Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2514

Title: Performing Confessions: Making Sense Afterwards of Field Immersion
Authors: Rossmanith, Kate
Keywords: fieldwork
ethnography
temporality
Issue Date: 17-Jun-2008
Abstract: “You have to create a fiction about yourself to make sense to people. I never lied; but I had to tell a story.” Joanne Good, a 42-year-old anthropology postgraduate, spent seven years in a rural Indonesian village conducting fieldwork. Now she is back, but she cannot put the pieces together. Based on research for a documentary, and drawing on lengthy interviews with Joanne, this paper charts her changing relationship to her fieldwork. The discipline of ethnography – central to many performance studies projects – insists of the coeval experience of fieldwork as the source of ethnographic knowledge (Conquergood 1991: 182). However, experiences of temporality are ongoing as the researcher returns ‘home’ to write about the field experience. This paper explores Joanne’s struggle to weave together – and tell stories from – a chronology based on chaotic field-notes that don’t add up. At the same time it considers the ways in which anthropologists have negotiated the post-fieldwork phase of research.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2514
ISSN: 978-1-74210-012-8
Rights and Permissions: Copyright Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
Type of Work: Conference paper
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