I am anthropologist – But where is the field? On fieldwork,intimacy,and home

Abstract

This article was prompted by a question: how can one be anthropologist when access to the field is denied? Drawing on the experiences of the author, who experienced a number of losses including access to the field during the COVID-19 pandemic, it shines a light on how, in a context of anthropology at home, intimate knowledge and memory fragments can be used to draw the field nearer when physical access is denied. In doing so, it reflects on how senses of home often go deeper than usually acknowledged. It suggests that knowledges produced at the hearths of homes become embodied aspects of ourselves that come into play especially in anthropology at home but that are always part and parcel of our engagement with the worlds around us. This in turn prompts the question of whether the old argument that fieldwork at home may preclude necessary analytical distance, still holds value.

This article is about the role of emotions and intimacy in fieldwork. In recent years, scholars have argued that emotions, including those of the ethnographer, should be included in ethnography as our felt responses to situations or contexts can contribute important insights. These works focus on emotions that arise during fieldwork or potentially when reading fieldnotes after returning from the field. This article explores the question of how intimacy, or, put differently, pre-objective knowledge, may come into play in anthropology at home, and how it may be utilised in a situation where the field became inaccessible due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For a long time, anthropology at home, or native anthropology, constituted an oxymoron in the discipline. If anthropology is about the exploration of other cultures through the application of conceptual frameworks developed in western universities, how could one study one’s own society? It was assumed the existing familiarity with one’s site of acculturation would preclude the analytical distance necessary for successful anthropological exploration (e.g. Jackson 1987). These arguments have long been challenged, in multiple ways, as I explore below.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have observed that the context of the pandemic led to an increase in virtual and remote methods, such as online interviews, digital research (Mwambari et al., 2021; Islam 2022), as well as the use of local agencies to outsource data collection (Baczko and Dorronsoro 2020). Much of the work based on these methods is yet to be published. The literature there is to date that further explores how the researcher’s affective responses can inform, supplement or expand fieldwork, focuses on cases where the research topic mirrors the author’s experiences (e.g. Kuiper 2021). The exploration in this article however differs. It interrogates how intimacy and senses of home can provide resonances that allow an ethnographer to grasp a sense of the field when barred from the field. The article does not seek to argue that we can do without fieldwork, without local immersion, or that memories are sufficient to make up for a lack of ‘being there’. Nor does it add to the growing literature on societal responses to COVID-19 (Giacomelli and Walker 2022; Sams et al., 2021), as this was not and did not become the topic of the research project. Rather, the article explores how in a moment of forced distance from the field, and of processing loss, intimacy brought about memory fragments that came to the rescue when both the project and my identity as anthropologist seemed in peril. It suggests further that we should pay more attention to these emotions and the intimate knowledge they entail, as this undoubtedly comes into play during data collection and writing up, even when work in the field is possible.

The article sets out by explaining the project, which is at the centre of these experiences and the situation during the time of the pandemic. It draws on the notion of home to suggest that any pre-objective knowledge we embody comes into play when working on topics that are already familiar to us, which in my case is the East German Protestant Lutheran Church. I explore specifically how reading texts from afar conjured grains of experience (Das 2017a) that brought the lifeworld under study close to me, at least in my inner senses, and reflect on how those aided understanding. The article works through the examples of the Christian ecumene and intercessory prayer linking fragments of my experiences with knowledge gained from fieldwork data. It goes on to extend the notion of home into the Church to shed new light on the link between emotions, knowledge, embodiment, and home in fieldwork at home.

The project, a pandemic and loss

The research project that forms the backdrop to this article concerned the question what people in East Germany could know about the State Security Police, the infamous Stasi (MfS). ¹ The Stasi often operated through secrecy. Much research has explored the strategies, practices, and structures that enabled the MfS to observe and oppress large parts of society (Behnke and Fuchs 1995; Gieseke 2001; Kowalczuck 2013; Pingel-Schliemann 2013). The project ‘Knowing the Secret Police’ however turned this question on its head and sought to explore what people could know and how, in four spheres of society: among literary authors, at the workplace, among members of the Third Reich anti-fascist resistance, and within the German Lutheran Church. The project had begun with this last sphere, when during a phone call in 2015 my father had told me that the Church had gathered information about Stasi tactics and passed this on. My father was able to talk about this as a former pastor and former head of a small further education institute for pastors, a Pastoralkolleg. His service had taken place within the Church province of Saxony, which became the regional focus of the sub-study ‘the Church’. My mother had also studied theology and worked as a pastor in the same province until her retirement. The Church was further of academic interest since they were allowed to exist relatively independently in the GDR, as long as they limited their work to religious matters. This position had allowed the Protestant Church to provide spaces for the oppositional groups that went on to lead the mass demonstrations of 1989.

