Abstract
What does it feel like, to be shy and demure, to live gender segregated roles, and to fall in love in that environment? This contribution seeks to tease out ways of utilizing close fieldwork entanglements to apprehend local perceptions of ineffable tacit knowledge, such as embodied norms, feelings, and emotions, through empathic participation. The author understands empathy as two-way communication process: instead of simply extracting information, the researcher attunes herself with her social environment and allows herself be “affected” to gradually embody local concepts. Reflecting upon local concepts of shame and modesty, the article examines the complex interdependencies between empathic experiences and one’s self in the process of knowledge production. The relationship between the researcher and her female interlocutors included many aspects, from sensuous involvement through touching, as in massaging each other’s heads, over conversations about sexuality, to performing the gendered role of a modest young woman. Her status as married, later divorced, family member played an important role in gaining insight into marital relationships. Finding herself deeply involved in her research topic on phone affairs, love, and intimacy, the author herself secretly fell in love via the cell phone. Based on examples of such affective connections in the field, the contribution argues that researchers can only understand interlocutors’ emotional cognition when they dare to use their own embodiments of local culture and the feelings attached to them as intersubjective methodological tool.
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Notes
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[Encounters] change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.” (Tsing 2015, p. 27)
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for generously funding my dissertation project on the appropriation of cell phones and gender relations in Gilgit-Baltistan as well as Professor Martin Sökefeld from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, who gave me plenty of rope to follow my interests in the field and discover the importance of emotions and love concepts. I also owe thanks to my colleagues and friends from the “Italian Writing Retreat” who provided rich feedback and helped me sharpen the argument. The biggest credit, however, goes to my hosts and interlocutors in Pakistan who received me with exceptional sincerity and the warmest affection.
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Walter, AM. (2019). Embodying Ineffable Concepts: Empathic Intimacy as Tool for Insight. In: Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., Thajib, F. (eds) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_13
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