Writing the Ethnographic Self in Research on Marginalised Youths and Masculinity

Abstract

In the wake of the so-called reflexive turn in ethnographic research, researchers have increasingly reflected on their emotions, identity-work and roles during fieldwork, often through first-person accounts of their emo- tions, thoughts and behaviour (Coffey 1999; Lumsden 2009; Venkatesh 2013) or through the respondents' constructions of the ethnographer (Venkatesh 2002). These developments can be traced to the 1970s and onwards when feminist scholars and critical theorists critiqued the posi- tivist notion of an impartial, objective view `from nowhere', and instead argued that all research is made from certain standpoints, with certain pre- conceptions, values and interests, which fundamentally shape the process and product of research (Harding 1987; cf. Haraway 1988). In anthropology and the field of ethnographic research this led to a crisis of representation (Marcus and Fischer 1999 [1986]) as the capacity of the researcher to `objec- tively' represent the culture of the researched was fundamentally questioned. This, in turn, led to a crisis of legitimation. The argument is that without any value-free standpoint from which to view the world and no way of gaining impartial knowledge about it, there is no way to legitimise the truth of one's research findings (Denzin and Lincoln 1994).