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Jackson: Power and pleasure in ethnographic home-work

open, shifting, ambiguous – the result of culturally available meanings and the open-ended, power-laden enactments of those meanings’ (Kondo, 1990: 24). Therefore, my subjectivity remained neither stable nor coherent during my fieldwork. Rather than being a ‘fixed point of departure or arrival’ (de Lauretis, 1984: 159) to which I could safely return, my subjectivity in the field emerged as an excessive effect of the interrelationships among social practices, power relations, and my specific experiences as a researcher. This poststructural view of the self has been theorized in fieldwork at home. Hoodfar (1994) likens the construction of the self in fieldwork at home to a ‘schizophrenic experience’, and Caputo (2000) referred to her ethnographic identity at home as always partial in response to the shifting and often-times stressful instability of the ground. Caputo (2000: 28) aptly refers to the field at home as a ‘swirl of sites’ and recounts the difficulty of sustaining her positionality while being at once ‘at home’ and ‘away’. Hastrup (1987: 105) claims the field is ‘everywhere’ – a ‘third culture’ of sorts – and thus the ethnographer ‘lives and works in the third person’. Hastrup’s ‘third person’ is not an omniscient observer who is detached and objectively knows everything, but one who is the combined effect of memory, history, place, and culture. It is one who is a contradictory, splintered self – a rupturing and hybridization of meaning systems, consciousness, and identity (Chaudhry, 1997). A turn toward home, the present, and the familiar in western social anthropology has produced a methodological awareness that is unique to studying home, including greater personal insight and keener reflexivity (Amit-Talai, 1994; Caputo, 2000; Hastrup, 1987; Jackson, 1987; Strathern, 1987). Yet problematic for the self in studying home is realizing the limits of memory, negotiating the insider/outsider binary, and experiencing the stress and anxiety of constant self-monitoring (Caputo, 2000; Chaudhry, 1997; Coffey, 1999; Hastrup, 1987, 1992; Jackson, 1987; Kondo, 1990; Stack, 1996; Strathern, 1987; Visweswaran, 1994). While I certainly experienced all of these problems of subjectivity while conducting home-work, I am attempting to theorize them differently by re-conceptualizing the ethnographic self as an ethical construct produced by power and pleasure. In order to interrogate and disrupt certainties about the self in home-work – even those certainties regarding fractured subjectivities – I attend to issues of power and pleasure in novel ways. I remember preparing myself for fieldwork at home by anticipating that I would in many ways become a split subject and would encounter many moments of collapsed subjectivity while at home. Yet as I experienced my self in the field, I came to understand that my split subjectivity, while in constant tension, was something that I looked forward to, that offered pleasant insights, and that actually delighted me in surprising ways. Interrogating power in this way offered a different sort of negotiation of the self that produced pleasures while in the field. This negotiation of the self is unlike other theories of subjectivity in ethnography at home. That is, the work cited above recounts the anxieties and difficulties of subjectivity; of course, my