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The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field
A practical and theoretical guide for field researchers struggling with access
Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they enter a community and start asking questions. People obstruct investigations and hide evidence. They shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget their own past and deny having done so. How can we learn about a community when its members resist so very strongly? The answer is that the resistance itself is sometimes the key.
Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not byproducts, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening. Instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.
An essential guide for ethnographers, sociologists, and all field researchers seeking access, The Interloper shares practical and theoretical insights into the value of having the door slammed in your face.
Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they enter a community and start asking questions. People obstruct investigations and hide evidence. They shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget their own past and deny having done so. How can we learn about a community when its members resist so very strongly? The answer is that the resistance itself is sometimes the key.
Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not byproducts, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening. Instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.
An essential guide for ethnographers, sociologists, and all field researchers seeking access, The Interloper shares practical and theoretical insights into the value of having the door slammed in your face.
208 pages, Paperback
Published April 9, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 18, 2024
I don’t think it is possible for me to state how much I enjoyed this book and how valuable a resource it is for ethnographers and other qualitative researchers. The rich quality of the fields explored, and the accessibility of the writing itself, draws you into the worlds that Anteby has entered during his academic career, which are weird, wonderful and intriguing - puppeteers at Disney, ghostwriters, anatomists and procurers of cadavers, to name a few. I would argue that the content is so interesting and the style of writing so engaging that this book could be of interest to people far beyond the academic sphere. Yet, it is also a book which has been thoroughly researched with substantial endnotes and bibliography of various sources.
I completed devoured it over three days, finding it difficult to put down, as I recognised many of the challenges faced in my own ethnographic doctoral research. Anteby made me realise that my experiences, although challenging, were not necessarily unique and I should perhaps consider them through a new lens as an interloper. I will undoubtedly be returning to this book for reference material over the coming years, and will be recommending it to many colleagues.
I completed devoured it over three days, finding it difficult to put down, as I recognised many of the challenges faced in my own ethnographic doctoral research. Anteby made me realise that my experiences, although challenging, were not necessarily unique and I should perhaps consider them through a new lens as an interloper. I will undoubtedly be returning to this book for reference material over the coming years, and will be recommending it to many colleagues.
June 7, 2024
The author does ethnographic research where he embeds himself into organizations to generate hypotheses. I saw this as being similar to being a consultant or marketing researcher (both prior work roles for me) doing open ended observational research to dig into organizations or a key question. By talking about the barriers of getting in the door (or once in the door, what topics are hidden or blocked from the researcher’s view), he addresses strategies for managing them, but the real value is just knowing that these kinds of defenses may be up and to think about what that says about the topic or organization in question. What do they value if they block a subject from view? What if they forget that something happened in their past? What does that say about the organization and how its culture is working? It is a short read with just a few examples but with a lot of depth and elaboration for each organizational blocking strategy.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews