Ethnology of Proximate

Jasna Čapo Žmegač ETHNOLOGY
Valentina Gulin Zrnić OF THE PROXIMATE

Goran Pavel Šantek The Poetics and Politics
of Contemporary Fieldwork
"'The field' has long been the symbolic centre of anthropology.

It is there that knowledge is collected and experience built up.
Fieldwork is the initiation rite of the professional anthropolo-
gist, and constitutes an important part of his or her symbolic
capital. (The anthropologist who never does fieldwork is as
much an oddity as a theoretical swimmer.)" (Hannerz 2003:19)
The examination of the notions of the field and fieldwork suggests
that these two concepts are not necessarily a matter of nature or
course, but that they may in fact be scientific constructs resulting
from particular understandings of ethnology, the ethnologist and the
subject of ethnology. Indeed, diverse understandings of the field and
fieldwork and their practices in various national scholarly traditions
of ethnology and socio-cultural anthropology point to the same con-
clusion.
The "deceptive transparency" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a:5) of
the concept of "the field" should be examined so as to reveal the com-
plex processes that take place in the field, in the encounter between
the researcher and the researched. How is the field defined in our
scholarly tradition? Does research require the researcher's physical
dislocation, or can the field be in the researcher's immediate vicinity
and the dislocation virtual, mental? In other words, does the field de-
note a particular physical location (or locations) or, instead, a net of
relationships unconnected with a particular physical place? How do
we select our field? What happens in the encounter of the researcher
with the "distant" or "close others" in the field, and how long should
261
Jasna Čapo Žmegač, Valentina Gulin Zrnić and Goran Pavel Šantek
this encounter optimally last? What is the relationship between re-

searchers and their subjects? What should the researcher focus on
during fieldwork – on social structures or on particular everyday
things people do? Or perhaps on their comments and opinions about
their own society? Which field techniques or, more generally, which
ethnological methodology is recommended when doing fieldwork –
– observation, interview or participation? Understanding the field
and fieldwork further involves recognizing the role of the re-
searcher's subjectivity in the research process. Moreover, interpreting
and writing ethnographies, i.e. (re)presenting the studied groups,
seem inseparable from the field procedure. Do researchers adopt the
position of the omniscient narrator-scholar (the etic perspective) or
do they grant a particular place in the final product – the text based
on their fieldwork – to the subjects of their research, frequently
called informants (the emic perspective)? Does this refer to a single
informant or to several informants? Should this single informant be
presented as a "generalized individual" – a representative of the re-
searched culture or as a person with a unique experience and inter-
pretation of the culture to which s/he belongs? How should partial
or concurrent accounts be combined? Finally, reflection about field-
work and the presentation of material includes a number of issues
connected with the reception of ethnographic work. Who are the rea-
ders and the potential audiences of ethnographic texts? In other
words: who do ethnologists write for – for the researched, for the
academic community, for a wider audience – and how does the in-
tended audience shape their texts? What are their reactions to ethno-
graphic texts? The issue of audiences is closely connected with the
clients who commissioned the research, with the sponsors of our re-
search and with some ethical issues. For instance, what are the
responsibilities of ethnologists to their subjects, or, how should the
responsibility of ethnologists to their discipline and to society be
allocated during and after the war?
However numerous, interesting or crucial the questions that we
could ask about our own fieldwork or the fieldwork of others may
be, they have largely gone unasked in Croatian ethnology and folk-
lore studies, even though fieldwork is one of the foundations of these
262
Ethnology of the Proximate
disciplines in Croatia. The central period of ethnological practice in

the twentieth century, dominated by the cultural-historic paradigm
(roughly between the 1930s and the 1970s), was almost entirely void
of discussions of fieldwork, both of general observations concerning
fieldwork and reflections about one's own fieldwork. This period
was preceded by the foundation of the ethnological science in Croa-
tia, when Antun Radić had elucidated some aspects of fieldwork in
more detail (Radić 1897 and 1936), but it was not before the 1970s
that some crucial questions about the subject of ethnology and its
methodology were asked (e.g. Rihtman-Auguštin 1976), which resul-
ted in critical texts about the ethnographic method (e.g. Rajković
1974). In the 1990s, prompted by the so-called ethnography of war, a
number of works were written in which the establishment of credibi-
lity was based on a detailed reflection about the positioning of the
ethnologist as the member of the researched culture and on the tex-
tual (re)presentation of the subjects (Povrzanović 1992a). However,
as late as 1998, in the issue of the journal Narodna umjetnost
published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Ethnology
and Folklore Research, fieldwork was treated marginally (in review
articles concerning the development of research at the Institute) or
anecdotally (in autobiographic stories of the researchers) (see Pleše,
this volume).
The volume Ethnology of the Proximate: the Poetics and Politics of
Contemporary Fieldwork is a result of certain epistemological and
methodological problems that the researchers at the Institute of
Ethnology and Folklore Research faced during their fieldwork and
their analysis of various issues (see Čapo Žmegač, Gulin Zrnić, Pleše,
Puljar D'Alessio, Šantek, this volume). In comparison with the stan-
dard fieldwork practice in Croatian ethnology, our studies were set
in a changed context: some dealt with the urban environment (Gulin
Zrnić 2004), others took place in religious communities (Šantek 2004)
or in several places in two countries (Puljar D'Alessio 2005; Čapo
Žmegač 2003a), and others still dealt with non-localized, deterrito-
rialized social spaces created by means of the internet (Pleše 2005) or
transmigration (Čapo Žmegač 2005a and 2005b). All of them seemed
to encourage reflections about the field: about its territorial in-
263
scription and boundedness, about the practices that we adopted so

as to establish relationships with our informants or to analyze our
own experience, or about the representation techniques that we se-
lected in our texts while keeping in mind that our work would find
its way to our interlocutors from the field, etc. Methodological dis-
cussions encouraged us to assemble a larger team of collaborators,
which resulted in the publication of this volume – a volume which is
the first step towards alleviating the shortage of ethnological texts in
Croatia explicitly tackling the issues of field and fieldwork (a
shortage which does not seem to be unique only to Croatian ethno-
logy; cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997a).
The first part of the introduction is an overview of ideas and field
practices in Croatian ethnology. In the second part we present our
view of ethnology as an empirical science seeking to gain insight
through fieldwork. Next, faced with the contemporary research si-
tuations, we re-examine the traditional concept of the field as a phy-
sical place. In the fourth part we discuss some features of ethnology
of the proximate and contemporary life, especially with relation to
the researchers’ auto-reflexivity, which becomes necessary when
their home becomes their field. In the fifth part we consider the re-
searched group as the readers of our work, and some ethical issues
connected with the ethnologists' responsibility to their subjects. In
the final part we give an overview of the texts appearing in this vo-
lume.
Field and fieldwork in Croatian ethnology

Although Croatian ethnologists have explicitly written very little
about the field and fieldwork in their scholarly works, we will
attempt to say a few things about their approaches to the field and
their understanding and treatment of the field. Our presentation is
based on existing discussions and on some works which do not
tackle the issue explicitly. Although we have no pretensions of
giving a complete overview of the shift in the scientific paradigms in
264
the Croatian ethnology of the twentieth century, we will not be able

to completely avoid doing this, because the attitude towards the field
and fieldwork is closely connected with the theory that a particular
scholar explicitly or implicitly advocates (including the subject of
ethnology and its goals as established by this particular theory).
Since explicit statement of theory is uncharted territory of Croatian
ethnology, our overview of the concepts of the field and fieldwork in
Croatian ethnology should be read as an attempt to construct a largely
implicit idea of the field and fieldwork included in particular scho-
larly works. Actually, as opposed to Anglo-American socio-cultural
anthropology which was dominated by Malinowski's 1922 definition
of the field, Croatian ethnology (and folklore research, which we do
not discuss in detail) is largely characterized by heterodoxy, i.e., a
number of concurrent ideas about the field and fieldwork, which
were a result of the twentieth-century shifts in ethnological para-
digms, parallelism between them, and some institutional restrictions.
Generally speaking, Croatian ethnologists, like their Eastern Eu-
ropean colleagues (cf. Jakubowska 1993), have not conducted field-
work by long-term immersion in the researched community. This is
justified by the fact that they belonged to the same national culture
as their subjects (with some regional and class differences), which is
why they could establish their credibility in the researched group ba-
sed on their membership in the elite urban intelligentsia (ibid.). They
would undertake a number of brief visits to their research site, usu-
ally staying several days at a time, rarely longer than a week. During
their visits they would stay in the local hotel or, more rarely, with
one of the informants. Their fieldwork usually boiled down to inter-
viewing the members of the community about their culture in the
past; in the 1970s the focus shifted to include its present-day aspects,
in which case observation was also used. Let us consider how this
fundamental concept of fieldwork was realized within the major
ethnological paradigms, and how some of them more or less signifi-
cantly departed from the paradigm.
Antun Radić, who is considered the founder of Croatian ethno-
logy, defined certain parameters of field and fieldwork some of
which are still employed (see Čapo Žmegač 1997a for a detailed ana-
265
lysis of his ethnological work). To begin with, Radić defined ethno-

logy as a science dealing with the rural culture of the (rural) part of
one’s own society. Given that the Croatian nobility and citizenry have
"become alienated" from the rural population, who were – according
to Radić – the bearers of the "real" national culture, Radić did not re-
commend that rural culture be studied by members of these classes,
but by peasants themselves – literate and educated people from the
country – students, clergymen and teachers (Radić 1936:69-70),
which resulted in the (intended) consequence that the ethnographic
material was recorded in the dialect of the researched region.
As early as the late nineteenth century, in his discussion of the
ideal ethnologist-researcher and her/his relationship with the sub-
jects, Radić implicitly raised the methodological and epistemological
issues that would be identified, some one hundred years later, as the
issues of representation of the researched and of ethnographic autho-
rity (cf. Clifford 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Radić doubted whe-
ther researchers from another (non-peasant) culture could see the
world as it is seen by peasants – he doubted whether they could un-
derstand it using the peasants' reference system. He claimed that
someone who is prejudiced against the peasantry, who does not
have a good relationship with the peasants and does not sympathize
with the peasant culture, as well as someone who romanticizes the
peasantry, cannot be a good researcher (Radić 1936:69-70). Therefore,
he recommended that educated people from the country be ethno-
graphers. The first Croatian ethnographers in the late nineteenth and
the early twentieth century were just that: in keeping with Radić's re-
commendation they were participants in the culture that they des-
cribed, or, if they were clergymen and teachers, immediate observers of
the culture from which they themselves originated. The material re-
corded by an educated peasant had absolute epistemological pre-
-eminence in Radić's idea of the field and fieldwork.
In other words, Radić favored the emic approach 1 (see below); and
ethnographic authority – in keeping with his recommendation – was
established as the voice of the participant in the culture (ethnographers
were participants in the researched culture, sometimes themselves
assuming the role of informants). Of course, Radić did not problema-
266
tize the position of these educated peasants-ethnographers, starting

from the assumption that despite their schooling they remained close
to the models of the peasant culture, and that they knew and under-
stood them well: "Whoever knows everything by himself, everything that
'The basis…'2 asks about; or whoever has a relative, friend or
acquaintance to whom he can say: please tell me about this or that, –
– he will be able to immediately sit down and start writing" (Radić
1936:70; emphasis added). The assumption of homogeneity of cul-
ture and of generalized experience (whoever knows everything by him-
self…) underlay this concept of ethnography, according to which the
validity of ethnographic records can be based on the narration of a
single person, whether s/he may be the collector herself/himself or
someone else. Although the 1920s and the 1930s saw the increase in
the collection of the material by educated specialists (Čulinović-Kon-
stantinović 1979), part of the earlier canon has survived until today.
The tradition of amateurs – participants of the described culture re-
cording material and publishing it in popular magazines and in the
media, often using their local dialect (which is in keeping with Ra-
dić's recommendation3) still survives. On the other hand, contempo-
rary professional ethnologists, who also participate in the researched
culture, include their own experience in their fieldwork and scientific
research (see Gulin Zrnić, Pleše, Puljar D'Alessio, Šantek, all this vo-
lume), but from a completely different epistemological starting point
and with a clear reflexive orientation.
Radić may be said to be the founder of the field practice of the so-
-called "folk ethnographers" (cf. Kideckel 1997) in Croatia, i.e. people
who collect material relating to "folk life", which is similar to the
practice used in early American anthropology where informants
themselves recorded data about their own culture (employed, for in-
stance, by Franz Boas; see Marcus and Fischer 1986:71). In Radić's
concept, fieldwork and recording – practices within the domain of
folk ethnographers – were separate from editing and interpretation,
which were the prerogative of Radić himself. Thus, the formative pe-
riod of Croatian ethnology did not see the establishment of the
authority of an academic researcher-theorist, combining intensive
personal field experience with scientific analysis, a concept familiar
267
from Anglo-American ethnology and socio-cultural anthropology

