The practice of anthropology: reflexivity, positionality and representation practice questions.

Abu-Lughod began fieldwork among Awlad 'Ali Bedouin families in Egypt's Western Desert in the late 1970s. Her father travelled with her and presented her to her host family, so that she was received as a daughter under male protection, and she then spent her days in the women's part of the household. The effect on the material she was able to gather is best described as an effect of

• reflexivity, understood here as the removal of the researcher's influence from the account
• her positionality, the social location of gender, age and kin status from which she observed
• ethnocentrism, since she judged what she saw by the standards of her own upbringing
• triangulation, since a second method was needed to confirm what the women of the household said

Answer: her positionality, the social location of gender, age and kin status from which she observed

Positionality is the position, in terms of gender, age, kin status or nationality, from which a researcher observes, and it opens some settings while closing others. Reflexivity is the later analytic work of making that position explicit, not a way of cancelling it.

Rosaldo carried out fieldwork with Ilongot families in northern Luzon from the late 1960s and recorded older men's accounts of the rage that follows a death. He wrote later that only after the death of his wife in 1981 did he feel able to take those accounts seriously as descriptions of grief. The methodological point usually drawn from this case is that

• personal feeling has no place in an ethnographic account and should be edited out before publication
• emotions reported at one field site can be assumed to be experienced in the same way everywhere else
• a researcher who has shared an experience with the people studied ceases to be an outsider
• what a researcher can grasp of other people's accounts is shaped by his own position and experience

Answer: what a researcher can grasp of other people's accounts is shaped by his own position and experience

The claim concerns the conditions of understanding rather than universal emotion: Rosaldo's bereavement gave him a purchase on statements he had earlier set aside. Positionality both enables and limits, which is why it is reported instead of concealed.

A monograph published in the 1960s describes a community in the timeless present tense, gives no date for the fieldwork on which it rests, and speaks throughout in a single authoritative voice with no quoted disagreement among the people described. Which criticism of this way of writing was developed by the reflexive turn of the 1980s?

• It fails to compare the community with a second case, so that its conclusions cannot be generalised beyond it
• It devotes too little space to the technical details of the methods used to gather the material
• It presents a situated, partial account as though it had no author, no date and no point of entry
• It relies on the categories used by the people described instead of on the analyst's own categories

Answer: It presents a situated, partial account as though it had no author, no date and no point of entry

Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture (1986) treated ethnographies as constructed texts whose rhetoric produces authority. Dating the fieldwork and letting disagreement appear is not decoration: it tells the reader whose account, gathered when, is being read.

Berreman carried out fieldwork in a village in the lower Himalayas in the 1950s. For the first months he worked with a Brahmin interpreter and was told that caste distinctions in the village were mild and that the old restrictions had lapsed. When illness forced a change and a Muslim assistant took over, villagers of low caste began to describe exclusions and payments that had not been mentioned before. The methodological point usually drawn from this is that

• the second set of statements must be the accurate one, since it was volunteered rather than solicited
• what a fieldworker is told is shaped by who is standing beside her and by what her presence is taken to mean
• interpreters should be avoided altogether, since any intermediary makes the material unusable
• the villagers had been lying at first and told the truth only once a more sympathetic listener had arrived on the scene

Answer: what a fieldworker is told is shaped by who is standing beside her and by what her presence is taken to mean

Berreman's argument is about impression management: people manage the fronts they present to particular audiences, and the ethnographer's team is part of the audience. Neither account is simply the truth behind the other — each was produced for a different observer, and that is the datum.

Narayan, writing in 1993 about anthropologists who work in the countries they come from, described how her own position in an Indian field site shifted with the setting: as a woman, as someone with a foreign university post, as a person of a particular family and region. Her argument about the category of the native anthropologist is that

• the distinction between insider and outsider is stable and should determine who is permitted to study a community
• anthropologists working at home produce accounts that are more accurate than those written by visitors
• no useful research can be carried out by a researcher who belongs to the community being described
• the pair insider and outsider is too crude, since every researcher is positioned along several axes at once

Answer: the pair insider and outsider is too crude, since every researcher is positioned along several axes at once

Narayan replaces a binary with a question about which of a researcher's many affiliations is in play at a given moment. That is why the fashionable claim that only members may study a group and the older claim that only strangers can see clearly are both rejected.

Malinowski's field diary was published in 1967, more than forty years after Argonauts of the Western Pacific. It records loneliness, irritation with the people he was living among, and long stretches of reading novels. Anthropologists have most commonly taken this contrast between the diary and the monograph as showing that

• the monograph's calm and authoritative voice is a literary achievement rather than a transparent record of the field
• the arguments of the monograph were fabricated and its material cannot now be relied on for anything
• diaries should not be kept during fieldwork, since they may later be used to discredit the published work
• Malinowski was unusual among fieldworkers of his generation in finding the experience difficult and at times unpleasant

Answer: the monograph's calm and authoritative voice is a literary achievement rather than a transparent record of the field

The contrast is evidence about genre. The monograph was written in a convention that removed the writer's presence, so the diary reveals not deceit but the labour of composition that the convention concealed — which is exactly what the reflexive turn later made a topic.