Emotions in the Field and Relational Anthropology[i]
By Dimitrina Spencer
Demystifying “traditional” empiricism requires the liberation of emotion from the
stigma of its associations with anecdote, the irrational and the
non-scientific. In this paper, I pose some questions regarding emotions in anthropological fieldwork, and revisit some of the aims of two volumes: Emotions in the Field: the Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience (Davies and Spencer 2010)[ii] and Anthropological Fieldwork: a Relational Process (Spencer and Davies 2010). I begin by discussing what might be involved in the process of liberating the emotional from the extraordinary, the feminine and the apolitical. This includes a discussion of the contributions of feminism and the role of emotions in understanding the political. Next, I turn towards some mechanisms that continue to hamper (within the academe) the usage of radical empiricism[iii]. Drawing on the psychoanalytic notion of psychological defence, I then offer a brief discussion of two defences that anthropologists often employ when dealing with the emotional: repression and splitting[iv]. I argue that these defences, similar to other anthropological beliefs and practices, are supported by emotional regimes of academia and particularly by fieldwork training programmes. It is important to explore further how individualism (sitting alongside traditional empiricism) permeates both our methodological thinking and our Western concepts of self, while also precluding acknowledgement of the relational nature of anthropological work. Instead, our volume reminds us about the relational aspects of anthropological knowing and reveals anthropological field[work] as a live web of dynamic relationships. The latter include relationships with people, aspects of self, things and places through which the anthropological field “becomes” and evolves. I briefly discuss how the emotional could be integrated as a vehicle of knowing into established areas of anthropological enquiry but also, how once embraced it could open new areas for research as well as new interfaces between anthropology and other disciplines.
Liberating Emotions from the Extraordinary, the Feminine and the Apolitical
Anthropologists have sometimes empowered rationalistic hegemonies about fieldwork removing what we actually do as being “unacceptable,” “eccentric” or “exceptional.” Even those open to the emotional might have fallen into this trap. Young and Goulet (1994), who undoubtedly demonstrate the importance of emotions and experience in anthropological work, do so while at the same time elevating them to an “extraordinary” status, as the title of their book indicates (as does Goulet and Miller’s later volume of 2007). While they describe certain experiences as sufficiently unusual and unique to warrant the “extra-ordinary” appellation, many more common experiences and emotions they report are painted with the same brush. By labelling it “extraordinary” we exclude it from the ordinary or everyday occurrences.
Feminist research and the growing body of queer research in particular have contributed enormously to coaxing emotions from the margins and the “extraordinary.” In fact Stanley and Wise (1993:189)[v] clearly showed this more than a decade ago, by placing emotion second on a list of seven characteristics that differentiate feminist research from “traditional” research. However, such differentiation has also served to entrap the emotional in the “insignificant” and “subsidiary” due to specific circumstances of domination (the marginalisation of feminists as described below), or what Lutz (1990) describes as the ideological subordination of women by labelling them “the emotional gender.” Thus, while on the one hand, feminist scholars were working to retrieve emotion, the conditions in which they were working meant that, on occasion, their contributions might have unintentionally and subtly facilitated the marginalisation of emotion.
Understanding how this marginalisation occurred is important in order to avoid its further continuation: firstly, many of these scholars fought to name and acknowledge rather than systematically or analytically study how emotion works as a research tool. In this sense, they struggled to convince other scholars not only of the value of including emotion in research, but also that the expulsion of emotion was linked to power inequalities between researchers and researched, subject and object, and between male and female in the academic space and beyond. Secondly, while feminist scholars opened an arena in which emotion could be more freely discussed, this space itself was “feminised” and thus marginalised by being associated (by their opponents) with their own marginal position. Thirdly, if such research was marginalised for the themes it pursued, it was also marginalised for the choice of idiom through which these themes were often communicated. The spaces allocated, but also often voluntarily accepted by women, through which to write and publish are often perceived as “unserious” genres: autobiographies, personal accounts, or memoirs, letters and various other confessionals. Barbara Tedlock (1995: 278) seconds this by quoting Martha Ward’s self-conscious description of her memoirs as “unworthy for my peers or professional colleagues. It is what John van Maanen calls an ‘impressionist tale.’” The “open” and “vulnerable” is subtly kept within the sphere of the “private” and female, while the “stoic” and “analytical” is kept decidedly within the “public” and male.[vi] Certain dichotomies, which debilitate and fracture research, are thus reproduced and solidify the place of the emotional as “private.” Judith Okely (1975:174) has spoken of these dichotomies eloquently: “…the specific is described as ‘hard,’ scientific and objective fact, its opposite is ‘airy fairy’ speculation, emotional and soft – woman’s domain… fact is equated with ‘vulgar empiricism’ and its opposite is theory, women are seen to be the fact gatherers and men are the theoreticians… Whatever ‘female thought’ may be, it is the one that is undervalued” (see also Moore 1994).
It is regrettable that the male-analytical/female-emotional dichotomies have silenced certain possibilities for integration. As Michael Jackson has reminded us, (1989:186), such dichotomies crumble and blend in the face of actual lived experience, for experience breaks the confines of “the orthodox discursive styles,” and furthermore refuses “to recognise any essential division between ethnographic experience and other modes of experience, personal, ethical or political” (ibid.). As Jackson also says in this volume, we cannot explore the emotional as though it were a “personal” and detached entity, a product of a bounded “self,” for it is formed within the interpersonal, political and transpersonal realms.