since Malinowski’s time (cf. Clifford 1983:127). Instead, fieldwork
and interpretation were treated as separate activities. In the 1920s
and 1930s in Croatia folk ethnographers were replaced by professio-
nal ethnographers who, with some exceptions, did not at the same
time become ethnologists-theorists. Therefore, in some areas of
ethnology, the division into fieldworkers and theorists is not a myth,
but reality (see Lozica, this volume; Prica 2000 and 2001). A call for a
reconciliation and a dialectic permeation of the two scholarly phases
was issued in 1976 by Olga Supek-Zupan (see Lozica, this volume).
This division was further perpetuated within the cultural-histori-
cal paradigm, the Croatian version of diffusionism, which followed
Radić's ethnological paradigm in the 1930s but did not replace it
completely. Defining ethnology as a historical science which "stands
and falls" with the notion of ethnos and which strives to reconstruct
ethnic history through studying culture (Belaj 1989:13), the cultural-
-historical paradigm turns towards the past forms of peasant culture. In
contrast to Radić's ethnography which deals with the present moment
of "folk life", this ethnology focuses on the past; and the present is of
interest to it only inasmuch as it preserves some older cultural forms.
This has direct consequences for fieldwork, because a concept of
ethnology with such aims implies that fieldwork can only rely on a
single technique – collecting verbal statements about the past. In
comparison to the techniques used in fieldwork inspired by Radić's
ethnology – where, along with verbal statements, observation and
participation also played an important role – this is a considerable
reduction.
Accounts of the past were partly collected by means of the que-
stionnaire from the Ethnological Atlas of Yugoslavia (1962-1967), or
by means of other questionnaires based on it. The questionnaire is a
lexicon of "folk" terms and procedures, whose existence in a particu-
lar region is to be confirmed or refuted by the fieldworker – initially
a peasant or a teacher, and later a student or some other unskilled
assistant of the scholar-ethnologist.4 In this paradigm, the ethnologist
was not supposed to play an important role in fieldwork. It is not
our intention to go into a more detailed description of the fieldwork
268
data collection technique based on the questionnaire (cf. Rajković

1975 for its inadequacy in studying certain topics in the so-called so-
cial culture). Suffice it to say that a number of issues have remained
unexplored within this paradigm, including the validity, reliability
and status of the collected material in general, the role of collectors –
– whether local inhabitants or outside professionals, their relation-
ship with informants (cf. Kolbas 1998), the epistemological pre-
suppositions of such research and the conviction that the application
of clearly aimed questionnaires would result in "facts" about past
forms of culture.
The cultural-historical interest in past cultural forms resulted in a
number of negative features of the collected material, discussed by
Zorica Rajković (1974) in the first effort to criticize the cultural-histo-
rical research methodology in the 1970s. Firstly, verbal statements do
not provide a precise definition of the time of a cultural phenome-
non. They condense time sections from various periods, and refer to
some indefinite past time, which creates an image of the existence of a
single, old, unchanging and timeless culture in the past, of "a parti-
cular period in the past which can be taken as a fixed whole; and
what ethnologists should strive for is its discovery" (ibid.). In search
of what was old and belonged to the past, researchers relied on ver-
bal statements, and were unable to use observation. This resulted in
yet another feature of the collected ethnographic material, its genera-
lity: researchers' general questions received "general answers, based
on the informant's total knowledge and experience, and not on a par-
ticular case" (ibid.). A generalized description, Rajković continues,
provides a model of a particular phenomenon, but the researcher
does not know the extent to which the population of a particular
village or region may conform to it. Moreover, the described models
are normative, i.e., they describe what is desirable and ideal rather
than real-life situations (ibid.). The opposition between recording
and analyzing the model (structure) and the performance of a parti-
cular behavior (practice) to this day remains one of the moot points
of Croatian ethnology and of international cultural anthropology
(see Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempijević, Niemčić, this vo-
lume).
269
During the 1970s the ethnologists and folklorists working at the

Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research contrast the ideal and
typical descriptions of culture with records and analyses of parti-
cular life situations in which individuals behave differently and de-
part from the typical. This contrast based on fieldwork experience –
– was expressed by Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin as a theoretical oppo-
sition between the imagined (normative, desired) and the realized
(lived) order of cultural phenomena (1976).5 She applied this oppo-
sition in the analysis of extended families (Rihtman-Auguštin 1984),
and Rajković applied it in studying marriage practices (1975).6 Olga
Supek-Zupan is the first Croatian ethnologist who used the Anglo-
American concept of fieldwork in an attempt to overcome certain li-
mitations of the cultural-historical fieldwork methodology through
extended stay in the field and by applying participant observation. This
methodology was later largely ignored for institutional reasons, the
inability of Croatian research institutions to provide organizational
and financial support for this type of fieldwork, and because of the
fact that ethnologists were members of the same national culture as
the subjects of their research (cf. Halpern and Hammel 1969; Jaku-
bowska 1993).
The agile team of ethnologists and folklorists at the Institute
should be recognized for yet another change connected with the field
and fieldwork. It is thanks to them that since the 1970s the field as
the location of ethnological research no longer implies only a village, as
was the case in the ethnological research traditions which developed
from Radić's and later cultural-historical ethnology. Similarly to the
tradition of the field in socio-cultural anthropology, going to the
"field" up to then "suggests a trip to a place that is agrarian, pastoral
or maybe even 'wild' (…)", which still remains the case for some
Croatian ethnologists. "What stands metaphorically opposed to work
in the field is work in industrial places: in labs, in offices, in factories,
in urban settings – in short, in civilized spaces that have lost their
connection with nature" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a:8). Thus, Gupta
and Ferguson conclude that the "field", as a metaphor used in socio-
-cultural anthropology, reveals many tacit assumptions of the discip-
line. Although the "field" in Croatian ethnology may not have im-
270
plied finding and studying "the natural/pre-civilization state" of hu-

man groups, it was certainly laden with connotations of "authenticity
and antiquity" (Rihtman-Auguštin 1976). Since the 1970s, however,
with the "revolutionary" issue 13 of the academic journal Narodna
umjetnost (1976) (see Lozica, this volume), the urban field, still some-
what vaguely described as research into "the culture of a particular
city" or into "the culture of certain changing socio-cultural groups in
a city" (Rihtman-Auguštin 1976:19), provides an alternative to the
earlier rural fields. Consequently, studying the present provides an
alternative to studying the past. By studying contemporary urban
everyday life, Croatian ethnologists situate the field very close to or
indeed in their own urban "home": Milivoj Vodopija (1976), for in-
stance, studied the graduate processions through the city; based on
observing the games her daughter played, Zorica Rajković (1978)
wrote a text about children's folklore in the city. Aleksandra Muraj
(1989) conducted a methodologically interesting research with
children in one of Zagreb's housing communities, which is included
as a comparative counterpoint in one of the first studies of spatial
concepts in the rural environment. Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin (1988)
researched how people internalize the urban space in the New
Zagreb housing estate where she lived. Unfortunately, the research
project dealing with the urban everyday life which was started in the
1970s remained rather general in nature, because only a relatively
small number of researchers tried their hand at studying the contem-
porary everyday life (e.g. Rihtman-Auguštin 1988; Povrzanović 1989;
Prica 1990; Čiča 1991; Kalapoš 1996). Studies of the everyday are con-
tinued under completely changed circumstances in the 1990s, within
the so-called ethnography of war.
Finally, in the 1970s there was another programmatic and practi-
cal step to redefine and expand the concept of the "field", which de-
serves mention. The long-standing research into the transformations
of folklore traditions by the collaborators of the Institute of Ethno-
logy and Folklore Research resulted in abandoning the concept of
the localized field: "As opposed to previous ethnological and folklorist
studies which were limited to particular villages or regions we did not
go about taking a demographic unit as our basis. We searched for
271
phenomena that jumped out at us and we looked for their expla-

nations." (Editorial 1978, emphasis added). Researching newspaper
obituaries, Rihtman-Auguštin (1978 and 1988) completely aban-
doned the concept of the "real" field as a localized (preferably rural)
place where one has to travel, a place which involves a physical dis-
location of the researcher. The researcher remains "at home" and stu-
dies the selected topic from the space of her home. At the time, such
fieldwork was not acceptable in the established ethnographic and
ethnological canon, as illustrated by suspicious comments denying
that it was fieldwork, and by the saying that this particular re-
searcher did not go to the field at all! It was years later that we could
hear (and read) that Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin considered everything
her field: "her everyday life was her field, which was different than
the rest of us who went to villages at the time. Her life, what she saw
around her – all this was her field" (Bošković-Stulli 2004:273). Such
understanding of the field, which was unorthodox in the 1970s and
the 1980s, has nowadays become an acceptable field strategy in
Croatian ethnology and in the international cultural anthropology,
as illustrated by Ulf Hannerz's remark "… that the anthropologist ne-
ver has to be entirely 'out of field'" (2003:35).
In the meantime, during the 1990s, Croatian ethnology along with
its fieldwork practice, was shaken by the appearance of the ethno-
graphy of the wartime everyday life. This ethnography was pro-
nouncedly reflexive with regard to the position of the researcher
and, consequently, with regard to the status of the knowledge con-
structed at that extraordinary social point in history, which was mar-
ked by the Croatian war for independence and post-war instability.
Therefore, ethnography of war introduced some key elements of re-
flexivity about ethnographic writing.
By emphasizing its subjective position in relation to the subject it
studies, Croatian ethnography of war referred to, with some reser-
vations, the postmodern American anthropology of the 1980s (espe-
cially to G. Marcus, M. Fischer and J. Clifford). Although taking a
stance on their subject matter confronted them with ambiguity, only
seeming stability and weakness of their beliefs (Povrzanović
1992a:70), postmodern anthropologists believed that this was inevi-
272
table in ethological writing. Any ethnological writing implies a parti-