The project was interdisciplinary using a combination of archival research and interviews; the study on the Church was further intended to be a historical ethnography. The pandemic began just as our three postdoctoral fellows had started fieldwork in Germany. The team moreover consisted of three senior academics, including myself as PI. All three of us had planned to also do fieldwork in situ, and I had budgeted considerable time for work on ‘the Church’. I expected this to allow me to be an anthropologist once more, living and breathing ethnography, recording the minutiae of everyday life. In the spring of 2019, just as I had received responses from potential interlocutors and planned my stay in Germany including childcare, news broke that European countries were beginning to close their borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The repeated lockdowns between 2019 and 2021 meant that neither of the three senior academics were able to travel to Germany, while the three postdoctoral fellows were locked down in Germany. In contrast to other projects (Berg and Leon 2022; Gross 2020), neither interviews, nor work at the main archives moved online; both paused instead during periods of lockdown. They resumed with considerable precautions when the lockdown in Germany lifted. ² It had not been possible to delay the project either, given the prescriptions of the UKRI COVID-19 Grant Extension Allocation.

In this climate during 2019–2021 I repeatedly planned visits to Germany that were then foiled at the last minute. In 2020, I reluctantly passed responsibility for the interviews on the religious network study to Dr Grit Wesser, who was in situ and would have supported me on this study if I had been able to travel. Instead, our roles reversed. Grit took over all aspects of the fieldwork. Stuck in the UK, I took on administrative project work, and focused on reading existing literature, some of it containing interviews with former clerics, some of it auto/biographical, in addition to publications of theological texts and reports of the Church leadership. I further had access to some of the interviews conducted by Grit, and secondary literature. I also had five pilot interviews, which I had conducted in 2017, just prior to the grant being awarded. These included interviews with both my parents, who had then been in their late 70s.

I had planned this pilot fieldwork aware that my father had begun to develop dementia. His ailing health meant he was increasingly unable to remember why he had thought a project on the MfS and the Church was valuable or even that it was. While to my mind his role in the project’s genesis was interminable, in his mind the connection became increasingly tenuous. The pilot project was a good decision also regarding my mother, who – somewhat unexpectedly – passed away in 2018. My father then died in 2019 during the first major lockdown. Although he did not die of COVID-19, the pandemic added many layers to this loss. It meant that my daughter and I missed his last days, the funeral, and were unable to visit the grave or see family until some 16 months later. This enforced distance mapped fully onto my geographical distance from fieldwork; attempts to visit during the time had always been for both familial and research purposes. As I felt the prospect of going into the field slip from my grasp, I increasingly wondered who or what that made me. Was I still anthropologist? Would I still be able to write ethnographically about the East German Church? I could not do being there; I could no longer ask my father to help me untangle aspects of clerical work and life. All I had were texts, or so it seemed. Given my father’s role in the project’s conception and the role both my parents had played in my own connection to the Church, as well as the timing of their deaths, their loss and the loss of access to the field fully intertwined.

I am anthropologist, or am I?

In summer 2021 I explained to a grief counsellor that I wanted to write an article about these multiple losses. The counsellor was not sure this would work – mixing (academic) work and familial loss; mixing producing outputs and your private life? But to me that question did not arise. After all, I ‘was anthropologist’. Just like Starship Voyager’s Seven-of-Nine responds, when asked how she knows so much about the starship, simply with “I am Borg,” ³ I knew that in this case, the case of this project, ‘being anthropologist’ meant writing these losses together. This is so for three reasons:

Firstly, my family had been part and parcel of this project from the outset through my father’s role in the project’s genesis. But moreover, the sub-study that mattered most to me, ‘the Church’, touched directly on an intimate part of my own life – it enquired into the East German Protestant Church within which I had grown up. The hearth of my childhood had been made up of mealtime prayers, religious décor, Sunday services, bibles and theological textbooks. This was my world in a manner that went beyond the project’s setting in my former home country of Germany. Having grown up often quite literally in churches, I felt, I had this research in my bones.

Secondly, ‘being anthropologist’ in any cultural context always means using oneself to a good degree. After all, our primary and much hallowed method of data collection, participant observation, means that data travels right through us, much more obviously so than in semi-structured interviews or survey research - self-contained methods as Davies calls them (2010: 23). We observe, listen, join in, hang out, chat, experience, and take note of what we then recall (also see Collins and Gallinat 2010). Our recollections are our data. As Stodulka et al. put it, our primary data collection tool is “the body-mind and its sensorial apparatus” (Stodulka et al. 2018: 519). There is no methodology that could be more intimate (also Fraser and Puwar 2008).

In this vein, thirdly, there has long been an undercurrent of writings that have questioned the subject-object, observer-observed distinction in anthropological knowledge production (e.g. Bowen 1954; Crapanzano 1980; Rabinow 1977; Hastrup 1995). The questions raised by this strand of work have pushed to the fore more recently in discussions at times referred to as the affective turn. These more recent texts argue for the importance of emotions and senses of intimacy in fieldwork seeing both as productive and valuable to the fieldwork endeavour (e.g. Davies and Spencer 2010; Lo Bosco 2021; Rutherford 2016; Stodulka et al. 2018). As Davies puts it, emotions are part of the lived experience and ignoring them would mean reducing our understanding of our interlocutors’ worlds (2010: 22), which is anathema to the goals of ethnographic enquiry. To explore the utility of emotions, Davies and Spencer (2010), and contributors to their volume, adopt a radical empiricist approach (Jackson 1989). They thus further argue for the inter-relational makeup of fieldwork. Inter-relational here means inter-subjective as well as inter-material/inter-environmental: since “the relations between things are just as much matters for empirical study as are things themselves” (Davies 2010: 23). Following this line of thought then also means that the emotions of the fieldworker – his or her “states of being” (2010: 1) – need to be given as much consideration as those of our interlocutors.