Feminist scholars have been among the pioneers (starting from the call of Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990) in the 1990s and their work on the way in which emotional discourses form part of the power relations and maintain social hierarchies) in introducing this dialectic linking emotions to politics, in historicising emotions and situating them in the intersections of culture and power (including some more recent examples such as Gould’s work (2003) on the role of emotions in social movements). However, we are yet to explore how the use of the emotional can itself be a political tool in that it can challenge dominant modes of knowing, and through this, dominant socio-political orders. Gould (2003:77) speaks of the recent increase in female scholars encouraging a greater sensitivity to “emotional sensibilities” and to emotions both as “strategic displays” and “sources of oppression.” And yet, like other feminist scholars, she does not explore the role of emotions (or rather how and where we talk about them) as continuing the self-oppression of feminist scholars themselves.
Outside feminist research, the analysis of emotions as a political capacity has seen important achievements in the recent advances in psychological anthropology that ascribe primacy to the lived experience of the relational such as in the volume edited by Casey and Edgerton (2005) and in particular the chapters by White (2005), Ewing (2005) and Casey and Edgerton (2005a). As Casey and Edgerton argue (ibid.10-11): “ ‘alternative,’ ‘parallel,’ and ‘multiple’ modernities require a self-fashioning of what is considered modern across relational experiences”. In response, psychocultural studies have furthered the understanding of “the saliency, forms and impact of modern persons and communal forms,” including the workings of power. Psychocultural scholars have developed the approach of “person-centered ethnography” where power relations are not explored through reliance on “abstract, experience-distant constructs” but from the point of view of “the acting, intending and attentive subject” (Hollan 2001: 49 cited in Casey and Edgeton ibid.:8).
There is a wide variety of approaches in different strands of anthropology to understanding emotions and politics. Kleinman and Copp (1993), Mahler (2006) and Milton and Svasek (2005) suggest that to have a genuine understanding of the political, anthropologists must develop methods specific to the experiential specifics of politics while examining the contexts shaping these experiences and how the emotional forms part of these. Other important contributions, not necessarily focusing on the researcher, are e.g. Appaduari’s (1990) work on emotions as intrinsic in the relations between inferiors and superiors; White’s (1990) contribution on emotions as framing discussions and power relations and, later, his “emotive institutions” (White 2005); Ewing’s (2005) discussion and expansion of Raymond Williams’ “structures of feelings,” Lyon and Barbalet’s (1994) work on embodiment as political process; Aretxaga’s (2003) “maddening states;” Navaro-Yashin’s “sensing the political” (2008); and Heatherington (2005) on emotional aspects of political protest (e.g. emotions as bridging the individual and the social and thus the political) – a point made also by Leavitt (1996), Overing and Passess (2000), Milton and Svasek (2005) and Svasek (2006).
Different scholars in sociology[vii], race and cultural studies[viii], and psychology debating the political have also inspired discussion in the anthropology of emotion. Exploring critically a number of sociological and psychological approaches to emotion, White (2005:245) concludes that they all point to the utility of the ethnography of emotions, and with this volume we add – also to the utility of the ethnography of the fieldworker’s emotions, as they might reveal subtle links between knowing and the political.
Some creative links between the recent anthropological research in migration and globalisation could also be employed in understanding fieldwork practices, and the constructions, consequences and experiences of anthropological “multi-sited fieldwork” (Marcus 1995), “globetrotting” (Herzfeld 2001), morality and power, e.g. the practices of “implication” and “intensification” in Hage (2003), migrant nostalgia, abjection and myth of return in Ewing (2005), “selfscape dreams” in Hollan (2005), “cultural models of time” in Birth (2005); and migration and globalisation in Svasek and Skrbis (2007). The questions arising are, for example, in what ways do our emotional experiences embody power relations and how do these subjective phenomena further either liberating or dominating propensities inherent in the dynamics of globalisation and research? How do anthropologists engage in such global networks of affective relationships?
One possible approach involves undermining the notion that the “field” is a geographical entity: it is instead a psychological entity and a relational process. And, as Ghassan Hage (2010), and Maruska Svasek (2010) demonstrate, it is emotionally imagined as well as experienced. Hage (2010), Hsu (2010), Smith and Kleinman (2010), Hastrup (2010), Luhrmann (2010), Lindquist (2010) and Crapanzano (2010), explore the political through the researcher’s emotional investments and involvements, showing how the emotional arises with the political within the experience of relatedness. In certain cases, only by sensing it in our lived field experiences we could grasp the political and know how people, things, space, events, or other aspects anything else are implicated in it; that is how the emotional, the relational and the political constitute each other. Political anthropologists and anthropologists of globalisation, migration and transnationalism (and also those who study abjected, immobile, entrapped spaces falling out of the international system[ix]) could use the radical empirical position we have offered to further their respective fields and pose vital questions concerning the relationships between anthropologists, the political and globalisation. However, we also need to examine how we might hinder ourselves on the way as I discuss in the next section.
Methodological Beliefs and Practices as Defences
The abundant literature on ethnographic methods, most of which does provide useful advice on how to manage or control emotions of different kinds in the field, rarely provides examples on how to analyse the complexities of emotional engagements (see e.g. DeWat and DeWalt 2002)[x]. As all other professionals and individuals, anthropologists also have certain ways in which they inhibit or allow emotional potential for engagement and knowing. Here, I discuss only two (among many others) of these internal defences that impact on and are impacted by our research practices – repression(and guilt) and cynicism. I pose the question: how certain forms of professional socialisation (cf. Davies 2009, Luhrmann 2001) and daily anthropological practices may be co-produced together with internal consequences, and how this social and psychological concert may have methodological bearings (cf. Davies 2009). I argue that these two forms of defences are widespread among anthropologists although they are not at all an exclusive anthropological experience. They have been reported in different guises in many anthropological accounts of fieldwork or in daily professional life and sites, including the routines of universities or events such as conferences. The embodied forces of our professional practices are indivisible from our intellectual, political, and ethical concerns.
