Emotions in the Field PDF

Emotions in the Field (Stanford University Press) Introduction James Davies The aim of this book is to help retrieve emotion from the methodological margins of fieldwork. Our task is to investigate how certain emotions...

Emotions in the Field (Stanford University Press) Introduction James Davies The aim of this book is to help retrieve emotion from the methodological margins of fieldwork. Our task is to investigate how certain emotions evoked during fieldwork can be used to inform how we understand the situations, people, communities, and interactions comprising the life-worlds we enter. By emphasising the relevance of emotion in anthropological research, we take up a theme that the “reflexive turn” of 1980s/early 1990s anthropology considerably overlooked. While this school explored how the ethnographer’s position in the field influences the data he or she acquires (and the varying ways our identity, gender, ethnicity and personal history affect how we understand, interact with, and write about our field-sites), it left comparatively under-investigated the researcher’s states of being during fieldwork, and how these states may either enable or inhibit the understanding fieldwork aims to generate. This relative neglect has naturally left many pages unwritten in our methodological canon. And so it is the aim of this volume to give voice to the growing chorus of researchers (within these pages and beyond) working to redress this imbalance. Our objective is to show how certain emotions, reactions and experiences that are consistently evoked in fieldworkers, when treated with the same intellectual vigour as our empirical work demands, can more assist than impede our understanding of the life-worlds into which we set ourselves down. Counting these subjective phenomena as data to be translated through careful reflection into 1 anthropological insight is the central and unifying aim of this volume, the contributors to which, by building upon existing work on intersubjective and experiential fieldwork, explore new ways how these translations can be achieved. Two Beliefs we Contest To situate this volume in existing research let me first survey historically how researchers’ emotions have been understood in social science methodology. To preface this task let me start by identifying two beliefs that have significantly influenced the history of modern field methods - beliefs we contest insofar as they reject the idea that emotion can have epistemological worth. The first and most recent stems from a school of post-modernism advanced in the 1970-80s. Its intention was to demonstrate the inherently imperialistic and oppressive nature of fieldwork. It held that by submitting “others” to the anthropological gaze, ethnographers often replicated in mitigated form the exploitative dynamics of the colonial era. This critique presupposed that researchers were riddled with many barely- perceptible self-interests and/or assumptions which distorted and biased their observations, leading them to construct more than to reveal their object in ways rendering their object oppressed. As objectivity was therefore seen as an illusion, any claim researchers made to assured knowing was naïve or, at worst, politically self-serving. While many important insights emerged from this critique, and at times many sobering and useful lessons, one central argument that this critique implied is inevitably contested by the chapters of this volume: that subjectivity undermines the process of knowledge construction and never enables it – this is to say, that subjectivity has only a corrosive affect upon the process of research. 2  The second idea we dispute stems from what we call “traditional empiricism”. This tradition drew firm lines between the researching subject and the researched object, and also defined across the social sciences what attributes of the researcher could usefully contribute to the activity of knowledge construction – namely, rationality and the capacity for detachment.1 This meant that anything believed to undermine these attributes, such as encroaching feelings or affects, had to be methodologically removed or subdued. This marginalisation of emotion was consistent with the belief that subjectivity in both quantitative and qualitative research is something to be controlled and restrained, as it invariably introduces irregularities that cloud and bias research. For traditional empiricism the idea that emotion could actually be used to generate understanding was therefore simply a non-starter. Indeed, much socio/cultural research influenced by this tradition, and keen to avoid its unsparing censure, thus not only under-investigated our emotions in the field, but at times actively under-reported or concealed them. The irony being that by neglecting these data such research offended empiricism more deeply. True empiricism does not ignore the facts but is obliged to accept them, embrace them, and advance theoretical formulations upon them. Both “post-modern” and “traditional empirical” beliefs, no matter how divergent the traditions from which they spring, share common ground on one critical point – each agree that the personal equation wherever it may arise is the saboteur par excellence of all generalising aspirations. While post-modernism by viewing subjectivity as belligerently omnipresent developed this into a radical repudiation of all universalising aims; traditional empiricism, taking the opposite route, developed ever more stringent methodological controls to create spaces in which so-called “pure” investigation could proceed - free from subjective distortion. The response of each made unavoidable for both one restrictive but 3 all-pervasive corollary: that subjectivity itself offers no royal road to insight, discernment or any species of knowing. It is clear, then, that any project placing emotion onto an epistemologically relevant plane implies a critique of both streams of thought: firstly by showing how the concealed and neglected aspects of the researcher’s emotional experience can actually present opportunities for understanding; and secondly, by developing a new and re-humanised methodological framework which exposes the weaknesses of the old. Why we in this volume and many colleagues outside it have arrived at such a position, demands some deeper historical elaboration. This I shall now advance with respect to the social sciences more broadly, and to anthropology, in particular. After offering this historical account I shall then describe the exact contribution each chapter makes before finally outlining the precise methodological position this volume advocates: one we call, after William James, radical empiricism – namely, a position that refuses the epistemological cut between subject and object, that endows transitive and intransitive experiences with equal status, and that investigates phenomena which the inductive methods of traditional empiricism were never designed to treat. A History of Emotions in the Field The basic rule of method in the early natural sciences was that scientists should remain detached from their object of enquiry, and through systematic observation of available data seek hidden uniformities which could be translated into quantitative terms. The physicist, chemist, and biologist all followed a similar procedure; each observing the facts of their respective domain with varying degrees of control over the context of investigation. Methods were developed to remove distortions caused by either the research environment 4 or the researcher (Bruyn 1966: 27). Such methods, especially with respect to the researcher, were considered to restrain those incursions of subjectivity whose unbridled expression was thought to otherwise corrupt research. When in the early 20th century this particular approach was applied to the study of social and human life, certain problems arose in method and theory. For one, the dichotomies upon which traditional empiricism rested (i.e. observer/observed, subjectivity/objectivity, subject/object), if supporting certain quantitative methods in early sociology, anthropology and experimental psychology, seemed only to impede research into those areas of life that resisted being quantified. It was therefore argued that since so many human phenomena could not be explored quantitatively, if we restricted our investigations to only those facts which could be measured and counted, we would be forced to omit so much from our studies of social and human life that our sciences would become somewhat sterile (Storr 1960). As the limits of quantification and objectification were more widely acknowledged in social science research, and as scepticism spread about whether detachment could reach what is most essentially human in society, these particular methods were less indiscriminately applied in other social science domains. This brought the advance of alternative methods that had their foundations in the phenomenological and interpretivist thinking of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Philosophers such as Gottfried Herder, Martin Heidegger, and Wilhelm Dilthey invoked the ideas of Einfühlung (feeling into the world), Gestimmtheit (attuning to the world), tonalité (adjusting to the pitch of the world), respectively; giving legitimacy to the participatory methods of which LePlay’s Les Ouvriers Européens (1855) provides an early example. These thinkers urged that participation and detachment were methodological postures that could each reach distinct