| Abstract: |
My ethnographic work has revolved around the body and desire, its articulation, and its reappropriation by people expelled from their habitual representations. In this sense, my academic reflection has focused on addressing and analyzing the body and the desire of the others, watching over my own. However, feminist epistemology has, for decades, been criticizing the science that aims to present itself as objective and neutral, and challenges us to produce situated knowledge, to face reflexivity and, in the words of Haraway (1988), to explain embodied objectivities. Methodology: In this article, I apply the methodological proposal of embodied anthropology (Esteban 2004b) that allows me, from two ethnographic passages in which my emotions played a fundamental role, to pose three areas of reflection around ethnography: the "construction of the research field"; the established (power) relationships; and the management of ethics, privacy, and conflict. Conclusions: The presentation of rigorously disembodied academic works can generate somatic infiltrations, which are unconscious and uncontrollable, in our ethnographies. On the contrary, confronting the influence of emotions in the field, of the affects, commitments and conflicts that we generate, constitutes a way to humanize expert knowledge, disclosing forms of epistemological production and, therefore, empowering the relations of horizontality and reciprocity with our interlocutors. Originality: The analysis of the role of emotions in the field of research allows us not only to verify the inherent subjectivity of all epistemological production, but to problematize what kind of linkages we generate in contemporary ethnographies in which the "natives" are our neighbors with smartphone and 4G technology: instant readers of our analyses, accomplices of our desires, witnesses of our faults. |
| Note: |
Doctora en Sociología y Máster en Investigación en Sociología por la Universitat de Barcelona, España. Licenciada en Antropología por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y Licenciada en Sociología por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Profesora del Departamento de Antropología Social y Cultural de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, España e investigadora postdoctoral vinculada a un proyecto internacional adscrito a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, España. Entre sus últimas publicaciones están: (en coautoría con Nuria Vergés Bosch y Elisabet Almeda Samaranch) "TFrom Alliance to Trust: Constructing Crip-Queer Intimacies". Journal of Gender Studies 26 (3): 269-281, 2017; (en coautoría con Andrea y Miriam Arenas Conejo) "Playing Crip: the Politics of Disabled Artists' Performances in Spain". Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 22 (3): 345-351, 2017. *agarcia_santesmases@uoc.edu |
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(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