This article uses the argument that emotions should matter in fieldwork as a starting point. But rather than exploring how emotions helped elucidation in the field, it explores how intimate knowledge and inter-material subject positions can be used to bring the field to us. Drawing on radical empiricism to explore ‘the space between’ – between traditional, more formal methods, which is also the space where we are at our most relaxed (Davies 2010: 23), this article shines a light on how resonances of childhood memories prompted by loss were used to conjure the field in the inner senses ⁴ when reading autobiographies, documents, and interviews from the field, but outwith the field.

Fieldwork at home – what home, what field?

It has been some 40 years since the edited volume by Jackson (1987) explored the notion of ‘anthropology at home’. The term ‘native anthropology’ has been used for even longer. Although the two terms are nowadays often used synonymously, they described distinct situations. Native anthropology was seen to be a situation where ‘a native’, a member of an indigenous group usually observed by western, university-educated anthropologists, had him-/herself trained in anthropological methods and conducted research on their fellow ‘natives’ (e.g. N.M. Srinivas 1952; Radin 1926). The term stems from the pre-Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) days of anthropology when clear distinctions were attempted between indigenous people and western academics, whose work had been enabled by colonialism. The concept of anthropology at home in contrast was popularised in the 1980s when due to funding cuts in UK Higher Education a growing number of anthropologists began to turn their anthropological gaze to British society (cf. Mills 2003; for example, Rapport 2002) – the ‘home of the discipline’. In his seminal volume, Jackson summarises that anthropology at home may well be beneficial, but only if the anthropologist has previously carried out fieldwork abroad to aid the epistemologically necessary ‘distanciation process’ (Jackson 1987: 14). The volume therefore still very much fitted a view of anthropology as the exploration of (colonised and Third World) “(o)thers whose alien cultural world they must painstakingly come to know” (Narayan 1993: 671).

In the past 30 years these discussions have become both more and less complicated. A number of authors questioned some of the underlying assumptions of both notions arguing that cultural knowledge and boundaries could never be this hard or fast (Narayan 1993; Collins 2002). We could never know all aspects of our culture or be part of all and any social sub-group, so to what degree was an anthropologist working in their origin society actually necessarily ‘at home’? Moreover, a growing number of scholars led increasingly cosmopolitan lives. Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) suggested the term halfie for those, “whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education or parentage” (137) and who “study their own or related non-western communities” (139). Written in the early 1990s, Abu-Lughod’s chapter shines a light on the challenges faced by such scholars, who, it often seemed, would write from a position of ‘intimate affinity’ (Narayan 1993: 671) but without analytical distance and who therefore needed to tread especially carefully in both the conduct of research and in writing (Abu-Lughod 1991: 142).

In recent decades these concerns about potentially lacking objectivity and an inability “to see ourselves as others [may] see us” (Jackson 1987: 14) for scholars working at home – by which I mean whatever society they conceive as their home – has diminished considerably. Academic internationalisation, growing PhD numbers, funding squeezes as well as technological and socio-cultural change mean that the numbers of those carrying research out at home, or in some way being ‘native’ to where they work, has grown considerably. Indeed, recent work suggests that rather than constituting an exploration of the Other, anthropology is increasingly facing a ‘challenge of the contemporary’ (Dalsgaard 2013: 213).

Nevertheless, even if doing research in our origin cultures no longer constitutes the epistemological conundrum it once did, there remains an overriding paradigm that fieldwork, as immersion in the socio-cultural realm we study, is at the heart of the production of anthropological knowledge. As Collins and Coleman (2006: 5) point out, this remains the case although both the origins of participant observation and its apparent hegemony have been far from clear. Collins and Coleman show further that the same lack of clarity goes for other much heralded aspects of the field, such as the ethnographer’s presence, which can be highly variable. They conclude that ‘the field’, and with that fieldwork, is performative and constructed, and as such also highly dependent on the academic context of the ethnographer herself.

These observations sit well within the growing literature of the affective turn that also sees fieldwork as performative and as arising out of emergent relationships (Stodulka et al., 2018; Stellmach, 2020). In this view, emotions matter as “embodied social communicators between anthropologists and their interlocutors” (Stodulka et al., 2018: 520). Emotions can therefore carry knowledge. Some of this knowledge concerns the relations to interlocutors, which produces fieldwork in the first place, as Stolduka et al. argue. Other knowledge may concern our relations to materialities and environments (Davies 2010), and other knowledge may yet again relate to experiences from other times in our lives. As anthropologists we come not only as individuals positioned in a particular way academically, but also personally. Rephrasing Bourdieu’s point (2003: 283) with an emphasis on knowledge and the senses (similarly Rosaldo 1989: 8) – our body-mind encapsulates a multitude of sensorial and conceptual understandings, experiences and senses that formed over a lifetime. Many of these will and any of these may come into play during fieldwork.

