Performing Confessions: Making Sense Afterwards of Field Immersion

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.