Repression
Most anthropologists would agree that this disclosure from a recent doctoral student exemplifies a familiar scene:
I always want to defend my discipline from the accusation that we exploit “the other”, but then I was under so much pressure to gather data in a short period of time (limited funding), that pragmatism often took the place of friendliness. I am guilty that I sometimes took more from my field relationships that I gave back to them(doctoral student 2007).
In such context, anthropologists may be prone to guilt, which can either be fully experienced (thus producing direct field responses) or to some degree repressed. The repressed and its effects may limit our field (and understanding of it) by limiting, ignoring or transforming the relationships involved in it and, thus, altering the nature of the data we collect. We are yet to explore the variety of mechanisms both the political and the methodological in the production and impact of anthropological guilt and doubt. Here, it is important to note the warning of Dominguez (2000) regarding the danger of anthropological oscillation between disengagement and idealization of people in the field as a result of our “politics of correction” and guilt from our geo-politically defined position. She sees our guilt and pity resulting in treating the people with “kid gloves both in the field and in our writings” (p.136). Instead, Dominguez invites us to stop the silence and the condescention and proposes “politics of love”:
“…based on a different criterion of value – namely, genuine love, respect, and affection, not categorical “identity” […] the kind of love we feel for family members, tough love at times but never disengagement or hagiography. Love – the thing most of us are not open about in our scholarly writing, the kind most of us have been professionally socialised into excising from our scholarly writing” (p. 365).
Jackson (1998) also calls for an authentic engagement in the field, which is endorsed by radical empiricism.
Splitting
Splitting as a social and professional practice has been experienced or noticed by all anthropologists[xi], and it has many guises[xii]. However, it has rarely been discussed as related to a psychological/embodied processes. I was at a conference at a very interesting presentation on ritual. The presenter who had obtained what he felt to be his richest data through reflecting upon his experiences in ritual felt it dangerous to mention this in the “official” domains of his textual and seminar performance. I was at one presentation of his at the conference workshop and then, in the coffee break immediately afterwards, he gave a completely different performance. The latter revealed how he really gained his insight experientially. His calm academic tone at the workshop was replaced by his passion that had marked his fieldwork participation in that particular ritual. I argue that this embodied “splitting” of ourselves between two different but not necessarily contradictory versions of the field only helps maintain the boundary between them.[xiii] In this way, we sustain the “scientific” image of our professional practice while we actually do something else in the field. In this way, the emotional, the embodied is excluded and its key contribution to knowledge remains hidden.
The fantasy in Lacanian terms[xiv] we adhere to despite awareness is discussed as cynicism by Zizek (1995), Sloterdijk (1988) and Navaro-Yashin (2002). In our case, it might take the form of professional anthropological, academic, cynicism. Zizek (p. 28-29, cf Navaro-Yashin 2002) describes the ideology of cynicism and how one may partake in it to sustain it: “The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon that mask…” as imagining getting free of this symptom may produce more anxiety than adhering to it. It is useful to employ this understanding in order to highlight the effects of the occasions when we engage in splitting. Is it the predicament of “powerlessness” of our discipline that we anthropologists may to a certain extent create ourselves here? Or, to what extent our splitting practices result from the maintenance of a fantasy that “we cannot do otherwise,” a fantasy that we are aware of and cannot escape for some important reason? To what extent we are “caught in a hegemonic bind” (Herzfeld 2007:96) and cannot, or must not step out; and, to what extent we choose to stay in the fantasy because we do not know that we can leave it behind or do not know (and thus get anxious about) how to break out of it (e.g. we might simply lack skills in writing[xv], reflection, emotional intelligence, sensitivity or something else). To what extent are we caught in a “hegemonic bind” (Herzfeld 2007:96) and cannot-or must not- step out? And, to what extent we stay in the fantasy because we do not know how to get out leave it or that we can leave it (e.g. might lack skills in reflection, emotional intelligence, writing skills, sensitivity, etc?). It is our political, ethical, moral, professional and intellectual responsibility to examine closely our splitting practices as they may have prevented us from properly analysing what is important and meaningful in the emotional and, thus, in the relational process that we develop as fieldwork.
As Heaton Shrestha (forthcoming) has noticed, we have not yet studied what exactly remains unknown through these practices. This is similar to how Harris (2007: 13) calls for opening the “black box” of “knowing how” (e.g. how we actually learn skills and come to perform them, how we actually acquire what Bourdieu refers to as habitus). We could address such questions in the hope that where possible and where our high professional standards, including our humanistic and intellectual responsibilities, call for it, we could integrate what we do with what we say we do through a valid and truly valuable way of knowing.
Here, further research might explore the developmental connections between the cultural, the social and the individual as in the recent advances of research into socialisation (Poole 1994). However, anthropological beliefs are not just a matter of developmental but also of institutional socialisation, which I explore in the next section.
The Emotional Regimes of Anthropology
Professional anthropological socialisation involves the acquisition of embodied knowledge, including some institution specific or wider disciplinary ways of experiencing and understanding emotions (cf. Davies 2009). Returning from the field in Nepal, Heaton Shrestha (ibid.) describes how the daily practices in her department affected how she came to understand, represent and analyse her fieldwork. She draws on Reddy’s work (2002) to illustrate how her field-data became subjected to and transformed by what he calls the academy’s “emotional regime” – namely, that complex set of practices which “establish a set of emotional norms and that sanction those who break them” (Reddy 2002: 129). Heaton Shrestha (ibid.) illustrates the effects of the academy’s “emotional regime” by showing how the rawness of emotion contained in her fieldnotes was transformed through the experience of specific academic practices, discourses and beliefs which found fertile soil in her own desire to “acquire legitimate meanings.” Gradually, certain emotional experiences came to dominate her PhD thesis while others disappeared: cynicism, the legitimate anthropological emotion in NGO research within development studies, had taken over her written text as a “legitimate meaning;” and her attempt to share her intense gendered feelings was framed by the advice to immerse in an ethnographic reading on the gendering of the national community. At the same time, new emotional tones entered her analysis and writing: emotions indexing her “powerful” position in the field replaced emotions indicating sharing and even experiences of “powerlessness” in the field; feelings of indebtedness came to deny her experiences of daily reciprocity in the field. Heaton-Shreshta (ibid.) discusses these emotional repositionings as field distanciation and othering practices with significant implications on how we construct the field.
