ABSTRACT
This essay critically examines and offers alternatives to the reflexive methodologies and concepts used in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in urban settings. Concepts such as reflexive ethnography, embodied ethnography, and affective ethnography, which emerged from critiques of the disembodied objectivity of earlier ethnographies, can be considered alternatives for exploring situated knowledges, as coined by Donna Haraway (1988). However, as noted by Pierre Bourdieu (2003), some reflexive studies exhibit aspects of narcissistic reflexivity, focusing solely on corporeal, psychological, and emotional changes within the ethnographic self, placing undue emphasis on its role in the field. As an alternative, Bourdieu advocated for participant objectivation, which interrogates the social and historical conditions that make anthropological research possible. Meanwhile, this essay suggests that such approaches can also marginalize the labor and roles of ethnographic others who actually enable the fieldworker's presence. Using two case studies from fieldwork conducted in Seoul's queer spaces, this essay argues that spaces are negotiated and created through interactions among people and objects in a given place during fieldwork, and that intersectional positionalities shape this relational process. Consequently, the essay proposes to adopt the concept of relational space to understand the multilaterality of fieldwork spaces and to decenter the ethnographic self.
