Abstract
Coping with “failure” before, during, and after doing fieldwork brings forth some of the silenced and less jubilant moments in research. Experiences and feelings of failure may come in varied disguises. They may relate to the methods used, the relationships established, the ethical challenges faced, or the way the physicality of doing research is dealt with, to mention just a few. But as every crisis can also become a turning point and imply the potential of new beginnings, instances of emotional struggle can be overcome and turned into rewarding anthropological insights.
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- 1.
We deliberately do not use the term “conduct” here because, as Judith Okely aptly notes, “it implies that fieldwork is managed and pre-directed” (Okely 2012, p. 5), and thus implicitly precludes the idea of methodological, personal, and cognitive openness, spontaneity, and flexibility or, put more abstractly, a general susceptibility to the unexpected that is central to the anthropological enterprise.
- 2.
Given the above-mentioned inevitability of failure in anthropological fieldwork, the articles collected in this section are not the only ones to depict moments of (experienced) failure (see chapter “Conflicted Emotions: Learning About Uchawi”, this volume). However, it is in this section where we explicitly invite the readers to look at fieldwork experience from the viewpoint of the productivity of failure in fieldwork.
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Mattes, D., Dinkelaker, S. (2019). Failing and Attuning in the Field: Introduction. 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_20
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