cular choice and begins at a particular position which corresponds to
the personal interests and views of the researcher and to the space
and time in which the ethnologist works. In this socially and existen-
tially critical point in time, Croatian ethnology turned to the re-
searcher and predominantly dealt with the ethnologist as the author
and her/his position and credibility, i.e. with epistemological as
opposed to methodological issues.
Highlighting the ethnologist's positioning and the conditional na-
ture of ethnology leads to pronounced reflexivity of Croatian ethno-
logists, primarily with regard to ethnographic writing. Among other
things, they problematized reaching what is objective within a se-
lected subjective paradigm determined by their participation (ethno-
logists are simultaneously participants and researchers of the war-
time everyday life); moreover, they asked the question of textual re-
presentation of the researched subjects and examined the partiality
and social commitment of ethnographers (cf. Čale Feldman, Prica
and Senjković 1993; Jambrešić Kirin i Povrzanović 1996; Povrzanović
1992a). By being reflexive, Croatian ethnologists of the wartime
everyday life make an epistemological break: they strike at the very
foundation of Croatian positivist ethnology and its image of the
omniscient and distant ethnological authority (which is in the cultu-
ral-historical paradigm frequently separated from the unskilled
collector of the ethnographic material).
One of the eminent Croatian ethnologists of the wartime period,
Maja Povrzanović, points out that she agrees with the Norwegian
ethnologist Marianne Gullestad who problematizes using the
author/researcher "as an informant about [her] own society (…) as a
part of the process of systematically transforming cultural familiarity
into systematic knowledge" (Povrzanović 1992a:72; Gullestad
1991:89). Concerning anthropological pretensions to presenting the
totality of the researched culture, Croatian wartime ethnologists are
aware of the observer's position being limited in scope by frag-
mented and incomplete reports (see especially Povrzanović 1992a;
Prica 1992), sending, in this way, the same message as the Native
American hunter when summoned by the court to testify about his
273
tribes' hunting ground: "I’m not sure I can tell the truth... I can only tell
what I know" (Clifford 1986a:8). In accordance with the paradigm, the
result of such insistence on fragments, on a lesser degree of authori-
tativeness and on polyphony is experimenting with ethnographic
texts, which, according to one opinion, "changed the face of Croatian
ethnographic writing" (Čale Feldman 1995:81). The subjectivist, po-
sitioned, committed perspective and experimenting with textual re-
presentation strategies are an invaluable contribution of ethno-
graphy of war to the contemporary Croatian ethnology. What makes
this contribution specific is the fact that ethnography of war emerged
in extraordinary socio-political circumstances.
In this volume similar issues are discussed within the framework
of a scholarly practice which studies the peacetime everyday life of
what is proximate. The discussion is extended to include a methodo-
logical and epistemological examination of the research procedure:
we study how our contemporary fields are constructed in relation to
the researched locality and the researcher's home, in relation to in-
siderness as a basic methodological procedure of empirical fieldwork
and in relation to our informants – the subjects of our research and
the readers of our work. In the methodological discussions that
follow we examine the research procedure, both generally (in rela-
tion to fieldwork in ethnology and cultural anthropology) and parti-
cularly (in relation to the selected subject and a particular fieldwork).
Methodological and epistemological tenets of

contemporary fieldwork
Ethnology: empiricism, insiderness, the emic perspective
Ethnology and socio-cultural anthropology are two empirical

sciences seeking to acquire knowledge through fieldwork. Before
discussing what contemporary anthropologists regard as their field,
we wish to take a closer look at how anthropologists analyze the
possibility of grasping reality in the field, i.e. of reaching the da-
274
ta/material they need. A classical realist position – that there is a rea-

lity independent of the researcher, whose nature can be understood
and later presented in a way that corresponds to it – used to be the
epistemological basis and the justification of ethnographic research.
This position, which was connected with the concept of culture as
objective reality, as a reified whole with a given content, shaped both
Radić's and cultural-historical ethnographic tradition in Croatia.
Postmodern criticism relativized this position, even to the extent that
it denied the possibility of grasping reality in the field, claiming that
reality does not exist beyond ethnographic interpretations, i.e., that it
is constructed within the text. In this way representation – whereby
an ethnographer "translates experience into text" (Clifford 1986b:115)
– has become the central ethnographic practice, and ethnographic
analysis emphasizes the techniques of representation and especially
of writing. The lack of a frame of reference makes it impossible to
say which construct is better than some other and, consequently,
ethnographic constructivism lapses into extreme relativism. A
growing number of anthropologists have been taking the position
that neither radical realists nor radical relativists are right in this epi-
stemological debate, and they have been advocating the adoption of
a "subtler form of realism" (Hammersley 2001:107-108). Thus, "neo-
-relativist ethnographers" adopt a position that does presuppose "the
existence of at least some realist premises of ethnographic research"
in addition to the awareness of socio-cultural constructedness of rea-
lity (Šantek, this volume). Therefore, fieldwork does to some extent
allow obtaining data, which enables ethnology/anthropology to re-
main empirical in nature. This, in turn, means that it is primarily ba-
sed on induction, which is realized in the recent theoretical and in-
terpretive approaches as the ethnography of the particular (Abu-Lug-
hod 1991) or ethnographically grounded theory (according to
Hammersley and Atkinson 1996). Furthermore, the research process
is frequently affected by reciprocal epistemological trends, whereby
empirical data shape theories (induction) which are then used to ex-
plain facts (deduction), and these two courses of acquiring know-
ledge are in constant interaction (retroduction).
275
While traditional concepts and paradigms of Croatian ethnology

did not require the researcher's participation in the "field" in the sen-
se of living in the researched community, this requirement became
the central methodological defining feature giving anthropology
scientific legitimacy. In the Croatian tradition the material was
collected by several shorter visits to the field when researchers inter-
viewed the native population about particular elements of material,
social and spiritual culture. The American and the British tradition
required an extended stay in the field and participation in the life of
the researched community, which was the key element in creating
specific anthropological knowledge based on personal experience
(Emerson 2001; cf. Lozica and Šantek, this volume). As far as we
know, this Anglo-American understanding of fieldwork was first
applied in Croatian ethnology by Olga Supek-Zupan in her four-
month research near Zagreb (1979). It was only recently that this
methodology was employed again, giving impetus to new analyses
of fieldwork, which are also represented in this volume (Gulin Zrnić,
Pleše, Puljar D'Alessio, Šantek, Zebec, this volume).
Malinowski believed that participation was "a counterbalance to
ethnographic abstractions about society" (Moore 2002:173). Partici-
pation would result in empathy, enabling the ethnologist to identify
with "the native's point of view"; it included observation, inter-
viewing and actual participation in everyday life. Looking back on
Croatian ethnology, the observational component of fieldwork does
not gain prominence until the 1970s, which coincides with the
change of paradigm whereby research restricted to studying a phe-
nomenon in isolation was replaced by research into a phenomenon
in practice, in context, interacting with the life of an individual and a
community. Interviewing has always been present in Croatian ethno-
logy, but the conversational forms and the relationship between the
researcher and the informant have changed significantly. In the older
paradigm an interview was comprised of questions and answers.
Open interviews and the life-story method have become more fre-
quent during the 1990s in the ethnography of the wartime everyday
life, which, feeding on the postmodernism of the 1980s, largely tur-
ned to texts, discourse and representations. Participation was present
276
in Radić's ethnography, and it was later epistemologically and ethi-

cally questioned as a practice in the extraordinary wartime circum-
stances. In the last decade or so, partially as a result of the relativist
criticism and of growing weary of the discourse analysis paradigm,
many ethnologists, mainly the ones who worked on creating this vo-
lume, have started using fieldwork devised according to the Anglo-
American model, in which insiderness, as a methodological procedure of
drawing close to the researched subjects7, is a vital foundation of the pro-
cess of acquiring knowledge. Insiderness – a long-term presence of
the researcher in the field – may be defined as one of the two ex-
tremes: an exclusively observational or an entirely participatory po-
sition, or any combination of the two. What used to be a relatively
fixed and distant position of researchers towards their subjects, has
now become unstable and open to continual redefining in various
field circumstances. Nowadays, emphasis is placed on the instability
of field roles, their contextual and situational character, and the in-
fluence of the researched on their formation. The fluidity of this po-
sition is further complicated if researchers blend their research with
their personal life, so that the field and home overlap physically and
socially. Open interviews resulting from a more intensive communi-
cation with the researched are still an important part of research, but,
at the same time, participation in the life of the community may
correct the possible bias in the narrative material and enable exa-
mining "the reality of interactions". Interpretation of interactions in
the socio-cultural context is the domain of ethnologists and cultural
anthropologists (Čapo Žmegač 2002:266-7; Šantek, this volume).
Ethnology of the proximate exhibits a more systematic appli-
cation of fieldwork modeled on classical anthropological methodo-
logy as defined by Bronislaw Malinowsky, and adapted to Croatian
circumstances. One such form of fieldwork, used in the ethnological
research into dance, is a decade-long going to the same field several
times a year, which has allowed long-term observation of all signifi-
cant events and a contextualized analysis of various situations
connected with the subject, whereby insiderness has primarily been
realized through participatory observation and, if the opportunity
arose, through actual participation (Zebec, this volume). A several-
277
-year-long participation in a religious community – which started

out as a personal experience and concluded as research, redefining
the researcher's position from a complete participant to a reserved
observer – is an example of the application of this model in the
anthropology of religion, posing similar dilemmas connected with
the delicacy of the topic (Šantek, this volume). In a different example
– an ethnological and cultural-anthropological research into the city
– the circumstances of the researcher's life have been brought to-
gether into a research project. In this case, the boundaries between
the field and the home, between what is professional and what is
personal are removed, and insiderness is achieved through continual
observation and complete participation, through constantly being in
the field, to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish where and
when the research ends (Gulin Zrnić, this volume). Another applied
form of fieldwork has been inspired by the phenomenological
approach and aims at understanding "culture-in-use" by almost ex-
clusively focusing on human practice – what people do in particular
situations. Methodologically, this approach requires the researcher's
complete, direct and physical participation, a "practical mimesis" as
the crucial part of the research procedure, and is called "radical em-
piricism" (Jackson 1983 and 1996; Frykman and Gilje 2003; Mathiesen
Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempijević, this volume).
All of our fields embody the concept of the semiotic under-
standing of culture, which makes insiderness indispensable in disen-
tangling "the web of meanings" (Geertz 1973)8 by means of narration,
interaction, observation and participation. Symbolic analyses that
treat subjective meaning as the problem of ethnography are central
to this concept (Čapo Žmegač 2002:16). This redefinition of the sub-
ject of ethnological or anthropological research, and the redefinition
of the physical groundedness of the field, may have encouraged
Croatian researchers to reemphasize the experiential field dimension
of the epistemological and methodological foundation of their dis-
cipline.9 Because culture is no longer seen as spatial or objectivist, the
legitimacy of the anthropological field is no longer achieved by
means of objectivist epistemology or by the selection of a particular
locality, but rather by means of experience of intensive long-term and
278
total fieldwork which Okely calls "total experience", requiring "all of

the anthropologist's resources: intellectual, physical, emotional, poli-
tical, intuitive" (1992:8). Thinking about all these personal and in-
tensive experiences in the field is the ultimate foundation of all texts
in this volume.
Finally, after fieldwork has been completed, ethnography re-
quires re-contextualization. The knowledge of the discipline allows
ethnologists, in their theoretical and interpretive work, to translate
the original stories, narrations, reflections and experience into
anthropological discourse, re-arranging them according to the
analytical framework of ethnography (Strathern 1987; Hastrup 1992).
This is transposition between the emic and the etic perspective, or,
according to Geertz (1983), between "experience-near concepts" and
"experience-distant concepts". Concepts near to the experience of the
researched subjects, the emic perspective, are concepts that the indi-
viduals from a certain society/culture apply on the basis of their
common sense, without explaining or questioning them – they are
concepts of the shared corpus of knowledge, which are under-
standable in communication. The emic is a view from inside, which
in no way means that it lacks plurality of views and meanings. The
etic perspective, or the application of experience-distant concepts,
means using technical language. The emic knowledge is interpreted
by means of scientific discourse, i.e. discipline-related notions, which
may in turn allow, for instance, comparative ethnological research,
because different emic knowledge is "translated" into scientifically-
-based, theoretically-founded concepts of scientific analysis (e.g. reli-
gion, kinship, dance), thus becoming readily comparable. The
current trend is to adhere to the emic perspective, especially in repre-
sentation, and to give legitimacy to the research by basing the inter-
pretation on the etic – scientific, ethnological, professional – per-
spective. Empirical fieldwork primarily aims at reaching the emic
perspective: either in the Malinowskian sense of reaching "the na-
tive's point of view" by "getting into the minds" of the researched
subjects; by trying to understand what the researched "think they are
up to" in the Geertzian sense; or in the phenomenological sense of
reaching a direct lived experience. Entering the researched commu-
279
nity, drawing close to it, being empathic, reaching the experience of