Since this literature highlights the role of emotions and/or intimacy in fieldwork, the majority of these texts continue to focus on encounters in a field, past or present, often still spatially conceived (see Dalsgaard 2013 for a critique). They all assume that ethnographic fieldwork has taken place, but promote giving greater credence to the ethnographer’s emotions both during participant observation and in writing. Take this quote from Lo Bosco, for example: “Consider, for instance, that feeling of epiphany in reading our fieldnotes and remembering the many difficult decisions, joyful moments, problematic encounters and different emotional states that we went through during our research” (2021: 8).

Yet, it was exactly this ‘being there’ that was unavailable to me during the period of funded research. As difficult decisions loomed in 2020 regarding my letting go of fieldwork and as I increasingly read books and other texts from afar, for a while I wondered if the COVID-19 pandemic had turned me into a ‘desktop-anthropologist’ – a current day and female version of Herbert Spencer. ⁵ Surrounded by German-language texts on the Protestant Church, gazing at my brother’s childhood picture of our father in his pastoral ropes (Figure 2), and at a photograph of the entrance to the Christian cemetery in the village of Gnadau where both my parents now rested (Figure 1), it did not quite feel that way. I also lacked an armchair.

Figure 1.

Entrance to the ‘Gottesacker’ (cemetery; literally ‘The Lord’s field’) in Gnadau; picture courtesy of the author. Each pillar of the gate bears reference to a bible verse. On the left: The Holy Bible b: Psalm 90. vs 2, 3, and 12. On the right: The Holy Bible c: Revelation 14 vs 13.

Figure 2.

Picture of my father in a service painted by my brother; picture courtesy of the author.

More home than home

As a scholar working ‘at home’ every research trip to eastern Germany has also always been a return to my familial home. I would usually stay at my father’s, in the village where I had grown up, ⁶ and would use the opportunity to see family and friends. During pilot research and preparatory work for the Knowing project in 2017 and 2018, however, I felt a double sense of returning home, and unexpectedly so. It was two project-related visits to clergy that gave me a sudden, visceral sense of home. This sense was stronger than what I had previously experienced in my father’s or my mother’s homes and the force with which it came took me by surprise. One of these visits was an appointment at the Roncalli House in the city of Magdeburg, an education centre of the Catholic Church; the second a visit at a retired clergy and Church post holder’s, Herr Dr Schmidt.

The Roncalli house, just off the beaten track in the city centre of Magdeburg, is fronted by a large stone entrance secured from a protestant church, as Herr Becker told me later. This imposing arch previously served as entrance to the home of the administrative leadership of the KPS, the Konsistorium, in Magdeburg, which I had visited a few times as a child accompanying one or another of my parents.

At that visit in 2018, I was collected by Herr Becker, the director. ⁷ He took me up to his office for a conversation about this place as a potential exhibition venue for later stages of the project. The office, which felt like a study to me (where is the difference?), was light and airy. We sat on an oval table whilst chatting. From there I had sight of the ceiling-high shelves filled with theological literature. On the desk behind me, stood a small wooden crucifix. My fieldnotes note that there were ‘muted symbols of Christianity’ spread across the office.

The office was larger and airier than similar rooms I remember, but the core attributes were all the same. The shelves - my father used to call them somewhat grandiosely his ‘library’; the small number of unimposing but nevertheless visible signs of religiosity – a crucifix or a cross, a tapestry or a picture; and the sense that we all understood and knew in what realm we met – in a Christian house, a house guided by the Lord and the teachings of Jesus Christ his son.

Darker but with higher ceilings and otherwise the same components was the study of Dr Schmidt, where we had sat down for an interview a few months earlier. Dr Schmidt had taken me directly there, foregoing an invitation into the living room or kitchen. His study seemed to be where a research project on the KPS was best placed. It is also an important part of his personhood – the study is where sermons are written, verses checked, interpretations explored, new research considered. To my mind this is one of the places where pastors are most unambiguously clergy. I remember my father sitting on his desk writing page after page in the late hours. Dr Schmidt himself had authored a number of publications for the KPS in the 1990s on the province’s GDR-time history. He pulled some of them off the shelves, which despite the imposing room height in this turn-of-century-villa reached the ceiling. Again, books, a desk, a picture/poster or two with more modern interpretations of the cross. Just a couple of symbols, not too much. Just like we had at home. Mixed with a sense of an appreciation of literature and classical music – a Christian, educated-bourgeoisie ⁸ kind of place. Just like all the studies and pastor’s homes that I had visited as a child accompanying my parents in their working day.

When I spoke with my father about the visit to Dr Schmidt, he reminisced. He had had frequent contact with Schmidt as his line manager, but recollected one meeting in particular. Whilst they were talking in Schmidt’s office at the Konsistorium he was watching Schmidt’s daughter through the window. She was scaling the tree just outside the building. I remember that tree. I know this is my father’s recollection of Schmidt’s daughter and yet, I feel like that could/should have been me. Also forever climbing trees as a child, and also accompanying my parents on visits and work commitments when school was out. This was me growing up in the Church, like her.

