Further reflections on writing ethnographic fieldnotes

The most popular post on my blog describes the fieldnote template I developed during the early stages of my PhD research with community-based NGOs running educational and economic development initiatives in Kolkata (India) and Lae (Papua New Guinea). This fieldnote template has made its way into other blog posts about ethnographic research, textbooks and articles, course outlines, and academic commons. Last year my colleague Grant Jun Otsuki assigned it as a reading for his first year Cultural Anthropology class at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington as a way of helping students prepare for an assignment that involved doing fieldwork, writing fieldnotes, and turning those fieldnotes into a piece of anthropological writing. Grant invited me to come and speak to the class, and that experience has prompted me to write some further reflections on writing ethnographic fieldnotes as a disabled, neurodivergent anthropologist.

In my guest lecture I spoke about why anthropologists keep fieldnotes, what my fieldnotes consist of (handwritten notebooks, photographs, maps, drawings, emails, ticket stubs and other ephemera, voice recordings, notes jotted in an app on my phone, a personal diary, and of course the hundreds of electronic documents generated with my fieldnote template), and my relationship with my fieldnotes, including how I draw on fieldnotes alongside headnotes (Ottenberg, 1990) when I write. I also discussed how ethnographic fieldwork is an all-encompassing activity that involves your body, mind, senses, and memories, and how my fieldnote template offers me a way to document my experiences and begin identifying what and how I “know” about my topic. As part of that, I described some of the strategies I use to manage my energy levels and wellbeing during fieldwork. In India and Papua New Guinea this included ensuring I had access to my medication at all times, packing my own food, wearing headphones, trying to avoid situations that would trigger migraines, and scheduling rest days in between fieldwork days so I could process sights, sounds, smells, and social interactions.

What I didn’t say during my guest lecture was how I have largely developed these strategies on my own. When I began my first major research project in the early 2000s, there were no guides on how to do ethnographic fieldwork as a disabled neurodivergent anthropologist. Neurodiversity, disability, and chronic illness were subjects of anthropological studies that I read as a student, but I don’t recall reading anything written by openly neurodivergent, disabled, or chronically ill anthropologists. We also did not use the terms “neurodivergent” or “disabled” in New Zealand in the early 2000s to describe people like me, who have been diagnosed with various mental health disorders (not all of which I am comfortable disclosing) and medical conditions like chronic migraine and endometriosis (which I am comfortable to share publicly). And I did not write this part of myself into my academic work. Indeed, in one instance I was actively discouraged from writing about how depression and anxiety affected my fieldwork by a well-meaning colleague who worried about how such a disclosure would negatively affect (a) how the quality of my work would be perceived, and (b) my chances of future employment in academia. “You can do that once you’ve finished your PhD and got a permanent job,” was the advice. Now, 13 years on from finishing the PhD and 9 years after securing a permanent job, I am still ambivalent about bringing my neurodivergence into my writing, research, and teaching. All anthropology is filtered, as Amelia Frank-Vitale (2022) points out, but I think there is still considerable stigma against neurodivergent filters. However, as Cinzia Greco (2022) asks,

… if ethnography and participant observation represent core anthropological methods, through which reality is filtered and turned into knowledge, what does it mean to observe, analyze, and conduct fieldwork as a neurodivergent subject? How can variation in how we see, hear, and perceive the world influence ethnographic practice?

These are important questions and I am heartened to see growing conversations about neurodivergence, abelism, and anthropology in academic circles (including, but by no means limited to, Durban 2022; Friedner with Kasnitz and Wool 2018; Gibson 2018; Kinsell 2022; Kasnitz 2020; Morgendorff 2023; Radher 2018; Starn 2022). If you have reading or researcher recommendations, please feel free to comment below or get in touch.

References cited:

Durban, Erin L. 2022. “Anthropology and Ableism.” American Anthropologist 124 (1): 8–20.

Greco, Cinzia. 2022. “Divergent Ethnography: Conducting Fieldwork as an Autistic Anthropologist.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, May 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/divergent-ethnography-conducting-fieldwork-as-an-autistic-anthropologist

Frank-Vitale, Amelia. 2022. “Writer’s Block.” In “Taking Note: Complexities and Ambiguities in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and Verónica Sousa, American Ethnologist, 26 August. https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/taking-note-complexities-and-ambiguities-in-writing-ethnographic-fieldnotes/writers-block

Friedner, Michele, with Devva Kasnitz and Zoë Wool. 2018. ‘What I Wish I Knew about Anthropology and Disability: Notes toward a more enabling anthropology’, Anthrodendum, 10 January. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/01/10/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-anthropology-and-disability-notes-toward-a-more-enabling-anthropology/ 

Gibson, Hannah. 2018. “Access denied: the dark side of prestige.” Chronically Academic https://chronicallyacademic.blogspot.com/2018/01/access-denied-dark-side-of-prestige.html

Kasnitz, Devva. 2020. “The Politics of Disability Performativity.” Current Anthropology 61 (S21): S16–25.

Kinsell, Hannah. 2022. “Am I an Anthropologist if… I am (dis)abled?” Anthways https://sites.gold.ac.uk/anthways/am-i-an-anthropologist-if-2022/am-i-an-anthropologist-if-i-am-disabled/

Mogendorff, Karen. 2023. “Countering Ableism in Knowledge Production. Empowerment of Subaltern People and Reproduction of Epistemic Hierarchies.” Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 28, 41–60.

Ottenberg, Simon. 1990. “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text.” In Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, 139–60. New York: Cornell University Press.

Radher, Micha. 2018. “Ethnographic Ableism: Structural Silencing of Physical Disability in Anthropological Research.” The New Ethnographer, 20 August. https://thenewethnographer.com/the-new-ethnographer/2018/08/20/ethnographic-ableism-structural-silencing-of-physical-disability-in-anthropological-research

Starn, Orin. 2022. “Anthropology and the Misery of Writing.” American Anthropologist 124 (1): 187–97.