the researched subjects and acquiring one's own experience are all
methodological means of giving legitimacy to the empirical episte-
mological foundation of ethnology/anthropology and the know-
ledge that it creates. Since this entire methodological complex is rea-
lized in the field, we can conclude that the "ethnology as a profession
can not abandon the field" (Lozica, this volume). The definition of
the ethnological field also depends on the standpoint (the scientific
paradigm) of the ethnology that we support (ibid.); and the historical
overview given above illustrates the changes of paradigms in Croa-
tia. However, some of the most contemporary fields provoke new
debates, requiring a radical redefinition of the very notion of the
field.
The field, place, culture
Some Croatian fieldworkers used to search for micro-cultural worlds

connected with a particular physical locality, basing their research
on the presupposition that there is a particular symbolic and real
connection of culture to a particular place – the presupposition that a
single locality presents a single cultural variant (monographs based
on Radić's questionnaire, later monographs about the town of Sinj,
the island of Zlarin and so on, e.g. Ivanišević 1987; Lovretić 1990; Na-
rodna umjetnost 1968, 1980 and 1981).
Croatian ethnologists of the cultural-historical orientation had a
somewhat different idea of the relationship between culture and geo-
graphical space, but they too looked for dominant cultural elements
characteristic of a particular space (region), which resulted in the no-
tion of cultural zones or areas (specific cultures connected with a parti-
cular space), which do, however, exhibit some overlap at their bor-
ders (Gavazzi 1978).
In both cases, culture was treated as an objectively given entity, a
"thing", as a factor determining locality irrespective of the people as
its bearers. Therefore, this type of ethnology can be called "ethnology
without people" (cf. Muraj 1989).10 In both of these cases the field is
280
conceived of as a larger or smaller locality, which allows forming a

complete image of the way people live or compiling a list of cultural
elements. In these approaches physical space is defined as the center
and the boundary of a particular local culture. Of course, studies of
the culture of a single locality proved to go beyond it, either because
the local culture was shaped by influences of other closer or more
distant cultural spaces, which is a typical contribution of diffusionist
and cultural-historical studies in Croatia and internationally (Gupta
and Ferguson 1997a; Giddens 1990 according to Hannerz 2003:20), or
because the local culture was integrated into larger geographical and
social spaces (such as state, national and global spaces), and could
not be studied in isolation from the larger social context.
Although it is still possible to choose to do research within a
single locality, because of the mobility of people, capital, ideas and
goods which cross the boundaries of local as well as national geo-
graphical spaces (Apadurai 1996) such a choice is no longer self-ex-
planatory and ethnologists are expected to account for their metho-
dological and analytical procedures (Hannerz 2003). Conducting re-
search within a single locality no longer means presupposing that it
represents a cultural whole, but presupposing heterogeneous pa-
rallel symbolic relationships formed between people and localities in
a single geographical place (multivocality of place, Rodman 1992; Gu-
lin Zrnić 2004). A gender-sensitive analysis resulted in a similar
realization: the author has concluded that a single local community
may have gender-specific, even conflicting representations of the
same event (Niemčić 2002a and this volume). While Gulin Zrnić
(2004) tried to cover the heterogeneity of cultural meanings in a
single locality by applying the ethnography of the particular, Mathiesen
Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempijević (this volume) tried to do the same
by applying the methodology where a group of researchers-ethno-
logists records reality – the celebration of the former Yugoslav na-
tional holiday – Dan mladosti [Day of the Youth] in the village of
Kumrovec in 2004 – from different viewpoints.
Today the field is constituted as several physical places of re-
search, as so-called multi-sited fieldwork (Marcus 1995).11 Sanja Puljar
D'Allesio's choice of two localities for her research means that she
281
examines the two geographical places as meeting places of local and

translocal – regional, national and global – cultural meanings. The
disentangling of this web of meanings in both localities and their
comparison are the subject of fieldwork and analysis (Puljar
D'Alessio 2005 and this volume). Her ethnography can be qualified
as bilocal (or multilocal), and only with some qualifications as trans-
national or "intercountry-translocal" (Čapo Žmegač 2003a). These
qualifications concern the fact that it is the researcher's analysis
rather than the activities of the inhabitants that connect the selected
localities into an interdependent structure. Thus, these localities do
not form a single unified "field" where people, ideas and objects from
both geographical localities overlap.12 Multilocal translocal research
is a typical product of migration studies, which pointed out some ten
years ago that migrants live their lives in two or more localities (lo-
cated in two nation states), and in the interspace that they have
created between them (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994;
Čapo Žmegač 2003a and 2003b). Transmigrants are migrants who
create so-called transnational social fields (Basch, Glick Schiller and
Szanton Blanc 1994), i.e. social fields going beyond geographical lo-
calities and bridging cultural and political boundaries. This is social
space par excellence, within which transmigrants "articulate and ex-
press their emergent identities and their own utopias of what they
would like to be" (Simsek-Caglar 1994:66-67). In diasporic situations,
places where the members of the diaspora dwell are multiplied, and
the research expands from bilocal into multilocal and translocal (cf.
Povrzanović Frykman 2004a).
In some recent studies the research goes beyond "the physical
field". The researcher breaks away from the traditionally dominant
guideline of physical groundedness, like in studies of the internet, "a
global network which connects the remotest and farthest spaces and
people in a new, non-physical cyberspace" (Pleše, this volume, empha-
sis added; Senjković and Dukić 2005). Hence the question asked by
one of the contributors to this volume: "Have I been in the field?"
(Pleše). This is a radical attempt to move away from the traditionally
field-dependent (localized, physically bounded) research space, in
which researchers and participants of the studied cyberspace are
282
supposedly free of being physically grounded. However, even in

such studies of a nonmaterial global communication network, re-
searchers-ethnographers tend to treat the virtual space of this new
technology as an "environment populated by real people with physi-
cal bodies (…) people with real-world problems and identities
shaped by their physical groundedness" (ibid.). The anthropology of
migration and transnationalism has also shown that physical place, a
particular locality where a person lives (whether bilocally or multilo-
cally), is more significant than suggested by initial theories, which
celebrated going beyond all kinds of boundaries (Guarnizo and
Smith 1998). Thus, similarly to transnational practices which are de-
fined by the possibilities and limitations of specific localities in
which they take place, transmigrants, although they participate in
trans-border activities, are still anchored in the localities where they
live and develop local connections and groundings (Faist 2000; Čapo
Žmegač 2003b).
It seems that ethnological research cannot completely abandon
the connection between the field and physical space. Locality/place
still remains the constitutive element of research, although it no lon-
ger implies that social and cultural spaces are bounded by a single
physical space or that cultural meanings within this space are homo-
geneous. This redefined concept of the ethnographic "field" in our re-
search into the contemporary life encompasses several (physical) pla-
ces: it can be constructed as a single (physical) place which is an in-
tersection of various local, (g)localized, national and global
meanings; it can be a "moving" place – such as a bus (Povrzanović
Frykman 2001); a social space based on religious communion (Šantek
2004); a seemingly completely deterritorialized space of the internet
communication; or a liminal, third space, where migrant and diaspo-
ric identification projects take place. These multilocal fields are
sometimes transnational or "intercountry-translocal" (Čapo Žmegač
2003a), because the ethnologist deals with groups which live across
nation state borders.13 Even when it seems that the deterritorialized
aspects of understanding contemporary fields are foregrounded and
that the practices of the modern mobile people connect various per-
haps very distant places, thus turning "the whole world" into "a glo-
283
bal village", people, the subjects of ethnographic research, are always

located in very specific geographic locations (or in several of them)
that contribute to the formation of their practices. Hence the inability
of recent ethnographic research to completely "detach" itself from the
field as a physical place. However, aspects of contemporary life in
which our research is conducted necessitate a redefinition of the
field.
Contemporary ethnological epistemologies do not define the field
as a given geographical locality. Rather, our fields are constituted by
the chosen topic and its treatment in a specific study. Contemporary
research does not focus on the geographic locality and cultures or
cultural phenomena that belong to it, but rather on people and social
spaces that they create. Therefore, contemporary field is more appro-
priately defined in terms of social relationships, networks and spaces
(Hannerz 2003; Pleše this volume), which are also used to give me-
thodological legitimacy to the discipline. Thus, we no longer study
localities as assumed places of a particular bounded culture, but peo-
ple, whom we follow, whether they stay in a single locality or move
through different localities (Welz 1998), and their interpretations of
their own world.
Ethnology of the proximate, auto-ethnography, the researched,

representation
European national ethnologies have a long tradition of studying

their respective societies and cultures in the widest sense of the term.
They used to do research into the peasant, traditional, folk culture
which, although an integral part of modern life, was studied as a re-
pository of past, older, disappearing cultural forms. Research was
conducted in villages, and the studied period was the past. The 1970s
marked a great paradigmatic turn towards doing research in the city
and in the present time, a turn which involved rethinking and rede-
fining the very subject of ethnological research. In the 1970s and the
1980s a growing body of research in, e.g., Scandinavian, German,
Slovenian and Croatian ethnology, studied certain segments of ur-
284
ban culture or working-class culture. This research developed the

idea of continuity and shifts in tradition in the modern time, of
creating new traditions in new contemporary spaces or socio-politi-
cal regimes, and offered new definitions of culture, intended to over-
come the limited and static opposition of the village and the city as
the places of "old" vs. "contemporary" ethnology (cf. Rihtman-Au-
guštin 1988; Bausinger 1961 and 1970; Kohlmann and Bausinger
1985; Kremenšek 1970 and 1980; Frykman and Löfgren 1987). In the
1980s, British social anthropology and American cultural anthropo-
logy deal with their great shift towards "anthropology at home"
(Jackson 1987; Messerschmidt 1981). In anthropologies this shift pri-
marily relates to space: a dislocation from exotic fields of remote
worlds and a "return home" – to studying one’s own culture and so-
ciety. In European ethnologies this shift is particularly evident in the
temporal relocation of research from the past to the present, while in
a spatial sense the research has remained within the same society,
but has moved from the village to the city.14 With respect to both of
these aspects, ethnology has "drawn closer" to the ethnologist, and
has grown into the ethnology of the familiar contemporary society, or
"the ethnology of our everyday life" (Rihtman-Auguštin 1988).
All the contributions in this volume belong to the ethnology of
the proximate 15, because they are situated within the framework of
studying one's own (Croatian) culture and society, in accordance
with the good tradition of Croatian ethnology. According to Peter
Niedermüller (2002) one's own society should not be taken as a spe-
cific place of research, but primarily as a common horizon, a state of
knowledge (Wissenzustand), which is the product of modernity. By
participating in constituting the same society, the researched and re-
searchers share a common view of the world, and a common –
– although not homogeneous – knowledge (commonsense under-
standing). In other words, Niedermüller claims that all research in
European ethnology is based on the cognitive assumption that re-
searchers share a significant part of their non-ethnological know-
ledge, their social commitments and moral attitudes with the re-
searched (ibid. 59). Thus, research in which the researcher is a part of
the society and culture that s/he studies is characterized by "basic in-
285
sidedness" in the sense of sharing some basic knowledge, the sense

