From the Field, With Love

Abstract

Lasting relationships with partners from the field have long been unacknowledged in anthropology. While ethnographers routinely reflect on their positionality and local entanglements during fieldwork, little is exposed of their private and intimate lives, behind closed doors. Instead of asking epistemological questions related to the research setting, this chapter - written in the form of a letter to our shared supervisor Martin Sökefeld - seeks to make sense of the reasons for anthropology students' long-term commitment to a partner met while conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Moreover, we discuss the discipline's reluctance to embrace intimate relationships with partners from the field despite its conceptual aspiration to deconstruct structural inequalities and biases. Lastly, we follow the intricacies of these transnational marriages that, while carrying worldly biases, also push against the (post)-colonial stereotypes and power dynamics anthropology has long aspired to deconstruct.