Similarly, another colleague, Sherryl Kleinman, states that “the structure of academia makes it difficult to do field research adequately, and especially to deal head-on with emotions in the field” (Kleinman, 1991:193). In Kleinman’s case this denial of field emotion (encouraged by her department) eroded her enthusiasm for her project:
“I dared not discuss with colleagues in my department or field-research friends and colleagues across the miles. I think I now understand why. Although not acknowledged in any methods text I know of, an unwritten rule says that fieldwork should be exciting and enjoyable. My conversations with colleagues who do quantitative research echo this “You’re so lucky you get to do interesting work.” This romanticising of fieldwork kept me, and might well keep others, from talking about feelings we fear will disrupt the research process” (Kleinman, 1991:193)
Reflecting further on her emotional isolation Kleinman (ibid.) suggests that she found it difficult to talk about her feelings also because they were “negative feelings” (disappointment and anger) against the group she was studying, and she felt she did not have the right to have these; she also experienced the pressure of having to appear an “independent academic” and not show feelings of self-doubt; and finally she also feared appearing untrustworthy and not scientific enough among her colleagues in a quantitative-oriented department. This emotional silencing raises a number of questions: e.g. how we perpetuate its lasting impacts on our research process and how it might lead to poorer quality research. Citing Reddy (2002), Heaton-Shrestha says that an implication of this suspicion of affect is that initiatives to train anthropologists to take their emotional responses in fieldwork seriously “will have to contend with the existing emotional regimes which may or may not support this aspect of anthropological training.” This shows the lack of training provision that could challenge the limitations posed by such emotional regimes (Heaton-Shrestha forthcoming, also Spencer 2008a). We have very limited explicit anthropological pedagogical experience to propose as an alternative to the methods training requirements of research councils. A notable exception is the proposal by Ingold and Lucas (2007). They suggest, anthropology is
“not so much the study of people as a way of studying with people […] the novice gradually learns to see things and of course to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do.[…] it elucidates our perception of the world and opens our eyes to other possibilities of being. And, in bringing these possibilities to bear upon our own experience, we can be led to new discoveries.” (p.287)
These authors take us on an inspiring and rare journey of teaching anthropology in practice by involving experiential methods (the senses, perceptions, the imagination, feeling as well as thinking) and an awareness of the important place of scholar-student relations in the development of fieldwork skills. Many anthropological experiences testify to the need for further discussion of teaching methods classes that truly prepare the novice artisans for the field and ascertain the continuity and growth of anthropological craftsmanship.
While Heaton-Shrestha speaks of post-fieldwork transformations of emotion occurring in the academic space, we must bear in mind that in pre-fieldwork training, students’ susceptibilities to powerful emotional regimes are more pronounced – in pre-fieldwork students are socialised into honouring certain “structures of being” while in the field (i.e. certain norms of research behaviour and thought) which delimit certain “states of being.” [xvi] Once these norms are internalised they are protected by emotions such as guilt and doubt, which are activated when these norms are transgressed. As Joanna Cook (2010) illustrates, her guilt about defying institutionally incorporated ideas as to correct field procedure, actually aroused a sub-set of field emotions which were more responses to her own internalised expectations than to the community at hand. Cook of course resisted these expectations and to good effect, but the question remains of in what way internalised methodological expectations come to limit what we are able to experience, and, assuming that reflection upon experience is informative, what we can ultimately come to know.
Relational Anthropology
The emotional has been continuously undermined by powerful scientific hegemonies, supporting the hierarchical distinctions between the social and natural sciences and between different methodologies within social science research. A lot is at stake today on this front, especially for anthropologists in the face of the growing audit culture (Shore and Wright 2000, Strathern 2000). As Michael Herzfeld describes it evocatively (2007:93-94), the rise of the positivistic vision of knowledge has been accompanied by a brutal elision of embodied forms of knowledge. The anthropologists who question the imposing positivistic measures of knowledge are like those Cretan artisans, described by Herzfeld (ibid.:107), who resist standardisation and place “experience” above “replicability.” Anthropologists as artisans are indeed engaged in the production of embodied knowledge (even when not acknowledged) through experience and intimate social involvement. Unlike what appear at first sight to be the proponents of the “dispassionate precision of modern science,” anthropologists are the “principal instruments of their own observations, analysis and comparisons” (ibid.:101), and these are affective and affecting instruments.
Thus, fine-tuning these instruments, that is, developing and demonstrating a capacity for self-reflection, creativity, improvisation, serendipity and intimacy alongside love for the craft and a sharp questioning attitude about the “politics of significance”[xvii] is central to the training of anthropologists.[xviii] Herzfeld (ibid.) argues that, today, anthropologists must respond to the “know-nothing” advocates by continuing the serendipitous affective learning of anthropology students as an “act of resistance to the uncritical uses of epistemic authority.” However, this must not be read as a call to continue the mystification of anthropological labour. Without falling into the traps of rampant accountability and the seduction of replicating our methods, we ought to gain and demonstrate confidence in our intellectual resistance. The question here is, as phrased succinctly by Harris (2007:8): “how to give adequate expression to the tacit in a recognizable form of anthropological theory?” One way ahead is to develop a sensibility to how we come to know through reflective emotional engagement, and this should be a task for every young anthropologist even if we do not explicitly intend to write about it or flag it up as one of our methods. At the same time, the time is ripe to state straightforwardly what we really do rather than what we would like others to think we do, and to support what we do with methodological advances on the relational nature of our work.
