BRØDRE OG SØSTRE: Position og deltagelse på feltarbejdet

Resumé

Michael A. Whyte: Brothers and Sisters -

Position and Participation in Fieldwork.

The author draws on fieldwork experience in

Marachi Sub-Location in Western Kenya in

order to explore some of the ways in which

participation can shape - and be shaped by - a

specific fieldwork. He takes the point of view

of a brother looking at a sister and, through

her, a relationship with another man. He traces

his own developing appreciation of the

complexity and the relativity of the exercise

and how this perception inspired new paths

of inquiry - which in tum led to other questions

and other methods. He develops the paper

in a series of vignettes - something about

Marachi and something about the experience

of a particular fieldwork in Marachi. In selecting

from hisown experience he stresses the

reflexivity inherent in fieldwork as process

by speaking from a number of different positions.

In an attempt to provide the reader with

some stability in this shifting universe he retums

periodically to an ethnographic position,

providing analytical context and a more

structured discussion of marriage, descent

and affmity. This discussion, shaped both by

the Africanist literature and the author’s experience

of positioned participation, draws

on other, more specific data-gathering exercises

which will also be identified as parts of

a process of understanding which inspires

and is inspired by positioned participation.

The point is to remind the reader that methodology

is not simply a procedure for knowing

but also a way of experiencing and a first step

towards tuming experience into science. Taking

a particular point of view has helped to

make a shift from funetion to experience, and

so to come to appreciate more direetly the

immediaey of being in Marachi in 1978-79.