Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid is studying poetry slam in Paris and has become one of them she is studying as we see in the video of herself - the anthropologist as slammeuse. She seems to be in quite an intensive period of fieldwork and is wondering: Is "going native" part of the darker arts of fieldworkers’ repertoir?
She writes:
Both my fieldworks have been in environments close to my own interests. I could have been – and I surely would have loved to be – hanging around with policial activists in Brixton and mucisians in Tower Hamlets as well as slammeurs and slammeuses in Belleville, even without the excuse of doing fieldwork. Partly, I see this as a more honest anthropology as it is entirely based on the idea of an anthropology without radical difference, and more so, I don’t have to fake or hide anything – not what kind of information I’m looking for, neither my political views, my artistic interests and my way of life in any sense. On the other hand, as I’ve found myself asking the last week; what if I’m faking it all (so well that I believe it myself!), getting access through this perhaps naïve enthusiasm.
>> read the whole article in her blog
SEE ALSO:
Panic, joy and tears during fieldwork: Anthropology Matters 1/2007 about emotions
Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork
Doing Fieldwork Among Poets and Rebels in Paris - Interview with Cicilie Fagerlid
You make it sound like something seamy. Let me just say that doing fieldwork online is less exhausting because one can easily retreat from being a researcher by turning one’s computer off, whereas when you are in the field physically, you’re always wearing your researcher hat and therefore always obsessively cataloguing and observing everything around you. Still, I kind of miss such complete immersion.