TY - JOUR
T1 - Questions from the field anthropological self-reflexivity through the eyes of study participants
AU - Lee, Sangmi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action.
PY - 2015/12/1
Y1 - 2015/12/1
N2 - Although there is nothing new about how anthropologists can be the observed instead of simply being the observer and that they can also be interviewed while interviewing, no one has studied the kinds of questions they receive from the people that they study and interact with in the field. Questions that research participants ask the anthropologists during fieldwork provide a critical way to reflect upon historical and persistent issues related to fieldwork, such as positionality, self-reflexivity and methodology. Based on fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among two Hmong communities in Laos and the United States, this article examines some of the questions I received from the people in my study and suggests that anthropologists need to pay more critical attention to these questions as a source of self-reflexivity and positionality in the process of ethnographic writing.
AB - Although there is nothing new about how anthropologists can be the observed instead of simply being the observer and that they can also be interviewed while interviewing, no one has studied the kinds of questions they receive from the people that they study and interact with in the field. Questions that research participants ask the anthropologists during fieldwork provide a critical way to reflect upon historical and persistent issues related to fieldwork, such as positionality, self-reflexivity and methodology. Based on fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among two Hmong communities in Laos and the United States, this article examines some of the questions I received from the people in my study and suggests that anthropologists need to pay more critical attention to these questions as a source of self-reflexivity and positionality in the process of ethnographic writing.
KW - Fieldwork methodology
KW - Hmong diaspora
KW - Laos and the United States
KW - Positionality
KW - Questions from study participants
KW - Self-reflexivity
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U2 - 10.3167/aia.2015.220305
DO - 10.3167/aia.2015.220305
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84957090960
SN - 0967-201X
VL - 22
SP - 39
EP - 42
JO - Anthropology in Action
JF - Anthropology in Action
IS - 3
ER -