Paper short abstract:

This paper details drafted co-attention and how togetherness articulates with interlocutors. My RA and I often reversed the direction of our habitual thoughts and brought to the foreground a sense-explication of the world that worked to produce something meaningful and unexpected to us both.

Paper long abstract:

By incorporating the role of attention into this paper I move beyond classic psychological anthropology discussions regarding the habituated and taken for granted ways of thinking and being (Csordas 1993; Throop 2005, 2008, 2010), and interrogate how anthropologists can similarly produce insightful accounts about ethical ethnographic transparency via patterns of attention. That is, we can dissect the who, what, when, how, and why of particular individuals and narratives, which are regarded as central to our studies, in order to better understand the influential intersubjective dynamics operating in fieldwork conducted with a research assistant.

Through a reflection on attention, this paper offers a discussion about the ways in which my researcher assistant's personhood functions in the development and enrichment of knowledge—he allows for a certain type of epistemological possession, which I alone would likely not encounter.

This paper details how my research incorporates what drafted our co-attention, and how our togetherness articulated with our interlocutors. In working together, Abinet and I often reversed the direction of our habitual thoughts (Zaner 1975) and brought to the foreground a sense-explication of the world (Husserl 1960) that worked together to produce something meaningful and unexpected to us both. We generated altruistic concessions to that which might be otherwise, offering a methodologically unique way in which the phenomenological enterprises can be undertaken with a research assistant. It is precisely through this type of phenomenological project that Abinet and I were able to bring assumptions about mental unwellness among returned Ethiopian domestic workers under closer examination.