Fieldwork dillemas: problems of location, insiderhood, - and implicit discourses

• Main Author: Simić Marina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Ethnography, SASA, Belgrade 2010-01-01
• Series: Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU
• Subjects: hierarchy of places; anthropological location; anthropology at home; othering and alterity
• Online Access: http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0350-0861/2010/0350-08611002026S.pdf

In this paper I want to address some problems of so-called ‘native anthropology’ and anthropology more broadly, through the native anthropologists’ double - insider-outsider position. Drawing from my own fieldwork research on post-socialist transition and cosmopolitanism in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad in 2005 and 2006, I want to investigate the issue of location and complex processes of positioning and othering in which I was caught myself due to my ‘double position’ as an insider and outsider and through which my informants understood and made sense of their ‘place in the world’. This positioning is relevant for the investigation of the social processes of identification and location-building as a one of the key anthropological issues, as well as for understanding of the construction of anthropological location itself.