My face turned red,but it led me … nowhere. Notes on epistemically pointless embarrassment in ethnographic practice

Abstract

The personal character of ethnography makes it meaningful to pay attention to emotions during fieldwork, not the least of which is awkwardness or embarrassment. To make a fool of oneself or to commit a faux pas in the field belongs to the palette of the ethnographic experience, and is often defined as helpful for obtaining new knowledge about the setting. But whereas many ethnographers emphasize the didactic quality of shameful mistakes, this article takes a closer look at instances which proved to be epistemically pointless. By analysing five different instances of embarrassment during fieldwork, the author argues that not all situations in which ethnographers do the ‘wrong’ thing lead somewhere. Embarrassment may present itself in more prosaic manners, stemming from the ethnographer being relatively uninformed, incompetent or out of place, and they need not enrich field knowledge. Attending to such instances may help us further understand and discuss the conditions of ethnographic practice.

Still, you learn something of it! Without this experience I wouldn’t have fully understood …

Whenever I present my findings on embarrassment in ethnography (at a seminar, or at the coffee machine) someone generally responds in a constructive fashion. Yes, fieldwork is at times embarrassing, but there is nonetheless a learning quality in this feeling, someone often comments, echoing today’s literature. ‘Uncomfortable fieldwork’, Hume and Mulcock (2004: xxiii) argue, ‘is often very good fieldwork’. Fieldwork can be emotionally challenging, and fieldworkers can be plagued by anxieties about inadequacy or about social, professional and personal failure, but it is precisely these qualities that also make it a very productive methodology (Hume and Mulcock 2004: xxiv). If our mistakes do not make us understand, for instance, the local norms and rules of a setting, or teach us the moral structure by putting an exclamation mark on our acute deviations from it (cf. Göransson 2019: 100–101), they at least teach us how to develop the fieldwork. We may, for instance learn to be humbler during the next visit, more tactful or discreet, and we may learn to attend to our own reactions more systematically, putting them into our notebooks and expanding on them within the rhetoric of the ‘confessional’ genre (Van Maanen 2011: 73–100). We may learn how to accommodate and respond to the politics of the field and manoeuvre past its hazards more securely, or learn how to redefine awkwardness into valuable opportunities to connect with people (cf. Tracy 2014).

I will not try to refute these and similar constructive interpretations, since fieldworkers’ reflections and lessons from the field sit at the core of this tradition. Without personal stories in terms of ‘what I learn …‘, and ‘now I understand much better …‘, ethnography would most likely not work (cf. Atkinson 2015: 156–157). What I attempt to do in this article, however, is to discern a certain minor, perhaps more ordinary, type of embarrassment which can hardly be described as epistemically productive, and yet can be illuminating for ethnographic practice.

My point is that, aside from productive embarrassment, there are also non-productive variants, and it would be overly rationalizing – or romanticizing – to ignore them. When we ethnographers enter a field and start taking notes on details of social interaction (Emerson et al., 1995), aiming to get close to the field members ‘while they are responding to what life does to them’ (Goffman 2001: 154), we sometimes find ourselves in situations of quite profane and not-so-epistemically-significant awkwardness, which can still be rather personally burning. The ethnographic enterprise easily puts the researcher in a place for which there is no guidebook, and where many ethnographic ideals are hard to live up to. It can be embarrassing in the field for quite minor reasons, and the embarrassment might not lead the ethnographer anywhere. It is rather, to paraphrase Goffman, a matter of what fieldwork does to us.

I will start with a brief detour into the literature and sketch out an analytic frame for embarrassment in fieldwork, with observations from previous research on emotional aspects of ethnography. I will then go through five different recollections of embarrassment from my own fieldwork over the years, with an emphasis on the minor kinds that hardly advanced my projects or helped me to understand the fields any better. On the other hand – as I will try to clarify in what follows, and return to in the discussion and conclusion – those moments did not put an end to my efforts. What can be learnt, I think, revolves less around the field and more around fieldwork in practice and how we can discuss it.

