Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation

INTRODUCTION: Awkward Spaces, Productive Places

Ethnographic research involves the use of a variety of techniques for collecting data on human beliefs, values, and practices. The ethnographer’s core methodology, participant observation, requires that researchers simultaneously observe and participate (as much as possible) in the social action they are attempting to document. The rationale for this approach is that; by being there and actively taking part in the interactions at hand, the researcher can come closer to experiencing and understanding the insider’s point of view.¹ At the same time, the practice of ethnography also assumes the importance of maintaining enough intellectual distance to ensure that researchers are able to undertake a critical analysis of the events in which they are participating. This means that they should be willing, and able, to take a step back from the relationships they form with the people they encounter in the field for long enough to identify and reflect upon some of the taken-for-granted rules and expectations of the social world they are studying. The ethnographer must be able to see with the eyes of an outsider as well as the eyes of an insider, although both views are, of course, only ever partial. Good participant observation thus requires a self-conscious balance between intimacy with, and distance from, the individuals we are seeking to better understand. By definition, participant observers deliberately place themselves in a series of very awkward social spaces, some of which are more difficult to inhabit than others.

The uncomfortable and contradictory nature of these fieldwork relationships has long been acknowledged in anthropological and sociological literature (e.g., Powdermaker 1966; Malinowksi 1967; Golde 1986 [1970]; Hammersley & Atkinson 1995 [1983]) through a discourse of reflexivity that has become increasingly mainstream over the last three decades. This collection of sixteen original papers, by anthropologists and one religious studies scholar (Harvey), differs from similar publications in that it highlights the potential productivity of such ethnographic discomfort and awkwardness. The contributors describe a range of fieldwork experiences that left them feeling, at different stages in their academic careers, as though they had at least partially failed to achieve their goals as professional researchers. Each author also shows how careful reflection on these same experiences eventually allowed them to gain important insights into the nature of the social settings they were documenting. Together their work contributes to the important ongoing project of developing a candid and intellectually rigorous ethnography of participant observation.

This volume is intended to help normalize the occasional (or frequent) feelings of personal inadequacy and social failure that are, perhaps, an inevitable part of successful participant observation; deliberately attempting to simultaneously position oneself as both insider and outsider is, after all, socially disruptive. By resisting total integration and commitment to the social domains we are researching, by attempting to maintain our intellectual distance while also indicating our desire to belong, we choose a socially anomalous identity that is fraught with inconsistency and ambiguity, both for ourselves and for our research participants. The personal and emotional costs of inhabiting such a space are often high. They also tend to be undertheorized. The papers included here combine to reveal some of the reasons why participant observation remains a powerful and seductive research tool, and why many of us continue to be committed to it, despite its deeply personal challenges and its often unexpected costs. Participant observation is primarily an advanced exercise in forming and maintaining intimate relationships for professional purposes. And therein lie its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses—as the stories that fill these pages so clearly show.

Our own awkward fieldwork experiences provided the initial impetus for this book. We describe them briefly here in order to illustrate the sort of research processes that we want to unravel in the hope that our readers may be better able to bypass some of the methodological anxieties and self-doubts that shape so many fieldwork encounters.

Lynne

In the mid-1980s I did thirteen months of fieldwork at Yarrabah, an Aboriginal community in northeast Queensland, Australia. My year there was the most difficult of my life. Believing that I had proven myself as an anthropologist during earlier research in a small, remote village on the Melanesian island of Vanuatu (see Hume 1985), I thought I was ready for any fieldwork situation. I soon realized, however, that different situations require different personal resources in order to assist the researcher in overcoming feelings of frustration and even despair. I suffered extreme angst throughout this research, but having spent so much time and effort in the preparatory stages, I felt obliged to complete the fieldwork.

