This reflexive paper presents the issues around my changing identity/identities during, and after, ethnographic fieldwork "at home" in South London, studying homeopathy and Tai Chi in the community. I will firstly explore this change of identity as a rite of passage using Wengle's notion of symbolic death of identity. This analysis, while useful, is limited in that it can be seen to over-essentialise the concept of identity. I will go on to show how my shifting identities in and after fieldwork were not solely the result of an individual psychological process but were constructed in contextual interaction with others as an embodied participant. It is my belief that ‘going native’ aided my understanding of the embodied experience of being part of alternative groups, but made coming out of the field a difficult time emotionally.
Introduction
In becoming very involved in fieldwork relationships and fully participating as an embodied and social being, the ethnographer inevitably becomes changed by the research. So it is not just a matter of ‘being’ in the field, but also of ‘becoming’. Hastrup suggests that "one is not completely absorbed but one is no longer the same" ( Hastrup 1995:19). Is the anthropologist changed forever by fieldwork or is there also a process of reversal of change? And what effect does this have on the emotional life of the anthropologist?
In this paper I will analyse issues surrounding my own changing identity as an anthropologist at ‘home’ through my fieldwork and post-fieldwork periods researching alternative medicine in South London.
I will explore this change of identity firstly as a rite of passage (Van Gennep 1960) using Wengle's notion of symbolic death of identity (Wengle 1988). I will conclude that while personally helpful to me in making sense of a period of reverse culture shock (post-fieldwork), Wengle’s analysis over-essentialises and over-individualises the concept of identity. I will go on to show how my shifting identities in and after the field were constructed in interaction with others as an embodied participant.
Anthropology at home: Engaging in the world of alternatives
Doing anthropology at home made me feel like a second-rate anthropologist, as my fellow students headed off for Mexico, Kenya and Nepal, and I headed for South London. I knew that studying my own culture would pose certain challenges, notably the difficulty of ‘making the familiar strange’. However, on the whole, it felt like an easy option: no language to learn, no horrible diseases to acquire, and no sitting alone at night longing for the comfort of one’s own bed.
During the initial stages of my fieldwork, the problematic relationship between fieldworker and fieldwork often expressed in methodological writings did not seem relevant to me. I loved my fieldwork, I was enchanted by the alternative communities I was studying, and rather than feeling like a fish out of water I felt I had "come home". In July I wrote in my fieldnotes: "This PhD is the best fun I’ve ever had in my working life. I really do get up on Monday morning and want to do what I am doing". I looked forward to my fieldwork outings, I liked and respected my informants, and grew to share many of their beliefs. After four years of researching biomedical contexts in which I frequently felt alien, I came to feel much more at home studying the world of alternative medicine.
I had been an acupuncture user for some time, but my approach to alternative medicine had been a fairly instrumental one. I had not been fully engaged in the lifestyle associated with alternative medicine, its discourses and practices, because I was bit of a sceptic. However as my fieldwork progressed I became more and more interested in and excited by alternative ideas and practices. I can distinctly remember one night, five months into my fieldwork, coming home from a meeting in which a holistic cancer doctor had addressed the members of a summer school. Feeling exhilaration, excitement and engagement with my data I scribbled my fieldnotes well into the early hours, too over-stimulated to sleep. I wanted them to capture the intense experience. Some of that heightened emotion and enthusiasm lingers on in my receptivity to my surroundings, and the group I became part of for that evening:
I feel great because I was made to feel good this evening. The place was beautiful. The evening sun was shining on the hills, I watched a heron take off, chased by two geese wheeling around in front of me. I saw a solitary figure in blue wander through that landscape and felt good. Then the talk. The atmosphere in the room was buzzing. It felt good to be alive. There was a nice energy in the room... At the end of the talk [the speaker] said "Lets have questions and do a meditation". It was great. He put relaxing music on in the background and said loads of comforting things. In particular, that we were unique and needed to give ourselves unconditional love. He had us visualising our hearts and energy flowing from us, out to our neighbours and the world. About three times during this I felt amazing. Like I was going to explode with energy. I wanted almost to shout out with joy. When he said hug yourselves and don’t worry about other people or about judging yourself, I didn’t want to hug myself but I fantasised about shouting out loud a kind of cowboy "Yeehah" kind of a yell. And I felt close to tears. To be in that room with all those people meditating was fantastic. I felt like I was in a community of people I wanted to be in (2nd August 2000).