These two visits let me to realise, to feel physically, that this project was taking me even further home than visits to Germany in recent years had done. It was taking me back into the Church a world I had left by degrees when growing up, moving to the UK as my parents retired, and when entering academia. But it was also a world I had continued to carry within me.

Home is where the hearth is

The notion of home has been conceptualised in different ways in anthropology. Writing about migrants, Fog Olwig describes it as the place you miss when you have left it behind (1993: 187–198); the place you wish to visit after migration. Rapport and Dawson (1998) suggest that home is a cognitive space: “‘home,’ we suggest as a working definition, ‘is where one best knows oneself’—where ‘best’ means ‘most’ if not always ‘happiest’” (1998: 9). Rapport and Dawson touch here on the notion of familiarity that is a core aspect of senses of being at home (Roth, 1975, cited in Bausinger 1990: 43). Home does not have to be a place, but it is a state where we feel known, or where we expect to be known, and where we feel we deeply know those around us. Much of this knowledge is pre-objective. It is a state of sensed knowing that is possibly best described as gut feeling (Wesser 2022). We know our place at home, for better or worse. It is thus also a place where less identity work is required to be recognised; where, as Kondo puts it in relation to her hybrid Japanese-American identity, one does not have to explain oneself to outsiders (1996: 97). But importantly, none of this has to always be happy or even pleasant – home can be fraud and ambivalent, if not unhappy (Rapport and Dawson 1998).

In her seminal work on kinship (1995, 1997), Carsten focuses on the hearth as central to family making. According to her ethnography on a fishing community on Langkawi, family is to a good degree created through eating together. Producing food and consuming the same food creates a shared substance that is embodied, and it is this out of which kinship arises. If family is produced through the consumption of shared substance cooked on the hearth, then so is a sense of home, I argue. If we accept this, then a sense of home goes deeper than a place to be missed, found, or to recognise as familiar. Beyond these aspects, home is what we carry within us from our childhood days. It is the space where our self was filled with the substance that binds us to our kin, to our culture, and that makes much of our knowledge. It is at the base of who we are, and it penetrates deep into our bones.

Home is therefore also a place or state, where our knowledge and our senses of the world are at their most intimate. Csordas (1994) uses the notion of the pre-objective in relation to embodiment. The body, he argues, is often experienced or perceived prior to being objectified – prior to being thought of and talked about in conceptual terms, which means that embodiment is also pre-objective. Fernandez referred to a similar sense of experience prior to conceptualisation through language as the inchoate (1986). I argue that much of our knowledge of home is also pre-objective and embodied – in many cases psychotherapy has the task to conceptualise the knowledges that prove difficult to bear. Moreover, loss, not unlike other change, often catalyses remembering and re-experiencing, both internally and prompted by inter-material relations such as when we sort through a late relative’s effects or share family photographs found in a cupboard in the now empty flat. Such recollections are inevitably partial and inchoate. So rather than attempting to re-create some artificially coherent narrative of life in the East German Church from this, I will show how, if used as fragments or grains of experience (Das 2017a), recollections can conjure senses of a place and a time that brings us nearer to the lifeworld under study. If anything, this conjuring helped me feel connected to my intended interlocutors’ lifeworlds – worlds that felt like they had once been mine – when I could not do ‘being there’.

Texts and sensed recollections

In early 2019, just pre-pandemic, I had exchanged emails with two clergy, who had agreed to an interview with me. Both had recognised my family name as likely linked to Dr. Gallinat, my father, whom they remembered well from his work at the Pastoralkolleg. I eventually met both of them in person when they attended my father’s memorial service in 2021. One of Dr Jurgis’ questions at this occasion stayed with me – had my father suggested that I interviewed him? My immediate response was, regretfully, that he had not. The dementia of his final years had meant that a lot of those details were no longer present. I explained that instead we had used a register of retired clergy to look for potential interviewees.

On reflection I realised however that was not entirely true. No, my father had not mentioned Jurgis when I interviewed him in 2017 or during later conversations. And yes, we had used the register of retired clergy which the director of the Church archive in Magdeburg had supplied us with. However, I remembered that when looking through the register I had always explored names that sounded familiar. Jurgis’ name was one of those. It had rung a bell, it had sounded like a name with a certain weight to it, a relevance of some kind. Jurgis’ name, like that of three or four others, was a name that had been mentioned at times in my parents’ home during my childhood. Even if I could not put my finger on the context or the content of those conversations, my at best semi-conscious familiarity with these names had made me look further into the persons behind them and in some cases approach them for an interview. Looking back, I realised that I had used resonances from my childhood in more than one way.

