Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“The transformations during anthropological fieldwork are affective experiences and the knowledge we gain and share in the field is affective as well as cognitive. When ignored, such understanding may affect, firstly, the quality of the engagement through which we produce knowledge and, consequently secondly, the quality of knowledge itself.”“The second step is to “liberate” emotions from some dominant but unhelpful discourses about them being “extraordinary,” “feminine” or “apolitical.”“This describes well what many anthropologists experience in the process of fieldwork and what often happens in the process of learning anthropology in general: constant challenges to “the Self” emerge through encountering the ongoing different ways of knowing, being and doing, together with the effort to understand, engage and empathise with “the Other” and to make sense of and articulate these encounters both personally and academically.”““identity disturbances” as described by the proponents of transformative learning theory. In anthropology, a good example is offered by Djohari (2011) who describes how in development studies students become painfully disillusioned about their professional careers in international development, as a result of taking a course in anthropology which critiques development practice. Such transformations are not always as painful or confusing as described by Djohari but they often lead to changing one’s previous ways of knowing, being and doing, at times, radically.”“feminist scholars have been among the pioneers in understanding the role of emotions, linking them to politics, historicising emotions and situating them in the intersections of culture and power”“…the specific is described as ‘hard,’ scientific and objective fact, its opposite is ‘airy fairy’ speculation, emotional and soft – woman’s domain… fact is equated with ‘vulgar empiricism’ and its opposite is theory, women are seen to be the fact gatherers and men are the theoreticians… Whatever ‘female thought’ may be, it is the one that is undervalued.”“If they prepare for the field as what it is - a lived relational, bodily and psychological process, occurring as much on the outside as on the inside of the anthropologist, and between the anthropologist and their research participants, their lecturers, peers, the discipline and others, then doctoral preparation may require a different set of readings – such as those above; and a different pedagogy”“In such context, anthropologists may be prone to guilt, which can be either fully experienced (thus producing direct field responses and engagement) or to some degree repressed (and leading to various forms of disengagement or adapted behaviours). The “repressed” may “return” and its effects may limit our field (and understanding of it) by foreclosing, ignoring or transforming the relationships involved. This alters both the quality of our engagement and the quality of our data and analysis. Guilt may have several different faces. Sometimes, it could stimulate an active engagement, and the student might redirect this energy to meaningful actions”-exactly—navigating power dynamics which are inherently unequal“The emotional, the embodied, is excluded and its key contribution to knowledge remains hidden to ourselves but also to those outside anthropology. This poses significant questions about the teaching and learning of anthropology and how such splits in embodied knowledge may be reproduced in academic practices and their organisation into different spaces for different states of doing, being and knowing.”“This emotional repositioning or silencing raises important questions: for example, how we perpetuate its lasting impacts on our research process and how it might lead to poorer quality research. Drawing on Reddy (2002), Heaton Shrestha (2010) says that this suspicion of affect is part of the failing initiatives to train anthropologists to take their emotional responses in fieldwork seriously because such initiatives have to challenge the existing emotional regimes. Indeed, there is a notable lack of training provision that might inform a more productive way forward and give strength to overcome such emotional regimes in individual institutions or the wider discipline of anthropology.”“The claim we make as to what we have found in the field, has moral, methodological and theoretical consequences. This is why it is important to foreground “informed subjectivity” (and with it, a “capacity for inclusion”) and epistemological and ontological openness in the training of anthropologists – to facilitate emotional reflexivity and with it - our knowledge-making.”“how we allow ourselves to experience and reflect on lived fieldwork experience, that is, how we learn as embodied beings and how we articulate it, is the key to what we come to know and how we teach. While we may have to be extremely careful not to convert emotions into another tool of hyper-accounting of academic practices by rampant neo-liberalism, our starting point may be to provide more formal forums for discussion, and a mainstream attention to articulating the emotional.”“emotional reflexivity may be the key in revealing the potential of anthropology as transformative learning.”