authority. The study certainly had a local focus and was based on in-depth fieldwork (or what Spittler 2001 and 2014 refers to as “thick participation”), but it also took into account the linkages between (trans)national and local political dynamics. This concerned not only the effects of national legislation on local politics, but also the active involvement of national and provincial politicians and state representatives in local affairs on the one hand, and the efforts by various local actors to affect political processes at higher levels on the other. Throughout my 18 months of fieldwork in Namibia and South Africa I was accompanied by my former wife and children. What made my fieldwork even more special – in terms of field research as well as family dynamics – is the fact that our youngest son was born about half-way through the fieldwork (in a private clinic in Swakopmund). My wife was pregnant when we travelled to Namibia in March 2007 and our oldest son and daughter were both less than five years old at

1

The three-year research project was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and I conducted fieldwork for 18 months in total: from March until November 2007 in Namibia and from December 2007 until May 2008, as well as from February until May 2009 in KwaZulu-Natal. In my research, I combined an empirical, synchronous approach with a historical perspective on the development and changes in neotraditional authority since the colonial era. Observation, or participant observation, “situational analysis” (see Gluckman 1940, Werbner 1984), qualitative interviews, local surveys and archival research were the key methods used. I conducted 153 interviews and 20 “situational analyses”, and wrote about 200.000 words of field notes in total. In addition, I collected several hundred pages of written documents such as legislation, newspaper articles, unpublished reports, minutes of meetings, letters and other forms of correspondence, and internet and archival documents.

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that time. As most parents are well aware, caring for three children is always rewarding but also demanding, and the demands may increase in a foreign social and cultural milieu. Mainly due to my wife’s pregnancy and our concerns about her health, we agreed to a compromise: the family would accompany me during my field research (my demand), but would live a suburban life in Swakopmund (my wife’s request). That is, we decided to keep our private sphere separate from the actual “field”. This also meant that our family would live a private life which was very different from that of almost all of my Topnaar interlocutors and which had a greater resemblance to our everyday life back at home in Germany. Our oldest son and daughter attended a day nursery in Swakopmund, and in the afternoons, my wife cared for them. In addition, my parents and sister visited us for several weeks and assisted us, particularly in the weeks before and after the birth of our youngest son; this made it possible for me to continue my field research after only a short break. The budget for the research project did not cover the travel and living expenses of my former wife and children. My wife took maternity leave for the period after the birth of our youngest son and we thus had to cover all costs from my salary as researcher. However, the research project included a budget to buy a used car and to resell it at the end of the fieldwork. I thus bought a VW minibus within the first weeks of our stay in Namibia, which turned out to be an excellent decision both in private and professional terms: privately, we could pack all our possessions into the bus in early December 2007, when as a family of five we drove about 2700 km from Swakopmund to Durban (South Africa) to continue the second part of my fieldwork there. Professionally, my minibus became a popular means of transport after a few weeks in the field and a kind of meeting place with potential interlocutors. One important consequence of the compromise between my wife and me of separating the private and professional spheres was the construction of my research field. I faced a somewhat different challenge from that of Felix Girke (this volume): whereas he had to find his specific field in their relationship as academic couple, I had to adapt my field to the demands of private family life, and vice versa. What was “the field” in my research in Namibia? I distinguish between an “outer field”, that is, suburban Swakopmund where my family lived (but which was far away from our German “home”) and from where I departed to the “inner field”, that is, the former “townships” of Kuisebmond and Naraville (both products of racial segregation in the apartheid era) in Walvis Bay and the rural “Topnaar heartland” along the Kuiseb river, up to 100 km inland from Walvis Bay. These two fields were not entirely separated but were intermingled here and

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there (when my wife, our children and me visited the “inner field” together at weekends, or when I worked at our temporary “home” in Swakopmund to make fieldnotes and transcribe interviews, mostly in the late evenings) – but basically I immersed myself in the “inner field” in the early mornings and emerged from it in the late afternoons to spend time with and care for my family. Most importantly, this balancing act between the private and the professional and my rambling between the “outer” and “inner” fields meant that I became highly mobile in a spatial sense – a “field commuter”, in other words. Without knowing it at the beginning of my fieldwork, I thus unconsciously adapted to the regular life and rhythm of many Topnaar, who frequently move back and forth between the urban and the rural. I commuted on a daily basis about 40 km between our small apartment and Walvis Bay; from there, my research assistant and I drove to the rural Kuiseb almost every day. In addition, I travelled once or twice a month for a few days to the capital Windhoek, about 400 km away from Walvis Bay, to meet representatives of state institutions and (trans)national civil society organizations, to conduct interviews and to work in the National Archives. Interestingly, the most relevant person for me on the local level, the Topnaar kaptein (“chief”), was even more mobile than me. Due to his comparatively strong dependence on the national centre, that is, the SWAPO-controlled government and administration, he frequently drove to Windhoek and met with national decisionmakers in the capital. Numerous informants thus called the kaptein “the chief on the road” and complained forcefully that networking in the capital was obviously far more important for him than caring about the concerns of local Topnaar (see Krämer 2020a).

MOBILITY, DISTANCE AND CLOSENESS My high spatial mobility had a profound effect on two key characteristics of ethnographic fieldwork: closeness and distance. By this I mean the inherent tension between establishing close social relationships with the interlocutors in order to be able to understand their worldviews, on the one hand, and the necessity of stepping back and looking at these perspectives from a distance in order to make sense of them on the other. During my fieldwork in Namibia, the general problem of balancing professional and private life translated into the more specific question of how to reconcile social closeness and analytical as well as spatial distance. My perpetual shifting between two different social worlds urged me to constantly rethink how to establish social closeness in the field despite my high spatial mobility.

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Spatial Distance, Mobility and the “Wanderer” In an article on ethnographic fieldwork and “thick participation”, Gerd Spittler (2014) refers to Edward E. Evans-Pritchard and Erving Goffman and their assessments that fieldwork must include a maximal distance from intimate persons and from home in order to be receptive to the “foreign” and to be able to completely immerse oneself into the field (see also Carsten 2012 on the transformation of fieldwork in the last two decades). Family and friends, however, would just put obstacles in a field researcher’s way. This attitude is certainly related to Max Weber’s ideal of having a closed mind and of completely focusing on one’s own research project. Gerd Spittler takes these assessments seriously but also perceives them critically and proposes an alternative idea. Referring to Georg Simmel (1923), Gerd Spittler compares the social anthropologist with a “wanderer” (der Wandernde), that is, someone “who comes today and will leave tomorrow” – in contrast to the “foreigner” (der Fremde), “who comes today and will stay tomorrow” (Spittler 2014: 227–228; translation of the author).2 According to Gerd Spittler, the relationship with the wanderer is not only characterized by distance. Far from it, social closeness may be established due to the wanderer’s temporary removal from the customary milieu, shared experiences in the present and the expectation of being apart again sooner or later. Hence, the expectation of spatial distance in future may create social closeness in the present. In retrospect, the social figure of the wanderer seems to be an accurate characterization of my role during fieldwork: I wandered (or to be more precise: drove) constantly between two social worlds and switched between the roles of father and fieldworker. At the beginning, I experienced my role as wanderer mostly in terms of the problem of distance and how to overcome it. Distance was built into my fieldwork by the construction of the field. The spatial separation of my (temporary) home 2

Julia Pauli (this volume) questions whether the “wanderer” is the right term to describe the fieldworker, because he (or she) often returns to the field. In her view, the return is connected to her (or his) social becoming in the field, which has long-term consequences. From my viewpoint, many fieldworkers are situated between the “wanderer” and the “foreigner” – the “wandering foreigner”, so to speak – because they neither leave soon nor stay forever, but rather move (more or less) frequently between at least two different social worlds (their home and the field). Furthermore, “wandering” becomes even more important in comparative research, which imposes stricter temporal limits on the researcher and often impedes regular return visits to more than one field site. This is even more the case when he (or she) is a parent of children of school age and fieldwork is, therefore, limited by school terms and holidays.

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and the “inner field” meant a temporal restriction on spending time with my interlocutors. Many relevant events took place at the weekends (community meetings, the few weddings and many more funerals, etc.), that is, at a time when I would usually be spending time together with my family. We thus adapted family life to the requirements of fieldwork and solved the apparent clash of interests: we shifted the “weekend” to the beginning of the week in order for me to make observations and conduct interviews on Saturdays and Sundays. Moreover, my research assistant (see below) acted as an “additional observer” when I was unable to attend specific events. Mobility as such reduced not only spatial but also social distance: the minibus was not only perfect as a private transportation vehicle, but the incessant driving around (often together with my research assistant) had very positive and unintended consequences for my research (see Corinna di Stefano this volume, who purposefully accompanied her interlocutors en route and also converted mobility into a research tool). We habitually offered a lift to people in need of transport and could thus establish contacts in a straightforward way, making appointments for visits and interviews and also becoming aware of the latest gossip in the Topnaar community. In addition, my research assistant and I used the time on the road between urban Walvis Bay and the rural Kuiseb to assess observations we had just made and to prepare for interviews (see also Gudeman and Rivera 1989 on the importance of the car during their fieldwork).3 Social Closeness and Local Conflicts It is quite obvious that too much (spatial and particularly social) distance is problematic in field research, but social closeness is also not unambiguous; this I learned through my very close interaction with my Topnaar research assistant. Gerd Spittler (2014: 222) makes clear that a close social relationship with some people may inevitably prevent access to others and this happened to me during my fieldwork in the Topnaar Traditional Authority. I became aware that the Topnaar community had been affected by internal conflict for some time when I was preparing for my fieldwork, through reading 3

Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera argue that “[t]o our surprise, control over an instrument of transport – the automobile – played a role in the conceptualization of our study, for a car became not only our means of transport but a mode of inquiry and a marker of ‘conversational communities.’ [...] the car became a place for our discussions and facilitated the making of our own conversational community. After a field conversation, in which we both participated and took notes, we returned to the car [...] to discuss what we thought we had just heard or observed.” (1989: 268–269)

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the accessible literature and talking to a colleague who did fieldwork with the Topnaar community in the 1990s (Thomas Widlok; see Widlok 1998). Only a short time after the start of my field research, I noticed that the kaptein was viewed critically (to say the least) by many Topnaar. As in KwaZulu-Natal, the leader of the Traditional Authority was one of the first people I spoke to after my arrival, but it very soon became clear that although the kaptein officially gave consent for my research project, he was not really keen on contributing to it: for example, he tried to avoid any observations of him interacting with his subjects and also avoided meeting me and talking to me for longer than necessary. That is, the kaptein and his close circle of followers attempted to keep me at a distance and even tried to get rid of me at a later stage. I decided, therefore, to work with two research assistants at first – one was the kaptein’s nephew, who was also his Traditional Secretary, and the other was a relative of his main opponent. For very pragmatic reasons it turned out after some weeks that the collaboration with the latter research assistant was very productive and pleasant, while my work with the former became increasingly difficult. I thus decided to bring our professional cooperation to an end a few weeks later. In August 2007, my research assistant and I conducted a questionnaire to get a better understanding of who identified themselves as belonging to the Topnaar Traditional Authority and, conversely, for whom a Topnaar identity was insignificant.4 My uneasy relationship with the kaptein deteriorated afterwards, apparently because he and his allies feared that too much attention to and awareness-raising about local problems and conflicts could intensify the persistent criticisms and the delegitimation of the neotraditional leaders. In early September, the kaptein, his nephew (that is, my former research assistant) and the senior councillor stopped me on the road and told me to end the questionnaire, to follow the “rules and regulations” of the Traditional Authority, and to inform the kaptein about any statements during my research that might cast an unfavourable light on the Traditional Authority.5 When I told my research assistant about this strange encounter, he joked about what these rules and regulations could be and told me that the kaptein had allegedly threatened “to chase you out of the Kuiseb and even out of Namibia” in front of other Topnaar the day before.6 My research assistant and his two closest friends were also upset about my encounter with the neotraditional leaders and when I asked them what to do in this difficult situation, they urged me 4

A Topnaar identity is often associated with belonging to the Topnaar Traditional Authority by those defining themselves as Topnaar. What is also often mentioned is an attachment to the Kuiseb area, which is perceived as the Topnaar place of origin.

5

Personal field notes (#331; 11 September 2007).

6

Personal field notes (#338; 14 September 2007).

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to continue with my research and fieldwork. They moreover decided to organize a community meeting in October, which then triggered a series of additional meetings and a “youth uprising” in the weeks that followed (see Krämer 2020a). What I had wanted to avoid from the start – being drawn into the local conflicts and somehow losing my independent stance – turned out to be naïve and inevitable after a while. For me, this was an important lesson to learn and quite a new experience. These very pragmatic problems show that it is, in my experience and from my point of view, impossible to be and to act impartially in a severely divided community such as that of the Topnaar – particularly if the goal is to achieve an in-depth view of local conflicts and political processes. Or, to put it another way round: the social distance which comes along with stronger impartiality may contradict the ethnographic task of “thick participation” and intensive fieldwork. For example, only at the end of my fieldwork and through close collaboration with my research assistant and his relatives and friends did I become aware of and could I make sense of the witchcraft accusations that were put forward in secret against some leading figures of the Traditional Authority. Quite obviously, my closer proximity to one of the rival “factions” had methodological and theoretical consequences: the material collected in the “opposition camp” was definitely more thick and extensive, which impacted on the ways in which I interpreted local processes and conflicts and how I constructed and formulated my theoretical arguments. My social closeness and intimate collaboration with my research assistant was thus a double-edged sword: only by this means did an in-depth perspective on local processes and relations become possible, but at the same time I lost access to other local actors and their perceptions and interpretations received less attention. To summarize, my collaboration and friendship with my research assistant was a turning point in my research and transformed the problem of spatial distance as it resulted from my construction of the field into social closeness on the one hand, but also into social distance from other Topnaar community members on the other. Moreover, it drew me into the midst of local conflicts, up until the point where I had to think about finishing my fieldwork earlier than intended. Being a Father and “Family Commuter” Not unlike social closeness, being a father in the field was also ambiguous: on the one hand, my fatherhood separated me from the “inner field” and at least initially increased the spatial and social distance from my interlocutors because I wanted to care for my own family in a comparatively foreign social environment and under exceptional circumstances due to the pregnancy of my wife. But on the other

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hand, my fatherhood, and specifically the fact that I became a father again during the course of my fieldwork, strengthened social ties with some of my interlocutors and particularly with my research assistant. His girlfriend was pregnant when we started our collaboration and gave birth to a son a short time before our youngest son was born. As well as mutual sympathy and a trusting working relationship, this simple coincidence reinforced our friendship. We shared a common experience, had another topic of conversation and I was able to learn about Topnaar kinship relations and upbringing in a comparative way. My role as a father, therefore, turned out to be essential for my fieldwork, particularly in the weeks before and after the birth of our son, and provided me with a different form of access to my interlocutors. For example, I made a few introductory remarks about the imminent birth at the beginning of meetings and interviews and excused myself for potentially having to leave immediately. Commonly, these short remarks initiated a conversation about parenthood and the interlocutors’ families, and often aroused curiosity about my family as well. Furthermore, people’s knowledge of my role as a husband and father affected my status in the field: although my research assistant and his closest friends were about the same age as myself, they called themselves the ‘Topnaar youth’ due to their status as unmarried men (see Pauli 2019 on the decline of marriage in Namibia since Independence). Being a father and married I was, however, perceived as an adult man. My role in the field also changed in another way: whereas I had started as a “wanderer” between two different social worlds, I became more and more integrated into my research assistant’s extended family towards the end of my fieldwork. That is, I became part of another family besides my own. I spent many hours of my fieldwork in the home of my research assistant, and his living room turned into a kind of office after a while: we invited other Topnaar interlocutors to my research assistant’s home to interview them or they visited us on their initiative. At the end of my fieldwork, we had a farewell party to celebrate in my research assistant’s home, which numerous Topnaar attended. Because I spent much time at his home, I was also able to build closer relationships with my research assistant’s mother, wife, nephews, nieces and children over the course of my fieldwork, and I was invited to family festivities (birthdays, confirmation, etc.). That is, the spatial separation of private and professional affairs at the beginning turned into an increasing degree of immersion by the end. For parts of the week I spent more time with my research assistant’s family than with my own. Therefore, I gradually became a “family commuter” and “wanderer” in relation to my own family.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS “Being a father in the field” taught me that Max Weber’s appeal to appreciate “science as a vocation”, that is, to have a closed mind and to focus completely on one’s own research project, turned out to be an illusion in the specific circumstances of accompanied fieldwork that I encountered in Namibia. This does not mean, however, that I entirely reject Max Weber’s ideal – quite in contrast, it could be one (but certainly not the only) remedy for academia’s “neoliberal disease” from my point of view – but it does mean that the ambivalent social roles of researcher and father demand a more pragmatic approach. What became clear to me in retrospect is that I unconsciously translated Max Weber’s ideal of vocation into the anthropological ideal of “total immersion” at the beginning of my fieldwork (Carsten 2012; see also Stolz in this volume). Fieldwork with family thus not only meant that I had to cope with a foreign social and cultural milieu, but also that I had to confront myself with internalized ideals of vocation and immersion and to adapt to a different kind of fieldwork compared with my previous research. Janet Carsten (2012) discusses her ambivalence about the ideal of total immersion and illustrates the different degrees of immersion in her fieldwork in Malaysia and Scotland. She describes how she approached her first fieldwork with a combination of naïveté and idealism and that the kind of immersion she eventually encountered was very different from what she had expected at the beginning; that is, fieldwork is often founded on unachievable ideals, but in the end all research remains incomplete and restricted. Both Janet Carsten (2012) and Gerd Spittler (2014) emphasize the value of the temporal dimension of fieldwork and contend that long-term engagement with one or more field site(s) and its people is probably more relevant and fruitful than the ideal of total immersion. By applying a longterm research strategy, it becomes possible “to compensate for limitations imposed by the circumstances of fieldwork through a layering of different kinds of investigation over a much longer time span” (Carsten 2012: 11). However, comparative research, such as the research I conducted in Namibia and KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), may present a problem for this ideal of long-term commitment in the simple fact that most researchers will not have enough time and resources to continue fieldwork in more than one place over an extended period of time – and as a parent of one or more children, this commitment will be even more difficult to fulfil. During my fieldwork in Namibia, I was initially confronted with the “problem of immersion” as a result of accompanied fieldwork and due to the specific division of the field into an “outer” and “inner” sphere, as outlined above. Far from achieving the goal of “total immersion”, my fieldwork, however, gradually shifted

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towards increased social closeness with my interlocutors and with my research assistant and his extended family in particular – up until the last stage of my field research in late 2007, when I had turned more or less from a “field commuter” into a “family commuter”. The relationship with my research assistant and friend was crucial in this conversion: at first, our research collaboration was able to alleviate what I experienced as the “problem of immersion”. Therefore, my research assistant’s role was that of a facilitator and broker at the beginning and shifted to the roles of a host and eventually a friend over the course of fieldwork. Most importantly, our collaboration, friendship and the common experience of becoming fathers, which strengthened our close bonds of friendship even more, had profound effects on the research findings (see Lockwood 1993): on the one hand, they opened a window to those Topnaar who perceived themselves as being in opposition to the neotraditional leadership, thus providing the opportunity of immersing myself into the intricacies of local conflicts. On the other hand, access to other Topnaar, who supported those in power, was diminished or doors were even completely closed. Even though I tried to balance both accounts by “complex triangulation” (Olivier de Sardan 2015), the perspectives of those who were critical of local neotraditional leaders were more detailed and these were the perspectives that predominated in my understanding of local political dynamics and conflicts. Hence, my analysis and assessment of the power and legitimacy of neotraditional authority in Namibia turned out to be quite different from my observations and interpretations gained through comparative field research in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa).