Much of my research conducted from the UK consisted of reading texts including original documents such as the reports of the Church administration to the synod (Schultze 2005). The synod (Synode)… or rather ‘Synodale’ was a word my mother often used – ‘members of the synod’ – it had mattered to her whether someone was or was not. Similarly, Konsistorium – the building that housed the Church province’s administration. And prayer texts, psalms, the ‘Vater Unser’ (Lord’s Prayer) – a language of home filled with words that describe an institution, practices, and a faith. That was the language I was surrounded by as a child, the language I had heard very little of in the past two decades, and it is the language that brought these texts close to me opening a sense of this world.

I read about bishop Krusche’s hard work in the Ökumene (ecumene) (Schultze 2005; also Falcke 2014: 66). Krusche was the first bishop of the KPS to promote a vision that went decidedly beyond the borders of the GDR. As I read about his efforts, visitors from Africa, who came into our home after attending the Pastoralkolleg, appear before my inner senses. Our guests with dark skin, wearing traditional dress, were very unusual in the predominantly white East Germany. I remember two gentlemen standing in our dining room. Later guests would sit in the living room and be offered sparkling wine and nibbles by my mother. They were likely from Tanzania, which the KPS had close links with. Into my mind flicker glimpses of photo-evenings in parishes telling of journeys to Tanzania, or sharing the story of Mother Theresa in India. My recollections are from the 1980s, but the literature tells me that these connections began much earlier. In August 1976 when a local pastor ended his life through public self-emulation, bishop Krusche was initially unable to deal with the developing crisis because he was in Tanzania (Schultze 1993). ⁹ One of our interlocutors interpreted Krusche’s seemingly delayed return as an affront. A sign that Church leadership did not give this case the priority it required.

Reading Krusche’s speeches on the ecumene (Schultze 2005), considering other interviews and literature, this argument however forgets just how integral these international connections and exchanges were to the East German Church. Just as much as it forgets how tricky it was then to organise long-distance travel on short notice. As a religious institution in a state often defined by its tightly sealed borders, travel, meetings abroad, visits by people from abroad, international exchanges of published and unpublished texts, allowed the East German Protestant Church to be a Church within a global Christian community, despite the Berlin Wall or maybe especially because of it.

Information arising from interviews thus also conjure associations. In an interview in 2017 Herr Petzold had told me that in the 1960s Fürbittengebete, intercessory prayer, had been used to pass on information about the state. The prayers, which remain an integral part of services, list a series of addressees for which the congregation requests the Lord’s help and blessings. According to Herr Petzold, in the 1960s, they had included people who had been imprisoned by the state for political offences. Mentioning this group raised awareness in the congregation and beyond about the oppressive character of the socialist regime. While not every interviewee remembered this practice, Grit met a former clergy who still had copies of the prayer lists. I later also found two such lists, which had been produced by the national Church leadership (EKD), in my father’s archive. They date from the early 1960s, when the state had introduced compulsory military service. This demand caused moral conflicts for many young Christians, who led a pacifist lifestyle (Pausch 2004). While Church leadership of the KPS repeatedly raised this issue with local and national authorities, a number of young men, in some cases pastors in training, were taken into custody for refusing to serve in the army.

In my experiences, intercessory prayer addressed groups – “for the victims of the natural disaster in…,” occasionally also “give our political leaders wisdom and strength” – but never specific individuals. From that perspective, these lists are quite remarkable. This also because apart from names, my father’s lists include addresses and details on why these individuals were in prison. With this detail, the prayer constitutes a direct, public critique of state practices, which authorities however could not easily contest since this was clearly a religious act. Finally, the practice was not entirely uncontentious, but here evidence is less clear. Interviews showed that pastors had discretion over how they approached this list – some would name only those individuals who lived within the parishes they served. Other pastors would read it in full. Documents from the meeting of the synod however also highlight that similar intercessory prayer, this time for Church officials during the Church-state struggles of the 1950s had raised objections (Schultze 2005: 113). It had seemed as though the Church used ordinary, and vulnerable, parishioners to further itself – in spiritual and political terms. As I reflect on intercessory prayer, my body-mind sensorial apparatus conjures senses from services past: I feel the hard Church bench beneath me as I listen to the pastor’s voice, the air in the unheated stone Churches cooling my nose as I breathe in, my head bowed, fingers interlaced, my mouth pronouncing the collective Amen. My inner senses create an affirmative connection to this religious practice that for a time became politics. While these sensed recollections do not replace having experienced those specific prayers of the 1960s, they will nevertheless undoubtedly influence how I write about intercessory prayer, and moreover how I further explore and then describe the interweaving of religious and political purpose in the East German Church’s theopolitics.

Many of the words I read thus fill me with senses of familiarity. Of course, I do not find resonances in everything I read about. I was too young and too oblivious to the political struggles my parents and their colleagues went through. Yet, as I struggle to come to terms with loosing access to this field, I feel comforted by reading a language that I know in an intimate and pre-objectively vague sense – much more a feeling than an intellectual understanding. It provides a sense of homeliness and warmth even if my parental home was not always that. A degree of this seems mirrored in some of what our interviewees and the theological texts they worked with also say.

