Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience

289 Pages·2010·3.62 MB·English

by  James Davies

Emotions in the Field

Emotions in the Field
The Psychology and Anthropology
of Fieldwork Experience
Edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emotions in the field : the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience / edited by
James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-6939-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-6940-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ethnology--Fieldwork--Psychological aspects. 2. Emotions--Anthropological aspects.
I. Davies, James (James Peter) II. Spencer, Dimitrina. GN346.E46 2010
305.8'00723--dc22
2009046034
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Introduction: Emotions in the Field 1
James Davies
Part I Psychology of Field Experience
1 From Anxiety to Method in Anthropological Fieldwork:
An Appraisal of George Devereux’s Enduring Ideas 35
Michael Jackson
2 “At the Heart of the Discipline”:
Critical Reflections on Fieldwork 55
Vincent Crapanzano
3 Disorientation, Dissonance, and Altered Perception
in the Field 79
James Davies
4 Using Emotion as a Form of Knowledge
in a Psychiatric Fieldwork Setting 98
Francine Lorimer
vi Contents
Part II Political Emotions in the Field
5 Hating Israel in the Field:
On Ethnography and Political Emotions 129
Ghassan Hage
6 Tian’anmen in Yunnan:
Emotions in the Field during a Political Crisis 155
Elisabeth Hsu
7 Emotional Engagements:
Acknowledgement, Advocacy, and Direct Action 171
Lindsay Smith and Arthur Kleinman
Part III Non-cognitive Field Experiences
8 Emotional Topographies:
The Sense of Place in the Far North 191
Kirsten Hastrup
9 What Counts as Data? 212
Tanya Luhrmann
10 Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or,
the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience 239
Joanna Cook
Index 267
Acknowledgments
To realize The compleTion of This volume, we relied upon the generous support of
so many individuals. To all of you we owe enormous gratitude. We thank, firstly,
Professor David Parkin, whose kindness, diplomacy, and intellectual acumen
were a constant resource. Other important people include Professor Marcus
Banks, Professor David Gellner, Professor Del Loewenthal, Professor Roland
Littlewood, and Dr. Louise Braddock. We thank all those involved in the early
meetings at Oxford University and the seminars held at Harvard University.
A special thanks to Michael Jackson for bringing some excellent scholars on
board, and for his tireless intellectual guidance and advice. We thank Nick James
from the Society of Indexers for his good work on the index. We are also grate-
ful to Peter Agree and Jennifer Hammer for their suggestions and guidance.
And finally we thank Jennifer Helé, who was instrumental in helping the project
along during the first stages of review and editorial work.
We also thank the British Academy, the Institute for Social and Cultural
Anthropology (University of Oxford), the Centre for Therapeutic Education
(Roehampton University), and the Oxford Anthropology Society for their fi-
nancial support and institutional backing.
vii

Contributors
Joanna cook is George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Southeast Asian Stud-
ies at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. research explored
vipassanā meditation in Thailand as a monastic practice. Her current research
focuses on the use of Buddhist meditation techniques in medical and health-
care practices in Thailand. Her forthcoming monograph is titled Meditation in
Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life.
vincent crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and
Anthropology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. His
publications include The Hamadsha: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (1981), Tuhami:
A Portrait of a Moroccan (1985), Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (1986),
Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation
(1992), and Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary Philosophical Anthropol-
ogy (2003). At present, he is finishing a book on the Hakris.
James Davies, coeditor of this volume, is a member of St. Cross College at the
University of Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate in social anthropology.
He is also a qualified and practicing psychotherapist working in the NHS at Ox-
ford and a senior lecturer in anthropology and psychotherapy in the School of
Human and Life Sciences at Roehampton University, London. He has undertaken
fieldwork in Nepal, where he studied Tibetan monastic communities. He is the
author of The Making of Psychotherapists: An Anthropological Analysis (2009).
Ghassan hage is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Association and the
University of Melbourne’s Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and
ix