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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on my personal fieldwork experiences (and memories) among rural women in Croatia. I argue that using the self as an ethnographic resource does not distort authenticity of the ethnography but rather shows the diverse and contested ways in which femaleness is socially constructed and understood.
Paper long abstract:
Acknowledging that research is produced by situated and embodied researchers, this paper draws on my personal experiences (and memories) as an anthropologist interested in constructions of femininity among rural women in Slavonia, Croatia. Through a discussion of my own fieldwork, I address how my femininity was critiqued and scrutinised and how in turn I closely monitored my behaviour, appearance/clothing, body's postures, positions and movements to facilitate deeper cultural immersions. I adopt an auto-ethnographical approach to illuminate the culture under study by drawing data from field diaries supplemented with interviews with the intention of "displaying the multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural" (Ellis and Bochner 2000). In this paper, it is argued that using the self as an ethnographic resource does not distort the authenticity of the work but rather gives it more clarity because it more convincingly illustrates the diverse and contested ways in which femaleness is socially constructed and understood in different contexts.
The self as ethnographic resource
Session 1