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This course takes the form of a series of seminars that taken together will provide students with a multifaceted glimpse of the manifold rewards, challenges, problems, and pitfalls of doing ‘fieldwork’ - and how best to deal with them in order to get most out of it. The course is structured as a seminar series in which a broad range of researchers will talk about their personal fieldwork experience and offer reflections and advice on the practice of doing fieldwork. To name just a few examples of the researchers who will contribute to the seminar series, Dr. Jenny Butler will talk about her ethnographic fieldwork with the Irish Pagan community, investigating contemporary Pagan worldview and ritual practices, as well as on her ethnographic research on fairy lore connected to the landscapes of Ireland, Newfoundland, and Iceland. Dr. Frog will reflect on his entries into fieldwork with different traditions and interests in Finland and Karelia, Greenland, and Indonesia, as a backdrop for talking about getting your bearings in fieldwork situations and getting a sense both of others and of yourself as part of the research process. Dr. Margaret Lyngdoh will talk about dangerous encounters in fieldwork where the usual ‘power’ relations between researcher and the researched are inverted; the focus topics are new religious movements, indigenous liminal ontologies, and ‘witchcraft’ in the context of minority communities in Northeast India. Dr. Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä and Lotta Leiwo (folklore student, yoga teacher) will discuss the intertwined roles of ethnography, collaborative ethnography, autoethnography and collaborative knowledge-production in relation to Mäkelä’s study on Finnish Forest Yoga and new spiritual practices. Dr. Valentina Punzi and Chimi Baobao (BA student in Social Work) will speak about the potentialities and challenges of doing fieldwork together in a marginalized community in southwest China, focusing on the negotiation of roles and research aims between a foreign researcher and a community member who is preparing to train as an anthropologist. Dr. Susanne Rodemeier will talk on her ethnographic field-research on the island of Alor (eastern Indonesia), that started with her interest in origin narratives and led into a performative introduction into the complexity of an ethnic religiosity. Professor Dr. Stefanie von Schnurbein will reflect on her three decade long research on Germanic Neopaganism (Asatru) and the complex effects that her and others' research has had on this ideologically and politically fraught field. Dr. Simon Young will discuss the use of social media as a fieldwork tool: he is particularly interested in supernatural systems in 19th-century Britain and has used social media to gather folklore memories from those born between 1920 and 1970, initially with the hope of recovering memories of the Victorian supernatural, but subsequently as an interesting exercise in itself. He has had, let's say, mixed results with memories of boggarts, fairies, ghosts, and mermaids.
Confirmed participants of the seminar series include Dr. Jenny Butler (University College Cork, Ireland); Chimi-Baobao and Dr. Valentina Punzi (University of Tartu, Estonia); Dr. Matthias Egeler (LMU Munich, Germany); Dr. Frog (University of Helsinki, Finland); Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir and Jón Jónsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík and Hólmavík); Dr. Sara Kuehn (University of Vienna, Austria); Lotta Leiwo (University of Helsinki, Finland); Dr. Margaret Lyngdoh (University of Tartu, Estonia); Dr. Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä (University of Helsinki, Finland); Dr. Susanne Rodemeier (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany); Professor Dr. Stefanie von Schnurbein (Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany); Dr. Alevtina Solovyeva (University of Tartu, Estonia); Dr. Katharina Wilkens (University of Leipzig, Germany); Dr. Simon Young (The Umbra Institute, Italy). |