Knowing-in-relatedness (cf. Bird David 2004) takes place through senses, emotions, and bodies - these reveal the relational dynamics of social practices. It is in this sense that I suggest we might extend the well established critique to the term “participant observation” by pointing to what most anthropologists nowadays will agree actually takes place during fieldwork: an embodied relational process of knowing in which “data” arises from a complex dynamic of enacted relations.[xix] It is in this sense that our work is a form of emotional labour[xx] producing knowledge through embodied relating and through the analysis of such relating whether it be with people, things or places. Many anthropologists have demonstrated this point implicitly or explicitly.[xxi]
Our fieldwork is thus brought to life through our actions, our practices and our sensing and embodied enactments of relatedness. The relational understanding regards the field as a messy web of alive and dynamically changing relationships, as providing opportunities for relationships with people, aspects of self, things and places (cf. Jackson 1998, 1989). The anthropological field thus emerges as a process of ongoing dialogue, of building, maintaining, negotiating, enjoying, suffering, imagining, remembering, challenging, questioning, dreaming, deepening or cutting off the relationships through which we come to know and share what we know, bridging the past, the present and the future. The field, if I am to draw freely on the inspiring work of Jimenez (2003) on “space as a capacity,” does not pre-exist as a geographical place; instead, it consists of events and “capacities,”[xxii] which are revealed in moments of relating (here, we add both external and internal, psychological relations).[xxiii] If we borrow this approach and use it to view the anthropological field as a particular form of space, we could paraphrase Jimenez (ibid.) and argue that the invisible fabric of our field[work] is not simply a context of our relationships and of knowing, but an aspect of the very relationships themselves. And, as the field(work) is threaded by our relational involvements and communicative practices; the web of fieldwork relations is a structure of distributed capacities, linking people, environment, things, to social practices, bringing together the material and the social, extending agency across things and people (ibid.). Our field(work), as Jimenez argues about space, thus “becomes materially woven into the world and distributed as a capacity”; “through our engagements with and in the world, we become the spaces to which we have invested our practices” (ibid.:141). Such a view of fieldwork could become particularly visible when we pay close attention to our social practices constituting the field not just as external events but also as psychological, emotional happenings as we have shown in this volume.
As much as emotions have been means of belonging, ranking, “othering,” excluding, challenging, protecting, including, supporting, or (de)legitimising those we research, they have played the same role for the researchers (of either gender) themselves. The two volumes – Emotions in the Field (2010) and Anthropological Fieldwork (2010) have offered evidence that the emotional pertains to the whole research process[xxiv] - including the researcher, be it a man or a woman, white or not, Western or not. This is to say, no matter who writes for or against them, they are always there and we might as well pay attention to them and search for their analytical value. But what do we mean by emotion here? In this volume, we have been reluctant to define ‘emotion’ in any proscriptive way that would presuppose the analytical separation between so-called “aspects of self.” The result of this has been to open rather than close possibilities, by allowing researchers to think about the “emotional” in novel ways. We aimed to distinguish between the confession of emotions from emotions as a means of gaining (anthropological) knowledge and rather than focusing on whether we can know the other or ourselves through emotion, we have explored how we participate in each other’s emotions.[xxv] Furthermore, by avoiding the codification of emotion through the avoidance of tight definition, we have allowed for faithfulness to the radical empirical approach, which refuses to essentialise the emotional as a product of self, or as a separate ‘component’ of personality. One might suppose that our use of the term “emotion” is thus somewhat unnecessary, and that we might have been better served by the term ‘experience’. By stressing the emotional, one might argue, we have (to a certain extent) reproduced a familiar dichotomy between thinking and feeling. But this accusation only stands if we are misunderstood as using this term only in a traditional sense. Rather we have been at pains to emphasise that we see the emotional as inseparable from other domains of existence – it flows in and through all aspects of human and social experience, affecting and being affected by them. We emphasize it separately precisely to show that it cannot be separate.
At the same time, all contributors to these volumes have aimed to bring emotion decidedly within the analytic domain, by subjecting it to radical empirical reflection. Thus, we have shown how emotions are both cognitive and physical, both discourses and embodied experiences, both individual and collective (cf. Casey and Edgerton 2005, Lindholm 2005, Svasek 2006) and also how they arise within a relational domain, and thus become mechanisms, keys, vehicles, or ways with which we may, through analysis of their meaning in our lived relational engagements, better grasp, orient ourselves in, question, sense and embody, the “taken-for-granted” or, as Malinowski put it, “the imponderabilia of everyday life?”
The long and rich history of research into emotions is far too comprehensive to do justice to here. There have been, however, many recent and successful attempts to summarise and collate this research – attempts which rather than focusing on “emotions in fieldwork” focus on the category or phenomenon of emotion itself.[xxvi] As Fischer and Manstead (1995) describe it, even though we are more than 100 years away from William James’s seminal essay on the emotions (published 1884), not only are physiologists and psychologists still engaged in debating the questions posed in that paper, but the social sciences and more recently neuroscience have shed new light on old debates. These discussions broadly focus on a few common disputes: are the visceral changes that accompany emotional experiences the cause or the result of emotional experience? - are emotions universal or culturally constructed phenomena, or does the answer lie somewhere in between? - what is the role of cognition and emotion in the interpretation of external and internal events? - is empathy a false tool lulling us to believe that we can know what is felt, or does it allow access to what may otherwise remain inaccessible? While it is clear that much recent psychological and physiological literature on the emotions focuses on inner, subjective experience and labeling, as anthropologists we recognize that people from other cultures may not have a word for emotion, or may have radically different ideas about the location and meaning of emotion, emotional expression, perception, experience, and the antecedents and physiology of emotion. But these points should not dissuade field researchers from taking the epistemological relevance of their own emotions seriously.
