| Since then I have often tried to understand, not very successfully,
what happened to me. I suspect that I suffered from an exaggerated
case of an occupational disease which often afflicts fieldworkers who find
themselves involved in a desparate factional
struggle and have accumulated just enough knowledge to think that they
are 'really involved'. Naïvely, I had taken the side of 'the
oppressed', and, as part of my protective self-deception, I had constructed
an ideal model of 'true Japanese' behavior - for the Japanese and for myself
- and I proceeded (in my own mind) to criticize and despise anyone who
deviated from this model. That my model
was melodramatic and unreal I did not then perceive. Nor did it occur
to me that as a social scientist I had no business sitting in judgement
on myself or on the people I was supposed to be studying and understanding.
Rosalie Wax (1970): Doing Fieldwork. Warnings and Advice, p.140 |