Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography

This introduction explores the role of researchers’ emotions and affects in understanding “the field.” Anthropologists have widely discussed and debated fieldwork reflexivity in terms of fieldwork ethics, methodological practices, colonial traditions inscribed in ethnographic encounters, and modes of ethnographic representation. This chapter focuses on methodological implications that bring to awareness the potentials of researchers’ affects and emotions that less hinder than enable processes of anthropological and social scientific knowledge construction. It extends on classic and recent contributions from psychological and feminist anthropology and aims to provide intellectual space for methodological and epistemological debates, and expound the potentials and the limits of affectively aware scholarship.