species of fact, 5 and that therefore both belonged in social research. This view was also implied in Max Weber’s insistence that the observer and observed were after all constituted of the same human essence; an idea grounding the concept of Verstehen: knowing through empathic attunement. In these ideas many early anthropologists found encouragement. For although fieldwork had been undertaken in anthropology since the late 1890s (Franz Boas had led his North Pacific expedition in 1897; and A.C. Haddon, W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman led the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898), there was still a reluctance to accept participant observation as a distinct method until the early 1920s. It was Malinowski at that time who proclaimed a philosophy of fieldwork in his Argonauts of the Western Pacific. He distinguished between “native statements” and the “inferences” researchers drew from insights gathered through participation. The fieldworker would document data with “camera, note book and pencil” after “joining in himself in what is going on” (Malinowski 1922: 21). Being “in touch” with the natives, Malinowski was certain, clearly marked the “preliminary condition of being able to carry on successful fieldwork” (1922 1961:8). If at this point participation gained legitimacy in anthropology, it was less accepted that participation could evoke in fieldworkers powerful subjective reactions and emotions which implicated the method itself. Methods where still seen to have more to do with minds than with emotions or feelings or with what Plato called θύμος (the heart). And to the extent this belief was accepted, reflection was inhibited upon whether the personal consequences of participation could be of any scientific value. Consider, for example, the advice received by Evans-Pritchard when studying at LSE in the 1920s. Seeking guidance from experienced fieldworkers about what to expect, both emotionally and practically, during his fieldwork in Central Africa, he accounts humorously the advice he received: 6  I first sought advice from Westermarck. All I got from him was “don’t converse with an informant for more than twenty minutes because if you are not bored by that time he will be.” Very good advice, even if somewhat inadequate. I sought instruction from Haddon, a man fore-most in field-research. He told me that it was really all quite simple; one should always behave as a gentleman. Also very good advice. My teacher Seligman told me to take “ten grains of quinine every night and to keep off women.” The famous Egyptologist, Sir Flinders Petrie just told me not to bother about drinking dirty water as one soon became immune to it. Finally I asked Malinowski and was told just to remember not to be a bloody fool (Evans-Pritchard 1973: 1). While Evans-Pritchard no doubt enjoyed raising smiles with this quote, there was also a more serious point to me made. At the time of his apprenticeship there was little said about the experiential consequences of participatory research. If participation was accepted, its personal effects for the researcher (and ultimately the work) were not. This particular predilection for emotion to be borne but never broached remained widespread throughout the first half of the 20th century. For during this period anthropology was fully aware that the “personal equation” tested its scientific place in the academy. As Dumont has told us, the founders of modern anthropology such as Boas, Kroeber, Radcliffe-Brown, and Evans- Pritchard were highly conscientious about how they represented themselves as researchers – for “it was the status of anthropology as science which was at stake with them” (Dumont 1978: 7). Anthropology was not alone with these concerns, as the misgivings of psychoanalysis and analytical history at that time indicate. Psychoanalysis, for instance, revealed its anxiety by regarding inadmissible the powerful subjective reactions evoked in analysts by the analytical relationship. Thus the analyst’s “counter-transference” (i.e. their 7 emotional reactions to the patient) was until the 1950s largely perceived as a nuisance or as something to be eliminated. Freud would not acknowledge a subjective influence he felt would render his aspiring science unscientific in the eyes of his peers. Analytical history too had its earnest denials – grand historical works by Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and earlier by Karl Marx all relied on the belief that exact historical method sufficiently removed the personal equation, and thus if one proceeded correctly further reflexivity was not required. This belief was compounded by the myth endemic in the socio/human sciences of the day: that conceding subjectivity was conceding status, and possibly privilege and position. The late publication of Malinowski’s fieldwork diary symbolised this disquiet within anthropology. For although it was written in the 1920s, it did not finally emerge until the safer ground of the 1960s; the diary contained all the emotions and experiences which Malinowski excluded from his formal methodological writings. Indeed, it was not until the 1950s that the experiences and emotions that participant observation evoked were reported at all. And yet even when these reports did emerge, as with Malinowski’s diary, they were still safely shorn from mainstream anthropology and relegated to personalised fieldwork accounts. For example, in 1954 Laura Bohannan published her novel/account of fieldwork Return to Laughter behind the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen. Presumably this nom de plume accorded security enough to flout a taboo which many honoured. Others were emboldened and followed suit. Gerald Berreman’s experiences in India found articulation in Behind Many Masks (1962), K. E. Read documented his vexations in The High Valley (1965); Hortense Powerdermaker’s experiences in the South West Pacific and Madagascar found outlet in her Stranger and Friend (1966), and Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques (1963) disclosed his troubled ruminations in Amazonia. Although these 8 confessional accounts brought awareness of fieldwork’s emotional underside, the experiences they documented were largely lyrical reflections that were detached from any systematic inquiry into their implications for method or theory-making. In short these works, as Paul Rabinow accurately noted, “all…[clung] to the key assumption that the field experience itself is basically separable from the mainstream of theory in anthropology” (Rabinow 1977: 5) - a thought earlier stated by Casagrande (1960) in his In the Company of Men,2 and to be later echoed by Freilich (1970) in Marginal Natives. 3 During the 1970s attitudes changed somewhat, as the experiential became slightly more formulaic. Kimball and Watson’s (1972) Crossing Cultural Boundaries, and P. Golde’s (1970) Women in the Field opened the decade with insightful compendiums on the human face of fieldwork. Golde’s edited work touched upon certain vagaries of culture shock, guilt, and the need for identity protection; while Kimball and Watson’s volume comprised papers telling “off-the-record” stories of anthropologists at work in the field and beyond.4 Also at this time a few interesting articles on the psychology of fieldwork experience were published, even if their impact was minimal. Scholars such as Freilich (1970), Nash and Dennison (1972) Mentiel (1973) and Hill (1974) dealt closely with the researcher’s identity in the field – its shifting position explaining for them certain personal field crises anthropologists can undergo. In many respects the early 1970s marked a kind of unfulfilled highpoint of psychological reflection on fieldwork – the apogee of which being George Devereux’s (1967) penetrating discussion of the relationship between anxiety and method usage. As Michael Jackson in this volume discusses, this scholar stood alone in broaching the interplay of method and emotion: methods were not tools for gathering knowledge, Devereux would flatly assert, but rather psychological devices used to confirm our biased perceptions and 9 the stability of our outlook. Certain applications of method could act as a “defence mechanism” bolstering steadiness in disorientating conditions, and ordering phenomena down preconceived conceptual channels. As method usage could thus subordinate unfamiliar cultures to the familiar epistemic visions in which these methods were rooted, we would often bring to the cultural facts the theories we claimed to derive from them. When reading Devereux’s work we are forced to consider how it undermined a core assumption precious to the traditional empiricist – namely, that if methods affected the researcher’s subjectivity they only did so in a very specific and controlled way: by creating in the researcher a detached and uninvolved relationship towards the object studied. The traditionalists believed that their methods rather tempered than enervated sentiment, rather quelled than aroused subjective response. This idea that methods could subjugate or even efface personality was one most easily received in the natural sciences. For here the personal reactions methods provoked rarely appeared exaggerated or conspicuous, especially because the long tenure of scientific training made experimental activities so routine to scientists that performing them rarely upset their states of mind. Moreover, if one’s research activity provoked any marked emotion at all there were always other sciences