of belonging and emotions with the researched (Povrzanović Fryk-
man 2004b:87-90). The researchers' knowledge of their culture has
not been acquired by reading; rather, it is "substantial under-
standing" originating from the experience of sharing time, the social
setting and situations (Dyck 2000:48). It is because of this interiori-
zation that the anthropologist at home studying the proximate will
not perceive differences and interesting topics as jumping out at her,
like in intercultural research, but will need a more vivid anthro-
pological imagination or estrangement of what is known in order to
distinguish the researched processes, topics and practices. As a re-
sult, the anthropologist will be faced with her/his personal attitudes
and views that are directly or indirectly connected to the topic (Gulin
Zrnić, Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempijević, Šantek, this vo-
lume). Anthony Cohen says: "As an anthropologist, I cannot escape
myself; nor should I try", but I "[use] myself to study others"
(1992:224). It is this fact that some describe as the "fundamental prin-
ciple" of fieldwork in research conducted in one’s own culture and
society (Pink 2000).
In ethnology of the proximate, researchers often select as their
field a group of people or individuals close to them by their place of
residence (Gulin Zrnić, Puljar D'Alessio), kinship (Čapo Žmegač),
gender (Niemčić), because they are friends (Pleše), or because the re-
searcher used to actively participate in the researched group (Šan-
tek). In this way, the selection of the field is, among other things,
pragmatic, which makes it easier to access it. Friends, neighbors,
acquaintances and relatives are already in the field, and they help us
in our research, becoming informants themselves and trying to
connect us with other informants. This is one of the characteristic
features of fieldwork in the research into the proximate, because it
requires reclassifying the existing relationships that the researcher
may privately have or foster (Hastrup 1987; Povrzanović Frykman
2004b; Gulin Zrnić and Šantek, this volume).
This research does not only lack physical dislocation to remote
and exotic anthropological fields, but also to closer fields which still
involves travel (however short), a dose of adventure, a departure
286
from the everyday, a change from the daily routine and facing some-
thing new (see Pleše, this volume). Some works eliminate all dislo-
cation and are literally created at home, which means that from the
researcher's perspective the field is construed out of "continuing per-
sonal engagement in certain types of social aggregations, activities and
relationships" (Dyck 2000:48, emphasis added). This engagement
was usually there before fieldwork was formally started, and re-
mains after it was concluded. Since there is no boundary between the
home and the field, being in the field is constant (Hannerz 2003:35),
and insiderness as a methodological procedure can no longer be de-
fined as physical movement but as cognitive realization, "auto-cultu-
ral defamiliarization" (Gulin Zrnić, this volume). Thus, ethnology of
the proximate is radically practiced where both the space and the
time of the field and the home coincide (Gulin Zrnić, Pleše, Puljar
D'Alessio, this volume). This coincidence goes beyond the mere
overlap between otherwise separate locations: it refers to inter-
weaving personal and professional life, roles, time and social activi-
ties, with strong mutual influence and shaping, and the field is inevi-
tably located "between autobiography and anthropology" (Hastrup
1992:119). In such a field the conditions and circumstances of the re-
searcher's life all converge into a research project, which means that
the research topic is simultaneously the topic of the researcher's pri-
vate and everyday life: on the one hand it would be a violation to re-
move the researcher as a participant (Pleše, this volume), and on the
other hand it is difficult for the researcher to detach herself/himself
and step away from the field (Gulin Zrnić, Šantek, this volume). In
cases where the researcher is practically, cognitively and emotionally
living with the field, the research is a continual blend of personal ex-
perience and the creation of anthropological knowledge; the re-
searcher becomes an informant because s/he possesses some know-
ledge about the topic, acquired through her/his personal experience,
but independently of the research (Gulin Zrnić, Pleše, Puljar
D'Alessio, Šantek, all this volume; Okely 1996; Dyck 2000; Pink
2000).
All these elements illustrate that research at home (i.e. research
into one's own culture) clearly incorporates the autobiographical ele-
287
ment into ethnology. Anthropological writing about the autobiogra-

phical experience of a part of one's own life is dubbed "retrospective
fieldwork" by Judith Okely (1996:19). The autobiographical perspec-
tive in this type of research, including one's own culture in general
as well as social and cultural practices of the contemporary world in
which the researcher herself participates in particular, is not so much
a matter of conscious choice, as a result of the topic itself (Pleše, this
volume). The autobiographical component may be consciously re-
pressed in the text (Gulin Zrnić and Šantek, this volume), made con-
scious in the research itself (Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempi-
jević, this volume), be present in the construction of the field and the
research topic (Gulin Zrnić and Šantek, this volume) or be interpola-
ted into the narrative corpus, whereby the researcher becomes one of
the central characters of her own ethnography (Pleše, this volume).
The term auto-ethnography defines the relationship between autobio-
graphy and ethnography as two research procedures and genres, no
matter of the extent of incorporating personal experience into ethno-
logical research and writing. In the 1980s, the convergences of and
the overlap between the genres of biography and ethnography have
raised crucial questions about the relationship between the re-
searcher and the informant, between scientific authority and legiti-
macy, authenticity, experience, etc. (cf. collections edited by Clifford
and Marcus 1986; Okely and Calaway 1992).
During fieldwork the ethnologist doing ethnology of the proxi-
mate is implicitly in a fluid epistemological position between a parti-
cipant-insider (researcher) and a participant-witness (native, infor-
mant). While the former position is methodological, the latter carries
with it an autobiographical element – an "authentic" testimony of the
researcher about her/his own experience: it is this position that
makes the researcher an informant and her/his personal testimony
part of the emic perspective. Such duality is characteristic in
studying the proximate. However, ethnologists will still organize
their knowledge differently than individuals from the social group
they are studying, no matter how close they may be to it; researchers
themselves are "bicultural", because they simultaneously belong to
the world of science and the world of everyday life (Narayan
288
1993:671-672). This will result in a hybridity of anthropological texts

but also in raising the researcher's awareness: one anthropologist,
examining her native country using the discourse of social analysis,
saw "many of the experiences that have shaped me into the person –
and professional – I am today" in a new light (ibid. 678). Many re-
searchers, including the contributors to this volume, point out that
their research has prompted them to question, develop or even
change their personal opinions (Gulin Zrnić, Mathiesen Hjemdahl
and Škrbić Alempijević, Šantek, this volume). Research, especially its
conversational part, very often goes beyond mere examination, and
transforms communication into a mutually committed dialogue (Ča-
po Žmegač 2002:41). This conversation then becomes a forum for the
researcher's and the informant's reflexivity (Gulin Zrnić, this vo-
lume).16 In this sense fieldwork is indeed realized as interactive and
intersubjective creation of meaning (Rabinow 1977:151; Hastrup
1992). Therefore, the field is no longer "discovered" but constructed
through interaction, which implies dynamic and fluid change of re-
lationships, balance and recognition between the researcher and the
researched social group and its individuals (Čapo Žmegač, Gulin Zr-
nić, Puljar D'Alessio, Šantek, this volume; Povrzanović Frykman
2004b).
The altered relationship between the researcher and the re-
searched in ethnography reflects the change in the concept of cul-
ture. The past decades have brought about a new concept of culture,
which is no longer conceived as an objectively given entity, but as an
interactive symbolic corpus whose meanings are subject to constant
negotiation. This means that people are no longer seen as mere cul-
ture-bearers, but as "culture-builders" (Frykman and Löfgren 1987;
Frykman 1999). In this way, the researched communities and indivi-
duals in it are no longer the object of research but become the subject
of research "with their own voice, views and dilemmas, their own par-
ticular attitudes and their interpretation of a situation and of cultural
meanings" (Čapo Žmegač 2002:42). Moreover, the change in the sta-
tus of informants and the nature of our relationship with them is also
illustrated by the pervasive change of the term which we use to refer
to them: since they are no longer expected simply to inform during
289
the new field interview which resembles a conversation, informants

become interlocutors (ibid. 41). In addition to this, through field and
open interaction the social group becomes the co-creator of the field
and the entire research: in more recent studies they point to specific
topics within a selected corpus and thus participate in the con-
struction of the research topic (Čapo Žmegač 2002 and this volume;
Gulin Zrnić, Pleše, Šantek, this volume).
However, their participation in the cooperative production of
ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986:71) goes beyond fieldwork,
and plays a significant role in the construction of the text and its in-
terpretation. Some studies base their presentation on extensive ex-
cerpts from transcribed conversations with various informants (Čapo
Žmegač 2002; Gulin Zrnić 2004; Pleše 2005; Zebec 2005), allowing
voices of individuals to be heard, and in this way pointing to a va-
riety in positions and attitudes, composing a "polyphony of the text"
(Clifford 1983). This is a result of anthropological debates in the
1980s, which raised the issue of ethnological authority that essentia-
lized and generalized the speech of others into a homogenous and
coherent ethnographic story (Marcus and Fischer 1986). It was as
early as the 1970s that Geertz (1973) pointed out that cultural analy-
sis in itself, intrinsically, cannot be complete, and that its aim is not
to create a coherent image of a community (nor can coherence be the
criterion of merit of cultural analysis). In the 1980s this observation
was stated in terms of "multiple meanings", "partial truths" or "con-
tradictory truths" (Clifford and Marcus 1986). One of the methodolo-
gical, interpretive and representational procedures used in ethno-
logy to deal with the multiplicity of reality was the ethnography of the
particular (Abu Lughod 1991). Starting with the claim that "ethnology
has never strived to remove representative samples from a pre-
sumed whole" (Augé 2002:40), ethnological knowledge is created on
the basis of completely researched individual cases. They valorize in-
dividual experience, extensive context of individual researched
situations, personal opinions and values, their change and the con-
ditional nature of knowledge. This is a way to overcome "the most
problematic connotations of culture: homogeneity, coherence, and
timelessness" (Abu Lughod 1991:154), to allow the representation of
290
multiple realities, and to validate the ethnological inductive episte-

mological position.
Situated between the earlier extreme realism and the later poten-
tially radical relativism, multiple representations of reality are
possible and legitimate because they are created by various points of
view, making the ethnologist’s text only one of possible interpreta-
tions; an interpretation based on ethnological concepts, which give it
legitimacy (cf. Geertz 1983; Čapo Žmegač and Šantek, this volume).
In order to present the multiplicity of reality and the multiple
meanings of experience, contemporary research and ethnographies
employ the ethnography of the particular, which clearly reflects and
readily accepts the emic perspective (Čapo Žmegač 2002; Gulin Zrnić
2004; Pleše 2005; Šantek 2004). Another methodological framework
which works towards the same goal is "the field from different
points of view", which relies on the phenomenological perspective
and on the technique of group fieldwork. Since this type of fieldwork
has not been practiced in Croatian ethnology, it can be considered a
novelty, but its tenets – understanding the perspective of others,
"multiplicity, variability and diversity of experiences, attitudes and
cultural practices" (Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Škrbić Alempijević, this
volume) and being aware of the researcher's role in creating know-
ledge – have all been inherited from anthropology.
Ethnological products: audiences, sponsors, responsibilities
Researching culture through ethnographic fieldwork is closely

connected with its product – ethnography.17 The reflexive awareness
of ethnographies being written products of fieldwork data collection
and analytical procedures must take into account potential audiences
of the textual products, because ethnographic texts and their inter-
pretations on part of potential readerships are part of the general
process of reflexivity in ethnology of the proximate. Final ethnologi-
cal products – texts – are shaped by, among other things, diverse
audiences for which they were created, whether they are a specia-
lized ethnological audience, a wider community of social scientists
291
and scholars, action-oriented practitioners, a non-differentiated ge-

neral audience or, last but not least, the researched subjects them-
selves (Hammersley and Atkinson 1996; Brettell 1993). How we are
going to write a text depends on our potential audiences, and in-
fluences the reception of our texts (Hammersley and Atkinson
1996:255, 261). We write differently when the audience we have in
mind is academic, and differently when our work is primarily aimed
at a general audience, or, even more specifically, at the researched
subjects.
Discussions about the reception of ethnographic work and
writing are not numerous in the international anthropological litera-
ture (but see, e.g., the collection edited by Brettell 1993), and are
practically non-existent in Croatian ethnology (but see Supek-Zupan
1979). However, in ethnology of the proximate and in European
ethnologies in general (which deal with their respective societies – it
is here where the researcher lives, studies, and writes about), the re-
ception of ethnographic texts – primarily by the researched, but also
by the wieder society – becomes a significant issue. There seem to be
two crucial reasons why this is so. On the one hand, writing about
proximate others (no matter what their degree of distance) – even
about neighbors, friends, relatives etc. – ethnologists of the proxi-
mate publish in the language that they share with the researched and
the general public. On the other hand, because of striving for insider-
ness as a basic methodological procedure and because of a special
status of the researched – as the co-creators of our interpretation – it
is to be expected that contemporary ethnology of the proximate
would also take the researched into account when they become the
audience or readers of their work. The change of status of the re-
searched means that ethnologists, when writing and publishing,
have to bear in mind that perhaps their most interested readers will
be the researched subjects themselves, and they, therefore, write
their texts allowing for this potential audience. In this sense a portion
of this text is dedicated to the other pole of the ethnographic coope-
rative enterprise – to those who were first given the role of co-crea-
tors in our fieldwork, and who later become the readers and evalua-
tors of ethnographic products. Other potential recipients of our work
292
– i.e. the reception of ethnographic texts by other audiences, both

