As emotion is often linked with irrationality, it's no surprise researchers tend to underreport the emotions they experience in the field. However, denying emotion altogether doesn't necessarily lead to better research. Methods cannot function independently from the personalities wielding them, and it's time we questioned the tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This book explores the idea that emotion is not antithetical to thought or reason, but is instead an untapped source of insight that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research.
With a new, re-humanized methodological framework, this book shows how certain reactions and experiences consistently evoked in fieldwork, when treated with the intellectual rigor empirical work demands, can be translated into meaningful data. Emotions in the Field brings to mainstream anthropological awareness not only the viability and necessity of this neglected realm of research, but also its fresh and thoughtful guiding principles.
As emotion is often linked with irrationality, it's no surprise researchers tend to underreport the emotions they experience in the field. However, denying emotion altogether doesn't necessarily lead to better research. Methods cannot function independently from the personalities wielding them, and it's time we questioned the tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This book explores the idea that emotion is not antithetical to thought or reason, but is instead an untapped source of insight that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research.
With a new, re-humanized methodological framework, this book shows how certain reactions and experiences consistently evoked in fieldwork, when treated with the intellectual rigor empirical work demands, can be translated into meaningful data. Emotions in the Field brings to mainstream anthropological awareness not only the viability and necessity of this neglected realm of research, but also its fresh and thoughtful guiding principles.
Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience
288
Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience
288eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
As emotion is often linked with irrationality, it's no surprise researchers tend to underreport the emotions they experience in the field. However, denying emotion altogether doesn't necessarily lead to better research. Methods cannot function independently from the personalities wielding them, and it's time we questioned the tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the emotional dimensions of fieldwork. This book explores the idea that emotion is not antithetical to thought or reason, but is instead an untapped source of insight that can complement more traditional methods of anthropological research.
With a new, re-humanized methodological framework, this book shows how certain reactions and experiences consistently evoked in fieldwork, when treated with the intellectual rigor empirical work demands, can be translated into meaningful data. Emotions in the Field brings to mainstream anthropological awareness not only the viability and necessity of this neglected realm of research, but also its fresh and thoughtful guiding principles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804774260 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 777 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Emotions in the Field
The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork ExperienceStanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6939-6
Chapter One
From Anxiety to Method in Anthropological FieldworkAn Appraisal of George Devereux's Enduring Ideas*
Michael Jackson
The subjectivity inherent in all observations [is] the royal road to an authentic, rather than fictitious, objectivity ... defined in terms of what is really possible, rather than in terms of "what should be." George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural Sciences (1967:xvii)
THIS CHAPTER IS INFORMED BY THREE ASSUMPTIONS. First, I take the view that there are no emotions that are unique to anthropological fieldwork, which means that our task is one of identifying situations both in and out of the field that may be usefully compared and that shed light on one another. Second, I contend that emotions are but one aspect of any human experience and that we do violence to the complexity of lived experience when we make analytical cuts between emotion and thought, or emotion, the senses, thought, and action. Third, I repudiate the prevailing view that the most significant thing that anthropologists have to say about emotions is that they are socially constructed and performed, for the brute reality is that many overwhelming feelings simply cannot be reduced to either culture or phylogeny.
My starting point here is the ambivalence and anxiety that I experienced when beginning fieldwork among the Kuranko in northeast Sierra Leone more than thirty-six years ago. My initiation into anthropology, however, depended not only on fieldwork but also on the intellectual mentorship of George Devereux, whose work proved crucial to the evolution of my approach to comparative method, anthropological theorising, and ethnographic writing. I therefore begin this chapter with a personal reminiscence of my relationship with Devereux, whose work, in my judgement, remains fundamental to any exploration of the relationships between observer and observed in the behavioural sciences. This then sets the theoretical scene for an account of how I addressed the anxieties of first fieldwork among the Kuranko by having recourse to local techniques of dream interpretation and divination. I then proceed from questions of anxiety to matters of comparison, arguing that insights that turn out to be personally useful may also illuminate the transpersonal and interpersonal life-worlds that one is seeking to understand.
