Duna Sabri’s session with us on “Researching in your own institution” brought back a lot of memories of my MA in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University; the readings and references Duna gave would not be out of place on my Social Anthropology reading list. It made me consider the ideas of distance, ethics of research and the complexities of being both the researcher and subject (if you researched your own institution) and how to navigate that distance/closeness.
(extract from a relevant essay I wrote for my MA on Anthropological and Ethnographic methods) “Once reflexivity had become an intrinsic component of ethnography in the 1980s (Chua, High, Lau 2008:4), what you produce and how you record (write, photograph etc.) became part of the context and was included in the ethnography itself; the anthropologist themselves became ‘objects of enquiry and evidence’ (Chua, High, Lau 2008:5). (…) it touches on debates around the distance an anthropologist should have from their field site and the question of whether there always has to be a ‘stark dichotomy between native and anthropologist’ (Amit 2000:7). Abu-Lughod coins the term ‘halfies’ (1991:137) to describe anthropologists with mixed or multiple cultural identities that intersect with their chosen field sites and communities of study, although this idea of halves and wholes still plays into the native/anthropologist binary [student/lecturer, or institution/lecturer?]. In early feminist anthropology the argument of “woman as other” was made (Narayan 1993:673). Amit who, whilst discussing Sarah Pink’s work in Spain that took place with her husband and friends, alongside Amit’s own personal experience with that of a friend’s illness becoming part of her research, she implies a more blended and blurred boundary, in which the field becomes ‘incorporated’ into the anthropologist’s biography (Amit 2000:9-10).”