REFERENCES Carsten, Janet (2012): “Fieldwork Since the 1980s. Total Immersion and its Discontents.” In: Richard Fardon/Olivia Harris/Trevor H.J. Marchand/Mark Nuttal/Chris Shore/Veronica Strang/Richard A. Wilson (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, Los Angeles: SAGE, pp. 1–14. Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446201077.n36. Downey, Charles Aiden (2013): “Kids Change Everything. How Becoming a Dad Transformed My Fieldwork (and Findings).” In: Tamara Mose Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 145–159. Dreby, Joanna/Brown, Tamara Mose (2013): “Work and Home (Im)Balance. Finding Synergy throught Ethnographic Fieldwork.” In: Tamara Mose

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Brown/Joanna Dreby (eds.), Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 3–16. Gluckman, Max (1940): “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” In: Bantu Studies 14/1, pp. 1–30. Gudeman, Stephen/Rivera, Alberto (1989): “Colombian Conversations. The Strength of the Earth.” In: Current Anthropology 30/3, pp. 267–281. Krämer, Mario (2007): Violence as Routine. Transformations of Local-Level Politics and the Disjunction between Centre and Periphery in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Köln: Köppe. Krämer, Mario (2016): “Neither Despotic nor Civil. The Legitimacy of Chieftaincy in its Relationship with the ANC and the State in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa).” In: The Journal of Modern African Studies 54/1, pp. 117–143. Krämer, Mario (2018): The Struggle over Neotraditional Authority. Power, Legitimacy and Democracy in South Africa and Namibia:Universität zu Köln, Habilitationsschrift. Krämer, Mario (2020a): “Neotraditional Authority Contested. The Corporatization of Tradition and the Quest for Democracy in the Topnaar Traditional Authority, Namibia.” In: Africa – Journal of the International African Institute 90. Krämer, Mario (2020b): “Violence, Autochthony, and Identity Politics in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa). A Processual Perspective on Local Political Dynamics.” In: African Studies Review 63. Lockwood, Matthew (1993): “Facts or Fictions? Fieldwork Relationships and the Nature of Data.” In: Stephen Devereux/John Hoddinott (eds.), Fieldwork in Developing Countries, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 164–178. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre (2015): “The Policy of Fieldwork. Data Production in Anthropology and Qualitative Approaches.” In: Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (ed.), Epistemology, Fieldwork, and Anthropology, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21–63. Pauli, Julia (2019): The Decline of Marriage in Namibia. Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community, Bielefeld: transcript. Simmel, Georg (1923): Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, München: Duncker & Humblot. Spittler, Gerd (2001): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als Dichte Teilnahme.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 126/1, pp. 1–25. Spittler, Gerd (2014): “Dichte Teilnahme und darüber hinaus.” In: Sociologus 64/2, pp. 207–230. Weber, Max (1917/1919): Wissenschaft als Beruf. Politik als Beruf, Tübingen: Mohr.

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Werbner, Richard (1984): “The Manchester School in South-Central Africa.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 13, pp. 157–185. Widlok, Thomas (1998): “Unearthing Culture. Khoisan Funerals and Social Change.” In: Anthropos 93, pp. 115–126.

Whisky, Kids and Sleepless Nights The Challenge of Being a Mum, a Student and a Researcher Tabea Schiefer

Balancing the conflicting demands of a university career and a family constitutes a major challenge for academic parents. This challenge is especially demanding for mothers, as the dominant distribution of gender roles and prevailing gender norms place significantly higher constraints on women (cf. Macha 2005). The possibilities of balancing work and family life are further shaped by the specifications of particular disciplines. “Anthropologists as parents share childrearing difficulties peculiar to the profession. […] No other professional activity so thoroughly obscures the differences between one’s life and one’s work” (Jenkins 1990: 152). This is most notably true for anthropological fieldwork (cf. Brown and Dreby 2013; Flinn, Marshall and Armstrong 1998). Tamara Mose Brown and Joanna Dreby and remind us that it “is not simply social statuses, such as being a woman or a man” that matters, “but the roles we undertake as women and men” (2013: 7). In this chapter, I explore how my different roles as mother, student, and researcher resulted in particular limits and opportunities. I further illustrate particular circumstances that confronted me with expectations and difficulties, but also with new skills, benefits and strategies. Through the lens of my personal challenges I show how “social sciences research can be enriched by researchers reflecting on their multiple roles” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 42). Drawing on my experiences, I provide an account of how being a mother of two young children influenced my everyday life as a student, as well as the field research which I conducted for my Master’s thesis. I hope to encourage other students, and particularly young mothers, in similar situations not to give up their scholarly ambitions because of the challenges that come along with balancing different roles. In responding to the increasing demand for reflexivity in social science, this article is written as a first person narrative account. “Since the reflexive turn in

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anthropology in the 1980s (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986), it has become a norm to elaborate on who conducted the ethnographic study and under which conditions” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 3). For someone performing a triple role – mother, student and researcher – there is need for a special reflexivity, emerging not only from the need to discuss the conditions in which a student-mother must organise her daily life, but also because “[b]eing the primary parent of a young child or children comes into play during every phase of research, from conceptualizing the project, to entering the field and gaining access to participants, to writing up the results” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 54). Going beyond the objective goal of a work-life balance there is – especially in the ethnographic-academic discourse – an increasingly recognised need for a reflexivityresults balance. I am thankful for the opportunity to reflect on my different roles and identities. “Going beyond the role of the researcher, and adding the element of the effects of motherhood in the field, brought new direction to this self-conscious process, allowing us to understand how we were shaping our field” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 44). My subjective account contributes to this currently relevant discussion and aims at encouraging others “to cultivate empathy for the embodied selves as a broader goal of doing reflexive research” (Norander 2017: 350).

BEING A MOTHER AND A STUDENT My study of anthropology is my second-chance education. My first challenge – even before motherhood – was that I am not from an academic background. Finding a way into higher education was thus quite unusual in my family (see also Miethe et al. 2014 on first generation students in German higher education). My first educational pathway was vocational training as a dentist assistant. However, when I finished my vocational training, I realised that I did not want to work in a dental surgery for my whole life. Although serious doubts about my choice of education had already occurred much earlier, I couldn’t easily quit this career. Due to the strong influence of my working class background, an interruption to my vocational training was out of the question. I did not learn until years later that a change in direction is nothing to be ashamed of. I experienced entering academia as a chance to discover new ways of critical and independent thinking. However, it was not always easy to find my way in the academic world, due to the lack of

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experience and support in the background in which I had been brought up.1 I will come back later to this point when I describe the kinds of support that helped me to stay on my path. After having found my way into academia, the second challenge I met was to manage my studies with two small children. After the completion of my professional training as a dentist assistant I enrolled in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Cologne University. I finished my BA studies already heavily pregnant with my first child. I gave birth to my second child during my MA Studies and thus had to manage my MA studies during their baby and infant stages. The challenges I was confronted with included not only sleep deprivation, feats of strength and stress management, but also barriers like inflexible educational infrastructures, a lack of social understanding for the complexity of my situation, and a rigid care system. I had to manage examination stages, deadlines for course papers and presentations, whilst at the same time following my daily routines as a mother. Besides struggling with time constraints, I saw myself confronted with different ideals and ideas about what makes a “good” mother (cf. DeSouza 2013; Diabaté and Beringer 2018; Elliott, Powell and Brenton 2015; Hays 1996; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; Mesman et al. 2016; Terry, Mayocchi and Hynes 1996; Thurer 1994). While being confronted with different – and sometimes conflicting – images of motherhood from outside, it was even more challenging to define my identity as a mother from the inside. I had high expectations of myself: I wanted to be a diligent student and a “good” mother, which meant for me spending most of my time together with my children and not having them cared for by others. In the introduction to the edited volume Fieldwork and Families, Juliana Flinn remarks that “[c]ultural expectations of motherhood in the context of decisions about fieldwork easily induce feelings of guilt” (1998: 11). In a similar vein, balancing my responsibilities as a student and a mother, I was many times “wracked with guilt if I spend too much time doing either one at the expense of the other” (Ghodsee 2009: 4). I realised that I was unable to fit in all the tasks and self defined goals without paying a high price – namely my health. This point of realisation was not easy to accept. But for me it was an important step in learning to set priorities – a valuable feature which enables me to deal better with professional situations as well. Being a mother and a student at the same time can be very stressful. But this is only one side of the coin. This situation also enriches my life, particularly my professional situation, for I have become used to learning efficiently. In a similar 1

Cf. Aladin El-Mafaalani’s study (2014) on working class students becoming academics in Germany, and the individual as well as emotional challenges inherent in the social mobility they experienced.

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vein Pia Jolliffe and Rasmus Rodineliussen discuss, in the Researcher Podcast Coffee and Cocktails, the advantages and disadvantages that come with having children in academia. They argue that having children limits the time one can spend working. But following Rasmus Rodineliussen, the challenge is learning to deal with this small time budget: “You have this certain amount of hours. And you have to produce all that you need within these hours” (Coffee and Cocktails, 4:52 minutes).2 I, like Pia Jolliffe, have had to learn to find moments that I can use for my tasks (for instance when the children are sleeping) and to use them as efficiently as possible (see Coffee and Cocktails, 6:40 minutes). As the host of the podcast, Ann Wand, rightly points out: “There is time. You just learn to find that time” (Coffee and Cocktails, 8:15 minutes). In summary, the benefit one gains from this situation is learning to manage your work in much less time. Therefore, having children can help to achieve some structure. Following further the arguments of the speakers on the podcast: having children also helps one learn to be kind to oneself. I can attest to this from my personal experience and from the related health issue mentioned above. Today, I can manage stressful situations much more easily. My mothering has helped me to learn to forgive myself and to focus on taking care of the most important things. These days, I can imagine working in every given environment. I am more organised than I was before. I am extremely disciplined, which enables me to manage my tasks in less time. I have all these skills thanks to my children and the challenges they gave me. Through my double role of being a mother and a student I have also had the opportunity to rearrange my priorities. Many times, I was confronted with situations where I am asked to decide what is more important. This can also mean overcoming moral and sensible boundaries. One experience I would like to refer to is giving a presentation whilst at the same time breastfeeding my child. Usually, the care for my children was organised in accordance with my schedule. However, one seminar in which I was supposed to give a presentation had no pre-fixed timeschedule so, on one particular occasion, I had to take the children with me, which was extremely stressful. Right while my son was clearing out another student’s pencil case, my daughter began to cry because she was hungry. I quickly checked the situation at the front of the audience. It seemed that the lecturer was likely to talk a few more minutes, so I decided that it was my best chance of feeding my daughter before the start of my presentation. I put her in a nursing position and began to feed her. Just as I did so, the teacher called my name and asked me to give the presentation. The problem was that my daughter would have reacted 2

Coffee and Cocktails, podcast for Researcher. Available online at https://soundcloud. com/user-579024727/coffee-cocktails-ep-7-work-life-balance-for-parents-in-academia (last accessed February 20, 2019).

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angrily if I had stopped feeding her. I decided to make the most of the situation and gave my presentation while feeding my daughter. Features of mothering like breastfeeding are behaviours that may be perceived differently. These features are culturally and historically embedded (cf. Barlow and Chapin 2010). “In Western culture, men and women, generally speaking, have a problem talking seriously about breastfeeding” (Shaw 2004: 100). This seems to be because of the shadow of “the primary status of the breast in the ‘West’ as hyper-sexualized” (Clinton 2016: 2).3 However, in that moment, I didn’t care about the confusion of my student colleagues, because there was no chance for me to do so. Mothering helps me to prioritise. By giving priority to the basic need of my baby, I had unexpectedly overcome my own and maybe general societal and moral boundaries. My children – especially when they are very small – must have priority. In describing this situation, I hope to give an example of being caught in dilemmas within mothering, whereof the solution is authentically clear. In addition to my double role of mother and student, I finished my MA studies with a research project, which included some fieldwork. My role as a researching mother was the third challenge I had to deal with. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reminds us that “fieldworkers must first establish a vantage point from which to interact and observe. Access to particular data is determined by the role, the expectations and obligations which the researcher assumes” (1988: 612). In the following section, I give insights into the development of my MA research design and further impressions on practising fieldwork with family. I summarise the support I was given in the course of this process, and what kinds of support proved to be most helpful in my particular situation.

BEING A MOTHER AND A RESEARCHER When I started my Master’s thesis project, I was confronted with the decision about what I wanted to do. As a matter of course, this decision was informed by my role as a mother, as “[t]he fact that a fieldworker has children influences the making of an ethnography at different stages” and starts “to have an impact when it [comes] to the choice of the research topic” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 5). My biggest fear was keeping up with the image of conducting research in a faraway place. During my studies I had absorbed the ideal of a lone and adventurous ethnographer, as described by Bronislaw Malinowski in his famous

3

For more references relating to breastfeeding see Glenda Wall 2001; Linda M. Blum 1999; Pam Carter 1995.

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Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). A “good” anthropologist seemed to be one who leaves “the company of other white men” behind (Malinowski 1922: 6) and who lives “in difficult situations” (Flinn 1998: 17): a person who conducts research in a dangerous desert, a faraway jungle or on a small Pacific island. I could not identify with this ideal; it rather disheartened and restrained me. The aim to follow these ideals put me under a lot of pressure, because I couldn’t foresee a research path like that for me. I needed a long time to realise that there is no need to expose oneself to such pressure. Adventurous fieldworkers have my deepest respect, but I had to accept that I had no ambitions to follow in their footsteps, as motherhood had given me an increased need for safety and predictability. I did not care about comfort, but I felt the need to secure the health and safety of my family, which seemed easier for me in a familiar environment. Several anthropologists have shown that cultural relativism stops when it comes to our own children and child rearing practices (see Sutton 1998; Young Leslie 1998; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016). Conducting research with family means that I must look after not only myself, but also take care of my family’s needs. Thinking about how to reconcile both family and research, I could neither imagine separating my children, two and three years old at the time of research, from their father and social environment for that length of time, nor being separated from them by myself. The question of whether to leave one’s children behind for the course of fieldwork, whether to place them into the care of others, can be emotionally charged and is related to cultural images of motherhood. I view myself as pursuing a form of intensive mothering, which is described by Sabine Diabaté and Samira Beringer as an ideal of “good mothering”, “which defines the child (and its care) as a woman’s highest priority” (2018: 293). In explaining that phenomenon, the authors point out the connection with socio-structural and cultural factors which inform our understanding of normative mothering. In their study they focus on the difference in ideal childcare concepts between East and West Germany. Therefore, traditional ideas of mothering – which entail reservations about the idea of thirdparty care – prevail in West Germany, while in East Germany maternal care is a less preferred form of mothering. The authors explain these differences in terms of different political motivated socialisation contexts, which still shape the current ideals of what a “good mother” is (see Diabaté and Beringer 2018). Setting up my Master’s research project made me aware of my cultural socialisation, my preferred child rearing practices and the central position of motherhood for my identity. My field research had to comply with my need for security and with continuous proximity to my children. Being a parent, and my particular ideals of motherhood, thus significantly shaped the choice of my research topic

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and my research site. Mario Krämer (this volume) and Felix Girke (this volume) also describe how familial needs and personal demands contributed to the construction of their respective fields. I look back to a long period of mentoring, tutorials and workshops for the design of my fieldwork project. My great luck was finally to find a supervisor who supported me in every possible way. As a mother-student-researcher from a nonacademic background, with a financially secure partner and available day care, the most important kind of support was ideal support (by which I mean support for my ideals as a mother, but also all kinds of support that encouraged me to stay on my path – like encouraging words, reinforcement, moral confirmation and so on). In my opinion this ideal support of relatives, mentors and supervisors is generally underestimated. In my role as a student I needed a lot of advice. In my role as a researcher I needed a clear structured plan I could follow. In my role as a mother I needed a sense of goodwill, understanding for my situation and a feel-good atmosphere in mentoring – because everything takes longer with family obligations. It was the combination of these different needs, when they were finally fulfilled, that made my thesis project successful. I was very lucky to find a supervisor who helped me to see things from another point of view, to stay focussed and to structure myself. Without this kind of support, my Master’s thesis project would never have finished. Giving up was an option I offered myself several times. It was hard work and a big challenge for me to stay on my path and to find the motivation anew every day. While reconciling work and family life is a challenge for all parents, I experienced it as being particularly challenging as a woman. Current expectations of “modern” mothers are huge: “Motherhood demands women to be the primary caregivers of their children […] and attend to and meet all of their needs, while being financially able to do so (cf. Mesman et al. 2016). A mother is expected to bestow abundant time and energy on her children, focus on their development, and put their needs above her own […] (cf. Hays 1996)” (Keefe, Brownstein-Evans and Polmanteer 2018: 221). Work as a mother is unpaid, but usually loaded with high expectations. All mothers strive to be good mothers (Keefe, Brownstein-Evans and Polmanteer 2018: 222). But the structure of an idealised family and ideas about motherhood are deep-seated in the social mind and these notions still form the fitting prospects and opinions: “It was meaningful work for woman to do, but more than that, it was considered something that should come naturally to woman and that should take a certain form” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 51). The point I want to make is that although I knew that “[t]he transition to motherhood is an individual process influenced by a combination of social, economic, political, psychological, and environmental factors (cf. Chapman, Coleman and Ganong 2016;

