Peter Berger

University of Groningen, Comparative Study of Religion, Faculty Member

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I am a socio-cultural anthropologist with a regional focus on India (Odisha). Currently I am associate professor of Indian religions and the anthropology of religion at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society, University of Groningen. I was a visiting professor at the University of Zürich in 2012, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich in 2015 and Mercator visiting professor at the Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt in 2023. For more details see: https://research.rug.nl/en/persons/peter-berger

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Assessing the relevance and effects of ‘key emotional episodes’ for the fieldwork process

For a long time the role of 'emotions' has been acknowledged as a crucial factor in the process o... more For a long time the role of 'emotions' has been acknowledged as a crucial factor in the process of fieldwork, particularly in those branches of the discipline in the USA and Europe that have been strongly influenced by psychology and psychoanalysis. Devereux (1967), Parin, Morgenthaler and Parin-Matthèy (1978 [1971]) as well as Nadig (1997 [1986]) are examples of the effort to introduce in various ways insights of psychoanalysis, such as the dynamics of transference, into anthropological fieldwork methods (cf. Adler 1993; Zinser 1984). Despite the influence and value of their endeavours most anthropologists without the respective training do not include these methodological ideas in their fieldwork, which, of course, does not mean that emotions do not matter in their cases. Being trained in social and cultural anthropology without any deeper knowledge of psychology and psychoanalysis this certainly holds true in my case. However, even if lacking this particular background, an attempt is made in this paper to pay attention to 'emotions in the field' in a systematic way and to make a contribution to the ongoing debate. 1 1 This contribution is based on a paper that has been presented in Oxford at the conference "Emotions in the Field: Surviving and Writing-up Fieldwork Experience" (14/15 th of September 2006). It has originally been published in D. Spencer and J. Davies (eds.) 2008, Anthropology from the Heart: Fieldwork as Embodied Experience. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Thanks are due to Michaela Schäuble and Ulrike Blindt for helpful comments on the manuscript. Reflecting on the process of my fieldwork in highland Orissa (India) and on 'participant observation' elsewhere (Berger 2004) I recalled an incident, an emotional outburst on my side, in which, for a moment, the side of 'observation' was at zero and the aspect of 'participation' at a maximum. In the present article, I will take this specific fieldwork experience as a starting point and try to unravel its more general implications for ethnographic research and understanding. More specifically, I will ask whether in the fieldwork process, apart from the usual emotional ups and downs, certain situations stand out that have a more radical impact on the persons involved. They may open up a different perspective on the field the researcher lives in and temporarily provide an interface and meeting point of experiencing 'self' and 'other'. I would suggest calling such situations 'key emotional episodes' (KEEs). 2 The 'keyness' of such emotional episodes lies in the essential influence they can exert on the field situation: a break-up of relations, a change of status, a change of research situation, a deepening of social ties, among other possibilities. Further, one crucial characteristic of them is that they happen without the intention of the ethnographer. They are instances when the ethnographer has no conscious control over the situation. Rather, he has lost control and is subordinated to the flow of events. In contrast to the ideal field situation, when the mindful actions of the ethnographer are guided by his rational research aims, here, emotions and the body take over. KEEs as understood here, I assume, occur in most fieldwork processes. After I have presented, contextualized and analysed the particular incident of my fieldwork I want to compare it with three very different cases as reported by

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