The hearth of Christianity

Speaking theologically, being Christian, relating oneself to Christ creates a hearth. It is a home in Jesus, the Lord’s son, who according to scripture died for all our sins. Holy communion is a form of shared commensuration. Homes and family also feature in some of the parables of the New Testament – such as the return of the prodigal son (The Holy Bible a: Luke 15: 11–32), or the shepherd who leaves the herd to find his one missing lamb (The Holy Bible a: Luke 15: 1–7). Moreover, being Christian means partaking in a shared ethos, worldview and way of life. This is evident, for example, when in the 1980s the East German Union of Churches worked to develop a new ‘order of life in the Church’ (1985) providing guidance on Christian conduct in the parish, marriage and family, and in society, including work. ¹⁰ As it explains, “God created humans in all their differences for a life of communal partnership… The varieties of human relationships are part of congregations’ richness. … The togetherness of congregations should be determined by communal behaviour and by tolerance towards different lifestyles and different ways of living Christian faith. Yet all remain obliged to the word and testament of Jesus Christ” (n.a. 1985: 12). This passage from the preamble positions the Christian congregation as a space of relationships and communality. It closes by bringing the different relationships and groups present in congregations together under the testament of Jesus Christ, their Lord.

The document’s focus already highlights how important family is to Christian life, to what degree it was expected that parishioners – and clergy – would have families, and a sense that (Christian) families required safeguarding. Indeed, it positioned congregations as protectors of marriages: “the Christian congregation is responsible for the marriages of its members. … It protects love and marriage” (n.a. 1985: 13). It explains in following paragraphs that marriages and partnerships will usually give rise to children who have been entrusted to their parents by the Lord. Congregations’ responsibilities extend to the wider families that arise from marriages. This concern with the safekeeping of families is also clear in bishop’s reports at synods where attempts to change state politics to support and protect families were a going concern (e.g. Schultze 2005: 24, 191, 402). In these moments, the Church became the protector of families, the save haven of the hearth; or put differently: it becomes a hearth of hearths.

The intertwining of family and Christian practice is, for example also evident in Grit’s interview of Herr Noack and in his biography (Röder 2019). The latter, subtitled ‘A cheerful protestant’s biography’, is striking, for example, in the absence of discussions of preparations of services and sermons, travel for home visits, or the dreariness of the administrative work that accompanied the ‘office’ of a pastor. Instead, it portrays pastoral work the way I also remember it, as a kind of work that pervades the family and the home. As Noack explains, his vicarage was always open. In particular during his work as a pastor for students in Naumburg, there were always young people about in the summer months (Röder 2019: 106). Parishioners came for advice, community, or to gain access to samizdat copies of texts, such as the Helsinki Accord of 1975, ¹¹ or even illegal literature that ended up, one way or another, in a locked cupboard in the vicarage (Röder 2019: 88).

I am further struck by many of the pictures that illustrate the biography. Axel Noack and wife Gisela in front of the house being welcomed by elders from the parish (Röder 2019: 118). Visitors from Mozambique sitting in the garden with Noack’s daughter Tabea on their lap (ibid. 131). There are more – Noack’s children at a Christian camp, Noack and his sons on the beach, the parish’s small brass band (Noack with them) performing in the vicarage’s garden… The pictures are interminably both private and about clerical work. Home, family, and office intertwine. Given this inseparability, it is maybe not surprising that the MfS spied on Noack by planting an IM (in-official employee) directly in the home – a female theology student who frequently babysat and helped out around the house. For the Noacks, the realisation that this young woman had reported on them left a bitter taste (Röder 2019: 106). But this not so much because of the danger they had been in, or because of the stories she may have told, but because of the betrayal of the deep friendship they felt they had enjoyed. Indeed, the woman had shared their hearth, had taken in the same nourishments in meals, prayers, and services and it turns out they were not made of the same cloth after all.

Many of our interviewees, though not all, similarly had families and homes that formed part of their being a cleric. I am further reminded of my father in his garden, in fact often on his birthdays once he was retired, still maintaining his pastoral habits. As new guests entered the garden, his warm voice would boom and laugh as he called them by their name his arms outstretched, then shaking their hand decidedly, inviting them to sit down on a table for coffee and cake; a welcome into the home and family, a welcome to an open hearth. Yet, our materials also highlight that the Church as institution was not always a familial, warm place, not even for clergy. Some struggled considerably, with Church leadership, or a particular bishop, or with forms of exclusion. A couple of interviewees talked about how distinctions were drawn depending on which training institution you had attended. Female interviewees spoke about gendered inequalities in the 1960s and their own and at times their partner’s fight against it. Yet, all interviewees created hearths in their parishes, ¹² and all remained connected and in agreement about the message of Christ, of sharing the hearth of being Christian even if that space was not always conflict-free.

