ABSTRACT
In 2004, when I visited the war-torn district of northern Uganda as an ethnographer and doctoral student interested in researching the impact of violence on children, the region had been engulfed by war for more than two decades. In that period, tens of thousands of people, including children, were displaced, and many of the children witnessed or experienced violence in various forms. My theoretical approach involved treating children as social actors in their own right. What I did not originally understand, however, was the degree to which my research would ultimately be influenced by the experiences I shared with the children who were my research subjects. This chapter is about that revelation. In reflecting on my positionality, and how it shaped my project, it contributes to the growing scholarship on intersubjectivity and “the autobiographic” in anthropological fieldwork. However, in contrast to much of the literature on self-reflexivity, which is dominated by white, Western scholars, including global North feminists who conduct research in African and other non-Western contexts, I highlight my positionality as a non-Western researcher who shares a history with the children I studied. While my discussion of “empathetic enmeshment” and writing “autobiographic” ethnography draws mainly on the medical anthropological scholarship in which I am situated—and I thank the collection’s editors for not imposing one literature on all authors—I also acknowledge that feminist oral historians have contributed much to the study of intersubjectivity and the embrace of reflexive writing.
