Familiarity in Progress

Stepping into an unfamiliar environment to perceive, observe, and record collective practices and behaviours increases the likelihood of the ethnographer experiencing a culture shock. To successfully manage it, the researcher needs good language skills, regular contact with members of the host community, and long stays. These are equally basic principles of long ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, as originally conceived by Bronislaw Malinowski. The gradual acquaintance with the cultural otherness implied by this condition is both the vehicle for conducting fieldwork and its very purpose as a cognitive process. In other words, implementing participant observation as a method in ethnographic fieldwork also requires the researcher to perform a social role—a social role that will ideally result in the shelter of an “intermediate identity”.