that could explain it away. Laboratory workers’ depression could be located in factors unlinked to their scientific activity, just as the biologists’ maladie du siècle could be traced to anything but the psychological posture their training and practice compelled them to adopt. Thus, while the traditional empiricists asserted that methods essentially restrained sentiment, they were less ready to admit that these very same methods could evoke emotions of a different order. For had they recognised that the application of certain methods could generate new emotions, then the view that methods effaced feelings and 10 personality would at once become untenable. Thus traditional empiricists were careful to assert that it was only the link between method and mind that mattered. For them methods created new states of mind (clear, rational, unencumbered by affect) and never new states of emotion. This was echoed in idioms depicting method usage as an essentially “technical” and “intellectual” affair: users “took up”, “applied” or “discarded” these “tools” as one would solid items from shelves. And if these detachable apparatuses implicated persons at all they only did so cognitively: to fail methodologically was primarily an intellectual failing; one traceable to mishandled procedure, misunderstood or misapplied design. The principle cognitio fit per assimilationem cogniti et cognoscentis was left everywhere unconsidered. The irony here is that the traditional belief that method usage only implicates the intellect draws upon the old “faculty psychology” idea (i.e. that individuals can be partitioned into discrete components of “intellect”, “emotion”, “memory” etc), rejected by many of these same traditionalists.5 Many traditional empiricists did not reflect that to link method to a discrete “intellect” is no less problematic than to relate it to pure “emotion”. “Intellect” and “emotion” are not analytical distinctions reflecting actualities of the “soul,” but are rational categories imposed upon the total context of experience. Thus, when these categories are reified in the domain of methodology they come to support a kind of intellectualist myth: that methods function independently of the total personalities wielding them. This myth ignores, as William James long ago stated, that passion, taste, emotion and practice cooperate in science as much as in any other practical affair (James 1995:40). Thus exercising method can be nothing other than a total psychological happening. For not only do we adapt personally to what methods dictate, but particular methods are most fully realised in those personalities best able to apply them. In this sense the popular yarn that the “obsessional” is always a more effective laboratory scientist than the “narcissist” (who 11 would rather parade the results), strums more than only a humorous cord. It underlines an insight emphasising the importance of personal suitability, and/or the process of its construction through professional training or socialisation. Late 1970s/Early 1980s To admit the link between emotion and method gained a little more credence in the late 1970s, even though these admissions somewhat veered away from the psychological links being made in the early 1970s. By the late 1970s a number of discursive works appeared, such as Paul Rabinow’s (1977) Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco; Jeanne Frvert-Saada’s Les mots, la mot les sorts (1977); Jean Dumont’s (1978) The Headman and I, and Vincent Crapanzano’s (1980) Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. While still reflexive, and in some measure psychological, these works explored fieldwork as an “intersubjective practice” – in other words, here ethnographic knowledge was seen to surface out of interaction and dialogue between subjects. Reflections upon the emotional effects of intersubjectivity, however, were subsidiary to revealing and philosophising upon the contours of a dialogic approach. Describing emotions was thus secondary to challenging a model of objectivity that denied the value of dialogue and intersubjectivity. The impact of these works was doubtless served by the critical politicisation of objectivity burgeoning in the same period – a critique grounded in the existentialism of Nikolai Berdyaev and Jean Paul Sartre, and developed in the Frankfurt School by Habermas and Adorno. These thinkers rendered objectivity doubled-edged. While to the researcher it brought status and results, it could also oppress it subjects, supporting a growing dehumanisation and “rationalisation of man”. It achieved this by subordinating divergent knowledges, technologies, and perceptions to its all-consuming, totalising vision: the 12 mythopoetic, non-rational and inspirational elements of individual and social life were being increasingly demystified by rational inspection. The implications for anthropology of such scientific colonisation were traced by Dell Hymes and Eric Wolff et al in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Anthropology must cease objectifying its subjects, become political, and show its subjects how they may overcome the conditions of their own oppression. Anthropologists could do this by teaching their subjects to objectify the causes of their oppressed state for the purpose of understanding and removing them. This petition initiated much of the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s as well as the reflexive turn of the 1980s, where objectivity, as the Writing Culture school (1984) claimed, was at heart a textual construct. Revealing the duplicities of objectivity, if not wholly legitimating research into subjectivity, did generate more interest in it in the 1980s. For example, this decade was flanked by two works showing how emotion in the field is not mere gratuitous interference, but could constitute an entrée into knowing. Rentano Rosaldo (1980; 1984) argued that it could be used as a prism through which the perplexities of difference could be discerned. He reflected upon how his wife’s sudden death in the field sensitised him to the source of headhunting among the Illongot. He understood their “grief that could kill” only after suffering the deep woe of his own personal loss. Unlike detachment where one learns culture from afar, Rosaldo believed that through exploring this unsought-for and tragic affinity, he had winched-up culture to apprehend human unity underneath; just as a tapestry’s interconnections are only revealed if the embroidery is turned and seen from its underside. In a similar vein, and at the end of the decade, Tanya Luhrmann’s (1989) work on contemporary witchcraft illustrated how the interestedness of the anthropologist often meant learning from the inside (inter-esse means, after all, “to be in”). This afforded her 13 experiential recognition of a binding sentiment integral to the life of the community. In both accounts emotion was not believed to be antithetical to thought or reason, but was seen as a source of insight that could be later disengaged and communicated through anthropological reflection.6 Late 1980s/Late 1990s The assertion that some of most profound and intimate modes of apprehension could be generated through the emotional domain was complemented by a stream of work stemming from the 1980s. Authors such as Cesara (1982), Stoller (1987) Wengle (1988), Jackson (1989), Heald (1989), Obeysekere (1990) Wikan (1992) and later Hastrup (1995) and Crapanzano (1998) stressed the collaborative nature of fieldwork, a mutuality changing both parties. Wengle developed the psychological ideas of the 1970s showing that understanding was forged via processes of primary and secondary identification. Kirsten Hastrup, asserting that culture is learned through a process of “gradual familiarisation in practice,” and that this familiarisation has it subjective concomitants, expressly linked praxis and affectivity and thus implicated subjectivity. While Obeysekere in particular redefined the concept of detachment: “it is not a reversal to methodological objectivism,” but rather is, and to invoke T.S. Eliot, “a recollection in tranquillity” - it is “the capacity to stand outside the experience and to mould the experienced into pregiven stanzic forms” (Obeysekere 1990: 227-8). The collapsing of the subject/object, observer/observed distinctions these works implied was explicitly articulated in Michael Jackson’s Paths Towards a Clearing (1989). He contrasted traditional empiricism with radical empiricism which rather investigated the interplay of the dichotomous domains. Knowledge is born of this space between, teased from the fabric of its interactions and intersubjectivity. So far as objectivity debars entrance to this space it is 14 defensively used to protect ourselves against “the unsystematic, unstructured nature of our experiences within that reality” (Jackson 1989: 3).7 At this point it is important to note that this stimulating stream of thought which stemmed from the 1980s was by no means the main tributary of writings on field research. In fact, we might even say that such periodic and scattered research on field emotions constituted a number of smaller subaltern streams in anthropology, which, when flowing into the mainstream8 were overwhelmed by the far more dominant methodological tide whose source was in the 1970s. This dominant tide was largely advanced by sociologists who attempted to systemise fieldwork into a series of more positivistic research procedures and strategies. This trend gained pace in the 1990s and early 2000 by