Embarrassing ethnography

As Scott et al. (2012: 716–717) point out, a range of developments in qualitative methods – the narrative turn, feminist models of research and autoethnography – have led to ‘a flurry of reflexive, confessional tales about experiences in the field’, including unsavoury encounters and failures. The researcher is seldom placed in a strong, powerful or paternalistic position in relation to the researched, but may rather, and often more accurately, be described as facing emotional and dramaturgical dilemmas in attempting to perform the role of the competent fieldworker (Hedlund and Sampson, 2022). Emotional labour is embedded in this effort (Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2014; Coffey 1999: 57, 158–159; Göransson 2019: 100–102). The researcher might for instance need to work up feelings of confidence, assertiveness and sociability, playing down shyness, embarrassment and other self-conscious emotions, and he or she may worry that someone will ‘find them out’ (Scott et al., 2012: 718–719). ‘The private use of emotions’, as Coffey (1999: 57) argues, ‘is tempered by a reality of fieldwork as work’.

As Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2014) have described their fieldwork among judges and prosecutors in Swedish district courts, an ethnographic project can be not only an emotional rollercoaster in the round, but also demand elaborate emotion management in its details. We try to build trust outwards and self-confidence inwards, and may struggle with emotive dissonance originating from the contrast between a performed persona and what we ‘really’ feel inside. Attentiveness to emotional signals – to monitor our position in the field and calculate the next step – is also a form of emotional labour. ‘Emotions’, Bergman Blix and Wettergren (2014: 701) conclude, ‘are both sources of information and tools of interaction’. Similarly, Göransson (2019: 100–101) reports how she had to observe and put her own feelings of irritation aside after being reprimanded by her host family in Singapore for staying out late one night and, in doing so, came to realize that the incident was actually informative for her project. It said something about different ideas of when a person is considered an adult.

Scott et al. (2012: 719–720) use Goffman’s concepts to argue that an anxious researcher in the field may try to conceal the discreditable stigma of felt incompetence, and attempt to pass as more confident than they feel inside (cf. Katz 2015: 548), something that can in itself – if caught as performance – turn embarrassing. The authors discern a cringe spectrum (Scott et al., 2012: 721–722) and argue that their own field-based activities in art galleries and museums occupied different positions along this spectrum. A setting’s emerging level of ‘cringeworthiness’ in relation to fieldworkers’ activities depends on ‘the levels of face-to-face interaction, on-the-spot improvisations and/or public performance it required’. Different situations produce different degrees of dramaturgical stress, including role conflicts and strain, so that placing all obstacles on the side of the fieldmembers, and their presumed spectrum of reluctance towards the researcher (Adler and Adler 2003), is a simplification. Emotions must be managed, not only to safeguard the welfare of participants, but also to maintain the researcher’s professional self (Scott et al., 2012: 730). A project which entails feelings of misplacement and of being an imposter – as many ethnographic projects do – may very well involve a lot of emotional labour, even though the researchers defined their own project and its to-do lists in the first place (cf. Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2014).

Fieldworkers construct emotional work for themselves by, on the one hand, setting and reproducing high standards for an ideal researcher and, on the other hand, placing themselves in project-related situations in which these standards can, at least sometimes, hardly be met. Jack Katz (2015: 545; 2019: 22) argues that ethnography typically entails a range of personal confrontations for fieldworkers, some of which are deeply emotional. Not everyone likes to ‘schmooze, hang around, subordinate your interests to those of others’, etc. – in fact, many standard tricks in the repertoire of ethnographic fieldwork can be felt impossibly uncomfortable for many researchers and students. Ethnographers are, in a way, naked in their fields, as Katz (2015: 548, 2019: 23) writes. They know too little to navigate adequately, and even though they often volunteer to perform tedious or ‘dirty’ work in the setting – typically to adjust the moral imbalance they feel for ‘taking’ findings and not ‘giving’ much of anything back – such role-taking can create new problems, since it might come to dictate how fieldmembers respond to the ethnographer (cf. Wax 1971: 366). And beyond such roles, ‘subjects [of the field] are left to their own devices to figure out what to do with the researcher’ (Katz 2015: 548; 2019: 24). There are no detailed scripts for ‘hanging out’, and even in the interview role ‘there is little cover’, as Katz points out. If fieldmembers strain to uphold the interaction with this strange and confused guest during, for instance a coffee break or an interview, the ethnographer becomes even more uneasy. Fieldwork is not supposed to disturb or to make people stiff; the slightest indication in that direction and the ethnographer may feel a complete failure. Shame and ethically-dressed-up self-criticism may then take the stage, and after a while the (would-be) ethnographer just wants to escape. Katz (2015: 549; 2019: 24) argues that ‘perhaps the most common route [to deal with shame in fieldwork] is to invent a moral analysis of why the interaction failed: the researcher is ashamed because he or she has no right to be there’.