In Yarrabah I learned how very difficult ethnographic research can be. My study focused on Aboriginal Christianity and the influence of the Anglican missionaries who established the Yarrabah mission station in the late nineteenth century (see Hume 1988). Missionary influence had eliminated almost all traces of Aboriginal languages at Yarrabah. Apart from a smattering of lingo,² Aboriginal English was the mode of communication. While this made my work easier because I did not have to learn a new language, there were many other factors that made it more difficult, including Aboriginal distrust of whites based on decades of racism, and different ways of communicating³ and of managing time.⁴ I was—as the Yarrabah community saw it—yet another white researcher coming to probe into their lives, to ask questions, and then to leave. I was an unnecessary presence, and I felt this acutely. Additionally, there were many different factions within the community, which meant that becoming friendly with members of one faction made it difficult to approach another. Community problems with violence and alcohol also added to my discomfort and unease.

Direct experience of these factors did, however, give me deep insight into life at Yarrabah. I learned, for example, how difficult it is for people with strong kinship ties to police situations of conflict that involve their own close kin.⁵ I also learned that it was far easier to get to know people in the community if I visited with an Aboriginal person from outside. My key informant was Tom, an old man who had been taken to the mission by white police from north Queensland when he was a young child⁶ and who had since been living away from Yarrabah for many years. I would sit down and talk with him and other elders about the past and, slowly, people began to accept that I was documenting life in mission times. When this became my established role, I felt more comfortable, although nearly all attempts at communication on this topic relied on my initiative.

I never experienced the same rapport with Yarrabah people as I had with the people of Vanuatu. I felt like an interloper—and the more I learned about the history of the place, and the way some of the old people had been treated in Queensland in the past (see Kidd 1997), the more I began to feel that my own mission was a somewhat selfish one that would probably do little to enhance the current situation in the community. Entrenched racist beliefs held by a few people in the nearby towns began to depress me. The history of distrust on both sides exacerbated my feelings of inadequacy, and I continually questioned my own reasons for being there. I survived this fieldwork period by escaping to Cairns (a 45minute drive away) to visit friends and frequent the Saturday cafés with their cappuccinos, newspapers, and markets.⁷

Once I had left the field, I looked back on my time there as a lesson: that some researchers are better suited to some types of research situations than to others (see also Prattis 1997:63) but that even in the most distressing situations one can still gain insights and valuable data. Through my embodied experience of attempting to participate and observe, I gained a better understanding of the difficulties of Aboriginal community life, of local white and black attitudes toward each other, and of how political decisions and well-meaning intentions can formulate and structure communities and lives well into future generations. Nonetheless, my own emotions, and those of my informants, influenced my sense of self and of the worthiness of my project. I could understand entirely why the people of Yarrabah did not welcome me with open arms, but this did not make my work easier, or negate the feelings of self-pity that at times overwhelmed me. I decided that my next project would be in a community of people with whom I could have more rapport and ease of movement.⁸

Jane

For almost three years after completing my first attempt at ethnographic fieldwork I avoided looking at my field notes or interviews. The thought of reliving many of the experiences and apparent failures of that time was simply too hard to face. Although there were a few select moments and conversations that I truly enjoyed, the two years (1996–1998) I spent doing fieldwork on the use of indigenous imagery in the Australian alternative health and spirituality (alias New Age) movement were predominantly marked by feelings of discomfort, uncertainty, awkwardness, disappointment, and sometimes even anger (see Mulcock 2001, 2002). Several expectations arising from my anthropological training, especially in relation to the concepts of relativism and rapport, contributed significantly to the feelings of failure and inadequacy that I experienced during this time.

Although I did my research at home in the city where I had grown up (Perth, Western Australia), the alternative health and spirituality scene was almost completely unfamiliar to me. In the early stages of my fieldwork I felt a degree of disorientation, or culture shock. In contrast to Ida Fadzillah’s (chapter 3) surprise at finding similarity where she expected difference, I was constantly amazed and confronted by the degree of difference I encountered. I had (naively) expected that similar cultural and educational backgrounds would ensure that my research participants and I would share the same basic understandings of the world. The ground seemed to tilt beneath me as I tried to loosen my grip on lifelong, taken-for-granted assumptions about physical and metaphysical realities in order to respectfully consider a range of New Age cosmologies / theologies. This sense of vertigo was intensified by the fact that I was doing research in my home town; I was moving between the strange and the familiar on a daily basis. Unlike those ethnographers who say farewell to their own cultural settings to temporarily immerse themselves in other ways of being, I was trying to maintain my balance across two, not always distinct but frequently competing cultural domains.