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DeSouza 2013) and guided by social norms about what is best for the child […] (cf. Thurer 1994)” (Keefe, Brownstein-Evans and Polmanteer 2018: 223), there are always additional expectations from the inside. Therefore, the indicators for pressure are not only the given circumstances (which does not mean that these circumstances are not noticeable), but for me personally it was my evaluation of myself as a “good mother” that made me judge myself harshly. Although the results of my Master’s thesis are not the subject matter of this article, I need to provide brief details on my research questions and the selected ethnographic methods I used. This is because the whole project was shaped by the needs of my family situation. After realising that I did not have to venture out for research to a faraway place, I started to design a project that I could realise close to home, following Sarah Pink, who came to be the main reference for my analysis: “In other circumstances, where long-term relocation of the researcher is not possible, ethnographers might learn by participating sporadically in events” (2009: 67). Sarah Pink herself worked on most of her projects “at home” (cf. Pink 2005, 2007). Her aim was to practise a sensory and auto-ethnographic method, which aimed at an understanding of the perceptions and world views of different people in her own society. She recommends auto-ethnography as a method because it “allows ethnographers to use their own experiences as a route through which to produce academic knowledge” (Pink 2009: 64). This methodical approach seemed ideal for me. Following her idea, I was encouraged to set up a research concept that fit my family needs. In the end, “whisky” turned out to be the central topic of my thesis. At first sight, this topic may seem questionable – especially given my familial situation. However, whisky proved to be a perfect research topic, as it constitutes an underresearched realm in anthropology and, most importantly, complied with my familial needs. My literature search revealed that there is no ethnographic literature on “whisky consumption”. I found some accounts of other kinds of alcohol, like sago consumption (Mead 1955), beer advertising (Graham 2001; Alexander 2009) and the performance aspects in the marketing of wine (Beverland 2005; Vannini et al. 2010). But even given that all the arguments in the available literature could be transferred to the context of whisky (concerning marketing strategies, etc.), there was no deeper consideration of the consumer perspective and their perceptions of marketing strategies, etc.: “[…] more research is needed to examine the differences between perceptions of authenticity held by consumers” (Berverland 2005: 1026). So I had finally found my Master’s project, namely exploring and comparing the whisky-consuming culture in Scotland and Germany (see Schiefer 2019). Apart from its scientific value, researching whisky enabled me to balance fieldwork and family life. Since there is a big whisky-consuming community in

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Germany, I could conduct most of my research “at home”, supplemented with a short field research stay in Scotland – one of the main whisky producing countries in the world. My major need – no separation for and from the children – was fulfilled and childcare could also be easily arranged. Throughout my fieldwork in Germany, I could attend whisky tastings, festivals and whisky fairs in the vicinity of my home. This meant that my husband, grandparents and friends could take care of the children when I attended events that took place during evening hours and on weekends. Since my research in Scotland was only for a short period of time, my family could come along and provide me with childcare within the family: During our sojourn my husband and my sister-in-law took care of the children. The purpose of my study was to provide qualitative data on the cultural relevance of whisky consumption. Therefore, my research focused on the consumers’ perspective and on their fascination with and their interpretations around whisky. Whisky consumers are a specific group of people who form a specific community. Their tastes are based on specific criteria and they have established a specific vocabulary to communicate these criteria within the community. At the beginning of my fieldwork I was an absolute novice. As my aim was to understand why these people are so fascinated with this type of alcohol, and the practices associated with it, it was not enough for me to practise “conventional” participant observation, which means to me mainly observation, with participation being dominated by visual impressions (cf. Stoller 1989: 9; Pink 2009; Ingold 2000; Classen 2005; Howes 2005; Lund 2005). I needed to experience this phenomenon for myself in order to understand the inner processes related to their fascination. This kind of knowledge is difficult to transmit via language, and that is why my methodological approach was inspired by sensory ethnography. Sensory knowing is informed by embodied knowledge, namely the senses and emotions of the ethnographer (cf. Stoller 1989; Pink 2009). As I mentioned above, I draw inspiration for my methodology from Sarah Pink. Therefore, doing a sensory ethnography means „doing ethnography that accounts for how this multisensoriality is integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practise our craft” (Pink 2009: 1, original emphasis). For the reasons mentioned, I included myself in the interpretation of the consumers’ fascination and used my own sensorial experience to gather my ethnographic data. “Because fieldwork requires that researchers take an inherently physical, sensual world and transform it into conceptual abstractions, this attention to the body serves as an important reminder that the researcher-self is physically immersed in, and often imposed on the social world which is studied.” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1988: 617)

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I found further support for this idea of working in Tim Ingold’s phenomenological approach “to be doing things ourselves“ (2013: 9, original emphasis), and further, “[i]t is, in short, by watching, listening and feeling – by paying attention to what the world has to tell us – that we learn” (ibid: 1). By following these methodological approaches, I was undergoing a sensory training which allowed me to feel and understand things as my whisky-mentors in the field do (cf. Grasseni 2004, 2007, 2009). As Tim Ingold emphasises, “participant observation is a way of knowing from the insight” (2013: 5, original emphasis). Choosing a sensory method as the main instrument for producing ethnographic knowledge was an experiment for me, which would not have been so successful if I had not been accompanied by my family in the field (both in Scotland and Germany). I will come back to this point later on. First, I want reflect on the challenges I had to deal with. Although my time in Scotland was rather short, I sometimes felt desperate. I had a strong feeling of an impending departure into the unknown. If this affected only me, I wouldn’t have seen it as a problem. But as I mentioned above, I did have an increased requirement for order and safety. This adventurous undertaking concerned my whole family. During my research I was continuously aware that my family was doing this just for me – because they loved me and wanted me to succeed. Even during my fieldwork in Germany, I felt that I was putting them into many stressful situations. Because my daughter was still being breastfed, my whole family sometimes had to accompany me for long distance trips even within Germany so that I could meet my interviewees. Fieldwork proved thus to be a real joint family effort for me. As Mari Korpela, Laura Hirvi and Sanna Tawah note: “Private and professional lives are thus very much entangled and this has significant consequences, not only for the ethnographer but for accompanying family members, which extend beyond the end of the research project itself” (2016: 14). Sometimes I had to deal with doubts and questioned whether I had not taken on too much. My aim was to minimise adverse and stressful impacts on my family. Therefore, I tried to avoid direct contact between field and family. However, the feedback I got from my family after my field experience was that they enjoyed every activity we did together – both in Scotland and in Germany (in cases of direct participation in the form of family trips). The realisation of my research required some finances. Firstly, I had to pay for whisky tastings, whisky fairs and further whisky-related activities in Germany. At a more advanced stage in my research – when I had greater currency and had made some contacts in the whisky community – I was able to do my observations at tastings for free. Secondly, I had the costs of conducting research in Scotland, which included fees for festival participation and distillery visits, as well as travel costs for our entire family, including my sister-in-law. Before my stay in Scotland

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and even during my fieldwork in Germany I tried to get some help with funding. I spend some time on scholarship applications, English tests, recommendation letters and so on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t successful. Neither were there specific foundations which support students’ conducting research projects with children in the field. One of the main problems was that I am not a single mother. Since I have a husband who supports me, I did not meet the stipend criteria for indigent students. As a result, we had to finance the whole research ourselves. To summarise my research project: I spent one year doing research in Germany, sporadically participating in whisky-related events and conducting interviews. Within this year I spent nearly three weeks in Scotland supplementing my data with expert interviews and field observations in the Scottish environment. Throughout my research time I was accompanied by my family – although the impact on our family life was relatively small in Germany. My childcare needs (in Germany and Scotland) were met by family members, including my husband, my sister-in-law, grandparents, etc. I get a lot of childcare support. This helped to offset the lack of financial support I experienced in my particular case. At some points during my research I felt the obstructive consequences of my motherhood. Breastfeeding, for example, was a serious handicap to immersing myself in the whisky-consuming culture. At the beginning of my field research, I had to decline every whisky offered, because I was still breastfeeding and did not want to harm my child. Although my breastfeeding excuse did not harm the information flow – because I never confronted my informants with a situation in which I was actually feeding my child – this situation was unfavourable: it was less than ideal in a situation where informants were eager to give me insights into what the whisky culture is about. As stated above, my aim was to become part of the community in order to understand the consumers’ point of view. Therefore, grounded in my sensory ethnographical approach, I had to taste the spirits myself. As I mentioned above, whisky consumption is the kind of knowledge that is “an important way of socialising knowledge within a community of practitioners” (Grasseni 2007: 211). Furthermore, “learning is a matter of understanding in practice rather than acquiring culture“ (Ingold and Lucas 2007: 288, original emphasis). Consequently, in order to become initiated in the practitioners’ cultural discourse, it was necessary to taste some whisky (see Schiefer 2019). However, being very convinced about the advantages of breastfeeding4 there was no way to stop 4

Apart from medical advice and scientific evidence, my decision to breastfeed was a personal one and I do not judge others for deciding otherwise. All decisions concerning one’s children are affected by different criteria - as well as by multiple socio-cultural and ideological contexts - and cannot therefore be judged at all. However, “[…] breastfeeding is subject to the most relentless moral scrutiny” (Shaw 2004: 100-101).

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immediately. I was only able to do so at an advanced stage of my research. I did so at a point where I personally felt that my identity as a breastfeeding mother clearly limited my actions as a researcher. It was, however, a challenge that I had to deal with and that I learned to grow through. As with my studies at the university, I also faced time constraints during my fieldwork. A limited amount of fieldwork hours can also mean “limited opportunities to study certain topics, as well as a change in the pace of research” (Ghodsee 2009: 4). Another disruptive factor was the constant presence of my mobile phone. As I felt the need to be available at any time, I never switched it off, even when I was in an interview, although I actually considered this impolite. Besides the disadvantages and problems one may face when doing fieldwork with family, there are many situations where I experienced great benefits through having my children with me. For example, my identity as mother enabled me to gain access to the community (cf. Ghodsee 2009: 4). During my research preparation my children helped me to come into contact with my interlocutors: “the presence of children opens access to information which otherwise might remain concealed” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1988: 615). Even if my children didn’t have any closer contact with my research field (because usually I did not have them with me during interviews, distillery visitations and tastings), my motherhood was “a key marker of mutual identification between woman researchers and participants” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 43; cf. Warren 2001). Despite the absence of my children, they served me as an icebreaker in the field. The opportunity to tell funny stories about my children helped several times to open up a dialogue with people and to create a friendly and sympathetic atmosphere. This opened doors for me. Especially in Scotland, it was very easy for me to find interview partners and to get access to the community. As Mari Korpela, Laura Hirvi and Sanna Tawah note, “[p]erhaps it is more the genuine exposure of a fieldworker’s vulnerability that helps to pave the way for the trust-based and honest encounter between human beings that is at the heart of ethnography” (2016: 15). As a woman who is attending whisky tastings and festivals by herself – without the company of a male person, who (following my observations) is usually the interested party in the whisky discourse – I found myself in a rather exceptional position. Whisky consumption is a male-dominated area, so it was very helpful to be a female researcher: “a lone woman, a condition I felt was in many ways a great advantage” (Litzler-Cinas 1971: 1443). Of course, this confronted me with gender clichés, but being a woman researcher in a male-dominated domain attracted the attention of the whisky drinkers, which helped me to get in touch with people (see Schiefer 2019). Making it clear that I am also a mother of two small children gave rise to additional curiosity. It was thus very helpful to position myself as a mother. At the same

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time, this unusual status allowed me to keep my distance as a researcher. Although I was a female researcher and mother in a male-dominated area, I was able to become nearly part of the community. The point I want to make here is that despite my rather unusual position, I was able to get access to the community. At the same time, I was able to remain in my private role as a mother and keep some distance. This finally shaped my own identity, as “fieldwork is also personal and identity work” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 17; cf. Coffey 1999: 1).5 Concluding this section about my role as mother and researcher, I’d like to come back to my methodological approach. Sensory ethnography is a method one must venture into. This was made possible by the support of my family because it gave me sufficient time and space needed to conduct my research. Since fieldwork is a physical and emotional task in itself (Norander 2017: 348), I was very happy that I didn’t have to worry about childcare arrangements for my children. The presence of my husband and sister-in-law in Scotland was very helpful. Even at night, when I had to write up my field notes, they looked after the children and gave me the chance to finish my work. This made my research very successful. I acquired knowledge of interview techniques (for example how to be focussed in interviews) and I felt confident in my role as a researcher. I personally believe that the positive atmosphere that I felt surrounded by was due to the constant presence of my family in the field. In an unconscious way, this situation supported me and my fieldwork process a lot. The presence of my children helped me to stay focussed and to work efficiently in the field. As Kristen Ghodsee states, “you have to be incredibly patient, organized and disciplined – traits that can be very useful when you are negotiating your way through another culture for an extended period of time” (2009: 4). I didn’t realise the truth of this until I had started the process of writing my thesis. Reflecting upon the construction of my research setting, I am very sure about the positive effect that my family had on the research process. In my case, the presence of my family played a significant role in the knowledge production: “the process of interactive knowledge production during fieldwork becomes particularly visible with accompanying family members” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 15). Another beneficial circumstance was the infrastructural support of having a car and a driver (my husband). Since I also practised the method of sensory ethnography in Scotland – which involved participating in whisky tastings for a closer understanding of the cultural field (see Schiefer 2019) – I was absolutely unable to drive. My research region was a rural area where it is

5

This point about identity shaping is one of my research findings. Specifically, identity shaping is a motivation for participation in the whisky discourse – for both consumers and producers in equal parts. For a further insight, see Tabea Schiefer 2019.

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advisable not to rely on public transport. So I was lucky to have a wonderful husband who picked me up at every location point and transferred me to the next one. All in all, the whole research project was a wonderful experience for me. I was able to collect a lot of relevant data. My family had a great time accompanying me in Scotland, and experienced no serious impact on their daily lives while I was doing the majority of my research in Germany. Being a mother and a researcher worked very well in my case as a result of adapting my field to family needs, and of the willingness of my family to support my research.

CONCLUSION Summarising my thoughts, I’d like to stress that I am proud that I didn’t leave my path and instead evolved in my different roles: becoming a scholar mother, a successful Master’s student and an experienced researcher. Conducting studies and fieldwork as a parent is, following Pia Jolliffe “a challenge, but it’s a good challenge!” (Coffee and Cocktails, 4:26 minutes). It needs a support network for childcare, financial support, and support for the researcher’s parenting ideals. This in turn requires a lot of cooperation between different people, as well as good time management for dealing with the particular time constraints of parenting (cf. Coffee and Cocktails, 4:10 and 4:35 minutes). However, “[t]his time constraint is not only within academia”, Rasmus Rodineliussen argues (Coffee and Cocktails, 15:50 minutes). I think, in fact, with regard to time flexibility, students and academic persons are in a more beneficial position than many people with other occupations. Every employee will have the same feelings about too much work, whether or not he or she has children (see Dr. Wand’s statement, Coffee and Cocktails, 5:30 minutes). As academics we are in the fortunate position of being able to be more flexible and free in scheduling our tasks. In my opinion this is a good context for the compatibility of family and work/student life. My example has shown that the compatibility of family and academic life is possible, although it can be very stressful and sometimes an experience of one’s limits. On the other hand, this situation offers new possibilities and perspectives on knowledge production, as well as access to informants and a benefit in developing relationships with them. Looking back to my own case, it was more important to get ideal support than financial support – nevertheless fundamental financial support is of great importance. For me it was crucial never to lose sight of priorities (and sometimes to rearrange them again) and to be confident in pushing my own limits. The balance between having a good strategy and an effective time schedule is a complex matter. Field research was a challenge which I could take

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on because my family situation enabled me to do so. The skills I gained from my mothering, like efficiency, a high level of organisational skills and serenity, are competences that I have been able to transfer to my research. My research experience has also strengthened my self-awareness as mother – a role that is unfairly neglected in social standing in Western societies, because “mothering contributes to shaping the next generation’s cultured selves” (Barlow and Chapin 2010: 329). Conducting accompanied research was extremely beneficial to me, both in private and professional terms. Having children and being a mother can be an opportunity: “instead of boycotting the impact that accompanying children may have on the fieldwork process, one should embrace the opportunities and insights that can emerge from collaborating with them” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 8). My children helped me to gain access to my research field much more easily. “Motherhood can thus provide a different type of access to participants, or provide access to a different set of participants”, as Tamara Mose Brown and Erynn Masi de Casanova (2009: 55) observe. Children can be an icebreaker, which is a very important point in developing relations in fieldwork (cf. Dr. Wand’s statement in Coffee and Cocktails, 11:04 minutes). The experience of doing fieldwork together with my family was an amazing one. I hope this contribution encourages other researchers and students whose status as mothers may be restraining their motivation to do ethnography. Like any other researcher, I was confronted with disciplinary conventions in writing my thesis, as “there is often no place for discussing how motherhood and fieldwork combine and coexist” (Brown and Casanova 2009: 55). But it is an important point to consider “how this dimension of reflexivity emerges in the final written product” (ibid: 55). While this was the case for my thesis writing, I knew well in advance that writing this chapter would offer me the possibility to reflect in more depth about the complex situation of simultaneously being a mother, a student, and a researcher. I hope that my experiences, as well as this entire volume, contribute to a rethinking of the work-life balance in academia, and the reflexivityresults balance in anthropology, especially.

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Figure 8: Family-research compatibility: Visit to a distillery in combination with a family day out.