offering work, if discussing emotions at all, that only did so from a traditional standpoint – e.g. it offered advice upon how emotions could be “managed” and “tamed” in ways freeing fieldworkers to undertake more unclouded research. This dominant treatment of the emotional in field research is one unfortunate symptom of what we shall call “codification” – that is, the process by which participant observation has been increasingly formalised over recent decades into a series of neat research strategies and procedures more or less positivist in orientation. While it is sensible to recognise that such codification has had an important role to play, by being rooted in traditional empiricism it has been one of the essential factors animating resistance to the study of how emotion and intersubjectivity can be of empirical worth. Accounts by sociologists such as Jorgensen (1989), Shaffir and Stebbins (1991), Lee (1995), Quinn Patton (1997), Adler & Adler (2000) Lichterman (2002) and Klandermans & Staggenborg (2002), when considering emotion at all, largely did so with the intention of offering guidelines about how researchers could navigate and control difficult field experiences that were commonly reported. The same may be argued for work by De Vaus 15 (2001), Handwerker (2001), Spradley (1997), Hammersley and Atkinson (1995); and more recently, Marlene de Laine’s (2000), DeWalt & DeWalt’s (2002), Walsh’s (2004), and Bernard’s (2006) anthropological fieldwork volumes and texts – all very useful pieces in themselves, but not works opening new doors to the pertinence of affectivity and emotion.9 While codification evermore dominates official fieldwork manuals written not only for ethnologists, but for psychologists, cultural theorists, sociologists and educationalists, many anthropologists have remained privately if not always publicly committed to taking seriously the value of fieldwork’s intersubjective and experiential dimensions. Many of these anthropologists, as Spencer discusses in the conclusion, share affinity with feminist theorists who have fought to retrieve emotion and subjectivity from marginal spaces. The abandonment of emotion into zones of pathology, radical and racial otherness, into the feminine, the outlawed, the exotic, the mad or the bad, is part of a wider traditional empirical movement where the emotional, as Catherine Lutz has criticised, is “considered as an unfortunate block to rational thought” (Lutz 2001: 104).10 If emotion is linked with irrationality, and the irrational with a kind of distorted vision, then emotion is simply grit in the eye of rational inspection. The syllogism misleads (as all syllogistic fallacies do) when empirical work produces data which contradict the syllogism’s first premises. And such data now increases, if only on the margins. For instance, Hume and Mulcock’s (2004) recent volume shows with impressive clarity how ethnographic discomfort and awkwardness can be sources of insight and revelation; Antonius Robben (2007) has revealed the dangers of “ethnographic seduction” in his interactions with powerful generals - seduction which can disarm critical detachment; Goulet and Miller (2007) show how “extraordinary” field experiences (visions, dreams, illuminations) can be epistemologically informative; Linda Green’s (1999) work illustrates 16 how her own fear offered a way of understanding that of Mayan widows in Guatemala; and Michael Taussig’s (1992), metaphor of a “nervous system” accounts for how ethnographers connect emotionally, viscerally and intellectually with their fields. In addition, Ruth Behar (1996) and more recently, Gina Ulysse (2002), have offered experienced-based fieldwork narratives which attempt to give greater credence to the emotions and experiences informing understanding. While these works keep reflection on the emotional alive in a few corners of our expansive discipline, their numbers are not sufficient to stem the dominant tide which has seen systematic work into the researcher’s consciousness significantly and precipitously slow since the early 1990s. How far this trend reflects a growing need in mainstream anthropology to present the face of participant observation in terms attractive to the current funding market, is at present a moot point. But as the growing audit and regulatory culture increasingly privileges and monetarily rewards the kind of “trade-research” that C. W. Mills (1959) feared would ultimately dominate all social science,11 the imperative grows to continue the critical commentary on traditional empiricism’s tendency to underplay the scientific, personal, and political consequences of the affective dimensions of fieldwork.12 Any radicalisation of empiricism must take to task the traditional myth that methods purify subjectivity. It should rather ask how far methods mould subjectivity, not into patterns that efface all emotion (for this indeed is impossible), but into patterns that produce emotions of a different order, and also into attitudes often too prone to privilege only cognitive learning and cognitively driven procedures in social research. As an important aside, as different academic fields aspire to reveal dissimilar dimensions of reality by means of their distinct methods, it needs hardly reiterating that where one discipline falls unduly servile to the admired methods of another or else bends 17 itself to fit a popular epistemological trend, it may not only compromise its own internal methodological development, but also darken the critical and informative light its maturation could have shed on neighbouring research procedures. Because “reality” tends to unfold in response to the particular set of methods by which it is studied, our formal understandings of the “real” are always somewhat bound by the limits of the methods we employ. The danger of course is that those aspects of reality which sit beyond the reach of the specified method, by being seen as methodologically inaccessible, are somehow depreciated in their empirical existence. This is not only true regarding what is researched, but also regarding what aspects of the researcher are deemed methodologically useful. In this sense methods constrain both what can be discovered, and what spheres of subjectivity are deemed empirically useful to the act of discovery. One way to loosen this double closure is to bring within our investigative scope new dimensions of human and social reality by devising new modes of learning (cognitive and non-cognitive) by which they may be apprehended. XXXXXX The Individual Chapters In this spirit of opening rather than closing enquiry let me turn to the chapters of this current volume; chapters that seek to build upon the existing strengths and insights of scholars whose work on emotions and method has not always been appreciated in mainstream socio/cultural anthropology. Each individual contributor attempts from his or her unique standpoint to advance thinking on the use of emotion in varying domains of fieldwork. By necessity the resulting inventory is far from exhaustive, and avowedly more exploratory than didactic. The volume on composite presents differing solutions to the problems arising when the traditional cords constraining the use of emotion are cut. It 18 focuses on how certain disavowed and disassociated experiences can be shown to have heuristic, epistemological and practical currency; experiences which, from the standpoint of traditional empiricism, have been seen to rather impede than assist social research. Many readers will doubtless be able to think of experiences and theoretical points under-emphasised in the coming pages. They may point to our exclusion of a more sustained consideration of how field, subjectivity and emotion are defined;13 and may call attention to how we could have further elaborated on how different anthropological traditions (national, thematic) have variously responded to the problem of subjectivity. Some might have hoped for a larger inventory of the subjective experiences viewed as corrosive to the research project; and there may be questions as to how far encouraging the researcher’s introspection may introduce into anthropology some of the common dilemmas that have historically inundated academic psychology. That there are many excluded standpoints we accept, but not without hope that these absences will encourage others to devote their energies to explicating themes that the limits of this volume have forced us to omit, or at least, at times, to have passed over cursorily. This, then, is an admittedly limited intervention, but we are convinced a timely and necessary one so far as a radical empirical approach can reveal certain hidden potentialities of field research. Having now acknowledged certain missing elements, let me outline our positive contributions. Section One: Our first section comprises chapters by Michael Jackson, Vincent Crapanzano, James Davies and Francine Lorimer. Each paper applies varying psychoanalytic and psychological ideas to the understanding of the researcher’s subjectivity in the field. In this they show how psychological theory can inform anthropology in novel ways; not in the traditional sense of 19 aiding research into the origins and meanings of social and cultural phenomena, but in illuminating how certain field experiences may be rendered methodologically pertinent. Even those who argued that psychology had little to offer sociology or anthropology (e.g. Durkheim and the Année Sociologique, we recall, held that as society was more than the sum of its