The stigma associated with the New Age in academic and everyday discourses⁹ meant that I had to struggle hard to find and maintain an appropriately relativist position from which to approach my fieldwork. This struggle was further complicated by my focus on discourses of cultural appropriation and my anthropological tendencies to favor the subaltern (Marcus 1995:101). I initially sympathized so strongly with indigenous critiques of appropriation that I was unable to appreciate the agendas of the non-Indigenous, New Age appropriators who were at the center of my study.¹⁰

Fernandez (1990) writes about the confusion that often occurs between the concepts of cultural relativism and moral relativism. He argues that as ethnographers we should be able to suspend any disbelief we might feel when listening to our informants’ narratives, at least long enough to gain an empathic understanding of their position. This kind of relativism is not the same as taking a moral position on the content of those cultural narratives. Learning to temporarily suspend my disbelief in New Age philosophies in order to listen respectfully helped me to overcome feelings of guilt and personal compromise associated with applying my critical researcher’s gaze to the beliefs and practices of individuals who were generous enough to contribute to my study and who often displayed their own vulnerability and disempowerment.

A conversation with one of my supervisors, Greg Accaioili, provided important insights into the awkwardness of straddling multiple, conflicting perspectives—my own, those of my research participants, and those of the scholars and Indigenous activists who took anti-appropriationist stances.¹¹ Accaioili talked about the uncomfortable business of inhabiting interstitial social spaces, a fate he suggested was common to many anthropologists who became caught between field and home, belonging to both and neither. His reflections contained the possibility that, as ethnographers and individuals, we are perhaps destined to live in-between, a condition exacerbated by our primary research methodology, which requires us to simultaneously participate in and observe social action, to seek intimacy while maintaining distance.¹² These ideas eventually reconciled me to the awkwardness I felt throughout my fieldwork. They also helped me to recognize the intellectual productiveness of such awkwardness, the diagnostic value of analyzing discomfort.

Expectations associated with the notion of rapport—its central importance to ethnographic endeavors and the forms that it should take—were foundational to the feelings of disappointment and failure that accompanied me throughout my New Age research. The rapport that developed between myself and my research participants was functional enough, but intrinsically, perhaps unavoidably, limited for a combination of reasons including: age differences (I was almost always a lot younger than the people I was working with); personal agendas (I was seeking academic, not spiritual knowledge and my sympathies lay with the so-called subaltern); the multi-sited nature and internal structure of my fieldsite (see Mulcock 2001; Muir, chapter 14), including the busy lifestyles of the people I was working with; and the conflicting demands of participant observation (I repeatedly felt caught between two counteractive forces, one of which pulled my focus inward—the intention of the workshops themselves—and the other of which pushed my attention outward—for the purposes of gathering information, making observations, remembering descriptive details). In most instances the intimacy I achieved was limited to single interviews and fleeting connections at New Age events. This was not what I expected, or hoped for, from my fieldwork, primarily because it did not reflect my understanding of what makes a successful ethnography. I was eventually able to recognize, however, that my failure to develop ongoing friendships or collaborations¹³ with my research participants was symptomatic of the values and forms of interaction that characterized the field itself.

My first experience of ethnographic fieldwork thus pushed me to think much more critically about the purposes and challenges of doing participant observation and the kind of knowledge that it produced. At the end of 1999 I wrote a paper for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association entitled When Fieldwork Isn’t Fun: Personality and Positionality in Ethnographic Research; or, Ethnography in Awkward Spaces.¹⁴ This was the beginning of an intellectual and emotional process that eventually allowed me to complete the ethnographic cycle (Spradley 1980).

