When fieldwork is forbidden: Ontological dilemmas, subjectivity and moral imperatives as constraints in the field

Abstract

Undertaking fieldwork in a remote location with limited health care and transportation comes with inherent risks, but doing so with a small child, in a place where understandings of illness and malice may be of a fundamentally different nature than in the ethnographer’s home e, brings additional challenges and highlights the ethical dilemmas we may face in the field. This paper describes how continued fieldwork became impossibe when my infant son’s illness led to dilemmas that precluded the continuation of fieldwork. I take this experience as a starting point to interrogate the nature of being and reality and its real-world affects when working cross-culturally, especially in the realm of “metahuman” actors; issues of gender, identity and power in a discipline that is coming to terms with its colonialist roots, and the ethics of fieldwork in precarious situations. It takes a “hesitant” approach to the writing of a reflexive ethnography that includes more than human agents in one of anthropology’s most iconic locales.