Abstract
In this chapter, I consider how ethnographic expertise always involves awareness of the impact of position. This leads to an emphasis on the body and physical positions of the ethnographer learning in a topologically fluid space. The chapter argues that the ethnographer, in meeting the empirical field, engages with already formed structural identities and social roles, which, once learned, are valuable resources for cultural analysis. The varied positions are not just entry points, but form material spaces as we move materials and ourselves from one place to another. These movements form the ethnographer’s spatial stories. The ethnographer learns cultural models of expectations tied to body signs and embodied practices of the corps vecu as well as the cultural body. However, the craft of the anthropologist demands that the ethnographer remains the radical other.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter I sometimes refer ethnographers as researchers. The term ethnographer is used when I refer to the specific method of participant observation (ethnographers as participant researchers writing ethnographies based on participant observation), whereas I use the term researcher to refer to anyone researching an empirical field (which can also be researched through interviews, surveys and consultancy work). Of course many ethnographers use many different approaches when doing fieldwork, but here I wish to underline the importance of position in the empirical field no matter whether we talk about an ethnographer or a researcher. In the analytical field, ethnographers may come from anthropology or other disciplines making use of ethnographic approaches. When I refer to the practitioners in the empirical field, I call them practitioners when they are engaged in practices and participants when they join social and sometimes collective groups. When they are subjected to the ethnographer’s attempts to learn, I name them ethnographic subjects.
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Hasse, C. (2015). Position Matters!. In: An Anthropology of Learning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9606-4_4
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