Affecting with and being affected by person-centered interviewing and observation

Person-centered interviewing and observation—an ethnographic approach that attempts to describe and represent human behavior and subjectivity from the point of view of the acting, desiring, intending, sensing, reflecting, and attentive subject—inevitably engages the emotions and memories of ethnographers and subjects alike as they interact and affect one another in both intended and unintended ways. In this article, I provide two brief examples of such mutual influence from my early Indonesian fieldwork, and I discuss how such dynamics are implicated in anthropological theory and ethics. I argue that person-centered interviewing and observation is a humbling practice that underscores experiential diversity and the limits of what we can know about others and ourselves.