The Ethnographer Unbared: Academic Kinship, Elective Affinities and (Re)Negotiating Researcher Positionality

Abstract

Based on ethnographies conducted in post-genocide communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the Bosnian refugee diaspora groups in Australia, Europe and the USA, and fieldwork on the island of Tanna (Vanuatu), in this article I discuss the challenges of the researcher and the researched in negotiating the space between perceived cultural insiderness and professional outsiderness. Firstly, I start by outlining the concept of academic kinship, the intellectual and social connections and networks that sustain and set the parameters for the researcher's construction of reality. Building upon the idea of kinship and elective affinity, I then move on to discuss examples from the fieldwork and literature relating to "doubly-engaged ethnography" (PACHECO-VEGA & PARIZEAU, 2018, p.1)—involving both emic and etic perspectives—and consider ethics and politics of this research approach. I conclude with an ethnographic vignette from my fieldwork on an island of strangers, highlighting how the mutual commitment to elective affinity and embracing both emic and etic perspectives create a dynamic research context in which different engagements in the field open up a conceptual space where the local and the global intersect, and where the roles of researched and researcher, insiders and outsiders, continue to be negotiated and (re)defined.