Furthermore, while anthropologists traditionally undertook fieldwork in ideally crowded and bounded fields, we have also discussed how our emotions can enable our engagement with what might at first sight appear the silent, empty, fragmented or illegible. If we can engage with, for example, an empty, quiet and vast space (Hastrup, this volume), a conversation with what is referred to as “God” (Luhrmann, this volume), or the silence of individual meditation (Cook, this volume), then in the future, as certain anthropologists are now indicating, what of our engagements with the State (to build on e.g. Hansen and Stepputat (2001) and Aretxaga et al. (2005) among others); the political in “no man’s land” (Navaro-Yashin 2008)[xxvii]; or happiness[xxviii] and kinship love (Trawick 1990, Harriss 2007)[xxix] or machines, science and new technologies[xxx], or anything with which, about which or through which humans relate and thus create space/time including the virtual? Acknowledging and understanding the emotional within our research practices could thus open new or previously challenging research spaces, and redefine old ones, as well as raise professional standards.
Indeed, high professional standards must oblige us to scrutinise not only our research practices and relationships, but also complacent separations and marginalisations that sustain dominant rationalist, statist, gender, sexual, racist, nationalist as well as other political ideologies. Here, we could also draw upon the recent developments in critical theory, sociology, women's studies and cultural studies which have all initiated, as Clough (2007) has stated, an “affective turn.” The “affective turn” has aimed, among other things, to analyse power relations which cross regional, state, national, economic, public and private spheres and international organisations (ibid.:2). As Michael Hardt (2007) describes in the foreword to the above volume, this “affective turn” has its foundations in academic work on the body (mainly feminism) and on the emotions (predominantly queer theory). As Hardt (ibid.) underlines, the turn towards “affect” has further problematised traditional dichotomies: affects refer to both body and mind and involve both reason and passions. They are also both causes and effects, and thus illuminate our tendencies to both affect the world and be affected by it. By joining this “affective turn” in one way or another, anthropology may open new interdisciplinary interfaces not only with cultural studies, feminist studies and queer theory, but also with art, philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and science and technology studies. We could also draw on the insights of earlier postcolonial studies on the subjectivity and emotion (see Fanon 1963, 1967) as well as on recent postcolonial critique and particularly Bhabha's "anxious identifications" (1994) Casey's "affective citizenship" (2008) and Stoller's "embodied colonial memories" (1995).
Radical empiricism as a particular type of experiential practice may be one of those well-suited tools for informing our studies in any field site as long as we reinstate the political in the emotional (and vice versa) and overcome the exoticisation of the emotional as extraordinary, stop marginalising it as private, rather than professional, or female rather than male, and finally take it from being simply indulged, hidden, disavowed or transmuted, to rather being understood.
Relational Epistemology[xxxi]
Anthropological epistemologies, as any epistemology, are specific cultural phenomena – there are current dominant beliefs about how to study things anthropologically and there are their variations. Different countries, different departments, and different individuals, practice their own variations of these dominant models despite certain sites of resistance such as, for example, feminism. Because we are professionals of a specific Western scientific culture, we may try and investigate the world in a rather disembodied way or claim that we do so. However, this does not mean that we do not in reality rely on our embodied experiences (such as emotions) to be our vehicles of knowing. It does not mean either that a disembodied epistemology is the only way to know. Relational epistemologies, and particularly the ones paying attention to our affective capacities could open different entries to knowing and sometimes even entries to different facts altogether. Emotions are universal human capacities although they are can be differently realized, understood, expressed, repressed, structured, symbolized and socialized in different socio-cultural contexts. Whether we include them or not in our research would tell us more about how our methodological practices are culturally shaped than about the nature of our findings. In this sense, how we allow ourselves to experience and how we reflect on experience is key to what we come to know. In order to allow ourselves the possibility to benefit from alternative epistemology, such as radical empiricism, it is important to begin to reflect not only on the social practices in which we partake but also in their embodied experiential processes – or as Vincent Crapanzano suggests – we should pay attention to how we participate in each other’s emotions. Thus, the observer participates both in the observed world and in themselves - this statement is itself constrained by it cultural origin – in many cultures such separation between self and observed world may make no sense – but in our case, it may be a useful starting point to break out of beliefs that may sometimes limit our knowledge. An epistemology such as radical empiricism may offer us the opportunity to understand completely different phenomena that “traditional” empiricism has not been tailored to study. Furthermore, independent of whether we have shared emotions with others, emotions could always lead us to some sort of analytical insight: they could allows us to find a better question; to sense the social practices; or to better grasp their meaning; they could also lead us into understanding our own involvement with methods in the field and our proclivities or resistances; or the sensed meaning that others may wish to impose on us. In this context, by developing relational epistemologies relying on embodied as well as other types of knowledge, we partake in the affective turn, which challenges the new positivism. Taking emotions seriously and acknowledging that we rely on them to know does not mean that we should focus on ourselves, become confessional, or anecdotal, rather, as Okely (1992:20) argues – what is deemed epistemologically relevant should be only what furthers our primary socio-cultural investigative task.