The Ethnography of Participant Observation

This collection of papers reflects a growing recognition among ethnographers of the value of reflexive research practice.¹⁵ All of our contributors bring their own experiences and insights to the ongoing project of uncovering, revealing, and exposing the complexity and value of participant observation as an extremely challenging (despite its deceptively simple title) but potentially rewarding methodology for social research. By openly deconstructing, analyzing, and interrogating our fieldwork experiences we are helping to enhance public understanding of our methodology. By drawing attention to the particular skills it demands of us and the personal tests that it subjects us to, we are able to advertise its intricacies and its rigor.

Other recent collections have undertaken similar tasks. Some have focused on particularly difficult aspects of fieldwork such as violence (e.g., Nordstrom & Robben 1995), sexual encounters (e.g., Kulick & Willson 1995), and experiences of alternative realities (e.g., Young & Goulet 1994) or on the challenges of implementing specific approaches to fieldwork (e.g., Wolf 1996). Others have simply sought to provide personal, or realistic, accounts of doing fieldwork (e.g., Hobbs & May 1993; Lareau & Schultz 1996; Grills 1998a; Watson 1999; Amit 2000a) or to demystify the process through which fieldwork becomes academic knowledge (e.g., Okely & Callaway 1992; Hastrup & Hervik 1994; Emoff & Henderson 2002). We add our voices to these, acknowledging the difficult, often emotionally dirty work of participant observation, but simultaneously emphasizing the outcomes that have made it worthwhile for us.

Participant observation requires researchers to use their social selves as their primary research tool (e.g., Powdermaker 1966:19; Stacey 1988:22; Kaplan Daniels 1983; Krieger 1985; Ganguly-Scrase 1993). For many ethnographers, drawing boundaries between the private and preexisting selves that they bring with them to the field and the researcher selves that they must develop once they arrive is constantly confronting.¹⁶ Ongoing internal conflict, between the desire to act upon deeply ingrained personal values and the need to maintain a professional and relativist position as a researcher, tends to characterize the participant observation experience—as many fieldworkers observe, the intellectual habits and philosophical shifts that often come of engaging a methodology that makes demands of this kind can be seriously life-changing. Such personal conflict differs radically in extent and intensity according to the nature of the research site and the research participants, the particular research topic, and the strengths and limitations of the individual ethnographer. We argue that sensitivity to, and serious reflection on, these internal conflicts can lead to powerful and unexpected insights, not only into the social worlds being studied, but also into the nature of the participant observation methodology itself, and from there into the epistemology of ethnographic knowledge. Within this framework, very good ethnography often emerges from very difficult fieldwork experiences.

Relating to the Field: Engaging the Self/Other

Building relationships with potential research participants, whether or not these reflect traditional anthropological notions of rapport, is one of the central requirements of participant observation (e.g., Stacey 1988; Okely 1992; Grills 1998b; Turner 2000). If we want to gather fine-grained information about the beliefs, values, and practices of others we need to be able to relate to those others on a one-to-one basis. And for that we rely heavily on our own interpersonal skills. Participant observation is thus an intensely humanistic methodology based almost entirely on the messy, complicated, and often emotionally fraught interactions between two or more human beings, one of whom is the researcher.¹⁷

The relationships that researchers build with participants vary enormously, depending on many factors, including the ethnographer, the people with whom she or he is working, the topic being researched, the time frame for the study, and the ways in which the fieldsite and the activities carried out there are structured. In some situations the researcher will need only to establish and maintain a relationship with a participant long enough to organize and carry out a productive and mutually satisfying (or at least acceptable) interview. In other instances a researcher will be living and/or working in a community for many months, sometimes years, and will therefore be required to build long-term relationships with participants, relationships that may continue throughout the lifespans of those involved.