professional and non-professional – should, certainly, not be over-
looked.
In the previous pages, the first phase of the relationship between
the ethnologist and the researched has been described in some detail
from the point of view of the researcher. Ethnological literature tends
to overlook the perspective of the researched, primarily their view of
researchers and the roles they assign to them. Because of the domi-
nant "'folk' idea of ethnology as a science which deals exclusively
with the peasant past" (Lozica, this volume), the ethnologist, espe-
cially when studying contemporary topics in Croatia, may face the
problem of being unrecognizable as a professional. Thus, many re-
searchers will find themselves painstakingly describing what they
do, sometimes accepting qualifications which in no way correspond
to their discipline, but are recognizable enough for the subjects to
overcome their initial doubts. For instance, an informant advised the
researcher that his questions about the polka dance do not belong to
ethnology18 (Zebec, this volume); while another concluded that the
researcher is actually a sociologist of the contemporary society (Čapo
Žmegač, this volume). In both cases the categorization of the re-
searcher's discipline functions as a means for the informant to si-
tuate, recognize and, thus, accept the researcher into the researched
community, which is a very important precondition for successful
research. The informants' assessment of the researcher is another
part of this important process of "accessing the field" and winning
informants' trust. Various personal characteristics, such as age, gen-
der, ethnic or religious affiliation, can facilitate first contacts (Čapo
Žmegač, Niemčić, Šantek, Zebec, this volume), which may result in
questioning the multiple selves that the researcher might face during
fieldwork (Zebec, this volume).
Informants may not only presuppose what a researcher should be
interested in based on their understanding of ethnology (Agelopou-
los 2003), but may also sometimes direct the material that is collected
and may try to control what is published (Niemčić, Čapo Žmegač,
this volume). A text by one of the authors in this volume was "locally
edited" by editors and publishers of the book for which it was
293
commissioned (Niemčić), another author was informed by the mem-

bers of the researched group that they wanted to inspect the texts of
her co-researchers before publishing (Čapo Žmegač). Negotiating the
relationships of power between researchers and their subjects, which
is a part of the ethnographic process, involves the major dispute as to
who has the right to represent the researched group – ethnologists or the
researched group. In the case described by Iva Niemčić, two factors
are evident: firstly, a local power struggle, as a result of which one
part of the researched group – namely women – are denied the right
to be represented, and secondly, negotiating for representation
between different fractions of the researched group. By controlling
the representation of the social group, the researched may attempt to
instrumentalize the researcher to fulfill their (political) objectives
(Čapo Žmegač, this volume). And while the ethnologist's inter-
cession on behalf of the researched was a matter of personal choice
and opinion in the ethnography of the wartime everyday life and in
the gender-conscious ethnography (Niemčić, this volume), some
ethnologists, faced with the dilemma of taking a committed or an
uncommitted perspective, decided on the latter, and, rather than
being advocates or witnesses, decided to be analysts or observers,
which raised numerous ethical issues (Čapo Žmegač, this volume).
These examples exhibit very complex negotiatory relationships
between the two subjects of ethnographic research – ethnologists and the
researched. Although ethnologists today choose to represent the re-
searched group as a subject, that is to say a co-creator of ethno-
graphy, ultimately it is the ethnologist who, in the theoretical and in-
terpretive work, translates the original stories, narrations and re-
flections into scientific discourse, recombining them into the analyti-
cal framework of ethnology (Strathern 1987), thus creating a gap
between the researcher and the researched – the gap which indicates
the epistemological distinction between the two. None of the authors
in this volume embarked on the inclusion of the researched popu-
lation into writing ethnography, as done by some anthropologists
(Brettel 1993). One of the authors gave her unpublished texts to one
of her informants to try to predict the reactions of the researched po-
pulation (Čapo Žmegač, this volume).
294
The gap between the ethnologist and the researched becomes

even more evident when the researched subjects become the readers
of our ethnographies. At that point neither of the two ethnologist's
procedures – her/his anticipation that the most interested audience
would be the researched subjects or the polyphonic presentation of
the ethnographic text (which is, to some degree, a consequence of an-
ticipating the researched subjects as the audience) – can resolve the
essential epistemological difference between the ethnologist and the
researched.
Contemporary ethnologists of the proximate do take other
audiences into consideration, but it is unlikely that a single text –
– whose poetics and rhetoric are determined by anticipated reci-
pients – would be capable of satisfying all the recipients' expecta-
tions. The attempt to write a text that is accessible to both the acade-
mic and a "common" audience (especially the researched) may result
in a "hybrid" ethnological/anthropological text (Narayan 1993:681),
in which the ethnologist "attempted to connect the ethnographic
narration with the theory, and supplemented the professional dis-
course formula – of introducing a thesis at the beginning, restating it
at the end and emphasizing theoretical frameworks and generali-
zations – with numerous narrations intended to present [her] interlo-
cutors and their views as vividly as possible to the reader" (Čapo
Žmegač 2002:43). The attempt of connecting the two discourses was
not a complete success, because at least one of the intended audien-
ces – the one comprising of the researched – understood the text only
in its narrative segment, and not on the level of interpretations (ibid.
and this volume).
When the researched assume the role of the audience or readers,
they "talk back" (Rosaldo, according to Brettell 1993). Their critical
comments on ethnographies in which they are the main characters
could be a result of their disappointed expectations. In folklore stu-
dies, informants expect the research to result in knowledge that will
be useful to them in renewing or further nurturing the researched
folklore phenomenon (Niemčić, Zebec, this volume). If the published
ethnography is not primarily an illustrative or a textual document of
the researched phenomenon, the researched population is
295
"disappointed" (Zebec, this volume) or considers it incomplete (Čapo

Žmegač, this volume). Anthropological reflections about the re-
searched subjects as an audience also mention their feeling of having
been "betrayed" or of not recognizing themselves in the ethno-
graphies in whose creation they participated. And while anthropo-
logists/ethnologists may consider themselves neutral and objective,
their ethnography is not received as such, especially when it con-
cerns a delicate topic or identity constructions of the researched
group (Brettell 1993). Even when the neutrality of the researcher has
been recognized, some members of the researched group are not sa-
tisfied with the "objective opinion, from a distance" which the ethno-
logist interweaves through her ethnography, giving precedence to
the non-academic books about the same subject (Čapo Žmegač, this
volume). Similar and even more critical attitudes about the textual
products of ethnological work can call into question the possibility of
the ethnologist to study the same group again.
This risk is also present when scholars, because of the nature of
their sub-specialization, such as ethno-choreology, become involved
in the practice of folklore, whether by participating in the organiza-
tion and assessment of folklore festivals and concerts or by restoring
folklore dances (Zebec, this volume). The ethnologist's position is
doubly sensitive, because his two roles – of a researcher and an eva-
luator – are intertwined. On the one hand, by assessing folklore stage
performance the ethnologist points out the deviations from the tradi-
tion. Interpreting the stage performance as authored choreographed
work based on a folklore template, Zebec attempts not to use the tra-
ditional template as a sole criterion, but to evaluate the performance
as an esthetic in its own right. The second ambivalence in the ethno-
logist's practical work, when faced with the choice between a bad
esthetic of choreographies and adherence to traditions in the same
choreographies, forces him to choose the latter.
The issue of audiences and the researched – who are simulta-
neously the subjects of fieldwork and the readers-evaluators of
ethnological written results – are closely connected with some ethical
considerations in ethnology and anthropology. Above all, there is
the responsibility of ethnologists to their subjects. The relationship
296
towards the researched comprises five issues: informed consent, pri-

vacy, harm, exploitation and the consequences for future research
(Hammersley and Atkinson 1996:264-275). The accepted view in
anthropology, with some exceptions, is that the researched should be
informed about the research in an understandable and precise way,
and that they should give their consent to it. Although this issue is
most clearly visible in covert research, it also appears in other types
of ethnographic work. With regard to the issue of privacy, the fact
that ethnographic research includes publication of things that have
been said or done in private situations, which may have undesirable
consequences, is a frequent cause for concern. Sometimes the re-
searched subjects may be harmed during fieldwork or by the publi-
cation of data. The research itself may cause or facilitate anxiety of
the researched, and the publication of results may have a negative
impact on the public reputation or on the economic status of indivi-
duals, and may upset them. Research may be considered an exploita-
tive relationship, in which the researcher takes information and gives
the researched little or nothing in return. Finally, depending on the
choices that the researcher has made concerning the relationship to
her/his subjects and their status in the research and publication of
the data, there may be various consequences for future research, and
dissatisfied subjects may prevent future research. In order to avoid
problems connected with all of these responsibilities, professional
anthropological associations have developed ethical research co-
dices.
Croatian ethnologists do not have an ethical codex, so these
issues are resolved on a case-by-case basis. In older ethnographies
informants were listed and named using their full names, age, some-
times their religious or ethnic affiliation, as a type of guarantee of the
positivist objectivity and verifiability of research results. One of the
few early attempts of protecting the identity of informants in the
1970s (Supek-Zupan 1979) was hiding the identity of the researched
individuals and the place where the research was conducted
according to the model of American ethnographies. Today, espe-
cially when studying political issues or delicate matters (which may
relate to political controversies, personal spirituality, intimate
297
occasions), it is considered unethical to disclose any personal infor-

mation about the researched. In addition to hiding their identity,
another way of protecting the subjects is for the ethnologist to refrain
from writing about all aspects of the research, especially about as-
pects that might in some way harm the researched group or indivi-
duals. Thus, in some situations the ethnologist is forced to censor the
collected data (Čapo Žmegač, Šantek, this volume). Sometimes this is
done not only to protect the researched but also the researcher. Du-
ring fieldwork and afterwards, the researcher can become an ex-
ploited victim (cf. Adler and Adler 1987), as well as the target of acts
of revenge which try to harm her/his personally and/or pro-
fessionally (cf. Wallis 1977). Sometimes publishing work in a foreign
language may inadvertently hinder reception in one's own society
and in the researched community (Čapo Žmegač, this volume).
Thus we arrive at the problems of multiple – and, consequently,
potentially conflicting – responsibilities that face an ethnologist: the
responsibility to the researched, to the wider society, to the sponsor,
to the profession etc. The contributors to this volume have addressed
this problem in different ways. Some of them consider the ethno-
logist's responsibility to the subjects to be primary (Niemčić). By
connecting emic and implicit conceptualizations of the world to
forms of professional (etic) knowledge, others establish a standard of
academic responsibility, without necessarily neglecting their respon-
sibility to the researched (Čapo Žmegač, Šantek, Zebec). Academic
responsibility can be regarded more narrowly: for instance, Šantek
advocates responsibility to his own discipline – ethnology and cultu-
ral anthropology – at the expense of potential audiences in other dis-
ciplines, e.g., theology, for which the topic he is dealing with is ex-
tremely relevant. There are also some discussions of the author's
responsibility to the sponsor or the commissioner of the research
(Čapo Žmegač, Niemčić).
The issue of being here and writing here becomes particularly diffi-
cult when the ethnologist of the proximate, the researcher of contem-
porary familiar worlds, decides to write critical and socially
committed cultural analyses of topics that may be politically sensi-
tive, or when s/he deals with topics that encroach upon the human
298
intimacy and are not normally open to public scrutiny. Such a po-
sition of the ethnologist requires an awareness of the social and poli-
tical implications of her/his work (both research and writing), and
calls for sensitivity to possible readerships. The problem is not so
much doing research here as writing here, i.e. writing and publishing in
a language that ethnologists share with their fellow citizens, espe-
cially if they want to write a critical socially committed cultural ana-
lysis. This issue did not arise in older Croatian ethnology, which fo-
cused on collecting information about old peasant types of culture in
a positivist manner. It became relevant during the latest war in
Croatia, when the ethnological scope of interest was expanded and
ethnology started to deal with various delicate matters that con-
cerned living people, and when the concept of culture was changed
and a new awareness of the ethnologist about the potential social re-
levance of her/his analysis was built.
Concluding remarks
There are numerous elements of ethnology of the proximate that
have been discussed in the previous pages. Ethnology of the proxi-
mate presupposes studying contemporary topics, in which the re-
searcher does not participate only by sharing a certain corpus of general
knowledge with the researched; the researcher may, in some cases,
participate by way of her/his personal life. Ethnology is characterized
by an evident reflexivity of the researcher about the procedure in all
phases of the research project. In this case, the standard reflexivity of
the discipline is reinforced by auto-reflexivity, i.e. the researcher's
thinking about the personal, which was brought about by the re-
search itself. These topics are in no way new: they have been under
discussion in Croatia for some thirty years now, inspired by the
changes in the paradigm during the 1970s, by the postmodern criti-
cism of the 1980s and by ethnography of war during the 1990s. All
these issues are reconsidered based on discussions of our recent and
particular fieldworks. Additionally, in contrast to a principal focus
299
on texts and their authors, we have supplemented our analysis with