individual parts it could not be reduced to psychology) would be hard pressed to dismiss the relevance of psychology in aiding understanding into the researcher’s subjectivity – for researchers, after all, are psychological beings, and by Durkheim’s own admission ‘subject matter’ for psychology. Using psychology in this way nonetheless raises certain problems: how far can psychology assist our understanding when certain psychologies may presuppose “concepts of the person” which are to some extent situational? In this sense, if we do interpret our field experiences in terms of a favoured psychological perspective is there a danger that when in the field we will rather create ourselves in this perspective’s image than in the image of the person embodied by our hosts? This is one question among others addressed by Michael Jackson in his opening chapter. Jackson shows that by using psychology anthropologists need not necessarily do violence to local facts by reducing all field experience to these home-grown understandings. One can use both psychology and local epistemologies to unravel field experience (this use of the local, after all, has always been an important learning resource). Jackson shows this by building upon George Devereux’s idea that much anthropological knowledge is an outcome both of disinterested observation and of the observer's struggle to allay his anxieties and find his bearings in a new environment. Jackson focuses on what he calls fieldwork's 'liminal phase' – that psychological phase marking the period between separation from our familiar life-world and our more comfortable integration into the new 20 environment. The stresses of liminality, disabling and disorientating, are often unconsciously managed by researchers. One common way to manage the unstructured morass is to precipitously objectify and intellectually systematise the disorientating scene. While this strategy may help to “magically reorient ourselves to situations that seriously undermine our sense of self,” when used defensively it can impede those insights that often arise when we allow ourselves to experience, slowly and non-defensively, the struggle to adapt. Jackson shows how by turning to Kuranko oneiromancy to assuage liminal anxieties (rather than turning to objectification) he came to understand not only the importance of dreams and portents in Kuranko life, but also to apprehend one situated, cultural solution to the general human experience of not-quite-fitting-in. He thus ventures beyond Devereux by showing that insights won through personal attempts at adjustment can illumine not only aspects of oneself and the world to which one is adjusting, but also dimensions of human condition itself: “In this view, the hermeneutic circle encompasses three horizons: that of one's own world, that of the society one seeks to understand, and that of humanity” at large. Jackson’s emphasis on learning by both studying our internal reactions and using local epistemologies, is developed in a different direction by Vincent Crapanzano. Crapanzano starts by contesting those circumscribed and incomplete notions of participant observation that under-emphasise the importance of taking seriously our emotional responses. This reflective stance must not only consider how field emotions affect the data we collect, frame and interpret, but how emotions are often structured by, and arise from, the field encounters themselves. Thus there are times when we can understand our emotions “transactionally:” not as private phenomena but as “shared” or quasi-objects that hover “in the between of an encounter”. Here Crapanzano develops previous work on intersubjectivity by arguing that it is often framed by what he and recent psychoanalysts 21 have called “the Third” – namely, a ‘“meta-pragmatic” ordering principle, authorising the various pragmatic, ‘indexical’, communicative, and interpretive maneuvers defining the encounter”. The Third may be dominated by an overriding cultural concept, a symbol (a god, a totem) or by one of the subjects of the encounter. Whatever dominates the Third will influence what and how things are experienced by all parties to the encounter. Emotions do not necessarily only emerge out of “self,” or even out of self in interaction (intersubjectivity), but out of the structures surreptitiously structuring these intersubjective interactions. By recognizing this, emotion can direct our analytical attention to the discerning the nature of the very structures that structure these interactions. James Davies in chapter three accepts two principles developed by Jackson and Crapanzano: firstly, and following Jackson, that if methods are used to solely stabilise the self they can obstruct anthropological learning; and secondly, flowing Crapanzano, that participant observation as a method should oblige an interest in our states of being during research. Davies shows through the analysis of one so-called “anomalous” field experience that the disorientation it brought, the way in which the fieldworker managed his disorientation, and how this disorientation altered his perception of the field, all point to experiences more widely encountered in field research than is generally acknowledged. Dwelling on the strategies by which we often manage unfamiliar and uncomfortable states and experiences (such strategies may include Jackson’s “objectification”), Davies argues that what should concern us is not that anthropologists regularly perform such strategies in the field, and that these strategies are differently employed by individual ethnographers at different times, but that these “strategies of withdrawal” are often performed spontaneously; without either the full recognition of the fieldworker or else a full appreciation of their methodological implications. To the extent that this spontaneous and 22 unconscious use of protective fieldwork strategies remains oblique, masked and under- formulated, our ability to learn is significantly impaired, for these strategies often inhibit the immersion which is essential for anthropological understanding. Francine Lorimer in this section’s final chapter, rather than discussing certain obstacles to knowing (Jackson, Davies), takes forward Crapanzano’s call for emotional reflexivity by showing how the psychoanalytic concept of transference can be used to translate so-called uninformative emotions into revealing facts. One method of obtaining social insight she identifies as reflecting upon our “counter-transference” reactions i.e. our emotional responses to the researched. During her fieldwork in a psychiatric hospital in Denmark, Lorimer’s counter-transference to the patient, Caroline, helped her grasp how the relationships fostered between patients in the ward created insidious cycles of relatedness which, although promoting contact between patients, sustained certain self-destructive modes of relating that these very patients entered the clinic to overcome. Here the psychiatric space engendered clinical outcomes opposite to those it worked to attain. Lorimer thus questions whether the true value of antidepressants resides in changing our biochemistry in ways that blunt those habitual and destructive styles of relating that can sustain clinical depression. Lorimer shows through grounded examples how she reached these insights into sociality by identifying the visceral reactions patients evoked within her, and by reflecting upon how these related to patients’ emotional states. Section Two: While each paper in our first section is concerned with how psychological perspectives can inform anthropological methodology, and thus help us draw insights from the personal dilemmas and reactions arising our from struggles to adapt and understand, in section two 23 Ghassan Hage, Arthur Kleinman, Lindsay Smith and Elisabeth Hsu explore what emerges for fieldworkers when the sites they enter are themselves traumatised and politically fraught. Through investigating their emotional parity with different social worlds in varying states of crises they offer new understandings of how in emotionally loaded situations the political and the personal can affect each other in powerful and informative ways. These ways include blending both researcher and researched into a shared subjective space as well as implicating them in each other’s lives, in the production of ethnographic knowledge, and in the political struggle at hand. Sites in crisis are not always to be avoided as the heightened atmosphere can intensify affiliations and understandings, as well as awaken burrowed obligations to act. In the first chapter Ghassan Hage scrutinises the anti-Israeli hatred he felt during Israel’s bombing of Lebanon (2005), showing how these feelings represented “political emotions” he shared with his informants. By reflecting upon his shared emotion he refines Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community:” “If ‘Israel is seething’ and ‘Palestine is weeping’ and I am a person identifying with either of these two nations, I will feel that I am seething or weeping too. This makes the experience of national identification more than just an imagining…we can call it emotive imagining.” However, this sharing of emotions (participation) is disrupted by occasions of analytic distance (observation) as well as compulsions to politically act (practice). Thus participant observation in politically fraught contexts asks us to negotiate between not two but three modes of participating in reality: the emotional, the analytical and the political. The