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“How Did It Feel for You?”: Teaching and Learning (by) Emotional Reflexivity in an Undergraduate Fieldwork Training
Abstract
How can emotional reflexivity be incorporated into teaching fieldwork? This chapter addresses this question by discussing teaching experiences in the context of fieldwork training that was embedded in an engaged anthropology project. It focuses on the discussion of two students’ emotional experiences in the field that took place during a class session. It shows how students’ processes of understanding can benefit from a group-based collective reflection of field episodes among peers. The expression and discussion of emotions in classrooms, though, are inevitably determined by the university context. The chapter investigates such socio-political dimensions of ‘classroom emotions’. In order to challenge persistent academic ‘emotional regimes’, learning and practicing emotional reflexivity requires a protected space and a self-reflexive, empathic teacher. Firstly, the teacher becoming aware of his/her own emotions in a university teaching environment and decoding their meaning helps her/him to become more sensitive towards students and to address emphatically their concerns, fears, and insecurities. Secondly, bringing socio-political reflexivity from the anthropological field into the classroom helps to critically evaluate teaching practices and situations. It further supports students in becoming ‘politically reflexive practitioners’ who are able to critically reflect on, engage with, and transform their learning and work surroundings.
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Questo Forum raccoglie brevi interventi di antropologi che con ruoli diversi lavorano in differenti contesti universitari, allo scopo di riflettere su recenti esperienze di riforme neoliberiste del sistema pubblico dell'istruzione superiore. I contributi esplorano processi di neoliberalizzazione dell'università e cambiamenti istituzionali in corso in Australia e Nuova Zelanda, Romania, Danimarca, Grecia, Finlandia, Messico, Stati Uniti, Olanda, Spagna, Canada e Regno Unito. L'obiettivo è quello di costruire una piattaforma che possa ospitare riflessioni critiche sulle trasformazioni attuali dell'accademia e delle relative implicazioni per il futuro dell'antropologia. Auspichiamo che il Forum serva anche a indurre i colleghi alle prese con le conseguenze del vigente regime di austerità a formare una coalizione in favore di una idea di università diversa da quella oggi dominante.
Contributi di Cris Shore & Susan Wright, Vintilă Mihăilescu, Sarah F. Green, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina & Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, Tracey Heatherington, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Noelle Molé Liston, Susana Narotzky, Jaro Stacul, Meredith Welch-Devine, Jon P. Mitchell.
Although much has been written about “socialization” and “emotion” in different cultures, these two topics have rarely been systematically combined and analyzed from the perspective of ontogenetic development. Drawing on approaches from developmental psychology and cultural anthropology, we examine how cultural models of emotion and their corresponding emotionally arousing child-rearing practices lead to culture-specific pathways of emotion development among the Bara (Madagascar) and the Tao (Taiwan). We focus especially on socializing emotions, which we define in terms of their function to orient individuals toward cultural norms and values and to inculcate social conformity. Based on empirical data gathered in long-term ethnographic field studies, we provide evidence that the Bara emphasize “fear” and the Tao “anxiety” as focal socializing emotions.
In this article, I draw on my doctoral field work in Berlin (2008-2010), on the illness experiences of undocumented Latin American labor migrants, and on my work as an activist for the Berlin-based NGO Medibüro, an anti-racist migrant health organization. I highlight how my attempts to 'give back', and the various forms of engagements and commitments that resulted from it, shaped my relationships with actors in the field, the data I gathered, and the analytical framework I employed. I offer solutions on how to address these (unintended) effects of activism, and highlight the unique potential of activist research in regard to the forms of data available to the researcher and in gaining and retaining field access. By probing into some of its concrete methodological and analytical implications, I explore how to do activist research.
Anthropological research with street-related children, adolescents, and young adults raises epistemological, methodical, and ethical predicaments. In this article, I illustrate the advantages of an anthropology that acknowledges the ethnographer's emotions as valuable data when conducting research with marginalized communities. By drawing on my own experiences when conducting long-term fieldwork, I argue that systematic self-reflexivity and an emotionally aware epistemology enhance both the anthropologist's emotional literacy and his or her understanding of informants and interlocutors. The integration of the ethnographer's emotions in the analysis and interpretation of ethnographic data can assist in formulating anthropological theory, challenging the limits of traditional empiricism and raising emotions to a category of epistemic value.
Participation entails bodily engagement. Participant observation has been integral to anthropological fieldwork. Although cross-cultural ideas of the body have been elaborated theoretically in social anthropology, the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy has privileged the cerebral in the understanding of fieldwork practice and the bodily experience of the fieldworker has been under-scrutinized. In seeking to rectify this situation, this chapter draws on extensive dialogues with leading anthropologists about their fieldwork. Examples are selected from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Malaysia and Europe. The anthropologists’ conscious and hitherto unarticulated bodily adaptations are disentangled, and research is examined as a process of physical labour, bodily interaction and sensory learning which constitutes a foundation for the production of written texts.