© Patrick Schiefer

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Norander, Stephanie (2017): “Embodied Moment. Revisiting the Field and Writing Vulnerably.” In: Journal of Applied Communication Research 45/3, pp. 346–351. Pink, Sarah (2005): “Dirty Laundry. Everyday Practice, Sensory Engagement and the Constitution of Identity.” In: Social Anthropology 13/3, pp. 275–290. Pink, Sarah (2007): “Walking with Video.” In: Visual Studies 22/3, pp. 240–252. Pink, Sarah (2009): Doing Sensory Ethnography, London: Sage. Schiefer, Tabea (2019): “Whiskykonsum als multisensorisches und identitätsstiftendes Erlebnis. Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung in Deutschland und in Schottland.” In: Kölner ethnologische Beiträge 52, Universität zu Köln. Available online at https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/9988/1/Heft52_Schiefer.pdf (last accessed September 25, 2019). Shaw, Rhonda (2004): “Performing Breastfeeding. Embodiment, Ethics and the Maternal Subject.” In: Feminist Review 78, pp. 99–116. Stoller, Paul (1989): The Taste of Ethnographic Things. The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sutton, David (1998): “‘He’s Too Cold!’ Children and the Limits of Culture on a Greek Island.” In: Anthropolgy and Humanism 23/2, pp. 127–138. Terry, Deborah J./Mayocchi, Lisa/Hynes, Gloria J. (1996): “Depression Symptomatology in New Mothers. A Stress and Coping Perspective.” In: Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105/2, pp. 220–231. Thurer, Shari L. (1994): The Myth of Motherhood. How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton-Mifflin. Vannini, Phillip/Ahluwalia-Lopez, Guppy/Waskul, Dennis/Gottschalk, Simon (2010): “Performing Taste at Wine Festivals. A Somatic Layered Account of Material Culture.” In: Qualitative Inquiry 16/5, pp. 378–396. Wall, Glenda (2001): “Moral Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding Discourse.” In: Gender and Society 15/4, pp. 592–610. Warren, Carol A. B. (2001): “Gender and Fieldwork Relations.” In: Robert M. Emerson (ed.), Contemporary Field Research. Perspectives and Formulations, Prospect Hights: Waveland Press, pp. 203–223.

Capturing Sounds Children’s Voices in the Field and how They Impact Our Research Andrea Hollington The ambiguous oscillation between sound as that which one tries to capture and that itself is a force of capture is particularly prevalent insofar as boundlessness remains a determinant in the thinking about sound […]. Capture, in other words, need no longer be imagined as simply a form of substraction: the always less-than-perfect remainder taken from a plentitude. It is rather a formalization of an instantaneous conversion – and limitless replenishing – in which actuality turns into potentiality and vice versa. (Chow and Steintrager 2011: 4–5)

INTRODUCTION Fieldwork is an essential aspect of many of the (sub-)disciplines concerned with the study of language, such as descriptive linguistics, language documentation, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition or pragmatics, among others. As linguists (and as linguistic

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anthropologists and sociolinguists in particular), capturing sounds becomes one of our crucial exercises. In the academic context, we learn how to “capture” sounds in linguistic fieldwork courses with the help of technical equipment, and experiment with audio recorders before going to the field. We learn how to transcribe and analyze recorded linguistic data. We learn how to hear and contrast linguistic sounds and how to analyze phonological, morphological and syntactic rules. However, the recording sessions created for us as students in seminars on practising linguistic fieldwork do not fully prepare us for capturing sounds in “real” fieldwork situations1, let alone for doing research as a family, or accompanied fieldwork2. In fact, there is very little (in our university curricula) that prepares a researcher for the experiences with fieldwork and family. Accompanied fieldwork has become more and more common – many of our colleagues have taken their children (or other family members) on their fieldwork trips, adding complexities to the fieldwork situation on the part of the researcher, particularly with regard to social and personal entanglements.3 The image of the 1

The “field” and what it constitutes is another discussion that is beyond the scope of this paper. In this context, it shall suffice to point out that the “field” is not a given environment awaiting researchers to come and do fieldwork, but rather an organic setting created by the researcher and shaped by all persons, natural and artificial surroundings, circumstances, artifacts and objects, and everything else that impacts on the complex situation of knowledge production on the ground.

2

Accompanied fieldwork here refers to the act of doing fieldwork accompanied by children, spouses or other family members. The notion could also be extended to friends or others.

3

I, personally, have been doing fieldwork accompanied by my children since 2010. The circumstances and conditions have varied with my multi-sited fieldwork destinations. In this regard, I believe that accompanied fieldwork itself is a process; it is not only we, as researchers, who change as we mature and gain fieldwork experience, but our social status changes and so does the age of our children and the challenges, options and influences that come with these changes. I have done fieldwork in Ghana and Jamaica accompanied by babies/small children as well as while pregnant. In the past few years, I have conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica with three children of various ages. During my PhD studies I had a scholarship from the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, one of the graduate schools of the University of Cologne, which provided very limited financial support for fieldwork (travel expenses) and no financial support for my family. During my time as a post-doc researcher at the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne, I was grateful for the support of generous travel grants (including travel expenses, local transportation, accommodation and allowances plus additional financial support for my accompanying family). My

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lone male white researcher in the field (à la Malinowski) has not conformed to academic realities for a long time (cf. the introduction to this volume, and Pauli’s contribution in this volume). The norms, ideologies, background and standing of a researcher in the field are issues that have generated fueled debate in critical research approaches recently (see Hollington and Storch 2016). The background and ideologies of a fieldworker, with or without family/company, deserve more attention in academic literature about (linguistic) fieldwork and critical research reflections of authors in any case. Coming to the “field” as a family enriches and complicates the research situation and opens up possibilities for further reflection on the nature, conditions, ideologies and implications of fieldwork. As various contributions in this volume discuss and illustrate, doing fieldwork with children/family poses a number of challenges, including financial, organizational, emotional, logistic, educational and epistemological. These fieldwork constellations change the conditions for knowledge production and impact on our research in various ways, for example in terms of the choice of setting, time or topic, the questions we ask and the things we see and notice, the compromises we make and the input of our family members in particular situations, such as participant observation or interviews. While managing all this during our research in the field often leads to a discussion of the challenges and difficulties of doing fieldwork with family members, another perspective is to reflect on the ways in which accompanied fieldwork can change our views, challenge what we perceive and enrich what we understand. This paper seeks to contribute to a discussion of the ways in which children influence our research in the field by discussing, in particular, the impact of their sounds and voices on linguistic fieldwork and sound recordings. In order to situate this discussion in the context of linguistic fieldwork, the next section will give a brief critique of recording and data processing in linguistics, before looking at the impact of children with regard to captured sounds in the third section. The reflection presented in this contribution is based on my own experiences with research and recordings of over eight years of fieldwork with children. While the implications of this will be part of the discussion in section three, I want to point out here that the tightrope walk of writing an academic paper about my own family and experiences required me to decide where to draw the line with regard to the protection of my children’s privacy. While this paper will reveal how my children’s voices and actions became part of my research, it will keep details on their identity at a minimum and only disclose information that is necessary for the discussion of the fieldwork situation in context (see footnote 2). childcare has always been organized privately and my children have often been present during interviews or other sessions (such as participant observation).

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The main objective of the paper is to open up and engage in a discussion of accompanied fieldwork in (socio- and anthropological) linguistic research projects. While there is some reflection on fieldwork and families available (in other disciplines, see for instance Cassell 1987; Sutton and Fernandez 1998; Brown and Dreby 2013; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016), the discipline of linguistics has not (yet) embraced this topic and reflected on its implications with regard to fieldwork and research. Therefore, a critical discussion of linguistic fieldwork practices and guides seems to be necessary in order to open up the discussion on the impact and potential of children in linguistic research. Since research in socio- and anthropological linguistics is concerned with real language practices in their cultural and social contexts, sounds, voices, speaking and background “noise” feature prominently in research in these (and other) sub-disciplines of linguistics (see Hollington, Nassenstein and Storch forthcoming), although their significance is not always appreciated.4 This paper argues that the inclusion of all sounds and voices in the complex situation of accompanied fieldwork leads to a more holistic and contextualized research outcome.

CAPTURING SOUNDS: ON TRADITIONS AND CHALLENGES IN LINGUISTIC FIELDWORK As stated above, linguistics is a discipline in which fieldwork often plays a signifi– cant role. Field studies and language recordings are an integral and important part of the work of many linguists in various sub-disciplines. While fieldwork with family and the issues related to this complex research setting have been discussed with regard to fieldwork in anthropology at least since the 1980s (see for instance Cassell 1987; Sutton and Fernandez 1998; Brown and Dreby 2013; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016; Cornet and Blumenfield 2016), there is little reflection on fieldwork with family in (socio- and anthropological) linguistics. Established publications on linguistic fieldwork such as Jeanette Sakel and Daniel Leonard Everett (2012), Claire Bowern (2015), and Shobhana Lakshmi Chelliah and Willem J. de Reuse (2011), which are used by many students as guides, perpetuate the

4

There are subfields of linguistics that are rather concerned with sounds as acoustic phenomena, such as phonetics, or sounds as neural phenomena, such as neurolinguistics. In sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, which are the disciplines in focus in this paper, we aim to study language in its social and cultural contexts – which should, as I argue, include the circumstances and effects of all sounds that are part of the complex communicative situations under study.

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stereotype of the individual linguistic fieldworker. All of these guides mention teamwork in the field, i.e. the collaborative work of several linguists, or linguists and researchers of other disciplines, who conduct fieldwork as a team. In other cases, they describe linguists doing fieldwork as part of community organizations. Nontheless, the practical guidelines for fieldwork are oriented to fieldwork conducted by an individual. For example, Jeanette Sakel and Daniel Leonard Everett write: “Fieldwork – in particular prototypical fieldwork – has long been considered the domain of the individualist, the strong personality who is self-motivating, able to withstand loneliness, well-rounded – a sort of Indiana Jones. That is, it is not normally thought of as an environment for teamwork (at least not with members of one’s own culture).” (2012: 60)

Similarly, Claire Bowern addresses the ideal of the individual fieldworker: “For most of this book, I am assuming that there will be a single linguist working in the field site at once, although other linguists may have worked on the language in the past. I do this for the most part because I think it’s a good idea for a field linguist to be self-sufficient in their methods as far as possible, and to feel at home gathering data in a number of different areas of linguistics, especially when first beginning language documentation work.” (2015: 15)

While there is some discussion in these publications on working as a team of linguists/researchers, families only seem to play a role as part of the researched communities themselves. For instance, anthropological linguists could be interested in families in terms of describing the language of kinship (e.g. Keen 2014, Hollington 2015) and hence look at families, extended families or clans, while sociolinguists might research the language practices of children within a particular social context (e.g. Smith and Durham 2019). On a more general level, some linguists have praised children as “informants”5 for the language. Bert Vaux, Justin Cooper and Emily Tucker, in their book on linguistic field methods, quote John Wells: “I found the best informants to help me get a grasp of Jamaican Creole were children of eleven or twelve, old enough to know their language thoroughly but young enough not to be affected by the sense of linguistic shame and embarrassment that characterized adult speakers.” (2007: 6)

5

While I find the term “informant” highly problematic with regard to the connotative histories and contexts of the notion, as well as in terms of the inscribed power relations it implies, it is still a term that is widely used in linguistic publications.

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In other words, children feature prominently in linguistic research if they are part of the researched community, but the children of the researchers are rarely mentioned with regard to linguistic fieldwork. Apart from the eclipsing of the researcher’s family background in the field, there is a history of linguistic field recordings and how they are handled which reveals practices of manipulation towards “clean” language data (see the discussion in Hollington, Nassenstein and Storch forthcoming). This historical conceptualization of linguistic fieldwork and knowledge production is connected to the removal of the researcher’s personal background, as the goals of linguists’ work, such as grammars and lexica, have often been considered as neutral and objective descriptions of the language system. This is based on ideologies of linguistic data as artifacts of language, as structure and lexicon, and on specific methods of linguistic fieldwork such as elicitation and other methods used in language documentation (see Hollington, Nassenstein and Storch, forthcoming). In this view, language is seen as something “that can be delimited, recorded and described”, as well as something that is “reproducible, controllable, and as an empirical fact” (ibid.). This critique is embedded in a wider discussion of what has been referred to as “artefactual linguistics” (Lüpke and Storch 2013) and a critical review of the dominant form of linguistic output in the 20th century: “There is an idea which is central to much of modern professional linguistics: the idea that language needs to be seen primarily as a limited collection of ordered forms – grammar – and of words – lexis. […] The assumption is, then, that modern linguistics has to find, identify and codify these things in ‘grammars’, ‘dictionaries’ and similar textual artefacts of scholarship. […] There are two deeper assumptions at play here. The first one is that speech – language in its actually used form, characterised by variability, negotiability and contextboundedness – can be reduced to ‘language’ by attending to and ‘extracting’ the core formsand-combinations, and listing its words. In other words, the fantastic variation that characterises actual language in use can (and should) be reduced to an invariable, codified set of rules, features and elements in order to be the ‘true’ language that can qualify as an object of linguistic study. […] The second assumption is that such reduction efforts can and need to be done in specific, regimented forms of textuality. In other words, it is not enough to just know these rules of grammar and lists of words, they must actually exist in specific genres of textual artefacts of limited size and specific shape.” (Blommaert 2008: 291–292)

There are so many sounds and voices that are regularly “removed”, that can be heard in recordings but do not appear in the grammars, language descriptions or other linguistic publications. We have argued elsewhere that this practice leads to a removal of the field:

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“Taking a look at our own recordings and transcriptions, we see a recurrent, rather obvious pattern: recordings are always, like imperfect photographs, retouched. Roosters, children and rain are removed, stammering, mistakes and repetition are erased, and our own voices (talking to our smartphones, scolding our children...) are taken out, too. This is not cleaning a recording to make it usable, but removing ‘the field’, the sonic environment in which data production has taken place.” (Hollington, Nassenstein and Storch forthcoming)

In addition to the sonic environment, which is important to consider when wanting to gain insights into real social language practices, accompanied fieldwork also highlights more explicitly the role of the social relationships of the fieldworker: “If we agree that data is not out there to be found but is constructed in social interactions between the ethnographer and the research subjects […], it is important to consider how those accompanying the researcher affect the data-collection process and also the data itself.” (Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016: 4) While this section has discussed the common practice of not including voices or sounds in linguistic fieldwork and data processing, the next session will look more closely at my own fieldwork practices and at the chances and perspectives that we gain when we include our children’s voices.

LISTENING TO SOUNDS(CAPES): HOW CHILDREN IMPACT OUR RESEARCH After eight years of experience doing fieldwork with children of various age, I have decided that it is time to reflect on the implications and impact of accompanied fieldwork. I, too, have erased my family background – which was always present in the field – from many of my academic writings, not only because of the feeling that including them in my academic discussions and analysis would be inappropriate, but also due to a lack of examples and role models for young researchers that show ways of accounting for the family in research experiences. There are, as discussed in this and other contributions in the present volume, a number of publications that broach the theme of accompanied fieldwork and the management and implications of family and research. However, they do not feature prominently in the training and fieldwork preparation of students and young researchers, as illustrated for the case of linguistics in the previous section. This section will contribute to the discussion of accompanied fieldwork and its influences on research with a special focus on (anthropological) linguistic fieldwork in the Global South.

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As hinted at in the introduction, taking family members on research trips inevitably involves an amalgamation of work and family, academic research and private experiences, of being both a fieldworker and a family member. While this amalgamation can be challenging, I want to emphasize that it is always present in any researcher’s fieldwork and other academic activities. In our role as linguists we can never separate ourselves from who we are as individuals and what we bring to the (academic) table based on our personalities and backgrounds. However, doing fieldwork accompanied by children or other family members may bring out aspects of our personalities in different ways, or more explicitly, as we have to take on multiple social roles (e.g. researcher/fieldworker, parent, spouse) simultaneously. This not only impacts on our own behaviour and thinking, but also on the ways in which we are seen by others, for instance by members of the communities in which we do our research. In the past months, I have talked to several female (and some male) colleagues who have taken their children on their research trips, and I have also read numerous blog posts and web articles by female researchers who did fieldwork while pregnant or with children.6 The researchers who voice out in these blog contributions state that their status as mothers or fathers, and the presence of their children in the field, impacted their research in non-trivial ways. However, when reading academic publications, we hardly find any mention of this impact, as we tend to remove our family from our academic writing (and only mention them in the acknowledgements), even though they have been an active part of the research (see also Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016).7 On the other hand, there are edited volumes and articles that are mainly concerned with fieldwork and family; the references of the contributions in the present volume are full of them (for example, Brown and Dreby 2013; Cassell 1987; Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016, among many others). In other words, while the topic has attracted academic attention (especially in anthropology), it is being discussed in seemingly small circles and in special publications dedicated to the theme, but it has not yet found its way into 6

See for instance: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/2016/01/the-pregnant-field-scientist/; https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/01/pregnant-in-the-field-blog -photography-have-trowel-will-travel; http://lorises.blogspot.de/2012/05/couple-of-da ys-ago-i-got-email-from.html; https://anthropod.net/2016/06/11/doing-fieldwork-withkids1/; https://throwntogetherness.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/care-work-on-fieldwork -2/ (All last accessed in May 2019).

7

Of course there are exceptions, but many publications, including my own, do not discuss the implications of accompanied fieldwork: in my PhD thesis, for example, I outlined my methodologies and fieldwork but I never mentioned that I was accompanied by my children.