emotional ambivalence this negotiation generates Ghassan calls “ethnographic vacillation”: “It is not like the famous image of the swing, used by some anthropologists to… [symbolise the movement between two cultures] it is more like being a table-tennis ball on the beach being drawn in and out by the waves, 24 with the sandy beach representing the informants’ culture and the water the cultural world of the anthropologist.” Vacillation creates a third set of emotions born of this friction between the emotive, the analytic and the political – a friction, which, if not identified and understood, can confuse these three aspects of participatory research. Of the three domains Hage discusses Elisabeth Hsu’s paper focuses on the emotional, providing an example of some powerful responses fieldworkers can experience in the midst of any political crisis, and how these can be used to facilitate understanding. Reflecting upon her fieldwork experience in China during the military crackdown on Tiananmen in June 1989, she asks how the political oppression following the protests provoked in her almost complete amnesia. In contrast to the psychoanalytic literature that locates the origins of forgetting in the repression of anxiety provoking memories (Rycroft 1995, Ogden 2009, Singer 1995), she takes a less psychologistic position by asking was it the undeniable social repression experienced during the months after Tiananmen that lead her to banish from memory many key events: “had the silently existent pressure on the social body…affected the individual body?” If this remains difficult to answer what is clear is that her submersion into the body politic deepened her emotional affiliation with her informants. In retrospect she analyses how the emotional parity she shared with them during the upheaval made possible the extremely revealing one-hour interviews six months later. In Hage’s terms, the “emotional” thus assisted the “analytical.” The experience indicated “that what makes a fruitful personal encounter and mutual understanding possible across boundaries of class, culture, gender, age, and the like, is located in an entirely different sphere of human experience, which makes ‘fieldwork method’ [that ignores this] look hopelessly superficial. Applying methods that allow systematic and quantitative assessment can even be detrimental.” Hsu concludes that anthropologically 25 relevant knowledge is not out there to be discovered in a purely systematic way, even if it may feel so to the fieldworker, but is created in moments, in heartfelt mutual interaction, in the emotive and unstructured conditions of field to which we are all invariably subject. If Hsu’s paper focuses on how the emotional aspect of Hage’s tripartite distinction between the emotive, the analytic and the political poles, then Arthur Kleinman and Lindsay Smith’s final chapter focuses on the political pole, how it is provoked or inhibited. They imply that the “analytical,” by being overly concerned with proper method and analysis, can actually limit the emotional affiliation born of deep field engagement – an affiliation provoking moral impulses to act politically. For example, drawing upon their respective ethnographic research on China’s Cultural Revolution and Argentina’s children of the disappeared, they illustrate how engagement with others (“engagement” understood in Levinas’ terms as including a sense of ethical responsibility to the “Other”) emerges less from overt ethical or analytical decision-making than from fundamental emotional affiliations born from empathic and human involvement. Conceived in this way, the consequences of engagement (feelings of guilt and injustice in their examples) also include the production of moral impulses to act. By broadening our understanding of engagement to include and normalise feelings of spontaneous ethical obligation, they transcend conventional ideas of the participant observer whose aim has been primarily conceived as intellectual/analytic and academic, not political or pragmatic. Their work implies a novel response to questions as to why anthropologists are rarely political actors, as to why, in Ghassan’s formulation, the political pole is often ignored – the political is ignored by a narrow notion of engagement, which, by transfiguring moral emotions into distractions and artefacts, discourages, conceals and thus ultimately dissuades the impulses they provoke and the actions these impulses occasionally propel. 26 Section Three: While section one explored how psychological perspectives can inform field methodology, and section two dwelt on how political emotions arise in response to sites in crisis and create strong affiliations, identifications or compulsions to act, then in our final section Tanya Luhrmann, Kirsten Hastrup and Joanna Cook dwell specifically upon what Luhrmann calls “non-Cognitive modes of learning” – the bodily, emotional, or imaginal modes of learning which can provide entrées into knowing. Whether these modes evoke experiences that are sudden and flashing (Luhrmann; Hasturp) or more gradually emergent (Cook), they often illuminate the limits of cognitive learning by showing how sudden or “raw” emotive moments can be informative. In this sense these chapters directly challenge the mind/method link, which elides how methods both affect and are affected by wider human experience, practice and proclivity not to mention the social atmosphere and environment to which one is subject. This latter point is explored by Kirsten Hastrup in her exemplification of how intersubjectivity denotes more than an encounter taking place in the human domain. Emotions in fieldwork emerge through relations not only between subjects (the intersubjective), but also through relations that exist between researching subjects and the material environment of the field. She shows how the presence of landscape can affectively be as psychologically significant as can immersion in new systems of social and human life. The sudden “raw moment” she experienced while walking alone (and lost) in the icy expanses of her Icelandic field site, provided an intimate entrée into the importance of landscape in the Icelandic world-conception. Whether what materialised through the mist was a piece of landscape or a person remains totally ambiguous, but what was clear was 27 that her relation with materiality was significant. Hastrup develops work on both intersubjectivty and the anthropology of place by showing how the intersubjective is mediated by place – thus place itself contributes to the emotional marking of the field. In Crapanzano’s terms, “place” may constitute a “Third” – a structure structuring interaction. Here the total research site is rendered constitutive of experience and knowing, and thus warrants deeper epistemological elaboration in any discussion of field methods. From the standpoint of the next chapter by Tanya Luhrmann, we would class Hastrup’s “raw moment” as what Luhrmann calls a “non-cognitive” field experience. These are visceral, emotional, highly unpredictable. But so far as they illuminate the life-worlds of others, they expose the limits of purely cognitive modes of learning. During fieldwork learning other peoples’ “discourses” (i.e. their cognitive models and representations of their world), she argues is not enough. It was her own non-cognitive experience when researching witchcraft covens in London that revealed the limits of cognitive learning. One must also learn through practice: a deep participation which can potentially yield informative experiences. To these two modes of learning (explicated in her model of interpretative drift [Luhrmann 1989]) she here annexes a third essential mode – namely, proclivity. Through her study of religious adherents in the United States she argues that people do not experience the ideas of their culture in the same way: “They must have something else: a willingness, a capacity, perhaps interest in allowing those cultural ideas to change their lives.” Some do, some don’t; it is having the capacity which makes the difference. That personal proclivity affects the way individuals respond to cultural models and social practices she insists is as true for ethnographers as it is for those they study. This offers an important message for methodology: “If psychological and bodily proclivities make a difference to the way people use and understand cultural models, it is to the advantage of 28 the anthropologist to understand their own proclivities and the way those proclivities may shape the way they learn about culture in the field.” As the bodily, emotional and psychological characteristics may be essential qualities affecting how we engage with and represent culture, a consideration of their affects must take up a more central place in our methodological considerations. In the final chapter Joanna Cook, reflecting upon her research in a monastery in Northern Thailand, considers how doubt and anxiety in fieldwork can be potentially enabling aspects of research. She draws a comparison between the learning processes at the heart of participant observation and those involved in becoming a Thai Buddhist nun. She argues that in each a consideration of doubt as an aspect of the learning process enables the practitioner to learn from doubt rather than being inhibited by it. The doubts that she compares in the chapter are those of the researcher (regarding her competence) and those of the committed monastic (am I heading in the right direction). She demonstrates how such doubts informed her own