George Devereux
In the antipodean summer of 1973-74, thanks to an initiative by my friend Michael Young, whom I had gotten to know at Cambridge a few years earlier, I spent about eight weeks in the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Derek Freeman, then head of the anthropology programme at RSPacS, had brought together an exceptional group of anthropologists, including George Devereux, Meyer Fortes, Adam Kendon, and Peter Reynolds, whose research interests encompassed biological anthropology, human ethology, kinesics, and psychoanalysis. Though these fields were all comparatively new to me, it was George Devereux's work that made the most profound and enduring impression.
Like Meyer Fortes, George Devereux was only a short-term visitor, and I had already been in the department for several weeks before he arrived. During those weeks, his book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural Sciences was passed around. Everyone appeared nonplussed by it, and I don't think anyone bothered to read it from cover to cover. But when the book came into my hands I was instantly and completely enthralled. Here at last was an anthropologist who sought the universal in the particular, yet did justice to the idiosyncratic and cultural contexts in which the universal is actually lived. Other thinkers possessed the same scholarly breadth and erudition as Devereux, but none, to my mind, so successfully showed how one might integrate social and psychological approaches to human reality. I felt as though Devereux was addressing and offering solutions to the very problems I had been struggling with-methodological as well as philosophical-in my own work. First was the question of reflexivity-of the reciprocal interplay of one's relationship with oneself and with others-or, as I phrased it at the time, the twofold movement that takes one out into the world of others and returns one, changed, to oneself. For Devereux, understanding this dialectical movement was imperative if anthropology was going to be truly methodical, but it had to be managed and monitored by techniques that involved the complementary use of psychological and sociological models. In other words, true reflexivity demanded scientific discipline, not artistic license or confessional impulse. Second, I found myself in complete accord with Devereux's insistence on the value of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for anthropology: interactions between observer and observed, object and instrument, are constitutive of our knowledge of all phenomena. This meant that anthropologists had to make choices of method and theory not on the basis of an objectivist principle of representing reality but on the basis of ethical, political, and artistic commitments to practical truths-truths that might make for a more equitable society or that held out the promise of enriching rather than impoverishing our lives. Third, I was impressed by Devereux's notion that much of the experience-distant rhetoric and theoretical model building we do in anthropology may be understood through an analogy with intrapsychic defence mechanisms-subterfuges for coping with the stressful effects of fieldwork and the unsettling complexity of life. Anthropological systematising could be placed on a par with pretty much anything human beings do to bring an illusion of order to their lives-attributing causation to inanimate things, furnishing a house, making a garden, writing a book, building a nation. In other words, whatever their different epistemological values, scientific and magical reasoning provide alternative strategies for coping with the panic that all human beings experience when confronted by the unresponsiveness of matter-the sheer otherness, non-humanness, and unmanageability of many of the forces that impinge upon us. Fourth, I found in Devereux's psychoanalytic arguments for the psychic unity of humankind a justification for the kind of anthropology I instinctively wanted to do-"the principle that each person is a complete specimen of Man and each society a complete specimen of Society" (1979:23). Fifth, and perhaps most momentously, I found in Devereux's focus on the politics of how ego boundaries are revised and drawn (rather than on how egos may be defined) a way around the static schemata of bounded entities-selves, social groups, tribes, cultures, nations-that dominated cultural anthropology in the 1970s.
Nothing is more sure to undermine one's social confidence than regard and respect, so when I was first introduced to the man whose work had already made such an impression on me, I was abashed and tongue-tied.
I remember the day vividly. A group of us were sitting around a table in the garden at University House, eating lunch. George had only just flown in from France, and in the dazzling sunlight that filled the garden he looked etiolated, jetlagged, and utterly out of place. I sat close to him, wanting to hear what he had to say. He grasped an unlit cigarette in a tortoiseshell holder, and his first remark was a request: Did anyone know where one could buy a Cricket lighter? His had run out of fuel. I volunteered immediately, and spent the next half hour going from one kiosk to another in the city until I found a Cricket.
