The researcher and the field assistant: a cross-disciplinary,cross-cultural viewing of positionality

Abstract

It is almost a given in the social sciences that the outcome of the research process is directly affected by the social makeup of both researcher and respondents. Researchers have been encouraged to engage in a reflective process so as to recognise the existence of multiple viewpoints, the partiality of their assessments and the situatedness of the knowledge they produce. As a natural scientist taking up social science research I accepted these ideas quite readily, and endeavoured to prepare myself by considering how my positionality would affect the research. However, fieldwork was a shock, as farmers were not interacting with me; instead they were interacting with my field assistant/interpreter as if he was the researcher. I experienced feelings of invisibility and exclusion, which reflexivity could not explain. In retrospect, and in an attempt to understand what happened during my fieldwork, I asked my field assistant to write about how he felt my identity, and his own, influenced the research process. I use this article in two ways. First, I have taken the opportunity to reflect on my experiences of fieldwork, by challenging my original reflexive account of fieldwork by contrasting it with my field assistant's reflexive account. Second, I use the experience of fieldwork positionality as a case study to illustrate one of the big challenges that face those who wish to become interdisciplinary scholars, spanning the natural and social sciences.