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Accepted Paper:

Reflections on shame and ethnographic 'failure'  
Michelle Hannah (Deakin University)

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon field experiences of 'rapport rupture' in a Buddhist nunnery in South Korea, this paper explores how ethnographic 'failure' and conflict might be fruitfully understood, and works to unpack long-standing understandings of field 'rapport', along with notions of 'successful' ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon my fieldwork at Keumgangsa, a Buddhist nunnery in South Korea, this paper explores how ethnographers might fruitfully understand 'rapport failure', 'rapport rupture' and emotions in the field. I focus on how I gained, and then later lost, rapport with significant sections of the community. This resulted in censure, an acute and very public loss of face, my withdrawal from Keumgangsa, and a pervasive sense of shame. I employ these field experiences to examine and unpack long-standing understandings of field 'rapport' and 'cultural intimacy', along with their association with 'successful' ethnography. I argue that rather than amounting to ethnographic 'failure', difficult ,and even emotionally tumultuous, field relations can often produce invaluable data and crucial insights. I discuss how, upon examination of my experiences and data, I discovered that I had (perhaps paradoxically) gained cultural intimacy and powerful insights through the experience of shame and 'failure', and that these emotions were a crucial tool in data collection and understanding the monastic culture of the nunnery. I argue that my 'rapport rupture', loss of face and shame were equally vital to my analysis as were my 'successful' field relationships. Indeed, I do not believe I would have gained key insights without these experiences, which enabled me to move beyond polite social relations, which at Keumgangsa, often worked to conceal nuns' private lives.

Panel P13
Ethnographic impasses: crises, dead ends, breakthroughs, and ensuing lessons
  Session 1 Tuesday 12 December, 2017, -