Following Katz’s line of thought, my intention in highlighting minor embarrassments in the field is not to advocate abstaining from fieldwork altogether. On the contrary, I think fieldworkers have to endure some ‘moments of awkwardness’ (Katz 2015: 548), which will surely recur, and not jump to analytical or ethical conclusions because of them. As Katz (2015: 551) argues, they belong to the crucible in which research selves are shaped, especially for newcomers and young ethnographers. How researchers handle these daily challenges can shape their future style of research. If, for instance (again following Katz), the researcher can settle with a couple of anecdotes from the field and then return to more relaxing, academic discussions of theory, the discomfort will be ephemeral; whereas a longstanding acceptance of managing and enduring embarrassing moments while doing fieldwork will be needed if the ambition is to generate rich materials with more independent and original explanatory descriptions. As Erving Goffman (2001: 156) remarks, serious fieldworkers (i.e. those who are not content with a couple of anecdotes) ‘have to be willing to be a horse’s ass’. If not, then ethnographer is not, perhaps, the right academic role. Rosalie Wax (1971: 370) puts it aptly:

The person who cannot abide feeling awkward or out of place, who feels crushed whenever he makes a mistake – embarrassing or otherwise – who is psychologically unable to endure being, and being treated like, a fool, not only for a day or week but for months on end, ought to think twice before he [sic] decides to become a participant observer.

One reason why it may seem difficult to accept embarrassments as epistemically pointless might be found in how ethnographers report on emotions after fieldwork. The so-called confessional tale has become an attractive rhetorical genre (Van Maanen 2011: 73–100), a sort of autobiographical and ‘opening-up’ narrative of fieldwork which responds to Rosalie Wax’s remarks by saying ‘hey, I am psychologically able, or at least that is what I have become’. This genre in itself puts pressure on ethnographers to contrive their experiences to follow certain literary tropes, typically as if engaged in a sort of enlightenment project (Atkinson 2020: 59, 61) and quest (Atkinson 2015: 156): ‘from stranger and outsider to member and insider; from puzzlement to enlightenment; pursued through troubles and privations; aided by true friends and mentors; sometimes led astray by false expectations and poor advice’. Like other research texts the ‘confessional’ tale follows conventions, Atkinson (2020: 21) argues: ‘the appearance of frank confession is as contrived as any other form of account’. It often focuses on emotional aspects of fieldwork, typically attempts to de-mystify the practice, and despite the initial impression of undermining the ethnographer’s overall work, in the end it validates it (Atkinson 2020: 56). The reason is, I would argue, that blunders and gaffes are presented as didactic. The clumsy and incompetent fieldworker is portrayed as an anti-hero ‘who learns through mistakes’ (Atkinson 2020: 59), so that confessing this or that eventually serves as support. The ethnographer is not portrayed as stuck in awkward situations without academic meaning, but as acquiring knowledge and competence.

When, for instance, Tracy (2014: 459, 461) reports on flashes of ‘horse-assery’ during her fieldwork (referring to Goffman’s colourful expression), she concludes that although these moments were uncomfortable, they were still valuable and even ‘remarkably insightful’. Once, she found that the entire back seam of her trousers had ripped open, causing immediate embarrassment in front of the correctional officer she was shadowing. Another time, she was almost locked out of her field at a jail and was snubbed at reception, despite having carefully coordinated with the gatekeepers and called in advance to confirm her arrival. The first incident eventually brought the correctional officer and the fieldworker closer to one another, ‘as fellow imperfect human beings’ (Tracy 2014: 459), and from the second incident she learnt something about the relative lack of information that conditioned the correctional officers’ work compared to the inmates’ situation. ‘Being locked out on that first day of research wasn’t exactly enjoyable’, Tracy (2014: 461) writes, ‘but it ended up serving as valuable data’.

Again, I will not try to refute these fortunate interpretations but, looking closely at what Tracy reports, at least one crack in the narrative appears. In a quote from her fieldnotes she states that ‘I console myself that this is a helpful learning experience …‘, as if she did take into account that maybe she was not only and successfully making the most of her own humiliations and awkwardness but also, to some extent, practicing a rhetoric of achievement and wishful thinking. ‘Typically’, van Maanen (2011: 80) notes when describing this genre of ethnographic writing,

… lessons are said to be learned through breaches of local propriety. Thus the experiences of the bumbling, awkward fieldworker, painfully figuring things out, provide a good deal of the substance of the confessional tale.

