PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE FIELD OR THE MAKING OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SELF
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE FIELD OR THE MAKING OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SELF

Summary/Abstract: Doing fieldwork, a crucial formative experience for an anthropologist, is an occasion for reworking one’s theoretical and epistemic uncertainties through repeated confrontations with the empirical realities of research. The ideal of participant observation is increasingly difficult to pursue in fragmented and complex field sites, but the aspiration remains for a way of being in the field that guarantees meaningful interactions between the researchers and their interlocutors. Based on my field research in a peri-urban community in southern Ghana , this paper investigates some of the options available for negotiating and asserting an anthropologist’s place in the world while in the field. I maintain that, in spite of ethical complications, the most reliable strategy of accessing knowledge is by integrating in the field as a person and building relationships with interlocutors in the same way. In a web of partial views of the world, we must concede the impossibility of representing the other accurately and completely and our main responsibility becomes that of assembling and representing these views from our own partial position in the shape of complex, fluid, fragmented, yet sound knowledge. This is knowledge that needs to be aware of its limits and make them visible through exposing the scaffolding of its production.

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