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the wider academic discourse. Tamara Mose Brown and Joanna Dreby view this as being part of the larger work-family divide: “Disclosing race, class, and gender and how this affects ethnographic projects may have become the norm. But academics, and ethnographers specifically, have remained strangely silent on that artificial divide between work and family. In practice, ethnographers – and to some extent other academics – eliminate work-family divisions in their daily lives. But they do not write about it.” (2013: 6)

From a personal perspective I feel that I am now, finally, doing something that I should have done at an earlier stage, namely including and reflecting on those who have been part of the processes of knowledge production who have hitherto been left out. There are a number of issues connected to this, one of them being the already mentioned balancing act between academic reflection on the presence of the family, and the protection of their rights to privacy and to decide whether or not they want to be drawn into those arenas. Whenever our children or other family members become engaged or actively engage in our research, whether they make a statement in an interview, run through the picture during a video recording, or add background noises to an audio recording session, we have to decide how to deal with this impact. Should we cut it out, should we leaving it uncommented on or should we include their presence and interaction in the fieldwork scenario? Drawing on ethnographic methods (such as participant observation or thick description), we often try to describe the people we “study”, and their cultural and social practices, in great detail, as social beings in a cultural world. It seems much harder for us to treat ourselves in the same way and to involve or reflect on our social/family situation, although we, too, are part of the complex research setting. I want to argue that a more holistic perspective on fieldwork and its outcomes can be achieved by including all participants in complex fieldwork situations, both those connected with the researcher as well as those who are researched. In this case the discussion will center on the children of the researcher in the field. As stated above, I have done research with my children for eight years in different countries and under varying financial and logistic conditions. My research in the Global South has taken us mainly to Jamaica, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, and my methods are basically qualitative, ethnographic research methods which involve participant observation, in-depth interviews and other audio and video recordings (e.g. of events, communicative situations, etc.). While I have recorded many different scenes, scenarios and conversations, I have often also – unintentionally – recorded my children. In fact, my children can be heard on most of my recordings. Listening back to all those different recordings, recorded at different

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times in different places and in totally different research settings,8 I have asked myself: what do I hear? I hear multiple layers of voices and sounds, the voices of the interview partners or performers and the voices of the children (as well as other layers, such as animal sounds, street noises, and car sounds, etc.). Sometimes these layers of sound make it harder to follow what the interviewee says or what the performers sing, and sometimes I get distracted. I hear the children making comments, reacting to the recording scene, fighting, asking me for something, laughing, singing or making other noises. I hear different layers and components of the complex situation in which I am both a mother and a researcher at the same time. These moments have often made me feel uncomfortable, as if I am torn between the two social roles, being a mother and being a researcher. I feel an urge to silence the children and at the same time I have a guilty conscience because I feel I cannot do justice to the situation and everyone involved (see also Goldade 2006 for a further personal reflection on the notion of guilt).9 I have come to ask myself why I felt like this in my fieldwork situations? Why does this complex situation make me feel tense? Why do I think my children disturb the recording and need to be silenced? I thought about these questions because, in fact, having children and hearing children has been a natural and common aspect in all my fieldwork settings. I have interviewed a Rastafari woman in the Blue Mountains in Jamaica while surrounded by her ten children. I have recorded local poetry and music events with children playing in front of the stage. I have held linguistic field recording sessions in which the children of the language experts were present. During all my research trips, I recorded interviews, discussions, storytelling, music and poetry events, talks, conversations, etc., in which I can hear children screaming, interfering, laughing, playing, fighting. I never felt stressed because of them; I took them as natural part of the soundscape of the recording situation, and never felt an urge to

8

This includes recordings during interview sessions, excursions, music events, at home as well as in public spaces, in Jamaica, Zimbabwe and Jamaica between 2010 and 2018.

9

In fact, this has created a process of learning how to deal with the two seemingly conflicting roles and learning to accept that I am who I am, doing research with my children without feeling guilty about not giving 100 per cent, neither to the children, nor to the fieldwork situation. This process of “maturing as a fieldworker” led not only to an academic reflection on the effects and implications of fieldwork with children and the complexity of sounds in my recordings, but also, and more personally, to learning to tolerate my complex role and the situations I found myself in as a mother and as a fieldworker.

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silence or remove them, because they were not my children! They belonged to the field. Why did I feel that the children of the people whose practices I was studying belonged to the field but that my own children did not? Reflecting on this, I now think it makes more sense to see all of us as part of the complex research situation, which is a special and created situation anyway. If we acknowledge the important role of our own positioning as researchers, who come with our own individual ideologies, beliefs, academic background and so on, and if we increasingly consider our research persona in our writing, then we must also conceptualize and reflect on what it means to be in the field as mothers or fathers, conducting research while accompanied by our children. We must acknowledge what our children do to our research: the voices they add, the questions they ask, the changes their presence makes in the field. Instead of silencing and excluding them, we could actually benefit from the complex situation and theorize the concept of fieldwork with family, as has been argued for at the least in the field of anthropology. Similarly to my own thinking, Mari Korpela, Laura Hirvi and Sanna Tawah state: “Usually, however, the fact that the ethnographer did not conduct the fieldwork alone but in the company of their family members is mentioned, if at all, only in passing in the acknowledgements page […]. Since the reflexive turn in anthropology in the 1980s […], it has become a norm to elaborate on who conducted the ethnographic study and under which conditions. However, spouses and children are usually missing from these accounts and it is, in fact, rather surprising that fieldworkers are often presented as sole actors while ‘the others’ they study are presented as social beings whose identities and practices are defined by their social relations.” (2016: 3)

There are several ways in which fieldwork with children has benefits for the research and the researcher. Among those commonly mentioned in the literature are the observation that children open doors (i.e. that researchers often find it easier to meet participants for their research, get to know people and start conversations in the presence of their children) and that children can open the researcher’s eyes and ears to things they would have not noticed otherwise (i.e. observing what children note in the field and seeing things from their perspective). These positive effects have an impact on knowledge production gained through the fieldwork (see Korpela, Hirvi and Tawah 2016; Goldade 2006). There are also special insights that can be gained from accompanied fieldwork from a (socio- and anthropological) linguistic perspective. In these areas of linguistics, and reinforced through recent paradigm shifts away from the structural

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linguistics dominant in the 20th century, it has become more and more important to look at real language practices, at the messy ways in which we, as human beings, use language in social, global, multilingual and cultural contexts (e.g. Blommaert and Backus 2011). This includes paying attention to everything that makes up the soundscape and environment10 of the particular communicative situation under study, as everything that happens, great or small, adds nuances to the creation of meaning in communicative practices. In my particular case, as a European scholar conducting research in the Global South, my communicative behavior, that of my family, and that of the people I interview and their families, sheds light on the complex entanglements between Northern and Southern concepts and practices of language, between the researcher and her companions and the researched and their companions as a complex dialog of voices, sound and noises. These might seem messy and even overcharged and overwhelming at times, and pose challenges to a researcher who wants to transform such recordings into transcriptions and written text, but they illustrate human interactions in transnational contexts and in research situations that constitute, in themselves, multidimensional, polyphonous and multimodal communication. What we can read in such a situation, when we take into consideration these complexities instead of filtering out the language data that we intended to record in the first place, are thus more nuances of meaning, and more finely-graded communicative actions and reactions. In other words, including these voices and sounds means acknowledging what we have called the “unpleasant and incomprehensible in language” elsewhere (Hollington, Nassenstein and Storch forthcoming), and that all sounds, noises, interruptions, screams, stammering and so forth, are a vital part of human language practices in real life. Zooming in to my field recordings, there are more finely-graded issues to be noted when paying attention to the impact of my children: while, on the one hand, they directly contribute to discussions by commenting on things that are said in the interviews (like voicing their ideas or having associations with particular terms that they know, even in multilingual contexts), there are also other ways in which they influence the communicative scenario. For instance, when they make noise they may cause the interviewee to raise her voice in order to predominate, or they may cause distraction and a subsequent change of topic. What seems like an annoying interruption to the interview mirrors things that happen in natural social interaction, particularly in family settings. They are part of the linguistic performance that is recorded, and constitute – whether positively or negatively evaluated

10 That includes not only the soundscape but also things like gestures, looks, postures and positions of participants in a communicative situation.

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– a significant influence to the linguistic practices, the negotiations of meanings and the content of the conversation or recording session.

CONCLUSION Accompanied fieldwork, and particularly fieldwork with children, constitutes a theme that is only starting to attract more academic reflection and inclusion in academic writing. While it still seems to be a specialized discourse in which only certain academics take part – namely those who have personal experience with accompanied fieldwork – the increase in discussions of the implications of fieldwork with family is leading to the topic and its challenges becoming more visible beyond the inner circle. While the topic has found more attention in anthropology (maybe because of the prominent role of long-term fieldwork in the discipline), it is necessary to fuel the debate across disciplines. The present contribution has attempted to include a linguistic perspective on the discussion of ethnographic fieldwork and families, with special attention to the traditions, challenges and opportunities of linguistic fieldwork. The anthropology-linguistics intersection, namely the study of the relation between language and culture (e.g. Foley 1997; Duranti 2009) has been prominent in the past century and continues to gain importance, especially following the decline of structural linguistics as the dominant framework of linguistics. Many socio- and anthropological linguists make use of ethnographic field methods; therefore, a discussion of the implications of accompanied fieldwork seems timely and ties in with the ongoing debate in anthropology (e.g. the contributions in this volume). This contribution has aimed at widening the perspective and has discussed the impact of the researcher’s children with regard to voice and sound in field recordings, a domain that is still understudied. This is just a beginning, as many more aspects of children’s voices and influences in the field could be investigated, especially from a linguistic point of view, as the discipline is highly concerned with voices, sounds and language practices and their effects. An important task for the future would be to include a discussion of accompanied fieldwork in linguistic fieldwork guides in order to give young researchers perspectives and options for making decisions and preparing for fieldwork, as the compatibility of work and family life becomes increasingly challenging in the changing work conditions of academia. This discourse is particularly important for women. While many male academics do take parental leave or take their children to the field, the general perception (which influences work conditions and the decisions of employers) is still biased against women. Mothering (not fathering) is seen as an interruption: “Note here the metaphor of interruption persist [sic] in

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the form of a temporal marginalisation that is deemed proper for motherhood.” (Bueskens and Toffoleti 2018: 18) Therefore, there is hope that further contributions on the subject of fieldwork with children and doing research as mothers will lead to more visibility and acceptance of this subject and, in practical terms, to better working practices and ways of managing accompanied fieldwork. In the end, the goal is an inclusion of mother-researchers as the norm and not as the exception. The sharing of experiences, challenges and gains from fieldwork with children, therefore, may encourage women, in particular, to consider their options in academia. And learning from our children during fieldwork, through their various and often unexpected inputs, could add a whole new dimension to our research.

REFERENCES Blommaert, Jan (2008): “Artefactual Ideologies and the Textual Production of African Languages.” In: Language & Communication 28/4, pp. 291–307. Blommaert, Jan/Backus, Ad (2011): “Repertoires Revisited. ‘Knowing Language’ in Superdiversity.” In: Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 67, pp. 1–26. Bowern, Claire (2015): Linguistic Fieldwork. A Practical Guide, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Brown, Tamara Mose/Dreby, Joanna (2013): Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bueskens, Petra/Toffoletti, Kim (2018): “Mothers, Scholars and Feminists. Inside and Outside the Australian Academic System.” In: Alison L. Black/Susanne Garvis (eds.), Lived Experiences of Women in Academia, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 13–22. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the Field. Anthropological Experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chelliah, Shobhana L./de Reuse, Willem J. (2011): Handbook of Linguistic Descriptive Fieldwork, Dordrecht: Springer. Chow, Rey/Steintrager, James A. (2011): “In Pursuit of the Object of Sound. An Introduction.” In: Differences 22/2–3, pp. 1–9. Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016): Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids! The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Duranti, Allesandro (2009): Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader. Second Edition, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Foley, William A. (1997): Anthropological Linguistics. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Goldade, Kate (2006): “Pangs of Guilt. Transnational Ethnography, Motherhood, and Moral Dilemmas in Central America.” In: Andrew Gardner/David M. Hoffman (eds.), Dispatches From the Field. Neophyte Ethnographers in a Changing World, Long Grove: Waveland Press, pp. 53–67. Hollington, Andrea (2015): Traveling Conceptualizations. A cognitive and anthropological linguistic study of Jamaican, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hollington, Andrea/Nassensein, Nico/Storch, Anne (Forthcoming): “Linguistic outtakes. Ideologies of the unpleasant and the incomprehensible in language.” In: Christoph Neuenschwandner/Laura Tresch (eds.), Through the Lens of Ideology. Debates on Language Contact, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hollington, Andrea/Storch, Anne (2016): “Introduction. Tidying up. A CMS special issue on language ideologies.” In: Critical Multilingualism Studies 4/2, pp. 1–9. Keen, Ian (2014): “Language in the Constitution of Kinship.” In: Anthropological Linguistics 56/1, pp. 1–53. Korpela, Mari/Hirvi, Laura/Tawah, Sanna (2016): “Not Alone. Doing Fieldwork in the Company of Family Members.” In: Suomen Antropologi 41/3, pp. 3– 20. Lüpke, Friederike/Storch, Anne (2013): Repertoires and choices in African languages, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pauli, Julia (2018): “Familiennormativität und Feldforschung”. Paper presented at the Workshop Feldforschung und Familie. Implikationen des Elternseins im Feld, June 7–9, 2018: University of Cologne. Sakel, Jeanette/Everett, Daniel L. (2012): Linguistic Fieldwork. A Student Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Jennifer/Durham, Mercedes (2019): Sociolinguistic Variation in Children’s Language. Acquiring Community Norms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, David/Fernandez, Renate (1998): “Introduction.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 111–117. Vaux, Bert/Cooper, Justin/Tucker, Emily (2007): Linguistic Field Methods, Eugene: Wipf and Stock.

Shared Field, Divided Field Expectations of an Anthropological Couple in Southeast Asia Felix Girke 1

“TWO ANTHROPOLOGISTS GO INTO ONE FIELD…” This sounds like the beginning of a worn joke, but as early as 30 years ago, Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp declared that anthropology was “a meeting-place where amorous relationships have come into existence” (just as in any professional environment really) while the interplay of the “emotional and professional dimensions of these relationships” (1989: 5) had hardly ever been discussed. This complaint still stands today. Anthropology has taken remarkable steps in terms of personal and disciplinary introspection, reflection on methods and theory, ethnographic writing and even institutional aspects such as gender balance; however, the question of how partners and families actually live their anthropological lives is still shrouded in the much decried mysticism that for so long has haunted fieldwork and the way it is taught. While by no means resolved, the difficulties of fieldwork with children have at least (and at last) become a recognized element of disciplinary discussions2 and are at times even acknowledged by funding 1

I thank Corinna Di Stefano for her comments on this chapter, as well as the editors and the participants at the workshop in Cologne from which this volume sprang. My fieldwork in Myanmar was supported by ZIRS (the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies) at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, the University of Konstanz and especially the DFG (German Research Foundation), to whom I am duly grateful.

2

E.g., the classic publications by Joan Cassell (1987) and Barbara Butler and Diane Michalski Turner (1987), the recent volume on “Accompanied fieldwork” by Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield (2016), and several contributions to this volume. Worth mentioning is the film Sweet Sorghum by Rosie Strecker and Ivo Strecker, reflecting on the years of her childhood spent in her parents’ field in southern Ethiopia (1995). In

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agencies.3 The specific constellation of going into and being in the field with (and as) a partner has received considerably less attention. This is remarkable. Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp stated quite early that anthropologists “first had to write on their children” before turning to their “own personal and scientific relationships” (ibid: 5)4; I will touch on some of the reasons why partnership might still be an even more sensitive topic than one’s own children throughout this chapter. Below, I discuss some well-known anthropologist couples; but despite these individuals’ relative renown, decades of reflection on fieldwork and positionality have meandered around the uncomfortable problems that emerge from the constellation of two legally or romantically partnered academics who go on fieldwork together, whether with a child or without one. To ground my motivation for pursuing this problematic: my partner (who is also an academic anthropologist) and I went on fieldwork to urban Myanmar together with our son. Looking back on that time, everything considered, we found it more challenging to meet the professional (and strategic) difficulties of being on fieldwork at the same time as partners than to be parents in the field, hence my emphasis on the former. One thread running through my discussion is that of expectations – expectations of the field and of “being there”, expectations of how we would have to negotiate out positionality within anthropology, and expectations regarding our family and partnership during fieldwork. “Expectations of”, of course, can be read both ways: our expectations, and expectations others had of us; as well as, to conjoin the two, what we expected others to expect of us. Much of what we did and how we positioned ourselves is a result of attending to such expectations, many of which are probably widespread through the discipline, while others might be more idiosyncratic. My partner and I both pursued separate fieldwork projects throughout, but through a mix of persuasion, luck and stubbornness managed to arrange our duties recent years, the online portal AllegraLab has hosted short pieces on “#fieldwork with children” (e.g., Halme-Tuomisaari 2017; McGranahan 2015; Toivanen 2015); other blogs offer similar items. 3

A three-year phase of my research has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). When I received the confirmation letter, it included some of the reviewers’ comments. One stated that while they did not know for sure whether the DFG would pay for the costs of bringing a child on field research, they certainly endorsed my asking for such funds.

4

And even though they and their contributors wrote about this topic, it helped little. Their thematic edited issue of FOCAAL on “anthropological couples” (with contributions by Micheline and Pierre Centlivres, Nancy and Richard Tapper, Elizabeth and Robert Fernea, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Richard Lobban) is hardly ever cited in anthropological texts on fieldwork.

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at our sites of employment in Germany, our funding schemes, and our family arrangements to enable us to avoid having to separate our family for the periods of this postdoctoral fieldwork. It seemed fundamentally undesirable to split the family for fieldwork, so to manage our affairs in this way was a test of our joint determination. In that sense, our decision constituted an active attempt to conjoin family life and fieldwork, rather than a reactive one of merely trying to avoid the loneliness of the ethnographer (cf. Ariëns and Strijp 1989: 7). This chapter, then, starts from disciplinary history and, by way of our experience of two people, partners, who are “in the field” together (without being all too confessional), will go on to problematize the subtle difference between “in the field” and “on fieldwork”. Throughout, I will seek to address expectations of fieldworkers regarding social integration, immersion, scope and other aspects of the research situation, abstractly as well as autobiographically. The specificity of going into the field as symmetrical partners (with both pursuing research projects) comes out when contrasted to two other constellations. First, it is not uncommon today to incidentally encounter other anthropologists during fieldwork. Such encounters with colleagues can be fraught with unspoken tension: We (still?) speak of “our fields”, and even if we do try to not project ownership claims outward when we do so, the pronoun is hardly controllable. “Being there” and “having been there”, that is, much of our ethnographic authority depends to a degree on exclusivity, on privileged access to another lifeworld or social environment. The other researcher, not another Other but another “I”, carries with them some threat or at least challenge to that exclusivity in their mere presence, let alone if we find out that we are, in fact, pursuing similar research questions in the same place – or that they are further along than we are, know the language better, seem better integrated, come from a more prestigious institution, or are simply better funded: all such observations might serve to undermine our confidence and increase the stress we operate under.5 As long as our knowledge and ethnographic authority rests to a degree on individual and exclusive achievement, the other “I” is a potential challenger. This sort of competitive tension was something that we ruled out ever allowing to emerge.