In December I gave a paper to the anthropology department and talked about my embodied experiences of Tai Chi as a participant observer. The feedback from colleagues included the observation that I seemed to have had some kind of conversion experience, and that I was insufficiently reflexive about my experiences. I experienced the sub-text as "Oh no, she is going native", but refused to disengage from the process, feeling it was taking me into an area of rich data.
Firmly committed now to exploring the alternative medicine lifestyle, I regularly attended a Positive Living Group, and weekly Tai Chi classes. I continued to go native through my homeopathy fieldwork. Over the course of my year’s attendance on an adult education ‘Introduction to Homeopathy’ class, I shifted from a more detached observer position at the start, just coming to learn about the concepts of homeopathy, to thinking quite seriously about enrolling at homeopathy college and training to be a practitioner.
An indication of my having ‘gone native’ and being cut adrift from my previous nine year identity as an academic came in June of 2001 towards the end of my fieldwork year. I returned to the university to attend an academic conference. I went to the opening plenary of the conference, participated in the usual coffee break chat and attended some of the presentations. A couple of days later I admitted to a colleague that I had hated the whole experience. The conference format seemed as strange to me as the daily practices of Fijian natives might have if I had travelled further afield for my fieldwork. I felt alienated from the whole procedure and worried whether I would want to return to my academic life at the end of my research. I rushed back to the warm protectiveness of my fieldwork groups, and seriously started to consider a possible new life training to be a homeopath.
Towards the end of my fieldwork I began reading about New Age spirituality to make sense of my data. Riches’ paper on "The Holistic Person" made me think that maybe I was a New Age person, but had never quite realised it before (Riches 2000). During the course of my research my response to alternative therapies and New Age ideas shifted towards a greater level of openness. I was now extremely open minded about things that had made me cringe with scepticism at the start – crystals and angels, absent healing, and auras, being some examples – and I began to believe that there might well be something in them.
During the course of this fieldwork period (April 2000-July 2001) several key events occurred in my own life. In May, I split up with my long-term partner. In October, my mother had a stroke, and the following February she died. During this difficult time I found both the homeopathy class and the vaccination group (two sites in my multi-site ethnography) to be places where I found support and succour.
Before I discuss the possible link between my own life events and my fieldwork experience, let me finish this trajectory with my post-fieldwork emotions.
Leaving the field
As I began to leave the field things changed subtly. The first change was that I left my twice weekly Tai Chi class that had been such a loved part of my life for 18 months. It was not a conscious decision. I just found myself finding excuses not to go and have not been back since June. I began to find the homeopathy meditation group saturated by overly weird discussions of past lives and guardian angels, and stopped attending. By now these settings felt like my life, not my fieldwork, and it was difficult to give them up. I was troubled by my slow disengagement from the field and the return of my scepticism, and e-mailed my supervisor:
I have been having some reflections about the difficulties of coming out of the field – it seems particularly difficult when you are doing anthropology at home as there is no ritual journey to separate you from your place of fieldwork. Now I am giving up all my fieldwork groups and interests, my life is very empty and I am having to rebuild it. What did I do with my time before my fieldwork, I keep wondering? (16th August, 2001).
I subsequently wrote about this issue in my journal:
I have been thinking about my identity leaving the field. I've started to wonder how interested I am in all this stuff as a way of life. I got swept along by their enthusiasm. The fact is I am not doing Tai Chi now, I don’t want to train to be a homeopath, and when I read the Alternatives brochure with it’s adverts for crystal colleges and so on I find myself reverting to my natural scepticism, even distaste. Read John Diamond (2001) on Homeopathy [a critical and cynical view] and began to agree with him. It’s all been very unsettling as I have started to ask myself who am I, what do I believe, and what am I interested in? This ethnography seems like a brutal thing having to go into other people’s ways of life and then divorce yourself painfully from it (Journal 21st August 2001).
This was a very difficult few months for me. Nine months on, I am happily reintegrated into the academic world. Presenting my early analysis at an academic conference in January, I enjoyed myself and didn’t find the format strange at all. I have reclaimed my academic identity and am still shaping my identity outside work. I still visit the homeopath that I started with as part of my fieldwork, but am continually racked with scepticism about whether it works and whether to give it up.