There are a number of common threads associated with the idea of participant observation as relationship that bind the papers in this volume together. The most obvious of these, not surprisingly, is the experience of being both inside and outside of the social action being documented. Each of the contributors reflects in some way on the tensions of the insider–outsider dynamic, the awkward experiences of simultaneously belonging and not belonging. Most draw attention to the variable dichotomies between participant and observer, self and other, subjectivity and objectivity, dichotomies that move in and out of focus, sometimes painfully sharp, sometimes so blurry and indistinct that the divisions become extremely difficult to sustain. This issue is perhaps highlighted as a result of the fact that all but one of the papers addresses some aspect of doing fieldwork at home, an experience that inevitably complicates traditional anthropological paradigms based on assumed distinctions between researcher and researched, insider and outsider, similarity and difference (e.g., Narayan 1993).

Fadzillah found that her Thai research participants were more familiar with some of the cultural rules of her Malaysian home than she was; Angrosino, Shuttleworth, Forsey, Coggeshall, and Muir had prior or ongoing experience of aspects of their fieldsites through their employment and/or through friendship and leisure networks; Telfer, Colic-Peisker, Kurotani, and Teaiwa were insiders to the extent that they shared key elements of their own identities and experience with their research participants; Birckhead, Tourigny, Beckerleg & Hundt, Robinson, and Harvey have all worked with communities in their own countries of origin or long-term residence even though their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds are quite different from those of their informants. Even Kelly, the single exception to this pattern, acknowledges that aspects of her personal history allowed her to feel at home with Mexican prostitutes and their coworkers during her study of urban Chiapas.

There are thus varying degrees of home at work (or work at home) in the ethnographic experiences of those researchers who chose to contribute to a volume on the awkwardness of doing participant observation. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence. Or maybe one of the things that these papers demonstrate is that undertaking fieldwork in familiar settings has a tendency to intensify some of the anxieties associated with doing participant observation. Perhaps this pattern speaks of the increasing difficulty of drawing intellectual distinctions between self and other in a rapidly globalizing world, and the ethical, methodological, and theoretical dilemmas and adjustments that ethnographers face as a result.

Closely related to the insider-outsider dilemma are the difficulties associated with juggling the simultaneous distance and intimacy of fieldwork, another unifying theme in this collection. When we apply the everyday learning strategy of participant observation to the business of doing research we become professional relaters, developing, or expanding upon, connections with people for the purposes of gathering data, and repeatedly finding ourselves inextricably tangled or nestled in complicated emotional interdependencies, conflicts, or dilemmas. Each of the contributors to this volume reflects, directly or indirectly, on the emotional and intellectual complications of engaging intimately with others. Several refer to the messiness of fieldwork, the messiness of relationship. Most emphasize the importance of vulnerability and empathy, trust, dependency, emotional attachment,¹⁸ reciprocity, and responsibility.¹⁹

The intimacy of long-term fieldwork relationships can be deeply enriching for both ethnographer and informant. The importance of empathic witnessing (Tourigny), the willingness to become emotionally, sometimes physically, vulnerable, to participate in processes of self-disclosure (Telfer), and to form strong attachments to individuals in the field, is highlighted by the contributors to this volume. As Robinson points out, the implications of such attachments for all involved are often hidden in academic discourse. Tourigny, Birckhead, Beckerleg & Hundt, and Robinson himself, for example, all had to deal with the premature deaths of people with whom they worked closely during their fieldwork. The emotional costs—for both researcher and research participant—of establishing research-based friendships, dependencies, and reciprocal relationships tend to be subsumed under the technical notion of rapport, the threshold level of relations . . . necessary for . . . subjects to act effectively as informants (Marcus 1998:106). These costs, rarely acknowledged, are often an unavoidable and extremely significant part of the ethnographic endeavor.

