Arguably then, researchers’ emotions need no longer be a distraction,
but they provide a way to gain insight, create knowledge, and better
analyze specific social phenomena. As emotions are always produced as a
part of a certain social and cultural context, understanding our own
emotional responses thereby become an analytical and interpretative tool
as they “can lead to the deepest sort of ethnographic empathy, a form of
emotive understanding” (Whiteman, Mu ̈ller, & Johnson, 2009, p. 49).
Therefore ethnographers have increasingly called for “emotionally engaged
research” (Whiteman et al.,2009 p. 49). Hereby fear, anger, resentment,
love, and excitement can serve as an analytical frame to interpret experi-
ences in the field. They reveal something personal, but also something cul-
tural: they reveal the manifestation of the surrounding culture in our
reaction to it, which is to be understood as not an individual response, but
as an amalgam of our own contextually varied sociality.
Conflict zones, more than other field sites, inevitably draw in the
researcher. During my over seven years’ experience of doing sociological
research in IsraelPalestine there was no more a profound ethnographic
moment than being under missiles attack alongside the people around me.
It provided an understanding of what it meant to be under siege, not only
intellectually, but also emotionally and physically (Leuenberger, 2013b,
2014 ).While consciously seeking out conflict situations is not advisable,
researchers don’t tend to advance knowledge by not being prepared to
engage in a research field “until the guns fall silent” (Goodhand, 2000,
p. 12). Indeed, the potential of violence or war is not to be understood as
those conditions that hamper research, and that have to be overcome in
order to do the research. Instead, in these sorts of contexts, cultures of vio-
lence are symptomatic of the reality to be understood. Data cannot be
culled and separated from the violent social context in which it is gener-
ated, rather, the context itself: the instability, the potential for violence, the
uncertainty, and ways of navigating it become part of the data.
Researchers’ reactions of fear and anxiety toward in-field violence thus
havea place in ethnography and should become part of the data set. Such
effects speak to their experiences of becoming functioning agents in local
cultures of violence as they learn (from and alongside those around them),
that the instability and violence of everyday life in dangerous fields “must
be negotiated and not avoided, filtered out or sifted through with innova-
tion and improvisation” (Kovats-Bernat, 2002,p. 213). This kind of embo-
died know-how can create an understanding that goes beyond that which
can be learnt at a distance and through the use of formal methodologies.
Also by attending to how researchers’ relations to their field are modified
34 CHRISTINE LEUENBERGER