Avada kedavra: disenchantment, empathy, and leaving ethnography

Abstract

Exiting long-term ethnographic research is occasionally fraught with a litany of professional, ethical, and existential dilemmas. As ethnographers in physical cultural studies (PCS) attest, participation with people in the field over the long term writes a researcher rather deeply. Being personally contoured by a physical culture under study can enchant a researcher as new physical experiences occur, meaningful social bonds are forged, affective curiosities are explored, and one’s analytic imagination is unleashed. The eventual separation and dis-embodiment from a culture as a study ends can be rather dis-enchanting and alienating. Often glossed over in the sport and exercise literature, leaving or exiting is a long-term process intimately connected with sensual embodiment in the field. Leaving is an ever-present process and inexorably stitched to how a researcher knows, does, and analyses ethnographic work. In this paper, we reflect on exiting processes in two separate ethnographic ventures in physical culture; namely, Ashtanga yoga and mixed martial arts (MMA). We dissect how the twin processes of inter-corporeal enchantment and dis-enchantment unfold in ethnography, and unpack how one’s ‘ethnographic self’ may be splintered into shards through disengagement from the field. Here, we disrupt rather standard forms of dispassionate or ‘disengaged disengagement’ from ethnographic fields commonly articulated in research in favour of a much more empathically engaged process.

Keywords:

• Ethnography
• exiting the field
• disengagement
• empathy
• embodiment
• inter-corporeality
• disenchantment
• yoga
• MMA