Years later, reflecting on this afternoon of his arrival, George would use his disoriented frame of mind-"a combination of influenza and severe jet-lag"-to illustrate how consciousness continually moves between focused and diffuse extremes, between modalities of engagement and detachment:
My total stimulability, my capacity to apprehend situations multidimensionally, was almost abolished. The moment I was able to entrust myself to my host's kindly care, I observed first an incapacity to operate in the framework of a time-span exceeding a few minutes. On talking over afterwards my behaviour while in a state of jet-lag exhaustion, my host told me that I had spoken rationally, but also that what I had said had no real continuity. I appear to have skipped from one thing to another, in response to the stimulus of the instant. My "temporal ego" had been momentarily impaired.
On another level, I noted that whenever I was not the recipient of a stimulus directly addressed to me-that is, whenever I was not directly spoken to-part of my mind began to dream. Thus, I knew that I was sitting at a table and eating; I was also aware of my host's presence, but only in a remote sort of way.With my eyes open, part of my mind was periodically slipping "sideways", into a dreamlike, at least hypnagogic, state-for the first, and I hope the last, time in my life, for it was not a pleasant experience. Also, though I was able to set in motion the machinery of my good upbringing, I could hear myself say "please" and "thank you" as if I were only a suitably programmed computer. At least twenty-four hours elapsed before I could once more apprehend those I met as multidimensional persons and not as mere "partial objects". So far as I know, I did nothing silly during the first twenty-four hours, but I also know that every person and thing I encountered during that period was experienced as unidimensional and non-symbolic and that successive events were apprehended as discrete: not as sequential, not as components of a temporal pattern. My time perception was not that of the historian but that of the chronicler. (1979:28-29)
Despite seeing me as unidimensional and non-symbolic, George must have divined in my eagerness to place myself at his disposal a desire for intellectual apprenticeship or affiliation. In any event, this is what happened. I accompanied him back to his third-floor room in University House-realising, as he rested a while on each landing and complained about the stairs, that he suffered from acute emphysema. And I devoted myself to proofreading articles and running errands for him, and hearing him out as he regaled me with stories of academic politics in Paris, of the indifference and dismissiveness of the university establishment to his ideas, and of his current psychoanalytic explorations of dreams in classical Hellenic literature.
Perhaps, too, I sensed some distant kinship, born of our isolated childhoods, though the vexed circumstances of his were more "political" than "familial." He was born in 1908 in the trilingual, tricultural town of Lugós, then part of Hungary. At the end of World War I, the town passed into Romanian hands and George's lycée became officially Romanian. This meant that one year he was told that the Hungarians had defeated the Romanians; the next, he was taught the opposite. Experiencing a growing sense of cultural contradiction, and an abhorrence of the hypocrisy of identity politics, he found "affective sincerity in great music" and turned, for objective truth, to the study of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne in 1926. But one year before Heisenberg's breakthrough, he abandoned physics for anthropology.
I think I also identified with George's sense of marginality-of often finding himself in countries where he did not feel completely at home, of often seeming to go against the grain of what was considered important or fashionable in his field. "One of the reasons for my huge written output," he once confided to a friend, "is the fact that for all those years I had no one to talk to. So I wrote" (1979:15). And elsewhere, and for me, as it turned out, presciently: "Considering all things-even the years of actual starvation, the lifelong insecurity of employment, no retirement income ... thirty-five years in outer limbo, I deem myself fortunate on two capital scores: I have made no compromises and I have done work that passionately interested me" (1978:402).
After Canberra, I saw George again twice, on visits my wife and I made to Paris in 1979 and 1982, and of course we corresponded frequently. One afternoon, he entertained us (more accurately, I should say, overwhelmed us), by playing one of his own compositions on his grand piano. On another he showed me some his old fieldnotes-evidence of how much work he had still to do. But most memorable is that long ago Austral summer, when ideas seemed to materialise out of thin air, bubble up out of the earth, as from a spring, and come in dreams, when the intense, undisturbed heat of the afternoons was filled with the brittle odour of eucalyptus, the screech of gallahs and parakeets, and the chug-chug-chug of water sprinklers on dark green lawns.