Keywords:emotion; narrative; ethnographic writing; fieldwork; literature
ABSTRACT In this article, I present the case for a narrative approach to emotion, identifying conceptual and presentational weaknesses in standard ethnographic approaches. First-person and confessional accounts, increasingly offered as a corrective to the distancing and typifying effects of cultural analysis, are shown to be unreliable; shared experience turns out to be an illusion. Instead, I suggest we look to literary examples for lessons in how to capture the full significance of emotion in action. Here, however, we reach the limits of ethnography.
This contribution is concerned with the 'emotional regime(s)' (e.g. Reddy 2002) of academic anthropology, and the processes and practices through which 'the field' continues to be constructed as an entity separate from everyday life. 'The field' has been the subject of considerable attention in recent years, as have the textual, social, and conceptual strategies of distanciation involved in its construction. The role of emotions and emotion work in this process, on the other hand, has generally been overlooked. In this article, I draw on my own changing emotions towards the subjects of research during my postgraduate training to show how particular feelings towards the subject of research were legitimised and their expression and sensation encouraged-while others were delegitimised and discouraged-through educational practices such as seminars. The article shows that the transformation in emotional tone (and experience) involved-not the suppression of emotion, as has often been argued in anthropological writings-but a change in emotional style. The paper argues that this change in emotional style-and the 'emotional regime' that supported it-contributed to the 'Othering' of the subjects of research, as well as recasting researcher and researched in a hierarchical relation to each other. Thus, the article suggests that emotional apprenticeship in the academic setting plays a key role in the enduring construction of 'the field' as involving distance and separation from personal areas of activity.
This article puts forward an experiential teaching method for becoming aware of, getting access to, and giving meaning to the sensory experiences that constitute and shape learning processes during social anthropological fieldwork. While social anthropologists use all their senses in the field, the preparation and processing of fieldwork are limited to certain senses. In accordance with the academic habitus, it is common to discuss theoretical texts pre-fieldwork and almost exclusively rely on making meaning of written fieldwork material afterwards. While cognitively produced textual sources and techniques of verbalisation (e.g. presentations) are extensively focused on, the body, emotional and sensory experiences are often overlooked in academic discourse and practices. The proposed experiential method integrates the dimensions of sensory experiences in classes, colloquiums and workshops, and brings into practice a teaching approach that includes the analysis of embodied knowledge and stresses its importance as an ethnographic source.
In this article, I argue that the transformative learning potential of anthropology can be achieved only if emotions of anthropologists in the field are understood, articulated and added to the mainstream strengths of our qualitative method. This requires: turning our attention to emotions in research and learning; liberating emotions from the �extraordinary,� �apolitical� and �feminine�; understanding the emotional practices and regimes of our discipline and how they shape knowledge production; and, adding emotional reflexivity to the reflexive project of anthropology. I discuss some psychological defences evident in anthropological work that may be supported by academic practices, and several examples from published anthropological self-reflection, which look at the practical implications of emotions on methodology and analysis. I focus on accounts by two doctoral researchers to demonstrate the crucial importance of emotional reflexivity in knowledge-making and in teaching and learning anthropology, particularly fieldwork. I conclude by raising pedagogical questions and making some tentative practical suggestions for the teaching and learning of anthropological fieldwork.
List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction: emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz 2. Shifting politics in Bedouin love poetry Lila Abu-Lughod 3. Moral discourse and the rhetoric of emotions Geoffrey M. White 4. Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse Catherine A. Lutz 5. Topographies of the self: praise and emotion in Hindu India Arjun Appadurai 6. Shared and solidarity sentiments: the discourse of friendship, play, and anger in Bhatgaon Donald Brenneis 7. Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion Judith T. Irvine 8. Language in the discourse of the emotions Daniel V. Rosenberg 9. Untouchability and the fear of death in a Tamil song Margaret Trawick Index.
In dem Beitrag werden das Verwaltungshandeln in der Flüchtlingskrise und mögliche Ursachen der aufgetretenen Vollzugsprobleme untersucht. Im Fokus stehen vor allem die Vollzugsrealität und die Verwaltungsvarianz im Bereich der Erstaufnahme von Flüchtlingen auf der Länderebene sowie die durch das BAMF als auch die Bundes länder mittlerweile begonnenen Reformen im Verwaltungsvollzugssystem. Leitfrage des Aufsatzes ist, ob das bestehende Verwaltungsvollzugssystem nicht nur in den jeweiligen Zuständigkeiten reformbedürftig ist, sondern ob es auch zu einer neuen Zuständigkeitsverteilung im Bundesstaat kommen sollte.