a more complex anthropocentrism, evident in our sensitivity to the
researched as the co-creators of the research projects and as people
for whom our research may have direct consequences. In our texts,
moreover, reflections about the personal may bring to light our per-
sonal decisions, attitudes and emotions, in this way illustrating the
interactive nature and the multi-sidedness of the research process
and its retroactive effect on the researcher, both professionally and
personally.
We have led numerous discussions of our experiences in the field,
the fluidity of the field positions in which we were, the processual
nature of the ethnological project, our dilemmas, decision-making
and the pleasures that we have gotten from particular research situa-
tions. Our fields, within the framework of the ethnology of the proxi-
mate as we defined it here, were characterized by intensive being in
the field, which was long-term and complete, within a chosen re-
searched community, and so the discussion of insiderness as a metho-
dological procedure took up most of our thinking. Insiderness is no
longer an ascribed role of a native indigenous anthropologist, as de-
fined in the wartime 1990s. It has been redefined as a chosen role, a
methodological position that the researcher has to acquire in the
field. Therefore, we have more systematically applied the classical
Anglo-American methodology of fieldwork, adapted to our particular
conditions, and, of course, redefined in accordance with the contem-
porary understanding of the field in general. As opposed to the issue of
poetics and politics of ethnographic writing (representation), we turn
to examining the poetics and the politics of ethnographic research (the
field). And while the former dominated the past decades of the post-
modern approach and textual criticism (Clifford and Marcus 1986), it
seems that the latter has arisen as central as a result of the growing
demand to return to researching actual practices, i.e. "culture-in-use"
(Frykman and Gilje 2003).
300
The articles in this volume

The volume consists of articles that examine fieldwork, based on the
personal experience of the researchers, and include issues ranging
from the choice of the field to restitution to the researched, as an
addition to a negligible number of texts in Croatian ethnology that
reflexively problematize fieldwork from a methodological and epi-
stemological perspective.
Starting from his ethnographic experience in studying a religious
movement, Goran Pavel Šantek discusses various contemporary
concepts of fieldwork and the representation of fieldwork material.
Without denying the numerous advantages that these concepts (in-
spired primarily by postmodern and literary criticism) have had for
ethnography and its affirmation, the author points to their trouble-
some side for the ethnographer. His analysis is based on the dis-
cussion of positive and negative aspects of the research procedure of
insiderness, and the ethnographer's own textual revelation and relati-
vization of reality, both field reality and the reality of the final ethno-
graphic product. As one of the possible ways to resolve this identity
crisis of modern ethnography, the author suggests at least a partial
return to the tenets of realism and an ethnography whose core in-
cludes being created in the field, believing that, ultimately, this can
result in a greater impact of ethnology on the social and humanist
scene and better arguments in discussions about relevant issues such
as religion with other disciplines.
Trying to construct a framework for her own research and field
experience, Valentina Gulin Zrnić uses the term of auto-anthropo-
logy. Crucial to this framework is eliminating Otherness (spatial, con-
textual), inverting the methodological paradigm and incorporating
the autobiographical. The author builds her professional con-
struction of the field in the space and time of her non-professional
and everyday life, literally intertwining the field with home. The
methodological and epistemological problem that arises is stepping
out of the field, i.e. ending a particular study. As this cannot be rea-
lized physically, "auto-cultural defamiliarization" is examined as a
method of cognitive distancing. This is necessary because the re-
301
searcher deals with her own contemporary culture, where there is a

"cultural continuum" between the researcher and the participants,
because they share the context of the research by having a corpus of
shared knowledge. Furthermore, in various phases of the research
the researcher's personal – autobiographical – experience is included
in the research project to various degrees. Thus, doing research
raises the issues of the researcher examining, transforming and
reevaluating personal experiences and opinions that had formed
earlier, irrespective of the research. The same dynamic and reflexive
process occurs in the researched, primarily because conversations
have the form of open dialogues in which the researcher herself
takes active part. "Personal" and "one's own" imply relationships
from the researcher's perspective: in the discussed concept of auto-
-ethnography, the researcher is so much surrounded by the field
both with respect to her personal (experience) and her own (society
and culture) that she must continually examine leaving the field. Fi-
nally, in the discussion the author examines all three elements (the
object, the space and the character) of the traditional canon of
anthropology, "the others – elsewhere – different", and discusses the
creation of knowledge in a new three-dimensional prism of "us –
– here – similar".
Starting with the premise that the ethnography of TV audiences
should not only relate to their interpretation of TV texts, but should
attempt to use them to analyze the cultural processes of assigning
and creating meaning, Sanja Puljar D'Alessio supports discussing
interpretive practices as the embodiment of localization of global
meanings mediated by television. In order to find out which tactics
TV viewers use in producing/localizing cultural meanings in their
everyday context of lived space, the author presents her research in-
to the viewers' interpretations of the TV game show Who wants to be a
millionaire?. The aim of the research was to investigate the interpre-
tive practices of people living in the first decade of the twenty-first
century in the Naples' district of Petraio and in the Zagreb district of
Studentski grad. The ethnography of TV audiences conceived in this
way defines the field in the interpretive space of TV reception, which
exhibits intersecting stratified local and global cultural characte-
302
ristics. Furthermore, since this type of ethnography is embodied by

research conducted in two localities, the author categorizes it as bilo-
cal and translocal. What connects the two localities is the life of the
researcher herself, which allows the field to be characterized as a "co-
vert autobiography". Since one of the localities had been the author's
home until the beginning of the research, and the second one became
her home during and after the research, the text discusses the con-
cept of temporal and spatial simultaneity of anthropology at home
and of the exotic field. Finally, both fields, apart from talking and
living with the locals, also consist of the analysis of the media dis-
course in the two countries – which expands the subject of research
to the national and global level.
Iva Pleše examines the possibility of defining her research into
electronic correspondence as fieldwork, and describes and interprets
the particular aspects and phases of this research. It deals with two
interconnected aspects of fieldwork – the issue of physical
groundedness of the field and the issue of the relationship with the
researched – placing them into the context of studying an internet to-
pic – e-mail. She describes her ethnography as, on the one hand,
moving away from the traditional field and turning to social instead
of physical spaces, and, on the other hand – in comparison with
classical fieldwork – as being more closely connected to particular
people in particular places. "The field" which is formed at the desk,
says the author, can still be considered a field, although shaped in
new ways, other than the classical.
Kirsten Mathiesen Hjemdahl and Nevena Škrbić Alempijević
base their thinking on the ethological research into the celebration of
the Yugoslav national holiday of Dan mladosti [The Day of the Youth]
in the village of Kumrovec in 2004. Their research dealt with the
social memory expressed through the commemoration of the Yugo-
slav national holiday, which evokes the socialist imagery. More spe-
cifically, it dealt with the recent past, which is stigmatized today, and
the narrations that are created about it in the contemporary context.
The text outlines the methodology that the group of twenty re-
searchers from Zagreb and Bergen used, and presents the experien-
ces and dilemmas that were the result of this particular fieldwork.
303
During fieldwork the tenets of the so-called "thinking with one's

feet" method developed by the anthropologist Michael Jackson were
used. They are based on using the body in the same ways as the par-
ticipants in the events that are being researched. The field was
approached from different points of view in an attempt to grasp the
fragmentary character of the event, i.e., various interpretations that
different participants ascribe to the same situation; while the more
comprehensive interpretation of the commemorative event comes
after the fact, through the comparison of the stories that each of the
researchers focused on. Focusing on the question of direct ex-
periences that the participants gain from their actions, the text also
discusses phenomenological research.
On the example of researching dances from the island of Krk,
Tvrtko Zebec presents the process of continual fieldwork, i.e. of ana-
lyzing material by mutual complementation and connection of the
emic with the etic perspective, and of the diachronic with the syn-
chronic. This is used as a way to achieve "communicative compe-
tence", and to discover deeper social structures, philosophy and
symbolism of the studied island communities. The author lays bare
the multiple selves of the researcher, which helps in determining the
"ascribed" social position of the professional in the eyes of the
community he is studying. He disagrees with the opinion that a
scholar's research work ends with writing a text, and, based on the
example of ethno-choreological experience, offers arguments for ex-
perts' active participation in practice. Depending on the different
context of performances, and, in accordance with this, depending on
the change in esthetic principles and on the contemporary needs of
identification of the performers, this activity extends from direct
counseling – helping to reconstruct the forgotten dance experiences
in a motivated community requesting such help – to instruction
which can simultaneously be a good way of protecting non-material
cultural goods, to indirect influence through judgments of per-
formed dances at festivals and concerts – in public music and dance
practice. The critical point of the assessment of particular choreo-
graphies is the point where the opinions of the choreographer and
the assessment of the critic-ethnologist, who decides about their re-
304
presentativeness, clash. The expert walks a tightrope between

different esthetic principles, valuing tradition more highly. The
author discusses the multiple responsibilities that he faced in
practice, and concludes that scientific and theoretical discussions
combined with various fields and research contexts become part of
their practical application and vice versa.
Iva Niemčić deals with the moreška dance from the island of Kor-
čula, which is a relatively well-researched topic, but which was pri-
marily studied by male ethnologists and historians. Therefore, the
author assumes that the male dominant view of the Korčula moreška
is a result of both the statements of male informants – moreškanti, and
the conceptual world of male researchers. In her research the author
used the same method, but chose the marginal group of bule, so that
the story about the bule, i.e. the ethnographic text she discusses and
its restitution have been constructed exclusively from the female per-
spective. And while the unofficial duty of the moreškanti – males – is
to verbally present moreška – the bule – women – did not have the
opportunity to tell their story, and had not (yet) created an ideal ver-
bal variant of the moreška for the public, so they spoke about the
problems, about them being neglected and about the asymmetrical
relationship in moreška. That is to say, as opposed to the moreškanti,
the bule do not "control" their story. The author also discusses the
way in which writing a text commissioned by the local community
should be approached: whether one should exclude the academic
perspective so as to publish a text about the thus far marginalized
and the only female role in moreška, or remain true to academic inter-
pretation, without paying attention to the consequences of the resti-
tution of the text.
Relying on the axiom of reflexivity of every phase in the process
of creation of an ethnographic text, Jasna Čapo Žmegač, on the
example of her own fieldwork concerning the integration of Croats
who were forced to move from Serbia in the early 1990s, examines
her position (in the society, in the researched community etc.) and
her influence on the research, as well as the possible consequences
that her ethnological products – papers and books – may have for
the researched subjects, the researcher’s relationship with them as
305
well as for herself, an ethnologist and a citizen of Croatia at the end