Van Maanen’s and Atkinson’s reflections on the strong expectations of the confessional genre lead us back to the point of departure I sketched out above. When embarrassment in ethnographic fieldwork is narrated, we easily slip into didactic mode, approximating what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981/2000: 392–393) defined as distinctive for a Bildungsroman. We, the method’s protagonists, are supposed to ‘become’ something because of what we have witnessed, felt and done. We are not supposed to merely return to the same shape as we were to begin with, only temporarily tested by the field adventure; we are supposed to mature and develop as a result of what we have faced. Any personal turbulence of ethnographic practice is looked upon as The School that forms and formulates the hero’s future character and worldview. When Atkinson (2015: 157) analyses this genre and emphasizes ‘the personal struggle for comprehension, the vicissitudes experienced and overcome’, he points out the power and range of these normative expectations, and thereby indicates a frame for understanding the ethnographer’s deep difficulty with just saying ‘oh shit, that was a mistake’, let alone laughing at whatever took place. The confessional style is strong today. Embarrassing situations in the field are supposed to be understood in terms of biographical journeys and constructive pursuits of new knowledge (Atkinson 2020: 59) – and this is what I would like to problematize in this article.

Despite the expectations, we can hardly define all instances of awkwardness and embarrassment during fieldwork as instructive. There are also cases of a more banal or odd character, which cannot be understood as achievements, and which we still risk experiencing when engaged in fieldwork. Indeed, articulating such minor embarrassments – to ourselves or others – might be even more shameful than the major ones. Since they do not lead anywhere, they might – from the standpoint of the implicit Bildungsroman – easily seen as really, really not worthy mentioning.

I will now describe five instances from my own collection of mistakes, gaffes and faux pas to provide a more concrete backdrop for the discussion. Three of these revolve around my studies of Swedish youth detention homes (i.e. rehabilitative institutions for young people with criminal experiences), where I have led three ethnographic projects. The remaining two are picked from my training in qualitative research as a student, and from a study of corruption scandals in which I tried to get those accused of taking bribes to tell their stories. I have deliberately chosen quite different instances – I will point out some their characteristics step-by-step – to illustrate that epistemically empty embarrassment comes in many shapes.

Rushing past helpful information

Many instances of embarrassment in my fieldwork memories revolve not around only being uninformed but rather around behaving as if uninformed, or not being able to employ the relevant background information. Rushing past useful information may easily mean that the ethnographer creates awkwardness. In the 1990s, I was collecting data for a thesis on Westerners in Eastern Central Europe, spending time there as exchange student, and taking fieldnotes among American, British, German and Swedish students and entrepreneurs. I often hung around in pubs and student clubs, and I was interested in the foreigners’ definitions of ‘East’, and how they, as Westerners, constructed their identities both as enlightened pathfinders in so-called emerging markets, and as hobbyist ethnographers in their terra incognita after the fall of the Berlin Wall (cf. Wästerfors, 2008).

I was about to interview George, an American student living in my student dorm in Brno in the Czech Republic, and I had brought over my tape recorder and two bottles of beer. It was not an odd choice of drink among Czech students, but as I took out those bottles from my bag and put them on the table, George said ‘you know, I don’t drink, I’m an alcoholic’ – and I remember that I knew, in a weird way, exactly what he was going to say. As I grabbed the beers, I could basically predict what would happen next. George had told me this before – at the faculty and at student dorm parties – and even elaborated on his struggle to maintain sobriety and to not drink in a beer-oriented setting, because there were times he could simply not resist the temptation. How could I have ignored this! I felt the floor disappear beneath me. I apologized and he seemed to overlook it, and we went on talking, although the start of the interview could have been better.

These bottles were, of course, very embarrassing for me. They symbolized not only bad manners in general (tempting an alcoholic with alcohol), but also my crude footwork. I had tried to ‘immerse’ myself in the field as it appeared to me superficially (‘students in Brno drink beer’), not taking into account individual idiosyncrasies, let alone the personal information I already got from George, perhaps even as an implicit instruction for our encounters. Even though alcohol did play a (small) part in George’s stories, I did not learn anything new about him, his adventures in Brno, his identity work as a Westerner in ‘the East’; the beers on the table were simply awkward. They were not ‘a source of insight and revelation’ (Hume and Mulcock 2004: xxv); my work would have benefited from not bringing them to the interview. In fact, I still blush when recalling the moment I put the beers on the table and I feel I must have given a strikingly ignorant impression.