A coherent account of emotional change must find a dynamic, a vector of alteration, outside the discursive structures and normative practices that have monopolized ethnographic attention in research on affect. But this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional expression. Emotion talk and emotional gestures are not well characterized by the notion of ''discourse'' derived from the poststructuralist theories of Foucault or by that of ''practice'' derived from the theoretical writings of Bourdieu, Giddens, and others. These concepts do not capture the two-way character of emotional utterances and acts, their unique capacity to alter what they ''refer'' to or what they ''represent''-a capacity which makes them neither ''constative'' nor ''performative'' utterances but a third type of communicative utterance entirely, one that has never received adequate theoretical formulation. An attempt is made to formulate a framework for emotional utterances, and the framework is applied to a number of examples.
Fieldwork is a complex research method. In anthropology, it includes the qualitative method of participant observation and is still a central research method of the subject. In this article I focus on the qualitative research process and its methodological and personal challenges. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific discourses implicated profound changes in theory and methods concerning the qualitative research approaches. This also affected the formulation of appropriate quality criteria. Two of these new standards are self-/reflection and openness. Today, both of them are theoretically taken for granted as quality criteria in qualitative-oriented research processes, but hardly supported methodically in research practice. The following should outline how and why these academic standards and personal needs of the researcher can and should be considered equally for conducting fieldwork as openly as possible, being of rich data and without lasting emotional burdens on the researcher. This focus led to a specially developed method—the Personal Field-Reflection (PFR)—derived from the phenomenological approaches of Existential Analysis. PFR supports self-care, emotional openness and improves the understanding of one’s own situation related perceptions, emotions and valuations. This self-reflexive method promotes the transparency of the researcher’s inner dialogue in the field situation and focuses on the inner and outer relational dynamics as a continuum.
Feldforschung ist eine komplexe Forschungsmethode. In der Ethnologie beinhaltet sie die qualitative Methode der Teilnehmenden Beobachtung und gilt nach wie vor als zentrale Forschungsmethode des Faches. In diesem Artikel möchte ich mich dem qualitativen Forschungsprozess und seinen methodologischen wie persönlichen Herausforderungen widmen. Die wissenschaftlichen Diskurse v. a. in den 1960ern und 1970ern brachten für die qualitativen Forschungsansätze tiefgreifende Veränderungen in Theorie und Methode. Dies betraf auch die Formulierung von adäquaten Gütekriterien. Reflexion und Offenheit gewannen dabei an Bedeutung. Beide sind heute als Gütekriterien in qualitativ orientierten Forschungsprozessen theoretisch selbstverständlich, jedoch in der Forschungspraxis kaum methodisch unterstützt. Daher soll hier anhand einer speziell dafür entwickelten Methode, der Personalen Feld-Reflexion, aufgezeigt werden, wie und warum wissenschaftliche Standards und persönliche Bedürfnisse der ForscherInnen gleichermaßen berücksichtigt werden können und sollen, um die Feldforschung möglichst offen, datenreich und ohne anhaltender emotionaler Belastungen durchführen zu können. Die Einbeziehung von Selbstfürsorge, emotionaler Offenheit, situationsbezogenen Gefühlen, als auch des inneren Dialogs des oder der Forschenden sind dabei in Relation und Wechselwirkung zum „Anderen“, zum „Beobachteten“ von wissenschaftlichem Interesse. Diese Methode wurde aus den phänomenologischen Ansätzen der Existenzanalyse abgeleitet.
'Kranksein in der Illegalität' ist die erste Ethnographie, die anhand detaillierter Fallstudien Einblicke in die Lebenswelt und die Krankheitserfahrungen undokumentierter Lateinamerikaner/-innen in Deutschland bietet. Die Autorin zeigt, wie Arbeitsmigrantinnen und -migranten ohne Aufenthaltsstatus ihren Lebensalltag ohne soziale Absicherung organisieren, und nimmt die Probleme und Lücken in der medizinischen Versorgung kritisch unter die Lupe. Das Buch wendet sich nicht nur an die Medizinethnologie und die Migrationsforschung, sondern auch an diejenigen, die in der Praxis mit Gesundheit, Migration und Illegalität befasst sind.
This contribution presents an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to emotions and social structures. Combining theoretical accounts from the neuro-sciences, psychology, and sociology, the role of emotion in the micro-macro link is investigated and the social components of emotion on different levels of analysis are examined. Micro-level analysis explores societal influences on the interaction of cognition and emotion, emphasizing the role of appraisals and of emotion circuits on the brain level. Analysis of the meso-level investigates how emotions are elicited and expressed in social interactions and macro-level investigation scrutinizes how instances of social structural configurations affect the processing and regulation of emotion. The authors conclude with a conceptualization of emotions as a bi-directional mediator between large-scale social structures and individual behavior.
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