Postface: Embodying Knowledge

This is an intensively reflexive text, which is meant to complement the theoretical and methodological input of this book. In the author’s view it cannot stand separately from the rest. Through an intensely personal tone, the author purposely attempts to highlight the fact that ethnographic fieldwork can turn out to be a painful and mentally demanding process with possible future implications for the fieldworker. Two major questions arise: (1) To what extent does the researcher’s identification with the research topic allow its completion? (2) Is the ontological involvement of the fieldworker a prerequisite for perceiving the phenomena observed? The writing style in this account functions as a measure and an indicator of exposure of the anthropologist’s “self”, long before they begin to write about the lives of “others”.