Dealing with Emotions in the Field and from the Field: The Researcher’s Role
Dealing with Emotions in the Field and from the Field: The Researcher’s Role

Summary/Abstract: Based on the analysis of a variety of ethnographic material – video oral interviews, recordings of rituals, research diaries and field notes – coming from fieldwork in four different places in Greece, I deal with the issue of managing the emotions/affects of both the researcher and the informants (emotions in the field), and of the implications of managing and analysing these emotions (emotions from the field) for the production of anthropological knowledge. More specifically, I analyse oral interviews in which the informants were asked to talk about “difficult” issues and ethnographic material from field researches to record rituals. The study of emotions/affects is linked to issues of fundamental importance for field research such as collection, analysis and interpretation of ethnographic material, reflexivity, positionality of the researcher, sensory learning, the agency of the body, the ethics of research, and ultimately the production of anthropological knowledge. Finally, such an approach contributes to overcoming the sharp divide between emotions and affects that is based on certain Western philosophies, for the sake of other, more encompassing approaches, that allow researchers to fully grasp the complexity of emotional experience.

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