2.a Methodological constraints

Strathern (1987) has also argued that fieldwork methods interfere with the research and with the comprehension of the social life experience. The presence of the anthropologist always highlights the unequal relationship between researcher and informant (Strathern 1987: 19). In this respect, my research disrupted life in the village in the sense that it was difficult to find a role that would smooth over my incorporation into the life of the town. At the beginning I was often assumed to be one of the many English teachers that travel twice a week to the local school to teach conversational English. Gradually people learned that I was ‘living in the town’, and for some I was ‘living with the Watanabe’. Most people were not sure how to define my status and how to treat me. As Hendry (1993b) has noted, the raising of Japan’s economic power has turned up-side-down the colonialist power differential between the anthropologist and the local people. Status is an important issue when doing research in Japan. It is one way of classifying not only people’s identity but ‘proper place’ (cf. Hendry 1987). Anthropologists working in Japan are no longer ascribed a ‘superior’ status by virtue of their origins. However, for most Japanese people, English-speaking people have a preferential status. They are regarded as speaking a privileged language. Not being from an English speaking country meant that my status was rather ambiguous, this being a factor in the non-equality of our relationship. I shared with English speakers the fact we were all regarded as having little knowledge of indirect communication. The effects of unequal relations were not lineal. They fluctuated depending on the context. I never felt that the longer I stayed in the town my status either improved or diminished. Status and unequal relations were always contextually tied to the occasions on which I was coming into a house (village, district, festival, ceremonial) or leaving these spheres. Being a woman in Japanese society meant that my age was the most important factor in determining my status. I was twenty-seven and single during research. On the whole, although disagreements over my presence and worries about me were not manifested verbally, people’s concern created an empathic relationship that was the beginning of deeper relations during the year. My strategy was to try to negotiate a temporary ‘social space’ and become a ‘marginal native’ (cf. Keynes in Jackson 1992). However, my association with people who were regarded as ‘marginal’ made the boundaries of my ‘social space’ more clear-cut than perhaps other kinds of approaches to fieldwork in Japan. I tried to negotiate, not the exploitation of the topics of ‘gaijin-Japanese, you-us’, but the dimensions of my own personal affiliations and the process of letting others ‘wrap’ me into their lives. This process of wrapping was not without problems. Each time I was ‘wrapped’ into a group I found my relations with other groups disturbed people’s sense of place and politeness. Fieldwork meant on most occasions that I was forced to leave some groups in order to visit others, to go from one village to another, and to have no particular alliances with a particular group. I did not consider that my presence in Kamikatsu was entirely successful in relation to how well I engaged with people, because I let others wrap me into their lives without accepting the constraints of such inclusion. If something came out of the process of wrapping and immersion, it was that to become part of a group, which was always marked by gifts, also meant to share social obligations to the group, some of which I fulfilled and others which I could not.

As I reflect here, I used the traditional methods of fieldwork: intensive participant observation (see Okeley 1987: 71 and Clifford and Marcus 1986). I have to say though, that ‘intensive participant observation’ is here a loan term that describes an experience full of contradictions, marginality and estrangement from what I assumed ‘participation’ to be before fieldwork. My methods encountered the fact that methods must deal not with ideal societies and identities, remoteness, or exclusive ways of living (Sperber 1982: 4 and Strathern 1987: 31). Indeed, fieldwork as a method was always constrained by the multiplicity of changes and divergence of identities in the society where I lived. Many of my initial assumptions about fieldwork, gifts, and wrapping were challenged and changed in order to include a more encompassing reality.