Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how my adventures in a Norwegian hamlet provided me with hunches that crystallized into the main paradigm of my thesis. It also questions whether these findings were more a reflection of my own position and personal features than how people experienced village-life themselves.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will give some retrospective thoughts on my own field-research, and how my personal adventures gave me hunches that directly lead to my theoretical findings. As a young novice in the field, I was met with cross-pressures on how I should behave from various quarters; what type of information I should acquire, how I should go about with my work, and who I should mingle with. This has of course been experienced by many anthropologists, and has been an important gateway to understanding social life in communities. But a greater challenge was the pressure to inform villagers on what was going on in each others households. Although sharing the same overall national background as the villagers, I was not aware of the subtleties of how to handle information and got occasionally caught in the trap of not knowing what to say and not to say. Eventually such difficult and occasionally disturbing incidents sensitized me on seemingly elusive aspects of village conduct. This came to constitute the main theme of my thesis; namely how the villagers' idiosyncratic behaviour and manners of speaking could be seen as ways to administer their own cross-pressures. Years later, however, I questioned whether the main paradigm of my theories in fact was more a reflection of my own position as an outsider and newcomer to the community, as well as other of my personal characteristics, than how people themselves experienced their lives in the village. These were questions I carried with me on later field-works, and made me ponder on the process of how cognitive patterns emerge and crystallize into anthropological theories.