On the Margins
Devereux's pioneering work on the effects of countertransference in the behavioural sciences, particularly the way we readily fall back on strategies of pseudo-objectification, intellectual systematizing, selection, scotomization, and simplification in order to magically reorient ourselves in situations that seriously undermine our sense of ontological security, implies for me that the viability of any human life depends on one's sense of being able, in some small measure, to comprehend and control one's immediate circumstances. As Bowlby (1973) and others have shown, the situations most devastating to our ontological security and sense of identity involve traumatic separation and loss. Though the prototype of all separation is separation from the mother, the bereavement reaction is grounded in our biogenetic evolution and has universally identifiable elements. This does not mean, however, that the familiar experiences of anger, protest, withdrawal, and acceptance conform to a strict behavioural sequence-a lineal progression in which each stage eclipses the one before it. Human beings seldom suffer grievous losses without some conceptual and creative response. And recovery depends not just on phylogenetically determined processes but on social imaginaries, cultural pre-understandings, and idiosyncratic experience (Friedman and Silver 2007:288). Existentially speaking, separation anxiety involves a fear of losing one's hold on the world around-of being reduced to passivity, aloneness, and childlike dependency, at the mercy of forces that are unresponsive to one's needs or persons who are hostile or indifferent to one's humanity. The recovery of a sense that one can, in some way and to some extent, comprehend and control one's situation-may be achieved in a variety of ways-telling stories in which we retrospectively recast ourselves as acting subjects rather than abject sufferers, having others confirm our wild guesses as to what is happening and why, seeking out familiar objects that symbolically restore our relationship with the world we have lost, and even imagining bonds of kinship or friendship with those who have, albeit innocently, made us feel so insecure, so that we later extol their virtues out of a misplaced gratitude for their having saved our face and recognised our humanity in a place and at a time when these were imperilled (La Barre 1972:52).
Reorientations
In what follows, my focus is the liminal phase of fieldwork-after separation from one's familiar lifeworld but before one finds one's feet and feels at home in one's new environment.
In retrospect, three things troubled me during my first few weeks in northern Sierra Leone: the first was my dread of interrogating strangers in a language I had only a smattering of; the second was an anxiety that I would never amass enough data in a year to write a Ph.D. dissertation; the third was a deep disquiet about having brought my wife, three months pregnant, to a place so remote from emergency medical services. While this last concern found expression in a generalised sense of moral uncertainty, the first two came into focus in my dreams.
A few weeks after beginning fieldwork, I had a disturbing dream that I felt compelled to record immediately upon awakening. The dream comprised two episodes. In the first I found myself in a bare room, reminiscent of one of the classrooms at the District Council Primary School in Kabala where I had first met Noah Marah (a teacher at the school, who later became my field assistant). A corrugated iron door was opened into the room and a book was passed into the room by an invisible hand or by some other invisible agency. The book hung suspended in midair for several seconds and I identified a single word in bold type on its cover: "ETHNOGRAPHY." I had the definite impression that the book contained only blank pages. In the second episode I found myself again in the same room. Again the door opened. I felt a tremendous presence sweep into the room. I felt myself lifted up bodily and, as if held in the hands or by the power of a giant, I was taken out of the room. The hands and arms of the giant exerted such pressure against my chest that I could not breathe easily. I was borne along aloft, still being squeezed. At this point I awoke in fear from the dream.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Emotions in the Field Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Introduction: Emotions in the Field James Davies 1
Part I Psychology of Field Experience
1 From Anxiety to Method in Anthropological Fieldwork: An Appraisal of George Devereux's Enduring Ideas Michael Jackson 35
2 “At the Heart of the Discipline”: Critical Reflections on Fieldwork Vincent Crapanzano 55
3 Disorientation, Dissonance, and Altered Perception in the Field James Davies 79
4 Using Emotion as a Form of Knowledge in a Psychiatric Fieldwork Setting Francine Lorimer 98
Part II Political Emotions in the Field
5 Hating Israel in the Field: On Ethnography and Political Emotions Ghassan Hage 129
6 Tian'anmen in Yunnan: Emotions in the Field during a Political Crisis Elisabeth Hsu 155
7 Emotional Engagements: Acknowledgement, Advocacy, and Direct Action Lindsay Smith Arthur Kleinman 171
Part III Non-cognitive Field Experiences
8 Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the Far North Kirsten Hastrup 191
9 What Counts as Data? Tanya Luhrmann 212
10 Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or, the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience Joanna Cook 239
Index 267