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Paper Short Abstract:

Embodied fieldwork during fertility rituals in Montenegro (2017–2018), where son preference persists, revealed how the body can become a site of knowledge. After participating in rituals aimed at conceiving a male child, I became pregnant and gave birth to a son. This experience challenged the notion of detached fieldwork and deepened my understanding of the women I worked with. Fieldwork emerges as ongoing and embodied, blurring boundaries between researcher and field, personal and professional life.

Paper Abstract:

This paper reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018 on fertility rituals in Montenegro, where son preference remains present in both historical and contemporary contexts (Stump 2011, UNDP 2012). While participating in womb massages and rituals aimed at conceiving a male child, my body became both a site of knowledge and entanglement. After returning to Latvia, I discovered I was pregnant. Several months later, I gave birth to a boy.

This experience challenges conventional notions of fieldwork as a detached or bounded activity. I argue that fieldwork can remain embedded in the researcher’s everyday life, continuing to shape their understanding of the field and themselves. My pregnancy, as an outcome of embodied participation, illustrates the enduring presence of the field and the fluid boundaries between personal and academic realms.

By centring the researcher’s body as a site of knowledge production, this paper engages broader questions around mobility, relational ties, and lived entanglements. It highlights how movement—physical, emotional, or reproductive—is shaped by and shapes the networks in which it occurs.

Ultimately, I propose that fieldwork is not something we leave behind—it moves with and within us. This perspective invites a rethinking of ethnography as an ongoing, embodied process that blurs binaries such as researcher/research participant, field/home, and personal/professional, offering new insight into the relational dynamics that underpin knowledge production.