When fieldwork is forbidden
Ontological dilemmas, subjectivity and moral imperatives as constraints in the field
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2402864 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Maccarthy (0000-0001-5908-5967, Saint Mary's University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Publication date | 2024-08-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1466-1381 • E-ISSN: 1741-2714 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14661381241266916 |
| OpenAlex | W4401442861 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
Undertaking fieldwork in a remote location with limited health care and transportation comes with inherent risks, but doing so with a small child, in a place where understandings of illness and malice may be of a fundamentally different nature than in the ethnographer's home e, brings additional challenges and highlights the ethical dilemmas we may face in the field. This paper describes how continued fieldwork became impossibe when my infant son's illness led to dilemmas that precluded the continuation of fieldwork. I take this experience as a starting point to interrogate the nature of being and reality and its real-world affects when working cross-culturally, especially in the realm of "metahuman" actors; issues of gender, identity and power in a discipline that is coming to terms with its colonialist roots, and the ethics of fieldwork in precarious situations. It takes a "hesitant" approach to the writing of a reflexive ethnography that includes more than human agents in one of anthropology's most iconic locales
Aesthetics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Face (sociological concept · Field (mathematics · Identity (music · Political science · Power (physics · Realm · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics
Good company and violence
Gendered Fields
Mothering from the Field
Looking Back, Moving Forward
Anthropology and autobiography
The fame of Gawa
Stranger and friend
Doing Fieldwork while Parenting
Argonauts of the western Pacific
Jesus Lives in Me
Reforming men
Born again, again
Materialising Oceania
Decolonizing ethnographies
Sorcery and Witchcraft in Melanesia
Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea
Preying on those close to home
Being There’
Mothers in the Field
Fruit of the Motherland
Truth in Motion
Decolonizing Methodologies
The House of Lim
Some Implications of Medical Beliefs and Practices for Social Anthropology
Truth beyond doubt
I am anthropologist - But where is the field? On fieldwork, intimacy, and home
The Practice of Mothering
Antihero Care
To write or not to write
Sanguma and scepticism
Sorcery's the curse
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |