Paper short abstract:

I reflect on my experience studying society from an ‘insider-outsider’ perspective. The ‘intermediate’ position between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ was challenging often in relation to informants. I suggest reflecting on such challenges become a method of knowledge production about the culture.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on my experience studying society from an ‘insider-outsider’ perspective. The ‘intermediate’ position between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in the field was challenging often in relation to informants. I suggest reflecting on such challenges become a method of knowledge production about the culture. The ‘field’ here is understood, socially, as ‘a physical site’ of interaction between people and local combinations of factors and processes, such as identifications, social organizations, administrative and business structure, infrastructures, various social groups, schools and local markets, public places including forms of media and communication (Eidson 2001: 582). They are also sites where certain ideas have been shared and transmitted by a number of people. My reflections on these issues have led me to place my fieldwork and methodological approach within Central Asian studies’ paradigm of ‘centre and periphery'. Two angles are opened up by this paradigm. One is about my own position as a ‘local’ scholar representing a ‘western’ institution, and, through this, the position of Central Asian studies as a whole. The other reflects my informants’ concerns about why there was a scholar studying them, and who was behind her: this opens up a perspective on the hypothetical threats perceived by people in Kyrgyzstan. Such perceptions are among the causes and effects of nationalism. The paper sums up 16 months of ethnographic field study in 2011-12 in rural northern Kyrgyzstan.