Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography by Thomas Stodulka & Samia Dinkelaker & Ferdiansyah Thajib

Author:Thomas Stodulka & Samia Dinkelaker & Ferdiansyah Thajib
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030208318
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Increasing Emotional Involvement

Being an individual researcher may increase the role of emotions in the field. In my case, my degree of emotional involvement13 was considerably higher when I was alone in the field. It was during my time without my family that I started to really love some people I was researching with and started to feel deep empathy for them. This strong emotional sensitivity enriched my perception in the field. Led by emotions I was able to identify very small details and, on the other side of the coin, I was also more prone to construct fitting details.

Many of my emotional notes, from my stay without my family, circled around interpersonal relations: Did I act the right way? Did the other person consider me arrogant in that situation? Why was he so brusque toward me? Should I have been visiting them earlier? These reflections are very detailed and go hand in hand with very detailed observations that contribute to the quality of research. Everything that others did seemed so important. What I often did not consider was that, in many cases, it was probably just me who put importance into a certain interaction or relation. When emotions occurred, I never thought to myself: “Anyway, this is just an issue at work. Soon it will be the weekend,” or “Anyway, this is just this person’s private opinion; it’s not related to my research.” On the other hand, the person my thoughts were concerned with might have done exactly that. They might have had something emotionally and practically more important to do than reflecting on their relation to a researcher. As an ethnographer without genuine care relations in the field, I think I somehow tended to overestimate my relations to others.

Interestingly, many of my strong feelings were connected to something that was missing in my life in the field: children and a loving family.14 Probably, my strongest emotional experience was when I felt that children I knew well were being treated unfairly by a teacher at their school. Also, I developed a strong emotional attachment to certain elderly women. As is customary in the Philippines, I called them nanay, meaning “mother,” and I conceptualized them as strong, politically active, full of love, organized, and socially and technically skilled. In short, I saw them as mothers and enjoyed being temporarily attached to them as a daughter would have been.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.