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Notes
[i] The conference from which this volume originates is “Emotions in the Field”, 9-10 September 2006, Lincoln College, Oxford. I am grateful to Kaveri Harriss with whom we conceived the idea to hold a conference, to Maruska Svasek, Elisabeth Tonkin and Andrew Beatty who supported the first steps; to the British Academy for the Conference Grant I received for Emotions in the Field and for the travel grant towards the follow up workshop at Harvard University; to the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, for the additional funding and support throughout. I am deeply obliged to Professor David Parkin for his strong support of this project at all stages and for the inspiration. I would like to thank James Davies, Michael Jackson, Vincent Crapanzano, David Mills, Marcus Banks, Xiang Biao, Alison Shaw, Maruska Svasek, Kaveri Harriss, Frances Hawkswell, Robert Spencer and Abbie Headon, the contributors to this volume, the anonymous reviewers and my colleagues and friends who form part of the writing of this conclusion or the volume and the project as a whole.
[ii] This piece is an abridged version of what I had prepared originally as conclusion for this volume. This abridged version now forms part of Spencer (forthcoming). The original title was: Anthropological Fieldwork: a Relational Process.
[iii] As discussed in the introduction and the individual chapters, we have referred to radical empiricism as a way of knowing through lived experience, produced by and producing relations between things as much as the things themselves, see the Introduction (this volume). We have also argued that it could be employed alongside traditional empiricism.
[iv] However, this section should be read with the following question in mind: how thinking through “splitting” and “repression” may create rather than simply describe an experience as constructed by one cultural model - the psychoanalytic one? Fitting experience in a psychoanalytic frame is one among many possible ways to talk about these experiences. Here, such talk serves the aim of enhancing the point about the role of what might be referred to as psychological processes in the way we relate to method. See also Jackson (this volume) who discusses the relationship between the use of psychology by anthropologists and the local epistemologies in the process of making sense of experience.
[v] See also Kleinman and Copp (1993).
[vi] At the same time, it is important to note that even memoirs of male anthropologists have often been the repository of emotional experiences in the field while their academic publications have been cleansed of any traces of affect and presented as paragons of rationality and linearity. As Dubois (1995) also reminds us (citing Mary Morris), many women have travelled disguised as men and their voices have been formed by male voices, which has framed the experience of travel and by extension of fieldwork in a particular way too: as a male venture. It might be interesting to ask what might be the contemporary parallels to such choices of the past, that is, how might women continue to disguise themselves as men during fieldwork?
[vii] Despite some of its limitations, sociologist Theodore Kemper’s (1989) concern with the importance of context in emotions could be one possible beginning for critical cross-disciplinary dialogue and discussion in the investigation of whether and how emotions are “subject to” political relations. For example, many of our emotional experiences might be stimulated by specific experiences of power and status. Thus where we are positioned in the structures of power relations might influence the configurations of emotions experienced. Might social disempowerment bring anger or depression; might social culpability bring guilt? Could we argue that when entering new relations of power in the field, these might also compel certain emotional effects? When we become subject to new forms of power relations, could we feel this in the emotional domain? Another sociologist, Jack Barbalet (2002: 4), writes: “Emotion is provoked by circumstance and is experienced as transformation of dispositions to act. It is through the subject’s active exchange with others that emotional experience is both stimulated in the actor and orienting of their conduct.” How could and should we, anthropologists, engage with such thinking in terms of our fieldwork experiences? Could we really study all these phenomena in any other way than the experiential?
[viii] E.g. Ahmed’s (2001:11) “surfacing of individual, national and global bodies through the mediation of affect” and “the cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed 2004).
[ix] As in Navaro-Yashin (2008).
[x] We do not underestimate the importance of such advice especially in relation to safety in fieldwork.
[xi] Perhaps the first time this practice was publicly discussed was at the time of the publication of Malinowski’s diary – which revealed a rather significant split between “the personal” and “the professional”; a different way of thinking about it may be spacial/psychological splitting which may be implied in Geertz’s discussion of “being there” and “being here” (as cited in Stoller 2007:175); Dumont (1978) provides an evocative documentation of this split also bringing into attention the female/male aspect of it; splitting practices are insightfully discussed in Okely (1992); and also in Kleinman and Copp (1993) and Heald and Deluz (1994), among many others; see also Svasek (2005 and 2006).
[xii] Cf the anthropological “presentisim” in James and Mills (2005:5).
[xiii] Of course, sometimes, it is not problematic. The question is, when we do it, can we choose?
[xiv] I draw here on Navaro-Yashin’s (2002) discussion of the Lacanian “fantasy” - in this context, it is a psychic symptom that continues to exert power over one’s life even though the person may have gained awareness that this is just a fantasy. The reason for such lasting attachment to a fantasy is that it becomes central to the identity of the person.
[xv] E.g. how to include emotions in writing without becoming confessional, cf. Herzfeld 2007:98, who argues that ethnographic writing has as much aesthetic as scholarly quality and that the anthropologist’s answer to statistical validity lies in “the cumulative - and therefore in some sense statistical – intensity and intimacy of their encounters.” Further on how to write intersubjectively, see the proposed return to narrative in Michael Jackson (1998: 36): “recounting in detail the lived truth of an event may convey less data with less jargon than the scientific treatise, but what it sacrifices in impressiveness and authority it may recover in immediacy, economy and craft. The minimalisation of ethnographic fact is not, therefore, evidence of a disenchantment with the empirical but rather an attempt to radicalize empiricism by emphasizing verisimilitude and contingency over system and structure.” That certainly demands specific writing and story-telling skills.
[xvi] I thank James Davies for his suggestions in this paragraph.
[xvii] Herzfeld 1997 cited in Herzfeld 2007:107.
[xviii] It is also central to one of the key tasks of anthropology, described insightfully by Michael Jackson (1998: 208): “… the task of ethnography is not to know the Other in any final sense nor even to know the self through the other. Nor is it to change the lives of others, or even critique one’s own culture. Its warrant lies in its power to describe in depth and detail the dynamics of intersubjective life under a variety of cultural conditions in the hope that one may thereby be led to an understanding of how these rare moments of erasure and effacement occur when self and other are constituted in mutuality and acceptance rather than violence and contempt.”
