Ciało i naród. O doświadczaniu uczestnictwa i pozycjonowaniu antropologa w terenie

This article offers reflections arising from my three-year field research with the Ukrainian diaspora in two Canadian cities. Drawing on this field experience, I present the body as a research tool and the impact of work performed by the ethnographer’s body. I discuss my multi-sensory field experience and the experience of participation, which are inter- twined with the increasingly important issue of ethnographer’s positionality in the field, and – in my view – the utopian freedom to choose or negotiate professional identities. My considerations are embedded within the insider-outsider dialectics (not opposition) and point to the contextual “nativeness” and “strangeness” of the researcher. I claim that the act of attribution of social class and ethnicity by our field partners influences our field- work and may have long-lasting consequences in the ethnographer’s later life, including their private life. I also discuss the fluidity and contextuality of a researcher’s familiarity with their field, including research situations where fieldwork is done with “one’s own people” or in cooperation with “one’s own people”, i.e. when and how familiarity is trans- formed into strangeness.