Anthropology that warms your heart: on being a bride in the field

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the difficult entanglement of personal and professional identities that I experienced when getting married during doctoral fieldwork. In addition to producing insights for my ethnographic data, the process of marrying, and the planning of a wedding, transformed my understanding of my relationship to informants, requiring me to re-examine my previously unconscious distance between my 'fieldwork life' and my 'real life'. Falling in love in the field, under the watchful gaze of informants and beyond the gaze of home, obliged me to challenge distinctions I had unintentionally made between an intellectual, anthropological involvement with Cuban culture, and an emotional, aesthetic and personal distance from Cuban culture. At the same time, I concluded that such artificial distinctions between 'field' and 'life' were in themselves necessary and productive strategies to manage the emotional challenges of extended fieldwork.

Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba

“…I think that the fact that my relationship with my closest informants was built on a family connection emerging from an initial friendship makes my fieldwork somewhat different from those organised, for instance, around sexual intimacy, as stated by a few anthropologists working on Cuban gender and family relations (e.g. Roland 2006: 18-19;Pertierra 2007;Fernandez 2010: 8-12;Lundgren 2011: 50). My position possibly exposed me more to (affine) conflicts, problems, and 'plotting' in relationships -things that are not so likely to be revealed to a spouse or to a girlfriend.…”

The Multi-Sided Ethnographer

“…through their relationship. In her essay Anthropology that warms your heart: On being a bride in the field (Cuba), Anna Cristina Pertierra (2007) points to the fact that it remains a constant and intense challenge to disentangle one's private and professional self. Is this blurred boundary the reason why so many of us struggle to admit the obvious absence of objectivity as well as the permanent struggle in carrying out the various expected social roles?…”

Black Mountain: The politicisation of a pilgrimage site in western India

“…I was accepted with love and open arms, often like a sister or daughter-in law, which enabled me access on a much deeper level than I expected. These are experiences mirrored by Pertierra (2007) in her account of falling in love and marrying in the field in Cuba, where gradually her partner, native to Cuba, became 'an attentive and at times protective partner' who would accompany her to interviews and 'impatiently [hold] the video camera' (Pertierra 2007:5). She also shares the experience of added acceptance, as she felt that her relationship and subsequent marriage with a Cuban man was interpreted as a 'gesture to people I was working with of the good faith I had in committing myself to experiencing life in Cuba' (ibid).…”