Harmonic Dissonance: Reflections on Dwelling in the Field

Abstract

Focusing on the idea of dwelling in the field, this paper explores the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families. Through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts – one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996 –97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004–05 – I interrogate what it means to inhabit the field. In the world of multi-sited ethnography all research sites are not created equal; both in terms of the kinds of data one can collect and the types of observations one can make. How ethnographers are situated in a web of affliations affects their experience in the field, what they observe, and their research practice. I propose renewed attention to how anthropologists live in the field, including how relationships are interpreted in the field by ethnographers and their informants.

Keywords:

• Ethnography
• fieldwork methods
• ethics

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Rebecca Allahyari, A. Aneesh, and Liisa Malkki for their perceptive comments on earlier incarnations of this paper; to Bill Maurer for the invitation to present an earlier version of it to the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine; to the Social Science Research Council and The School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for providing a serene writing environment as a Resident Scholar 2006–07; and to the American Institute of Indian Studies for funding my research on charitable giving in New Delhi, India, 2004–05. Three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Ethnos gave extremely thoughtful and generous suggestions toward the revision of this paper, which I have done my best to heed.

Notes

1. One might also consider studies of families we flee (Passaro 1997) and friendships we maintain (Grindal & Salamone 2006).

2. One essay (Moreno 1995) about being raped by a research assistant in the field is doubly chilling. Not only does she expose the sexual vulnerability of being a female fieldworker, she writes under a pseudonym at the press' request — not to protect her own identity, but to protect the identity of the rapist (and the press from possible charges of slander).

3. Writers in the volume edited by Sharon Stephens (1995) have begun to break open this territory and question the place of children in ethnographic practice.

4. In addition, professional anthropological writing often contrasts alternative or experimental writing such as the classic fieldwork novel by Elenore Smith Bowen (1954); novels written after fieldwork that challenged the sanity of the ethnographer (Gibb 2005); religious experiences of an anthropologist converting to a native or other religion (the boundary here being between the secular and religious); and autobiography (Oakley & Callaway 1992).

5. Many of the constraints were self-imposed. For a recent discussion of ethnography and improvisation see Cerwonka and Malkki (2007).

6. Also see similar concerns in Ferguson 1999.

7. This has been critiqued. See Gupta and Ferguson (1997a, 1997b), Amit (2000) and feminist anthropologists Bell (1993), and Wolf (1996) among others.

8. See Dyck (2000) and Pink (2000) for other examples of fieldwork at home.

9. Feminist anthropology set the groundwork for questions of multiple subjectivities in field research. Books like Women in the Field (Golde 1986) and Children in the Field (Cassell 1987) give narratives of trials and ordeals, some due to gendered contexts. The field has been, and continues to be, reconfigured in our changing world, where one no longer attempts to write a general ethnography of a culture. What gets studied, when one embarks on fieldwork (Malkki 1997) and the fact that one does not always travel to a foreign land for fieldwork (Passaro 1997) offer new challenges to Malinowskian understandings of fieldwork.