The psychology of ethnography
Making sense of my trajectory of fieldwork, and the associated emotional journey was aided substantially when I discovered Ethnographers in the Field: The Psychology of Research (Wengle 1988). Starting from Margaret Mead’s idea that "Anthropology is fieldwork", Wengle interviewed a number of fellow anthropologists about their experiences of fieldwork.
He analysed the fieldwork process using Van Gennep’s (1960) concept of the three stages of a rite of passage: separation, transition (or the liminal stage) and reintegration. Wengle suggests that the transition phase of fieldwork involves a loss of identity and threat of disintegration of the self, which can be seen as a symbolic death. Identity is continually negotiated through cultural practices and through having ourselves mirrored back to us through interacting with significant others, and people like ourselves. When this is all taken away, the person’s sense of identity can founder. Wengle suggests that the emotional experiences of our upbringing and life experiences will lead to some anthropologists being more vulnerable to loss of self than others.
In order to cope with this threat to identity, fieldworkers employ psychological strategies to maintain a sense of identity. These strategies can be both defensive, bolstering up the individual’s original sense of identity, and reparative, adopting a new one. They can happen both in the field and afterwards. In the former category Wengle finds anthropologists maintain links with their home culture through clothes and customs from home, writing letters, dreaming of the past, avoiding sexual relations and craving familiar foods. Sometimes fieldworkers seek out individuals who mirror their identity back to themselves. This can be through contact with supervisors, or through selection of informants who are similar to the anthropologist. Perhaps, for instance, individuals who are more analytical in their thinking.
The alternative strategy of adopting a new identity, what he calls secondary identification, is more familiarly known as the concept of ‘going native’. He suggests that in the light of the threats to identity, any identity is better than none. To internalise the other's culture reduces anxiety and gives the anthropologist a sense of belonging.
The threat to identity is not just experienced in the field, the experience of ‘culture shock’, but can also be experienced on exiting the field, ‘reverse culture shock’. The third stage of the rite of passage, re-integration, involves the building of a new identity, that of the fully-fledged anthropologist. The creation and maintenance of this identity is achieved through interaction with supervisors, peers and academic communities, and through academic publishing.
My strategy of ‘becoming New Age’ can be interpreted using these ideas. With my own identity shaken by serious life events, the new identity on offer provided comfort and I was quick to ‘go native’. As a result, my fieldwork period was not experienced as stressful, but enjoyable. The stress for me came with an experience of reverse culture shock, of discovering my New Age persona to be purely a fieldwork survival strategy, and the attendant anxieties about reclaiming my initial identity.
At the time of my post fieldwork angst, I felt Wengle's account matched my own fieldwork experiences extremely well. His comments on the vulnerability of those with particular life experiences seemed to fit my troubled year of difficult life events, and made sense of the difficult emotions I suffered post fieldwork. Nowhere else in anthropology had I read so explicitly about the emotional journey of fieldwork. In some senses it was therapeutic to construct my experiences as a psychological journey.
Having come through this difficult phase of post-fieldwork I now find myself to be more critical of his conception of identity. Wengle has fallen into the trap of essentialising identity as a relatively stable and fixed property residing within the individual. In this sense he is operating from within a psychological paradigm of explanation. If instead identity is seen as a property of interaction and as a negotiated process then it is easier to see that identities are always shifting according to the contexts and the participants.
A more interactional view of identity change
Whilst I can accept Wengle’s view that my own life events may have predisposed me to react in a particular way to my field experiences, I would now say as much of an impetus to identity change came through interaction with informants in the field. My enthusiasm for the alternative lifestyle was one that was developed in interaction with others as a process over time.
Early in my fieldwork I reacted with some scepticism to ‘New Age ideas’. After discussing astrology with one of the members of the positive living group at my second meeting, I ruminated in my fieldnotes about my problems with believing this view of the world:
Jasmine's a psychic into astrology and this is where I have trouble. Some astrological explanation for things going wrong is acceptable. But the thought of psychic phone lines I'm afraid makes me snigger and feel 'Oh god it's so New Agey and I wont be able to bear it and keep a straight face'
However it soon became clear as my fieldwork progressed that the position of sceptic was not one which would yield the best quality information. Revealing my scepticism tended to close informants down. When I changed to an increasing openness, others were able to be open with me in turn. When I sat next to 24-year-old Julian at a lecture on alternative healing one of his first remarks to me was that he was sceptical of alternative medicine. In my fieldnotes I wrote that I had shared my move to openness with him. I told him:
Well, I am open to some and sceptical towards others but that is changing. I was talking to someone about absent healing the other day where you can heal someone who is in a different country. I find that difficult to understand but I’m beginning to think there might be something in it.