Treating informants’ data carelessly

Another source of embarrassment can be found in careless treatment of data – and, closely tied to this, actions that risk breaking down trust. Whatever informants trust us to take part in should be treated carefully, and certainly not in ways that might jeopardize our field relations. If we happen to communicate something that might expose an informant’s identity, or in other ways seem tactless or thoughtless regarding their position, we may disperse fieldmembers’ trust and put our future presence in the field at risk.

Quite recently I was involved in a study of administrative activities within a range of people-processing organizations (Åkerström et al., 2021), and was observing a series of meetings among teachers at a detention home. The idea was to get closer to the attractive aspects of administration, since my colleagues and I had started to find indications of an expansion of meetings and documents, originating not only ‘from above’ but also from co-workers themselves. By taking notes from meetings I was trying to get at the ‘pull’ of such formal gatherings.

I got a nice contact with one of the teachers, who also invited me to join her lesson with young people outside the staff meetings. The idea was to show me how she worked with forms to keep track of her students’ achievements, and she showed this to me in quite tangible ways: the forms, the lists of achievements to monitor, student lists, etc. And how did I thank her? I realized at my office, some days later, that I had taken her papers. I must have placed my notebook on top of a pile of papers on her chair at the detention home, and then simply put it all in my bag at the end of the day. I discovered my unintended theft at a time when I was writing a quite sceptical article on ethical boards and the rigorous ethical control apparatus of today (Wästerfors, 2019) – and here I was, with a stack of papers with students’ names and their personal school assignments at a detention home. I had not even asked if I could take this information. I had just taken it.

I felt dizzy when I realized what I had done – and I could not find any useful aspect to it. The names and details in the teacher’s papers were precisely of the type that I am trained to leave out in the first place – too-specific and with identifying details, which create ethical problems and sometimes distract the analytic gaze from the interactions and the social scene. Some days later I handed it all back, and the teacher was surprised. ‘I wondered what happened to those papers!’ she said. I was lucky my field relations were not affected, probably because of this teacher’s positive attitude to ethnographic research.

As ethnographers of prisons and other total institutions know (cf. Coggeshall 2004: 147), basically all fieldnotes from the inside, which are intended to be used outside, may raise suspicion from both staff and inmates. The legitimacy of collecting any material at all can easily be questioned, and in my case I had basically smuggled out too much and too-sensitive data – to no purpose. My mistake did not advance my field knowledge in any sense; it was simply embarrassing.

Naïvely trusting young criminals

Some years ago, I was on my way home from another detention home when I got a feeling that I had forgotten something. I stopped the car and started searching through my belongings. I realized my camera was not there and I soon understood that it must have been stolen. The theft turned out to be embarrassing in several respects; it gave the impression that my fieldwork was absent-minded and nervous, and created an image of me as criminologically uninformed compared to my colleagues. But it hardly taught me anything new. I already knew that young people in detention homes sometimes look for opportunities to practice their skills, and the tiny piece of analysis I could squeeze out of the incident could surely have been reached in many other ways.

I went back to the detention home, asked the staff and some young people, but the camera was gone. I remember having it in my rucksack during the day and I had put the rucksack down in various places, with young people walking in and out of the rooms, running around, etc. At the time, I was following lessons to capture how schoolwork was done in practice (Wästerfors, 2014), and I used the camera now and then to document things like the use of a stress ball or words and sketches on a whiteboard (Wästerfors, 2012). I searched in vain. I felt stupid. This was an institution for young people with criminal experiences; of course I should have kept an eye on my valuables. Nobody said anything, but I remember looks from the staff – and their speaking silence – implying that I had not been too smart, and even some faces among the youth were full of pity for me.

Later, I learnt that my stolen camera was used in an uprising of sorts. Some guys blocked a wing with mattresses and stuff, and then they ran around partying shouting and ‘creating chaos’ – and used my camera to document it. Soon realizing that this documentation could be turned against them, they flushed the memory card down the toilet. But I did actually get my camera back. The staff found it after the riot had been suppressed by the police. This particular piece – the riot, how the young people wanted to block staff and get some ‘wild’ time for themselves – I could use analytically (Wästerfors, 2013), but I had plenty of other data to help me). An uprising and the stories around it were interesting, but my camera was just a prop, and there is no shortage of equivalent dramas in detention homes.

