A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork

Kaur, Jastinder

Abstract

Places that live in the collective Western imagination as paradisiacal – once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon and holiday destinations replete with the whitest sands and the bluest seas – are incommensurable with imaginaries of violence, conflict, and exclusion. Yet Fiji is an exemplar of both. Coups in Fiji often express a competitive struggle between the notions of Fijian ‘paramountcy’ versus Indo-Fijian calls for equality of opportunity. Within a week of the author's arrival in Suva, the capital city of Fiji, in mid-September 2002, one of the English-language daily newspapers published an editorial predicting the ‘real possibility’ of a ‘race war’ between the country’s Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Almost a decade after the author returned from fieldwork in Fiji, she formally resumed her PhD. She prepared for it by writing some 70,000 words about ethnic identity, relations, and conflict; and about culture, coups, and constitutions.

Citation

Kaur, J. (2023). A cautionary and hopeful tale about experiencing, thinking with, writing through, reflecting on, and teaching the emotional in ethnographic fieldwork. In N. Weiss, E. Grassiani, & L. Green (Eds.), The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333418-4

• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2020
• Publication Date: Feb 15, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 6, 2023
• Publisher: Routledge
• Series Title: Routledge Studies in Fieldwork and Ethnographic Research
• Book Title: The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World
• ISBN: 9781032333816
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003333418-4
• Keywords: Fiji, coups, ethnography, fieldwork, emotions, pedagogy