5

However, this is an empirical question: meeting another “I” in the field might just as well offer a refuge, a “time out” from the flow of everyday life, a chance to exchange ideas; and in fact, this positive synergy and its possible and factual merits are acknowledged in the increasing attention that fieldwork in teams is (again) receiving. See Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris (2018) on the older “eclipsed” tradition, and Judith Schlehe (2013) and Mathias Heybrock (2018) on a current practical approach from the University of Freiburg to teaching anthropological teamwork in the field.

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Second, it is another familiar permutation that an anthropologist does not go into the field by themselves, but with a partner who is not an anthropologist (like Matthew Engelke’s “untrained wives” [2001: 126]). Beyond the well-worn acknowledgment sections, this sort of fieldwork is tacitly understood to occur but is rarely discussed. But there, the non-academic spouses and children are both thanked for enduring the necessary time spent in the field, as well as the subsequent writing-up process, during which the scholar unfortunately had to absent themselves from domestic duties. This is an ambivalent positioning: acknowledgment sections are notoriously sites not only of introspection and displays of genuine gratitude, but also of bare-faced “careering” (Ben-Ari 1987).6 But it was clear that in our case we could not allow any such asymmetry to intrude: neither of us was accompanying the other (or even following, as I will explain in more detail below), and for our arrangement to succeed, both our projects needed to have equal priority in planning and decision-making. Thinking through the various configurations of not going into the field alone is not intended to set up a hierarchy, but rather to highlight specific expectations anthropologists might face, and how a certain kind of partnership will shape how one faces questions of symmetry and equity, as researchers and – as in our case – as parents.

FIELD RESEARCH IN A SOUTHEAST ASIAN METROPOLIS In their introduction to their thematic FOCAAL issue, Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp report that they asked 14 “anthropological couples” for a contribution, but only four affirmative replies were returned – intriguingly, all based on fieldwork in the Middle East, an area, as the authors emphasize, of “more or less strict sexual segregation” (1989: 6). This precondition, it is suggested, had the effect that “the

6

Anecdotally, I recall that during my student days in the 1990s, more senior figures in the discipline were discussed in terms of whether they had found a partner “aus dem Fach oder aus dem Feld” (from the discipline or from the field-site), and both constellations were amply represented even in our still limited social landscape. The underlying insinuation was surely that the anthropologist’s life was such (extreme? particular? demanding?) that these two options were preferable to partnering with someone who was neither. I cannot speak for my peers at the time, but it is well imaginable that certain expectations were imprinted on us even then. “You can pick whoever you like, but,” so the short phrase seemed to hint, “don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work out.”

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limitations of fieldwork experiences in these societies” (ibid: 6) were particularly evident.7 But this assumption implies that both partners in the field pursued some holistic vision, and that they apparently worked in shared fields, and not a divided field. What sets my personal experience of doing fieldwork as one half of an anthropological couple apart from most of the examples discussed above is largely encapsulated in this chapter’s title: my partner and I shared a field, and yet the field was divided. And it was not simply divided along gender lines, the set-up that Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp suggest the contributors to their volume followed so productively (and sustainably). The tension between “shared” and “divided” works more subtly in German – both are easily rendered as geteilt, and this, too, was a very conscious decision quite early in our planning stages. Our very first ideas revolved around research on moral tourism under the condition of a travel boycott since the late 1990s (intended as an empirical extension of Jim Butcher [2003] and Andrea Valentin [2009]), as at the time it seemed that this focus might be innocuous enough to allow for relatively unfettered access to the “field”. But this idea was soon confronted with political changes in Myanmar: as sanctions were dropped, our idea of studying how tourists operated to make their stay in Myanmar morally tenable lost its most interesting element. We never again returned to the idea to jointly work on a singular research question. Also, the time in which anthropologists simply went into a field and studied what they found there seemed to be over, for good or bad, so we each came to conceptualize an individual research project. Both had in common that much of the empirical data that we were after was to be found in Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, with a focus on the colonial downtown, the townships of the central business district. We felt that our research projects needed to be clearly and cleanly delineated and separable at any given point: we were both seeking to produce research that added to our personal academic profiles, and we needed to avoid having our research appear as an entangled or conflated conglomerate that we had jointly produced. While we have already published together, and will at times continue to do so, we understood fieldwork strategically as something that must distinguish the individual researcher. These considerations and concerns seemed more pressing before and during fieldwork than any practical matters that had to do with bringing our child into the field, or how the factor of having a child in the field would affect our work. The care that we took to keep our professional profiles apart also began 7

The subsequent suggestion that “it appears that the contributions of a partner of the other sex [in the context of fieldwork in the Middle East] are valued so much, that the authors have felt the necessity to reflect on their cooperation” (Ariëns and Strijp 1989: 6) seems a little over-enthusiastic.

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much earlier, with our decision not to use a common last name in professional contexts. Margaret Mead (1970) herself had choice words about those researchers who went into the field as “anthropological couples” but did not even attempt to balance the career opportunities of both partners. She emphasized that female anthropologists took on “the combined role of secretary and technical assistant, at rates cheaper than such functions command in the market place” (ibid: 326).8 But Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp highlighted that while for a long time “the professional advantages nearly always accrued to the male partner” (1989: 10), this was changing – that “not only the number of female anthropologists has increased, but also that they pay more attention to their own scientific ambitions and no longer give priority to the education of their children or to their husband’s career” (ibid: 6).9 I do not recall us very explicitly discussing the division of labor in the field, either beforehand or during our research periods. It was understood nevertheless that we strove for radical egalitarianism – rather than accountable balance – in how we each took on the various tasks that arose in managing both the family and our respective fieldwork. When one of us needed to be somewhere, saying “It would be great if I went there now” meant that the other took care of the household and the family without asking questions or demanding any further justifications. It was clear for both of our projects that sudden developments (and the “anthropology by appointment” so typical of urban research) would require reactivity to unplanned occurrences, and it was paramount for both of us to prevent the sense of “the partner/the child is preventing me from researching” ever arising, even if sometimes one person had to let go of some less firmly held plans in order to accommodate the other. But we never kept score.

8

Cited in Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp (1989: 8). See also Ernest Gellner as cited in Eyal Ben-Ari (1987: 77) for a proactive take on this very suggestion.

9

Well before that time, Margaret Mead herself is of course an exceptional case: she was successively married to three anthropologists, and was in the field with two of them, an arrangement that has stimulated the anthropological and literary imagination. While fictional, Lily King’s recent book Euphoria (2014), which retells the Papuan ménage a trois between a faux-Fortune, a mostly-Mead and a nearly-Bateson, very plausibly conjures up the tensions and (literarily exaggerated) dangers, but also the creative potential of shared fieldwork.

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL COUPLES Even as we sought to chart our own course through fieldwork, as an anthropological “professional couple”, we never existed in a historical vacuum. Some of the better known “anthropological couples” even hold a special place in our disciplinary imaginary, especially when they are known to have done fieldwork together. Some of these are even referred to by their shared last name. I have at times heard people speak about “the Comaroffs”, about “the Benda-Beckmanns”, about “the Turners”, “the Geertzes”, “the Bohannans”, and (less reliably) about “the Goodies”, the “Hugh-Joneses” or “the Rosaldos”.10 There are many more who do not have a conveniently shared last name, in Germany most prominently Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, and globally the aforementioned Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and Fredrik Barth and Unni Wikan. While Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, with their Work Journal (1979), have offered edited-yet-candid insights into the dynamics of their shared fieldwork, for many of the other cases we are reliant on sources such as retrospective interviews and marginal footnotes for glimpses of how those couples came to share a fieldwork stay and how that unfolded. Some examples of this kind of writing must suffice. The citations below point to very different sorts of relationships and circumstances. Jointly, they indicate that there is no established genre or medium for this specific biographical aspect of anthropological lives. In an interview intended to serve as part of disciplinary history, Stephen HughJones explained the “we” of his narrative to Alan MacFarlane, and how “we” entered the field: “Should explain the ‘we’; Christine had started doing sociology at the L.S.E. with a bias towards anthropology and very quickly transferred to anthropology; … she was a year behind me although older than me; we had married in my second year as an undergraduate and we knew we wanted to do fieldwork together; there was some debate on where we should go as she was quite keen on New Guinea and I was absolutely certain I was going to Amazonia; after graduation I spent a year in King’s supervising and reading as much as I could about Amazonia while Christine finished; she graduated in July and by the end of August we were in the field – so much for pre-fieldwork training that they have to do now...” (2007: 54:26:10)

10 There are more, still (Godfrey and Monica Wilson, Pat and Lionel Caplan, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock), but many are only familiar to regional or thematic specialists.

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Others were similarly or even more circumspect. Keith Hart (2015) recounts Jack Goody’s early life, including how his first marriage “did not survive the prolonged absences” (due to fieldwork in Northwest Ghana), and sums up the emergence of an anthropological couple in two sentences: “He married Esther Newcomb, his American doctoral student, in this period and they had two daughters. Jack and Esther Goody became a team in the following decades, frequently spending time in Ghana and publishing together and separately.” The Comaroffs provide more intriguing details in a shared interview, which hints at the influence of other couples, and their engaged stance-taking vis-à-vis what they perceived to be institutional constraints on their partnership: John: “Jean and I met in anthropology where Monica Wilson took us under her wing. She and her husband had been an anthropological couple; she had done a kind of historical anthropology and was coeditor of The Oxford History of South Africa. We went on to write historical anthropology and Jean worked on ritual, so there was a very strong genealogical link with her.” (Appelbaum 2011: 15:14:03) Jean: “There were nepotism clauses in force in British Universities at that stage; husbands and wives could not be in the same department.” (ibid: 16:25:00) John: “Jean has a wonderful line which is absolutely true. Social anthropology was deeply gendered when we were at the LSE, so she ‘got’ religion and I ‘got’ politics; the LSE didn't entertain any possibility of us doing a PhD together. The model of the individual author really did apply; it was no different here [in the USA]. Basically, we started to write together as a way of arguing with that tradition.” (ibid: 34:08:12)

From Marilyn Strathern (2009), we can glean little more than that some domestic difficulties occurred while in the field (cf. Strathern and Czegedly 1992/93: 2): “Managing relationships was fraught; for a while I was by myself because we thought we had different PhDs to get from this work, and Andrew went off in one direction and I in another; I had a house built much closer to Hagen town at a place called Kelua and I was there by myself for two or three months, and quite lonely; the tension manifested itself in indigestion; after the evening meal I would withdraw to have a bit of time to myself, but it would invariably end with me lying on my camp bed on my stomach trying to get rid of indigestion.”11 11 This is an exceptionally asymmetrical case, as most people I asked were not even aware that Marilyn and Andrew Strathern had been partners, as her fame so overshadows his. Regarding the domestic difficulties mentioned, while I have no indication of whether the divorces among anthropological couples (e.g. the Bohannans, the Stratherns, the Geertzs, Margaret Mead and her various husbands) are directly linked to shared

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These examples are necessarily anecdotal, even though a close reading of these scholars’ works might reveal more facets of what it means to go on fieldwork together. But they do appear to be symptomatic of how anthropology as an institutional and social milieu approaches the fact that there are occasional anthropological couples: while acknowledging that it might be a good idea, anthropological couples create difficulties.12 They might want to live together, they might want to work together, they might want to publish together, but this fits badly with how the discipline is organized. For every successful anthropological couple like the Comaroffs, how many others have foundered on the rocks of tenure, professional profile, cooperation and competition, even after managing to do their fieldwork together? How many wives eventually took on a secondary role in terms of textual production (Tedlock 1995)? Was there anything in the specific ways they managed their personal relationships that contributed to their professional success or failure, as the case might be? This concerns questions of strategy, as I have hinted at above, which – while possibly uncomfortable – can hardly be absent when partners negotiate their respective careers and their relationships, especially in a field such as anthropology which puts so much stock in the individual achievements of the researcher under difficult conditions. Drawing from survey data, Margaret C. Nelson and Deborah L. Crooks, in their study on “Dual Anthropology Career Couples” (where “anthropology” encompasses “archaeology”), found three main barriers to “success for dual-career couples in anthropology” (1994: 63): “1) lack of mobility, perceived or actual, on the part of one or both members of the couple (this is most often expressed by the woman in our survey); 2) anthropology departments’ adherence to anti-nepotism policies that restrict the hiring of both spouses; 3) anthropology departments’ slowness in accepting job-sharing as a viable alternative for dual-career couples, as well as a profitable alternative for the departments themselves.”

They suspect these barriers to be even stronger for women, and “mobility” seemed to them and their respondents to be the strongest factor overall: “Of the 40 fieldwork or not, Ilva Ariëns and Ruud Strijp make a point of mentioning that an unspecified number from among the 14 couples they had asked for contributions refused to submit anything, citing “recent divorce” as a reason (1989: 6). This is one of the points where discussing partners and spouses of anthropologists feels uncomfortable and intrusive. 12 Consider Matthew Engelke’s narrative of how, just as fieldwork, liberated Edith Turner to become an anthropologist herself, the demands of her husband’s career had the effect that she played an increasingly smaller role in his writing (Engelke 2001).

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respondents, only 2 did not see mobility as an issue” (Nelson and Crooks 1994: 63). Reading their analysis, the very suggestion of “job-sharing” made me stop short, as I had never considered this as even a possibility; but they go on to cite other studies and cases that indicate that once one partner has managed to get tenure and then effectively entered “demanding negotiation for the hiring of the partner”, departments might realize that a happy couple’s steady and increased output is an asset that might well off-set costs and other liabilities.13 But for several of the examples above (as well as for myself), the question of tenure still lay far in the future when the partners concerned found each other and ventured forth on fieldwork. However, when my partner and I met as graduate students at a very busy international research institute in the field of anthropology, we were very soon exposed to these imaginaries, and – jokingly – confronted with those famous couples who had managed to establish themselves as brands in the discipline. “Oh”, some people inquired, apparently both half-mocking and halfcharmed by our apparent commitment to each other as well as to professional anthropology, “will you be working together like [insert a name from the list above]?” This might have been exacerbated by the fact that both of us were mentored by anthropological couples ourselves. But from the beginning, we had the positive experience of people seeing us as each other’s peers, with neither considered “senior” nor “junior” (even though I am nearly two years older). This was an impression we actively sought to reinforce over the subsequent years, as we received our PhDs, advanced to new positions, heightened our professional profiles, and eventually came to the agreement to set aside the regions where we had done our respective PhD fieldwork, and jointly start research projects in a new place, where we expected to be better able to reconcile our fieldwork and our family life. This last point bears elaboration, as it provided the foundation on which everything else came to rest. What exactly was the process by which we ended up doing fieldwork in Myanmar? Many anthropologists are ready to present anecdotes about how they chose their fields (or how the fields chose them), and often the punchline is that it was simple happenstance or coincidence that led to a (life-) long engagement with a region. Both my partner and I had been absorbed by existing research programs with clear regional foci while we were still in the process of writing our MA theses; we both became established specialists for subregions in East Africa and Central Asia, respectively, and were able to pursue this engagement up until the conclusion of our PhDs. Now, in German anthropology, 13 At this point, Margaret C. Nelson and Deborah L. Crook’s paper seems to show its relative age; today, while not entirely unheard of, the suggestion that departments were at liberty to offer tenured positions to partners of faculty staff must be considered stunning exceptions rather than a realistic model.

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there is a mostly unwritten expectation for academic advancement: continuing after the PhD towards a habilitation requires a thematic and regional shift, a reorientation, ostensibly to prove that one is more than a one-field pony. And although this is at best loosely enforced (and there are prominent exceptions), it is presented as a challenge to junior academics.14 We, too, could each have plausibly claimed to have changed field-sites by just crossing a national border or an ethnic boundary, and could have pointed to precedents in which similar maneuvers had been no impediment to further professional success. The benefits of such a limited reorientation are clear – academic networks (which still are largely regionally oriented, as are many positions in the job market) can be maintained, language skills can often be reused or adapted, and regional-cum-historical knowledge might easily carry over into such a “new field”. But this seemed hardly feasible; our objectives were, more or less in this order, to be together, to keep doing anthropology, including fieldwork, and to avoid privileging one of us in any way tangibly disadvantageous to the partner. Hence, there could be no shared fieldwork in Central Asia or East Africa – we needed to start afresh, in a place where neither of us had pre-existing academic standing or a head-start in knowledge. Why we specifically picked Myanmar goes beyond the scope of this text; it was sufficiently distant from our previous fields to fulfil our criteria, and it appeared to be a promising site for the future: for many years quite closed to field research, would it not be a strategic move to enter the field now (i.e., subsequent to 2009 when we first discussed these matters) and then be part of the first wave of researchers that surely would materialize “post-opening”? It was also, we agreed after a first touristic visit, a country where we would feel comfortable doing research with a child – especially in an urban area. This shared decision to face together the risk of broadening our established academic profiles – without turning into a conjoined two-headed anthropology chimera in the eyes of our colleagues – and acquiring language skills and regional knowledge as well as building up a new regionalist network together, was decisive for us: it grew into a firm commitment to be partners in our field research as well, with all its unknown vicissitudes.

PRODUCING THE FIELD AND THE PRIVACY OF THE CITY Beyond being confronted by their partners’ “personalities, qualities, weaknesses and professional objectives”, the contributors to the FOCAAL issue Anthropolog14 The habilitation in German academia today is losing formal importance, but has not quite lost its aura.

