After an oh so long time in the field, I’ve finally got around to make a summary of some good advice I’ve returned to from time to time during my stay. They’re rather commonsensical knowledge for any graduate in anthropology, but it’s surprising how quickly I get accustomed to the details of everyday life, and thus stop paying attention… (from Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw, 1995)).
The working title of my project has been Communities in the making: Identity and belonging in postcolonial Paris and London. Initially, the idea was to do a similar project to the one I had done for my master thesis. However, after I came to Paris I quickly learnt that the situation here is quite different from the one in London 6 years ago. The first thing I realised was that it was no wonder my first fieldwork went pretty well, but – hélas – I yet don’t see any reasons for this one to follow suit…
The name of my blog is a sort of homage to the field diary that inspired me to start blogging: Jon Henrik among the Ifugaos. Lorenz, my Webmaster and the editor of www.antropologi.info, asked me ages ago to write a few words on why I decided to write a blog from my fieldwork. In fact, the answer isn’t as well-considered as Lorenz, a dedicated net publicist, might have thought. I just thought that what Jon Henrik had done was such a cool thing to do: It was nice to see what he was doing among the Ifuagos. However, after I started I have noticed that blogging sharpens the attention, just like taking a lot of photos (and probably painting) does; One starts to see motifs everywhere, and then one has to reflect on how to make the motif into a story so other people can understand what you want to tell them.