Abstract

PATRIARCA, Madalena. How do we become anthropologists?: Unexpectedness and mutuality in the fieldwork of mental health in Lisbon. Etnográfica [online]. 2012, vol.16, n.3, pp.589-618. ISSN 0873-6561.

Under what conditions can unexpectedness in the fieldwork become a way of anthropological knowing? How can we write about silence and the concealed? This paper explores unexpected situations that occurred during our fieldwork on several psychiatric hospital wards in the city. Due to their medical thinking most psychiatrists are suspicious of ethnographic data, mainly when they are the ones the anthropologist wants to study, serving as gatekeepers is a way to limit our access to their medical world. This becomes highly problematic since the ethnographer feels most of the time as having failed her fieldwork. But differently, our proposal is to understand fieldwork difficulties as a process of anthropological apprenticeship. In other words, difficulties in the fieldwork become paths to understand and to craft our knowledge of a shared world.

Keywords : anthropology; ethnography; epistemology; interaction; psychiatry.

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