[xix] See also Spencer (forthcoming).
[xx] Here, we do not follow Hochschild (1983) closely and we do not think of emotional labour only as that of front stage performance but include all sorts of emotions during anthropological work, see also Spencer and Davies (forthcoming).
[xxi] See e.g. Dumont (1978), Okely and Callaway (1992), Wikan (1992), Jonas and Gilje (2003), Casey and Edgeberton (2005), Svasek (2005), de Neve and Unnithan-Kumar (2006), Harris (2007), Wulff (2007); and especially Jackson (1998) on the intersubjectivity in anthropological work; also “ways of knowing” in Harris (2007) “intended to foreground the situated and relational character of knowledge,” which is demonstrated in all chapters in their volume; and also the notion of “carnal hermeneutics” in Papagaroufali (2008: 115-121) in the description of interpretation as “a sensory and emotional engagement with the world” where the “…multisensory production of meanings proves to be always taking place in time-bound intersubjective milieus […] with whom [we] might share, negative or positive sensory-emotional relations” (ibid. 116); and also all contributors to Davies and Spencer 2010.
[xxii] “This double constituency of space as a moment of action and a mode of presentation is what I call ‘capacity.’” (Jimenez 2003:142)
[xxiii] In proposing an ontological re-definition of the concept of space Jimenez argues that “eliciting meaning” is “not a referential activity, but a mode of display and aperture, a moment of propagation” (ibid.:150).
[xxiv] The anthropologist’s field begins to grow long before the actual fieldwork begins, continues to develop and change in the post-fieldwork period and never really ceases to exist and transform with all relations one develops with it.
[xxv] Vincent Crapanzano, personal communication and see Crapanzano (1992), stressing this also in personal communication: “it is less interesting to pose questions about knowing the emotion of the other or our own, but instead, it is important to pose questions about how we participate in each other’s emotions… in an emotional surround – in which we may exalt or disappear or succumb or disengage. It’s near impossible to see/conceptualise ourselves in the in-between experience. Objectification pushes us towards possession, pre-possessiveness, and possessive attribution and self-attribution.”
[xxvi] For example, in anthropology, see all chapters in Casey and Edgerton (2005), also Wulff (2007) who has prepared a Cultural Reader on emotions, also Svasek (2005, 2006 and 2007), Beatty (2004), and, of course, Lutz and White (1986).
[xxvii] Navaro-Yashin (2008:170) reflects on the desensitising effects of discourses rationalizing, flattening and normalising the political and proposes instead that we “sense the political” as it appears “often in phantasmic form, between absence and presence […] or in the recurring imaginaries and fantasies of statehood […] the meaning of existence […] must be sensed to be grasped, in the subdued tentativeness of time, in the fleeting or cursory remarks, in the weird surroundings.” (ibid.:187). If “sensing” here is the only way to grasp meaning, it might also be insightful to find out how such process of sensing is actually experienced by the anthropologist and related to anthropological theory in writing.
[xxviii] I argued that the clear anthropological disengagement with happiness might at first sight look like a political stance and a moralising philosophy, but its origins might well be in the difficulties anthropologists have had in dealing with lived emotions and “the transient” during fieldwork (Spencer 2008) which does lead to political and moral questions. Perhaps, one area we can now expand, being equipped with radical empiricism, is the anthropology of happiness and joy.
[xxix] Until recently, kinship research has been dominated by a lack of understanding of its experiential dimensions and to a large extent the responsibility for this formalism lies with the research methodologies devoid of engagement with the experiential. Jackson (1998: 207) argues that “kinship relations must also be understood existentially as a dynamic interplay between self and other in ever-altering contexts of identification” and he refers to the work of Travick (1990) who explores love in a Tamil family through sharing it; see also Harriss (2007) who shows how her affinity with fieldwork families assisted her analytical project of producing knowledge about love and politics in the field. See also the call for focus on the intimate aspects of kinship in Carsten (2004:9) and Shaw and Charsley (2006) whose intimate involvement in their field led them to see the importance of studying the role of emotion in marriage practices. Even though the authors do not describe their methods in the article, it is obvious that their own intimate relations in the field have brought such insight.
[xxx] Here radical empiricism could certainly enrich the predominantly cognitive approaches to emotion in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or in Computer Supported Coopertive Work (CSCW). In terms of science and technology studies, its main area of anthropological enquiry has thus far been concerned with the relationships between people, science and technology, Downey (2001), see also Hess (2001). As a relational approach, radical empiricism may be able to move the field forward by discussing the mechanisms and the obstacles by which these new forms of relatedness between persons and between persons and things are either facilitated or obstructed. By making this contribution we could help answer Bray’s (2007) reproach that anthropology, despite all its promises, has yet to fully realise its potential in this new domain of research. Paul Rabinow (2003), in his research on new technologies in the globalising world, has pointed to three key challenges for contemporary scholarship in these new domains: firstly, we must create new concepts and tools for conducting inquiries into the contemporary world in its “actuality” (as it exists – global networks, technologies and all); secondly, we must enquire in a manner that makes connections, relations, and disjunctions between “logos” and “ethos” apparent and available to oneself and to others (making those relations part of the inquiry itself as well as part of life); and, thirdly, we must take into account the pathos of this undertaking and open a space for it within the form under construction. Rabinow (ibid.) further proposes that fieldwork and participant observation are outdated terms which fail to capture contemporary anthropological studies that are concerned with a different range of objects; studies which failed to place “the self, in its relationship to itself, to others and to things, in motion as well as in question. The challenge, therefore, is to bring these diverse aspects together. This challenge includes the practice of enquiry in its experiential dimension” (ibid.:77).
[xxxi] I thank James Davies for his suggestions to an earlier version of this section.