of the twentieth century. The text discusses the ethical dilemmas and
particular decisions of the researcher who, practicing ethnology of
the proximate, deals with the topics in which the researched subjects
and the larger society are passionately involved, and the complete si-
tuation is potentially laden with political meanings. Deciding to take
the role of an analyst and an observer of the chosen field, without si-
multaneously neglecting "the voices of the researched", the ethno-
logist faces the issues of restitution of her works and multiple, po-
tentially conflicting responsibilities of the ethnologist-author. Faced
with the dilemma of choosing between several types of responsi-
bilities, she chooses personal and professional accountability (the
responsibility of the ethnologist to the changing standards of her
own discipline), without, simultaneously, neglecting the commit-
ment of the ethnologist not to harm the researched subjects. There-
fore, concludes the author, the ethnologist sometimes cannot say
everything that she has heard or seen, or should, in order to protect
the researched, use special strategies. In the five years since the
creation of the first version of this contribution, the author's views
regarding the commitment of the ethnologist to restitute their works
to the researched subjects have changed. This shows that positioning
is not only the characteristic of ethnological work in general, but also
of personal reflections about it.
Ivan Lozica discusses the opposition between thinking and field-
work in light of humanist interdisciplinarity. In order to define the
field, it is first necessary to define the object of research, which
means that everything depends on the academic paradigm that we
advocate. The cognitive impact of the act of defining itself is also
problematic, because it is based on Aristotle's teaching that things
contain essences. The author disagrees with the traditional oppo-
sition between field workers and theoreticians, and gives arguments in
favor of his view of the unfeasibility of such a distinction based on
the criticism of the static linguistic-structuralist understanding of the
opposition as a basic relationship of two elements in a system, advo-
cating a dynamic, dialectic concept of the opposition as a relation-
ship between two processes or events. Furthermore, the author gives
306
an overview of the historical development of the dialectic, and ana-

lyzes the consequences that recognizing the time-space continuum
and accepting the dialectic movement as a principle of reality have
on the understanding of the relationship between the subject and the
object. Thus, the subject no longer asks what the object is, but asks
from inside how the object happens, thus questioning his own po-
sition. Through the opposition of Hegel vs. Marx, the author analyzes
to opposition between theory and practice and relates it with the ini-
tial opposition theory vs. fieldwork. Going back to Aristotle's tripartite
division of science (praxis, poiesis, theoria), the discussion is concluded
by the proclamation of inseparability of theory and fieldwork.
Notes
1
Actually, he advocated a combination of the emic and the etic approach,
because the folk collectors of cultural forms worked according to Radić's
template – a questionnaire called Osnova za sabiranje i proučavanje građe o
narodnom životu [The basis for collecting and studying material about folk life;
1897], which provides guidelines for cataloging the ethnologically rele-
vant material.
2
"The Basis..." refers to The basis for collecting and studying material about folk
life.
3
This signalizes a lack of professionalization of ethnology, as diagnosed by
Lydia Sklevicky (1991).
4
The Glas Radne zajednice za Etnološki atlas [The Voice of the Working
Community of the Ethnological Atlas; 1962:5-6] mentions two types of
collaborators collecting data: the so-called explorers or professional re-
searchers, "who must at least have basic ethnological education" and
non-professional local correspondents. While the former "use que-
stionnaires to examine" a certain number of villages and settlements, lo-
cal correspondents "collect materials for the atlas only in their own
village, where they are living or working (and where they were born),
307
where they know the people and where the local residents trust them".
The text advises against a person without ethnological education
collecting material in an unfamiliar village where s/he has not lived for
a longer period of time. Apart from peasants, local collaborators also in-
clude teachers.
5
In doing so, Dunja Rihtman Auguštin relies on Claude Lévi-Strauss, rather
than on the much earlier methodological text by Bronislaw Malinowski
in the introduction to his classical work Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(1961, originally published in 1922). In this text Malinowski distin-
guishes three levels of ethnographic research: the structural level, the le-
vel of real life and the level of commentary about life.
6
During this period the emphasis on the diversity of practice/performance
in relation to the ideal and typical model also appears in the folklorist
research of the collaborators of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore
Research (Marks and Lozica 1998; Lozica, Zebec, this volume).
7
In this particular case insiderness is not synonymous with the under-
standing of the insider or native indigenous as an authentic participant in
culture and society (cf. Povrzanović 1992a).
8
Geertz makes a radical break from the positivist and objectivist tenets of
anthropology, offering a semiotic concept of culture, in which science it-
self is not defined as an experimental entity in search of laws but an in-
terpretive endeavor in search of meanings (1973:5).
9
Reemphasize rather than simply emphasize, because intensive fieldwork
that was practiced throughout the 1970s, although not in the same way
as insiderness that is discussed above, also created material which be-
came the basis to criticize the cultural-historical paradigm which was
dominant at the time. In short, the material undermined the generality,
normativeness and coherence of knowledge about certain phenomena,
and pointed to the variability which was observed in their contextua-
lized research in everyday situations. Cf. Rajković 1974; Rihtman-Au-
guštin 1984; and the section about field and fieldwork in Croatian
ethnology in this chapter.
10
Since the 1970s, ethnologists working at the Institute of Ethnology and
Folklore Research have shifted their focus from cultural artifacts to peo-
ple. It is in the context of this tendency that Aleksandra Muraj quotes
308
the statement of the famous Russian ethnologist S. A. Tokarev "Ethno-

logy is the science of people and not of things" (Muraj 1989:4).
11
Multi-sited fieldwork as a term in international anthropology has been
used since the late 1980s, prompted by several programmatic works by
George Marcus (1986, 1995; Marcus and Fischer 1986). When Marcus
started propagating the idea that a combination of fieldwork in several
localities can shed light on larger social and cultural interrelations, there
were few anthropological studies that he could have used as examples
(Hannerz 2003:22). We believe that multi-sited fieldwork was conducted
before Marcus made the phrase popular. Comparative studies in cultu-
ral anthropology and cultural-historical studies in Croatia were usually
based on multi-sited fieldwork. A significant post-cultural-historical
attempt of multi-sited research in Croatia was the one by Zorica Rajko-
vić (1988) in her research of memorials of death in public places which
led her to a number of localities where she had noticed this phenome-
non. However the difference between older and more recent multi-sited
research lies in the fact that older research is not simultaneously trans-
local, i.e. research in which all research localities are considered parts of
a single social network, that is of a more or less coherent structure (cf.
Hannerz 2003).
12
When events in one locality influence the events in another locality, doing
research in a single locality becomes inadequate and the researcher
must define her/his field as a network of localities. It is in this sense
that Ulf Hannerz (2003:21) talks about the field which includes several
sites in one. In such research the field is multilocal and the analytical en-
tity is translocal.
13
Hannerz (2003:24) points out that the terms translocal and transnational
are not synonyms. Although translocal studies can be conducted within
a single country, they are usually connected with a keener interest for
transnational and global processes and structures.
14
Of course, this does not mean that rural ethnology or ethnology of the past
have been discontinued.
15
The newly coined term "ethnology of the proximate" has been inspired by
the title of Augé's text "The close other" ("L'autre proche" in the original,
2002, originally published in 1989) in which this African studies scholar
309
describes the path of the French ethnology (social anthropology) from

the research of spatially remote others towards "ethnology at home"
(ethnologie chez soi) and the research of spatially close others. In
connection with the theoretical and methodological consequences of the
development of "anthropology of the proximate" in French ethnology
during the 1990s there was an animated discussion which resulted in
numerous works where the new French ethnology is called "ethno-
logy/anthropology of the proximate" (ethnologie/anthropologie du proche),
"the ethnology of the present" (ethnologie du présent), "anthropology of
contemporary societies" (anthropologie des mondes contemporains), etc. (Se-
galen 2002 [1989]; Althabe, Fabre and Lenclud 1992; Augé 1994; Brom-
berger 1997). Also see the thematic issue of the French journal L’Homme
entitled "Anthropologie du proche" (1992) and of the Canadian journal
Ethnologies entitled "Ethnologie du proche/Ethnology at home" (2004).
16
Cf. Gingrich's argument that postmodernism established a methodological
principle of the polycentric and self-reflective dialogue as a part of
ethnological empiricism (1997:201).
17
As a matter of fact, the term ethnography refers to both the process of pro-
duction of ethnography and the textual product itself.
18
Questions about the polka dance should presumably not be a part of
ethnology because this dance is a newer tradition on the island of Krk,
and it is expected that an ethnologist traditionally deals with older and
rural cultural phenomena.
310

Ethnology of Proximate

Cargado por

Información del documento

Descripción original:

Derechos de autor

Formatos disponibles

Compartir este documento

Compartir o incrustar documentos

Opciones para compartir

¿Le pareció útil este documento?

¿Este contenido es inapropiado?

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Ethnology of Proximate

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Jasna Čapo Žmegač ETHNOLOGY

Valentina Gulin Zrnić OF THE PROXIMATE

"'The field' has long been the symbolic centre of anthropology.

this encounter optimally last? What is the relationship between re-

disciplines in Croatia. The central period of ethnological practice in

scription and boundedness, about the practices that we adopted so

Field and fieldwork in Croatian ethnology

the Croatian ethnology of the twentieth century, we will not be able

lysis of his ethnological work). To begin with, Radić defined ethno-

tize the position of these educated peasants-ethnographers, starting

from Anglo-American ethnology and socio-cultural anthropology

data collection technique based on the questionnaire (cf. Rajković

During the 1970s the ethnologists and folklorists working at the

plied finding and studying "the natural/pre-civilization state" of hu-

phenomena that jumped out at us and we looked for their expla-

table in ethological writing. Any ethnological writing implies a parti-

Methodological and epistemological tenets of

Ethnology and socio-cultural anthropology are two empirical

ta/material they need. A classical realist position – that there is a rea-

While traditional concepts and paradigms of Croatian ethnology

in Radić's ethnography, and it was later epistemologically and ethi-

-year-long participation in a religious community – which started

total fieldwork which Okely calls "total experience", requiring "all of

nity, drawing close to it, being empathic, reaching the experience of

The field, place, culture

Some Croatian fieldworkers used to search for micro-cultural worlds

conceived of as a larger or smaller locality, which allows forming a

examines the two geographical places as meeting places of local and

supposedly free of being physically grounded. However, even in

bal village", people, the subjects of ethnographic research, are always

Ethnology of the proximate, auto-ethnography, the researched,

European national ethnologies have a long tradition of studying

ban culture or working-class culture. This research developed the

sidedness" in the sense of sharing some basic knowledge, the sense

ment into ethnology. Anthropological writing about the autobiogra-

1993:671-672). This will result in a hybridity of anthropological texts

the new field interview which resembles a conversation, informants

multiple realities, and to validate the ethnological inductive episte-

Ethnological products: audiences, sponsors, responsibilities

Researching culture through ethnographic fieldwork is closely

and scholars, action-oriented practitioners, a non-differentiated ge-

– i.e. the reception of ethnographic texts by other audiences, both

commissioned (Niemčić), another author was informed by the mem-

The gap between the ethnologist and the researched becomes

"disappointed" (Zebec, this volume) or considers it incomplete (Čapo

towards the researched comprises five issues: informed consent, pri-

occasions), it is considered unethical to disclose any personal infor-

on texts and their authors, we have supplemented our analysis with

The articles in this volume

searcher deals with her own contemporary culture, where there is a

ristics. Furthermore, since this type of ethnography is embodied by

During fieldwork the tenets of the so-called "thinking with one's

presentativeness, clash. The expert walks a tightrope between

well as for herself, an ethnologist and a citizen of Croatia at the end

an overview of the historical development of the dialectic, and ana-

the statement of the famous Russian ethnologist S. A. Tokarev "Ethno-

describes the path of the French ethnology (social anthropology) from

También podría gustarte