ABSTRACT
The kind of loneliness the author experienced was peculiar to the experience of going to a new place, where she was entirely strange, and hoping, desperately, that she would be able to build a home there. In this chapter, the author hope to give but one example of what an anthropologist might experience in balancing intimacy and estrangement while building a home. She points to the kind of loneliness that grew from this tension in her own home, and how it played an important role in the practice of participant observation. Loneliness is the realization that any intimacy built in the field is temporary and fragile, and contains within it its opposite, strangeness. To borrow again from Berlant, – ‘I didn’t think it would turn out this way’ is the secret epitaph of intimacy and indeed the secret epitaph of any ethnographic monograph.