He replied "That’s interesting because I am a bit involved in healing" and told me about his recent training in Reiki. It turned out that most of Julian's friends are very sceptical about alternative medicine, and that he chooses very carefully who to talk to. "I’d never tell the people I play football with I do Reiki. Can you imagine down the pub on Sunday after the game!" However once he had gauged my openness, he agreed to be interviewed and revealed a number of very alternative beliefs to me about spirit guides, previous lives, absent healing, and the desire to give up conventional employment for a more alternative lifestyle. Had I agreed that I was sceptical in our first talk and left it at that he probably wouldn't have opened up to me.
After this I began to notice that most potential informants wanted to position me. Was I sympathetic to their worldview, or was I hostile and aiming to discredit them? I was not consciously aware of my strategy of moving closer to a sympathetic view. In retrospect I can see how I began to frame myself as more and more accepting of New Age ideas, in part in order to get better quality information from people. This sounds like a manipulative strategy with associated moral implications. However it was not a fully conscious strategy nor was it a purely of my own doing. It was a co-constructed interactional pattern that stemmed from my informants wanting to accept me and wanting me to value them and see the world as they did.
My own feelings of wanting to be accepted were not just aimed at improving the quality of the information for my thesis. It was also about wanting to belong in the groups I was studying rather than feeling like a marginal outsider. I liked most of the people I was researching, but I did not always like their views. If I could come to see their views as less strange I could come both to like them better and to be more accepted by them. So my enthusiasm and openness to alternative ideas was an identity constructed intersubjectively over time.
My own behaviour in interaction in these settings also tells me something about how other members behave and interact within these alternative groups. 'Belonging' and 'believing' seem to be important to many of my informants. Maintaining a sceptical distance is not easy in collective settings. Having felt marginal in many ways in their mainstream lives, in holding alternative views (such as being a minority opposed to childhood vaccination), they relish a setting in which they find they are at last one of a group which thinks like them. This may have the effect of increasing the levels of enthusiasm and belief within the group, as positive group identity may depend on this. None of those who attended the homeopathy class and the anti-vaccination group expressed scepticism or lack of enthusiasm in these group settings, but some of the members did admit to these more negative feelings once alone with me.
Embodied influences on identity
Whilst some of my openness was constructed in these verbal interactions with informants, some of my enthusiasm arose from my embodied participation in groups. My ecstatic experience at the summer school was part of a group experience which involved communal meditation. I experienced similar feelings in my Tai Chi group practice sessions, and to a lesser extent in my other fieldwork settings. These experiences, of altered bodily awareness and states of consciousness, could be likened to those of anthropologists who have experienced trance states in the field. During her 2000 conference paper at Brunel, my PhD colleague Isobel de Salis recreated the dress, ritual scattering of flour, and dancing experienced in her fieldwork in Africa and spoke of her changed bodily experience. Similarly, Desjarlais has attempted to write about his emotional and bodily experiences of a shamanic journey (Desjarlais 1992).
Group meditation changes the energy of both the individuals and the collective space. I experienced the events I participated in as healing. I went in troubled by my life experiences and came out feeling lighter, relaxed, and with good feelings flowing through me. I can only describe these good feelings as infectious and perhaps a little addictive. Csordas (1994) has written about the difficulty of analysing transcendent experiences and I do not have space to attempt that here. However I would say that my embodied ‘being’ in these environments contributed to my changing identity during fieldwork.
Multiple shifting identities
Reviewing my fieldwork experiences I can now see that I was not solely positioned as a New Age believer. When I did fieldwork in other settings my identity was constructed quite differently. In the November after my experiences at the summer school, I attended a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine. I experienced this group setting entirely differently. One of my overriding perceptions of the conference was its efficiency. I noted in my fieldnotes that
The whole conference was ablaze with confidence. Not one person in two days faltered in their presentations. It was slick and professional. I felt that it was more like the conferences I went to in my business days. I felt smart and efficient in my severe dress and briefcase, chosen specially to blend in with the formal dress code of doctors meetings. Dressing efficiently, makes you feel efficient. I wondered if anyone in the street would mistake me for a doctor, which felt quite nice.