**

So in my desktop-confinement, I use resonances to invoke the field – I try to and I am compelled to feel my way through this world while reading the literature. As Davies explains radical empiricism asks us to examine the happenings in spaces between – between formal methods and between things in relationship – “which are of critical and factual value” (2010: 23). So I pay attention to how my mind wonders prompted by the words I read on the page. What comes to me can only ever be fragments, similar to the fragments Das (2017b) finds in Mookherjee’s book (2015) when woman are prompted by a gust of wind, by a smell, to share a snippet of their horrific past. She writes that “stories acquir(e) a footing in the real through being embedded within a field of force made up of swirling words, other stories, gestures and much else” (Das 2017b: pg. 19). Das follows Wittgenstein here who argues that “this word fits, that doesn’t … the first judgement is not the end of the matter, for it is the field of force of a word that is decisive” (1968: 219e). I similarly sense my way through the fields of forces of the words I read, conjuring, recalling, remembering to see what footing the texts have in my real, what I can give them in my mind’s eye and sensation.

In between writing, I look at pictures I compiled for a presentation – my brother’s picture of our father delivering a sermon on a Church lectern (picture 2), The picture had been pinned to the inside of one of the cabinet doors in my father’s study for decades – it wouldn’t be in my procession now, had he not passed away. I look at a photo of the gate to the cemetery in Gnadau with inscriptions of bible verses and oh so many green trees behind (picture 1) – my sight moves to my study’s widow. I can see treetops in neighbouring streets slowly losing their leaves. It is November. On my desktop, I look at a photo of a delicate 1970s style wooden dish that was always on the table in our living room. Containing, what? Peanuts when we had guests? Maybe our African guests had had nibbles from this bowl? I remember it being in my sightline when our family sat around that same table playing board games. More than anything, this little dish reminds me of our home. All these clues build a sense of place in me and a sense of the Christian spaces I shared with our interviewees and with the people behind the texts I read. There is a little of that world in my study in the rainy Northeast of England now and I can feel more of it stretching in my bones.

Conclusion

As the pandemic had locked down borders while this project was ongoing, I struggled with loosing access to the field. Doing fieldwork is an integral part of being an anthropologist, to my mind, and I wondered if I could still claim that label. I had also lost both my parents, and with that in my father also my key informant on the East German Church, and I was unable to visit their graves, see family or spend any time in my native country.

In this context, the language I was reading, which conjured associations, senses of knowing, senses of being able to relate, brought much comfort. It gave me a sense that I did know something of this world, that I shared it with my interlocutors, at least in some, somewhat vague, somewhat fragmented sense. Grains of experience raised themselves when I paused in reading to reflect, when I remembered my childhood prompted by the loss of my parents; I made connections to scholarly knowledge gained from texts, when sorting through my parents’ affects brought memories. In these spaces in-between, emotions inflected my thinking about our interlocutor’s lives in the East German Church, about some of the Church’s practices and policies. I have shown this above in relation to the ecumene, intercessory prayer, and links between family, home, and clerical work. As fragments and grains, these felt connections nevertheless remain but poor substitute for actual fieldwork, and I am not arguing we can do away with fieldwork visits.

The sense itself did not suggest fragmentation, it rather created feelings of wholeness that stem from intimacy, and that pushed against my worry of having been reduced to a desktop anthropologist. Yet, as a social scientist, I try to maintain a self-critical perspective reminding myself that these are fragments. I drew on these associations more strongly in the absence of other forms of access, and in a context of loss. This in turn led me to reflect on the utility, role, and place of intimate knowledge in ethnography, not only for vulnerable observers (Behar 1996) but also more widely. Since my knowledge of this field stemmed from growing up, I connected notions of home with anthropology at home to think about the character of emotive knowing.

Critics of the home-versus-Other-cultures distinction are right to say that it cannot be assumed that scholars working at home will share strong affinities with their interlocutors (Narayan 1993; Collins 2002). But where research taps into a home that really was, or feels like, our childhood, or other significant, home, it becomes clear that sensed knowledges that penetrate deep into our being come into play. The hearths of our homes, however configured, played a considerable role in making us; the substance they produced and that we consumed – whether as food or as prayer – continues to work on us, our perceptions, reactions, and views of the world, even if they are not the only thing that has made and continues to make us. It is therefore right to draw attention to the fieldworker’s emotions and states of being in the ‘between’ (Davies 2010), but as the article shows this does not need to be limited to the fieldwork encounter or its recollection. There is more than this at work as resonances invoked by experiences layer over one another and impact on re/experiencing. Attempting to draw on these dynamics without taking them as the be all and end all of fieldwork allowed me to hold on to my position in this research and my sense of ‘being anthropologist’ at a time when it was tested in more than one way.

The exploration presented here should give pause for thought on just how much the substances that make us, continue to impact on our work as academics. I have shown that this intimate, sensed knowledge is particularly relevant when researching topics, people, places we are already familiar with. If we accept that we all carry such knowledge within us, however we also have to accept that it will always play a role, whether we do fieldwork at home or abroad, or none. This is part of Das’ argument when she says that experience clings to concepts. Concepts are not merely flight of our intellectual fancies, but they belong “to thought as to what the body has come to forcefully know” (2017b: 21). If that is the case, then experiences will always impact our academic work. The question that arises, is then, while fieldwork at home may be particularly well placed to bring this out into the open, should it really constitute such an oxymoron as has been argued in the past? Who is to say that the emotions coming into play in fieldwork abroad are any more or any less insightful than those coming into play in fieldwork at home?