experience and how a consideration of doubt as an inherent and welcome aspect of fieldwork may help anthropological researchers more generally. Thus, rather than seeing the researcher as detached from the fieldwork process (via strategies of systemisation and objectification), she suggests that the on-going subjective negotiation of the fieldworker in the field and the incomplete nature of many field experiences are themselves opportunities for learning; experiences which, if subjected to sustained reflection, may reveal dimensions of the studied community that would have otherwise remained concealed. Radical Empiricism 29 While mainstream anthropology now comprises many fieldwork memoirs and confessions in which emotion is clearly acknowledged and expressed, what it still lacks are analytical works which together build a more comprehensive epistemology in terms of which field emotions and their methodological pertinence may be more consistently and systematically researched. What anthropology therefore requires is an epistemology whose first principles can be clearly stated, whose rules of method can indicate how to study field emotions more consistently and systematically in the future, and into whose framework existing subaltern work on field emotions can be more effectively related and integrated. It is therefore my aim in the final section of this introduction to outline such an epistemological framework, and in consequence to help bring to mainstream anthropological awareness not only the viability and necessity of this realm of research, but also the guiding principles in terms of which it may be more effectively conducted in the future. As I emphasised at the outset of this introduction, the particular framework advanced in this volume we call ‘radical empiricism’ – a position first articulated by William James, and later significantly developed in the realm of anthropology by Michael Jackson (1989). Here we understand radical empiricism in two separate senses. Firstly, in the sense that the relations between things are just as much matters for empirical study as are things themselves. In our case this includes the relations between person and person(s) (intersubjectivity), between person and method (inter-methodology), and between person and materiality and environment (inter-materiality). In this volume we specifically concentrate on the emotions and experiences such relations evoke within fieldworkers, and how these emotions, when translated through reflection into anthropological insight, can be proven to have definite empirical worth. Our second understanding of radical empiricism is of a methodological standpoint which takes as critical those periods during fieldwork when 30 we are not applying a self-contained method (a “self-contained method” we define as one productive of formal interview, statistical, or inventory data). This is to say, the subjective postures self-contained methods oblige (e.g. “detached,” “professional,” “non-disclosing” postures), if ever completely realised at all, are only realised for the period of time during which the method is being used. In this sense the postures they coerce are temporary. Radical empirical enquiry thus begins at the point when our temporary adaptation to a self- contained method relaxes, when our personality or posture, so to speak, bends itself back to its habitual form. A radical empirical approach is therefore concerned with showing how the spaces between each separate adoption of a self-contained method contain happenings of critical and factual value. After all, these spaces absorb the majority of time spent in the field, and generate personal postures and experiences at least as critical as those shaped by self-contained methods alone. Radical empiricism, as a guiding framework, is therefore best conceptualised as a methodological position concerned with the spaces between – between things in relationship, on the one hand, and between each separate use of a self-contained method, on the other. Thus understood, radical empiricism need not necessarily stand in antagonistic relationship to the traditional empirical emphasis on using self-contained field methods. There is no need for an either/or – for both approaches may be used in any one season of research. As long as we are clear about how radical and traditional empirical approaches can affect each other in the domain of research (e.g. how codification may inhibit radical learning, and radical learning impede codification), these approaches may be understood as complementary (as Tanya Luhrmann’s chapter, which makes use of both approaches, aptly demonstrates). Such complementarity rests on the principle that each approach (the 31 traditional and the radical) attains facts, via its particular techniques and modes of learning, inaccessible to the other.14 If unlike traditional empiricism, radical empiricism creates a framework in which emotion can epistemologically count, let me close by finally clarifying the central assumptions that inform how we study these now permitted emotions. Three assumptions, developed by Jackson in his chapter, could be said to underpin this volume more broadly.15 The first is that “there are no emotions that are unique to anthropological fieldwork, and that therefore 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.” Identifying comparable experiences enables the use of existing psychological and anthropological theories of emotion to elucidate the methodological pertinence of the researcher’s experience (e.g. Lorimer uses “counter-transference;” Crapanzano the “analytical third;” Jackson ideas of “separation” and “liminality;” Davies analytic concepts of “mourning;” and Hsu ideas of the “social and individual body”). It also permits the development of new explanatory concepts (in this volume these include Luhrmann’s “proclivity” as influencing what can be known; Hastrup’s “raw experience” as a powerful type of non-cognitive learning; Davies’ “dissonance” which creates cycles of disorientation and withdrawal; and Hage’s “vacillation” as capturing the movement of participant observation). Finally, to assume that there are no emotions which are unique to fieldwork challenges the old functionalist idea that fieldwork transpires in a distant realm of the “other” or the exotic, or, psychologically speaking, of “exotic experience.” This othering of fieldsites has in the past made the geographical distance one travels to the field the measure of its validity as a site of research. The further we journey the more anthropological the study, or so the claim is made. But as soon as the concepts of “home” and “field” are understood in psychological rather than geographical 32 terms, then “home” and “field” become wherever one experiences them to be, irrespective of their actual physical location. There is no reason why we should feel more affinity with a group situated 20 miles away than with one situated at 2000; or why a geographically remote tribe should feel less homely than a professional tribe located across the street. This is to say, if physical distance rather than human experience is privileged as defining what constitutes “the field,” then whole ethnographic domains are depreciated in their legitimacy as valid sites for field research. Understood from this standpoint the “anthropology of home” is simply an outworn and unnecessary category. This is because by understanding “home” in terms of what is physically rather than psychologically proximate, it mistakenly privileges the dynamics of distance over the more meaningful dynamics of experience. Our second assumption is that “emotions are but one aspect of any human experience, and 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.” To adopt a self-contained method (one restricting how you should be when conducting research), is to assume a pre-defined and tightly controlled human posture towards the studied phenomenon. Methods delimit how and what aspects of subjectivity are said to generate the “purest” forms of knowledge. In this sense they try to shape and bend our subjectivity into a specific kind of research tool. These mouldings of self into instruments of data production not only privilege certain kinds of knowledge (essentially those which these tools can reveal), but also privilege what aspects of subjectivity and what kinds of experience epistemologically count. By implication they pronounce jury-like upon what aspects do not. But where methods artificially cut from research the so-called epistemologically corrosive subjective states, they over-simplify and warp the complex nature of how we as researchers learn. Experiences such as doubt (Cook), lust (Crapanzano), 33 hate (Hage), mourning (Davies), raw experience (Hastrup), illumination (Luhrmann), loss (Jackson), compassion (Kleinman & Smith), and forgetting (Hsu), for example, can all provide entrees into knowing should only we know how to translate them. Where traditional empirical partitions divide and view these experiences only negatively (i.e. as corrosive), they devalue those potential modes of learning which transcend the purely cognitive. Thirdly, we reject 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.” Emotions also arise out of experiences generated between things in relationship (Hastrup; Jackson; Crapanzano) – new combinations can create new experiences which go beyond old patterns of experience established by socialisation and set by culture (Davies; Hage; Luhrmann). Cultural or phylogenic reductionism thus does violence to lived