The Professional and the Personal: An Experience of Fieldwork in Chukotka with the Entire Family

Abstract

This article discusses the particularities of ethnographic work carried out by a researcher together with the members of his or her family. Reflecting on our own experience of three fieldwork trips to Chukotka in 2017–2019 with a total duration of six months, we examine how the presence of members of an anthropologist’s family in the field, especially a child, affects the process of ethnographic work and collecting materials. The discussion focuses on methods of field research, the particular feature of which is the fact that we, as researchers and authors, were in the field with our own son. At the same time, during the three fieldwork trips, the methods of work with informants underwent significant transformations. An analysis of the context of ethnographic cases allows us to show the evolution both of the authors’ views on the “field with children” and of the field research approaches employed. We discuss how a child, by means of own subjectivity, can influence the methods of fieldwork, the focus of observations, and even to a certain extent affect the process of anthropological interpretation. Ta king the cases of work in villages and the tundra, we show how being in the field with children requi res researcher’s looking for autonomy and developing a safe food and nutrition strategy. We do not limit ourselves to describing positive and negative aspects or benefiets and challenges of the fieldwork carried out in a company of family members; we also intend to show how anthropological knowledge can be produced in the field within the process of cooperation among parents-anthropologists, their children, and informants.