riendship and fieldwork: A retrospect as “foreword”
Friendship and Fieldwork: A Retrospect as “Foreword”
SJAAK VAN DER GEEST
To Kwasi Nimrod Asante-Darko
Friend and co-researcher
In a call for papers plus introduction for a sympo-
slum on ethnography and subjectivity, ATHENA Mc-
CLEAN and ANnneTTE LEI8BING (2011: 190) suggested
'hree pathways for bringing autobiography and
>thnography together: (1) exploring the influence
9f personal life on research; (2) exploring—vice-
versa—the impact of research on personal life; and
(3) using ethnography as self-exploration. All three
perspectives are covered in this double special issue
of Curare. What these three pathways have in com-
non is that they all look at anthropological research
as a personal and subject-bound event that is much
nore than “collecting data;” it is an experience that
affects and follows the researcher throughout his/
her life and helps the process of self-exploration
hrough understanding the other. In contrast to the
;oncept of “othering” put forward by critics of orien-
calism and by postmodernists, the emphasis here lies
an what we could call “selfing.” The encounter with
‘he other leads the researcher to reflect on his/her
wn being. EDWwARD E. EvAns-PrRiıTcHARD’s answer
Oo the question of why he travelled to such a remote
and harsh environment (of the Azande) and took an
interest in such a strange phenomenon as witcheraft
provides a—perhaps apocryphal—anecdote in sup-
port of this. He had not so much been interested in
the Azande, he replied, but mainly in himself. The
Azande provided the answer to a question that had
vexed him for a long time: what is rationality?
In the introduction to the special issue that re-
sulted from the abovementioned symposium on
zubjectivities in fieldwork, we (VAN DER GEEsT etal.
2012: 12) quoted Evans-Pritchard about what field-
work had done to him:
“I wonder whether anthropologists always realize
‘hat in the course of their fieldwork they can be, and
sometimes are, transformed by the people they are
naking a study of, that in a subtle kind of way and pos-
sibly unknown to themselves they have what used to be
called ‘gone native.’ If an anthropologist is a sensitive
person it could hardly be otherwise. This is a highly
personal matter and I will only say that I learnt from
African ‘primitives’ much more than they learnt from
me, much that I was never taught at school, something
more of courage, endurance, patience, resignation, and
forbearance that I had no great understanding of be-
iore. Just to give one example: I would say that I learnt
more about the nature of God and our human predica-
ment from the Nuer than I ever learnt at home” (EvaAns-
7RITCHARD 1976: 245).
Obviously, the mutual “lessons” that are ex-
changed between researcher and “others” are the
consequence of the anthropological intersubjec-
ive research approach, but it also follows from the
length of time that the two players interact and com-
municate, In my case, I have continued visiting the
same Ghanaian community for research from 1969
ıntil today. Fieldwork is not a fleeting passing-by
ut an extended and continuous meeting, which
generates affection and mutual expectations. The
sditors of this special Curare issue therefore rightly
ink subjectivity and emotional involvement to the
‚Oong-term nature of ethnographic research.
But before I delve more generally into the na-
ture, perils and opportunities of the often close rela-
tionships formed during ethnographic fieldwork, let
me first recount some memories from my own first
anthropological fieldwork and a few—somewhat
contradictory—reflections that I wrote shortly after
chat research period. The research was a case study
of an extended family (abusua) in the rural town
of Kwahu Tafo, Southern Ghana. The focus—on
conflicts in the family—was a reaction to the over-
ıomogeneous picture of African family life that the
structural functionalist generation of anthropolo-
zists had painted.
Kwasi Asante-Darko!
Many years ago, the Polish philosopher and anthro-
pologist ALICJA IWANSKA (1957) wrote that North
American farmers divided the world around them
into three categories: landscape, machinery and
Jeople (quoted by SMALLEY 1958)*. Remarkably, in
1er vision not all human beings belonged in the cat-
2gory of people. She noted that Native Americans,
for example, belonged to the “landscape” and the
Curare 38(2015)1+2: 38
