Containment in interlocution-based fieldwork encounters: Thought,theory,and transformative thinking

Abstract

This article theorizes a single dimension of interlocution-based fieldwork: that of serving as a ‘container’ for the emotions of our interlocutors. I focus on the dynamic of ‘containment’ of messages in fieldwork interactions that arrest the ethnographer in the task of thinking. This arrest draws attention to the need to connect emotion to thought in order to learn from experience. That connection contributes essentially to the goal of ‘transformative thinking’: to awaken new qualities of relatedness and aliveness. I argue that not all interactions produce encounters that result in experience in which we are prodded to think. Many interactions are immediately cognized and understood because they seem to leave us emotionally untouched. Scholars who avoid or dismiss such moments of arrest tend to unwittingly replace the verification of perceptions with the authorization of results as the primary legitimation of knowledge acquisition. Verification requires thinking through the lived experience of the ethnographic encounter, whereas authorization makes knowledge production contingent on the application of key thoughts, words, concepts, and positions derived from inherited sources, methods, and paradigms.