ABSTRACT
During my nine months of fieldwork in a hospital, I was struck by the immediacy of the dark sides of human emotional existence. Regardless of my initial methodological intentions, I inevitably found myself under the influence of my own emotional experience of the field. As the field was having such a heavy impact on me, I soon recognized that it would also affect my data gathering, interpretation, and analysis. This proved to be a bigger challenge than I initially anticipated. Ever since the dawn of Enlightenment, emotions have been portrayed as a threat to reason. Hence, guided by this conventional view on objective knowledge and scientific validity, at first I saw my emotional experience of my field as a problem, something that would blur my analytical precision and pollute my scientific objectivity. However, being caught in the area of tension between my feelings, my data, and my pursuit of understanding, I soon realized that ignoring my emotions might do more harm than good to my scientific task. So, instead of covering up my emotions, I dubbed them “emotional notes” and incorporated them into my analytical toolbox. In this chapter, I will argue for emotional notes as an ethnographic tool that extends the anthropologists’ reach and deepens our understanding beyond being merely intellectual. Instead of jeopardizing the ethnographic endeavor, feeling the field adds to its validity.
