The unbearable impossibility of fieldwork: ethnographic dilemmas, moral laboratories and narrative phenomenology

Journal article

Writing ethnography is a creative experience. It produces outputs and, more importantly, it leaves traces. However, such creativity is of a particular kind, for it is mutually poietic. Objects are subjects, and the practice of fieldwork makes and re-makes subjects in unexpected and indecipherable ways. From this perspective, therefore, understanding the other, knowing the world and being ethically engaged with both appear ephemeral and, as a consequence, fundamentally unsubstantial. It is as if ethnography initiated a set of possibilities while at the same time incorporating these as impossibilities. In this sense I take ethnography to be utopian because its aims are inherently unattainable: looking at the world through the eyes of the other, pretending to do so without hijacking the other’s perspective and establishing an ethical relationship of mutuality and fairness is always impossible in the concrete, everyday practice of ethnographers. In this article, I intend to explore this utopian character throughout the examination of three themes: the unattainable perfection of inter-subjectivity, the unattainable perfection of epistemology in the social sciences, and the unattainable perfection of the ethic of fieldwork.

Authors: Maggio, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 190-206
• Publication date: 2016-04-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-04-30
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: JASO