After a while the camera theft turned even more embarrassing: I met a researcher in a neighbouring discipline, and it turned out that she had been working at this institution at the time of the theft. She had heard about it, although she did not know until now that I was the victim, and she had told herself ‘well, at least I’m more street smart than that researcher!’ She would never have left a bag with valuables unattended among these young people. Even if this was told with a smile, I felt embarrassed again – about my naivety and clumsiness in the field. And she told this during a dinner so that colleagues heard about it. She even said she thought she had written about the episode in her dissertation, although this, fortunately, turned out to be incorrect, she later concluded, when I asked about it.

Not so unobtrusive

Another time, perhaps a year earlier, I had made another awkward mistake. I had set up an appointment with a treatment assistant and union representative at a detention home to talk about violence and its covariance with staffing (this was for a project on violence in detention homes), and we would meet on Friday night. He usually worked night shifts and I went to the home by car. It was late, it was dark, it was Friday, and the barrier at the entrance of the detention home, which usually opens automatically, remained shut. I could not enter.

I jumped out of my car, started phoning the guy and I also tried the intercom next to the barrier, but I could not reach the man I was going to interview. Maybe I had the date wrong? He didn’t work this day, I was told. His colleagues seemed puzzled, and they sounded a bit suspicious.

Suddenly I saw guards approaching me with torches – ‘Who are you?’ ‘What are you doing?’ And I realized how this looked: the car with the engine still on, me trying to get through the barrier, the late hour – it looked for all the world like a sloppy prison break. I felt so stupid. I already knew that friends of the incarcerated sometimes try to break into detention homes with cars at night (these are also reported in the media), or just drive by and then the young people inside run away from the staff and jump into the car. I could have (a) checked the day and time beforehand, and (b) informed the manager of the institution about my late visit – not just showed up, unannounced, on a Friday night. Driving home I felt foolish and promised myself to never speak about it, though I did. The episode became one I subsequently transformed into a humorous anecdote, approximating Nigel Barley’s (1983) model (even though he made his whole fieldwork into a salty comedy) perhaps because there was a bit of a drama, with the guards and the flashlights.

The ‘ten lies of ethnography’ listed by Fine (1993) include ‘the unobtrusive ethnographer’. Even though the ideal is to influence the field as little as possible, Fine argues that there is often a point in being an active member. He himself did not try to be a ‘cipher’ in his fieldwork – he collected mushrooms among the mushroom collectors, and played role-playing games among the role-playing gamers – which means that he was engaged in the activities under study, although in various ways and to differing extents. The ideal of being unobtrusive belongs to the lies to be debunked, Fine argues. But in any case, Fine (1993: 281) writes, the ethnographer is not supposed to burst into a scene and generate an ‘excessively directive or substantive’ impact. With this in mind, I found few routes to render my memories from that Friday night epistemically meaningful. I did burst into the place, I learnt nothing new from it, and I am quite sure the night staff wrote a report about me.

Too unobtrusive

To ‘keep making the choice to remain open to whatever the day-to-day field experience may bring’ (Tourigny 2004: 124) has been one of my ideals during fieldwork – not imposing exogenous meanings in my fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 1995: 109), and not indicating ambitions to control my surroundings. Even though I have often found embarrassment in situations when I failed to do this, I have also, sometimes, awkwardly stayed too much in the background. This is what happened in my final example. I was doing interviews and conversations with managers accused of corruption in a project some years ago, and had settled a date to visit one quite prominent ex-manager at Systembolaget, the Swedish State monopoly on the sale of alcoholic beverages, who had been accused of taking bribes (Åkerström et al., 2016). I arrived at her house at the same time as a group of nurses. We met outside the door, and rang the bell, and we all entered at the same time – I took for granted that the ex-manager knew them all from before.

It turned out that the woman I was meeting had trouble with her arm: she had gone through medical treatment, and had a special bandage and a sling which needed to be removed – this had nothing to do with the corruption affair. I sat there on a chair in her kitchen, with a friendly smile, and waited for them to finish what they were supposed to do, and everybody talked a lot, and not only about the arm but about the winter, the house, the family, etc. Obviously they had all met before. Then the nurses started to leave, and I did not say anything, I just waited, thinking that I must have come at a terribly strange time, but hoping to get some corruption talk anyway. I waited and talked with this lady, and then she asked something about the arm, as if I should know. Then I finally understood that she had totally forgotten our interview appointment, and thought I belonged to the care team, maybe as some sort of occupational therapist.