experience through bypassing immediate human relations and the experience (often new and surprising) arising there from. Conclusion In the end, the structure of radical empiricism framing this volume, and our assumptions about field emotions which this structure permits, provides a complement to traditional empiricism’s tendency to normalise the reduction of fieldwork to a series of neat research strategies (captured in proscriptive and positivistic “research guidelines”); strategies underpinned by a philosophy sceptical as to emotion’s heuristic value. Understanding fieldwork from only the traditional standpoint, marginalises, expels or simply ignores the wider domains of experience, action and interaction which fall outside its methodological competence. Thus any position arguing for the relevance of these disowned phenomena is a 34 position which, in an era of growing codification, not only provides a corrective to the unchecked expansion of codified research, but re-emphasises those alternative modes of learning which have always rendered participant observation a singularly unique and powerful method in the sphere of human and social research. Having offered these comments it only remains to say that if radical empiricism is to balance its traditional counterpart by better articulating the mechanisms by which it may deepen our understanding of other life-worlds, then its object of enquiry, the human reaction, must be brought more fully within the scope of our methodological concerns. It is with this final thought that the following authors apply fresh modes of reflexivity to their own and to others’ reactions and emotions evoked in the field. 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Robben, A. and Sluka, J. 2006. Ethnographic Fieldwork: an Anthropological Reader. London: Blackwell. Rosaldo, R. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Illongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rycroft, C. 1995. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin Press. Taussig, M. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge. Spradley, J. P. 1997. Participant Observation. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Ulysse, G..2002. “Conquering Duppies in Kingston: Miss Tiny and Me, Fieldwork Conflicts, and Being Loved and Rescued.” Anthropology and Humanism 27, (1):10-26. Walsh, D. 2004. “Doing Ethnography.” in: C. Seale, (ed.) Researching Society and Culture. London: Sage. Notes 39 1 Traditional empiricism I define, following William James, as firstly that methodological approach which is more concerned with studying ‘things themselves’ than the relations between things. Secondly, and consequently, as an approach that treats subjectivity in both quantitative and qualitative research as something to be controlled and restrained. The investigator’s emotions and experiences etc., from this standpoint are viewed as corrosive elements in research, not as elements integral to the research process; elements whose study can be empirically informative. 2 For example, Casagrande wrote in his introduction: “Field research is a challenging scientific undertaking, an adventure of both mind and spirit. It is also a memorable human experience, yet most anthropological writings tend to obscure the fact” (Casagrande 1960: xii). 3 Freilich went on to explain this partition in terms of “a fieldwork culture that underemphasises methodology and supports private rather than public communications of field experiences, and second, the ‘rewards’ field workers receive for keeping their errors and their personalities hidden and for maintaining a romantic attachment to the fieldwork mystique” (1970: 36). 4 With these we could include George Spindler’s edited volume Being an Anthropologist (1970). This contains personal accounts of what anthropologists do in and around the field. 5 Meyer Fortes (1963: 433) epitomised this position when he remarked that psychological adjustment in the field is largely a “peripheral” issue, while at the same time being notorious for criticising academic faculty psychology. 6 John Macquarrie makes this point in his Existentialism (1972: 155). 7 To be correct, Jackson uses this phrase to account for our use of conceptual models to order reality into ideas manageable for us. But he also thinks in these terms about our use of methods too: “…given the arduous conditions of fieldwork, the ambiguity of conversations in a foreign tongue, differences of temperament, age, and gender between ourselves and our informants, and the changing theoretical models we are heir to, it is likely that “objectivity” servers more as a 40 magical token, bolstering our sense of self in disorientating situations, than as a scientific method for describing those situations as they really are” (Jackson 1989: 3). 8 These streams stem from various sources – one issues from classic psychological anthropology such as Devereux’s From Anxiety to Method and now includes more recent psycho-cultural studies (particularly studies that use phenomenological approaches, ie. Csordas and Dejarlais); a second might be said to flow from anthropological work closely aligned with postcolonial and subaltern studies Green’s (1999), Dominquez’s (2000), and a third from feminist anthropology (Luz 2001), Ulysse (2002). 9 These have been joined by recent and highly admirable compilations of classic papers on fieldwork – we think here of Bryman’s (2001) and Robben and Sluka’s (2006) edited volumes which are highly readable collections although they only contain one or two papers considering emotions in field. 10 There is a long history of viewing women and non-Caucasian Euro-Americans as irrational, unable to control emotions, and thus, more susceptible to hysteria, depression, culture-bound syndromes (such as anorexia, latah, windingo, koro, amok), and violence. This history of emotion and pathology may be part of the reason that female and non-Caucasian researchers have championed emotional reflexivity and the usefulness of emotional understanding in everyday life situations (as opposed to the 'pathological', later spun into the 'extraordinary'). 11 To provide but one example – the ERSC has now refused to fund anthropology doctoral candidates in Britain unless they can first demonstrate competence in using qualitative and some quantitative methods. Departments like ISCA at Oxford, for example, while having largely defined how anthropology is taught there for the past 100 years, are increasingly subject to an external research culture to whose values it must be seen to at least partly correspond. 12 For whatever prevailing zeitgeist we are “subject to” in the academy will affect how we proceed in the field. As what aspects of “self” or subjectivity are deemed relevant to knowledge 41 construction is largely determined by the empirical values we internalise in the academic space. Following Adorno, the “subject to” and the “subjective” are always indivisible, always mutually entailed. And thus enfolded in subjectivity reside the multifarious and manifold coercions of culture guiding individual and professional activity in ways consistent with these internalised demands. 13 Of course we have not entirely ignored these considerations. In short, we can say this volume broadly defines subjectivity as both an empirical reality and a conceptual category. In this we follow the definition of subjectivity offered by Biehl, Good and Klieinman in their recently edited volume Subjectivity (2008). Here they view subjectivity as “...patterned and felt in historically contingent settings and mediated by institutional processes and cultural forms” (p5). In this sense subjectivity is not only understood as a synonym for inner-life processes and affective states – but also for states or “inner-life processes” that by being “refracted through potent political, technological, psychological and linguistic registers...capture the violence and dynamism of everyday life” (p.5). With respect to the category of “field” we define it less in spatial and geographical terms than in psychological (see page..... for elaboration). When we understand concepts of “home” and “field” in psychological rather than geographical terms, then “home” and “field” become wherever one experiences them to be, irrespective of their location. In this sense all geographic deliniations of the field are simply arbitrary constructs – lines drawn which may have little bearing on internal subjective states. Finally, while the category of emotion shall be treated in greater depth within the conclusion, for now we may say that emotion here refers to those affective phenomena which can be differently expressed, repressed, managed, and conceptualised in different socio/cultural settings. 14 Thus while in a practical sense these two positions are complementary, this is not to say that their underlying epistemologies are consistent. As we have seen radical and traditional 42 empiricism both undermine the conceits and excessive claims of each other. But they may also do this without totally effacing the other’s value and importance. The balance is found in the spirit of compromise, where each recognises that the other’s ability to discern facts debarred to the other and where each is able to attain a kind of relativistic position with respect to its own epistemological status. 15 The first assumption does not apply to Ghassan Hage’s chapter. He argues that ethnographic vacillation creates a “friction” particular to fieldwork; a friction which generates its own unique experiences. 43