Emotions in the Field Emotions in the Field The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience Edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emotions in the field : the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience / edited by James Davies and Dimitrina Spencer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6939-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-6940-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology--Fieldwork--Psychological aspects. 2. Emotions--Anthropological aspects. I. Davies, James (James Peter) II. Spencer, Dimitrina. GN346.E46 2010 305.8'00723--dc22 2009046034 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Contents Acknowledgments vii Contributors ix Introduction: Emotions in the Field 1 James Davies Part I Psychology of Field Experience 1 From Anxiety to Method in Anthropological Fieldwork: An Appraisal of George Devereux’s Enduring Ideas 35 Michael Jackson 2 “At the Heart of the Discipline”: Critical Reflections on Fieldwork 55 Vincent Crapanzano 3 Disorientation, Dissonance, and Altered Perception in the Field 79 James Davies 4 Using Emotion as a Form of Knowledge in a Psychiatric Fieldwork Setting 98 Francine Lorimer vi Contents Part II Political Emotions in the Field 5 Hating Israel in the Field: On Ethnography and Political Emotions 129 Ghassan Hage 6 Tian’anmen in Yunnan: Emotions in the Field during a Political Crisis 155 Elisabeth Hsu 7 Emotional Engagements: Acknowledgement, Advocacy, and Direct Action 171 Lindsay Smith and Arthur Kleinman Part III Non-cognitive Field Experiences 8 Emotional Topographies: The Sense of Place in the Far North 191 Kirsten Hastrup 9 What Counts as Data? 212 Tanya Luhrmann 10 Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or, the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience 239 Joanna Cook Index 267 Acknowledgments TO REALIZE THE COMPLETION OF THIS VOLUME, we relied upon the generous support of so many individuals. To all of you we owe enormous gratitude. We thank, firstly, Professor David Parkin, whose kindness, diplomacy, and intellectual acumen were a constant resource. Other important people include Professor Marcus Banks, Professor David Gellner, Professor Del Loewenthal, Professor Roland Littlewood, and Dr. Louise Braddock. We thank all those involved in the early meetings at Oxford University and the seminars held at Harvard University. A special thanks to Michael Jackson for bringing some excellent scholars on board, and for his tireless intellectual guidance and advice. We thank Nick James from the Society of Indexers for his good work on the index. We are also grate- ful to Peter Agree and Jennifer Hammer for their suggestions and guidance. And finally we thank Jennifer Helé, who was instrumental in helping the project along during the first stages of review and editorial work. We also thank the British Academy, the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Oxford), the Centre for Therapeutic Education (Roehampton University), and the Oxford Anthropology Society for their fi- nancial support and institutional backing. vii Contributors Joanna Cook is George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Southeast Asian Stud- ies at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. research explored vipassanā meditation in Thailand as a monastic practice. Her current research focuses on the use of Buddhist meditation techniques in medical and health- care practices in Thailand. Her forthcoming monograph is titled Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. His publications include The Hamadsha: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry (1981), Tuhami: A Portrait of a Moroccan (1985), Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (1986), Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (1992), and Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary Philosophical Anthropol- ogy (2003). At present, he is finishing a book on the Hakris. James Davies, coeditor of this volume, is a member of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate in social anthropology. He is also a qualified and practicing psychotherapist working in the NHS at Ox- ford and a senior lecturer in anthropology and psychotherapy in the School of Human and Life Sciences at Roehampton University, London. He has undertaken fieldwork in Nepal, where he studied Tibetan monastic communities. He is the author of The Making of Psychotherapists: An Anthropological Analysis (2009). Ghassan Hage is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Association and the University of Melbourne’s Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and ix x Contributors Social Theory. He joined the University of Melbourne in 2008 after fifteen years of teaching and researching at the University of Sydney. As a Future Generation Professor, he works at fostering interdisciplinary research across the univer- sity. He has researched and published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism, and migration. For many years, and until Bourdieu’s death, he was an associate researcher in the latter’s research center at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Kirsten Hastrup is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has conducted both historical research and long-term fieldwork in Iceland and, more recently, in Greenland. She has published extensively from both fields and on more general methodological and epistemological issues in anthropology. Elisabeth Hsu is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Green Templeton College. She has studied and worked in China since 1978. Her research interests lie within the fields of medical anthropology and ethnobotany, language and his- torical textual studies. Among her research concerns are Chinese medicine, body and personhood, pulse diagnosis, touch, pain, feelings, emotions, and sensory experience. Her current field research is on Chinese medicine in East Africa. Michael Jackson is Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Har- vard Divinity School. He has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Aboriginal Australia, and is the author of numerous books of an- thropology, including the prizewinning Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Em- piricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (1989) and At Home in the World (2000). He has also published three novels and six books of poetry (Latitudes of Exile: Poems 1965–1975 [1976] was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and Wall [1981] won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry). His most recent books include The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (2009) and the forthcoming Life within Limits: Wellbeing in a World of Want. Arthur Kleinman is Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Har- vard University, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, as well as Victor and William Fung Director of Har- vard University’s Asia Center. He is both a psychiatrist and an anthropologist and has conducted research in Chinese society since 1968. Kleinman is the au- thor of 6 books, editor or coeditor of 28 volumes and special issues of journals, and the author of more than 200 research and review articles and chapters. His Contributors xi chief publications include Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1981), The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1989), Re- thinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience (1970), and What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger (2007). Francine Lorimer has done anthropological fieldwork among the Warlpiri of Central Australia and the Kuku-Yalanji of Southeast Cape York, as well as in a psychiatric hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has taught anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and at Harvard University. Her interests lie in exploring how anthropology, psychiatry, and psychology can be combined to deepen their different perspectives. She is currently completing training as an analytical psychologist at the C.G. Jung Institute–Boston and as a clinical psy- chologist at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. Tanya Luhrmann is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She trained at the University of Cambridge (Ph.D., 1986) and taught for many years at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to moving to Stanford, she was Max Palevsky Professor and a Director of the Clinical Ethnography Project at the University of Chicago. She has published three books: Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (1996), and Of Two Minds: An Anthro- pologist Looks at American Psychiatry