She laughed and laughed, and I tried to see the funny side, but I felt very stupid. Why did I enter without introducing myself to begin with? I had just walked into her house and spent around 45 min there without stating my errand. It was as if I was tongue-tied by the situation with the medical trouble – it was perhaps a bit too intimate, too – and ambivalent about being there in the first place. Maybe I should have left right away, saying ‘we’ll see each other some other day’, but instead I drifted into shyness, that is into relative incompetence at managing the social encounter (Scott et al., 2012: 720–721).

The situation was saved, but not by me. This ex-manager easily changed role – she was ethnographically flexible, receptive and humorous. She called her colleague, another of the accused in the corruption scandal, and whom I was also supposed to interview, and eventually we had a nice talk. But I had a hard time shaking off the feeling of having made a very strange arrival and an incompetent first impression. I seemed to have got stuck in being too ‘open’ and unobtrusive, making it too difficult for the ex-manager to position me and start interacting with me in the way I wanted. This instance of embarrassment might have – paradoxically – emanated from my shunning embarrassment; I tried hard to ‘fit in’ among the nurses, but did so in a way that made the situation absurd. There was certainly no point in immersing myself into a ‘setting’ of medical treatment in a project on corruption accusations. I had no chance to incorporate the story into the study, it was too odd – and too trivial.

Discussion and conclusion

Things go wrong during fieldwork, and through such experiences you often learn things about the field and your research role, but things also go wrong in more non-functional and redundant ways, and you learn nothing. I would never wish to be that ethnographer who forgets to employ local knowledge, who treats data carelessly and unethically, who appears absent-minded or nervous, who forgets about the setting’s background expectations (and the fieldmembers’ backgrounds), let alone the one who puts himself so much in the centre that it obstructs his work, or disappears into the scenery and does not dare to speak out when needed. I wish all these moments (and many others) undone, but, on the other hand, they have not stopped my fieldwork and, as I go through the analyses and publications that followed, I see few traces of them. I seem to have just endured them, and not really applied any strategic and productive emotional labour (cf. Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2014), and I expect that I will go on experiencing more of the same in the future.

All that said, I really enjoy fieldwork. The list of embarrassments above is not representative in that sense; I mostly have fun, seldom find interactions difficult and usually find it harder to relax within academia than outside it. As Coffey (1999: 158–159) underlines, emotional connectedness to the processes and practices of fieldwork is ‘normal and appropriate’, and a fundamental feature of the research. If we had no emotional connection to the research endeavour, setting or people it would probably indicate poorly executed research. My point is not to portray fieldwork as an emotional burden, constantly generating draining embarrassment, but to curiously discern a couple of illuminating situations in which it – momentarily but distinctly – gets slightly painful. We do not ‘need’ these situations for our projects, they most likely do not represent our efforts overall, and there is no reason for them to interrupt or redirect our research, but they will surely keep popping up in various forms, since they are intrinsic to this methodological practice and its inevitably relational character (Coffey 1999: -39-58; 159). They will often be mistaken as methodological or ethical problems (cf. Katz 2015) – as if they could be ‘cured’ or ‘solved’, which is, after all, yet another version of didactic meaning being ascribed – but there are few chances to rehearse in advance to transform into some better version of ourselves, one who is fully equipped to deal with them without a blush. ‘We cannot’, Coffey (1999: 56) points out, ‘conceive of field relations purely as unemotive and purposive work’.

But even as I argue the occasional absence of didactic meaning, am I not creating a logical paradox by writing an article about these situations, thereby implying that there is, after all, something to learn from them? Indeed. By interpreting my experiences in interactionist and dramaturgical terms, I produce a contribution to the sociology of awkward face-to-face encounters (although the research projects themselves did not benefit from it) and I simultaneously imply that there is a methodological lesson to be learnt from my analysis, even though it cannot be placed within these individual projects (i.e. addressing the respective fields).

I will spend the final paragraphs addressing this paradox, which I think points to the general practice of ethnographic fieldwork. What can be learnt is different from field-contextualized expectations (e.g. ‘my blunder made me aware of what members presume …‘) and closer to elementary working conditions for ethnographers across fields.

‘By definition’, Hume and Mulcock (2004: xi) argue, ‘participant observers deliberately place themselves in a series of very awkward social spaces’, and there is no doubt that these circumstances at times harbour great productivity. But, next to such productive instances, we also find a range of more unproductive variants, often too commonplace (or too uncomfortable) to even bother to report. When I ask colleagues to give examples, they may even find it embarrassing that they found certain instances embarrassing and lapse into accounting procedures: ‘I guess I tried to look smart’, ‘it must have been important for me to understand this immediately’. It is not surprising that it can be embarrassing to find oneself in slightly weird situations in new places, or to be trapped in this or that briefly quirky interaction with a stranger, but given the ideals of ethnography – a smooth and tactful immersion into a field – it still is.