As many of these authors show, good fieldwork relations can lead to much heartbreak as research participants in vulnerable situations suffer the injustices of the systems that contain them, or as researchers struggle to meet the obligations and commitments that accompany various degrees of intimacy. The very fact of trying to maintain some kind of emotional distance, or of leaving or staying away from the field for long periods of time (e.g., Birckhead), can also be painful for those involved. Tourigny and Beckerleg & Hundt also show how trust and dependency in the field can be a matter of personal safety, even of life or death. As a result, questions such as What kind of knowledge does my emotional involvement generate? are important and valid and can provide us with important information about ourselves and our informants (Corsino 1987; Kleinman & Copp 1993).

Ethnographic fieldwork has an intrinsically autobiographical quality (Okely & Callaway 1992; Behar 1994, 1995). Both researchers and research participants have to repeatedly negotiate their own feelings of trust and fear to maintain their relationships (e.g., Beckerleg & Hundt and Tourigny). Revealing parts of ourselves and our backgrounds often enhances our relationships with others and encourages the sharing of information that informants might otherwise be reluctant to disclose. As Jon Telfer shows, for example, personal revelation is sometimes an essential step toward achieving a sense of resonance, or empathic understanding, in the field. Such understanding is the ground of social knowledge and the principal means we have of truly appreciating²⁰ the standpoint of others.

Another of the themes that emerges from some of these papers as presenting a particular challenge to the research relationship is linked to the shock of recognizing the self as other, that is, the subjective self in the role of supposedly objective researcher. For some of the contributors the researcher role carries connotations of the colonial or hegemonic gaze and raises questions about the ethics of studying others. Shuttleworth and Harvey describe the awkwardness of working with communities who were highly critical of research practices that were not properly accountable to research participants. Colic-Peisker discusses the discomfort she experienced as an insider anthropologist when resisting expectations that she take on an advocatory role for some of her respondents. These and other contributors also show how the researcher’s field identity is constructed in collaboration with research participants who have expectations of their anthropologist and are rarely passive in their involvement.

Siting the Field: Safety Nets and Danger Zones

The changing nature of the field is also a recurring theme in the papers collected here, although it features most clearly in those on multi-sited research (Muir, Kurotani, and Teaiwa). George Marcus (1995, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2002) has written extensively about the changing conditions of ethnographic fieldwork and the implications for anthropological praxis, his most significant contribution to this conversation being the notion of multi-sited ethnography itself. Ahkil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a) have also furthered debates by probing and deconstructing long-standing anthropological ideas and assumptions about the field and asking how we might reconceptualize it to better reflect the diversity of ethnographic research now being undertaken (see also Fog Olwig & Hastrup 1997).²¹

The issue of anthropology at home has often been central to these disciplinary discussions. It has been a topic of interest to American (e.g., Messerschmidt 1981; Moffat 1992) and European (e.g., Jackson 1987; Okely 1996) anthropologists for some years and more recently to those working in Australia (e.g., Morton 1999). The methodological and theoretical implications of doing anthropology (and participant observation) at home, however, have not been widely addressed. As Marcus (1999a:10–11) notes, traditional anthropological rhetoric and language for evaluating fieldwork and ethnography, the old standards, are often not sufficiently sensitive [to] or accommodating of the conditions in which many contemporary research projects take place. For a combination of reasons, anthropology at home is on the rise. It is thus highly appropriate that many of the contributors to this volume offer interesting insights, often indirectly, into the business of doing fieldwork in, or near, their home territories.

The fieldwork injunction to go elsewhere construes home as a site of origin, of sameness. While a certain degree of sameness can prevail in a home situation, our contributors suggest that that sameness can highlight the nuances of difference that are invaluable in collecting data. Merely speaking the same language, having similar histories, and coming from the same socioeconomic group does not necessarily equate with sameness. In some cases it might cause more discomfort and dis-ease to the ethnographer. The notion that home is a place of safety, a comfortable, nonthreatening research environment, is repeatedly challenged by the contributors to this volume. Fieldwork is often inherently hazardous. The possibility of experiencing physical and emotional trauma is frequently unavoidable.²² Some of the authors represented here were placed in dangerous and/or illegal situations while in the field. Several of the ethnographers in this collection write about the ambient danger they faced simply through doing research in a dangerous setting (Lee 1995:3–4). They show, however, that such incidents provided the opportunity for deeper insight into their research. As Tourigny points out, risk is a part of what we do and needs to be anticipated and accommodated, even if it cannot be eliminated.