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ical Couples all “struggled to find a way of living acceptable [sic] in the eyes of the native population and satisfactorily for themselves” (Ariëns and Strijp 1989: 18). More intense interpersonal experiences are probably a universal aspect of shared fieldwork time; but this would be true even for camping trips or anything beyond the routine domestic interactions. Rightly highlighted is the additional aspect of the views of “the native population”, which shape both expectations beforehand and behavior in the field as well. But the degree and form of this particular aspect can only be guessed at and will certainly show itself in the field in surprising ways. This is also true for the second part: how strongly should one adapt to an observant (and interpreting) public? Will adaptation attempts satisfy local demands? Our fieldwork in Yangon ended up being rather unremarkable in the first respect, and only situationally subject to the second consideration. I see this as an artefact of urban anthropology, and more specifically, of the conditions in Yangon at the time. During our fieldwork, and even now, it was rather risky in some instances for locals to host foreigners privately for any length of time. In some townships, it was rumored, wardens reported residents just for having overnight guests. Even renting an apartment was so troublesome during our two three-month stays in Yangon in 2013 that we ended up living in a hotel: rent for apartments usually had to be paid up front, for a full year. Later, in 2015, when we had managed to find a place for our family through a broker, we ended up in a section of downtown that had a budding reputation for being foreignerfriendly – “this is your area”, a local informant once said, jokingly, but the various sushi places that sprang up there were clear evidence of a gentrification that made some locals rather wealthy. The effect of both the time in the hotel and in the apartment was that we had, without much effort (merely following the typical procedures for people like us in Yangon at the time), achieved a clear separation between “field” and “non-field”. More precisely, our residence served as our private retreat, “home” (as per Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 12–13) away from home, in which we slept, worked on our data, played, stored things, cooked, washed our clothes, etc. We had some guests at times, mostly academic colleagues or academically-non-contaminated friends and acquaintances, and some few individuals whom I would classify as “informant-friends”, that is, people whom we had initially met through research but with whom we eventually reached a degree of familiarity that we felt comfortable having them in our place. To create this sort of private space (however porous in the end) seemed to us not only practical (and, again, other arrangements would have been rather tricky and unsafe in various ways), but also fair towards our child, who – five days a week – doggedly went to

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attend a private preschool mostly catering for children from upper middle class ethnically Chinese families. His willingness to handle three foreign languages at the same time (Chinese, Burmese, and English), to study “numerics” and to practice choreographies for numerous pop songs at initially barely two years of age, as well as having to deal with the inevitable attention he received as the only European child at this institution, was the only thing that enabled us to do any work in the first place. Thus, we decided that there needed to be a place which was relatively free from outside intrusions, and opted against a nanny to cover the daylight hours when school ended. We were aware that other researchers demanded still more from their children, for example by hiring nannies to enable full eight to twelve hour work days for the parents, but we found our measures adequate in practice. Still, one of us had to drop everything at three pm every day to pick our child up from school; whether more “work” would be possible during those afternoons was often uncertain. Within our private flat (and the earlier hotel room), there was no such division as we practiced it in our research projects. We also jointly established our contacts with the local university and many of our collegial relations to other researchers who lived in Yangon at the same time. But we soon noticed that we occupied a very particular niche as a researcher couple with a child – most other foreign fieldworkers at the time seemed to be there by themselves, without partner, without child, which of course enabled them to integrate themselves much more intensely, flexibly and with fewer reservations both in the “expat” milieu and in their respective research settings. We must sometimes have felt envious of those who could simply spontaneously change their plans and follow their informants or spend the nights outside in celebration or participation. This way of organizing our daily lives during fieldwork stood in marked contrast to our earlier research in East Africa and Central Asia, where both of us had stayed and worked in rather pheripheral and intimately face-to-face village settings. Our projects in Yangon did not fit with our expectations of how we had learned to do fieldwork before. Methodologically, neither of our research designs required the sort of full immersion we had engaged in previously, and (also due to numerous extraneous commitments) we were simply not as free and untethered as we had been as graduate students. We could accept that. I want to offer a neologism to characterize the ideal-type “classical” fieldworker, which despite all changes in the discipline (and in the world) still provides a baseline for discussions on how to work and live in the field. Unprepared despite long preparation, one enters the field, one is soon immersed and absorbed by people and the work, and one becomes an anthropologiste totale sociale. This total social anthropologist will not keep up any separation of “field” and “not-field”

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while in “the field”: they will be in a place, the place will be the field, they will speak only the local language and interact only with informants, and for them, there shall be only the field until their return to the office. This is clearly a caricature, but I offer the concept as a sensitizing device to instruct our methodological and theoretical reading about fieldwork. For us, it became clear that our approach towards our specific projects in Yangon was adequate. We found it difficult to move beyond the intermediary stage in the national language, Burmese (Myanmar), which was where several language courses and the time in the country had landed us; but it became clear that fully mastering Burmese (while certainly wonderful) would have eventually had diminishing returns: my partner’s main informants spoke not Burmese in their private and semi-public interactions, but Farsi or Urdu or Jinghpaw; mine, as professionals in a highly globalized setting, mostly spoke English, and not all of them were citizens of Myanmar in the first place. As Clifford Geertz had it, “the locus of a study is not the object of study” (1973: 22): We did not study a city, we studied in a city; we did not study Myanmar, we studied in Myanmar. The total social anthropologist as a projection of unrealistic expectations is a challenge to the field researcher.15 I am sure the disconcerting sense of not being in the field quite totally enough has been felt by many. The sense of not being holistically immersed in a lifeworld while feeling that one must be so can be countered: it is not only an unrealistic but sometimes also an unnecessary demand. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s (1997) text on ‘“The Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology’ is helpful here. They suggest that while anthropology and especially the world has changed rapidly ever since fieldwork became part of the brand and disciplinary identity, our understanding of it has remained curiously underdeveloped. One of the alternatives they offer to better address these changes (and to chart a new course for our own approaches) is summed up in the term “location-work” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 5), which replaces the “fetishized” commitment to a traditionally understood “field” with an “an attentiveness to social, cultural, and political location and a willingness to work self-consciously at shifting or realigning our own location while building epistemological and political links with other locations” (ibid: 5, 39). This new expression seems to have gained little traction in the discipline at large. But a “good” field-site (or location) is constituted by “its suitability for addressing issues and debates that matter to the discipline” (ibid: 10), rather than an a priori given regional or positional focus. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson emphasize choice, while acknowledging the role of happenstance and contingency in how people find 15 I do not seek to explore the more sophisticated ways that Marcel Mauss’ invocation of the “total social fact” in his The Gift can be read (cf. Valeri 2013).

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their respective fields; they urge acceptance of generative heterodoxies and decenter the tacitly maintained traditional privilege of “the field” as the place away from “home”, a dichotomy that continues to generate contradictions, often with a colonialist texture. This juxtaposition brings me back to the afore-mentioned “informantfriends”.16 As some local people we had met turned into “friends of the family” whom we enjoyed meeting without any instrumental sense that a meeting had to produce data (even though it often enough did), I eventually realized that they had all come from my partner’s side of the research rather than mine. In my estimate, this had less to do with our personalities and general sociability, and more with the way our respective fields were constructed. My partner’s research focused on urban religious minorities, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, who all pursue different strategies, both individually and as “religious communities”, to maneuver their lives and practices within predominantly and sometimes rather insistently Buddhism-focused Myanmar. Throughout fieldwork, all three of us became familiar faces especially around some Mosques, and our child and I often joined Church celebrations, Hindu processions or Muslim feasts. That we had come to Yangon as a family was perceived and appreciated; it might even have helped my partner’s access to some milieus or individuals, but that must remain speculative. My critical research on the politics of cultural heritage, on the other hand, drew on observation at public events and places (with a degree of participation), interviews, and other situated methods. While I also got to know some individuals quite well and became a familiar face at “heritage events” myself, there was never a stable presence of people in a place, no multiplex “community”, only fluctuating networks and semi-stable assemblages that soon dispersed. My informants, the people I got to know better, were experts in a general sense, journalists both local and foreign, artists, gallerists, activists, architects, officials. My access to them largely depended on my ability to ask interesting questions, and – in a crass contrast to my partner’s situation – not at all on my potential social roles as father or husband. In the terms suggested by Julia Pauli (this volume), my partner encountered (and satisfied) “family normativity”, and I did not – nobody among my informants cared much about who I was beyond being a person who asked them questions. Sometimes it is said of anthropologists that “family is something that the Other has”; in my case, I experienced the exact opposite, to my occasional consternation.

16 The term “informants” is considered problematic by some. I still use it, as suggested alternatives such as respondents, collaborators, consultants, participants, or research subjects come with their own sets of problematic associations. The construction of “informant-friends” hints at the difficulties of positionality.

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My partner’s informants became informants qua their belonging to stable groups that met at and often resided near religious buildings and belonged to selfidentifying “communities”, along with their families and neighbors in classical multiplex relationships. My informants mattered to my project as individuals who through their personal qualifications had achieved expert status and come to be involved in certain projects. Leaving aside some complexities, I can contrast our fields: there, people were active in communitarian projects; here, my informants were involved in networking. This analogy simplifies matters, but it explains why virtually no “informant-friends” came from “my side” – my interlocutors kept their families and other social entanglements outside of their involvement in “heritage”, i.e., the professional arena where I met them. Bringing my child along to certain events had no tangible effects in that it made anyone want to get to know us on a more than professional, object-oriented level. Considering the spectacle that our child occasionally caused in public in Yangon, where I carried him everywhere in a child carrier backpack, this is saying something about the contexts in which I moved. Figure 9: Making our way through a street fair (Bo Yar Nyunt Lan, Yangon, 2016).

© Judith Beyer

In an everyday sense, my partner and I were in the field in one location, together with our child – sharing it; in a methodological sense, we were in two fields – or a divided field. One field was community-oriented in terms of methods, as there

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were stable assemblies of people and places. The other was network-oriented and consisted mainly of experts who had little motive to turn their personal backgrounds into aspects of their professional lives; but I was, in effect, researching their professional activities. This was a division of fields that we had not expected, even though we probably could have.

CONCLUSION Thinking through the issues of two professional anthropologists who decide jointly to venture out on fieldwork in the same geographical location while deciding that their professional profiles must be kept apart – unlike those of many of the “anthropological couples” who have come before us – has given me a new appreciation of, mostly, the choices we made in constructing not only our fields but also our life in the field. Some of these choices were debated beforehand, while on others (so it seems to me in retrospect), we tacitly agreed upon. Despite these choices, it took me a while to articulate the most marked contrasts between our research situations: to state that we were in two different fields is no exaggeration – unlike some of those anthropological couples mentioned above, who were not only in the same place but seemingly worked together on the same things at times. This brings out how only the nexus of research design, methodology and social assemblages in a location truly makes a field. The decision to draw a line between “the field” (outside) and “home” (where we still worked, but also intentionally did not maximize our work at the expense of the family and partnership) was palatable for both of us as we had the secure knowledge that we had already previously “done” fieldwork as “total social anthropologists” as graduate students (in the vein of Georg Marcus’ “first fieldwork” [2009: 9]). To emulate again the ways we had studied in our respective villages was neither necessary nor particularly better. That we kept our research projects separate and then ended up having wholly different social positionalities vis-à-vis our informants was an unintended parallelism; another unexpected outcome was that our radical egalitarianism in how we divided our domestic duties in the field had the effect that our child for a long while after fieldwork used our established terms of address interchangeably. Apparently, it mattered little who was “Mama” and who was “Papa”. At the same time, I suspect that the way we divided domestic duties in the field still shapes the way we organize our family today, long after those formative months the three of us spent in Yangon. While I cannot in good conscience advocate the way we did fieldwork in Myanmar as a model for other anthropological couples to emulate, as we were rather privileged in terms of funding and employment throughout, I do

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consider this symmetrical approach an appropriate adaptation over older models and practices. Keeping our profiles separate is occasionally bothersome; but we expect that it would be unwise to – for example – write a joint monograph where our respective contributions (especially as they relate to fieldwork) are not carefully kept apart before both of us have tenure, as some other anthropological couples have previously done. It could certainly be argued that this paper might have profited if my partner and I had written it together; but the sense that we share, that conflation of two distinct academic careers, research fields and even names is a real and tangible risk to professional success today (maybe even more so than in the past), seemed to be better illustrated by offering a single-author paper to this volume.17 Note that the divided positionality we pursue is largely based on expectations rather than on actual feedback or on any negative experience of having been treated as one conjoined unit rather than as two professional individuals: but such is the influence of institutional history and the precarious job market that it directly impacts on the fraught nexus of family and fieldwork.

REFERENCES Appelbaum, Kalman (2011): “Jean and John Comaroff. Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers.” Available online at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/ filmshow/comaroff_fast.htm (last accessed September 16, 2019). Ariëns, Ilva/Strijp, Ruud (1989): “Anthropological Couples. In the field and beyond.” In: Focaal 10, pp. 5–24. Ben-Ari, Eyal (1987): “On Acknowledgements in Ethnographies.” In: Journal of Anthropological Research 43/1, pp. 63–84. Butcher, Jim (2003): The moralization of tourism. Sun, sand … and saving the world?, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Barbara/Turner, Diane Michalski (1987): Children and anthropological research, New York: Plenum. Cassell, Joan (1987): Children in the field. Anthropological experiences, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cornet, Candice/Blumenfield, Tami (2016): Doing fieldwork in China…with kids! The dynamics of accompanied fieldwork in the People’s Republic, Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

17 I do not even thank my family in a footnote.

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Engelke, Matthew (2001): “Books Can Be Deceiving. Edith Turner and the Problem of Categories in Anthropology.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 26/2, pp. 124–133. Geertz, Clifford (1973): The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books. Gupta, Akhil/Ferguson, James (1997): “Discipline and Practice. ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” In: Akhil Gupta/James Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–46. Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia (2017): “Yes we can – and this is how! #fieldwork with kids.” In: Allegra Lab. Available online at http://allegralaboratory.net/yes-wecan-and-this-is-how-fieldwork/ (last accessed September 16, 2019). Hart, Keith (2015): “Jack Goody (1919-2015). An oral history.” Available online at https://savageminds.org/2015/09/15/jack-goody-1919-2015-an-oral-history/ (last accessed September 16, 2019). Heybrock, Mathias (2018): „Besser nicht allein ins Feld. Transkulturelle Teams in der Ethnologie bereiten Studierende auf Kooperation in der Arbeitswelt vor.“ In: Uniwissen 01/2018, pp. 40–43. Available online at http://www.pr. uni-freiburg.de/publikationen/uniwissen/uniwissen12018.pdf (last accessed September 16, 2019). King, Lily (2014): Euphoria, New York: Grove. MacFarlane, Alan (2007): “Interview with Stephen Hugh-Jones. Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers.” Available online at https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1122016 (last accessed September 16, 2019). Marcus, George (2009): “Notes towards and ethnographic memoir of supervising graduate research through anthropology’s decades of transformation.” In: James D. Faubion/George Marcus (eds.), Fieldwork is not what it used to be. Learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition Ithaca, New Jersey: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–34. McGranahan, Carole (2015): “Yes, you can. Being an academic and a mother – redux.” In: Allegra Lab. Available online at http://allegralaboratory.net/yesyou-can-being-an-academic-and-a-mother/ (last accessed September 16, 2019). Nelson, Margaret C./Crooks, Deborah L. (1994): “Dual anthropology career couples. Different strategies and different success rates.” In: Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 5/1, pp. 59–64. Schlehe, Judith (2013): “Wechselseitige Übersetzungen. Methodologische Neuerungen in transkulturellen Forschungskooperationen.” In: Thomas

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Bierschenk/Matthias Krings/Carola Lentz (eds.), Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Reimer, pp. 97–110. Strathern, Marilyn (2009): “Marilyn Strathern, interviewed by Alan Macfarlane May 6, 2009.” Available online at https://www.haujournal.org/haunet/ strathern.php (last accessed September 16, 2019). Strathern, Marilyn/Czegedly, Andre P. (1992-93): “(Re-)Production of the Self. An Interview with Marilyn Strathern.” In: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 16/3, pp. 1–18. Strecker, Ivo/Lydall, Jean (1979): Work Journal, Hohenschäftlarn: Renner. Strecker, Rosie/Strecker, Ivo (1995): “Sweet Sorghum.” 32 min, Watertown, Massachusetts: DER. Tedlock, Barbara (1995): “Works and Wives. On the Sexual Division of Textual Labor.” In: Ruth Behar/Deborah Gordon (eds.), Women Writing Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 267–286. Thomas, Martin/Harris, Amanda (2018): Expeditionary Anthropology. Teamwork, travel and the ‘science of man’, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Toivanen, Reetta (2015): “Redux. #fieldwork with children.” In: Allegra Lab. Available online at http://allegralaboratory.net/fieldwork-with-children/ (last accessed September 16, 2019). Valentin, Andrea (2009): The role of political awareness in backpacker decisionmaking: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, PhD thesis. Valeri, Valerio (2013): “Marcel Mauss and the new anthropology.” In: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3/1, pp. 262–286.

