Paper short abstract:

How do women fieldworkers approach personal safety risk? In this literature review, I present key themes around how locally varying understandings of gendered risk collide with each other as ethnographic access is negotiated and experienced.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology is the only social science whose core method immerses us in the full unpredictability of life. We are not able to control our data collection environment in the same way that someone working in a lab or an archive can. Indeed, this is partly the point – we trade predictability of working conditions for richness of understanding.

Prompted by risk calculations I had to make during my experience as a master’s student arranging meetings with mostly male interlocutors, in this paper I will examine a selection of anthropology’s literature on women in the field, with a particular focus on how acknowledging risk may contribute both to better safety and better theorising, and on questions of universality versus locality in moral norms.

If anthropologists and anthropologists in training are not encouraged to prioritise risk considerations as part of their fieldwork planning, is more than safety compromised? Such an approach can carry with it an under-acknowledgement of the social embedding and co-construction attendant upon living with a community, and a failure to fully contend with the relational, positional nature of ethnographic work suggests theoretical implications as well as practical ones. On the other hand, very rigid approaches to mitigating the risk of violence may restrict our participation in the lifeworlds we go to the field to learn about. Through this review, I will engage with these and related questions through querying the work of female fieldworkers who have reflected on the price of access to ethnographic knowledge.