I Woz ’Ere: Tales from the Field

Abstract

I can be my own worst enemy at times. I am immensely self-critical and have an amazing ability to unravel just about any achievement and represent it in my own head as a failing. Fieldwork is tough, but when you have tendencies like these it can become mildly tortuous. Nothing I did was ever right or good enough. I never tapped deep enough into the heart of this subculture. I never integrated myself enough. I never forged that all important gatekeeper relationship that every other ethnographer seems to treasure and depend on. For a lot of the time I felt like a failure, a sort of badly disguised pseudo-ethnographer. That is, until the day a friend of mine, fed up with my moaning, sat me down and forced me to answer an all-important question, ‘Where was I getting all these standards to condemn myself?’ ‘From other studies and researchers I suppose.’ ‘And were these researchers all 23-year-old British women studying illegal subcultures comprised of seemingly invisible men who only manifest themselves as scribbled signatures?’ ‘No.’ I had my answer. This was not failure, it was fieldwork — an experience as individual as the person who conducts it and the people who facilitate it.