‘Wearing down of the self’: Embodiment, writing and disruptions of identity in transformational festival fieldwork
Methodological Innovations January 1, 2017 Deirdre Ruane 10 citations
Immersive ethnographic fieldwork, especially in settings engineered to disrupt identity and induce emotional vulnerability, can destabilize a researcher's sense of self. The struggle to reconcile dual roles as researcher and participant often centers on the difficulty of creating linear written narratives from embodied, non-verbal experiences. Developing fluid, non-linear, multisensory documentation methods that align with the mental states induced by the field setting can mitigate this disjunction. Ethnographers in intense or extreme settings benefit from tools that remain effective even when they are out of their everyday minds.