The anthropological field is social and relational and calls on the intersections of relationships, actions, interests, and identity constructs (Gupta and Ferguson 1997b:35–37). Sawa Kurotani confirms this with her observation that the anthropological field exists in the collaborative building of relationships between an anthropologist and her informants even when the anthropologist is one of them. It is important to recognize that such processes, and the emotional responses that accompany them, are a normal part of fieldwork. Participation needs continuous theorizing, and the way we can do this is through revealing and interrogating our emotional and personal experiences (Okely 1992; McCarthy Brown 1991; Dubisch 1995).

Perhaps by looking to other disciplines we will find frameworks of value in this process. The work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, for example, reveals that reason and emotion are inextricably interwoven. Damasio’s findings show that, although emotional upheavals can lead to irrational decisions, neurological evidence suggests that selective absence of emotion is also a problem. Well-deployed emotion is a support system without which the edifice of reason cannot operate properly. Indeed, emotion is an integral component in reasoning and decision making (Damasio 1999:283). Emotional identification with informants and our extent of practical involvement influence the field and the fieldwork over time (Norman 2000:140). Further, such experiences can shape and change the direction of any project, either positively or negatively. As Ida Fadzillah writes below, the fieldwork process is charged with the energy and emotions of its participants, and its participants include both the fieldworker and the subjects of her study.

Redefining Good Fieldwork

Fear, self-doubt, and feelings of failure can haunt us throughout our entire stay in the field. It is important to acknowledge these feelings, especially to novice ethnographers about to embark on lengthy (or short) sojourns in the field. Many of the contributors refer to the feelings of self-doubt that they experienced during their fieldwork, and several asked the self-probing question, What am I doing here? In his reflections on the impacts that our fieldwork can have on research participants, Robinson writes that wisps of human shame inhabit the expert account; Muir remarks on his feelings of voyeurism, given that much of his data was gleaned from casual conversations with people who regarded him as a friend; and Angrosino questions his own spiritual motives for doing research in a monastery.

Each of these situations and feelings creates a sense of awkwardness, a kind of social and personal uneasiness. They are, however, an unavoidable part of what we do as participant observers. One of the main intentions of this volume is to argue that uncomfortable fieldwork is often very good fieldwork. If we can accept this we might at least be able to overcome some of the anxieties about social, professional, or personal failure and/or inadequacy that plague many of us during and after difficult fieldwork encounters. The authors of the essays in this volume suggest a number of ways for dealing with the awkwardness and discomfort of fieldwork, the most important being a willingness to embrace a rigorous reflexive process as a necessary component of the participant observation methodology. They have also raised a number of points about the difficulties of doing fieldwork at home, close to home, or as insiders. Additionally, Muir, Kurotani, and Teaiwa have productively added their voices to ongoing conversations about the realties of doing multi-sited research. All have helped to showcase participant observation as a highly demanding but very productive methodology.

Participant observation is hard work—even though lack of formal training (in some places) and general appearances tend to deny this. It requires constant awareness of multiple sensory input and often demands extensive personal compromise in order to fit in; it also calls for high levels of sensitivity and relativism. Individuals with these skills are also likely to be very self-critical and/or susceptible to criticism from others. The very personal nature of participant observation, along with the challenges of entering an unfamiliar social setting and/or taking on a new role as a researcher, can mean that many first-time ethnographers experience intense feelings of self-doubt, confusion, and anxiety. Such challenges, however, can be highly rewarding, self-revelatory, and productive.

This book emerges out of our belief in the importance of normalizing the self-doubt,