Wax (1971: 366) found that her carefully prepared self-introductory speeches made little impact on fieldmembers, and what mattered were her long-term efforts to build up friendly and communicative relationships (also, see Bergman Blix, 2019). And in reasonably friendly and communicative relationships, people often just smile at minor embarrassments. They do not elevate them to serious hurdles, nor do they put them in reports and redefine them as didactic exercises; they simply laugh and move on – as the ex-manager did when I was mistaken for an occupational therapist. She laughed and laughed at the discovery of my true identity, whereas I had trouble finding it as funny as she did, trapped as I must have been in those unattainable ideals and my academic self-absorption. If fieldworkers, Rosalie Wax (1971: 365) writes, wish to develop and maintain long-term relationships, the most important thing is not precisely which words they choose when they introduce themselves and their research – or similar relatively organized situations – but the style in which they act over the long term, relatively spontaneously and when going amongst people. If granted the possibility to hang around long enough so that people may watch, test and talk to ethnographers in a range of situations, people in the field site will eventually – perhaps – cooperate with them. Disciplined preparedness appears to be less important, and a relatively relaxed field presence much more so – including its cringes and laughable sides.

When my students start their fieldwork (including those who are, in theory, very enthusiastic about ethnography in general) I sometimes get the feeling that quite small and seemingly trivial things become obstacles. What should I say when I call them? When should I arrive? Where should I stand in the room? What if somebody says this or that, starts questioning me, or what if I forget to behave in this or that manner? Minor embarrassments are anticipated and charged with significance, which later appears to make it harder to ignore or downgrade any tiny deviation from A Perfect Performance in the Field which, previously – in the seminar or in discussions with advisers – was treated as so genuinely important. In other words, I think the risk of facing such embarrassments might be a key to understanding fieldwork hesitancy and its occasionally project-changing consequences. Scott et al. (2012: 727) conclude, for instance, that all in their research team ‘felt deeply uncomfortable’ about cold calling, and they eventually had to admit that these emotional and dramaturgical concerns played a role in their decision to remove this technique from their project.

As Katz (2015: 548; 2019: 23) notes, ethnographers are naked in the field. We need to be prepared to be unprepared: ‘… one cannot plan and control the self that will be enacted when the researcher meets people he or she does not know, in situations never before entered’ (Katz 2019: 26). Felt disorientation is necessary and logical: if we knew the place in and out, and the people hanging out there, we would not go there to begin with. Ethnography is, in that sense, inevitably a bit silly and uncomfortable, at least at times. We end up in places with no particular role to play, with no routine to follow, no timetable, and we have left our comfort zones behind us: the home or office, our well-used hideouts and well-practiced habits of dealing with emerging troubles.

No wonder, then, that minor embarrassments, as variants of an especially self-centred emotion (Scott et al., 2012: 718–719), keep knocking at our doors. Ethnography requires a heightened alertness and attentiveness, which easily magnifies feelings and social disturbances that we would not pay much attention to in other contexts, perhaps fuelled by the emotional reflexivity that (rightfully) impresses an academic audience and that contemporary fieldworkers have learnt to employ epistemically (Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2014). We might as well simply endure certain situations – have a laugh and let them pass, admit they are part of the method. But we are trained to pay respect to the ideals of the constantly and indiscriminately observant ethnographer (Fine 1993: 279), and consequently to make something out of also those situations which we would probably never bother to put into notebooks in our private lives, let alone ponder in sophisticated terms. The Bildungsroman must go on.

What this boils down to is the puzzling role of the researcher’s self in ethnography. Fieldwork demands of us to be both very sensitive and a bit insensitive to how we are presented while generating data (Hedlund and Sampson, 2022), and bouncing between these two poles, tiny pebbles may turn into surreal boulders. To enter into and sustain field relations is a paradoxical work of trying to get to know things with the help of one’s situated self and simultaneously letting go of self-centredness.

This is what I think can be (paradoxically) learnt from epistemically pointless cases of fieldwork embarrassment. Ethnographic fieldwork entails not caring so much about one’s own specific person, which nonetheless must be exposed and extemporarily put to use.