Instead of an Introduction: The Ethnographer, the Listener, the Performer—Three Roles in One Attribute

The multitude of criteria inspiring fieldwork as a way of life can prove to be as inexhaustible as our choices in (real) life. Ethnographic fieldwork can emerge as a parallel reality, usually of critical importance for the researcher, while reflexivity for anthropology is a part of the method. By shifting the burden of fieldwork research from the field to the researcher and their behaviour, with the aim of a tangible and comprehensible “method” for conducting fieldwork, largely based on participant observation, we shift the content of “performative behaviours” from everyday culture and its performances to ethnography and the researcher. If anything, the researcher presents and directs themselves as if on another “stage”, “building a character” through which they connect with the “host” culture and society. It is this, intermediate, identity that the researcher performs for the duration of their fieldwork research and perhaps even after its conclusion. Through the lens of anthropological theory and methodology and a retrospective of monumental contributions in the history of fieldwork as a fundamental qualitative research practice, we will investigate the route towards the formation of personalised methodological tools. We consider this a journey with clear characteristics of initiation, a condition of passage for the fieldworker who eventually, and for as long as necessary, undresses their “normal” self in order to dress the character of an intermediate field identity, an option that will finally guarantee the researcher’s wellbeing.