Afterword From Tightrope Walks to Entangled Families

Erdmute Alber

When I was asked more than ten years ago to contribute to a collected volume on female scientists’ experiences of managing their academic careers alongside mothering, I used the metaphor of a tightrope walk to describe the sometimes risky balancing act between the two. (Alber 2005) I combined the metaphor of the tightrope walk with that of a life standing on several feet, arguing that the combination of multiple (or, at least two) life models (“feet”) and the related normativities of mothering and scientific work would allow the scientist to change his or her principal point of stability from time to time. If one foot no longer stands, the argument goes, one could still stand on the other for a time. That might even reinforce the weaker foot for a while. Life concepts would, in a society with plural normativities, be plural anyway, I argued. This model encompassed the idea of the multiple normativities and temporalities to be orchestrated in a female academic life course, in which mothering might be more important for a certain phase, but later on (or earlier), career related tasks might be more relevant and consume a greater proportion of time. Optimistically, I envisaged that balancing the multiple challenges would allow a mother not only to get into the scientific system, but possibly also some day out of it, while at the same time it would allow her into and possibly also one day out of the burdens of mothering. In contrast with the other contributors to that volume, I was the only author who had faced the specific challenges of combining motherhood with ethnographic fieldwork. The situation is quite different in the present volume, to which I have the honor to contribute with this afterword. Here, fieldwork with children itself is in focus, as well as being accompanied by others such as caring grandmothers or partners. In the frame of this endeavour, I think that the concept of entangled families (Häberlein, this volume) describes much more adequately the

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chances and risks as well as the epistemic challenges of research with children than the metaphor of the tightrope I used previously. I am referring to the fact that the construction of a field, and, in consequence, the process of fieldwork, involves connecting and entangling formerly separated social fields to which parenting may and often does contribute specific and sometimes surprising reconfigurations of relatedness. In this perspective, it is not only one’s own children, whatever that means in terms of biology, law or care, who are becoming part of meaningful relationships in the field, but also those who become part of a parental relationship through fieldwork, either temporarily or for a whole life span. This also includes larger webs of kinship, such as with grandparents, in-laws, siblings, friendships and so on, as well as the relationships of parenting and filiation (to use a somewhat old-fashioned anthropological concept) In other words: in order to balance on the tightrope, one is better off alone, dealing with the movements of the rope and the wind at great height. In contrast, even an imagined lonely hero fieldworker has to swing not only with the wind in the field, but even more with the relationships that emerge, break, mirror and connect him or her with research partners, their life worlds, relationships and temporalities. Children are part of these. Furthermore, even if they are not seen as part of the fieldwork, they are part of the relational making of the researcher’s self. This is especially evident in Krämer´s contribution (this volume) in which he analyzes the changing relationship to his field assistant through parenting. Of course, children are also involved in making the researcher’s relational self when he or she departs to his fieldsite alone. (see Pfeifer, this volume) The imagined old and classical (male) ethnographer did his work as a heroic lonely single researcher. Maybe he did not have children, but if he did, they stayed, of course, at home. But we must acknowledge that even in that configuration, the wife and children left behind are part of the setting that makes him the lonely hero field researcher who sacrifices himself (and also those left behind) for the sciences. However, in the other cases, described in this volume, researchers are travelling together with their children, and often their partners as well. In consequence, being connected to them, they have the opportunity to notice how their children as well as their partners shape relationships in the field, as well as the selves connected through the ethnographic work. (see the contributions by Funk, Girke and Stolz in this volume) The related reflections and interactions are essential parts of producing anthropological knowledge by doing thick participation in the field. 1 Some of the authors in this volume, such as Pauli and Pfeifer, thematise the process of searching for an appropriate medium and language to express that process. 1

I am here referring to Gerd Spittler’s concept of thick description as thick participation (2001).

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Good fieldworkers cannot and never should escape these relationships and entanglements, and this is the reason why field researchers should never walk on tightropes over the field. They have to be in the field, and through doing participant observation, become an essential part of it. If Marilyn Strathern argued that kinship is always a surprise, this holds, of course, for parenting, which is one way of doing kinship. However, it is not only a surprise but also a mess, that challenges anthropological positionality in and after the field, and all the articles in this book vividly confirm that. My compliments to the editors of the volume who gave twelve anthropologists at different career levels at German universities the seemingly simple task of writing down their reflections on their experiences of doing fieldwork together with their children. The outcome is a jewel: a timely book full of surprising insights and a variety of outcomes that also contradict easy assumptions about the implications of taking accompanying children to the field. The chapters demonstrate that even if it is still not at all self-evident that one should take one’s children into the field, the related production of situated knowledge, produced by parental reflections on children’s interactions in the fields, are extremely rich. On the basis of the chapters of this book, one could even argue that it would be better to encourage parents to take their children with them than to continue making it a rare and hard earned exception. Paradoxically, as it is argued in the introduction (this volume: 13), long-term fieldwork opens up the possibility of an academic career in the field of social anthropology, but doing that fieldwork together with children remains a precarious endeavour. I think that there are many reasons why it has become easier, but is still not self-evident, to take one’s children to the field. Even at my own institution, and given the fact of a broad range of experiences of taking children to the field by myself and some of my PhD candidates, the administration has to be convinced again and again that it makes sense to do so. Still, many perceive it as a kind of luxury or well-paid additional holiday, and not as a necessary pre-condition of doing long-term research for young mothers and fathers. Another doubt I have sometimes heard from colleagues or administrators is that researchers work less efficiently when accompanied by their families. Again, the image of the lonesome research hero mentioned in the introduction of this book is reproduced in this doubt. In contrast, the chapters of this book vividly describe alternative heroes and heroines. These are people who are seriously and creatively dealing with the societal limitations of their home institutions, their personal and economic conditions and the challenges in their webs of kinship at home and in the defined and constructed fields of their anthropological fieldwork, and confronting the numerous

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organisational and emotional challenges of undertaking field research with children. Last but not least, there sometimes seems to be some fun in such endeavours. Taking up Julia Pauli’s concept of family normativities (this volume), I would claim that the many prejudices against children in the field could be better understood if one reads them as research normativities entangled with family normativities. In this model (on which Mario Krämer also reflects in his contribution), research and family should be separated entities, the former being seen as professional, the latter as private. The place of children, as well as the responsibility for the care of those children, is seen in this model as a private task, separated from the sphere of work. It is part of the professional shape of the work that it is not “polluted” by the presence of children, who are imagined as troubling or interrupting the working sphere. Of course, this image of the private family, absent from the workplace, is part of the bigger narrative of the so-called modern nuclear family composed by the bread-winner father, working in the public sphere, the caring mother, in the private sphere, and the children, separated from both the workplace and the public sphere, being educated in schools and at home. The chapters in this book take a different perspective. They demonstrate – through refreshingly honest descriptions of individual research settings – that taking one’s children and other kin into the field is first and foremost nothing other than putting the ethnographic method of observation and participation into practice. These researchers are taking seriously the idea that participant observation always implies that the relational self of the researcher is part of the process of field research, and parenting – as well as other relationships such as friendship – is part of that and thus relevant for knowledge production. Some of the chapters in this book demonstrate concretely how children were part of the production of research results, sometimes in an unexpected way, as shown by the story of Häberlein (this volume), whose child no longer wanted to sleep alone after the fieldtrip. Similarly, Stolz demonstrates how her son’s interactions with other children allowed her to better understand local norms. The chapters also show that this is not a mechanic principle. It depends on the researcher’s relatedness, his/her research partners, the research question and therewith the construction of the field. Refreshingly, the chapters do not therefore all tell success stories. The researcher’s mother, taken into the field in order to care for the child, might be bored, so that the researcher might shift between the responsibility of entertaining both her mother and her child, and the responsibility for the research (Turin, this volume). In the process, however, she also learns something about leisure and racial separations in the field region. Pregnancy might prevent one from taking on a productive perspective to research barrenness (van

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Tilburg, 1998), but the opposite might also happen: pregnancy might help one to gain new insights about questions of citizenship in the context of transnational labour migration (Di Stefano, this volume). As all the authors share a careful view on the limits and opportunities of parenting in the process of ethnographic research, the chapters also demonstrate how important and fruitful these careful reflections are in the process of analyzing ethnographic material. Last but not least, they reflect on the synchronization of scientific careers through joint fieldwork experiences (see Pauli and Girke’s contributions, this volume). This gives the book a real value for everybody who is interested in better understanding how anthropological reflections work, be it with or without children. The book opens up the field to new perspectives that should be followed in the future. The editors note in a footnote that all of the contributions represent family constellations that fall into the standard family normativity of heterosexual couples and gender binaries. It would be of immense value to include experiences of non-heterosexual couples and their children, whether in fields where this is widely recognised, or less so. Or what about the experiences of adoptive parents bringing their child(ren) into the field? What would change in the field of research on the reproductive technologies, in this kind of context? I am aware that this would also imply ethical aspects that it would be necessary to discuss. The book provokes these questions without including such case studies – a possible future path. There is another way of extending these questions further. Some authors have already given examples of the blurring of boundaries between “us”, the researchers with their relationships and situated knowledge, and “them”, in the field (Haug, this volume). Doing research with children contributes to challenging these boundaries anyway. In some cases, children become de-facto co-researchers, as for instance when they are included in the reflection process, or when children’s contacts open the doors for parental ethnographic work. It is hard to avoid the impression that the conception of parenting in many of these contributions is somewhat conventional, implicitly reinforcing the idea of the western ethnographer taking his/her children to the field, on the one hand, and the relationships in the field, on the other. If one takes the perspective that parenting is not only limited to so-called biological parenting, and not even to jural acknowledged parenting, one should consider further the parenting relationships that emerge during fieldwork. These may end after the fieldwork, but could also continue for the whole of the researcher’s life span. Häberlein, Pauli and Haug give some examples of this type. What could be explored more is the notion that researchers themselves are partly acting as children in their fields, for instance by being named or adopted and thus playing the roles of sons and daughters in their host families. Some of

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these relationships are continued and confirmed by the field partner’s godparenting or even adopting children in the field. These relationships are sometimes, although not always, continued for a longer time span than the duration of the field research. Such kinds of participation in the field sometimes not only change the relationships in the field, but the web of relations of the ethnographer at home, and should also be reflected on, not exclusively but also in ethical terms as well. Sometimes they produce contradictions and troubles, for instance when the visiting partner of the field researcher has problems with an attributed role in the field, as Funk vividly described. Last but not least, all these processes happen at specific times that are not necessarily congruent with the time of the field research. I remember very well a conversation with one of my first PhD candidates. She asked me if I would advise her to foster a child in her research site. Her impression was that her access to the people might thereby be improved. I answered that I did so in my research, but as a supervisor, I could not possibly advise her to do so, because the implied moral responsibility would possibly outlast her time in the field and maybe even in academia. There are specific moralities and responsibilities for supervisors, too, and we have to deal with that. And, of course, these responsibilities imply research funding. Very few funding organizations pay for accompanying children in the field. Who pays for the extra costs of accompanying grandmothers or partners? How can and how should field researchers justify these extra costs, and who decides what should be funded? Where are the limits? Having worked in many different research projects as well as in the German Research Council, I remain surprised that even today only very few researchers ask for money for their partners and children. It seems that, despite all, the large majority of researchers are still travelling alone. Another aspect of children in the field is relatively rarely reflected on in this book, but was part of my experience in the field: the people in my fieldsite in West Africa were highly surprised that I brought my children there. They had an image of European children that was not completely confirmed by the experience of knowing my children. But first and foremost, they had, before I came, widely associated Europeans with white middle aged single men, as these were the dominant picture in the colonial administration as well as in development institutions. Their reflections on my family situation helped me to get a better sense of the family normativities projected onto Europeans, but also of the perceptions of relationships during colonialism. Last but not least, the images of the field presented in this volume are refreshingly conventional, in the sense that most of the ethnographers are not carrying out fieldwork at home. What if they did so? What would the issue of parenting

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then become – a barrier or a door opener? Schiefer’s contribution talked about the fact that she decided to do fieldwork at home because of her family situation. The book is an excellent starting point for inspiring thoughts and reflections. Still today, 25 years after first going with their mother in the field, my (“biological”) children continue to remember parts of their experience in the field with satisfaction. The same holds for those of my children whom I fostered in the field, who have also accompanied my life trajectory for a long time and will do so into the future. My wish is that all the sons and daughters mentioned in this book would, as well, remember their times in the field with joy.

REFERENCES Alber, Erdmute (2005): “Drahtseilakt? Plädoyer für ein Leben auf vielen Füßen.” In: Nikola Biller-Andorno/Anna-Karina Jakovljevic/Katharina Landfester/ Min Ae Lee-Kirsch (eds.), Karriere und Kind. Erfahrungsberichte von Wissenschaftlerinnen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 41–50. Spittler, Gerd (2001): “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als Dichte Teilnahme.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 126/1, pp. 1–25. van Tilburg, Mariette (1998): “Interviews of the Unspoken. Incompatible Initiations in Senegal Fieldwork.” In: Anthropology and Humanism 23/2, pp. 177– 189.

Authors

Alber, Erdmute is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). Her main fields of research are the intersections of politics and kinship, as realized in care relationships. Furthermore, she works on generational relations, ageing, and the formation of new middle classes, as well as recently on new illiteracies. She has extensive and long-term research experience in the Republic of Benin (since 1992), other African countries such as Togo, Ghana and Kenya and the Andean region. In 2018, her monograph Transfers of Belonging was published with Brill. A volume on Reconnecting State and Kinship, co-edited with Tatjana Thelen, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017. Currently, she works on relational approaches on researching young adults learning trajectories. Braukmann, Fabienne is a social anthropologist and PhD candidate at the University of Cologne. She has worked as a research fellow at the Asia Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, for the interdisciplinary DOBES Project ‘Bayso/Haro’. Between 2012 and 2016, she was an affiliate researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. She has conducted fieldwork in the Cook Islands and, since 2010, in southern Ethiopia. Her research interests include cultural forgetting and remembering, critical heritage studies, social change, ethnicity, minority studies, culture-environment adaptation, and culture and language documentation. Di Stefano, Corinna A. is a social anthropologist currently working on her doctoral thesis on mobilities and EU borders in the Lesser Antilles. Her research is based at the Cluster of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Integration” at the University of Konstanz. Among her research interests are human mobilities and ethnicization processes in the Caribbean.

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Funk, Leberecht is a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the area of psychological anthropology. In 2019 he finished his PhD on the socialization of emotion among the Tao on the Taiwanese island of Lanyu. He works on social relations, cosmologies, childhood and socialization, emotion, personhood, and the life course with a focus on East Asia and Southeast Asia. His publications include the chapter “Entanglements between Tao People and Anito on Lanyu Island, Taiwan” in the volume Monsters and Anthropology (2014), and the co-authored article “Learning (by) feeling”, published in 2015 in Ethos. Girke, Felix is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in the peripheral regions of southern Ethiopia, as well as urban Myanmar. As well as his monograph The Wheel of Autonomy (2018), he has edited four books and published widely on issues such as ethnicity, exchange, orality, politics, tourism and cultural heritage. His award-winning film Morokapel’s Feast is freely available on Vimeo. He is a team member of Allegra Lab and series editor of Studies in Rhetoric and Culture (Berghahn Books). Follow him on Twitter: @felixgirke Häberlein, Tabea is a social anthropologist interested in the economics of the life course, adulthood, ageing and intergenerational relationships in West Africa (Togo and Benin). Currently, she works as an assistant professor in Social Anthropology at University of Bayreuth (Germany). She is the author of GenerationenBande: Ordnung, Praxis und Geschichte der Generationenbeziehungen bei den Lama (Kabiye) im nördlichen Togo (2016). She has also published on the “Complexities of elder livelihoods” in Anthropology & Aging and on “Participant observation as thick participation” in Sociologus. Haug, Michaela is Assistant Professor at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Senior Researcher at the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne. She focuses on human-environment relations, political, economic and social change, inequality and gender relations with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her current research project explores how different and partly contradicting visions of the future affect forest use changes in Indonesian Borneo. Recent publications include the article “Claiming Rights to the Forest in East Kalimantan: Challenging Power and Presenting Culture”, published in Sojourn (2018) and a special issue on “Translating Climate Change: Anthropology and the Travelling Idea of Climate Change” in Sociologus, co-edited with Sara de Wit and Arno Pascht (2018).

Authors | 289

Hollington, Andrea has a background in African Studies. Her research interests include anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnomusicology and postand decolonial studies. She focuses on cultural, linguistic and musical practices in Africa and the African Diaspora, and on African-Caribbean connections. She has conducted research in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica. In 2015, she published her book Traveling Conceptualizations: a cognitive and anthropological linguistic study of Jamaican and co-edited a volume on Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond with Nico Nassenstein. Krämer, Mario is a Senior Researcher at the University of Siegen and a Privatdozent at the University of Cologne. His main fields of research are political anthropology (neotraditional authority and democratization, violent conflict and social order) and anthropology of sports. Since 2001, he has conducted about thirty months of fieldwork in Southern Africa, mainly in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and Namibia. His most recent publications appear in African Studies Review and Africa (Journal of the International African Institute). Metzmacher, Katja is studying Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. She has conducted short fieldtrips in Tanzania, Namibia, and Uganda. Her bachelor’s thesis was about whether economic experiments are a valid way of studying fairness interculturally. In 2019, she published on research data management in the humanities. Pauli, Julia is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg (Germany). Her main research interests are gender and kinship studies, transnational migration and class formation processes. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico (since 1995) and Namibia (since 2003). In 2019, she published a monograph on The Decline of Marriage in Namibia. She is currently coediting a special issue of Africa Today on “Migration and Social Class in Africa: Class-Making Projects in Translocal Social Fields” (with Cati Coe, to be published in 2020). Pfeifer, Simone is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Mainz University. She focuses on social and visual media practices, kinship, migration, mobility and transnationality in Germany and Senegal. Her postdoctoral research project (part of the project “Jihadism on the Internet”) is investigating the circulation and appropriation of militant Islamist videos and images in social media and their relationship to anti-Muslim sentiments. She

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has co-edited a special issue on media practices in 2017. Her monograph Social Media im transnationalen Alltag is in press. Schiefer, Tabea is a socio-cultural anthropologist. She conducted research on the cultural relevance of whisky in Speyside (Scotland) and West-Germany – led by the assumption that whisky consumption is a culturally and socially grounded phenomenon. She specializes in performance studies (performative ethnography), sensory ethnography and tourist ethnography. Her master’s thesis, Whiskykonsum als multisensorisches und identitätsstiftendes Erlebnis, was published in 2019. Stolz, Rosalie is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University. She obtained her PhD at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. In her ethnographic research she specialises in the topics of kinship, sociality and socio-economic change. She focuses on Southeast Asia, and specifically on Laos. Her postdoctoral project is investigating the transformation of houses in the uplands of northern Laos. In 2018, she published “Spirits Follow the Words” in Social Analysis; her article “Making Aspirations Concrete?” will appear in Ethnos. Turin, Anne is a socio-cultural anthropologist. Her master’s project is concerned with the importance of the former dirt road of the Sani Pass for local power relations on the South African side prior to the infrastructural road upgrading of the Sani Pass frontier between South Africa and Lesotho. She focuses on Southern Africa and is interested in environmental history, human-environment relations, political ecology, infrastructure and human-animal studies. Her bachelor’s thesis Imperiale Jagd und europäische Expansion im Oranje-Freistaat, 1800-1890 was published in 2014.

Cultural Studies Elisa Ganivet

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