Abstract
Even though it is increasingly common for ethnographic researchers to reflect on their own emotional and relational positions in the field, the assumed “normality” of a researcher’s life is still that of a person traveling alone. This assumption is often at odds with everyday experience of and expectations toward many people in their mid-1930s who pursue a professional career and, at the same time, have a family. Based on fieldwork in the rural Philippines, the article reflects on how different notions of “normality,” be they maintained by the community or the researcher, affect emotions in research, research settings, and results. Two research situations are analyzed: That of a mother who brought her family to the field and that of an individual researcher with a second, nonvisible identity as a mother. The latter goes along with a deeper level of emotional involvement in the field. This promotes a raised awareness in observation but a tendency to overestimate the importance of one’s own social relations to (socially embedded) research subjects. Running a family while doing participatory observation does not allow for grand emotions concerning field-relations. While limiting possibilities for research outside, it creates new opportunities for participatory observation of everyday domestic work and its emotional dimension, which easily can be overlooked by individual researchers. In both situations, everyday challenges of research such as reciprocity or questions of practical life and their corresponding emotions influence the outcome of fieldwork in a different manner.
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Notes
- 1.
“Family” here refers to my partner and our three children.
- 2.
I assume that this notion is held by at least the general public in my country, by academia, and by many local communities in the Philippines that have experiences with researchers.
- 3.
She also points out that “these family members may or may not share the anthropologist’s affinity or enthusiasm for ‘basic strangeness’” and that children’s involvement may rarely be voluntary (Scheper-Hughes, 1987, p. 218).
- 4.
To complete the picture, it should be stated that, regarding research content, female lifeworlds prior to the women’s movement of the 1970s were rarely studied. The same is true for children who were not perceived as independent actors up to the 1980s.
- 5.
This was done in cooperation with the research project “The Researcher’s Affects,” based at the Free University of Berlin. In the diary the project provided were questions about the days feelings and desires and a check box questionnaire with different emotion words (see Appendix). To answer this, I used my everyday concept of emotions as feelings that I was able to identify in the moment of writing. My own agency in these feelings, the involvement of my body in these feelings, my consciousness of my feelings in these situations, and other criteria that do specify emotions, differed in their degree.
- 6.
These names have been slightly modified. Chris gave his consent on publishing, the children I did not consult.
- 7.
Neighbors in Hamburg, friends, and mothers from my children’s kindergarten and school.
- 8.
The style how I differentiate myself here from homogenized “other mothers” is symptomatic of my emotions at that time. In fact, of course I have the same conflict (such as many working parents) to an individual degree.
- 9.
If I had time, I bought food at the market and handed it over to a young mother who usually cooked for the office staff with whom I took my meals. If not, I simply gave money.
- 10.
I borrow the term “social fiction” from Scheper-Hughes. She describes it as an “‘as if’ phenomenon” in which both sides, anthropologist and local people behave ‘as if’ the anthropologist were a normal part of local life, while knowing better” (1987, p. 219, citing Pelto and Pelto 1973). Acting “as if” there were no family at home for me was an additional “social fiction.”
- 11.
The transparency of your own life, as Cassell points out, gives way to a more dialogic research relation because people can study how you deal with family issues (1987a, p. 258–250). This is true for my case also, but of course there remains a power relation.
- 12.
Rural areas from which people in metropolitan Manila had migrated.
- 13.
This refers to a rough combination: number of emotions, frequency of being emotionally affected, intensity of emotions, instability of emotions, willingness to surrender to emotions, the capacity to allow for emotions.
- 14.
I was conscious about missing my family especially when I prepared their stay and after they had left. But even when I was not so conscious about missing them, I think it still played a role.
- 15.
Due to space limitations, I will focus on the role of the children. Surely, Chris also influenced how I felt in the field. His motivation for joining was low, that’s why he was moody most of the time. I felt obliged to compensate for that, meaning that I felt I had to ensure a positive atmosphere in the family, fix most logistics, and care for our relations to the neighbors. This situation was stressful to me and led to some tension between us.
- 16.
Upon my arrival in the field, similar to Cassell, the obligation to care for somebody other than myself provided me with security (1987b, p. 8).
- 17.
Dreher also describes this feeling of being occupied by childcare, even when you are rarely involved in the practical aspects of it (1987, p. 168–169).
- 18.
The writers in Cassell’s volume who tutored their own children did not mention that it was stressful, while for me, it was.
- 19.
- 20.
Bringing my own child made this objectification of children more visible to me. Fernandez even gained insights through an offensive situation experienced by her child (1987, pp. 200–203).
- 21.
The whole issue of reciprocity is affected by family constellations. With a family of five, I felt even more helpless in expressing my gratitude when people were trying to make life more comfortable for us than I did when I was on my own. On the other hand, people might actually have enjoyed being with us even more.
- 22.
- 23.
With “level of contact” I refer not only to the aspect of communication, but also to the presence my family somehow had in my life when I was preparing for their stay.
- 24.
It is important to mention that I do not see myself in the same cultural position as American anthropologists during research in the 1960s–1980s. Especially their conception of childhood and methods of child-rearing were in many cases different from mine. But overall, there are many similarities in how fieldwork with children is perceived, and thus I could easily connect to what they wrote.
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Acknowledgements
I thank all the people who worked with me during “my” fieldwork, my family for allowing me to publish parts of our relationship, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Leuphana University of Lueneburg for their financial support. I also thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback and for encouraging me to write an emotion diary.
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Dannenberg, J. (2019). “Normality” Revisited: Fieldwork and Family. In: Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., Thajib, F. (eds) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_15
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