THE GHOSTS OF FIRST FIELDWORK

How do the ghosts of first fieldwork appear and disappear not only in everyday life but also as we write theoretically informed academic works that try to reconcile abstraction and the immediacy of ethnographic experience? The many volumes of ethnographic memoirs that recount experiences in the field may be evidence of the ghosts of ethnography, but there has been little explicit attention to how we may be haunted by first fieldwork. This chapter is a reflection on the longue durée of my relationship to my first fieldwork experience in rural France and its resonances over forty years later. I use the ghost as a metaphor for the ways that the past shows up in the present. Anthropological ancestors and the fieldwork accounts written by others that have preceded this chapter may be considered as ghosts that haunt my understandings of the legacies of my early attempt at “being an anthropologist” in the field. The hauntings of my first fieldwork are both sensorial and intellectual, full of both pleasant and uncomfortable reckonings. They include embodied memories that arise in my everyday life and have followed me to subsequent ethnographic projects. Many of my generation were trained without much attention to methods, but with the value of immersive fieldwork abroad. Working as a young “lone ethnographer” in a remote part of France hoping to “study up,” I faced many challenges but carried home both material objects and a broader understanding of the world and myself that stay with me.