Exchanges with delegates were formal, scientific, and academic in style. And I slipped into my academic persona without effort. However in conducting a brief interview with one of the doctors, I felt I was ‘constructed’ by him as a researcher/journalist with a structured list of questions to ask. He asked me ‘What is it you’d like to know?’ I reflected irritably in my fieldnotes:
I have had this question often from GPs. As if there are one or two facts – multiple choice answers that I can ask directly for. "What percentage of GPs are also homeopaths?" or something like that. Or it is a way of taking charge of the conversation. Whenever anyone says this I sink in confidence. I don’t know what it is I want from him. Just to talk; to find out more about him.
Whilst I approached the conference with an efficient appearance I was not up to the task of verbal presentation and efficiency demanded in doctor-doctor conference interaction. This encounter left me not enthused, welcomed, and inspired as the more alternative groups had, but feeling, lowly, struggling to maintain an efficient persona and lacking in confidence. So my identities in the field were very context bound and depended on whom I was interacting with.
Conclusion
Through accepting the influence of the majority of my informants to adopt more New Age beliefs and enthusiasm and openness for alternative ideas, I gained greater access into groups and individuals lives and became a more accepted participant in the settings of my ethnographies. I think that as a result the quality of the information I received was far better and represents more of an insider's view. However it could be that had I struggled to maintain my more sceptical identity my interactions with the groups would have revealed less positive and more sceptical elements in these groups.
I also think that the pressures I was feeling to appear positive and open to ideas in interaction with other group members were pressures that other members joining those groups may have felt. The infectiousness of the enthusiasm and the reaching of altered states of mental and bodily being were also experienced by group members and my informants.
I learned firsthand that the alternative lifestyle can seem particularly appealing during times of life crisis and psychological upheaval. This was reflected in the life experiences of some of my informants. For example, a number of those at the homeopathy class had suffered recent important life events, such as the birth of a first child, divorce, or redundancy, and seemed to be seeking support.
In talking about the processes of identity during and after fieldwork I hope I have shown how there is both an internal journey, but also that my identities were constructed by others through interaction. As Hastrup’s quote in my introduction indicated, for the duration of the fieldwork I ‘became’ a different person and was more open to alternative beliefs. Although it would perhaps be fairer to say that I became a number of different people according to setting and participants. However, my post-fieldwork experience was about the strangeness of having to reclaim my pre-fieldwork identities. I would say that these experiences of changing identity, while psychologically unsettling, were worth having as they deepened my understanding of the people I studied. I feel that by becoming one of them I have a far richer understanding of what it feels like to be in those kinds of settings. This is one of the primary advantages of the participant observation method. Using interviews would not have helped me to understand the embodied experience of being part of alternative groups.
My final destination in this journey is of becoming yet another identity, that of an experienced ethnographer, one which I am still in the process of 'becoming' through the experience of writing up. The new identity is one in which I have learned experientially the power of using oneself as the main tool of research. With this came all the benefits of enriched data, and all the drawbacks of the psychological strain of bringing my identities into question.
References
Csordas, T. (1994). The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. back
Desjarlais, R. R. (1992). Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia. back
Hastrup, K. (1995). A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge. back
Riches, D. (2000). The Holistic Person; or, the ideology of egalitarianism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4), 669-685. back
Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage (Vizedom, M & Cafee, G., Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. back
Wengle, J. L. (1988). Ethnographers in the Field: The Psychology of Research. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. back
Acknowledgents
I would like to thank Ronnie Frankenberg and Celayne Heaton Shrestha for alerting me to the dangers of essentialising identity as a fixed property of the individual and pointing me in the more anthropological direction of positioning identity as something which is ever-shifting and constructed in interaction.
Christine Barry has worked her way through the social science disciplines, holding degrees in geography and psychology and having worked on sociological academic research projects for 9 years. She has finally found a home in anthropology and is currently a PhD student in the Social Anthropology Department at Brunel University, conducting an ethnographic study of homeopathy and Tai Chi in the community and in the NHS in South London.